Google has launched a new mobile version of Google News, designed specifically for current-gen smartphones: the iPhone, Palm's WebOS phones (the Pre and Pixi, so far) and Android phones.

Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian already had their own Google News page, so its only fair for the new kids on the mobile block to get in on the action, too.

Google's pretty vague about the changes in the official blog post, but it looks like they've just managed to do more with the same amount of screen real estate. Navigating between sections is easier with the new layout, and you can now customize your Google News the same way you've been able to in a full desktop browser.

Google Image Search is already a great way to find images from all corners of the Interwebs, and it just got more interesting with a new way of visualizing results. It's called Image Swirl. Searching for an image with swirl will give you a list of 12 images, and clicking on each one brings up a cluster of related pictures. Picking one of those will spin the wheel around and give you even more to look at.

This new way of exploring images may be more fun than it is useful, but it does definitely deliver the goods. If you're a visual thinker, it's probably a quicker way to browse results than the existing "similar images" link in Google Image Search. The underlying technology for Image Swirl comes from Similar Images and Picasa's face recgonition features. If you want to give Image Swirl a spin (har har) it's available in Google Labs now.

[via Official Google Blog]

Google's autocomplete feature for searches can be pretty useful when you're looking for a common search term. Hey, neat! You don't have to type the whole thing! Sometimes, though, Google's suggestions take a turn for the hilarious or just plain weird. A site called Autocomplete Me collects some of the strangest ones for your amusement. Admittedly, some of these might be offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.

Who knew that searching for "the air s" would show you Monty Python's famous "air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" I suppose that's not too surprising, but "i like to t" will find you a number of strange results, notabiy "I like to tape my thumbs to my hands and pretend I'm a dinosaur" and "I like to pretend Jesus was a mischievous badger." If you took this site and added Bill Cosby, you'd have a show called "Kids Search for the Darndest Things."

Have any favorite Google autocomplete results of your own? Put them in the comments (and send them to Autocomplete Me, of course).

Google Translate just got a lot better, with a nice, clean new look and several new features. The first thing you'll notice is that you no longer have to click to translate. Translate now works instantly, as you type. If you're trying to translate something into a language with a non-Roman alphabet (like Chinese, for example) Google will also show the phonetic pronunciation underneath the translated characters.

If you're translating into English, you've got an even better option: you can hear an audio pronunciation of the English translation. This feature is awesome, and I'm looking forward to a time when Google inevitably implements it for other languages, too. There's a new feature for English-speakers, too, though: if you type in the phonetic, romanized version of a word from a non-Roman language (Google cheekily gives Fake Steve Jobs' trademark sign-off, "namaste," as an example), Translate will attempt to show the proper characters in the original language.

Keeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

One of the challenges small businesses have is in developing trust in their customer base. While some customers are happy to work with the small guy, others need the impression of size to help them feel comfortable that they're not dealing with a fly-by-night organization.

This is a particularly difficult challenge for virtual companies, which are companies consisting of team members that are spread out geographically.

How do you have a single company phone number for a team of people that are spread out in different cities? One solution is Grasshopper. In fact, that's exactly how 37signals' CEO Jason Fried decided to manage his phone for his office hours, where he sets aside dedicated time to speak with customers, prospective customers, or anyone with an interest in or question about 37signals.

While Google Voice seems to be getting all the press these days, it's a solution that focuses on the individual. If you're trying to run a team and present a cohesive, "bigger business" image to your customers, you might need to step up to something like Grasshopper. While not free, Grasshopper has plans starting from $9.95US per month, making it accessible to even the earliest of startups.

Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they're working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn't some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google's web spam team.

Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.

At first blush it seems counter to Google's accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user's search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I'm looking for more quickly.

Of course, now I have to do something about the slowness of my personal blog. But I probably should have long ago.

[Photo by chrisscott]

We've told you before about Google Chrome's slick new bookmark syncing feature, available in the Windows beta version of Chrome 4. It automatically keeps your bookmarks synced across multiple Chrome installations, using your Google Account. Well, this feature has landed in recent builds of Chromium for Mac (that's the open-source project Chrome is based on). To enable it, you'll first need to grab the latest version of Chromium.

Bookmark sync isn't on by default. To use it, you'll have to pop open your Terminal and do a little command-line magic. You'll want to right-click Chromium, show package contents, and then find Chromium inside the MacOS folder. Drag that to the Terminal, and then add the argument --enable-sync. Chromium should open, and you should see bookmarking syncing in your preferences.

Sign in with your Google account, and your bookmarks will be synced automatically to any other Chromium/Chrome browsers that you sign into. If you want to see where they're stored on the web, check a slightly strange location: a Chrome folder in your Google Docs account.

I know it seems like a lot of trouble to go through for bookmark syncing, but such is the peril of being on the bleeding edge of browser development. Bookmark syncing will very likely pop up officially in the Chrome Mac beta scheduled for early December.

It seems a little birdy told TechCrunch that Google's Chrome OS has an early version launching next week. Here at Download Squad, we've been searching for clues about what this new browser-centered OS might look like. Early screenshots proved to be fake, and later ones seemingly depicted the browser component of the OS. Sources inside Google have said there's more to Chrome OS than that.

One thing we DO know is that the browser in Chrome OS will be able to mount drives and function as a system navigation tool. How will hardware support be in these early builds, though? Not good, TechCrunch speculates. Although Google and device manufacturers are on the case writing drivers for your favorite peripherals, don't count on all your devices working with Chrome OS right away.

