It happens to practically all useful Web sites at some point – they get a makeover designed to make them even more useful. While not every appreciates a makeover, it can at least make the online real estate look clear. Such is the case of the redone Google Maps.

Google says with the Maps look you can do what youv’e done before, including find businesses, addresses and “more” from one search box. The map has also apparently been made bigger and it is reportedly now easier to get to full screen maps.

Google Maps

Nets2go has a new set of 9 custom-made wood blinds, but they’re not the kind you find in home decor stores. They feature Web 2.0 logos. You can get them in Google flavor, Firefox, YouTube, Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, even Wordpress. Just be warned, being this geeky could cost you your marriage.

In fact, these blinds have an interesting story. Net2go manufactured the entire set for a customer who separated from his wife a couple of weeks after installing these blinds, because “She doesn’t understand the intense geek in me”. Maybe he should have added match.com into the mix.

The Sari is a traditional piece of clothing originally worn by Indian women. The Google Sari is a designer’s attempt at being clever. Of course, if Google doesn’t appreciate it, your Sari may turn into a genuine sorry. It’s from designer Satya Paul, who showed the Google sari in one of his recent shows. Very clever. Or maybe not. I can’t decide. I can’t wait for his next attempt, which is probably iPhone inspired and called the Safari Sari or something. Maybe a see-through sari called Microsoft Touch. That one would be trouble.

The portable is getting Google search, with stored memory of your last 20 searches. Another feature is that video played from a memory stick can be sped up or slowed down to suit your needs. Nothing very earth shattering, but welcomed nontheless.

Google seems to always have something new coming out and this week Google Health is taking the spotlight. We had first heard about Google Health last October and until now the service has only been available to a select few.

The new service is now open to the public (in beta, of course) and is being offered as a free service to help store and manage all of your health related information in one central location, accessible from anywhere. The service allows you to log in with your Google account to build an online health profile, import medical records and prescriptions from hospitals and pharmacies, find education health resources, find doctors or hospitals in your area and provides connections with other online health services.

The folks at Google Maps have recently released a pretty cool upgrade to the mapping service incorporating geo-coded photos, entries from Wikipedia and even some real estate listings from local and national real estate companies.

The next time you use Google Maps to look up a location you will notice a ‘More’ button next to the ‘Street View’ and ‘Traffic’ buttons on the map. Click the ‘More’ and you’ll have a couple of options for both photos and Wikipedia. Selecting the Photos check box brings in small geotagged photos from Panoramio right onto the map. Checking the Wikipedia box, just as you would expect, brings up little “W” icons representing geotagged Wikipedia entries. Clicking on the Wikipedia entries then brings up an excerpt of the article and a link.

Google rolled out some new technology that automatically blurs out human faces in street-level photographs. Oh. Horses too.

Just when you think Google is finished branching out and taking over the world, comes another Google…something. In this case, it’s the Google mouse. They have a bright vivid look and these mice are recycled, so Google is already scoring some green points. And they’re wireless too. When you’re Google, your mouse has to be up to par and be at least wireless right?

They come with a WiFi dongle stored on-board and feature an 800dpi resolution. The material they are recycled from is plastic. They’re a tad loud and fugly for my taste, but hey to each his own search giant inspired mouse.

Google has announced the launch of App Engine, a new tool allowing developers to create web applications that can be hosted on a Google’s own infrastructure. The idea of making a hosted development environment isn’t necessarily new as Salesforce has had the Appexchange platform for some time now, along with a few others companies offering similar services. One of the major things that makes Google’s App Engine stand out from the rest however is that it’s free.

The App Engine platform is launching as a “preview release” with all the expected features of the service not quite complete yet. It’s also going to be available only to the first 10,000 developers that sign up, which at the point of this writing appears to be already full. (You can get on a wait list, though).

Google today has announced the roll out of a much anticipated feature for the online Google Docs – bringing them offline. Starting today a select group of individuals that have Google Gears will be able to save their online Google documents and have them available offline as well.

The online Google tools currently provide a great convenience with things like Gmail, calendars and online documents with centrally located storage that can be accessed from almost any browser with an internet connection. One of the downsides is that as soon as the internet connection is lost, so are the documents, email, etc. With this new feature, the documents will still be available through the browser when the internet connection is lost and it will continue to save changes, syncing up with the online storage the next time a connection is available.

After removing video clips that were deemed as offensive to officials in Pakistan, the country decided to lift a country-wide ban on the YouTube website that it had imposed last week. The popular video sharing site had videos of cartoons originally published earlier in a Danish newspaper depicting the prophet Mohammad in which Pakistan lawmakers described as “blasphemous”.

The government of Pakistan has today ordered all local internet providers to block access to Google’s YouTube video sharing site “until further notice” due to offensive content. According to officials, the YouTube website contains cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad which angered a large number of Muslims.

The same cartoons were published earlier in a Danish newspaper which led to protests, rioting and eventually more than 50 deaths in countries including Pakistan. Internet surfers in Pakistan trying to access the YouTube site were met with a simple message saying the site was unavailable, with the local ISP’s unable to restore access despite upset users.

Six American film studios have filed a lawsuit against the Chinese file-sharing firm Xunlei Networking Technology for copyright infringement. They were offering hundreds of movie downloads illegally. The firm is part owned by Google. The studios are seeking more than $1 million in damages and costs, according to the Motion Picture Association, though that seems a low number.

The MPA trade group said in a statement on Friday that in addition, the plaintiffs are seeking a public acknowledgement of the infringements and a pledge from Xunlei to stop them. The MPA said that Xunlei facilitated the unauthorised transmission of hundreds of Hollywood movies produced by its members, like “Spiderman 3,” “War of the Worlds” and “Miami Vice.”(Who the hell watches Miami Vice? Now that they have, I assume they have learned their lesson. Some movies aren’t worth the trouble.)

In case you’re keeping track of that latest open source development platform for mobile devices called Android , the team just released an updated version based on all the great feedback they’ve received from the early releases of the platform. This latest release got the snappy name of m5-rc14, which I guess seems fitting for a platform named Android.

This version has a UI that is still a work in progress but received a significant update. Also new is the addition of layout animations, new media codecs to support 6 new audio file formats, an improvements to the Eclipse plugin and classes for geo-coding that will let you go both ways, (address to coordinate and coordinate to address for you pervs).

Normally we give traditional wireless home phones about as much attention around here as talking moose heads on the wall, but when the New York Times points out one which might be cool we have to check it out. They in fact seem to be right – the forthcoming GE Premiere DECT 6.0 28821FJ3 has a nifty GOOG-411 button centered for you to press for business information calls.

GOOG-411 you say? Isn’t that a Google property? That’s right – Thomson and Google inked a little paid attention to deal at CES last month which brings the one-touch, auto-dial GOOG-411 button functionality to a number of its 2008 DECT 6.0 Interference Free phones. This feature is tied to Google’s free, voice-activated, business directory assistance service and will actually be part of more than a dozen GE phones, available in April.