While Google’s executives have recently been attacking Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows Phone platforms, Apple supremo Steve Jobs has now stepped in to hammer Google’s Android operating system. While not attacking the OS specifically he’s been hugely critical of the tablets onto which manufacturers are dropping it, saying that 7″ screens are simply too small [...]

With the smartphone market already crammed with handsets, operating systems and options, Microsoft have now entered the fray with their latest and greatest.  At an event in New York city this morning, Windows Phone 7 was officially unveiled. It’s exciting too, finally a smartphone OS for people who bemoan the lack of buttons on their [...]

With the official launch of Microsoft’s long-overdue new Smartphone operating system, Windows Phone 7 just two days away, it’s little wonder that people at Apple and Google might be more than a little worried about the publicity it’s bound to receive and how it will impact on their own businesses. In an interview this week [...]

There are two to tango, and the same is true for an effective online security strategy. What does it mean? One the one side, the company offering a service needs to make sure that user accounts are protected on their servers, that no one can exploit vulnerabilities to gain login information or other data from [...]

There are basically two options to access and read documents posted on the Internet. The documents can be downloaded to the local PC to access them locally, or viewed online providing the proper tools and services are available. Google for instance has added direct links in Google Search to view documents. Depending on the document [...]

On the Internet, when something makes click and becomes very popular overnight, it takes usually less than a month before similar services are offered to the public, often with a similar or slightly modified feature set. URL shorteners, those services that turn long urls into short ones, are very popular on today’s Internet. Why? I [...]

Google Instant Search, which was introduced by Google earlier this month is posed to stay, it appears. I personally dislike the new feature for a number of reasons, including search results pages that change to fast, if you type fast, and the increased bandwidth requirements and having to press a key to accept a search [...]

A few months ago, when you would have asked me why you are only seeing one page of results in Google Search, I would have told you that this is because you have searched for an exotic term that does not yield more than a handful of results. Today however I witnessed for the first [...]

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, discussed how and who Google now needs to compete against and it’s clear that the foundation of the company, search, is still its main focus going forward. In the interview, Schmidt described Microsoft’s search engine as their main competitor, [...]

The sheer size of a company like Google, or Microsoft for that matter, makes it really hard to keep up to date with all the latest developments of said company. Google maintains blogs and web services that try their best to promote new or updated products, but this until now meant that interested users had [...]

When it comes to online translations, it is Google Translate that gets the most attention from Internet users. The popular service is not only accessible through the official website, but thanks to its API also through third party tools like browser add-ons or desktop applications. The translation is the only constant when it comes to [...]

Germany is the largest country in Europe where Google’s controversial Street View has not gone live.  This is because of privacy complaints made about the service around the world.  Now the German government has called for a voluntary data protection code to be in place by 7th December this year, as reported by the BBC. [...]

It’s been around for five years now, though I’d imagine for most of you it feels much longer, but YouTube, now owned by search giant Google is almost becoming profitable according to YouTube CEO Eric Schmidt.  NeoWinhave reported he recently told a French University that the website is now close to becoming profitable. This is [...]

Google Instant is being rolled out and will become available to users in select countries in the next few days. As with every major change there are users who do not want to use the new feature. Some of the reasons for disabling Google Instant may be the additional bandwidth requirements, or that Google Search [...]

Google engineers have been experimenting with auto-updating search results for a while now. The new technology basically displays search results as the search engine user types. The new feature is currently rolling out to users on Google domains in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Spain, but only if they use [...]

Google has proposed payments totalling $8.5m (£5.5) to settle a lawsuit brought over the Buzz social network.  Back in February the new social networking beta from the company caused controversy when users could see the contacts information for everyone they were already connected to. Several GMail users who were affected by the glitch sued Google [...]

One of the things that’s really come to public attention internationally in 2010 is the small matter of our online privacy rights.  Facebook has been the biggest victim of a public and press backlash in this regard but now search giant Google is simplifying it’s privacy policy in an attempt to make it friendlier for [...]

