Google

TechCrunch is reporting that Google is about to close a deal to acquire RSS management firm FeedBurner for $100 million in cash. The report cites a "source close to the deal." The transaction is expected to close in two to three weeks, TechCrunch says. FeedBurner was founded in 2003 and has raised about $10 million in venture capital funding. FeedBurner allows blog owners to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. A Google spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation. Representatives at FeedBurner did not return calls seeking comment.

Apparently, Google is quite the valuable research tool for college students.

The problem of students buying prewritten theses on the Internet that they then submit under their name in their classes is so prevalent that Google is banning ads on its search site for such paper-writing services. The BBC reports that Google is blocking search ads for essay-writing services because higher-education institutions have complained that plagiarism is "threatening the integrity of university degrees."

A Google spokeswoman confirmed the report and said that the ban will go into effect in the coming weeks. "Google AdWords policy will soon … Read more

Google is running a limited test that will allow select advertisers to run video ads inside of video clips on some U.S. publisher Web sites in Google's AdSense program. Under the AdSense for Video test, which began on Wednesday, revenue will be split between the Web site publisher and Google. Details were not disclosed. Advertisements will play on the publishers' Flash players and not on YouTube or Google hosted videos. Publishers can select which videos to monetize and track the performance of the ads, as well as choose where the ads will appear within the video. Ads will … Read more

Google grabbed the Web search headlines on Wednesday with splashy news that it was revamping its main page and blending results for all kinds of media indexed into one place -- not just text on Web pages, but video content, images and local map-related results. Previously, searchers had to conduct separate searches on Google's video, image and other search sites.

But Yahoo representatives say big deal -- they already do that. "We are blending that information already," Eckart Walther, vice president of product search at Yahoo, said on Thursday. "For a lot of the queries we have the same multimedia content, we just don't make it as quick to access."

… Read more

At Google's Searchology press event right now, Marissa Mayer just announced a feature we're all going to appreciate: "Universal Search." Google is finally going to display results from various "silos" of search on one page. In other words, you'll no longer have to search books, videos, pictures, and the Web separately. The new Google search will display everything on one page.

Mayer also showed how videos from Google and YouTube will even play in the Google search results. Very cool.

You'll still be able to drill into data types ("corpuses"), … Read more

The California Clean Tech Open kicked off its second competition with a sunny outlook at San Francisco's City Hall Tuesday night. In October the contest will award six fledgling green businesses with start-up starter kits worth $100,000 in cash, office space and professional services. Prize sponsors include AMD, Google, Lexus and Pacific Gas & Electric.

Last year 156 seedling companies entered the open, which is backed by nonprofit Acterra; twice as many contenders are anticipated for 2007. A new green building award joins five other categories: energy efficiency; renewables; smart power; transportation; and air, water and waste. Entries … Read more

Google may be known as the Web search advertising company but Google has big plans for offering services to corporations, says Stephen Arnold, author of The Google Legacy and a Google patent scrutinizer.

Arnold figures out possible tech company strategies by analyzing their patents. He's come across several patent applications from Google that he says indicate that they plan to use the Google Search Appliance as much more than just a device that lets employees search for data within the internal network. The Google Search Appliance is a "Trojan Horse" that will soon be able to do … Read more

Robert Love, a high-profile Linux kernel programmer and chief architect of Novell's Linux Desktop project, has left the company for Google.

Love announced his departure from Novell on Friday via his blog, then followed up likewise Monday with news of his new employer. Love said he'll join Google's Open Source Program Office after a few weeks off finishing a new book to be published by O'Reilly and Associates: Linux System Programming: Talking Directly to the Kernel and C Library.

Love's departure takes place a few months after another high-profile open source programmer, Jeremy Allison, also left Novell for Google. … Read more

Google has added links to Belgian newspapers back into its main Web search site after beginning talks with a group that had filed a copyright lawsuit over Google's practice of linking to French- and German-language Belgian newspapers.

The group, Copiepresse, sued Google more than a year ago alleging that the search giant's use of headlines and snippets of Belgian newspaper articles in its Google News aggregation service, and its practice of providing links to cached copies of the articles in its main Web search results, violated copyright. A Belgian court sided with Copiepresse last September, ordering Google to … Read more