Right now, Google wants to promote their desktop photo app Picasa 3 on the google.com homepage, but the link is dead... at least for some of us, me included.* "This is very wrong. 40 minutes, and still 404," Jérôme Flipo comments. [Thanks David Hetfield!] *In one browser, I'm getting a link to picasa.google.com/learn_more.html, in another to picasa.google.com/download_promo.html, but both show a "not found" message.

Colin Colehour in the forum spotted a couple of image ads in Google image search . In previous times image search was ad-free, but Google had already announced they're experimenting with ads there. I can't reproduce these here from Germany, but Colin saw the following light-yellow box titled "Sponsored Links" in a search for canon camera : Colin writes: <<Here's what I found out so far,

Google has removed the dictionary link in search results for at least a portion of users, or perhaps all users )who of you is still seeing it? I'm not seeing it on computers in two different locations tested(. Before, when you searched for a word in the dictionary - e.g. "house" - there would be a link leading to a definition in the top blue bar. Some years ago this was linked to dictionary.com and afterwards, to answers.com. Answers.

Why hasn't Microsoft already made their office tools available as online versions? It could set them up in a good position against Google's online office efforts - the shift to the so-called computing cloud, the buzzword of recent times. I once heard someone argue they don't move to the cloud because it would cannibalize their own desktop office suite. But times are changing, and now Google boss Steve Ballmer said some interesting things,

As of recently the Google Blog Search homepage consisted of a simple search box, but now it looks more like Google News or Techmeme: it groups related stories into groups. To the left side of each cluster, you'll see how many blogs discussed this story recently, and the way this is formatted it may remind you of sites like social news Digg. It would be interesting to know if Google gives more weight to popular or high-PageRanked blogs here.

Google recently rolled out a search engine accessing their 2001 index, though the design of that one isn't quite like it was back then. Above actual screenshot from 2001 comes courtesy of Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land . [Thanks Danny and Tony!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: What a Google Result in 2001 Really Looked Li ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Imagine dramatic music, bright text on a dark sky background, and the words "Some days ago in a country far, far away...", followed by a floating title reading Privacy Wars: Attack of the Street View Car Clones. OK, back to reality... in a couple of towns in Northern Germany, politicians are starting to protest against Google's Street View cars, which photograph cities to put panoramic photos into Google Maps.

Google in India launched a new Labs service called Google SMS Channels , as Digital Inspiration reports. Digital Inspiration explains the service "lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages," adding that Google SMS Channels are "free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS." [Thanks Amit and WebSonic.

Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, put up an FAQ - a list of frequently asked questions - for the 2008 US Presidential election. The list deals with lots of facts and figures and comparisons, as opposed to mainly personal opinions, though of course even stats aren't always neutral )as you can pick from different stats to begin with; also, Peter does state he supports Obama(. It's tough to judge the quality of this article in detail but by its intent,

Simon was a memory toy from the late 70s/ 80s*, and as Google Chrome's logo looks similar to it**, we now have Chromon : a browser-based spin off of the game using the Chrome logo. What's your score? *According to Wikipedia Simon's marketing slogan was "Simon's a computer, Simon has a brain, you either do what Simon says or else go down the drain." Try replace "Simon" with "Google" in that slogan for some extra fun... **The logo also looks like a Pokeball ,

Google Image Search has a new advanced option: you can restrict results to show photos only )or photos mostly , as Google's analysis may not always get it 100% right(. Just go to the image search , click on Advanced..., and tick the "photo content" box. Enter your search term as usual, say, Mickey Mouse , and the search results will now contain a lot more photos than e.g. cartoon drawings in comparison to a normal search. Ionut Alex. Chitu,

In honor of their tenth birthday*, Google brought back their search engine the way it was many years ago , in January 2001. Below an old-school Google logo ) in 2001 they were actually already using a newer one( the input box invites you to search through "1,326,920,000 web pages". A search for Barack Obama returns around 773 results, for instance, with the top link leading to the old address as it was,

Between Google's 10th birthday, the third Google founder controversy, ordering your G1 and their launch of "10 to the 100th"*, you might have missed the new "Google Story" . This latest iteration of David Vise and Mark Malseed's National Bestseller hit store shelves last Tuesday**. "Updated for Google's 10th Birthday", this new edition is the same "Google Story" you've come to know only updated with new accounts. Like previous versions,

According to the Guardian , Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, said: <<One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control ... It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.

A PDF file published at GovernmentAttic.org contains, according to its description, the "NSA [US National Security Agency] administrative processing file for FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request for records on Google and contracts With Google". I asked Seth Finkelstein of the Infothought blog about this set of documents. He only glanced it over but here's what he's making of it: <<I don't see any *particularly* deep meaning or implications in the file.

Back in December last year, Google released the Google Toolbar version 5 for Internet Explorer. Now, version 5 is also available for Firefox , with a bunch of changes . Unfortunately, this release breaks some of the functionality that used to work with the older toolbar; in my case, as shown in the screenshot above I'm moving the PageRank bar to the top bar and hide the toolbar itself, but now the PageRank icon won't update anymore as it did before,

The Google OS blog reports that Google added a couple of new languages to their translator : "Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese". Ionut Alex. Chitu notes, "In most cases, Google uses English as an intermediary language, so when you translate a text from Indonesian to Vietnamese, Google translates the text to English and then it translates the result to Vietnamese.

In a post yesterday, the Google Talkabout blog announced they've launched a new help forum for Google Talk )and closed the old Google Talk Group to new posts in the process(. It's interesting to see that Google could be moving away from using Google Groups for their own product support forums. Some of you might remember the Pomoc Google service launched in June by Google Poland,

Google Maps UK has finally added live traffic data to the major roads. As with other areas in Google Maps that have traffic data enabled, you can also let Google predict what the traffic situation will be like on any day at a specific time. In other Google Maps news, NYC has just got Google Transit directions , which allows users to plan their public transportation routes online. You can visit the Google Transit site to see which other cities also have this functionality.

A Car's Life is an interactive Arcade-style game using YouTube. To make it through a given level, all you need to do is click a button which appears. The video makes use of YouTube annotations, which can be linked to other YouTube videos. It's a bit like the 1980s Dragon's Lair in some respects: it has animations and somewhat stretches the limits of its medium, but it also has rather low playability.