The Googleplex is getting bigger thanks to a new 40-year lease the search vendor inked with spacey neighbor NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, with whom Google first inked the agreement for this development in 2005. For a whopping $3.66 million of year in base rent, Google will lease more than 42 acres of land in NASA Research Park at Ames to build 1.2 million square feet of offices and research and development )R&D( facilities. Check out the area here .

When The 451 Group put out a report last week calling for Google to buy Salesforce.com, we wrote about it in eWEEK.com. Since then, a few readers chimed in to express their colorful views on the subject. In short, people think a Google-Salesforce.com merger is either a great idea or the worst idea ever. Okay, fine. How about Oracle buys Salesforce.com, then Google buys Oracle? How do you like them apples? Ralph Smorra cheered Google for Salesforce.com,

Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google, told me that both Google's Mini and its big brother General Search Appliance are here to stay and are not being cast aside for the company's new and improved hosted Site Search. Currently, both the search appliances and Google's hosted search each have thousands of customers, with the appliances boasting much more by dint of being around for the last seven years. Even so,

Now that a Delaware court judge has unsealed the complaint in a shareholder lawsuit filed against Yahoo's board of directors, we can get an idea just what the company was up to as it fought off Microsoft's unsolicited acquisition attempt . The complaint is a thick 64 pages, featuring transcriptions of private phone calls and some tabloid-esque allegations of how Yahoo tried to throw "sand in the gears" of Microsoft's acquisition efforts.

SAAS business intelligence provider Panorama Software is looking to get acquired by Google, and the company is providing in interesting lesson in how to position itself for an offer. Why would Google want Panorama? Only because it would provide a cloud-based alternative to Microsoft's BI capabilities. Panorama's attempt to get on bed with Google will either succeed or backfire. During a briefing with Oudi Antebi, Panorama's vice president of marketing and strategy this week,

If we take nothing else away from Google's I/O event beyond my colleague Darryl Taft's take that the event made the Moscone West an absolute nightmare for claustrophobes, we now know that Google cares about the developer. Oh, Google never said it didn't care about the developer, but the search vendor used to lord internal search and advertising innovation over all. Even when it began rolling out Gmail, Docs and other productivity apps,

Google has been on cruise control for awhile regarding copyright issues, but in the past week a few issues have burbled up that bear watching. First, Google last Friday filed a statement in a Manhattan district court challenging Viacom's more than one-year-old, $1 billion copyright infringement suit versus Google's YouTube video-sharing Web site. The gist: Viacom is tired of its MTV and Comedy Central content running on YouTube.

Rumors from TechCrunch of the Google Mini search appliance's demise were apparently ill-founded. The company today upgraded the search appliance for SMBs, which starts at $2,990 for a two-year contract that handles 50,000 documents, with a few new features that point toward more granular search capabilities. This upgrade is a surprise when you consider TechCrunch's report )it is portrayed as a rumor( that the Mini would be replaced by a cloud-based solution .

Microsoft two days ago said it was shuttering its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic software projects, through which the company digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Slated to close next week, this includes nixing library scanning and the company's in-copyright book programs. Why would a company desperate to gain search market share from Google close down two search services? Simple. Money, or rather, the lack thereof, in book search.

I've had a couple days to mull this over and I've concluded that Live Search Cashback is a first-class ticket to nowhere but lost money for Microsoft. Speaking as one of the most cynical shoppers you'll find, I don't think it will work in the long run. A reader who responded to my story on eWEEK.com yesterday said he would indeed switch to Live.com if getting that $2,000 laptop he was eyeing at Circuit City will save him $60. He called it free money. Fair enough.

Now that Google has kicked the tires of its Sites wiki application for a few months, the company is comfortable opening things up a bit. Originally launched as a wiki for companies that wanted to use the service on their own domains, Google Sites is now available for anyone who wants to set up their own Sites Web site to share information and collaborate with coworkers, or students, Google Sites Engineering Manager Andrew Zaeske wrote in a blog post May 21 . Of course,

Today I had the privilege of attending the opening of one of Google's crown jewels: a datacenter. This one was in Lenoir, N.C., nestled in the rolling hills of Caldwell County. Never heard of it? That's okay. Google likes it that way, nice and secretive. For perspective, Lenoir is about 70 miles southeast of Charlotte. I was the only tech trade reported in attendance. This post is a rough sketch of the event. I'll be coloring in more details for eWEEK.com,

After suggesting that Google would make money on from Google Health by placing ads , and after reading my peers' coverage that Google really, really just wants to help the good of mankind, I've had a change of view. It's not what you think, at least not a 100 percent turnaround. I still think Google will make money from this, but after thinking about the annoying pharmaceutical advertisements about Cialis, Viagra and Lunesta that I see on TV,

As we opined earlier, Microsoft has circled back to Yahoo for round two in the let's make a deal for search and Internet ad sweepstakes. But in a saga fraught with twists and turns, it's not what we expected. Some of us )myself included( at eWEEK discussed in this podcast the possibility that Microsoft would come back relatively soon to try to buy Yahoo.

Shortly after Facebook banned Google's Friend Connect the service's engineers took the time to detail how Friend Connect works. Facebook claimed it banned the service because it allowed developers to access users' data. So, Google went to great lengths in a blog post to explain that the service does not threaten user privacy, chiefly because users control what data gets shared. "Users choose what social networks to link to their Friend Connect account.

Innovation continues to happen at a crisp pace since Google launched its App Engine in April . Yesterday, a programmer for the company, which has been dinged for just accepting applications coded in Python, introduced Google App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X . The app, unleashed during MacWorld , aims to manage a list of those unwieldy App Engine apps. With a few clicks, developers can run, browse, deploy and view logs for their apps, John Skidgel,

Okay, so I can't help but harp on Facebook's affront of Google over the Friend Connect service. Never mind the he-said, she-said BS, but one of the parts I didn't cover adequately in my first go-round for eWEEK is how Facebook tried to come off as a company that is earnest about data portability. To stress that Facebook really, really wants to play nice with Google, or perhaps more appropriately, that Facebook really, really wants Google to bow to its will,

Some people may think I'm perseverating here on Verizon's casual-seeming rebuke of Android , but I'm going to illuminate anyway. When asked why Verizon chose LiMo over Google, Kyle Malady, vice president of network for Verizon, said on a conference call that LiMo's membership consists of a diverse set of experts from the carrier community, software developers, and handset manufacturers. Well, so does the Android flag-waving Open Handset Alliance,

Google is holding a press pow-wow Monday, May 19 at its Googleplex in Mountain View, offering what an invite says is "an insider's perspective on search" and "an update on Google Health." The former sounds like background BS. What will Google tell us about its search that it hasn't already illuminated? Even if it gives up the secret sauce to its search, we still wouldn't be able to fathom how it works.

Google continues to improve its applications for the iPhone. The latest perk is a new version of Google Reader designed for the iPhone and other mobile phones with "advanced browsers." Check it out here . Google Reader is essentially the company's RSS feed, allowing users to check their favorite news sites and blogs for fresh copy. Google said users can scan the titles for an item that interests them and tap it on that lovely iPhone touchscreen to watch it expand.