The world’s largest Internet search company, Google, today unveiled a new HTML5-powered news and media aggregator for mobile and tablet devices, Google Currents, that elegantly displays user customized content from a number of sources, including from Google News, Google Reader, RSS Feeds, and even the company’s latest social network Google+.

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The world’s largest online search engine, Google, is now indexing Facebook comments that are posted using the Facebook Commenting plugin on websites that use the plugin to power their commenting system.

If you use your Facebook account to post a comment on a website that uses Facebook Comments, your comment (with your name) can now be indexed by Google’s web spiders and will be directly ranked and searchable in Google’s index.

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The world’s largest online search engine, Google Inc., is now subject of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) review, after the agency officially announced the formal investigation last Friday.

Users do have many alternatives to finding information online, from other search engines, including Microsoft Bing, to specialized search engines that retrieve information from particular databases, like financial information from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Although far from perfect, the reality today is that Google’s superior algorithmic technologies make the search engine the go-to place for online search – giving the company 65-percent market share of the U.S. Internet search market alone, and a whopping 84-percent of the global search market share.

Google maintains the company is exceedingly transparent in how it ranks search results (but there’s evidence it seems to favor top sites – that’s a different topic), and that it clearly labels and differentiates paid advertisements from organic search results (fine). However, as nice as that may be, the primary reason behind the investigation stems from more significant and potentially illegally activities in the way the company generates revenue.

Most of Google’s revenue is generated from its online advertising business. In the latest quarterly earnings (Q1 2011), Google reported $8.58-billion in gross revenue, up 27% from the same period last year. $8.306-billion of which was generated from advertising, that represents over 96.7-percent of total revenue for the period.

The issue is that a significant portion of Google’s advertising revenue could be generated from non-legitimate companies that advertise illegal products and services to U.S. consumers. For example, it is difficult to miss advertisements on Google-owned webpages that offer cheap drugs without prescriptions – an illegal activity – that Google in the process could be greatly profiting while essentially promoting the operations of the illegal enterprises.

Google maintains the company takes aggressive action through developed systems to identify, mitigate, and remove illegal advertisements, but the company has not been very transparent as to how successful it really is at identifying those ads. More recently, Google tweaked its systems (dubbed Panda update) to demote spam sites, and low quality websites from its index, a move that changed over 10-percent of U.S. search results. Google has also filed lawsuits against counterfeit pharmacies in the past that used its advertising platform Google AdWords.

The U.S. Justice Department has already launched an investigation specifically toward complaints of advertisements relating to illegal drugs. In that case, Google has earmarked $500-million toward a possible settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, where if the fine is paid, would make it one of the largest fines ever paid by a U.S. firm to the U.S. government.

Although Google claims to be transparent, it is not as transparent as perhaps it should be in many different functional areas: ranking organic search results, ranking sources in Google News, censoring search results abroad, promoting its own offerings, and possibly most importantly: mitigating profit from illegal advertisements. Now, the last time I checked, if I promoted the sale of illegal/counterfeit drugs (even if I didn’t have proper knowledge of the law), it is an illegal act, and as far as I’m concerned, there is (or, at least there shouldn’t be) no difference between me, you, Google, or any other organization.

It could be argued that Google is simply an advertising medium criminals are using, and that if Google begun censoring which types of advertisements can/cannot be shown (especially given Google’s near monopoly of the online advertising market), then we’re just heading down the Big Brother road. Rather, it is the government’s responsibility to identify, shut down, and prosecute those responsible for selling illegal drugs.

Google says the company would fully cooperate with the current FTC investigation, and that it strongly believes its principles will “stand up to scrutiny”.

The top software-maker in the world, Microsoft Inc., released a new Android developers package to make it easier for developers to port their applications to the Windows Phone platform.

The Android developers kit provided by Microsoft includes two primary tools, an Android to Windows Phone API mapping tool, and a ninety page whitepaper (“Windows Phone 7 Guide for Android Application Developers“).

Microsoft acknowledges it could be a tedious process for developers to port their apps because the platforms are built on different architectures and based on different user interfaces, but the company has offered to provide help through a team of developers hired for the sole purpose of providing guidance through online forums, including the official Windows Phone 7 Development forum.

A similar developers kit is already available for the Apple iOS platform.

The Windows Phone Marketplace currently has more than 20,000 available applications, after reaching the 10,000 apps milestone only last March.

