Google Apps is moving closer to being an integrated corporate dashboard with the announcement tonight of Google Apps Marketplace at a developer event at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The company will give vendors multiple hooks into its own products, handle billing and take a 20 percent cut of revenue in return. Apps, which is now used by more than 2 million businesses and this weekend crossed the mark of 25 million business users, will support enterprise resource management, document management, security and compliance, and a variety of other outside products — about 50 at launch.

» via GigaOM

“Machine translation is one of the best examples that shows Google’s strategic vision,” said Tim O’Reilly, founder and chief executive of the technology publisher O’Reilly Media. “It is not something that anyone else is taking very seriously. But Google understands something about data that nobody else understands, and it is willing to make the investments necessary to tackle these kinds of complex problems ahead of the market.”

» via The New York Times

One question on the minds of everyone following the settlement is : What happens after the judge rules? Jonathan Band, a specialist in technology law and policy, has created a nifty chart of possible paths the settlement might take, depending on what Judge Chin decides. Called “GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement,” the chart lays out a many-branched tree of appeals or litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

The future of productivity applications is in the cloud. We’ve always believed the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information, and Google Docs has already helped millions of people become more productive. But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.

For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

» via The Official Google Docs Blog

Many of us take the disaster readiness of servers and data centers for granted. But for IT admins from both small and large companies, being prepared for disaster and emergency situations is complicated and expensive issue. Google has made an announcement today for any enterprise users of Google Apps; assuring IT admins that the suite is now fully prepared for disaster recovery. Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps, tells us that as of recently, Google is prepared for disaster recovery for all of its products in the Google Apps suite, which include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video.

Google’s secret sauce is live and synchronous replication. So every action you take in Gmail is immediately replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, Google will transfer data over to the other one. Traditionally, Google says, synchronous replication can be very expensive for companies. For example, the cost to back up 25GB of data with synchronous replication can range from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs per employee. Google says that exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. Of course, Google replicates all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. And data from Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video, which encompass most of the applications in Google Apps, is also synchronously replicated for free.

» via TechCrunch

We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars.

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].

» via The Official Google Blog

Google is thinking about ways to inject search into the educational process as more than just a quick and dirty cheat sheet.

One of the most amazing things about Internet search is the speed and precision at which it returns answers to specific questions, ideal for students researching subjects for tests or papers. But this also generates criticism that the knowledge gained from services like Google can be a mile wide and an inch deep: data points don’t organize themselves into concepts and ideas.

Google’s Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has begun exploring “education search,” or ways to help students “get to where they are going,” he said. Norvig told attendees at SMX West during a presentation on Google Research that he’s trying to understand “how can we support people who are looking for not just an answer in five minutes” but over a longer period of learning.

The project is in the very early stages, and Norvig and a Google representative were unwilling to share much more about the thinking behind its plans.

» via CNET news

A Google engineer has hit back at the European Commission’s preliminary enquiry into the company’s dominance in the search market, noting that there is no secret formula for the way Google ranks sites.

In the company’s European Public Policy Blog Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Search Quality Team, says that talk of Google not being ‘transparent’ is ‘hard to swallow’ and then goes on to explain how Google does things.

“One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google’s scoring has always been PageRank. That ‘secret ingredient’ is hardly a secret,” he notes, linking to Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s infamous Stanford paper outlining Google’s embryonic stages.

» via TechRadar

Topeka’s mayor says the city shall temporarily be referred to as “Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics,” in an effort to persuade the Internet giant to test an ultra-fast connection in the state capital.

Mayor Bill Bunten issued the proclamation Monday after no city council members objected to the monthlong change.

» via Yahoo! News

Do people actually care about liberating their data? Some do, but usage of the export features remains low. Google sees a “continuous low-level of use of these things,” said one engineer on the team, especially when it chooses to shut down underperforming services. Having export tools actually makes it easier to do such shutdowns, too; recall that DRM-laden music stores ran into problems when they eventually tried to shut down their DRM servers. Google’s data openness helps the company avoid this sort of public criticism in the event of service shutdowns, as when the company closed its Google Notebook product.

Nicole Wong, Google’s Deputy General Counsel, told us separately that DLF matters to Google for two reasons: 1) it provides control to users and 2) “when we say our competition is one click away,” initiatives like DLF prove that it’s true.

» via ars technica

“On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

» via The New York Times

Google is to the 21st century what certain railroads were to the late 19th. It creates conditions for economic activity unthinkable before its advent. There had been no market in Paris for North Dakotan wheat until suddenly there was. Trading personal information for a free e-mail service from Gmail is not a transaction people would have understood in 1990.

» via Financial Times