Google just put a dot to  its desire to become part of the social sphere with its latest acquisition - the social search engine founded by some ex-Googlers called Aardvark . Although both companies have not yet issued an official statement about the deal, the buyout was confirmed through an email sent by Aardvark CEO Max Ventilla to TechCrunch confirming that indeed, Google has bought their company. The price - $50 million.

The Paris District Court ruled today that eBay is liable for harming the reputation of luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton through its use of trademarks, company name and domain name. The Paris court has ordered eBay to stop using keywords which harm the reputation of the Louis Vuitton brand to promote its sites and will impose penalties of $1,372 (1,000 euros) for future violations. "Louis Vuitton welcomes this decision,

Aardvark has, in a sense, returned to its roots. Or in other words: Two of the four men who created the social search engine are former Googlers, and now, it's been confirmed that the search giant's acquired Aardvark. Details regarding timeframes and the fate of Aardvark's technology and employees are sadly lacking at this point. "[A] source that has been briefed on the deal" just puts the purchase price at "around $50 million," according to Michael Arrington . Still,

Semantic results are organized by category. Click to read the rest of this post.

Update: This article is nearly a year old, but pretty much the same thing is happening again (or still). A number of popular music blogs have been removed from Blogger, some are saying without warning. When we covered this before, Blogger Product Manager Rick Klau left us the following comment (as seen in the comments section): Hi - I'm a product manager on Blogger, and I wanted to clarify a few things. Google only removes content when legally obligated, and under U.S. law,

This week, YouTube launched Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps users screen out potentially objectionable videos. We asked YouTube how it works. For example, is there human intervention involved? "Safety Mode goes above and beyond the flagging system and manual review to use community signals to filter out content that may be objectionable," YouTube tells WebProNews.

The move continues Google's pursuit of social search. Click to read the rest of this post.

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YouTube has just launched a " Speed Dashboard ", which makes speed information about videos available to users. YouTube's Chris Dale tells us it "offers granular insight into what your YouTube video speed looks like." "We think it's pretty cool and all part of our goal to make the web a faster place," he adds. Factors which affect your YouTube video speed include the speed of your Internet connection, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you're using,

Developers working with our API sometimes run into errors when executing Update operations in which they try to update an entity's status. During operations like UpdateCampaigns(), UpdateAdGroups(), UpdateKeywords(), etc, the status of adCenter objects cannot be modified. In addition, editorial status cannot be modified by the user, and is determined and set only by the system. As a result,