The hiring plan was announced on Tuesday by Google’s senior vice president of engineering and research Alan Eustace in a blog post.

Google, which had 24,400 people at the end of 2010, hired more than 4,500 in 2010. The company once added 6,131 employees in 2007.

Analysts say Google are trying to fight off rivals like Facebook by this hiring spree to improve services such as mobile computing, display advertising and video.

Internet social network Facebook has been growing rapidly in recent years. Now about 200 of Facebook’s roughly 2,000 employees used to work at Google.

Google’s expansion was announced on the same day when Yahoo Inc. cut 100 to 150 workers, or about 1 percent, amid pressures from falling revenue.

One week ago, Google announced that its co-founder Larry Page will take over as the company’s CEO on April 4 this year.

Google earned 8.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2010, far more than its Internet peers. The company is expected to see another 22 percent increase in revenue this year. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-01/26/c_13707820.htm

David Barksdale, a 27-year-old engineer in Google’s Seattle offices, used his position to break into four teenagers’ Gmail and Google Voice accounts, according to media reports.

Google confirmed that it dismissed the engineer in July, but declined to provide details about the incident.

“We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google’s strict internal privacy policies. We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls,” Bill Coughran, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, said in a statement.

“That said, a limited number of people will always need to access these systems, if we are to operate them properly — which is why we take any breach so seriously,” he added.

Analysts say the privacy breach comes at an awkward time for Google. Recently U.S. federal regulators and lawmakers are weighing whether to make Internet privacy rules more stringent — a move opposed by Google and other Internet companies that argue the industry can regulate itself.

Google previously said in a white paper that the company’s hiring process includes criminal background checks. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-09/16/c_13514935.htm

Chrome had 8.97 percent of the U.S. browser market in the week that ended June 27, topping Safari’s 8.88 percent, said analytics company StatCounter.

“This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10 percent of the U.S. market in under two years,” StatCounter chief executive Aodhan Cullen said in a release.

Figures also show that 52 percent of U.S. users surfing the Internet with IE. Free and open-source browser Firefox remained the second most popular with 28.48 percent of people using it.

StatCounter said its statistics was based on an analysis of 3.6 billion page views, 874 million of them in the U.S., captured from its network of counters embedded in the pages of three million websites.

Outside the U.S., Chrome remained in a solid third place with 9.4 percent of the browser market while Firefox had 31 percent, and IE 52.8 percent. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-06/30/c_13376697.htm

Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management, listens to a question during a news conference at the Computex 2010 computer fair in Taipei June 2, 2010. Google expects to release its Chrome computer operating system in the “late fall” of 2010, as it looks to compete with rival Microsoft’s Windows, Pichai said on Wednesday. Computex, the world’s second largest computer show, runs from June 1 to 5. ©Reuters

BEIJING, June 3 — Internet giant Google said it is planning to release its own operating system, Chrome OS, for free this fall, media reported Thursday.

The Chrome OS, seen as a rival to Microsoft’s Windows, will be designed initially to work on laptop PCs, said Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management at the Computex PC show in Taipei.

“We are working on bringing the device later this fall,” Pichai said at the biggest IT trade show in Asia.

“We expect it to reach millions of users on day one,” he added.

Google said the open source operating system is centered around by the Google Chrome browser, which is now used by more than 70 million people worldwide.

Previous reports said that Google began the process of removing the Windows system from its offices earlier this year because of security concerns. Some analysts say this move may be linked to the launch of the new system. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-06/03/c_13330975.htm

Citing several Google employees, the FT said the internal directive to move to other operating systems began in January and could end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” a Google employee was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Google has so far declined to confirm the report.

“We’re always working to improve the efficiency of our business, but we do not comment on specific operational matters,” Google said in a statement.

Microsoft responded to this report Wednesday, defending its Windows security.

“When it comes to security, even hackers admit we’re doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else, ” Microsoft said in its blog post.

Last November, Google unveiled its own operation system, Chrome OS, to challenge Microsoft Windows. Google promised to release it by late this year. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-06/02/c_13329146.htm

Internet users who opened Google’s home page after 1500 GMT Friday were greeted by a small-scale Pac-Man game set around a “Google” logo.

