Google is offering a cycling option for users of its map service.

If you ask Google for directions in some US cities from today you can choose “bicycling” as an option, alongside “by car”, “walking” or “by public transport”.

The company said it had been the most requested feature since the map site launched.

Google Inc and No. 2 U.S. satellite TV operator Dish Network Corp are jointly testing a television programing search service, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The paper said the service runs on TV set-top boxes which use elements of Google’s Android wireless operating system. It allows users to search content from Dish as well as websites such as YouTube, and to personalize the lineup of shows.

This week Google quietly rolled out a new feature within Google Docs. It is offering a Web-based clipboard that will let users copy-and-paste content between Google Docs. It also manages to keep Web formatting intact.

Google writes in a blog post, “This new clipboard temporarily stores items you’ve copied in the cloud, then allows you to paste them with proper formatting into other Google Docs. The new web clipboard lets you copy content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations more easily and with improved fidelity, and this is just our first step. Note that while items in your web clipboard are available across browsers and across sessions, they do expire after a month.”

Google Inc stepped up its assault on Microsoft Corp’s productivity software business with the acquisition of a small start-up company that allows Microsoft users to edit and share their documents on the Web.

Google said on its company blog on Friday that it has acquired San Francisco-based DocVerse. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of Web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications,” Google Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said in the blog post.

Although it continues to face criticism from European privacy authorities about Street View, that hasn’t stopped Google from adding features to the service. The latest to launch is a kind of user-generated layer to Street View that uses photos uploaded by individuals to create a pseudo-3D panorama of a specific spot. Although there aren’t going to be enough user photos to do this for every site or building, it’s an additional way to get different perspectives on popular landmarks.

Google, the world’s largest search engine and the owner of the world’s largest online advertising platform, has been granted a major U.S. patent for “determining and/or using location information in an ad system.” In other words, Google now owns a key patent for location-based advertising.

The patent, which was first discovered by Venturebeat, was filed nearly seven years ago, in September 2003, but was only granted last week.

Since then of course, location-based advertising has boomed with companies such as AdMob (acquired by Google) and Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple) leading the charge.

That patent itself focuses on making sure businesses can better target their ads based on location information so that they can do things such as price arbitration (e.g. figuring out prices for items near you and getting the best deal). It also deals with the user interface and defining geographic areas.

European Union data privacy regulators are telling Google Inc. to warn people before it sends cameras out into cities to take pictures for its Street View maps, adding to the company’s legal worries in Europe.

Google should shorten the time it keeps the original photos from one year to six months, regulators also said in a letter to the company obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday.

In a statement, Google said its need to retain Street View images for one year is “legitimate and justified.”

The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., said it also already posts notifications on its Web site about where its Street View cameras are clicking.

U.S. government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware program used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The man, a security consultant in his 30s, posted sections of the program to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was “working on,” the paper said, quoting an unidentified researcher working for the U.S. government.

The spyware creator works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had “special access” to his programing, the report said.

Google Inc won approval from U.S. energy regulators to act as a power marketer, which will make it easier for the Internet search giant to obtain renewable energy to run its huge data centers.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday approved Google’s request to purchase electricity and resell it to wholesale customers.

A company spokeswoman previously said that the Google Energy LLC subsidiary wanted the authority from FERC “to contain and manage the cost of energy for Google.”

In its approval order, FERC pointed out that Google does not own or control any facilities that generate electricity to sell in the wholesale markets.

Google says the extent of its electric generation ownership is to provide power solely to the company’s facilities and for emergency backup power.

The Internet attacks that may end up driving Google Inc. out of China originated from two prominent schools in the country, according to a story published late Thursday.

The New York Times reported security investigators have traced the hacking to computers at Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School in China. The newspaper attributed the information to unnamed people involved in the investigation.

Already besieged by complaints of shoddy user privacy, Google Buzz is susceptible to exploits that allow an attacker to commandeer accounts and even learn where victims are located, a security researcher said Tuesday.

The XSS, or cross-site scripting, vulnerability is unusual because it affects google.com, the domain that sets authentication cookies for a variety of popular Google services, including Mail, Calendar and Documents. That means an attacker might be able to tamper with victims’ accounts simply by tricking them into visiting a booby-trapped link, although the researcher said only cookies for Buzz appeared to be at risk in this case.

What’s more, the vulnerability ties into to the much-vaunted Google Location Services, making it possible for the attacker to learn the geographical location of users who have already opted in.

As it introduced a new social hub, Google quickly learned that people’s most frequent e-mail contacts are not necessarily their best friends.

Rather, they could be business associates, or even lovers, and the groups don’t necessarily mix well. It’s one reason many people keep those worlds separate by using Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for professional contacts, or by keeping some people completely off either social circle despite frequent e-mails with them.

Google Inc. drew privacy complaints this week when it introduced Buzz and automatically created circles of friends based on users’ most frequent contacts on Gmail. Just days later, Google responded by giving users more control over what others see about them.