Google, Internet | featured news

France's online privacy watchdog has fined Google €100,000 for unfair data collection from wireless networks through the company's Street View mapping service and localization program Latitude.

Google Inc on Monday accused the Chinese government of making it difficult for Gmail users to access the service in the country, the latest development in a rocky relationship between the two.

Google (GOOG) has acquired Green Parrot Pictures, a Dublin, Ireland-based provider of digital video.

Most search engines, including Google, continually run an army of computer programs that retrieve pages from the web, index the words in each document, and store this information in an efficient format. Each time a user asks for a web search using a search phrase, such as "search engine," the search engine determines all the pages on the web that contains the words in the search phrase

Google has broken new ground in the personal finance realm with the purchase of UK price comparison website BeatThatQuote for $61.5 million (£37.7 million GBP).

Google's mergers and acquisitions chief said he plans to be aggressive this year, despite challenges that include soaring valuations for some Web start-ups.

Google said its latest algorithm change is so big that users will notice different, higher-quality search results.

No wonder Google seems so panicked about Bing. The latest results from market researcher Experian Hitwise show not only that Bing grew at Google's expense in January. They also show that Bing is delivering more accurate results. In the U.S., Bing now powers more than 27% of search results, up from 25% in December. That's despite a slight decline in traffic to Yahoo's search site, which has been powered by Bing since December.

Google is in final-stage discussions to acquire online video site Next New Networks, people familiar with the matter said.

Executives at microblogging company Twitter Inc. have held "low level" talks with executives at Facebook Inc and Google Inc in recent months, about a possible takeover of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.