For the second in our new series of what will hopefully be a regular monthly round-up of the more interesting occurrences at Google, we will take a look at a few newsworthy stories doing the rounds this February.

Let’s start with the positives, Google Docs, the online office application suite from Google got a new web clipboard, allowing copying and pasting in the ‘cloud’, surely a good thing for any user of Google Docs. Read more at the official Google Docs Blog here. In other Google Apps news there are a few Gmail Labs features that will be graduating from Labs into normal Gmail - these include Search Autocomplete, Go To Label, Forgotten Attachment Detector and more. There are also a few Labs features that will be retiring, read more at the official Gmail Blog here.

A few other happenings in February, Google is planning to test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of communities in the United States - read more here. The new beta release of Google Chrome for Mac added two key features (that were previously only available in the developer channel), bookmark synchronization and support for extensions along with other improvements - read more here.

The recent acquisition of Aardvark by Google is set to introduce a bit more of the ‘human touch’ to the Google experience. Aardvark (available at vark.com) allows users to ask questions and Aardvark will discover another human being in your network to answer the question, reportedly within minutes, providing a more social form of search. Aardvark is currently available as part of Google Labs here (or at the Aardvark site here).

One other small tweak this month, on the currently hot topic of geolocation, is the introduction of the new “Nearby feature” in the Search Options panel of the Google search page - read more here. And for any African university students who are interested in coding and an internship at Google along with special prizes and t-shirts, head over to Google Code Jam Africa 2010. You can also find out more at the official Google Africa Blog here.

And the middle-ground? Google Buzz…whether this is going to be a killer product in the future or another Orkut is debatable. Google Buzz is somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, though deeply integrated with other Google services (and Twitter itself, amongst others). Allowing (theoretical) real-time updates of status, picture posts, Twitter posts and more, the service was launched quite abruptly and not quite bug-free. Though no beta tag was attached on launch (surely a first for Google), many users raised concerns regarding security and the fact that Twitter status updates did not actually work for many users. Google Buzz seems to have been rushed out by Google and only time (and bug-fixing) will determine whether the product is adopted by it’s massive Gmail user base.

Unfortunately there is a cat amongst the pigeons this month, Microsoft is initiating a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints against Google regarding the algorithms it employs to determine search results, through companies it has interests in - read more about the complaints at the official Google European Policy Blog here and a response from Amit Singhal of Google regarding their algorithms here.

There doesn’t seem to a  quiet moment to be had for Google, who had a rather mixed bag this month. The eagerly anticipated ’superphone’ - the Nexus One was launched and despite all the hype surrounding the smartphone, sales figures have reportedly been poor. Comparatively, The iPhone 3GS sold over a million units within 72 […]

The online game is all about rapid change and 2009 was no different, here is a round-up of some of the good stuff from last year and how it affected (or will affect) the search market.
Missing something? Well, that would be Live Search from Microsoft, in it’s place we now have the (rather oddly titled) Bing. […]

 It is amazing how quickly we forget, just over a year ago saw the release of a rather buggy browser named Google Chrome. Our own staff, generally quick to praise Google, even had a few doubts. Today, the beta version of Google Chrome supports extensions and we are now at the point of seeing what […]

If you have every managed a campaign on Google AdWords, you will have come across a little button which asks you whether you would like your ads to display on ‘all devices’ or have the option of deselecting ‘mobile browsers’. Have you ever considered the real implications of choosing yes or no to mobile browsers?
The […]

Just before for the peak shopping days of the year Google released a new feature called Ad parameters. This feature, which was initially know as Live Ads enables advertisers to update numeric fields in their ad copy without actually deleting the existing ad and creating a new one (which is how the standard Adwords ad […]

It has been a very, very busy time for the folks over at Google lately. The much hyped Google Wave is open to a few lucky individuals who got invitations (read more about it at Wikipedia here) and is set to revolutionize the way we communicate online. Not only that, the Google Wave interface is […]

After using Google for so long we have become quite used to an almost ‘psychic’ search. You type in something and Google will return a match, even offering suggestions if you make a spelling mistake, and you generally find what you want quite easily.
This ‘comfort zone’ we have developed can however lead to problems, as […]

We’re all familiar with the concept of user experience and its importance. Personally, I prefer to think more specifically of user expectation. It somehow seems to stir stronger feelings of personal responsibility.
I’d venture that our responsibility for user’s expectations is something the creative department is more aware of than anyone else. The reason: when you […]

If you have never used it, Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” which equates to an online ‘computer’ of sorts, using a vast archive of information to generate facts and figures about most things. Though not a ’search’ engine as such, it represents an interesting resource to be utilised in research. It is the product […]