October 27, 2009, 1:34 PM — Another busy week for Google included a Blogger meltdown, Google Voice tweak, word about Social Search, net neutrality lobbying and a dive into the music selling business. Here's a recap of the news from Network World and its sister publications, including IDG News Service.
Keeping Google Voice mail out of search results
After transcripts of some voice mail messages from Google Voice users appeared in search results, Google has modified the telephony management service to prevent this from happening, the company. Since its launch in March, Google Voice allowed users to post voice mail transcripts on public Web pages, so that they could share the content of the messages with others.
Google thumbs its nose at SharePoint
Google took the wraps off of more than 10 new features for its Google Search Appliance aimed at the enterprise, including better SharePoint integration. Perhaps the coolest feature is the Self-learning Scorer, which lets the device fine-tune and improve itself. Note the timing of this news though: the news coincided with Microsoft's sold-out SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, where the company was trying to wow customers with search and SharePoint news of its own.
Google's Blogger service suffers widespread outage
Google's popular Blogger blog-publishing service crashed early on Friday and remained unavailable to most users for about 90 minutes, the type of broad system outage that Google has been trying to eradicate from its Web-hosted applications. Google acknowledged the crash in brief statements posted to the Blogger Status site and to the Blogger Help Forum.
Google will let users sample and buy songs directly from its search results page via a new service. Google will let users stream songs from Lala and iLike.com, which is owned by MySpace, according to a report in the The Wall Street Journal. A Lala link will let users stream a full song once for free and pay about $1 to download a copy, the report said.
Google, Microsoft search battle heats up
PC World reported that Google and Microsoft used the Web 2.0 Summit to unveil details about their latest plans to integrate social networking and search results. For Google, this included a deal with Twitter to include Tweets in search results, plus the intro of Google Social Search.
Slideshow: 10 great Google Apps add-ons for the enterprise
Google, Verizon make for strange bedfellows on Net Neutrality
As usual, Google was at the center of the Net Neutrality discussion last week, pre-empting the official FCC opening of a rule-making process by issuing a joint statement with Verizon outlining their similarities and differences on the issue. Their statement begins: "Verizon and Google might seem unlikely bedfellows in the current debate around network neutrality, or an open Internet. And while it's true we do disagree quite strongly about certain aspects of government policy in this area--such as whether mobile networks should even be part of the discussion--there are many issues on which we agree. For starters we both think it's essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform--where people can access any content (so long as it's legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice."
Google, not known for using conventional marketing to promote its wares, has nonetheless found that such an approach is effective for its enterprise products and will roll out internationally a campaign it launched in the U.S. in August. The "Gone Google" campaign is reaching the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore.
