Google held one of its Zeitgeist meetings at the company's Mountain View headquarters, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin holding court with the media for a spell. The interesting news from my perspective came out of this press briefing, where Schmidt apparently said Google was going ahead with the Yahoo deal in the face of scrutiny from the DOJ, the European Union,

Stat of the day for GoogleWatch: More than 1.93 million unique people - 73 percent of whom were males - visited the Google Chrome Web browser "Thank You" page between Sept. 1 and Sept. 7, according to stats published today by number cruncher Nielsen Online. Nielsen research director Jon Stewart added that nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S. users who went online from home or work visited the page, which usually means a download. Stewart found that Chrome buzz spiked on Sept. 2nd,

Following my Google Android post earlier today, I just received an invite to easily the hottest high-tech ticket )at least on the so-called "right coast"( of the year, the launch of the first Android-powered phone from T-Mobile. The date is, as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported, Sept. 23. Unlike with the iPhone 3G, people won't be spending hours in line to buy one Tuesday. Indeed, TechCrunch claims the actual phone will go on the market Oct. 20. Instead,

The Wall Street Journal today is rehashing last week's Reuters report about the Sept. 23 introduction of the HTC-built Dream, based on the Android mobile operating system, by Google and T-Mobile USA. This is an interesting twist because usually it's Reuters who rehashes the Journal. That's a warning; if you see Reuters issue a report rehashing the Journal, which rehashed Reuters, then you've got a cause for concern, but I digress.

The New York Times over the weekend published a clever feature by reporter Joe Nocera on Google's search advertising practices. Nocera chronicles how Sourcetool directory site proprietor Dan Savage is struggling to return his earnings from Google to form after the search giant jacked up his Sourcetool's AdWords minimum bid requirement from 5 or 6 cents to $1. Allegedly, Google told Savage his landing page quality was too low.

Google continued its offline access march Monday by launching Google Gears for Apple's Safari browser on the Mac OS X operating system. The upgrade means you can now access sites that support Gears, including Google Docs , Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, Zoho office, WordPress and the YouTube uploader via Safari. Gears , which lets users store data locally in a database, is an important part of Google's strategy to help users access their Docs,

On my flight home from the TechCrunch50 show in San Francisco to the right coast Wednesday, I racked my brain about how I might use the content from Jason Calacanis' entertaining interview with Mark Cuban. Read the notes from TechCrunch here . The content doesn't really fit for my audience, but then it hit me: If Mark Cuban were a company, he'd be Google. Cuban is a Swiss army knife entrepreneur who has his fingers in movies, movie theaters, HDTV and other stuff,

Google sure is stitching up its loose privacy ends. Heeding concerns about search data information Google stores in its new Suggest feature, Google today said it will anonymize that data within 24 hours in the Google Suggest requests it uses. Google Suggest provides users suggestions for search queries from the home page as they type queries in. So, when you're typing into the search box on Google Toolbar or Google.com, or the Omnibox in Google Chrome,

SAN FRANCISCO - By now most of you Google Watchers know about the program Google launched today to make more search ad money by displaying historical newspaper content going back more than 200 years. I just read the blog post on the Google News Archive Partner Program , and it doesn't do it the justice it deserves after seeing Google Search guru Marissa Mayer demonstrate it at TechCrunch50 here today.

Lost in all the glitter dusting Google's new Chrome Web browser this week was the launch of new versions of Google's popular photo-editing and photo-sharing applications. Google's Windows-based Picasa 3.0 still syncs with Picasa Web Albums, so that any edits made in photos in Picasa 3.0 will render online through the new version of Picasa Web Albums. However, new editing tools in Picasa 3.0 provide more professional glitz to the photos you upload.

Google, Yahoo and MySpace formally launched the OpenSocial Foundation to garner support for the OpenSocial data portability effort. The group's goal is make sure that OpenSocial will remain open and free for developers or anyone else contributing to the specification . The Foundation has selected five of the seven board members to preside over the group's governance. They include: Google's David Glazer,

Early on during a question-and-answer session after demonstrating Google's new Chrome browser, a reporter asked if Google sees Chrome as the operating system for Web applications. The question was simple enough, but the answer promised to be more complex, if only the person who answered it answered it with candor. To answer "yes" would be to admit that Google is indeed intent on supplanting Microsoft's Windows desktop operating system , the foundation of Redmond's business.

UPDATE: One week after Microsoft captured headlines by posing Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 as a weapon to keep Google's search ad dominion at bay, Google is fighting back ... with a comic book . It's not just any comic book; it's a super-creative introduction to Google Chrome, the company's long-rumored take on an open-source Web browser. Google Blogoscoped got the scoop and posted the comic book, which Google crafted with artist Scott McCloud, here today .

In February 2007, Google turned heads when it launched GAPE )Google Apps Premier Edition( , a paid version of its Apps suite for enterprises that includes extra security, 24/7 phone support, 99.999 percent availability ) which was severely tested last month with a few outages ( and other perks such as API access. Since that time, Google has frustrated journalists and analysts by laying claim to 3,000 new business customers per day, now totaling more than 500,

I've now read one dozen reports about Microsoft buying Greenfield Online, which owns a Web research business based in my home state of Connecticut as well as European comparison shopping site Ciao. My favorite analysis was published Friday by my colleague Joe Wilcox for Microsoft Watch because he correctly outlines how Microsoft made the $486 million buy for search market share. Specifically,

Google's Android team today unveiled Android Market, a content distribution system through which users can purchase applications for smart phones based on the Android mobile operating system. Eric Chu, a programmer for the Android Mobile Platform, wrote in a blog post that Android Market will let programmers make their apps and other content available on a Google hosted service that uses a YouTube-like feedback and rating system.

Few deals currently give open-source advocates unrest like Google's deal with Mozilla, which Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker said in a blog post has been renewed for three years, through November 2011. In the deal, Google pays Mozilla a lot of cash to be the default search engine on Firefox, which commands about 15 percent of the browser market behind perennial market leader Microsoft Internet Explorer. Google paid Mozilla $57 million in 2006 ,

Talk about capitalizing )making money( on something )copyrighted content( that sticks in peoples' craws. Google's YouTube video-sharing site is getting an unexpected boost from a content protection tool it launched in October 2007 to help companies weed out copyrighted content. Rather than using the software to block video users put up,

Google Labs is the proud father of a new graduate search tool. Called Google Suggest, the software provides users suggestions for search queries from the home page as they type queries in. The tool uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. Think of it as the "Did you mean?" feature, but in real time from your search bar. I tested it out first with a search for "Microsoft.

UPDATE: I added a response from Google. When Google bought Jaiku last October it spawned a great deal of talk about whether Google would be looking to throw its weight behind a micro-blogging service to lure people tired of Twitter's downtime. Well, that was a long, long time ago, making some of feel that we were in a galaxy far, far away. In subsequent months,