In a time when the verb “Google” is not only synonymous with the verb “search,” but has come to nearly replace it, the thought of a little disruption in this space makes my feet tingle. MIT gradGabriel Weinberghas been sitting in his basement in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the past 3 years, building a search engine calledDuckDuckGo(see:Philadelphia Start-Ups You Need to Know About). The site uses online crowd-sourcing to augment traditional search engine results, hoping to “clean up the clutter” and improve relevancy....

One and two-letter ‘.co.uk’ domain names were madeavailableby Nominet last December, and Google has bid to buy g.co.uk, asreportedtoday by the FT. Whilst Google hasn’t announced what it will use the domain for as of yet if successful, some other big digital brands have already been granted their single letter domain – Yahoo! has secured y.co.uk, whilst Virgin has nabbed V.co.uk. Elsewhere, T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is up against Huawei and a number of other big brands to secure the rights to t....

Google today announcedin a blog postthat it is bringing support for the HTML5 speech input API to the company’s Chrome browser. The API allows web developers to incorporate speech-to-text transcription in their apps. Users with a microphone will be able to record their speech, have it sent to a transcription server, and show up as text within the web app. Support for the speech input API will give developers the tools they need to introduce amazing new features in a variety of web apps, but it also has ramifications for accessibility....

Google has announcedthat the lucky residents ofKansas City, Kansasare the latest recipients in their ultra high-speed broad band deployments. Almost 1,100 cities felt theneed for speedfrom Google and after careful consideration Kansas City signed a development agreement and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community. If you are like me, you are wondering why Kansas City? In selecting a city, Google’s goal was to find a location where they could build it out efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations....

If you’ve ever had to handle the editing of a Google Doc via comments, then you know it wasn’t the best system available. A right side column that showed the edits was effective, but certainly not easy to understand or use. The Google Docs team has been hard at work and withthe latest revision, we’re getting collaborative discussions that actually make sense. Oh, and they will also load in real-time, right as a commenter presses the button to show that they are finished....