Google has released an enterprise version of its popular hosted productivity and communications suite, Google Apps. Google Apps Premier Edition will cost businesses $50 per user per year.

For $50 a user you get the entire Google Apps package plus access to APIs, conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of storage for email, extended phone support for critical issues, and mobile GMail on your BlackBerry.

Google Apps includes GMail, Talk, Calendar, Start Page, Docs and Spreadsheets, and Page Creator. Google Apps currently comes in three editions: Standard, Education, and Premier. The Standard and Education editions will remain free.

Google has already signed on some larger companies such as Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, and Prudential to use the new service.

Gmail For Your Domain was launched back in February 2006 as an invitation-only beta and allowed Gmail to be used with a …

January marks the first time Wikipedia has made the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S.

In a report from comScore Networks, the online encyclopedia officially came in ninth with 42.9 million unique visitors last month, just behind Ask Network with 49 million and ahead of The New York Times (#10). This is a significant improvement over last January where it languished in 33rd place with 18.3 million unique visitors.

Much of Wikipedia’s recent U.S. success may be attributed to some generosity from Google. A report from Hitwise indicates that Google traffic to Wikipedia is up 166% Year over Year. The analysis showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines - 50% from Google alone.

The …

Vodafone can add yet another service to its growing family of mobile applications. In a recent announcement from the mobile telecommunications company, Vodafone Live! will now offer Google Maps for mobile in addition to Google Search.

In the agreement, Vodafone and Google will develop a location-based version of Google Maps for mobile. The service is expected to offer customers access to maps, local listings, local search, and navigation capabilities. Google and Vodafone are also developing a service that provides customers on selected handsets with an automatic user-location capability.

Other enhancements include changes to Vodafone’s multimedia portal, Vodafone live. These changes will include search technology from Google that enables customers to access both on-portal and off-portal sites in the wider mobile internet.

This announcement is another example of how Vodafone is working to bring popular Internet brands and services to the mobile phone. An announcement …

Google is welcoming Princeton University as the latest library partner in its Book Search Library Project.

Princeton University will be opening approximately one million public domain works from their library system in an effort to make them available online in a searchable format. The Princeton University library system consists of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library and thirteen special libraries located around the campus.

The books being considered for the project are out-of-copyright works and therefore part of the public domain. Once digitized, the books will be fully searchable by researchers and readers alike. With Google Book Search, users can view the texts online, download them, or print them for later reference.

The project is expected to be completed over a six year period.

Google has announced an improved version of its Google Mini search appliance. The new Mini offers document and user-level security, access to other business applications through Google Onebox for Enterprise, and integration with Google Analytics.

The Google Mini is a combined hardware and software solution that can search from 50,000 up to 300,000 documents and 220 different file types. Mini was introduced two years ago as a small, simple and affordable appliance to aid small business in finding and sharing information.

Secure Search
The new Google Mini now offers document and user-level security across all business content. Google’s entitlement management capabilities will integrate with existing security systems to ensure that employees can access only authorized information.

OneBox for Enterprise
The Mini’s new OneBox for Enterprise feature enables users to view search results from various business applications through a single Google interface. …

A recent entry on the Google Book Search Blog highlights a new feature that integrates Google Maps with Google Book Search. With Google Book Search you can now see a visual representation of the places mentioned in a book through an interactive Google Map.

When you click the “About this Book” link next to a search result from Google Book Search you will be sent to a detailed page for that book. If the book contains a good share of quality locations it will also include an interactive Google Map highlighting those places mentioned in the book. The map points will contain snippets of text from the book and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned.

I did a search for “The Great Gatsby” and saw the following results:

This is an interesting …

Google has taken action to limit the impact of so called Googlebombs also known as link bombs. According to Wikipedia, A Googlebomb is an “attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.” The bomb works by relating key works to a link. For instance if you link to site with the words really great technology site, Google will associated those words with the site to which you linked. Now consider if 1000 or 10000 sites do the same thing. If enough sites link to the same site with similar terminology then the target site will become strongly associated with those terms in a Google Search.

Some of the famous Googlebombs involved slights against George W. Bush and Microsoft. The …

November saw Google’s acquisition of YouTube and many of us wondered what would happen to the existing Google Video product. Certainly Google wouldn’t need two competing Video services. A recent post in the Google blog by Salar Kamangar, Vice President of Product Management, has shed some light on their plans for Google Video and the future of video in general.