The Google doodle Pac-Man comes complete with the arcade game’s trademark music and sound effects, and has an “Insert Coin” button placed beside the “Google Search” button, where it used to be a “I’m feeling lucky” button.

The Pac-Man game, designed by Toru Iwatani 30 years ago, was first released by Japan-based game developer Namco on May 22, 1980.

The playable Pac-Man doodle stayed on Google for 48 hours. The Google home page has returned to normal Monday.

Now the Pac-Man game is still available at google.com/pacman. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-05/24/c_13312119.htm

Patrick Bazin, director of the Municipal Library of Lyon, said Google is contracted to scan the books in the library within 10 years.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday said its government would spend 750 million euros (1.07 billion U.S. dollars) to digitally scan the content of its museums, libraries and cinematographic heritage via a public-private partnership.

The Lyon library — whose books are municipal, not national properties — made a call for offers for the digitization project in 2006, only Google offered “an excellent solution.”

The antique books include a 16th-century edition of predictions by Nostradamus and Isaac Newton’s 17th-century scientific treatise “Principia.”

Under the contract, the Lyon Library will use the digital images of its books for its own purposes but notably cedes to Google the right to exploit them commercially for 25 years. Google in return scans the books for free.

The U.S. company has been less welcome elsewhere in France, where digitization has become bound up with the sensitive issue of protecting French cultural and intellectual property.

French publishers have accused Google of infringing their copyright by scanning books for publication in its online library Google Books.

A Paris court on Friday ruled that Google cannot digitize any more French books without the publisher’s approval and ordered it to pay 300,000 euros (428,000 U.S. dollars) in damages to publishers whose books it has already scanned. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/22/content_12686253.htm

The channel on the Google-owned site was opened when Google chief executive Eric Schmidt was paying a visit to Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki unveiled the new channel, saying the YouTube channel would allow his government to showcase its achievements to the world.

“The world has not seen what the Iraqi government has been able to achieve in regard to security, economy, politics and building a federal democratic system,” Maliki said, “the government sees in this video technology an opportunity to show our achievements.”

In a YouTube video, Schmidt said the new channel will allow visitors to “discover even more what’s great about Iraq, this new country that’s being built, the resurgence of a new society and the amazing things they have in store.”

Schmidt also made a presentation on Wednesday inside Iraq’s National Museum, announcing that Google would create a virtual copy of the museum’s collections at its own expense, and make images of four millenniums of archaeological treasures available and free online by early next year.

Internet users can log on to youtube.com/iraqigov to visit the channel. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/26/content_12541024.htm

Levinson’s move averted a regulatory probe into overlapping directors in the two companies.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had been investigating whether Levinson’s double duty on the boards of both Google and Apple would lessen competition between the two companies.

Levinson’s serving on both boards had raised antitrust concerns at the FTC because the companies increasingly competed in the same markets.

“The investigation is over. This allows the companies to move on and do what they do best, which is to make better products,” said FTC Chairman Jonathan Leibowitz.

Two months ago, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board for the same issue.

Google and Apple have expanded into each other’s market over the past two years. Both companies offer mobile phone software and Internet browsers, and Google is developing an operating system for personal computers.

Google didn’t mention whether it will fill Levinson’s vacancy. Levinson’s resignation leaves Google with nine directors, including Eric Schmidt. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/13/content_12221897.htm

The outage affected “a majority” of Gmail users, the company said, and lasted about an hour and 45 minutes until the problem was fixed.

Worldwide users appeared to be affected, with people from England, Italy, Singapore and South Africa reporting problems on the company’s support site.

The free version of Gmail is the world’s third most-popular email program with some 149 million users worldwide in June, ranking behind the free email services offered by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., according to data from comScore Inc.

The disruption came as Google attempts to compete with Microsoft Corp. and IBM to expand its service among business users, who are likely to be less tolerant of long outages. Gmail already competes with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo’s Web-based e-mail.

Though occasional disruptions are common, widespread outages involving Google’s services are rare.

This is the second outrage of Gmail this week after a small one on Monday that wiped out email to only a “small subset” of users. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2009-09/02/c_1339221.htm