Relevant Results

As another year dawns, life is still pretty good for Google but ever more complicated.

With that, let's reexamine the five New Year's resolutions we outlined for Google at the start of 2010 to see how the company lived up to that unsolicited advice, and offer more of the same for 2011.

First, last year's report card:

1. Don't forget where you came from: This resolution involved priority No. 1 at Google: remain the world's leading provider of Internet searches by a comfortable margin. It passed this test with ease: despite significant investment on Microsoft'… Read more

Sony wasn't about to let 2010 expire without throwing another legal action into the mobile industry's growing lawsuit mess.

LG was the target of Sony's lawyers yesterday, who urged the International Trade Commission to prohibit LG from selling phones in the U.S. because those phones supposedly infringe on patents held by Sony, according to a report from Bloomberg. The portion of the ITC's Web site that was supposed to be hosting the complaint was down this afternoon, but Bloomberg reported that patent issues with LG's Lotus Elite, Neon, Remarq, Rumor 2, and Xenon phones … Read more

Those obsessed with where Google ranks their Web site have a new topic to mull over: cloaking.

Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted over the past week that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users. This can include "serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users," according to Google's Webmaster Central help pages, … Read more

As the hours tick away before the close of business today, it appears Google is not going to comply with a demand from the State of Connecticut for the data gathered through its Street View project.

Google technically has until 5 p.m. ET today to turn over the payload data it says it inadvertently gathered, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. The Wall Street Journal obtained a statement from Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's office implying that Google had already decided against complying with the civil investigative demand issued last week by Blumenthal's … Read more

Google has delayed the selection process for its Google Fiber project to bring fast wired networks to a few lucky communities in the U.S.

When it first announced the program earlier this year, Google had hoped to make a decision by the end of the year but isn't ready to pull the trigger, said Milo Medin, Google's new vice president of access services, in a blog post. Google now hopes to inform the winners in "early 2011," he said, noting that submissions are still closed.

Google's project involves building high-speed broadband infrastructure at speeds &… Read more

Richard Stallman, one of the computer industry's most outspoken defenders of open software, doesn't like Chrome OS.

Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, continued to speak out against the notion of cloud computing today, telling The Guardian that the notion of Chrome OS' cloud model might better be described as "careless computing" than as cloud computing. Chrome OS is loosely based on a project near and dear to Stallman's heart--GNU/Linux--but "it is delivered without the usual applications, and rigged up to impede and discourage installing applications," he said.

That's developer … Read more

OAKLAND, Calif.--It's fairly rare in 2010 to walk into a technology company where the first thing presented to visitors is a whiteboard covered in multicolor Post-It notes.

But that's exactly what lies just beyond the receptionist's desk at Ask.com, the venerable yet beleaguered Internet company in the middle of yet another strategy shift. The sticky notes are actually part of the company's product-development workflow, giving everyone a visual representation of the number of balls in the air at any given time, not just those logged into the project management software.

Doug Leeds, president of … Read more

Google's legal headache spurred by its Street View project shows no signs of easing.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who has been leading a cadre of attorneys general investigating Google's Wi-Fi Street View data gathering, formally ordered the search giant today to hand over data gathered during the years it operated Street View cars. He issued a civil investigative demand, a legal order similar to a subpoena, after Google refused to provide the data after less formal requests, according to a statement released by his office.

"We need to verify what confidential information the company surreptitiously and … Read more

Google quietly added an advanced search feature over the last couple of days that sorts the Internet by reading level.

Search Engine Roundtable noticed that when you click on the "advanced search" link next to a Google search box on the right, you're now presented with an additional option to sort by "reading level," which lets you "annotate results with reading levels," "show only basic results," "show only intermediate results," and "show only advanced results."

A Google representative said in a statement that the company added this &… Read more