Regularly rapped for keeping details about its algorithms hush-hush, Google continues to slowly peel back its complex search onion . The latest is a new feature in Google search that lets users grasp how their search results are customized. Soon, users will be able to see how Google customizes their results by location, recent searches and Web history. This is some interesting disclosure on Google's march toward the semantic Web,

Call it the Google Apps for EDU road show. Starting in Mountain View on Google's campus September 8, members of Google's Apps for EDU team are boarding a Google bus to visit various universities using, or that just started using Google Apps. Google offers these Web-based apps, including its Gmail e-mail, Docs spreadsheets, word processing and presentations software and the Sites wiki,

Have you ever grabbed a YouTube clip and wanted to tweak it for you Web site or blog? Google said on its YouTube blog today that it has acquired Omnisio , a startup that lets users customize clips of YouTube videos with tags and comments . Users can then embed these video clips in a blog or Web site. Omnisio creates a link to the source video and starts playing it wherever you want. The Omnisio team posted a note about working with the YouTube team on its home page today,

Similar to the joint cloud computing partnership between Google and IBM, HP, Intel and Yahoo are creating open source cloud computing test beds to facilitate wide-scale computing in the world. Here are the high-level nuts and bolts: The systems vendor, chipmaker and Internet portal are teaming with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore )IDA(, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology )KIT( in Germany for this effort,

Last week, Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, proclaimed that Nokia and Google would unite the open-source mobile operating systems of Symbian and Android within the year or so. Here is some context from which his theory springs: Nokia, last month said it was acquiring the remaining 52 million shares it does not already own of Symbian for $410 million. Many of Nokia's popular smartphones run Symbian. Nokia, AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola,

Rearden Commerce, the Web concierge service that makes it easier for working stiffs all around the world book travel arrangements, rent cars and buy theater tickets, is set to an "business service-related" acquisition and a new mobile service soon. The news was supposed to drop Monday, but got squelched because "there is more "stuff" brewing that we want to get in line," the company told me. Why mention this here in Google Watch?

Google has formally released to the public knol , it's alternative encyclopedia service to Wikipedia. Check out the page here at your own risk ; it includes a lot of information about diseases. Google bills knols, announced last December , as units of knowledge. The service had been limited to invitations to contributors and readers to this point. The company calls the service an act of "moderated collaboration,

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has revived his rumor that Google is negotiating to buy Digg for $200 million and tuck it into Google News, a rumor that has been boomeranging since he first wrote about it in March . Digg, a site that lets users load stories and vote on them in a user-generated popularity contest, has millions of users. Google would love to get its hands on them to put ads in front of them,

Though I use Google Maps frequently, I don't pay it a whole lot of attention in Google Watch because I, like so many others have come to take it for granted as a utility just like the phone book or any old directory. Well, today this old directory Google Maps got a jolt of fresh blood with the beta of Walking Directions. And I'm excited about it. We all know driving and walking in cities can be two different experiences.

Earlier this morning, the editorial staff at eWEEK fell into an interesting discussion about the latest Amazon Web Services S3 )Simple Storage Service( outage and how big a deal it is. Opinions varied from, big deal, to not so big a deal. I'm in the not-so-big-a-deal camp. Look, even the massively parallel,

Earlier this morning, the editorial staff at eWEEK fell into an interesting discussion about the latest Amazon Web Services S3 )Simple Storage Service( outage and how big a deal it is. Opinions varied from big deal, to not so big a deal. I'm in the not-so-big-a-deal camp. Look, even the massively parallel,

Maybe Google Co-founder Larry Page should skip quarterly earnings conference calls more often. Nothing earth-shattering came out of yesterday's call with financial analysts, where Google reported a 35 percent profit hike that left investors displeased. However, between co-founder Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and Page stand-in Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, there were a number of interesting nuggets to glean. Here's the Cliff notes version of the hour-long call.

Funny, when I get briefings from Google, they're usually under strict NDA. Andrew Fogg apparently wasn't under the same constraints when he posted this tweet that Google is adding offline support to its Gmail and Calendar apps later this year. He offered no other detail, but none were required. This is a big deal. Through Google Gears, an open source browser extension for IE and Firefox that lets Web applications work offline ,

Just about every software maker that wants to plant a stake in the mobile market today unveiled applications in anticipation of the launch of 3G for the Apple iPhone. Apple said in a statement that more than 500 native applications will be available through its iPhone App Store when the iPhone 3G goes on sale tomorrow, July 11. This being Google Watch, I'm going to start with a note about Google's contribution to the iPhone 3G effort.

Google last Monday released Protocol Buffers to the open-source community and before you scream old news hear me out. This isn't just about the Buffers, which as a faster, less expensive alternative to XML lets programmers write software that exchanges data between servers, index records or geospatial datasets, among other entities. Google software engineer Kenton Varda explained the catalyst for Buffers : "When we roll out a new version of a server,

I didn't attend the Senate or House hearings regarding the Google Yahoo scrutiny yesterday, but when I blogged about it based on my colleague's reporting, I expressed concern that the government officials, though not necessarily Luddites, were perhaps not the best judges of modern seach and online ad deals. Today I was pleased to see that Kara Swisher, who did attend the hearings , has the same concerns. Though she, unlike me, is not in favor of the Googlehoo union. Look Kara,

The Googlehoo hearings have begun on Capitol Hill and, true to the course of events that started with Microsoft's Feb. 1 offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, the opposing lawyers for Microsoft and Yahoo are in disagreement. My colleague Roy Mark, eWEEK's intrepid reporter of all things political, captured the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing action today in this story .

Google last Monday released Protocol Buffers to the open source community and before you scream old news hear me out. This isn't just about the Buffers, which as a faster, less expensive alternative to XML lets programmers write software that exchanges data between servers, index records or geospatial datasets, among other entities. Google software engineer Kenton Varda explained the catalyst for Buffers : "When we roll out a new version of a server,

Just about every software maker who wants to plant a stake in the mobile market today unveiled applications in anticipation of the launch of 3G for the Apple iPhone. Apple said in a statement that more than 500 native applications will be available on its iPhone App Store when iPhone 3G goes on sale tomorrow. This being Google Watch, I'm going to start with a note about Google's contribution to the iPhone 3G effort.