Millions of Hindi speakers across India and the rest of the world have a reason to cheer: Google News is now available in Hindi.Google News gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the web and presents a ranked one-page summary with all the links to your favourite news sources in the various sections. One of the interesting challenges we faced in this edition was the fact that not all our Hindi news sources are in UTF-8 format.

Yahoo has started integrating Yahoo Messenger into Yahoo Mail, just like Google did with Gmail over a year ago. Because of Yahoo’s cool tabbed IM interface, the IM window is full size, supersized even, making for lots of room for avatars, rich text editing controls, and timestamps.
I’m not sure how integrated it is in Yahoo Mail and how it compares to Gmail Chat, but it’s interesting to see this becoming a trend

A Belgian court has upheld an earlier court ruling, preventing Google from displaying items from Belgian newspapers.
The case was brought by Copiepresse, which manages copyrights for Belgium’s French- and German-language newspapers…Copiepresse argues that versions of news articles stored on Google can be seen on its service even after the articles are no longer freely accessible on a newspaper’s Web site.

One silver-lining for Google

Philipp Lenssen reports that Google News has technical problems and doesn’t show any news on the homepage. Sometimes even the search is broken.Oh well, who needs news about Windows Vista, Google’s earnings or global warming? No news is good news.

So you want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Some information is available for free (the web), other information requires subscriptions or should be bought (books), there’s information too hard to find (rare documents) and information too personal (your emails).The first content acquisition for Google was Usenet, a collection of bulletin-board messages

Want to know the best way to push any website to the #1 popularity spot for its industry? It’s quite simple, you leverage the traffic from one of Google’s existing properties.
Need proof?
Google’s Blog Search has taken over the #1 spot from Technorati, thanks to a link placed on the homepage of Google News

Steve Rubel reports that Google News Mobile now lets you personalize the layout of the page, and even add custom sections. Now you can create a Google News page to view on your cell phone or other mobile device and get just the news you want. Visit it on your device at this address, or try it out live embedded in the page below:

Google News has been under pressure over the inclusion of some news sources in their index — they even lost a court battle in Belgium which forced them to put the embarrassing court ruling on the main page of Google.be.  Google News Sitemaps were just launched today, giving current news sources more flexibility over which [...]

After months of hard work, the day is finally here: we’ve released Google News in Norway and Sweden.
At Google News, we cut to the bone — er, to the core — searching to get you the freshest takes

Google gives the world a little Halloween treat this year by making classic scary stories searchable online.  They’ve gathered a number of spooky classic tales, including Dr. Jecklyl and Mr. Hyde, as well as Dracula, The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, Frankenstein and more, and put them all up on a special page for easy access.
Just go to www.google.com/scarystories, where you will find 26 classic scary titles

Over the past few years, Google has been pumping out product after product, most of which are still in “Beta” stage at the time they are released.  Eric Schmidt admits that Google has been so aggressive in introducing “a blizzard” of new products that “it’s confusing to almost everyone.”
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is leading an initiative to see fewer products launched, but with more features

The newest member of Google Labs, Google’s playground for new ideas, is Code Search, an ambitious project that aims to index billions and billions of lines of code.
Code search gives users the ability to search for publicly accessible soruce code. According to Google, source code lives in two ways on the internet: in things like zip files and gzip, or in software control repositories such as SourceForge, Google’s code hosting, and other places

Google announced Monday that registration is now open for Google Code Jam 2006, Google’s annual online coding competition. The competition is set to run through October 27, culminating with the Championship round held at the Google offices in New York City.
The tournaments are a series of timed competitions in which programmers work to solve the same problems using the programming language of their choice: either Java, C++, C#, VB.NET, or Python.
Up for grabs is $165,000 worth of cash, with $10,000 going to the first place winner

Despite the soaring prices in gas, Americans are still hitting the roads to travel in record numbers. You can make your drive, whether it is for work or for play, a little easier by getting live traffic updates with Google.
Launched today as an update to Google Maps for mobile, you can now access comprehensive information about traffic conditions in more than 30 major metropolitian areas, as well as partial information in many other areas.
To utilize the service, you will need to download Google Maps for mobile through your mobile web browser