Google’s extraordinary strength has always been creating products that make information more available and easily searchable. Google products aren’t necessarily known for their friendly, cheerful interfaces which is likely a big reason they bought YouTube - in addition to the vast legions of users. YouTube’s strengths are its community of users who create, watch and share videos. Google’s plan is to make the most of the strengths of these two products.

Google Video will be relegated to a video search …

Google is partaking in a multi-year project in conjunction with University of Texas at Austin to digitize more than one million books from the universities libraries. This extends on a deal they had made starting in 2004 with five other libraries - the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library. This is a massive, massive job that Google is undertaking, but Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe stated an important fact at an invite-only event called ‘Unbound’ held recently at the New York public library, ‘The majority of information lies outside the Internet.’

Redmer went on to describe the project Google is undertaking, “We are working on a platform that will let publishers give readers full access to a book online.” This project has been under some scrutiny …

Four of the leading technology companies in the world have come together to announce an agreement along with human rights groups for a working set of principles addressing freedom of expression and human rights.

Google, Microsoft, Vodafone and Yahoo along with the Berkman Center, Business for Social Responsibility, the Electric Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders among others were all involved in the creating the code of conduct, which is designed to hold the participants responsible in these areas. There would still be a number of questions involved with this agreement, the largest of which is the deterrent to keep companies in line with the agreement.

This agreement comes after multiple technology companies being scrutinized for providing hardware or software that allows the government to censor or monitor information running through them. A prime example is …

We reported back in December that Google Blog Search had surpassed Technorati in market share of US Internet visits visits during the week ending 12/23/06. This was based on data from a Hitwise analysis that drew considerable attention from many prominent insight sources. However, a study performed at Compete.com reports findings entirely opposite to those results.

Compete performed the same analysis, but came up with a different conclusion with their data. Compete determined that Technorati continues to hold a significant lead over Google Blog Search.

Both analysts agree that Google Blog Search’s recent traffic surge was associated with a well-placed link to Google Blog Search added to the Google News Homepage back in October. This action failed to propel Google past Technorati as the leading blog search according to Compete.

The …

Google and Yahoo! continue to erode U.S. Web Search market share from the competition according to a December 2006 analysis from comScore Networks.

In December 2006, Google increased its share of Web Search by capturing 47.4 percent of the U.S. market. This marks a gain of 0.4 share points from November and continues Google’s impressive run of gaining share in 16 of the last 17 months. Yahoo! continued to maintain its second place ranking by growing 0.3 share points and capturing 28.5 percent of U.S. searches.

Some of the competitive Search entities didn’t fare so well, suffering from falling market share. Microsoft slid 0.5 percent to 10.5 percent, while Ask Network’s share dipped 0.1 percent to 5.4 percent and Time Warner Network dropped 0.2 shares to 4.9 percent.

The study also reported that Americans conducted …

This is a follow up to the previous post on the Gmail Contacts Exploit.

It appears the the problem has been partially fixed by Google. A blog on zdnet is claiming that the issue is partially fixed. They are reporting that the issue may still exist on some Google domains. Another blogger is stating that the vulnerability still exists. SlipperyBrick is researching the issue and will keep our readers informed of any developments in the case.

Update: The author has posted to the Google Group handling Gmail issues to get a response from Google. The author of this post uses Gmail as his primary email client.

The problems continue for Gmail users. A vulnerability was found in the Gmail web based email application that allowed anyone to see a Gmail user’s contacts. The vulnerability came from the fact that apparently Gmail stores the users contacts in a JavaScript file. Any clever web hacker could steal this information as long as the user was logged into their Gmail account and visited a malicious site.

Gmail has had problems in the past with this sort of issue. Jeremiah Grossman discovered the issued and reported it to Google.

Both issues revolve around using JavaScript, the scripting language used in web pages, to make requests for data. If the request is made from the HTML within a Gmail message then the cookies used to authenticate a user to Gmail may be used to get information …

According to Internet traffic-monitoring firm Hitwise, the number of visits to Google Blog Search has surpassed visits to Technorati for the week ending 12/23/06.

Google Blog Search was introduced in September 2005 and experienced some trouble finding an audience. However, October marked a significant increase in Google Blog Search traffic when Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page. This action resulted in a 168% surge in market share for Google Blog Search over a two week period and positioned the Search tool as a serious threat to Technorati. Since then, approximately 60% of Google Blog Search’s traffic has been coming directly from Google News, compared to less than 1% before the change.

Hitwise also identified another interesting fact regarding Google Blog Search visitors. The Demographic data show that 34% of visitors to …