Google makes one of the world's leading mobile operating systems. It does e-mail and an office suite and photo sharing and Internet phone service, and does them all well. It's even getting into solar power and is trying to invent the self-driving car. But for all its far-flung ambition, the company isn't synonymous with many things. It's synonymous with one thing: its namesake search engine, the business that started it all. At a press conference in San ...

The ballroom on the third floor of San Francisco's Moscone West convention center doesn't look like special. But in recent years this nondescript hall has become the epicenter of major news about smartphones, tablets, and other cutting-edge mobile gizmos. Both Apple and Google use it for the keynote addresses that are the signature events at their developer conferences. As the two most significant companies in the mobile software business, they're doing much of the heavy lifting of ...

On Aug. 14 a computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant. WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet ...

Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down, I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers' share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s. No wonder Marx is back ...

It's 9:30 p.m., and Stephen and Georgina Cox know exactly where their children are. Well, their bodies, at least. Piers, 14, is holed up in his bedroom--eyes fixed on his computer screen--where he has been logged onto a MySpace chat room and AOL Instant Messenger for the past three hours. His twin sister Bronte is planted in the living room, having commandeered her dad's iMac--as usual. She, too, is busily IMing, while chatting on her cell phone and chipping ...

California, you may have heard, is an apocalyptic mess of raging wildfires, soaring unemployment, mass foreclosures and political paralysis. It's dysfunctional. It's ungovernable. Its bond rating is barely above junk. It's so broke, it had to hand out IOUs while its leaders debated how many prisoners to release and parks to close. Nevada aired ads mocking California's business climate to lure its entrepreneurs. The media portray California as a noir fantasyland of overcrowded schools, perpetual droughts, celebrity ...

Google wants new friends. After signing a series of new partners, CEO Eric Schmidt says the Web giant's spate of recent deals is just a start. Schmidt talked to TIME about changing the company's philosophy and planning its next steps. TIME: You've done a series of recent partnerships with eBay, MySpace, MTV and others. What's driving these deals? Schmidt: Toward the beginning of the year, we recognized that we needed to get good at partnerships. I'm just ...

Paramilitary policemen keep buy Thursday throughout the Lantern Festival around the final day of Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations in Beijing. For his position in galvanizing protests by means of a Facebook group, which earned him 12 days in police detention, Google executive Wael Ghonim became a hero of your Egyptian revolution. In China, individuals like Ghonim who problem the state remain locked up for lengthy terms, say human rights activists and analysts, who say Beijing's intolerance of dissent and massive state ...

Sales of Video Game and Flagship Software Lift Microsoft Microsoft’s profit engine is humming along nicely, even if most investors remain unimpressed and the software giant’s stock price is stagnant. Microsoft reported strong gains on Thursday in its first-quarter profit and revenue because of robust sales in its mainstay business of selling personal computer software to businesses, which have increased their technology spending. Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, called it “an exceptional quarter” that combined brisk sales to business customers with solid ...

Appeals court rules AdWords doesn't infringe bidding patent Bid for Position has lost an appeal to a ruling that its bidding system patent was not infringed by Google's or AOL's search advertising purchasing system. The decision of the lower court was affirmed by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week. Bid for Position owns rights to US Patent #7,225,151, titled "Online Auction Bid Management System and Method." The company claimed that search advertising systems from AOL, Google, Microsoft, ...