Google isn't one to rest on its laurels, and over the coming months it plans to massively overhaul its search system. Expect to see far more than just a page of links; Google is planning to push the boundaries of semantic search to give you answers directly. More »

Google has made the newest version of its popular browser available, offering more secure downloads and faster-loading web pages. Here's what's new. More »

Google announced on Friday that it has purchased the music licensing company RightsFlow for its detailed information about who should get paid when any of over 30 million songs get played. More »

Google on Wednesday took the wraps off a new and improved music service. Building onto “Music Beta by Google,” Google has launched Google Music, a publicly available cloud-based music services that will be free to users in the United States. Google Music users can add up to 20,000 songs from their local libraries to the cloud and stream them to any number of supported devices over the Internet. “Pinned” albums and songs are downloaded to devices and cached for local playback without the need for an Internet connection. Read on for more.

The service is integrated with the Android Market, allowing users to purchase 320Kbps songs from within the Market starting at $0.99 a track. Features include a curated music section, a recommendation engine, a name-your-own-price self-managed “artist hub” for independent artists, integration with YouTube for artists, music playback from within the Market, auto-transfer of purchases to your online locker and several sharing features that are integrated with Google+, Google’s new social network. Purchased tracks that are shared with users via Google+ can be played once for free, and then users can click through to purchase tracks they want to buy.

In an interesting twist, Google worked with artists including The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews, Shakira and Busta Rhymes to offer tracks and live albums that are exclusive to Google Music and unavailable anywhere else.

EMI Music, Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and 23 independent labels have signed on as content partners. The new enhanced Google Music service is available immediately online, and updated Google Music apps will trickle out to phones and tablets in the coming days.

Google released a bunch of new Google+ features yesterday, including "What's Hot" and Instagram-ish photo filters—those weren't big surprises. But Google Ripples? We didn't see that one coming. It's weird, it's interesting... but what exactly is it? More »

Google announced on Friday that it is shutting down a number of properties in the coming months, the most notable of which is likely its failed social network, Google Buzz. Best known as that annoying thing under “Inbox” in Gmail, Google Buzz was a Twitter-like service that never gained traction. Buzz encouraged users to share status updates, photos and more that could then be viewed by friends in real time, however it offered no compelling features compared to already established services such as Facebook and Twitter. Google will also shutter several additional services in the near future, including Jaiku, a social network the company acquired in 2007, and Code search, a tool that helped programmers search for open source code. Google Buzz will shut down in the coming weeks while Jaiku and Code Search will both go offline on January 15th, 2012 along with a few other seldom-used Google services.

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Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page spoke candidly about the future of Google during the company's recent earnings conference call. Page wants to make Google's products more social and the best way to do that is through Google +. More »

Google is hoping that it can talk the British into buying Chromebooks on the High Street. I hope they remembered to replace the $ key with a £ key. More »

Google + went public last week and its growth has been explosive. So explosive, it has some people wondering if it's time to take closer look at the social network. More »

Google makes dozens of products we use everyday—they've killed plenty of disappointments, too. Now Google's getting trigger-happy on some of its babies. Here's a list of what they're knocking off to make way for the bigger and better. More »

Lee Allison had the brilliant idea of hosting a cooking class using Google+. He invited participants to video chat using Hangouts while he walked them through a recipe. More »

Google hinted its educational tool, App Inventor for Android, may become an open source project for classroom teachers. More »

Google has never been upfront about its electricity usage, but with all those data centers, its power consumption was expected to be enormous. Apparently, these estimates have been off, way off. More »

Google created an interactive doodle that commemorates legendary guitarist Les Paul who was born on this date (June 9) in 1915. The doodle is a virtual guitar that lets you play a tune and save it for posterity. You can use your keyboard or mouse to compose your ditty, but you may have to live in the US to take part. [Google] More »

Google announced today that the Wi-Fi snooping its Street View vans were engaged in was even worse than previously acknowledged. The company announced today that entire URLs, emails, and passwords were collected as well. And they still have it. More »

Google is rolling out a new beta feature to Gmail users: The Priority Inbox. It's a way for Gmail to learn which emails are important to you and make sure that you see them first. Oh, and it works incredibly well. More »

Google, the brave search engine company who refused to censor search results in China, seems to be finding itself entirely unwelcome in the country: Apparently Google is now fully blocked in China. More »