The Internet is growing fast, but Google is growing even faster. According to online security company Arbor Networks, Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic. This is a new record for Google, as it gained more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January. Now, only one global ISP handles more traffic, and a lot of that traffic is – unsurprisingly – Google’s traffic. ...
If you want to improve Google’s results and report spammy web pages, there’s a Chrome extension for you.Google Webspam Report adds a link next to each Google search result and automatically fills the spam report form with information like the URL of the page and your query. You can also use the button from Chrome’s toolbar to report pages. The most interesting feature is the integration with Chrome’s browsing history that lets you select recently visited pages and recent Google searches. ...
(Reuters) – Google Inc said its “Street View” cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, and that it was changing its privacy practices. Regulators in some of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated are looking into the issue. Google’s Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city’s streets, collected the data. The company displays the pictures in its online street maps. ...
Google News continues to integrate with Twitter and other micro blogging services. After testing a section that shows newsworthy tweets from your subscription, Google started to add to the Google News Onebox the number of times a story has been shared. For example, Google’s Onebox shows that this article about Google TV has been shared by more than 50 Twitter users. Google links to the real-time results for this article, but the page only includes 10 results. ...
Google Docs adds a feature that’s already available in Gmail: you can now upload images using drag and drop. Open a new document and drag an image from your desktop or from a file manager. This feature only works in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari because it requires HTML5’s File API. Unfortunately, you can’t upload multiple images and Google Docs doesn’t show a placeholder image or a progress bar. ...
Google Official Blog: In May we announced that we had mistakenly collected unencrypted WiFi payload data (information sent over networks) using our Street View cars. We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here. So we’ve spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices, as well as talking to external regulators globally about possible improvements to our policies. Here’s a summary of the changes we’re now making. ...
Google’s ultra high speed fiber network — which the company says can offer speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second — is about to get its first trial outside of the Googleplex. The trial is fairly small and not too far from home; the company will be deploying its network at Stanford University to “a group of approximately 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on campus. “ Google also points out that this isn’t part of its call for small-to-mid-sized communities to submit proposals to get “Google Fiber” in their towns. That competition sparked an amusing social media battle earlier this year between dozens (if not hundreds) of towns ranging from Topeka, Kansas, to Huntsville, Alabama. Google says that they, “still plan to announce our selected community or communities by the end of the year.” ...
BERLIN — Google on Thursday said 244,000 people in Germany had asked the company to remove images of their houses and apartments from its Street View maps, but that the requests would not derail its plans to activate the service this year. The figure was in line with what German data protection officials had previously estimated. The officials predicted that several hundred thousand people would opt out. In a blog posting on its Web site, Google said 2.9 percent of the 8.5 million households in Germany’s 20 largest cities had opted out of the service. ...
Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data. The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released today by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that “collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it.” Assembling an extensive list of the location of Wi-Fi access points can aid in geolocation, especially in areas where connections to cell towers are unreliable. ...
Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 has been released to the stable and beta channels for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Updates from the previous stable release include: Hundreds of bug fixes An updated HTML5 parser File API Directory upload via input tag More information on these and other changes in Chrome 7 can be found on the Google Chrome blog. Download Chrome today! [Standalone / Offline setup here]