Google

Google is now 15 years old, and the company is celebrating by smartening up its bread-and-butter technology, search, and adding new features such as comparisons and filters.

The new features are part of an advanced search ranking system that Google has been rolling out over the past several months, called "Hummingbird." Hummingbird, a Google spokeswoman said, is designed to make users' search results more useful and relevant, especially when they are asking the search engine long, complex questions.

An app that purportedly spoofed a Mac so that Android smartphone and tablet owners could send and receive text-like messages through Apple's iMessage service disappeared today from the Google Play app store.

Google confirmed that it yanked the app for violating its store policies.

Dubbed "iMessage Chat," the app came under quick fire Monday from other app developers who said the program may have been harvesting Apple ID usernames and passwords by passing packets through a China-based server.

Google has begun to encrypt all searches made by users even if they aren't signed in to Google but it reveals the searches to its advertising customers. The search giant appears to be taking advantage of the NSA spying scandal to increase the number of its advertisers.

Danny Sullivan reports:Post-PRISM, Google Confirms Quietly Moving To Make All Searches Secure, Except For Ad Clicks

A bug bit Gmail on Monday and almost half of the webmail service's users have been affected by the problem, which causes email delivery delays and problems downloading attachments.

Google first acknowledged the problem shortly before 10:30 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time and has been wrestling with it ever since, according to information on the Google Apps Status page.

 If an Android device (phone or tablet) has ever logged on to a particular Wi-Fi network, then Google probably knows the Wi-Fi password. Considering how many Android devices there are, it is likely that Google can access most Wi-Fi passwords worldwide.

Recently IDC reported that 187 million Android phones were shipped in the second quarter of this year. That multiplies out to 748 million phones in 2013, a figure that does not include Android tablets.

The ongoing revelations about NSA snoopery have prompted The Chocolate Factory to accelerate its effort to encrypt user data at every possible point.

Mountain View had already announced that its Google Cloud Storage platform was adding server-side encryption to reassure users. User data uploaded to the service is now being encrypted using AES-128 in RAM before being written to disk.

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all filed petitions Monday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as part of a renewed effort to reveal more information about government data requests.

The companies had already petitioned the U.S. government to let them be more specific in reporting the volume of national security-related requests they receive, following the first leaks in June about government surveillance programs such as Prism.

The companies said Monday they are pushing harder now because those previous efforts did not pay off.

"We want to be really, really clear that whenever you give us information, we're going to take it."

These aren't the words of some suede-shoed government spy, trying to put an honest face on an inherently sneaky job.

Google's attorneys say their long-running practice of electronically scanning the contents of people's Gmail accounts to help sell ads is legal, and are asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to stop the practice.

In court records filed in advance of a federal hearing scheduled for Thursday in San Jose, Google argues that "all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing."

Microsoft and Google may sue US government to allow them to publish user data request from the government after talks with the Justice Department stalled.

The tech giants filed suits in a US federal court in June, arguing a right to make public more information about user data requests made under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The technology giants agreed six times to extend the deadline for the government to respond to the lawsuits, the Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post.