The US Department of Justice has hired its old anti-trust boss Sandy Litvack to head up its probe into Google’s advertising practises. Litvack served as the head of the antitrust division under President Jimmy Carter before leaving in early 1981; he is now working as a partner at a private law firm.

It is unknown if the probe will investigate anything beyond Google’s advertising partnership with Yahoo, as it is already unusual as the DoJ launches an investigation if there was a full merger.

Source : The Register

Google has made an embarrassing backdown after it would be revealed that the company would have the right to use any information that was entered into websites using their new Chrome browser, just a day after it was release.

The clause on its "End User License Agreement" (EULA) has been removed, after it allowed users to give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly, perform, publicly display and distribute" any information that was typed into a website.

It also allowed Google to share that information with other companies that Google has relationships with.

It has been quickly changed to give users back their copyright over their information.

UPDATE: Google has made a comic about it. You can view it here.

Google will be releasing its own internet browser to counter the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer by making sure that it provides a quick and easy access to many of Google’s sites.

The browser, called "Chrome", is expected to be released on Tuesday (or Wednesday - depending on the time differences) in 100 countries that are running on Windows. Google, however, plans to release versions of their browser for Mac OS X and Linux.

The browser is trying to capitalise on the Google name, trying to bring down the dominance of Internet Explorer, which has a 75 percent share in the market. Google also has an arrangement of Mozilla’s Firefox, the second-most popular browser with a 10 percent share, by trying to promote it with its services.

Not everything, however, is successful under the Google banner; with its instant messaging client Google Talk, based on Jabber, has not even made a dent on AIM, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

Image from Ruben Ploneda (Flickr)

TechCrunch is reporting that search giant Google is close to acquiring social news aggregator Digg for around $200 million, with the companies are in "final negotiations" according to their sources.

It would most likely to be under its Google News property, but it could still fall through or another party would step in, like Microsoft - whom they have an advertising deal with and will be terminated if a sale to Google is a likely outcome.

It is one of the best known sites, competiting with Reddit and Slashdot, and has a loyal community. It launched in November 2004 by Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. Rose also hosts "Diggnation", a show based around news on Digg.

Google is in the process of buying the Russian contextual ad company ZAO Begun for $140 million from the UK-registered Rambler Media, according to TechCrunch.

While the ad company is a Russian company, many firms have based themselves in the UK; with Rambler owning 50.1 percent of the company. Basically, Rambler will buy the other 49.9 percent from Bannatyne Limited and then sell the firm to Google.

As well, Rambler will also use Google Adsense’s services for Content and Search.

As part of its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube, Viacom had asked for the source code for all of its search functions on the YouTube site, its new "Video ID" program and databases containing all user information and every video hosted on YouTube, including all private videos and those removed.

Though Viacom won’t be able to get all of the source codes, it will be able to access all the databases containing what videos you watch and all videos hosted and those were removed. However, your private videos will not be given to Viacom.

The user database, which is 12TB, will allow Viacom to determine on all the views that its content uploaded without their permission - among the other information that could be used against other lawsuits. In other words - if you watch anime on YouTube, Viacom will now know what anime you watched.

YouTube currently insists that it is protected by the DMCA’s "safe harbour" provisions, but with this decision - it looks like that the case would continue until 2010.

Google has confirmed that all of its US-based employees hired prior to 2006 after its data was stolen in a recent burglary in an external company, Colt Express Outsourcing Services.

The burglary, on the 26 May this year, also affected other clients, including CNET Networks - who had 6,500 of their employees’ details stolen. The data contained names, addresses and social security numbers, and Colt did not put protection on the information.

Though there is no evidence that the data is currently being misused, the information is sufficient enough to create fake accounts and identities. The company is also reported to be in financial difficulty and could not help those affected.

Google is offering all affected and former employees a free one-year credit monitoring service. A similar deal were offered to CNET Networks employees.

The Department of Justice in the US is now opening a formal investigation into the partnership between Google and Yahoo, the first and second place leaders in search. The investigation comes after the DoJ is fearing that it would reduce competition in the online advertising market.

It is currently preparing demands for information from executives at both companies and rival advertising firms. There was initially a two-week test run, but a formal investigation suggests that they have concrete concerns about the deal.

According to The Register, the DoJ would not open a "full probe" unless the firms were carrying out a full merger.

Google has announced its first job axing at its online advertising unit DoubleClick by axing 300 jobs, about one-quarter of it’s 1,200 workforce in the US. Worldwide, it has 1,500 employees.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, also suggested that overseas operations maybe affected but at a later date.

Some workers have been already laid off already, with Google saying that others will be offered contract jobs after the two companies are ‘fully integrated’. Google bought DoubleClick for over $3 billion and was completed just less than a month ago, after being held up by competition regulators for over a year.

The deal was heavily criticized by many non-profit privacy groups, Microsoft and AT&T. They had argued that it would give Google unprecedented access to information about the consumer and their online behaviors.

On top of the layoffs, Google says it will also sell DoubleClick’s Preformics Search Marketing; which helps marketers place ads on search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com praised the decision of selling it off, as many saw it represented a “conflict of interest” for Google, and says it was not unexpected.