With all of this talk about KDE 4.5 lately, I thought I should take a moment to mention a tool that hasn’t had much (or any) talk here on Ghacks. That tool is Kontact. But what is Kontact?  Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that includes more tools than your standard suite, has a lot [...]

There has been some concern about smartphone apps in recent weeks after a malware app worked its way into the Android store that sent premium-rate text messages to make money for criminals.  What’s more the BBC demonstrated a proof-of-concept Java app that seemed to be a simple game of noughts and crosses, but was copying [...]

Not all change is good, and it is often better to keep a system as is, than to add self proclaimed innovative features that many users might not want. Google has made lots of changes to Google Search in the past, and while some of them made sense, others did not. Google’s latest experiment is [...]

Google, Google, Google. Seems everywhere you turn these days you hear the company name, from their core business Internet search to web browsers, operating systems, web applications, smart phones and now, TV. The guys over at Stuff We Like have posted a video demonstration of Google TV that was recorded at Comic Con 2010. It [...]

Google’s new Chrome OS cloud-based operating system is about to make its first appearance, not on netbooks, as was first thought, but on tablet devices instead. Engadget are reportingthat smartphone maker HTC are building the device which will sport a 1280×720 multi-touch screen, 2Gb of RAM and a minimum of 32Gb hard disk storage.  It’s [...]

With the number of smartphones on the market on an ever-increasing rise Google’s Android operating system is the first to be hit by a major virus.  The malware can steal cash from unsuspecting users by sending premium-rate text messages from their handset.

Google Books offers one of the largest collections of books online, divided into full books which are accessible from page one to the end, and book previews which are not accessible completely. Up until now users have tried different ways to download those books to their computers and devices, largely to access them in an [...]

The BBC is reporting that talks in the US, intended to find a way to make sure all data on the Internet is treated equally have stalled. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) began the talks on net neutrality after Google and Verizon said they wanted to see faster access speeds for websites that paid extra [...]

Google’s new social networking service, Google Wave, launched last year to a huge fanfare and and equally huge controversy over privacy.  Many users complained that anyone befriending you on the service could then see personal contact details of everyone else if your address book. The service was based around  real-time character-by character chat typing, drag-and-drop [...]

Up until now, if you had two or even more Gmail accounts, you had to log out of one account first to access another one. This was in fact true for Google accounts in general, if you had more than one you had to log out first to log in with another identity. Several workarounds [...]

Is it possible, is there such a thing as an attack that can tell a hacker where you live?  The BBC has revealed that a specially booby-trapped website can tell a hacker where you are to only a few metres. The attack was dreamt up by security expert Sam Kamkar who demonstrated at the Black [...]

Leveraging search engines to identify vulnerable systems and data in corporate networks, websites and services is generally known as Google Hacking, with Google standing synonymous for all search engines. Recent changes in Google’s SOAP-API rendered many security tools using Google useless. The aim of the Diggity project is to provide security researchers and network admins [...]

The news was just posted over at the official Youtube blog that the video length limitation on Youtube has been increased for “normal” Youtube users. The limit has been raised from 10 to 15 minutes. We want YouTube to be the best place to upload video. Without question, the number one requested feature by our [...]

Just as Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined forces in search, now Yahoo! Japan and Google have linked up too. Yahoo!’s Japanese search engine will now use Google’s technology rather than stick with fellow partner Microsoft and their Bing search engine as reported by NeoWin.

There are so many Linux distributions out there. Some of them are pretty standard and some of them go well out of their way to try to bring something different to the table. I’ve seen just about every take on the Linux desktop. Today, however, I came across a distribution, Peppermint Linux, that added another [...]

If you are at the top you have to keep up with the demand, if you are not it is likely that someone else will snag that position right from you. Youtube has recently redesigned several of their inner category pages, including shows and movies to offer users better access to popular and recent additions [...]

