Google Street View - those panorama photos part of Google Maps - has now been released for France , as second country in the world after the US. However, the pics taken are just from the Tour de France route, as Luka from the French Zorgloob blog explains. The faces of people are blurred as they are in other Street View locations nowadays, Luka explains. In the meantime,

In February this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google wants to "crack" the Chinese market with a music-related offering. "The U.S. search giant is in the late planning stages of a joint venture with a Chinese online music company that would permit it to provide free - licensed - music downloads in China," the WSJ wrote. )Please note the logo above is just for illustrative purposes with no relation to the service...( Now,

Many of us are noticing an odd black-to-gray ink spot at the top left of Gmail, like in Firefox. Does anyone know what this is? )Tony Ruscoe suspects it's a zero-width inline frame...( [Thanks Mrrix32 and Jarred !

Google's sitelinks are the navigational links displayed below a main result; they're automatically picked by Google, and just show for some sites/ queries. Now it seems Google also shows other sub-domains among these links.... like uk.ask.com below www.ask.com in a search for ask )oddly enough, the subdomain link seems to use a different font, too(. Does anyone know if this is new? [Thanks Russell!

This particular YouTube video has a couple of things going for it which might make more people subscribe to the creator's video channel or view more of their videos: The first part of the video is basically a still telling viewers to click the Subscribe button to "see Tania naked." To not see her naked, you are told you also need to click the Subscribe button... The customizable channel banner graphic itself has an arrow pointing to the Subscribe button.

Google announced they improved their handing of Flash files in search results ; they say they now have a better ability "to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds," including buttons, gadgets and so on. Google were already able to find and read Flash files to some extent, but now, to quote them )my emphasis(: <<We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on.

Google just announced they are ending their AdSense referrals program. In the past - and until August 2008 when this will officially stop - AdSense referrals allowed you as a webmaster to include links from different kinds of products; health, real estate, shopping, computers, travel, Google-suggested products like Firefox or the Google Pack download, and many more. When a user to your site bought something via that link, you'd get a commission of the sale.

Seero.com allows users to mash and sync videos with a Google map. One user mapped a car chase scene from the movie Bullitt with Steve McQueen: to the left you'll see the video, and to the right the related San Francisco locations. )If you're wondering why there's no jet fighters or transforming robots in this car chase, note the movie's from 1968.( [Via Boing Boing .

This video has over 2.7 million views on YouTube. And over 23.000 comments. It's by YouTube sensation Fred, 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank's fictional 6-year old with "anger management issues", as his channel explains - and this is by far not his most popular video. Some other of his videos, done in a high-pitched voice, fast cuts, and about lots of teen problems, are titled "Fred Gets Bullied", "Fred Loses His Meds", "Fred Goes to the Dentist",

The New York Times reports Google will be teaming up with the creator of the US cartoon series "Family Guy" to distribute short original episodes of a show called "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy."* The first news of this came in last year already. Instead of creating a new microsite where people can view these episodes, in this model the new cartoons will be shown in AdSense spots, those automated Google ads third-party webmasters include on their sites.

The Chinese Google Rebang site - a listing of hot searches as well as a general info directory - provides a new research tool for prospective university students in China. The tool is called Gaokao Zhuanti , which can be roughly translated to "Special Subject: College Entrance Examinations." I asked native speaker Aaron Liang from Canada to provide more background info about this, and he says: <<When the high school students in China graduate,

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,

In much the same way that Google launched the Russian-only Knowledge Search almost exactly a year ago, a new Google Help site has now been launched by Google Poland. The site's FAQ page )available in English( states: <<Google Help is a place where you can ask questions about Google services and give answers to questions posted by other users looking for help. Google Help is an unmoderated forum for users wanting to discuss Google Products. We encourage you to ask questions,

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.