Jason Yu provides a break down of some of the differences between Google China and their local competitor, Chinese search engine Baidu . One section compares the products of the two: <<Both Google and Baidu are trying to leverage their network effects to promote other products. Google has many excellent products, but not every product has performed well in China. For example, Google Maps is widely used by American users. Unfortunately,

Difficulty of Climbing a Mountain % of People Who Know What the Acronym RADAR Means Route the Golf Player Took Can you create one too? [Also see Matt Cutts' post on Google Charts .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Self-Referential Google Spreadsheet Visualiza ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Need a dream team? Look no further than ACS!

Author Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker writes that the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, called "multiples" by science historians, is very common )added quote characters for clarity(: <<One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus.

Google.com now links to a special donation page titled "Support disaster relief in Myanmar )Burma(". Google News has more information on the devastating cyclone that struck the country. [Thanks John.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Homepage Links to Donation Page for Bu ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Search Engine Roundtable shows off a screenshot of what looks like a Google experiment - of using the Comic Sans font in AdSense ads . Among designers and people with taste in general, Comic Sans is often considered one of the worst fonts of all time )or at least, the worstly abused font(. So much that there's a Ban Comic Sans initiative ... which, as this latest case show, may be a futile attempt. On the other hand,

Elliot Schrage has left Google to join Facebook, BoomTown reports. Google on their management information page explains Elliot is or was "Vice President, Global Communications & Public Affairs" and "responsible for the company's public-facing communications, including media relations, policy strategy and stakeholder outreach, as well as internal communications." At Google Press Day 2006, Elliot said,

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle today writes about his experience visiting the Google headquarters , and he's reminded of another building: <<Some years ago, I spent a year taking meetings at the Playboy mansion, both the one in Chicago )RIP( and the one in Los Angeles. It had a lot of amenities - I was never more than 15 feet from food and extremely good red wine, and the chairs were comfortable enough for the all-nighters we routinely pulled.

The Chinese Google news blog DWGoogle reports that Google is about to release a dictionary tool in China in some kind of cooperation with Kingsoft. This tool )pictured( is an adaption of Kingsoft's existing popular tool PowerWord, and it allows the look-up of words as before but also brings new features added by Google. According to Wikipedia , PowerWord* "is a collection of Chinese, English and bilingual dictionaries and supporting proprietary software,

You can now add your messages to Google Reader to be seen by your Google friends. To post a note, log-in to Reader and click Your stuff -> Notes to the left. This will open a box where you can type in a note with any thought, Friendfeed/ Twitter-style. To find out who exactly your friends are, check the Friends tab at the Settings page for an overview )or click the Manage Friends links(. Next to the notes box,

Google released a chart which says that Unicode encoding - which can be used for a variety of languages, not just the smaller set supported by ASCII and others - has become the most popular encoding on the web since December 2007. While their search index - which this was based on - may not represent all pages out there, it might be the next best approximation. Google, who announced they've begun to support the latest version of Unicode now,

Three days ago I sent a first email to Google in regards to the Carrefour query censorship we see on Google.cn - searches for 家乐福 )French hypermarket chain Carrefour( are turning up no results. I've also sent follow-up emails to Google press US and Germany and asked employees of the company trying to find someone responsible. Google press support is keeping quiet on this topic though, making no comment so far )perhaps they're busy or need more time,

Google recently added a CSS )Cascading StyleSheet( editor to their Google Docs document editor. To edit the stylesheet, create a new document or open an existing one and pick Edit -> Edit CSS from the menu. Google put up a Docs-specific CSS tutorial to guide you through some of the details. For instance,

Janusz Nowak told me about Polish Google employee Mariusz Gsiewski . "[H]e is great evangelist of Google products in Poland. He is seen as one of the best AdWords and web analytics specialists in Poland ... and he loves to share knowledge about this." Among other things, Mariusz wrote a couple of free Polish ebooks to introduce people to Google Analytics, Janusz tells me, and creates website templates for small business.

From Reuters : <<Italians were surprised, and in some cases outraged, on Wednesday to discover their income levels were available for public viewing on an Internet site [agenziaentrate.gov.it]. As part of a crack-down on tax evasion, the outgoing centre-left government made public every citizen's declared taxable income on the state's tax website>> The data was then taken down later on Wednesday after a complaint from privacy watchdogs and attacks by politicians.

Search Engine Optimizer Aaron Wall put up an extensive, multi-angled analysis of the worth of a top Google ranking . [Thanks Aaron! Disclosure: Aaron advertised his SEO Book here about a couple of years ago.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Value of a Google #1 Ranking | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Google boss Eric Schmidt was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo of CNBC . Some excerpts from the longer transcript: On innovation and the next big thing << Eric Schmidt: I've always thought that the scariest piece of innovation is knowledge understanding and language translation. I don't understand how it works, but to watch a computer - literally watch it - read something in English, dissect what it's about,

A couple of days ago I received the first couple of copies of Google Apps Hacks * from O'Reilly and today, the book is fully live on Amazon, too! It's very exciting for me, as this book project was spanning around a year, with about half of that in preparation, and the other half in writing of the book ) in Google Docs (. Google Apps Hacks features tips and tricks evolving around not search but the "Google office" consisting of such programs as Gmail, Google documents,

Google in the US is currently promoting a new "artist themes" section for iGoogle via a special logo and text below the search box. IGoogle is the name of Google's personalized homepage, and as it allows skinning with special background graphics and so on, this directory offers works by artists like Jeff Koons, Coldplay, Robert Mankoff, Dolce & Gabbana, Akira Isogawa, Anne Geddes and more who Google says collaborated with them.

Google is planning to map not only the sky and land masses )Google Mars, Moon, Earth, Google Maps and so on(, but - according to a report by News.com - also aims to map the oceans : <<The company has assembled an advisory group of oceanography experts, and in December invited researchers from institutions around the world to the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex. There, they discussed plans for creating a 3D oceanographic map, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Google Docs received a couple of updates . For instance, you can now create custom views onto your documents by saving advanced searches, which will then be displayed in the folder pane under a "Saved searches" label*. To save a search, click "Show search options" in Google Docs and perform a search; afterwards, click on "Save this search" and give the search a custom name.