Google is full of useful functions and search tricks that you probably don’t know. I recently spent some time with Google engineers Jake Hubert and Dan Russell, learning ways to get more out of Google search. These are tips you’ll find useful, whether you’re wondering how to convert Centigrade to Fahrenheit before you head for the beaches in the south of France, or need to look at a patent for a technology innovation.

We had hardly started our conversation, when Russell gave me his first, and over-arching, tip: If you want to know something about Google search, simply search for it. “Don’t bother to remember a URL. I don’t,” he said…..

Let’s say you want to know something about a patent. Simply type “Google patents” in a search bar, and the first hit you get will take you to Google Patent Search. Google and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have struck an agreement, and you can now have access to more than 7 million patents, including drawings.

The Internet promises unlimited connectivity, but such connectivity requires that computers and devices find one another through a common address plan. The current plan, in place since the late 1970s, is running out of open addresses, and a new scheme called IPv6 is being put in place to power the Internet’s next stage of growth.

For small businesses that plan ahead, this shift can enhance computing security and application reliability and performance. But waiting until the last minute could leave you scrambling for costly equipment updates, missing an opportunity to turn a necessary change into a business boost…..

Malicious hackers attacked Google’s YouTube on Sunday, exploiting a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on the ultra-popular video sharing site, hitting primarily sections where users post comments.

“Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour [of discovering the problem], and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours. We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future,” a Google spokesman said via e-mail…..

The attack potentially put at risk YouTube cookies of users who visited a compromised page, but it couldn’t be used to access their Google accounts, the spokesman said. As a precaution, YouTube users should log out of their account and log back in again.

The attackers apparently targeted singer Justin Bieber, incorporating code into YouTube pages devoted to him so that visitors saw tasteless messages pop up about the teen star, and were also redirected to external sites with adult content

An industry source familiar with the situation said that while the attack itself didn’t involve malware infections, such a risk is inherent whenever users visit any Web page, such as the ones attackers redirected users to. It’s not clear if those landing pages contained malware, but most up-to-date anti-virus software is designed to protect against those threats, this person said.

YouTube is by far the most popular video uploading and sharing site. In May, U.S. residents watched 14.6 billion video clips at Google sites, mostly at YouTube. which is about 43 percent of all clips watched online that month, according to comScore.

On a day when the U.S. marks its independence with fireworks shows, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook lit up on Sunday morning with reports from thousands of individuals who noticed the YouTube hack.

A separate stream of postings on social media sites focuses on whether Apple’s iTunes App Store may have been compromised by a rogue developer and whether purchases may have been made without victims’ permission using their credit cards on file.

People posting about the Apple issue are suggesting that App Store customers check for any unusual activity on their accounts.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from IDG News Service.

Google has reached an agreement to buy ITA Software, a maker of air travel flight-information software whose customers include major airlines and online travel agencies. Google will pay US$700 million in cash for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software vendor, the companies announced on Thursday.

Google plans to use ITA’s software to improve the ways in which people can find flight information online using Google search services, Google said in a statement…..

ITA, founded in 1996, counts among its customers American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and Microsoft’s Bing.

Google said it will “honor all existing agreements” ITA has in place and plans to add new partners.

The companies are holding a press conference this afternoon to discuss the deal

Google’s encrypted search engine, launched in May, has moved to a new Web address that isn’t as convenient as its original one but that gives organizations the option to block the site for their users without locking them out of other Google services.

Originally offered at google.com, the encrypted search engine has been relocated to encrypted.google.com, a move prompted primarily by the requirement of schools and universities to block encrypted search engines for their students.

Educational institutions often ban encrypted search engines because students can use them to bypass the Web content filters of their schools and universities…..

However, blocking google.com also interferes with other encrypted Google products, like the hosted Apps communication and collaboration suite, which many educational institutions offer for their staff and students.

By moving the encrypted Web search engine to its new address, it’s now possible to block access to it without affecting other Google services, Google said on Friday.

“We are continuing to explore longer-term options such that we could return encrypted search to https://www.google.com without introducing issues with school content filters,” wrote Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard in an official blog post.

Google introduced the option to encrypt Web search sessions with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology for people who want to make sure network snoops don’t sniff the data they exchange with Google servers, such as queries entered and results received.

Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom has confirmed that it has received ban orders from Lahore High Court on Thursday to ban Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, YouTube, Amazon etc , reported BBC Urdu, citing unnamed sources in the Ministry.

It merits mentioning here that inter-ministerial committee of IT Ministry decides on how to and why to ban or not to ban a website. Committee is reportedly meeting today to discuss the implication, execution and procedures of the ban.

IT Ministry has an option of getting stay-order from Supreme Court against LHC’s decision; however, all these options will be discussed in today’s meeting.

Unlike Facebook’s ban previous month, LHC’s current ban orders for search engines were not welcomed by the masses.

Earlier this week, Lahore High Court had ordered to immediately block nine websites for publishing and promoting sacrilegious material while hearing a writ petition filed by a citizen, Muhammad Sidiq, seeking a ban on the websites for publishing blasphemous materials and twisting the facts and figure of Holy Quran.

PTA  has already sent a summary to Prime Minister of Pakistan to discuss ban options of offensive websites – summary has details on implications of banning search engines and social media.

Ban includes 9 websites, which are considered as backbone of internet, blocking them will mean a total internet blackout in the country.

Update:

Inter-Ministerial committee has decided to ban all those URLs containing blasphemous content, as directed by LHC, however, search engines won’t get blocked in accordance to decision that was earlier taken by Federal Cabinet.

In this regards, Ministry of IT and Telecom will send a list of 17 websites to PTA for a permanent ban.

Moreover, Ministry in its letter will ask PTA to keep monitoring the web for any occurrence of blasphemous content to block them immediately.

Search Engines won’t get Banned:

Committee decided not to ban search engines, as they don’t host or store any content. However, options are considered to make it impossible to search for certain keywords on search engines..

A longtime iPhone and iPod touch app, Google Earth has been updated to version 3.0 with a handful of new features. Most notably, the app has gained a native iPad version, complete with a new toolbar, a search field, and a layers popover for choosing exactly what kinds of information you want to view while you’re floating around.

Google Earth has also gained a “Road layer” that works on the iPad and iPhone 3GS (and presumably iPhone 4). This is in addition to existing layer options like Places, Businesses, Panoramio Photos, Wikipedia, Borders and Labels, and Terrain…..

Google Earth is a universal app for iPhone and iPad and requires iOS 2.0 or later. It is available now for free in the App Store.

Google is under global scrutiny for its “accidental” gathering of wi-fi data while driving about photographing the world with its Street View camera cars. In the court of public opinion Google’s actions cross ethical boundaries, but whether or not the activities were illegal depends on the laws in place for the given jurisdiction. Businesses in the United States should understand that the interception of publicly available data traversing the airwaves is probably not illegal.

Granted, “probably” is not a very legally precise term, but the reality is that publicly-available wireless networks fall into a legal gray area that isn’t defined very well. Google didn’t “steal” anything, or even violate any expectation of privacy per se. All Google did was intercept airwaves that were trespassing in its vehicles.

The lesson for businesses and IT administrators is that you have to put forth some effort to at least give the appearance that you intend for the information to be private in order for there to be any inherent expectation of privacy. The burden should not be on Google, or the general public to have to determine whether the data you let freely fly about unencrypted is meant to be shared or is intended for a specific audience…..

Some will equate Google’s actions to someone taking property from a business with an unlocked door. The comparison is not apples to apples, though. If a business has an unlocked, or even a wide open door, passersby still know that entering it would be trespassing, and that taking property from inside would be stealing.

However, in Google’s case, it is more like the business took its property and set it out in the middle of the street. In fact, it might not even be in front of the business, or even on the same street–since the wi-fi signal from the wireless router is broadcast for a respectable distance in all directions. If someone were walking down the street and found a laptop, or a copy machine in the middle of the street, taking it would be neither trespassing, nor stealing–just serendipitous.

There have been cases where individuals have been fined or prosecuted for accessing open wireless networks. A Michigan man was fined and forced to perform community service for accessing a local café’s wireless network without being a customer. An Illinois man plead guilty and received a fine after being caught riding on the wireless network of a non-profit agency from his parked car.

