Google has (for a change) lost a court case that it filed against a small Canadian search engine called Groovle.com. The search engine giant had claimed that the name resembled theirs closely enough to confuse people. Google had asked that 207 media, the company in question, hand over the domain to them, however this claim was refused by the arbitration panel appointed by the National Arbitration Forum.

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No one would be surprised to learn of delight at Microsoft related to the news that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, are thinking of removing their content, which includes some of the world’s most popular newspapers and television channels, from Google. There is famously no love lost between the companies. However, few commentators would have expected Microsoft to wade in, in quite the style they are thought to be contemplating.

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Google Wave, the application that promises to revolutionise collaborative work and communication between friends and colleagues, has received a practical endorsement from members of the scientific community, who are already using it to work together on collaborative projects.

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Some of you may have noticed a new thing that the Google homepage has started doing when it loads up. Last week, some users began to see only the search bar when they loaded the page, no logo and no surrounding links, these would then fade in slowly after a couple of seconds.

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Google has launched a new advertising campaign entitled, ‘Gone Google’ which aims to highlight the various ways in which the company’s products and services can benefit businesses and the growing number of companies choosing to, as they put it, ‘Go Google’. More than two million businesses around the world use Google applications in some way, which is an impressive stat, one that Google apparently feels is not widely known enough.

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According to a video blog post from Chad Hurley, one of YouTube’s founders, the world’s most popular streaming video website currently enjoys more than a billion hits per day. The announcement marks the third anniversary of the site’s $1.65 buyout by Google, a price those within the search engine giant have since described as ‘a premium’.

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SEOs are well used to a fairly adversarial relationship with Google – fair enough really, we do exist solely to manipulate their carefully worked out system – so it’s always refreshing when they do something that makes our lives easier. A new change to advanced search features, entitled ‘creative commons’ is one of those rare instances. Creative Commons allows users to find free content that is available for use on your website at the touch of a button.

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Conservative malcontent, David Davis has hit out at his own party’s plans to move NHS health records onto Google, going so far as to describe the proposed policy as ‘dangerous.’ Davis, who is a former shadow home secretary and stood against current Conservative leader David Cameron at the last leadership election, described the plan as;

“Both dangerous in its own right, and hazardous to the public acceptability of necessary reforms to the state’s handling of our private information.”

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Paying yet more lip-service to Twitter, co-founder Larry Page has today stated that Google is losing out to Twitter in terms of real time search. “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it, I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis,” Page stated at Google’s Zeitgeist conference.

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Google has courted huge controversy amongst the world’s brands by announcing a relaxation of its trademark policy. The search engine giant has essentially lifted the ban on companies using competing brand names as keywords in their campaigns, meaning that companies with deep pockets will basically be able to force their competitors out of first placed ad positions even for their own brand names.

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As anyone who’s ever tried to get a job at Google can tell you, the company is not the easiest place in the world to find employment. They tend to require flawless qualifications and a proven track record of excellence in the industry before your CV even get s a second look.

That however, was not the case for Google’s latest intake of employees. Not only do these new Google workers not have any qualifications at all, they’re not even human…

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It seems even the undisputed ruler of the Internet is not immune from a little credit-crunch related turmoil, first quarter results, published yesterday have led to the company’s first ever decline on the previous quarter, overall revenue from advertising has slipped an unprecedented three percent from the last quarter of 2008.

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If you’ve used Google recently you may have noticed a new feature in the search bar. As you type in a query, the Google search bar will now attempt to guess what you are looking for, not based on your previous searches as was the arrangement before but on what Google calls complex popularity algorithms.

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These days it seems YouTube gets more professional by the day. The site has been moving away from its amateur, homemade roots for a while now, though the pace has accelerated over the last six months or so, which have seen legitimate music content hit its channels, HD content, even a downloadable speech from President Obama. Now it seems that another frontier is about to be broken by YouTube, full length feature films.

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