google

Alas, Gmail's day has come! Google has finally decided to nix the "by invitation only" requirement and allow anyone interested in Gmail to sign up for a free account. Google has been phasing out the invitation restriction geographically, beginning ... last week with Europe. This past Wednesday, North America, South America, and Asia all gained restriction-free access to Gmail. (Source: news.com ) Although the nearly three-year-old service is still in beta mode -- signaling that Gmail is still a work in progress -- lifting the invitation restriction is a big step for Google. Keith Coleman, Product ... (view more)

Do a quick search for Google here at Infopackets, and you'll be amazed at all of the different ventures the company is involved in. And, even though the buzz is currently centered on Windows Vista, Google has managed to keep itself strongly in the ... news. The latest: it appears that the search engine giant is looking to branch out into a new frontier -- video game and television advertising. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is looking to purchase Adscape Media, Inc. -- a company that puts advertising into video games. It could be a response to Microsoft's purchase of Massive Inc ... (view more)

Pranskers beware. Google has made what it says is a "pretty small" change to the way it indexes websites for its search results in an attempt to prevent 'Googlebombing.' (Source: betanews.com ) Googlebombing (also known as linkbombing) is a prank ... where many people link the same keyword to a specific website in order for that website to appear at the top of search results. For example, a search for "miserable failure" would return a website on George W. Bush. (Source: citizen-times.com ) Although there are less than 100 well-known googlebombs, Google has decided to remove these bombs using an ... (view more)

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is in the process of finalizing a deal with search engine powerhouse Google. The conditions of the agreement will make BBC programming available on the online video site YouTube.com. The deal will once ... again exemplify the site's growth in global popularity as it continues to add international content to its service. A spokesperson for the BBC recently confirmed that the publicly funded broadcasting corporation had spoken with Google. The extent of the conversations have not yet been reported, but several sources have confirmed that many different ... (view more)

Google's vice president for content partnerships, David Eun, recently revealed in an interview that Google is just as perplexed as the rest of the world with respect to the future of online video. Many were shocked when Google paid over one and ... three quarters of a billion dollars to acquire the emmensly popular YouTube web portal. Notably so. And yet, one might assume that in order for Google to make such a large purchase, the company must have had some prediction as to where things may lead. However, the opposite may be true. Eun admits that analysts have been unable to determine both the ... (view more)

Google hasn't been shy about announcing its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. But accessible to whom? This is the question that many are asking after it was recently discovered that terrorists used ... Google Earth to pinpoint the location of British soldiers. (Source: hardocp.com ) British Intelligence discovered images taken from Google Earth after a series of raids on insurgent safe houses in Iraq. Officers describe the images as having "significant detail" of British camps in Iraq. (Source: canadafreepress.com ) "This is evidence as far as we are ... (view more)

In the world of search engines, nothing beats Google. The competition, led by Yahoo, makes up a single digit fraction of the market attempting to challenge the Goliath. However, with that success comes a substantial amount of attention from hackers ... and the like. The most recent issue facing Google were reports that users were seeing their cookies exploited, giving the web's most malicious access to a pile of personal information. It's pretty simple. If a user is signed into their Google account, the pages they visit give the web host access to their cookies. This means the web host -- or the ... (view more)

Yahoo recently unveiled its latest weapon in the ongoing battle with Google for Internet search and advertising supremacy. The software is called Go for Mobile 2.0, and was released shortly after Google made a partnership announcement with Samsung ... Electronics. This partnership means that most Samsung cellphones will now be equipped with Google's own brand of mobile software. (Source: mobile-tech-today.com ) The Go for Mobile 2.0 service is an upgrade from software Yahoo introduced last year. The new revision makes it easier for users to move among various online services and have easier ... (view more)

It probably won't be your 4.0 GPA that lands you a job at Google. But it might be the fact that you have pets. Or the fact that you started a club. In typical Google fashion, the company has created a new method for sifting through the 100,000+ job ... applicants itching to work at Google each month. The company has ditched the typical hiring methods in their quest to hire more well-rounded candidates. (Source: nytimes.com ) Job applicants will now be asked to fill out a survey which assesses intelligence and personality. The algorithm will then rate each candidate on a scale from 0 to 100. ( ... (view more)

Right before the New Year, Google received a nasty surprise. Gmail users were susceptible to having their contact lists stolen and used for malicious purposes. In order for the bug to activate itself, people had to be logged into Gmail and then go ... to a website designed specifically to exploit the vulnerability. Signing in to sites such as Blogger.com, Orkut.com, and Google Docs ... (view more)