Google has made it known that they will now be offering additional storage for their online applications, for a fee. Currently Google offers up to 1GB for Picasa Web Albums and as much as 2.8GB of storage for Gmail, all for free. When you reach your limit on the amount of storage space you now have the option of purchasing more which will apply across the different applications on your Google account.

The company is offering plans that start at $20/year for 6GB of additional storage and go up to $500 a year for 250GB. Right now the extra online storage will apply to Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, but in the future, according to Ryan Aquino, Google Software QA Engineer Lead, the storage will also be available for other online applications such as …

While Google might not ever really get into the hardware game directly with their own Google phone, according to the WSJ they are definitely putting a fair amount of time and money in that specific direction. According to the report, Google has put not millions but hundreds of millions of dollars into its cell phone project.

Google has worked on developing mobile phone prototypes and worked out specifications with manufactures like LG to likely come up with a partnership in providing a mobile device that takes advantage of Google applications and of course their advertising. Google already has a likely partner in AT&T for the US market but resources have said that they’ve also had talks with Verizon Wireless who decided not to integrate with Google due to the companies demands …

Google may have an antipiracy tool for the YouTube video sharing site as soon as September according to a statement Friday by an attorney for Google. During a hearing in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google last March a Google attorney stated that they are currently working on some type of video recognition technology.

The new technology should be able to create a unique identification on each video, similar to the uniqueness of a fingerprint, that owners of the videos can place on their media. In the event that anyone would upload a copyrighted video on to YouTube the site would be able to automatically recognize and remove it within minutes of its upload. According to the attorney’s statement to the judge Google hopes to have this technology in place this fall and could …

This morning Digg’s Kevin Rose made a pre-announcement on the sites blog about the company making a 3 year deal with Microsoft to start exclusively providing ads on the Digg website, which was Google’s job up until now. “This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth,” said Rose in the blog entry.

The Digg website sees around 17 million unique visitors a month which equates to a whole lot of page views and a whole lot of revenue and publicity for Microsoft’s ad-service product. Rose went on to express the importance and plans that Digg has to further focus on feature development and improve the user experience. He also mentioned that they will continue to work with their long-time partner Federated Media …

Last year Google launched something called the Google Custom Search Engine, which is a tool that allows the addition of a custom-looking Google search box to just about any website. It met a lot of needs in providing a comprehensive search tool to the websites of many businesses, but it to the dismay of some it came with ads. The advertisements are how Google can afford to provide these tools without charge, but often the ads would take away from the professional branding of the site and even have the potential of showing advertisements from competitive products or services.

Tuesday Google launched a service that builds on the Custom Search called Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE). CBSE allows businesses to place the search tool on their site and customize the results, without the Google ads. Businesses can implement their own logo …

It appears that Ebay is back to advertising with Google Adwords after a slight spat which triggered an “experiment” by Ebay to pull all of their advertising from Google over a week ago.

The issue arose from news that Google was planning a conference at the same time and city of an Ebay conference where Google was promoting Google Checkout, a rival platform to Paypal used by Ebay. As a result Ebay, who is one of the largest advertisers on the Google Adwords pay-per-click, pulled all of their ads from the system in what was called an “experiment” to test their dependency on the search engine giant.

Ebay is now again advertising with Google having completed their experimental run, and have concluded that even though they will continue to use Google Adwords, it will be at a lesser volume than previous. Hani …

Microsoft has reached an accord with the help of the U.S. Justice Department and state antitrust regulators to address complaints from search engine giant Google regarding desktop search functionality on the new Windows Vista operating system from Microsoft. Google cited that their desktop search application does not work correctly on the Vista OS, and Microsoft is not allowed under a consent decree to take any actions to stop a rival companies desktop software from working as designed on their OS.

The changes are a “step in the right direction,” Google chief legal officer David Drummond said. “But they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers.”

A desktop search engine made by Google, Microsoft or any other company allows users to search for documents, emails or other content …

Today Google announced that its recently acquired video sharing site YouTube will begin serving localized versions of the YouTube home page and search functionality for nine additional countries aside from the U.S.

Prior to this update, videos have been shared from users around the world but the entire interface was available only in English. According to the co-founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the main featured pages of the site also showed content that was “heavily skewed” to the preferences of U.S. visitors even though more than half of the actual content posted on the site was from users in non-U.S. countries.

