Google Inc

Selling a home without a real estate agent can save thousands of dollars in commission fees, but it can also be a painstaking, confusing task. Foregoing an agent, however, is easier these days thanks to Web sites that help homeowners advertise their properties on the hottest real estate portals and even walk them through figuring out how to price their home to sell. Sites such as ForSaleByOwner.com, Owners.com and Fizber.com don't claim to supplant every service a real estate agent provides, but they  

A Vietnamese blogger has alerted the world to another Google product. Details are sketchy at best. In fact, all we have is a photo: The photo - whose authenticity has yet to be verified - seems to indicate the product is some sort of "2 ply bathroom paper" made from "100 per cent virgin pulp."  

Brizzly , an application for managing messages in Twitter and Facebook, expanded its beta test today — now you don't need an invite code, so anyone can use it. The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs , and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to "mute" people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists . In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a new feature today, the ability to translate t  

Google has some ambitious goals with its open source PC operating system ...  

Google's Chrome OS captured a lot of headlines and hype this week after the company invited the media in to have a look-see, setting off a whole lot of opinions about whether it will be any good. Microsoft, predictably, doesn't think so. Otherwise, Al Gore offered his opinion on the role supercomputers can play to quell climate change, and for the first time we can recollect there were not one, but two, cat-related IT stories that caught our attention. 1.  

The 51-year-old could have Googled his directions, or used Mapquest. Maybe Yahoo. Instead he drove to AAA's office in downtown St. Petersburg for a more human, low-tech touch: He was picking up a TripTik travel planner.  

It's hard to compete when your opponent's name is so popular that it's become a verb. Such is the plight of every search engine that dares to challenge Google. Last year, four search engines made up more than 95 percent of all search traffic: Only Google increased its share of the pie that year, eating up 67 percent of all searches in January and 72 percent by 2009, according to the online traffic monitor Hitwise.  

 

Danny Sullivan does a great job calling out the hypocrisy of the Associated Press yet again. The organization, which has taken a very maximalist position on copyright, where fair use gets mostly ignored , apparently had no problem scanning Sarah Palin's entire book into a computer so that reporters could search it. Of course, this is no different than what Google is doing with its book scanning program (which, again, I still believe is a clear case of fair use).