I would argue that even those actions were not technically illegal. If I am out in public with my laptop or iPad, and it detects an available, unencrypted network to connect to, there is no way for me to know whether the owner meant for that network to be private, or if it is intended as a public hotspot. A wireless network is a wireless network, and some devices are configured to connect to any available wireless signal.

Google, however, did not “access” the open networks. It simply intercepted the unencrypted data that businesses and individuals beamed through the air willy-nilly. The data was left in the middle of the street so to speak, and Google gathered it as it drove through collecting photograps.

In Google’s case, the legal issues may just be beginning, though. Some countries, like Germany, have a much different opinion of privacy and different laws in place. Even in the United States, there may still be legal avenues for pursuing Google. But, if Google simply collected data that was publicly available, and never even accessed or used the data in any way as they claim, I fail to see where it did anything wrong.

If you want to stay out of the legal gray area, and protect your data you must turn on encryption for your wireless network. WEP encryption is pathetically simple to crack–trivial for anyone interested, but even WEP at least implies that you intended the data to be private. For better protection, you should employ WPA, or better yet WPA-2 encryption.

If you have a business–like a coffee shop or book store–where you want to share a public wireless network, but only with patrons and only under certain conditions, then you should implement some sort of initial notice or login screen that explains the policy for acceptable use of the wi-fi connection.

I am not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV–or even on the Internet, but the bottom line is that if someone walking or driving by can intercept your unencrypted data as it trespasses into their airspace, it’s not your data any more.

If slightly fuzzy pictures of a phone looking like a Motorola Droid are anything to go by, a blog called DroidLife claims to have exclusive pictures of an alleged Motorola Droid 2 device.

The website doesn’t share how it got hold of the pictures or the device, and we can’t verify how legit the images are. The device is fully branded by Motorola and Verizon, together with a “with Google” tag on the back, and could easily be a knockoff.

DroidLife has uncovered pictures of a device that is purportedly a Motorola Droid 2; externally it looks almost identical to the original Droid. The device, according to the specs published by the blog, features the same screen as the original Motorola Droid (3.7 inches with 480 by 854 pixels resolution), and bumps the processor speed to 750mHz (550mHz on the original Droid).

The site also posted a video of the phone booting up, with a swish animation showing the word “Droid” and the red eye featured in the Motorola Droid ads.

There is no front-facing camera on the uncovered device (Sprint’s Evo 4G and the iPhone 4 are reviving the trend), and the camera on the back is at 5 megapixels (with flash). The device also lacks HDMI ports, and the blog reports it came with 8GB of internal memory and a 8GB microSD card preinstalled.

The phone DroidLife shows doesn’t run on the latest version of the Google Android OS either (Froyo 2.2), but runs version 2.1, with what they say is a new version of Motorola’s custom Android interface, MotoBlur. Would Motorola launch a Droid 2 later this year without the latest version of Android? Not likely, unless this device is actually an early preproduction prototype.

Also apparent are several cosmetic differences between the pictured device and the original Motorola Droid. Most noticeably, the keyboard has no multidirectional D-pad, and the keys look more raised and softer, occupying the whole surface of the slide-out area. The back cover also features a different design.

If this turns out to be the real Droid 2, then Motorola was very conservative in taking the device further. On the other hand, the company says it is still seeing strong demand for the original Droid, so it makes sense to not make a huge departure from the original model.

A better camera on the Droid 2 would be good though, considering the Motorola Milestone XT720 introduced on Monday rocks an 8-megapixel camera (with 720p HD video recording).

Actually, if this is the Droid 2, the phone might not be Motorola’s flagship Android phone this year altogether. The company’s CEO of consumer business and mobile devices division, Sanjay Jha, announced that we would see by the end of this year a 2GHz smartphone from Motorola, which would “incorporate everything that is technologically possible in a smartphone today.” By the sound of it, this won’t be the Droid 2.

Google has introduced a new Web indexing system to provide users with more up-to-date search results, the company said Tuesday. The new system, called Caffeine, delivers results that are closer to “live” than Google’s previous system, the company said.

Previously, Google would crawl a fraction of the Web each night, index it and push it out in its results. With Caffeine, as Google crawls the Web and finds new information, it indexes it immediately. “We process it immediately so we can serve it seconds later,” said Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team. He unveiled the news at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle…..