Google

Venture capital blogger Fred Wilson hit a minor speed bump while searching Google the other day. The site asked him to verify that he wasn't a bot by filling out a Captcha.

Other people have seen this block before, though we don't hear about this too often. If you manage to set off Google's filter, it should be a pretty innocuous block. Enter in the text, and you should be back up and googling in no time.

That is, unless you are vision-impaired, as this blogger ranted in 2005. In that case, you need an alternate route … Read more

Google is buying in-game advertising company AdScape Media for $23 million, a source told CNET News.com.

The deal was rumored to be in the works since last month. Red Herring reported that the deal was being finalized on Thursday.

Spokespeople at Google and AdScape declined to comment on "speculation and rumor."

Buying AdScape would give Google technology that would allow it to move into yet another market to serve ads to -- the fast growing online and video game market, which is expected to reach $200 million in revenue this year and as much as $700 million … Read more

Nearly three years after Gmail was first released, the free Web-based e-mail from Google is being opened up for anyone in the world. Beginning Wednesday, everyone and their mother can sign up instead of having to get an invite from a Gmail-using friend. Google has been phasing out the invitation restriction geographically, with total general availability offered in Europe last week and in North America, South America and Asia this week. The service is still in beta test mode, however.

Many people thought Google's ad-based searchable e-mail service with an unheard-of gigabyte of free storage was an April Fools' … Read more

Google will soon let advertisers bid on a cost-per-click basis for ads they target on specific publisher Web sites. Right now, advertisers using Google's site-targeting feature place bids based on cost-per-thousand impressions.

Beginning in a test next month, advertisers will be able to bid on a cost-per-click model in which they set a maximum price they will pay every time someone clicks on their ad, according to a Google AdWords blog posting. Many advertisers, particularly smaller brands, prefer to pay only when someone clicks on the ad--which ostensibly indicates a desire to get more information for a possible purchase--as … Read more

Apparently things aren't going so well for Google and its foray into radio advertising. Chad and Ryan Steelberg, brothers and founders of radio advertising company dMarc, have left the search giant a little more than one year after Google acquired it, the company confirmed on Friday.

Google announced in January 2006 that it was purchasing Newport Beach, Calif.-based dMarc for $102 million in cash, plus the possibility of an additional $1.13 billion if revenue targets were met. Google began testing its Audio Ads program for radio, using the dMarc technology, late last year.

However, dMarc is affiliated … Read more

They're young, hip and now, very, very rich. The founders of popular video sharing site YouTube received shares of Google worth many millions of dollars in Google's all-stock $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley received 735,319 Google shares, worth nearly $346 million based on the current $470.01 share price. Co-founder Steve Chen received 694,087 shares worth about $326 million, and a third co-founder, Jawed Karim, received 137,443 shares worth about $65 million. Sequoia Capital, the chief venture capital backer of … Read more

More trouble for Google's video darling YouTube. The new chief executive of NBC Universal criticized Google and YouTube for dragging their feet on deploying technology to protect copyrighted material that gets posted to the site on a daily basis by avid fans.

Google has the ability to block pornography and hate speech and does so, Zucker told reporters Tuesday, his first day on the job, The Financial Times reported.

"YouTube needs to prove that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It's proven it can do it when it wants to," he said. &… Read more

Princeton University is the latest partner to join Google's controversial Library Project.

Princeton, like partners including Harvard and Oxford, only wants books in the public domain digitized; one million of those are on tap. Other partners, including the University of Michigan and University of California, are allowing copyright-protected books to be digitized as well.

The digitization of books not yet in the public domain is at the heart of lawsuits filed against Google by publishers' and authors' groups in the United States and Europe.

Opponents of Google's Library Project claim that it is a copyright violation to scan … Read more

Google is working on a tool that will let you convert documents into a presentation much like Microsoft's PowerPoint does, according to the Google Operating System blog. The tool is dubbed "Presently," which is a play on the name of Google's Web-based word processor Writely, according to the blog posting.

A Google representative said: "We're continually exploring opportunities to expand our offerings but we have nothing to announce at this time."

Google has been releasing more and more productivity applications and other services as free, online versions, starting with Gmail. Last year Google merged its Documents and Spreadsheets … Read more