It's getting increasingly harder for Google to claim it is friend to the long tail of Website publishers indexed on its search engine. Nicholas Carr, the pundit who has argued that Google is making us stupid, has another go at Google in his blog. Carr argued that Google's new Recipe View search refinement favors high-profile and corporate cooking Websites such as Epicurious.com, Foodnetwork.com and AllRecipes.com over the smaller, amateur food bloggers and cooks.

Google's hiring of the spurned Java creator James Gosling could be a brilliant tactical move for the search engine as it defends its Android castle in court. Gosling claimed not to know what he would be working on Google, writing in his blog March 28: "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon." I think we know it exactly what Gosling will be working.

Waving network neutrality as its championing cause, Google likes to talk about federated data shuttling from network pipes airwaves to users' computers and mobile phones. But what does this mean from the consumer standpoint? Google Goggles is an great example of an application that will provide greater value for users with the facilitation of speedier, 4G networks and net neut. Let me explain why, backing up a bit.

Bloomberg cited a state official and some other person who claimed that Ohio and Wisconsin are weighing whacking Google with antitrust investigations over its business practices: Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is "evaluating the facts to determine if it's something we want to review," Dan Tierney, his spokesman, said. In Wisconsin, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is weighing a probe of Google's bid to buy ITA Software Inc.,

Motorola is apparently not content to tether its lifeline on Google's Android operating system alone. According to InformationWeek , and confirmed by industry analysts, Motorola has hired engineers from Apple and Adobe to forge a mobile operating system as an alternative Android. As in, Motorola is no longer willing to place all its chips in the Android camp. Motorola told me the same thing it told InfoWeek : "Motorola is committed to Android." Let's step back a second.

Google's WiSpy incident, in which its Street View cars inadvertently sniffed out and socked away 600 gigabytes of user data from unsecured WiFi networks in more than 30 countries, is costing the search engine dollars, not just bad publicity. While U.S. states are hashing out multi-million-dollar settlements, France has just settled with the search engine, imposing a $142,000 fine on the company in the name of redress for gross privacy violations.

If you can't beat 'em, might as well go down fighting. That' the takeaway I have from Sprint's public relations blitz Monday, one day after No. 4 carrier T-Mobile agreed to be bought out by AT&T for $39 billion. To summarize, Sprint said March 21 it would: Sell the Samsung Nexus S 4G this spring for $199.99 Offer Google Voice free on all of its CDMA phones )wow!

Business ethics think tank Ethisphere has declared its list of top 110 most ethical companies , which "demonstrate real and sustained ethical leadership within their industries, putting into real business practice the Institute's credo of "Good. Smart. Business. Profit." Over 3,000 businesses of all types were urged to apply. A methodology committee of "leading attorneys, professors, government officials and organization leaders," concocted the list,

C.K. Sample III, vice president of product development for Crowd Fusion , which makes a Web-based publishing platform hosted entirely in the cloud, brought up an interesting point in the wake of Apple's iPad 2 unveiling March 2. Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed that the iPad 2 was the company's third, post-PC blockbuster: Our competitors are looking at this like it's the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this.

When it comes to ways to make money from online advertising, Google can never be accused of not being platform agnostic. The search engine's AdMob group has to date fueled more than 50,000 mobile applications Google's Android, Apple's iOS and HP's webOS platforms, helping the company to 60 percent of the mobile ad market )most of it is from mobile search, a $1 billion business for the company(. Google hopes to boost that figure with a new platform: Windows Phone 7.

With the bloggers writing to and fro that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 , the AndroidHD blog has scored a long, long hands-on video test of the Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" tablet, slated to go on sale from Vodafone this spring: If you've seen or used the Motorola Xoom , the demo won't offer much new to you, as it's the same Honeycomb OS. Though this guy actually took the Tab 10.1 in his car to show Google Maps Navigation. Sweet! He also took it into the bathroom. No so sweet.

A frustrating news teaser bubbled out of the blogosphere today, starting with ReadWriteWeb's report that Google would announce Google Circles, a super social product, at South By Southwest Interactive today. The teaser is that not only is Google not announcing anything news-oriented at SXSW, but it denied that Circles exists, according to AllThingsDigital . That's straight from the mouth of Chris Messina )he "didn't know what [the story] was talking about"(,

Google whipped up one of its customary crisis response Websites to provide support information from those affected by the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that roiled the Pacific Ocean off Japan's coast and triggered a tsunami March 11. On the 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami Google is offering real-time updates for the disaster, which is impacting other countries as the tsunami speeds across the Pacific. The site includes emergency lines, sources for alarms and warnings,

It's a small technological gesture that means a whole lot. Google March 10 began letting users click to call numbers that friends, colleagues and other contacts them in a Gmail e-mail or chat message. I tested this out last night with my number, which rendered as a link after I typed it and e-mailed it to my Gmail. When I clicked it, I saw the familiar Gmail dialpad pop out to the right, including the number I clicked on,

I'm always interested in seeing how search startups try to position themselves once they enter the market. Launching is the easy part. You get trendy tech blogs to buy into your approach and product )it helps to know people who will vouch for your work( and write about them, then you open for business and watch the traffic flood in to see how you're different from Google, Yahoo or Bing.

I spent 15 minutes using Google's Instant Previews for mobile search tool on my Droid X last night. I came away convinced that the tool will get more traction on Android and Apple handsets than it will on desktop version, which Google introduced last November to enhance its Instant predictive search technology.

Google March 7 introduced a potentially great time-saving feature for motorists, adding the ability to route users around traffic congestion with the Google Maps Navigation turn-by-turn GPS feature . Google Maps Navigation has saved me a lot of time and stress of Googling directions and printing them out to follow. From my Droid X, I type in my destination on Google Maps and tap the Navigation option to have spoken directions lead me.

Google rarely overtly tips its hand on coming products, preferring to operate under the practice that they don't preannounce new software services, but if you read enough of their 30 or so product blog posts a week you can glean some stuff. Take for example,

When portraying yourself as an underdog in an online travel industry where you're claiming Google will have the prohibitive edge if it is allowed to acquire the leading flight far and schedule data provider, it's probably best to appear humble and weaker. Which is exactly what Kayak Co-founder and CTO Paul English didn't do in this Bloomberg interview,