Google Maps is a great tool for finding driving directions, as well as for getting a general overview of an area.  Now they've added another great feature for those who like to get around by foot: walking directions .  So what's the difference between driving directions and walking directions?  Walking directions ignore things like one-way streets that don't apply to foot traffic, and give you the fastest route from point a to point b.

Google has invested an undisclosed sum in two U.S. companies developing technologies for plug-in electric vehicles. The investment is a part of the company's "RechargeIT" initiative begun in 2007 to help speed up the adoption of electric transportation.

Last year tech sites were abuzz with rumors of the mythical Gphone - a mobile phone created by Google. Nothing came of it, and Google eventually squashed the rumors by instead announcing their involvement in the Open Handset Alliance and Android, their open-source mobile phone operating system. But now, comments made by the Google co-founders and CEO have many speculating about the Gphone yet again. Hollywood Reporter writer Dan Cox has sparked the newest round of rumors,

Viacom, if you recall, filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube not too long ago.  As part of the lawsuit, a court as now ordered Google to turn over a complete log of all users' activities to Viacom.  These logs would include such things as usernames, IP addresses, and videos that each account has viewed in the past.

The newspaper business is slowly fading away and out of relevancy.  By the time a story gets printed, it's already broken in the online world.  Newspapers are facing dwindling subscriber bases, and slashed advertising spending, and drastic changes are being made.  My hometown paper, the Plain Dealer, recently announced that they'll begin cutting 35 pages per week out of their printed newspapers, cutting jobs,

Following months of fending off a Microsoft takeover, Yahoo announced last week that they had entered into a non-exclusive advertising agreement with Google. Much in the same way many were concerned about a Yahoo-Microsoft merger, there are already those skeptical of a Yahoo-Google arrangement, including some pretty prominent lawmakers. Rep. Joe Barton )R-TX(, the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on Thursday,

Microsoft isn't keen to be left behind in the yet to be fully explored area of targeted TV advertising.  Google has been looking into this, as have the cable companies, and now Microsoft is jumping into the mix with their recent acquisition of Navic Networks. Navic Networks is a seven-year-old firm from Waltham, Mass. that targets interactive advertising through cable set-top boxes.  Microsoft acquired them for an undisclosed sum.

BlackHat SEO has a reputation, and it's usually not a good one. Those who practice so-called "blackhat" SEO techniques are often branded as social outcasts, treated by holier-than-thou "whitehat" SEOs and Google much like Hester Prynne in the "The Scarlet Letter". Case in point: the recent SMX Advanced conference in Seattle apparently had a lot of blackhat emphasis this year, much to the shock and horror of some. A few high profile blog posts later,

One of Google's biggest goals this year was to make YouTube profitable.  Well the year is nearly half over, and they've still yet to figure this puzzle out.  Traffic and users is not the issue, but rather, how to convert them into cash in their pockets.

According to various reports, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has invested in a space tourism company.  Furthermore, Brin has expressed interest in going into orbit himself within three years. Brin has plunked down a $5 million down payment for the option to book a seat on a future orbital flight with Space Adventures, a U.S.-based space tourism company.  His investmentwill help the company to launch its first private mission to the International Space Station,

The Google App Engine, the search giant's new platform for building and hosting 3rd party web apps, is blocking applications from integrating with PayPal for payments.  Considering that Google has their own payments system - Google Checkout - is this just an honest mistake, or is there something more sinister going on?  The Washington Post uncovered today that developers making apps that use PayPal for payment handling are encountering a peculiar error.   You see,

What good is a site if no one can find it? That's one of the basic premises behind search engine optimization, or as it is commonly called, SEO. Websites that rank higher in search engine results pages get far more hits than those sites buried several pages back. So ever since the dawn of search engines, clever webmasters have been tinkering away at finding the best ways to get their sites ranked higher, and in turn increase its traffic and visibility.

Earlier this week, consumer groups requested that Google make its privacy policy more visible, making the argument that under California law the company is required to place a link to the privacy policy on its home page. With better visibility, the groups said that users would be more aware of the kind of information that Google collects about them. Other major websites, such as Google competitors including Yahoo and MSN,

There was apparently much more to the Microsoft-Yahoo merger story than many of us knew. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that a judge unsealed documents in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo, and the contents are quite surprising. The most damaging bit of information contained is that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at $40 per share in January 2007, and that the then-CEO Terry Semel turned it down, instead seeking to forge a commercial partnership.

While there were some reports floating around that parts of Android might not be as open source as original thought, Google has come out and made it clear: the core Android platform will be 100% open source. ZDNet confirmed with various Google employees that everything will be open r. Besides a couple exceptions, everything will use the Apache software license )ASLv2(. There are two exceptions,

The Belgian copyright defense group known as Copiepresse recently filed a court document, asking for up to 49 million Euros, or $77.25 million, in damages from Google. The issue at hand is Google's reproduction of select extracts from Belgian newspapers. This is not Google's first tangle with Copiepresse. Last year, a Belgian court ruled that Google was not permitted to reproduce extracts from Belgian newspapers on the Google News search engine. In this case,

Upon graduation, the dream of many MBA students is to snag a job at Google. Yep, that's right - Google. For the second year in a row, Google has become the most coveted employer of MBA grads , beating out expected favorites of investment banks and consulting firms. A survey found that 23.65% of those students polled would choose Google as the top choice of where they'd like to work after graduating. So why is Google the top choice? For one it's a recognized global brand,

According to Google Inc., a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit brought against YouTube by Viacom Inc. threatens to drastically alter the way hundreds of millions of people share all kinds of information on the Internet. The claim was made in papers filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, as Google responded to Viacom's latest lawsuit which claims that the Internet has led to an "explosion of copyright infringement" by the likes of YouTube and others.

Be careful what you do on Orkut, Google may not be willing to protect your privacy, depending on where you live. On Monday Google revealed that it complied with Indian legal processes when handing over information about an Orkut user to Indian police. By supplying the IP address of an individual who is alleged to have posted vulgar content about top Indian political leader Sonia Gandhia, Indian police were able to arrest a suspect.

Last week the popular social networking site Facebook blocked Google's new service, Friend Connect, due to privacy concerns. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg now says that he'd like to sit down and talk with Google and work out some of these issues. Google Friend Connect allows website owners to add social networking functions to their own websites, allowing them to interact with existing friends or new friends from a range of social networkings sites, such as Orkut, Facebook,