It looks like civil heads are prevailing among the parties involved in the search ad deal between Google and Yahoo . The Wall Street Journal today said Google and Yahoo are hashing out concessions that will make it easier for the U.S. Justice Department to allow the deal to pass muster. This comes after Google said the deal , in which Yahoo would run Google keywords alongside its search results ,

Bloomberg Friday posted a fine feature about how a technology chief in Washington, D.C. inked a $500,000 a year contract with Google to grant some 38,000 municipal employees access to Google Apps. This includes Gmail and the Google Docs spreadsheet and word processing software among other things, which the article notes are alternatives to Microsoft's Office productivity suite. We've seen these stories before and I've written some.

Financial analysts are taking a dim view of Google's third quarter earnings announcement for Oct. 16, a day that could set the tone for Internet stocks that are already taking a beating. Shares of Google spiraled to $345 and change Tuesday, but that lamentation proved premature: Google is trading at around $315 as I write this after closing at $328.98 last night. That means that in 11 months, Google's stock has lost more than half of its valuation.

Lest you thought there weren't enough venues for people to lend their ruminations on the volatile stock market and brittle U.S. economy, Google has made the harrowing subject the centerpiece of a new debate series on its erstwhile Wikipedia-killer knol service . The first debate kicked off with a discussion on the state of the US economy, with Daniel J.

Everyone in the blogosphere and media is having fun with this one, so I don't want to miss out because this is quite the party feature. Google Gmail engineer Jon Perlow, who presumably when we he was taking a break from working on anything important regarding Gmail, has created Mail Goggles for Gmail . The feature's name comes from the "beer goggles" syndrome. Perlow has created a feature that lets you practice safe e-mailing, saving you from sending irreverent, vulgar,

Much has been made about Google's Android mobile operating system stack as an open source platform with an asterisk . Sure, it's been open sourced for programmers to use, but the devices that run it, starting with the lone T-Mobile G1 smart phone, have their own restrictions. It seems Android isn't the only open source product from Google that comes with some limits to the search engine's largesse. Chrome may very well be an open source Web browser based on Webkit,

Sometimes in this business, when you read enough opinions, offhand comments or outright vitriol, you can get caught jumping the gun and drawing ill-conceived, intemperate conclusions just from a headline or two. Take for example, this headline: "Kohl Weighs in With Justice Department Over Google-Yahoo Agreement," which tops a letter sent from Herb Kohl, )D-WI( and chairman of the Senate's Antitrust Committee,

Google launched a new home page for Google Blog Search , leveraging some of the content situation tools from Google News. This may or may not be a good thing depending on how you like the aesthetics of Google News. Some think it's ugly. I've gotten comfortable with it. As with Google News, blog categories, from politics to technology, entertainment and sports, run vertically on the left side of the Web site,

Despite the overtures of several Internet companies to be open regarding users' social data, the social Web is still a competitive landscape. It seems Ringside Networks, the now defunct creator of social software applications that lets Web sites operators embed social capabilities within their Web site, got a taste of that scenario, which led to its closing last week. According to this post from Ringside co-founder Bob Bickel ,

Last week, T-Mobile unveiled the G1 to a flurry of interest from the public who wanted to see the first smart phone based on Google's Android mobile operating system. One of the knocks on the G1 is that it won't support Microsoft Exchange out of the box when it hits retail Oct. 22. Andy Rubin, senior director of mobile platforms at Google, told the audience there is "no Exchange compatibility, but it's a perfect opportunity for a third-party developer." This is a fair,

In what is clearly a case of politicians supporting its California crown jewel, members of U.S. Congress from California Monday implored the U.S. Department of Justice not to sue to block Google and Yahoo's search advertising agreement. U.S. House Rep. Anna Eshoo )D-CA.(, Rep. Zoe Lofgren )D-CA.( and other Democratic members of U.S.

Less than two weeks ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters that Google was hardly feeling Wall Street's financial crisis. "My guess is the drama is in New York, not here. It's business as usual at Google," he said. Google's search, ads and apps machine may be turning a robust dollar, but it's stock took a beating this afternoon, dropping $50 at market close to $381 , or percent 11.6, from Friday's close of $431. This is lower than Google has traded in two years.

Who better to hold forth on the future of the Internet than a man who presided over the early Web's birth? Indeed, when Google's Chief Internet Analyst Vint Cerf talks about what Web use will be like a decade or more out, people tend to listen. Cerf discussed the future of the Internet in a blog post late yesterday . These "future of" posts are very interesting and if you follow them close,

The embers that stoked T-Mobile's G1 fire may be smoldering from a lackluster launch , but Android is still red hot. Visa today agreed to build mobile applications that work with smart phones that run on Google's Android mobile operating system. The announcement comes two days after T-Mobile formally unveiled the G1, the first smart phone based on Android. G1 will be available Oct. 22, but you can check out some of the launch here in this video.

Another Google 20 percent time tool had made its way into the public in the form of a Q&A crowdsourcing app. The search engine has released Google Moderator to let users of Google's App Engine cloud computing application platform decide what questions should be asked. Google Moderator has its roots as a tool created to ease the Q&A process for Google's several "tech talks" on computer science subjects such as ranking images based on text queries in Google search and,

Another Google 20 percent time tool had made its way into the public in the form of a Q&A crowdsourcing app. The search engine has released Google Moderator to let users of Google's App Engine cloud computing application platform decide what questions should be asked. Google Moderator has its roots as a tool created to ease the Q&A process for Google's several "tech talks" on computer science subjects such as ranking images based on text queries in Google search and,

In its bid to map everything in the world - this sounds portentous but it's no more a joke than Google eanting to digitize the world's 30-million-plus books - Google has added transit information for the entire New York metropolitan region. Google Transit now includes maps and information on New York's subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transit Agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York,

Crow tastes lousy, but it's the dish I'm eating now. I mused Sept. 17 the first T-Mobile G1 phone based on Google's Android could ship 1 million units in almost the same amount of time as Apple's iPhone. Had this device arrived before the iPhone, it would easily ship 1 million units in 70 or days. But after sampling the G1 in person , the phone is nothing that will make people tuck their iPhones away in a desk drawer for.

NEW YORK - Having just attended the launch of the T-Mobile G1 smart phone, based on Google's Android open source mobile operating software stack, I have to say I'm a bit torn. On one hand, the event, which featured Android creator Andy Rubin, executives from T-Mobile USA, Deutsche Telekom, and HTC, was significant because it showed that Google made good on its November 2007 pledge to get Android in a phone before 2009. On the other hand, sadly, it's just another smart phone.

Google's No. 1 goal is to organize the world's information and make it easily searchable online. Considering that a whole lot of the world's information can be found in books, the company sees book search as a big step on the path of fulfilling the primary goal, in spite of the uneasiness from some publishers who resist having their works on the Web for everyone to see gratis. Today, Google is opening its Book Search door up to retailers, publishers,