U.S.

Google makes enough small purchases that a lot of them, seeming almost irrelevant at first, fly under the radar. However, for those who know about Google’s overall pursuits, their upcoming product lines, and the potential of some of the technology being acquired, these “insignificant deals” are anything but insignificant.

Google just  lost a legal battle for Street View in Switzerland. While that particular battle didn’t ban Street View altogether, it did make the service impractical, largely due to the immense number of labor hours required to meet the legal requirements set out by the Swiss government

We’ve discussed the Google/ITA deal several times over the last, oh,  year . There’s been plenty to talk about; after all, the merger itself is huge news, and the massive anti-trust investigation, as well as the back-and-forth swings of that battle, have certainly been of note

For more than a year, Google has been testing a program called Hotel Price Ads that shows ads for hotel searches inside of Google Maps. It looks like those ads are headed to Google’s main search results soon. A Search Engine Land reader has tipped us to three new types of hotel price ads, all…

Google has helped back companies, research, education, and other major projects around the world. With the help of Google’s advanced technology, property space, and – of course – their ability to fund startups, Google is the real capital investor behind a great number of projects worldwide

In the past I’ve described Google’s Hotpot service as an “evolution to places.” This moniker has been both very accurate and somewhat misleading; Hotpot and Places were different services that, while they shared a huge portion of the same territory, existed independently. At least, that was the case until a recent Google announcement that revealed Hotpot is merging fully with Places. This is hardly surprising to those who paid attention Hotpot’s development.

Posted by randfish I hate webspam.

In most locations, Google sends its Street View cars out on a repeated basis “to make sure the information is accurate and kept up to date,” as the Street View website explains. But that’s not happening in Germany

The 13th annual Settimana della Cultura (Culture Week) of Italy begins today, and is also marked with a special logo on Google Italy . The logo features The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy, in places of the “g” and “l”: Click to read the rest of this post…