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Google: Not Slacking Off For The Holiday Season

Google had a busy week last week, releasing a custom version of Internet Explorer 7, updating its Firefox toolbar, reportedly in talks with a company that makes a Microsoft Office clone, upgrading Google Apps for Your Domain, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Reader, and more. Here's a rundown:

Custom Internet Explorer
Google released a customized version of Internet Explorer 7, adding its own toolbar and changing the home page and custom search page to you-know-where.

Google also posted beta of Version 3 of the toolbar for Firefox, including integration with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Google bookmarks. Most of those features are already available to Internet Explorer users.

Microsoft Office Clone
The Korean press reported that Google is sniffing around a company that makes an online clone of Microsoft Office.. Kang Tae-jin, CEO of Haansoft, which makes the ThinkFree application, reportedly visited Silicon Valley this week for acquisition talks.

Google Apps For Your Domain
Google expanded its Google Apps for Your Domain service to allow users to register their domains with Google.. Previously, users had to already have ownership of a domain to activate the e-mail, calendaring, and IM service.

Picasa Web Albums
Google upated its online photo-sharing service, Picasa Web Albums to allow users to order prints from Shutterfly and Photoworks, upload videos, and enhanced search of titles, captions and descriptions, according to the Official Google Blog.. Picasa Web Albums works with the excellent desktop photo-sharing software for Windows, Picasa.

I recently figured out the difference between albums and folders in Picasa Web Albums (short version: folders correspond to the actual folders in Windows where your photos are stored, where albums are equivalent to labels or tags in Gmail.) So I'll be spending downtime over the holidays organizing my collection of photos of the Most Wonderful Nieces And Nephew In the Whole World.

Google Reader
Google Reader added the ability to change the sort-order of posts in a feed, according to the Official Google Reader Blog. The default is still to read the newest post first, but now you can change that to read the oldest first, for all your feeds, or just for individual feeds or individual folders.

Google Reader also adds an "auto" sort order, useful in folders of multiple feeds, which floats posts from infrequently updated feeds to the top of the sort order. The Google Reader Blog explains, "This nifty feature mixes feeds together according to posting frequency, so items from rarely-updated feeds (your friend's blog) show up higher than items from frequently-updated feeds like The New York Times. Look for this feature to evolve over time as we try to find other ways of highlighting the most interesting content in your feeds."

I thought Google Reader had the "auto" sort order, then got rid of it. Could be I'm just imagining things.

In other Google news this week:

• Google launched a search engine for patents.

• The New York City Pension Fund, which holds nearly $400 million worth of shares in Google and Yahoo, adopted a resolution saying all U.S. technology companies that operate in authoritarian nations have an obligation to comply with the human rights principles set by the United Nations.

• Google launched a stock auction program for workers.

• The company said reports of a 2% click fraud rate are inaccurate.

• And it gave its finance page a facelift.

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