Youtube is raising the bar once again with the announcement that the video hosting site will support 4K videos in the near future. Less than a year ago Youtube enabled full HD, 1080p, video resolutions on Youtube and most people thought that 1080p was going to be the top resolution on Youtube for a long [...]

In the last year or so there’s been an explosion in sites allowing you to use a third-party login to access their services.  Every major company except for Microsoft has so far jumped on the bandwagon but it appears we have an outright and runaway winner already. Read Write Web is reporting a study that shows [...]

YouTube owner Google has been forced to act quickly to fix a flaw on it’s YouTube video sharing website that allowed hackers to bombard users with pop-up messages, redirecting them to adult websites. The code was placed in the comments section of targeted videos and would run automatically when people watched the clip.

Search giant Google has made a surprise move into the travel business with the acquisition of  flight information firm ITA Software, as reported by the BBC.  The firm provides software that organises fares, flights and journey times.  These are then used by airlines, travel agents and flight comparison websites. Google have hinted that they may [...]

Google back in March introduced a warning system in Gmail that would notify Gmail users about suspicious account activity. From what we could tell back then the system compared IP addresses of the computers used to log into Gmail. Logins from different regions in the world, for example the U.S. and Russia in short succession [...]

Google pulled out of China earlier in the year in an argument over censorship that began with rumours that the communist government there had hacked into the GMail accounts of political activists in the country.  The government then, in the ensuing row, went on to censor the search giant until Google eventually had no other [...]

The war of the webmail is raging on with the continued roll out of Microsoft’s new Hotmail service.  Now Google is coming back with new features to it’s own GMail service, the first of which was quietly announced over the weekend. The company has added a one-click preview for the world’s most common file format, [...]

Google launched an encrypted version of their web search in May (see Google SSL HTTPS Search). HTTPS search was enabled on the main Google.com domain and users simply had to add an s after HTTP in the url to access the encrypted search engine. Encryption increased the privacy of the search engine user by preventing [...]

Imagine the surprise of a close relative when they were greeted by an iGoogle page instead of the classic Google homepage after opening their web browser. The search page looked slightly different. The Google logo now read iGoogle and a message below the search box told them that they have been signed out and needed [...]

Google’s Street View Cars came under immense international pressure earlier this year after it became known that the cars did not only take pictures of streets in countries they were operating in but also recording Wi-FI traffic. Google’s initial response to the allegations was that the recorded data was used to power and improve location [...]

The introduction of encrypted search at https://www.google.com/ a month ago has increased the privacy of search engine visitors by preventing people from intercepting search terms and results. Encrypting all communication between the client’s computer and Google Search had a few side effects though. It was for one not possible to use all Google services. Google [...]

Google Books offers a vast library of books and magazines. Some books and magazines are provided as full digital copies that can be read online while others are only available as previews or summaries. Download options are not provided on Google Books which leaves users with no other choice than to read the books and [...]

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are always looking for ways to make their search engines better, and Google’s latest volley into search has kicked off today with a caffeine hit. This new way to index pages treats all pages on the web the same, their old system treated web pages as being of different tiers, some [...]

Australia’s Attorney General has instructed the country’s police to investigate search giant Google for possible breaches of privacy while taking photos for it’s Street View service. The investigation, reported by the BBC, has come about following complaints  that Google gathered some personal data from unencrypted WiFi networks.

Is it gmail.com or googlemail.com? The answer to this question depends on the country that you are living in and the time you have registered a Google Mail account. Most users have the email address in the format username@gmail.com with the notable exception of users from Germany and the United Kingdom who both use the [...]

Later this year Google will release their Linux-based Chrome OS operating system.  They first announced it a year ago when XP  shipping on Netbooks was the most talked-about subject in IT circles.  Back then there was no talk of tablets beyond a few people saying how nice it would be to be able to properly [...]

Google is just rolling out a feature to U.S. users that allows them to change the background image of the Google Search homepage. The feature should be available to all U.S. users in the coming days and international availability is also expected in the coming days. Please note that this feature is only available to [...]