The New York Times says that Google News, Google's semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth : <<... traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online. Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites.

Reuters today writes: <<Google Inc was named on Monday in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company's business software unit copied a tiny start-up's tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google's. LimitNone LLC filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm's tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it.

Google just went live with Map Maker , a program that makes certain regions around the world - like Jamaica, Iceland, Bahamas, Grenada and more - editable by everyone )everyone with a Google account, that is(. "Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities," Google writes in their blog post .

Google Japan* launched a microsite titled One Green Project to help prevent global warming, and promote some ways of using Google's tools like iGoogle. The page seems to contain tips for reducing CO 2 emissions. Can anyone who speaks Japanese explain more? [Via the Google Japan blog . The screenshot shows a bug I'm seeing on Google Maps.] *I'm not sure if this is also rolled out for other countries?

Worth1000 started a little photoshopping contest to show what things would look like if Google ruled the world )arguably, they already rule quite a bit of it, at least online(. I like the One Google dollar bill... [Via Google Watch Blog . Image by Hbales.

You can now enter a domain into Google Trends and switch to the Websites tab to get traffic information. Use a comma between domains to see comparative stats, as in mashable.com, techcrunch.com . Note Google's guess of the daily unique visitors only works for some websites, and you also won't get absolute numbers. Google on their help page explains: <<Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data,

This is the story of Russell, whose AdWords campaigns fell prey to a phishing scam. Russell advertises one of his websites )WorldLabel.com( using AdWords, Google's program that will launch advertisements on search results and third-party websites using AdSense. Russell is not a large-scale advertiser, so he only had a single campaign set up, he tells me. Seemingly out of the blue, Russell one day noticed how a lot of odd,

When you search Google for gay , you will see special rainbow colors next to the AdWords ads to the right side. Rainbow colors are a globally recognized gay symbol and there's Pride Week coming up. On a related note, Google also sometimes dresses up AdWords for holidays , and they've also had their own wagons at gay parades before. Within Google, gay employees call themselves " gayglers ." [Thanks Michelle L.!

Vittorio sent in this Google translator finding: <<If you type "simpaticone" )very funny person( in Google Translate and choose Ita-Eng, the result is "Barack Obama".>> The ways of the Google are long and complicated... [Thanks Vittorio!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Translator and Barack Obama... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Google provides a daily Google tips gadget for iGoogle. Here's a sample tip of the day: <<If you use Gmail, you may have noticed the headlines that appear at the top of your inbox. These web clips show news, blog posts and other information available from web feeds. You can customize what web clips are shown by clicking Settings, then the "Web Clips" tab. Choose from a directory of sources, or provide your own feed.

The designers at TurboMilk didn't like the new Google favicon - the icon displayed in the address bar and elsewhere on Google's sites - so they decided to take the design job in their own hands . Four designers each had a try at a redesign, and came up with different reasoning and different end results. Here's one of their results: As the official Google blog told a while ago,

Totlol is a community-moderated video site for "those between the ages of 6 months and 6 years." Its video embeddings - like the Googleheads song - are based on the YouTube API, making for a customized, integrated look*. Totlol's About page explains, "Online video is a great new experience, and new parents discovered that showing their tots videos on the computer screen is a great way to spend time together. So they head to the leading video websites.

Are you using a Firefox 3 release candidate but you miss the Google Toolbar? Well, it's now working and available . [Thanks Hebbet !

When preparing a new text message to someone on the mobile phone I use, you're offered to pick from ready-made text templates like "I am late. I will be there at _" or "I'm busy right now. I'll call you later." Another template Nokia decided to include reads: I love you too>> Thank you Nokia developers of the world for making our busy lives a bit simpler!

Googolopoly is a game of Monopoly where the goal is to "organize all of the world's information." To achieve this, you can buy or build internet properties. The board includes fields like "Go" )"collect 200 shares of VC funding as you pass"( or a "deadpool" jail )"404 error file not found"(, and properties you can buy range from Jotspot, YouTube, SketchUp, over to PayPal, eBay, Yahoo and Microsoft... [Via Spreeblick .

Now when you look for bits and pieces at Google Code Search, you can switch to an Outline view additional to the existing Files view. In the )presumably( new Outline view, you will see a linked list of functions and their parameters. This does not work with all kinds of programming languages yet )like Visual Basic(, but it worked in some when I tried )like JavaScript(. Google Code Search was released in 2006 and allows you to search all kinds of publicly available source code,

Surprise... I usually enter "gmail.com" to jump to my email inbox, but today I'm greeted with the following message after doing so )the message sits at mail.google.com/gmail/(: <<We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we're called Google Mail here instead. If you're traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com. Oh, and we'd like to link the URL above, but we're not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

Geoquake released a bird's view driving simulator ... based on the Google Maps Flash API . Well, perhaps "simulation" is a bit far-fetched, as you can pass through any object, like houses. )Ironically, this works better for me than maps.google.com, where I mostly see gray tiles.( [Via Waxy .

TinEye is an impressively fast, and well-working image comparison search engine - you provide either an image URL or an image on your hard disk, and then they will show similar images. While they don't yet have enough images indexed to show a lot of results - and often, there won't be any result at all even when you know the image exists online - this is still a very interesting engine, and already useful for certain types research.

Google announced they about doubled the scope of their Google Maps Street View imagery, bringing it to many new locations including Springfield, Atlanta, Knoxville, Reno and others. Also, some old imagery has been expanded or updated, and Google also says they've rolled out their face blurring technology to all pics. You can also now look upwards in all of their images, Google says, and looking down also won't result in you seeing their Street View car or other obstacles.