Continuing its revamp of the Google+ social network that began in March, Google announced on Wednesday the addition of 41 new features and a redesign of the service, which it claims has 190 million active users. The changes focus on three areas -- the Google+ stream, photos, and the Hangouts feature. Among other things, Google+ will automatically add hashtags to posts, identify and rank related conversation ...

Google Maps, already the de facto standard for online and mobile maps, is breaking new ground with added capabilities announced on Wednesday at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco. Maps will get 3D views, speech recognition, enhanced voice search capabilities and will leverage artificial intelligence, among other things. Google Maps for mobile is also being enhanced. The company is also added to Goog ...

Google announced on Monday that it was consolidating the storage allowances for its various products. It will now provide 15 GB of free storage space for use across Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. Before, Google gave users 10 GB for Gmail and 5 GB to be used for Drive and Google+ Photos. Google is also updating its Google Drive storage page with pie charts displaying how those 15 GB are being allocated. Us ...

Developers who put their name down for the prototype Explorer edition of Google Glass at last year’s I/O will be pleased to learn that the high-tech eyewear should be perched on the end of their schnozzle pretty darn soon. According to AnandTech‘s Brian Klug, the Mountain View company sent out an email to the developers, informing them that the device will be coming their way very soon. “We’ve been working ...

Bing may be engaged in a "Scroogled" marketing campaign, but an 18-month study by an antivirus security firm shows that Microsoft's search engine may need to play some defense, thanks to results showing more malware-infected links popping up in its search results than for Google. The study by AV Test showed that despite the best efforts of the world's leading search engines to provide safe links in their re ...

Google announced this week that it is going to replace the open source WebKit browser rendering engine using a fork of WebKit's WebCore component known as Blink. The move means that Google and Apple won't share development of WebKit. WebCore is really a layout, rendering and document target model library. Blink is implemented together with the Chromium Content module, and thus must run in Chromium. This mea ...

The Language Council of Sweden has dropped the term "ungoogleable" from its list of new words, following pressure from Google to adapt its definition to something more flattering for the company. According to Sveriges Radio, Google wanted the meaning of the term ogooglebar — which describes something "that you can't find on the web with the use of a search engine" — to be altered so that it would only descr ...

A few days ago, Google prematurely released the Google Keep service, only to pull it back down on the same day. For those who missed that, Google Keep is a note taking application for Android that syncs with your Google Drive account. Now, the service has been officially announced in the form of the Google Keep app on the Play Store. It is a very basic note taking app meant for quickly jotting down your tho ...

An apparent promotional video espousing the joys of the feature already enjoyed by many Android users appeared on YouTube on Tuesday. The 42-second ad was, however, promptly pulled, though not before several fast-acting viewers managed to save it. In the meantime, several copies have resurfaced on Google’s video streaming site since – perhaps it’ll pull those as well. When you line it up against the Google ...

Google says the FBI is monitoring the Web for potential terrorist activity. But it can't confirm the extent of the surveillance. As part of the Google Transparency Report, the Internet giant released data this week on so-called National Security Letters -- official requests for data under the Patriot Act passed after the September 11, 2001 attacks. But Google said it was only allowed to provide broad ranges ...