As to which computers you'll be able to run it on, TechCrunch guesses it'll probably be a small group, including EEE PCs. Google's partners on the project are Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba, but that doesn't mean hardware or software from other companies won't be compatible.

A few days ago there was a nasty rumor going around that Google had just purchased Skype competitor Gizmo5. Funny thing about rumors is that sometimes they're true. Like, for instance, this one.

Gizmo5 offers a variety of tools that let users make cheap calls from a PC to a phone, or free calls from computer to computer. Google says that Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team. The company isn't announcing exactly what that means in terms of new features yet. But considering Google Voice currently lets you screen, receive, and record calls, I'd be shocked if Google and Gizmo5 weren't planning to add the ability to make calls.

For now, Gizmo5 has stopped accepting new user registrations, but current customers will be able to continue using the service. The same thing happened when Google acquired GrandCentral a few years ago to create the service now known as Google Voice.

OS X browser geeks, start salivating ... Reports from around the web are saying that Google's Chrome browser might get a finished Mac version in about month. Stephen Shankland at CNET has been vigilantly monitoring the Chrome development mailing lists, and some talk about Chrome's new extensions UI reveals that the Mac launch is scheduled for early December.

Chrome 4 for Windows is in Beta already, while Mac and Linux only recently got their first developer previews. Since the highest-profile new feature in the Chrome 4 Beta is browser actions (Chrome's equivalent of Firefox's add-ons), developers are getting their extensions ready for launch. Apparently, a product manager for Chrome posted a message advising developers to switch to the new browser actions system so they'd have more time to get their code in shape for a beta launch in "early December."

Over at the Chromium blog, Google has announced a project they've been working on called 'SPeeDY.' It's an updated transport protocol for the web which improves upon HTTP, reducing latency through network-fu like multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and header compression.

"We started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate," says the official blog post. It continues, "We want to continue building on the web's tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers."

It's not all about altruism, of course. Improvements like those Google is seeking with SPDY, the Go! programming language, and Native Client will all greatly benefit the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. After all, an OS which relies heavily on the cloud for access apps and data will certainly perform better with an improved protocol powering the client and server. It's probably a safe bet that Google would roll SPDY on their own servers early on to give apps like Google Docs and Picasa Web a performance boost on the Google platform.

Whatever the motivation, I'm all for more speed on the web. My ISP is obviously in no hurry to improve things on that front, so if Google can pull off the estimated 55% performance gain then I'm all for it. You go, Google!

If you've ever used Google to search for, ahem, "adult" content, you're aware of the site's SafeSearch feature. It filters out questionable content, to the delight of parents and the dismay of porn-seekers. Now there's a new "lock" function for SafeSearch, which keeps your account's settings locked in strict filtering mode until you enter a password and change them. The obvious use here is for parents looking to keep risque material out of view of their kids, but I can also see it being handy to prevent embarrassing search results from accidentally popping up at work.

When SafeSearch is locked, you'll see four extremely conspicuous, very large colored balls in the top right corner of your search results. Google says this is so parents and teachers can tell from across the room whether the lock is still in place, and come over to reset it if it's not. It even works across Google's various languages, so clever kids can't get around it that way. Could they thwart SafeSearch in an even more obvious way, though, by simply logging out of Google? I guess that's where keeping a close eye on the giant colored balls comes in.

If you're confused about how to go about turning the lock on, the very clear video instructions in Google's official blog post will shed some light.

[via AppScout]

In exciting, but not unexpected news, Google has has put its name behind the brainchild of three of their in-house genius programmers. But it's not a web app, nor is it an enterprise solution -- it's not even a downloadable tool like their Chrome browser. They've actually gone and invented a new language. It's called Go. (That's their mascot, the Go-Gopher, over on the right.)

Citing difficulties with existing languages and arbitrary restrictions that prevent them from making the Google services as good as they could be... they did the only really sensible thing they could do: they made their own superior language. To put it into simple terms: imagine trying to communicate with grunts and squeals. That's how Google feels with today's languages, and why they've made their own one. It's why we speak English today, rather than Tarzan Talk.

And in true Google style, they've done it right. Go is fast. It's secure. They even go as far as to call it 'fun' on their homepage!

I don't want to bore you with specifications -- they're all there on their site if you're a developer and want to get going immediately (it's open source, of course!) -- but I will tell you that this is big, big news.

We haven't seen a new systems-oriented language for over a decade. Technology has moved on a lot. Heck, Google themselves have pushed the requirements of computer systems. When you're trying to build a system that scales to hundreds of thousands -- or millions -- of servers, it's no surprise that existing languages don't quite hit the spot.

Say they're only squeezing 40% of the max theoretical output from their server farm. If Go could push that utilization up to 60 or 70%... imagine the gains! For them, for us! This is even good news for the environment!

Of course, it's free to download and use, and there are tutorials that are very easy to get started with. There's even a little video showcasing just how fast it is, after the break.

Over the summer, we told you how Google had enlisted users to test the next generation of its search technology. The new version of search, called Caffeine, might be ready to roll out very soon, according to some evidence dug up by Mashable. The sandbox link - for testing Caffeine - that we gave you back in August no longer works, because "the sandbox has been retired."

It's been replaced with the following announcement:

"Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given. "

All signs indicate that Caffeine will apparently be arriving soon. The thing is, you might not notice at first when it does. Caffeine's improvements to Google Search are all under-the-hood, focusing on faster, more accurate results. There probably won't be an overhaul of the iconic design of Google's search pages to go along with it.