Wasiq Ansari’s World

BRUSSELS — European Union data privacy regulators are telling Google Inc. to warn people before it sends cameras out into cities to take pictures for its Street View maps, adding to the company’s legal worries in Europe.
Google should shorten the time it keeps the original photos from one year to six months, regulators also said [...]

Google has admitted to BBC News that testing of its controversial social network Buzz was insufficient.
The firm has had to make a series of changes to the service after a ferocious backlash from users concerned about intrusions of privacy.
The BBC understands that Buzz was only tested internally and bypassed more extensive trials with external testers [...]

Google aims to take on Facebook with new social feature called ‘Buzz’
Google, which has faltered in its attempts to break into the booming social networking business, is making another bid to counter the growing influence of Silicon Valley rival Facebook and San Francisco upstart Twitter with new products that make it easier to share with [...]

Google on Thursday confirmed that it has acquired social search start-up Aardvark, a company founded by ex-Google employees.
“We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don’t have any additional details to share right now,” said a company spokesperson in an e-mail.
Google has not confirmed a price, but a report on TechCrunch says [...]

Google ’sister’ launches in China:
A new search engine and social network provider called Goojje has appeared online in China.
The site contains very similar branding to Google, and the final syllable “jje” sounds similar to the Mandarin word for older sister (jiejie).
Goojje’s search results appear to be filtered for sensitive content in accordance with Chinese regulations.
Google [...]

Google search results sometimes include documents that were not originally formatted to be viewed in a web browser, such as PDFs. In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application. To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily [...]

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that [...]

Many of the readers of Marketing Pilgrim likely had a rough 100 or so minutes yesterday when Googles popular Gmail application crashed and went dark via the web. Watching the Twitter stream of panic and rage caught in 140 character snapshots was amusing for a while but when everyone tries to out Tweet the next [...]

Analysts keep bringing it up. Reporters do, too. How much money is Google losing on YouTube? And can they afford it? The lingering question that affects Internet marketers the most is what happens if Google decides they can’t afford it. If you are using YouTube for marketing, should you be worried? First off, no one [...]

It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings [...]