A 17 Item Roundup of News From and About Google and Google+

UPDATED (Monday, August 15, 2011):
Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion; Patents Seen as a Leading Reason for Deal

Time once again for another in our series of Google news roundups. We missed last week so this is going to be full of items in addition to several Google items we posted as soon as we learned of the news. As always, we hope the roundup alerts you to one of more useful items. Let’s get started.

Google+

1. “Now On Google Plus: 16 Games To Play Online & Sharing Google Books Info on Google Plus”

2. “Google+ Posts Will Appear on Google Social Search Results” (via PC World)

3. “‘Google+ To Suspend Users Using Pseudonyms”, If Suspended You’ll Have Four Days to Make a Change'”

4. “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power (via apophenia)

5. “Google Plus – Innovators and Early Adopters” (via Experian Hitwise)
New Google+ user statistics.

6. “Eye-Tracking Study Shows Users Perceive Google+ and Facebook Virtually Identically” (via AllThingsD)

Google+ App for iOS updated to add iPad and iPod touch support, but no iPad interface (via The Next Web)

7. “Scaling Google+”   (via O’Reilly Radar)
A video interview with Google social web engineer Joseph Smarr.

8.  “Google+ pseudonym wars escalate” (via The Guardian)

Google

9. “Google to Shut Down Android App Inventor” (via Hack Education)

10. “Google’s Expanded Sitelinks” (via Google Operating System)

11. “Google Starts Choosing Winners & Losers Among Its Lab Projects” (by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land)

12. “Google Remains Ahead of Bing, But Relevance Drops” (via Newsfactor Network)

Google’s lagging search success rate may be due in part to the massive number of library books in the search giant’s database. To scan millions of older works, Google and its library partners used optical character recognition (OCR) programs that are not 100 percent foolproof — especially when processing old texts typeset in archaic fonts or with foreign-language characters.

Due to OCR errors, for example, Google Books contains a huge number of word misidentifications that can lead Internet users down false trails. What makes this a significant issue is the current preference among U.S. Internet users for conducting one-word searches.

13. “Spain orders Google to delete citizens’ data from search engine results, media reports” (via Out-Law)

14. “WSJ: Android, Along With Web Search, Now Part Of Google Antitrust Probe” (by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land)

15.  “New Google search app for Android gets outed, pulled” (via Endgadget)

16. “Google docs: Try out a new look and keyboard shortcuts for your documents list” (via Google Docs Blog)

17. “Google News gets a new human touch, launching publisher-curated Editors Picks as a standing section” (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

18. “Gmail Adds Handy “Preview Pane” Labs Feature So You Can Reply To Emails While You Browse Your Inbox” (via Business Insider)

19. Fetch, Googlebot! Google’s New Way To Submit URLs & Updated Pages” (by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land)

Filed under: Data Files, Interviews, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Profiles, Publishing, Reports, Roundup