About a decade ago, if we were to tell you that Microsoft is part of a group who is filing a complaint against another software giant who they feel is unfairly using its own software to promote it’s own products, you would have thought we were crazy. But that is exactly what is happening today in the EU as Microsoft, Nokia, and a few other companies are accusing Google of unfairly using its own Android software to promote Google’s products and services.

Sound familiar? It should, it’s a similar complaint that Microsoft faced many years ago that resulted in the browser ballot that you see today and also the N versions of the Windows platforms in Europe. The NYTimes is citing a lawyer for Fairsearch, Thomas Vinje, who filed the complaint, that represents these large corporations by stating that Android software is “a deceptive way to build advantages for key Google apps in 70 percent of the smartphones shipped today”.

This is kind of typical to large companies, if they can’t compete they try to buy you, if they can buy you they’ll sue you. Microsoft and Nokia don’t believe Windows 8 can compete with Android and gain market share, the same way Android competes with iOS and eventually won ?

Let me tell you about a browser. An innovative browser that was the first to implement new Web technologies that allowed for greater interactivity. A browser with a striking new interface. Chrome? No: Internet Explorer 6.

There’s a reason that Microsoft’s browser took over 95 percent of the Web browser market from Netscape (Firefox’s ancestor): IE6 could do things earlier browsers could not. There was dynamic HTML, CSS, and yes, it even had new security features.

But over the years, problems with all these unique capabilities reared its ugly head. Every major Web site started to target IE, to the point that the sites didn’t function correctly or fully in other browsers.

Fast forward to 2011. The hot new browser is Google’s Chrome, which has just overtaken former indie darling Firefox in global market share, according to StatCounter. Chrome can do things that no other browser can do, and Google now targets Chrome exclusively, meaning some Google sites only function fully when viewed in Chrome. Even today, you can read on the Google blog about some new Angry Birds levels that only work in Chrome.

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The Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone, which went on sale last week, is suffering from a particularly annoying bug.

The glitch sees the handset drop the audio volume of its own accord. The phone goes suddenly silent, without warning, many an owner spent the weekend complaining on the intertubes.

Others have grumbled about the volume key becoming unresponsive, and even the power key sometimes ignores users’ presses.

Not every handset appears to be affected, but the consensus is that the bug only makes its presence felt when the Galaxy Nexus is operating in the 900MHz band for 2G communications. That’s a very commonly used band in Europe.

Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.

Gogle Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type [olympics] without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for.

Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

Today Google is making a significant improvement to the ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness: Recent events or hot topics, Regularly recurring events, Frequent updates.

For well over a year now, Google has been hyping up something called Native Client. It’s an open source technology that allows a web browser to run compiled native code. In other words, it’s a potential missing link between native apps and web apps. And now it’s finally getting baked into Chrome.

As Google notes on their Chrome Blog blog today, the latest beta version of Chrome (version 14) has Native Client built-in. Their implementation allows for C and C code to be executed inside of the browser while maintaining the security that a web technology like JavaScript offers.

Today, Google launched a new way for site owners to request that specific web pages be crawled. How is this different from the other ways available to let Google know about your pages and when should you use this feature vs. the others? Read on for more.

This new method for submitting URLs to Google is limited, so you should use it when it’s important that certain pages be crawled right away. Although Google doesn’t guarantee that they’ll index every page that they crawl, this new feature does seem to at least escalate that evaluation process.

Earlier today, Google came out swinging. Seemingly sick of being continuously slapped in the face by the patent issue, Google’s SVP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, wrote a blog post calling out several of Google’s rivals for attempting to use “bogus patents” to destroy Android. Chief among the rivals called out was Microsoft. Drummond noted that the software giant had been getting in bed with other rivals to hurt Google.

Among the accusations was that Microsoft teamed up with Apple to buy Novell’s old patents, implying that they did so in order to keep them away from Google.

Microsoft didn’t take too kindly to that remark.

“Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no,” Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel tweeted out in response.

The latest version of Google’s Android operating system for tablets is official, which means the update will likely be arriving on a range of tablets in the near future.

Motorola has already begun to roll out the update on its Xoom tablet. Other tablet candidates for a 3.2 rollout include Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, Acer’s Iconia Tab 500, and Toshiba’s Thrive.

Google Inc found itself at the center of multiple government investigations on Thursday into whether it is using its dominance in search advertising to scotch competition.

At least three state attorneys general have started antitrust investigations into Google, a source familiar with the matter said.

The source declined to elaborate on the details of the investigations by the attorneys general of California, Ohio and New York as they were still in the early stages.

The attorneys general investigation into Google was first reported by the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the investigations.

The news of the attorneys general investigation emerged on the same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the internet search giant is about to receive the civil equivalent of a subpoena from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as part of a probe into the company’s Internet search business.

The company, which dominates U.S. and global markets for search advertising, has been accused by competitors of favoring its own services over rivals in its search results.

Google’s launch of Google Instant last year was somewhat limited in its scope. At today’s Inside Search event Google Fellow Amit Singhal revealed some recent developments in Instant Search, which currently saves users between 2-5 seconds in each search. Google Instant will now be available in 32 languages and over 69 domains on desktop and mobile. Today it will be launching in all of Latin America, which means in 16 new domains.

The Instant Search feature is also now available on Google’s “Image Search,” working by changing the images as you enter search queries.

Singhal also announced “Instant Pages,” or what Singhal calls “the next big leap in Google Instant.” Instant Pages prerenders search results, allowing you to click on a search result and have it load instantly, as opposed to having to wait for four seconds.

Dutch tech site All About Phones claims that Google Maps Navigation will get a true offline mode later this summer. In December the Android app received an update that cached routes and the surrounding areas, but without a data connection you still couldn’t enter a new destination. A source inside the Dutch telco industry said that Google would remove the requirement for coverage

Google has detected a campaign to gather Gmail account credentials that appears to originate from Jinan, China, and is warning users to take a few minutes to review their security settings.

Eric Grosse, engineering director for Google’s security team, said in a blog post that hundreds of users have been affected, including senor U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries such as South Korea, military personnel, and journalists.

“The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings,” Grosse said.

By changing these settings, which are only evident through the appropriate Gmail Settings tab page, the attackers could generate copies of incoming and outgoing email that would be forwarded without the account holder’s knowledge.