"We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002."

This week Google announced a “forecast” feature in Google Insights for Search. Essentially it’s a new function that looks at the search history (popularity) of a term and tries to predict what the future trend for that term will look like.

I got this in my Gmail inbox the other day: "Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We're happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product". Since I'm all about making improvements, I clicked the link to accept my invitation to Google Wave.

Google has finally released a long-awaited native Linux application: Google Desktop for Linux. As with the already shipping OS X and Windows versions, Google Desktop enables Linux users to search for text inside documents, local email messages, their Web history, and their Gmail accounts. [...] Google Desktop for Linux is based on Google's own desktop search algorithms.

Summer of Code? Setter of tracking cookies? "Open Source" heroes? Supporters of Firefox? These links explore Google's current war with M$/Amazon/Yahoo. A can of worms.

Most Firefox users don't realize that Firefox's current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox's search bar. This revenue amounts to tens of millions of dollars.

Google was set to launch late on Wednesday a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop. [...] Although Google has released other projects as open-source software, where it can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone, Google Desktop for Linux is proprietary.

Since version 2 came out in 2005, Google Desktop for Windows has included a sidebar that users can fill with screen gadgets, but the Linux version (version 1, from June 2007) provided only indexing and search functions, with no eye candy whatsoever. This has finally changed. Google recently released Google Gadgets for Linux (GGL), which closes the gap between the operating systems.

Google's protests over the way desktop search is handled in Microsoft's Vista OS have so far fallen on deaf ears. A U.S. district judge denied Google's request to extend Microsoft's antitrust agreement with federal and state governments, essentially saying the matter was none of Google's business. The judge suggested that Google appeal to DoJ, which has shown no sympathy for the search giant.