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Google has finally announced the winners of its Project 10^100 contest, which will award five different projects a total of $10 million.

The contest was first announced back in 2008 but has taken quite a long time to reach its conclusion, after Google changed the project to focus on "themes" rather than specific ideas. Sixteen themes were selected exactly a year ago, and the public was given an opportunity to vote on the themes most worthy of funding.

Organizations then submitted specific proposals for the five most popular ideas, and the list of winners follows below:

• The … Read more

Editors' note: By late afternoon, Facebook was saying that it had gotten to the bottom of what it called "the worst outage we've had in over four years." Below is our account of how things unfolded during the course of the day.

Facebook struggled to maintain service availability today during the same period of time as a prominent Internet service provider dealt with a major outage.

We're getting countless reports of Facebook problems from users both inside and outside of CNET, with most reporting that the site has been up and down all morning. Facebook acknowledged … Read more

T-Mobile argued in a court briefing today that text-messaging services are not subject to the same regulations as voice services, in defending itself against a lawsuit filed by a text-message marketing company.

Last week T-Mobile was sued by EZ Texting, a company that runs marketing campaigns for various clients that want to send group text messages. In the suit, EZ Texting claimed that T-Mobile pulled the plug on its service after learning it was running a campaign for a client called Weedmaps.com.

However, T-Mobile said it yanked EZ Texting's messaging code because it was supposed to get prior … Read more

A radio talk-show host urged his listeners Wednesday to search the Internet for two specific phrases in order to get those terms into Google's closely watched Google Trends list and promote a blog post implying President Obama will invite a terrorist attack on the U.S. to boost his popularity.

Alex Jones, who hosts The Alex Jones Show weekdays on around 60 radio stations, asked his listeners to conduct Internet searches with two specific queries: "save his presidency" and "Obama terror attack." They responded, driving those two terms briefly to the top of Google Trends … Read more

A few weeks after starting a video series to promote the most popular searches in a given week, Google is starting a blog of sorts to promote its new products.

Google New went live today as a directory of new products designed to help call attention to the new products Google launches at a dizzying rate, the ones that may not get as much attention as say Google Instant Search or voice calls from Gmail. The site will pull together posts from Google's various product and policy-related blogs and it appears it will use some editorial judgment in how … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Krishna Bharat, founder and engineering head of Google News, was stuck in New Orleans at a conference in the days after September 11, 2001, and like so many others desperately searching for news about the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Not only was it hard to find the most authoritative information online, it was hard to find information from differing points of view.

"(There was) a lot of time to think about current events and news and trying to get out of there," Bharat said in a recent interview with CNET. "… Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--In the men's room outside the media briefing room here at Yahoo's headquarters, there's a dual sink with mismatched faucets: one modern hands-free sensor-activated model and a more traditional hand-operated one. It's a fitting metaphor for a company that, even when it moves in new directions, never quite manages to let go of the old.

Yahoo is a massive media company, the biggest and arguably most successful content provider among media companies to have made a name exclusively on the Internet. It also has a rich history of technology innovation, developing one of the … Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Yahoo made some key changes to one of its most important products today, rolling out a new look for Yahoo Mail.

Blake Irving, the company's new executive vice president and chief products officer, unveiled the new design at Yahoo's headquarters here during an event optimistically called "Product Runway." Yahoo said that its 281 million Yahoo Mail users will start seeing the new design this fall as it rolls out an opt-in beta version of the service, which is one of the key drivers of traffic to Yahoo's array of news and entertainment Web … Read more

Google's legal department has another pressing case on its hands, this time courtesy of location-services provider Skyhook Wireless.

Google was sued in both federal and state court in Massachusetts Wednesday by Skyhook over patent infringement claims as well as what GigaOm called "business interference," according to its report. Skyhook is claiming that Google used its control over Android and Google Maps to bar Skyhook's mapping technology from Motorola's Android handsets in favor of the search company's own technology, and that Google's mapping technology violates four Skyhook patents.

Specifically, the complaint regarding business interference … Read more