Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

GOOGLE, The world's largest Internet search engine, is on several fronts a danger that has to be stopped, a study released by Austria's Graz University claims. A research team led by Prof. Hermann Maurer, chairman of Graz University's Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media , argues that Google is turning into a new version of George Orwell's "Big Brother" - creating unacceptable monopolies in many areas of the worldwide web. According to his research, around 61 billion Internet searches are conducted each month. In the US, on average 57 percent of searches are conducted with Google, and up to 95 percent of Internet users use Google at least sometimes. It is dangerous enough that single entity such as Google is dominant as a search engine, Maurer and his co writers say, but the fact that Google is operating many other services and is probably colluding with still further players was "unacceptable". "Google is massively invading priv...

LONDON (Reuters) - Popular mapping service Google Earth will launch a new feature called Sky, a "virtual telescope" that the search engine hopes will turn millions of Internet users into stargazers. Google, which created Google Earth to give Internet users an astronaut's view that can zoom to street level, said the service would be a playground for learning about space. "Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available," said Dr. Carol Christian of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who co-led the institute's Sky team. " Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the universe by bringing it to everyone's home computer." Like Google Earth, Sky will enable users to float and zoom in on over 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. Users will view the sky as seen from earth. It has created different layers which will show the life of a star, co...