In a post to his personal blog Thursday morning, ten-year Mozilla vet Asa Dotzler quoted Schmidt in full before indicating that he's not too happy with the Googler's haughty take on data retention. "That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy," Dotzler says, after quoting the Google boss.

"The open-source search engine backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could go live as an early test version as soon as next week. Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor invade privacy by storing users' search terms..."

Google has finally released a long-awaited native Linux application: Google Desktop for Linux. As with the already shipping OS X and Windows versions, Google Desktop enables Linux users to search for text inside documents, local email messages, their Web history, and their Gmail accounts. [...] Google Desktop for Linux is based on Google's own desktop search algorithms.

The Internet and Google have made FOSS developers lazy because they have made it too easy to abdicate the job of proper documentation to "The community." Telling users and potential contributors to use Google, mailing lists, and forums is not documentation. It's a way to guarantee having fewer users, unhappy users, and fewer contributors.

Most Firefox users don't realize that Firefox's current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox's search bar. This revenue amounts to tens of millions of dollars.

A recent report shows that users of Google Chrome are more likely to be up to date with all the updates than users of any other browser. The reason for this is that Google pushes out silent updates and installs them without even telling the user, even when Chrome is not running. The report concludes that this is a very safe and secure way of updating users.

Google unveils the open-source Blog Converters project for federating the exchange of data between blogging platforms, including Blogger, MoveableType, WordPress and LiveJournal. Blog Converters is just one facet of a fundamental shift from siloed Web sites, which lock users in to their services, to a more boundless Web, where users can liberally migrate their data from one Web site to the next.

Google is unlocking its data door by launching a new initiative called Data Liberation, an approach to engineering that allows users to move their data - be it pictures, mail or documents - from Google’s servers to any other location.

You Google Google while Google Googles you. Also check out included Scroogle link - no cookies, no search-term records and access log deleted after 48 hours.