Aviv Refuah, the young CEO of the public Israeli company Netex Corporation, has managed to score a US patent on an internet search option developed by the company he founded that could well force major Internet search players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to cough up royalties for future use of the technology…

BRUSSELS, Sept 7 (Reuters) – The French government plans to file its objections to Google Inc’s (GOOG.O) plan to digitize millions of books in a New York court this week, a French Culture Ministry official said on Monday. “France will send its observations to the U.S. court today or tomorrow,” Nicolas Georges, director for books [...]

First Germany, now France. Nicolas Sarkozy’s government has written to a US court urging it to stop a $125 million settlement between Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and US book publishers, warning that Google will have unfair control over European works and a “monopoly (on) digitising European orphan works without permission” (via Reuters)…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) will ask European book publishers’ permission before making their works available to U.S. users, in a bid to stay on the right side of EU states’ copyright law. Google confirmed to paidContent:UK in a statement that it will digitize either the full text or excerpts from “commercially available” books—but says “such books [...]

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We’ve created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment…

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Kai-fu Lee, Google Inc’s former China chief who quit the search giant this week, said on Sunday he will launch his own business next week to fund Chinese technology start-ups. Lee, described by Chinese media as the face of Google in China, said on his Twitter page (http://twitter.com/kaifulee) that he will [...]

Yesterday Google posted a mysterious doodle that linked to the search results for [unexplained phenomenon]. According to Google Korea’s blog (English translation), this was the first from a series of 3 doodles that celebrate a famous person. The next doodle will be posted on September 15th and the hints are: mystery, invisible, novel…

Kai-fu Lee, who announced his departure from Google China last week, has cause the Internet to erupt with speculation on the reasons for his departure and future plans. News on this hot topic has been difficult to report, as many original sources are difficult or impossible for tech bloggers with limited resources to translate. However, [...]

As time runs short for comments on the proposed Google book settlement to be filed, Amazon has filed its objections: it’s Congress’ job to sort out copyright issues, the deal will create an illegal entity, and (worst of all) it’s bad for Amazon’s business model…

I know there are some people who have not slept for fear that Google had finally committed itself to some alien culture. Well, some outerworldly alien culture. Well, some outerworldly alien culture where all beings were green and no one used phrases like “market segmentation” and “41 shades of blue.” You see, a mysterious doodle [...]

We don’t want to go too hard on Google, but it seems they’re having some serious stability issues lately. After this week’s Gmail outage, now Google Calendar is unavailable (at least some of the time), too….