Google has added hands-free voice search to the latest beta version of the Chrome Web browser. Users need not have to interrupt messy housework and first wash their hands in order to search for a recipe for homemade glass cleaner, for example. All they need to do is open a new tab or go to the Googl...

Google's Street View team has captured images of polar bears in northern Canada, a successful end to its first-ever wildlife-specific quest. Google Street View has long been in the business of capturing things other than streets, including, for example, the world's tallest mountains and Antarctica.

TECH TREK

French Teen in Hot Water Over Drone Footage

A French teen faces charges of "endangering the lives of others" over his use of a drone, which he sent skyward to capture impressive -- and seemingly harmless -- footage of the city Nancy. Eighteen-year-old Nans Thomas affixed an Internet-bought drone with a GoPro camera and then sent the contrapti...

Microsoft cited an "error in our system" for quirky results given to users making searches in Chinese on the company's Bing search engine. Chinese-language searches outside of mainland China were yielding results that mirrored those inside mainland China, where Bing filters in accordance with the wh...

It looks like Google and European regulators have, at long last, reached a settlement to allay European Commission antitrust concerns. Google has struck a deal with European competition regulators, and the agreement now awaits formal EC approval. Under the terms laid out, Google would have to swallo...

OPINION

Lenovo Rising, IBM Evolving

The new deal IBM and Lenovo announced last week showcases that the companies are on very different paths toward two widely divergent but equally powerful goals in what is a rapidly changing market. Lenovo is on a path to dominate the hardware side's second technology wave, while IBM is jumping to wh...

The hottest rumor for Microsoft Xbox Halo fans has taken on a life of its own: The voice and text-based virtual assistant service -- code-named "Cortana" and planned for release with Windows Phone 8.1 -- actually might be created with the real-life voice behind Cortana, Jen Taylor. While there is no...

Facebook will start peddling user data to Yandex, Russia's top search engine, as part of a deal between the two tech giants. Yandex will get full access to public data from users in Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Yandex will use the data in question -- which includes posts and comm...

TECH TREK

Microchips May Haunt Tombstone Thieves

A private company in South Africa has created "Memorial Alert," a microchip-based technology designed to thwart tombstone robberies. There recently has been a spate of these crimes in Johannesburg. The microchip is inserted into a memorial. When it is disturbed, it will sound an alarm and send a tex...

Google and Microsoft have ramped up their efforts to fight online child porn following months of pressure by the office of UK Prime Minister James Cameron. Among other things, the two have created a blacklist of search terms for which results will be blocked. When Cameron asked Google and Microsoft ...

A French court has ruled that Google must automatically block links to nine images of Max Mosley participating in an orgy. Mosley is the former president of the International Automobile Federation. The company must find a way to prevent all links to the images from appearing in its image search resu...

Strong encryption and natural language search can be like oil and water. That's because encrypted data can't be digested by your typical search engine. However, CipherCloud announced a solution to that knotty problem last week. The latest version of the 3-year-old company's cloud-based service inclu...

Indian Saroo Munshi Khan used Google Earth to track down his long-lost family 26 years after accidentally falling asleep on a train. In a tale that's almost too Hollywood to believe, then 5-year-old Saroo reportedly took a break from searching for change with his brother in Berhanpur, India, and hop...

Google Maps has become the default source of directions for many users, but one feature it has notoriously lacked is the ability to provide directions to multiple destinations. On Wednesday, however, the company announced that it is now rolling out the feature at last. "Based on your input, we're pl...

Facebook announced Monday it was expanding its Graph Search to give users a more complete experience, allowing searches of status updates, photo captions, check-ins and comments. Graph Search rolled out to a limited number of customers earlier this year. At first, it limited searches to individual o...

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