The news comes as the Waterloo-based maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion, announces the availability of its PlayBook tablet in an additional sixteen markets, including in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Germany, UAE, France, Italy, Indonesia, and Australia, among others.

RIM has yet to get developers to adopt its QNX-powered PlayBook tablet on wider scale. That platform still has a marginal amount of applications, and consumers have widely criticized the quality of the applications available compared to other platforms including iOS.

Many developers have very publically abandoned developing for RIM’s platforms widely because of avoidable inconveniences, both technical and administrative ones.

Back in September 2010, Adobe released a new tool part of Adobe Air that allows developers to build a single code-base for a single application and to essentially automatically convert their application to run on multiple operating systems that support Adobe Air and Adobe Flash, including the BlackBerry PlayBook, and Android devices.

The applications work perfectly across the different operating systems, and also scale to the different resolutions on different devices.

The world’s largest online search engine, Google Inc., has acquired the product search engine Sparkbuy, according to a note on the Sparkbuy website.

Google has yet to issue an official announcement concerning its latest acquisition, and at this time, the terms of the deal are being kept strictly private.

Sparkbuy to date has raised about $1-million in venture capital funding and was founded by Dan Shapiro in 2010 after he was disappointed with current search methods when he was looking at purchasing a new laptop. The search engine aims to allow a user to easily get recommendations on consumer electronics (like laptops) based on various input criteria and preferences, including price, feature options (like memory, hard drive space, battery life, etc.), among other filters.

The search engine works by aggregating various bits of information about products and generating recommendations based on aggregated data. Sparkbuy has thousands of products in its database, including from Amazon Inc., and even has more than 3,000 products from North America’s largest consumer electronics chain Best Buy Inc. after reaching a deal with the company within weeks after it launched.

If you were hoping to use Sparkbuy right now, unfortunately, that is no longer a possibility as the service has already been shut down as a direct result of the acquisition.

Sparkbuy said in a statement, “We’re stoked about the opportunity to share our vision for search with a broader audience. And while we won’t be offering services at sparkbuy.com any more, stay tuned for truckloads of new awesome from our team at Google.”

Google is expected to incorporate proprietary Sparkbuy algorithms in its current product search engine to generate more relevant results.

The small Sparkbuy team will now join the Google camp at the company’s California headquarters.

The Google stock (NASDAQ:GOOG) closed down just over 10-basis point at the end of the last trading week to $518.39 per share.

Most recently, Google reported total revenue of $8.58-billion in Q1 2011, up 27-percent from the same period last year. Google reported GAAP net income of $2.30-billion in the same period.

The Internet search giant, Google Inc., has completed its third acquisition of a Toronto-based tech company, this time scooping up PushLife Inc. with the details of the acquisition being kept private.

PushLife was founded in 2008 by ex Research In Motion employee Ray Reddy and aimed to developed software for people to organize, share, and purchase digital content across different mobile platforms from a single application.

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Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page

Google co-founder Larry Page today replaced outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt as part of a transition process that takes place today.

Schmidt will continue to work at Google as Executive Chairman, where he will focus on external factors like business partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and government lobbying and policies that impact Google’s operations. Schmidt says he will still be involved in key decision making among the three co-founders.

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Google’s volatile relationship with the Chinese government doesn’t seem to be ironing out yet, in fact, it could get worse, as a new deadline from the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying looms that could see Google Maps blocked in the country.

The Chinese government requires Internet mapping websites that operate in China to receive a license to operate in the country through an approval process that is designed to protect national security, including by censoring data, among other practices.

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In another apparent attack on its computer systems, the world’s largest search engine, Google Inc., is publically pointing the finger at the Chinese government for allegedly manipulating how some of its services function in China.

It appears many basic functions and tasks within Google’s Gmail email service, including sending messages, using the instant messaging service Gtalk within Gmail, starring or marking messages as read, all appear to be sporadically hindered for users in China.

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The world’s largest Internet search engine, Google Inc., has released a new search application, Google Mobile App, for Apple iOS devices that includes a revamped user interface with new gesture controls, new features, and improved performance, among other enhancements.

The new swipe features make searches more intuitive by utilizing new swipe gestures that bring up contextual menus. For example, if you swipe from left to right, a contextual menu appears that allows you to filter your results by time, Google Places, Images, News, Videos, Blogs, Discussions, among other parameters.

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