In August, Google announced that it was reworking its search engine to make it faster and more efficient. The new project is called Google Caffeine.

Google Caffeine is billed as an effort to improve Google’s indexing speed, power and accuracy.

Google’s own Matt Cutts discusses more about the Google Caffeine project in the video below:

Google has been the target of much criticism lately regarding how much information they record on people who use their search engine and other web services as well as how they use this information.

In an effort to make their personal data more public, Google has launched a privacy dashboard for users who want to find out exacly what information Google has collected about their online activity as well as control their privacy settings for Google services from one central location.

Google’s privacy dashboard covers personal information collected from over 20 of Google’s services services, including Gmail, Google Docs, Search History, Orkut, YouTube.com, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Alerts, Google Latitude and more.

The Google dashboard can reveal just how much personal information and online activity data you’re providing Google when you use their search engine and other web services.

You can watch the video below for more information on how the Google Privacy Dashboard works:

Wonder what all the fuss and buzz is about surrounding Google’s new communication tool called Google Wave? This clever video attempts to explain some of Google Wave’s “killer app” potential in 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

Although Google Wave isn’t ready for public release yet, you can learn more about Google Wave on their site at Google Wave.

Google has made some recent changes to help their search engine compete with the real-time search engines by adding search options that allow people to choose search results based on freshness and timeliness.

Today Google announced 9 new search options that allow users to refine their searches:

Past Hour and Date Range: Users can see the most recent results in the Google index, or get results from a specific date range. These search options will show you the freshest information or information that was released during a specific time period.

More Shopping Sites or Fewer Shopping Sites: Choose the “More shopping sites” option to show more commercial pages and product prices in Google’s search results. In addition, you can choose the “Fewer shopping sites” option to weed out many of the commercial search results.

Visited Pages or Not Yet Visited Pages: Find pages you’ve visited already by choosing the “Visited pages” option or remove the pages you’ve visited by choosing “not yet visited.” To use these options you must be signed in to a Google user account and have your web history enabled.

Books, Blogs and News: Choose these options when you want your Google Search results from one of these sources. Using these filters together, along with video, forum, and review options allows you to change between different source types directly from Google’s search results.

You can use the new search options yourself by doing a search on Google and clicking the “Show options” in the blue bar under the Google logo.

Source: Google

The New York State Supreme Court has ordered Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who posted defamatory comments about model Liskula Cohen on Google’s Blogger site.

Google fought to keep the blogger’s identity anonymous. However a judge ordered Google to hand over the blogger’s internet IP address, rejecting the legal claim that the online comments were “personal opinions”.

Protection of anonymous speech is a complex legal issue. Protection of anonymous opinions vary by state. In some states, the plaintiff only needs to prove that the request to reveal the blogger is being made in good faith. In other states, the plaintiff has to show evidence that damage has been done to their reputation.

Cohen stated that the anonymous blogger’s posts made it harder for her to find modeling work since the blog along with posted pics often came up in her job interviews. Cohen claimed the blogger’s comments labeling her as “skanky” and being a “ho” defamed her “serial monogamist” traits. Since this legal case was decided by the New York State Supreme Court it’s likely that the court’s opinion will carry significant legal weight and insuring that the controversial debate over anonymous internet opinions will continue to rage on.

Source: PCWorld

For more information on this issue you can watch the YouTube video below: