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Facebook last week announced Place Tips for iPhones, a feature that will give subscribers location-based recommendations at the top of their News Feeds. No mention was made of launching Place Tips for Android or Windows Phone devices. Tapping on Place Tips will call up the information, which will in...

Google reportedly is gearing up to launch a shopping and comparison site for auto insurance in the United States. The company has been operating such a site in the UK, dubbed "Google Compare," for the past two years. Although it apparently has been beset by delays, an entity called "Google Compare A...

Google on Thursday said it will close Google News in Spain, as of Dec. 16. That's in reaction to a new law that will take effect in Spain in January. The law requires all Spanish publications to charge content aggregators for publishing any part of their content. Spain's new law is "a perverse polic...

Google soon will begin targeting kids 12 and under with tailored versions of its products, likely including its search functionality, along with offerings such as YouTube and Chrome. The company is pushing to change make its products fun and safe for children, Pavni Diwanji, Google VP of engineering...

Google on Friday unveiled Contributor, an experimental service that lets users make a donation to support the websites they visit instead of viewing ads. Currently available only by invitation, Contributor begins by asking users to set a monthly contribution amount between $1 and $3. Then, when they...

Mozilla on Wednesday announced that Yahoo would replace Google as its global default search option, in a move that has set the tech media abuzz. Pointing out that Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004, Mozilla painted the move as seizing the opportunity to review its competiti...

Google is offering a limited trial of a feature that offers people conducting searches of medical terms the opportunity to engage in a video chat with a health professional via its Helpouts service. Helpouts, which launched last November, connects users with experts in a variety of fields such as Ar...

Google may be on the receiving end of a $100 million lawsuit from attorneys representing some of the celebrities whose nude photos were hacked from their iCloud accounts and subsequently posted online. Entertainment lawyer Martin Singer has sent a letter to Google's top executives and its legal staf...

News Corp. and Google have lashed out at each other as the EU reconsiders the terms of its proposed antitrust settlement with the latter. News Corp. essentially accused Google of nefarious behavior in a letter to the European Competition Commissioner over the EU's proposed antitrust settlement with ...

Can an automated Google feature that ostensibly helps users with a search be a basis for libel? Courts in Germany, Italy and Hong Kong have had to field that question. Google's position is that there is no human intervention, and that its algorithm is based merely on what others have searched for, o...

A conflict between Google's push to make the Web more secure and its Trusted Store program may be costing at least one business money. Pegasus Auto Racing Supplies, which encrypts all the pages on its website, reportedly has had its application for Google's Trusted Stores program turned down. Think ...

Google is planning to allow kids under 13 to have their own personal accounts on services such as YouTube and Gmail, according to reports. Under the new system, parents would be able to set up accounts for their children, control their use of those accounts, and regulate the information collected ab...

Google on Wednesday announced that it has begun factoring websites' use of HTTPS into its search rankings, resulting in more favorable results for those that use the security-minded protocol. "Over the past few months we've been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted c...

Marie Antoinette may not have been too far off the mark when she intoned the immortal line, "Let them eat cake." When it comes to the right to be forgotten, it seems Europeans want both to have their cake and eat it. They are up in arms over Google's having deleted links to various news stories from...

Google has kicked explicit pornographic advertising from its ad network. The company said it made the AdWords change, which it announced in March and recently brought into effect, "as an effort to continually improve users' experiences with AdWords." Advertising policies were updated to reflect the ...