Google

As expected, the proposed union of Google and ad-tech firm DoubleClick is about to get some congressional scrutiny.

According to an aide, the U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee that deals with antitrust issues has scheduled a hearing for September 27 entitled "An Examination of the Google-DoubleClick Merger and the Online Advertising Industry: What Are the Risks for Competition and Privacy?"

A witness list hasn't yet been finalized but is likely to be released Thursday, the subcommittee aide said. But the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that lawyers from Google and its rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are likely … Read more

Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google sure can write a dramatic blog entry. For instance, in this one on Google closing a security flaw in its new Presentations feature of Google Docs, he starts out with a screen capture of e-mail addresses that were leaked through that flaw. Of course, the addresses are obscured. It's a graphically appealing but very scary image.

Weinberg explains what happened:

"Google Presentations has a chat feature, based on Google Talk technology, that lets people chat while viewing a presentation. I embedded a presentation here, as did Matt Cutts on his blog, and a … Read more

Web site owners and SEOs alike often feel at odds with the search engines, but times are changing. This was often the case in the past when the engines made updates and changes to their algorithms that seemed to send Web sites into a SERP tailspin, leaving everyone scrambling to regain their precious page-one positions. The engines were also a lot less forthcoming with information and guidance, perhaps taking the view that giving this information gave too much power to the spammers and phishers.

While this view was understandable on the surface, it didn't float all that well in … Read more

This is just in time for all those teams considering building a robot lunar rover to win $20 million in the Google Lunar X Prize.

NASA said Tuesday that it has added new lunar imagery to Google's Moon Web site, a photographic display of the moon with information graphics about the Apollo landings.

The additions are part of an ongoing partnership between NASA and Google, which signed a Space Act agreement in December 2006 to work on Web projects together. NASA, for example, recently added photographs taken from the satellite sensor Landsat into Google Earth.

The updated moon site … Read more

Google Presentations, which is free, is part of the company's online office suite, Google Docs.

Right off the bat, you will notice that Presentations has some of the same basic functionality as Microsoft's PowerPoint. It does enable you to create some really basic presentations, with themes, but the lack of features and slide show polish are real turn-offs for me.

Yes, there are nice collaboration features, just like the other Google Docs applications, but if the final product isn't on par with what … Read more

Google is launching AdSense for Mobile, which will allow marketers to place contextual ads on sites viewed via mobile devices. The company has been running mobile ads through its auction-based AdWords program since mid-2006. Now it will be automatically converting AdWords ads to text ads that will appear when someone accesses a participating Web site on a mobile device. The Web sites must be optimized for mobile browsers first.

Basically, the system reviews the content on the site and delivers text ads that are relevant; the publisher earns money every time an ad is clicked on. AdSense for Mobile will … Read more

Obviously, the lack of offline e-mail reading is the one huge downside to using Web mail. If Google implements this correctly, it could be a pretty big deal, but we will see if the functionality of a browser-based offline solution can compare to an actual desktop client.

It should be noted that Windows Live also currently has its Live Mail Desktop client available … Read more

I recently wrote about interesting rumors of a Google browser, and now there are strong rumblings of a Google phone. Of course, just like the browser, this is something that has bubbled to the surface several times over the years, but equally like the browser, the newest rumors seem to have the strongest merit yet.

Tech gadget sites Gizmodo and CrunchGear are reporting that the alleged "Gphone" will be produced in Taiwan and is expected launch sometime in the first quarter of 2008. Alleged functionality -- and this would make total sense -- includes Gmail and calendar functions; … Read more

Several analysts are predicting that the mortgage crisis in the U.S. will ripple through to the online advertising market. One of the most popular types of online ads happens to be for mortgages. So the theory goes that if lenders have to cut their ad budgets, Google, Yahoo and other news sites and blogs will be pinched too.

In a research note on Friday, Sandeep Aggarwal of Oppenheimer & Co. spells it out: "Internet advertising is not immune to any potential cutbacks in ad budgets."

The firm trimmed its financial estimates for Google, Yahoo and Bankrate last … Read more