Google has recently decided to get with the times and revive its worn out favicon. Marissa Mayer wrote on Google’s blog that the favicon – the small icon, which appears in browsers just before the URL or in lists of bookmark – has been changed to improved suit new web gadgets. “We wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices,” she wrote.

“So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.” The favicon that has not been changed from past nine years required to upgrade from the upper-case ‘G’, which moved out quietly last week and was restored with a lower-case ‘g’ in blue. There are actually more than 300 possible favicons debatable to reinstate the ‘O.G’, but the one at present displaying would not be the final one for sure. Google is accepting new ideas for its favicon at http://www.google.com/faviconideas

Google has just incorporated a new feature in its services for Gmail users called ‘Gmail Labs’. This would provide Gmail users to test amazing new features successfully during their growth phases and share their opinion on them.

“Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not. When you sign in, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we’ll eventually retire the ones that don’t get much use” according to official Gmailblog.

Gmail Labs is the open workshop for all Google engineers to share their advances in this proposal while maintaining their growth processes whole because all their work would get live users opinion which would act as online laboratory for innovators from all across the world on Google Mail platform. So in case you have Gmail account, then try to use it and share your feed with and innovators.

Yahoo Inc exposes a new plan to add 94 newspapers to its online advertising consortium, comprising the Chicago Sun-Times. The deal with Sun-times incorporates 70 of its other newspapers as in the Chicago area. These 94 newspapers bring the consortium’s total of 800 by now. However, terms of the deals are not yet announced.

Additionally to the Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (owned by Journal Communications), the Akron Beacon Journal and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (owned by Black Press Ltd) as well join the group that are selling online advertising across newspaper Web sites using the job board’s technology.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo further proclaimed this week about new advertising contract with Wal-Mart Stores and CBS. Yahoo would become the elite reseller of display advertising on Walmart.com and as well would stream CBS’ television shows online.

Last January, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched a new search engine named Wikia Search, a supposed “Google-killer” that intended to edit and filter search results with the same techniques that made Wikipedia a Web phenomenon-the hand-outs of thousands of volunteers.

Since then, now six months have passed, and it has affected Google in no ways. Web Analytics Company Hit wise study that Wikia Search’s traffic is actually yet too small to calculate. Bloggers have cruelly criticized Wikia’s meager do, calling the search engine “miles behind the competition” and “an inexcusable waste of time.”

On the other hand Wales maintains that it’s yet too soon to decide upon his fledgling search engine project. Last week, Wikia Search re-launches with new features, which permits users to completely edit and filter all search results, as an alternative of the limited editing purposes given to users in Wikia Search’s alpha phase. Only now, Wales argues, could the real test of Wikia’s community-powered loom begin.

Microsoft recently announced an agreement with Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC manufacturer that would considerably make stronger its fight to collapse Google as the head in search. Starting upcoming year, Microsoft’s search engine – Windows Live Search – would certainly be installed as the default search tool on all PCs moved by HP – a move that must augment the number of people who use the software gigantic to aid them search the web.

Google’s engine further performs the vast mass of the searches mannered by users of Firefox; an option browser to Microsoft’s made by Mozilla. Taking into account PCs that are made use at work and in the home, Internet Explorer is used by maximum 75 per cent of people to steer the web. Firefox is the next well-known browser, used by 11 per cent, according to Nielsen Online.

Yahoo has exposed a new beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9 software where user can have new and amazing options for reconstructing networks of friends and contacts they have built anywhere.

This new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 could further help user to invite contacts on AOL, Google’s Gmail and Orkut, Microsoft’s Hotmail, MySpace, and also from other online services to get connected through the Yahoo service. Version 9 as well has a special group of all people in your Yahoo address book, assisting to connect with contacts users might have stored somewhere else within Yahoo itself. Yahoo Messenger 9 is planned for use on Windows XP, on the contrary to the more clearly named Yahoo Messenger for Vista. The last version of the Yahoo Messenger 9 is due in the third quarter, Yahoo said. The Mac equal is programmed to be exposed by the end of the year.

Google Inc. exposed its nearly done mobile software system to about 3,000 computer programmers this week, expecting to grow more services and marketing for people on the go. Although short, the display at the Internet search leader’s annual developer conference at San Francisco stated the most wide public look so far at “Android” – an open-source platform being intended for “smart” phones and other mobile devices, which surf the Web. Android was first proclaimed about seven months ago.

The bells and whistles exposed Wednesday comprised: a way to unlock phones by drawing a precise shape on the touchscreen in its place of typing a password; bookmarks for favorite Web sites on the device’s index page; a “compass” tool, which mechanically roams with the phone while a user looks at graphic images of a city map; a expanded tool to zoom in on Web content; and a mobile version of the video game “Pac Man.”

Google is soon planning to release a near-last version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software intended to simplify the burdensome parts of writing complicated Web-based software. GWT 1.5 comprises support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language that was launched in the year 2006, and produces software, which runs about 1.2 to 2 times quicker for complex Web applications, stated Bruce Johnson, Google’s engineering manager for GWT.

This fresh software fuels Google’s goal of making the Web a much wealthier software environment – a purpose on present this week at the Google I/O meeting in San Francisco. Johnson also considers that the Web is by now “really close” to the abilities of PC as a software foundation.

“We’ve observed that there’s no question anymore whether you’re going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you’re going to target the browser,” Johnson said. “For the right set of applications, it’s already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we’re still a couple years out.”