google

Google's Enterprise Search Appliance customers are being notified of a free upgrade that's now available. It adds new features to the buttoned-down, behind-the-firewall search appliance designed for giant companies and their IT departments.

But the product now has an unbuttoned, free-for-all aspect that admins can turn on, that allows end users to stuff search results into the engine for other users at their company. Called KeyMatch, this feature lets users create specific results for search terms. For example, a user could add a search result for "picnic" that points to an intranet page about the company … Read more

Earlier today, my colleague Elinor Mills covered the announcement that Google had purchased the Helsinki, Finland-based microblogging company Jaiku. It's the third oddball move in the mobile (or semi-mobile, as microblogging is) social-networking space that Google's made in the past few years, with its reported acquisition of Zingku late last month and the ill-fated buy of Dodgeball in 2005.

RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks this may not be the last microblog acquisition we'll see. In fact, he said, Google rival Yahoo may be after Jaiku rival Twitter, the company that put "microblog" in everybody's … Read more

Google has added six new cities to its Google Maps Street View, as well as the ability to pan to the top of skyscrapers.

The new cities with the 360-degree view are: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson. And the images in Phoenix, Tucson and parts of Chicago are in high resolution, like those in San Francisco and San Diego, according to Google's Lat Long Blog. There's also a dorky video about it on YouTube.

The images in the new cities were captured by Google's own camera-equipped cars since its contract with Canada-based Immersive Media expires … Read more

Google is acquiring Helsinki, Finland-based mobile social-networking provider Jaiku, also known as Twitter's competitor.

The news was announced on Jaiku's Web site:

"Exciting news: Jaiku is joining Google! While it's too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together, and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, … Read more

When Google first announced in 2006 that it had purchased @Last Software, and its Sketchup 3D modeling tool, there were few people more excited than Jerry Paffendorf.

Paffendorf was at that time the futurist-in-residence at The Electric Sheep Co., as well as one of the people behind the Accelerating Studies Foundation's Metaverse Roadmap project.

And he saw, even early last year, that folding Sketchup into Google could mean magic for virtual world developers, since it meant there was a high probability of a 3D, social virtual environment built around Google Earth.

As a futurist, Paffendorf was spot on: Virtual … Read more

The New York Times is reporting that Google's "gPhone" is coming soon, will be advertising-supported, and will run Linux. None of these should be surprising to any who have kept tabs on Google over the years. Not to state it too bluntly, but Google is essentially a massive, heavily modified Linux server farm. So, it's no small surprise that Google is opting for Linux on its mobile phone, as well.

Whatever Google has been to open source on the server, it seems ready to "play ball" with open source on its mobile clients:… Read more

Google is expanding its AdSense program so that Web site publishers can display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads, in addition to the traditional text ads that Google offers.

Pretty soon Web sites will be able to get any kind of content they want on their sites and get a cut of the revenue from accompanying ads. This will boost Google's already successful online ad business and give publishers a way to earn more money on their sites. Soon, we'll see Google distributing all of the … Read more

In advance of the October 15 debut of Fox's new television business network, media svengali Roger Ailes spoke with The Wall Street Journal about Fox's plans. On other occasions, Ailes has described how the Fox entry will present a more pro-business face to the world than CNBC. That will be a tall order. With the exception of Mark Haynes and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, CNBC's coverage is dominated by suck-ups and sycophants to the rich and powerful.

It's hard to believe Fox can engineer a more business-friendly turn. Then again, these are the same folks who left CNN … Read more

Grayboxx is a local recommendations service that's been quietly humming along since 2005. This morning they added 100 cities to the network, bringing the grand total up to 175. Grayboxx takes aggregate customer reviews from all over, and combines them by neighborhood to serve up business recommendations, kind of like what Google has done with its search results. Grayboxx will scour the internet for references to a business (be it tagged photos, or mentions in a blog post), and give that business a certain rank based on its pervasion. However unlike Yelp and Yahoo Local, which are designed and … Read more