Tonight, Spain will be playing against Germany in the European foot)as-in-soccer(ball championships final. For this special event - people in Europe are often found partying on the streets when their team wins - Google launched a logo doodle contest a while ago, and today presents the winner on the homepage of Google homepages of Switzerland, Austria and Germany . The logo was selected from 3,800 competitors and received over 300,000 votes, Google says,

Embedded comments, and star ratings Google's Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are: Star ratings : Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box. The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post.

A couple of minutes ago an interesting attempt to phish for Google account credentials made it to my inbox. It had me blink my eyes because while I suspected phishing there were some things with this one that had me check twice to see how it's done, as things looked quite official on the surface. As you may know, phishing emails are sent out by abusers to make the recipient in some way reply with their password or click through to enter their password,

Google used to pride themselves about how word-of-mouth spread popularity of their search engine, and to this day they're doing remarkably little traditional advertising. However, after their ad campaign in Russia now another ad campaign in China has been spotted. Xujie in the forum posted photos from a DWGoogle.cn article , with one pic shown above which includes Google's super-short "g.cn" domain.

)Yes, for the record it's a joke !( [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Grassroots Movement to Elect... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe has a long article about how Google managed to remain "fundamentally likable" , as he says, while today being "a behemoth, with more than 15,000 employees and a market value as big as Coca-Cola and Boeing combined". He mentions concerns that even provided Google sticks to its privacy policy and handles the sensitive information we feed it sensibly indeed, "government might compel it to turn over search information.

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!