The countries targeted with the new local versions of the site are Brazil, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Currently only the text content and search functions will be in …

Google’s online map application now has an even more advanced imagery than the already cool Google Maps satellite photos, called Street View, and although these new photos are great for seeing places you’ve been, might like to go, or may never go now that you’ve seen them, the images have been raising some concerns over privacy.

Google isn’t the first to start mapping the world this way and they also aren’t the first to gain criticism for doing so, but anything Google does these days gets more than the average share of attention. One of the major concerns for these types of street level photos comes from groups helping women with domestic violence as the photos could capture women entering shelters. In this instance Google worked with the groups to identify and avoid taking images of …

According to TechCrunch, the rumored deal between Google and Feedburner has been been moved to a “confirmed” status and Feedburner is in the closing stages of being bought out by Google for a hefty $100 million. The agreement consists of mostly a cash-up-front deal retaining the founders of Feedbruner for two years, and is expected to close in the next few weeks.

Feedburner, founded in 2003, is a service that distributes media for blogs and different RSS feeds, helping web site owners promote their sites and profit from it’s content. It allows blog owners to manager their own RSS feeds through the service and track the number of subscribers.

An announcement was made Wednesday by Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products, at the Searchology event at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA regarding a change in Google search engine results to something they are calling a “universal search model”.

Google, along with other search engines, have recognized that although they have various search engines for things like images, videos, news and patents, most users only use the main search engine and often are even unaware of the other features. Also it can be an inconvenience for users to have to switch between different engines of the same search provider to find relevant results.

The changes involved in the universal search are said to be slowly ongoing and subtle to notice, but nevertheless noticeable. A Google search may return results of web pages, maps, videos, books and photos all within the first ten …

Friday YouTube and their new parent company Google were hit with another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time from England’s top soccer league and a US music publisher.

The Premier League and Bourne Co. issued the lawsuit citing that not only does YouTube have their copyrighted content on the video sharing website, but that they are encouraging people to view the footage on the website and subsequently are “knowingly” misappropriating the two companies intellectual property. By this, according to the lawsuit, the operators of YouTube are exploiting the valuable intellectual video property for their own gain without any payment to the owners of these videos.

This lawsuit comes less than two months after Viacom sued YouTube and Google for copyright infringement of their television programming, and 6 months after the search engine giant Google purchased the YouTube …

Two days ago Viacom dropped a $1 billion lawsuit on Google and YouTube stating that the video sharing giant had violated copyright laws by hosting videos created by some of Viacom’s programming brand.

In response, attorneys for Google feel that they have strong legal protections under current copyright law, according to Reuters. The legal team feels they have a very strong defense due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or… bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online … the ’safe harbor’ we need in order to be able to do hosting online,” said Alexander Macgillivray, general counsel for Google. “We will never launch a product or acquire a company unless we are completely satisfied with its legal basis …

The chatter on the net amongst the tech community is that Google may be close to announcing its own mobile phone, giving Apple’s iPhone its first major competitor.

It began when a poster on the Mobileburn message forums said that they had taken an online survey about possible user interest in a Google phone that featured WiFi capability, 3 Gigs of onboard storage and a built-in 2 megapixel camera. They managed to grab a screenshot of the design which resembles something that may be Samsung inspired.

As the story traveled more gasoline was added to the fire when another user found a job posting on Google’s website calling for applicants for an analog designer/engineer position. “Google is experimenting with a few wireless communications systems including some completely novel concepts,” reads the Google job description in part. “We are building a small team of top-notch …

Last month Viacom had asked YouTube to remove over 100k video clips from its website that Viacom stated violated copyrights, and then later that month Viacom made a deal with Joost to provide video content for their website. Today Viacom has issues a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google for copyright infringement claiming 1 billion dollars in damages.

Viacom is claiming that YouTube has over 160,000 unauthorized video clips of Viacom’s content on their website which collectively has been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Viacom is also looking to find a way to ensure that YouTube and Google do not violate any copyright infringement again with Viacom’s content.

Some of Viacoms many programming brands include BET, Famous Music, MTV Networks – MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central, CMT: Country Music Television, Spike TV, TV Land …