One month ago, Google put the word out that it was looking to build and test its own fiber-to-the-home networks in a couple of cities. The speeds would be up to 1 Gbps and the reach would initially be about 50,000 homes. Immediately, hundreds of cities began making pitches to attract Google's attention, some earnest, some outlandish. Topeka, Kansas unofficially renamed itself "Google" for the month and garnered a considerable amount of attention; Sarasota, Florida quickly followed suit and re-named its City Island "Google Island".

Last month, Google announced that it was applying to buy and sell electricity on federally-regulated wholesale energy markets via a new subsidiary called Google Energy. Well, it just got the green light from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — giving it the same rights and abilities as any other utility company, just like PG&E. The question now becomes: how will it exercise its new power?

It still seems unlikely that Google will actually set up its own utility company. It doesn’t seem to have any interest in selling electricity to average homeowners.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Friday said he's optimistic that his search engine will not have to pull out of China over hacking and censorship issues.

"I'm an optimist. I want to find a way to work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information," he said. "I think a lot of people think I'm naive, and that may be true."

The remarks came at the annual TED Conference of thought leaders in Long Beach, California.

Google Inc.

Reporting from San Francisco and Los Angeles - In an ambitious bid to revolutionize how consumers use the Internet, technology giant Google Inc. says it will build a network that would be 100 times faster than what is available for many users today.

Entering territory tightly controlled by telecommunications carriers, Google announced Wednesday that it would build and test an experimental high-speed fiber optic network that could be available in several communities and reach as many as 500,000 people.

The U.S. Senate plans a March hearing on technology companies' business practices in Internet-restricting countries. Executives from Google and other tech firms, as well as administration officials, are expected to testify about their efforts to promote Internet freedom. The exact date of the hearing has not been set.

As a prologue to the hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the assistant majority leader and chairman of the the Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, sent Feb.

Other U.S. corporations doing business in China may admire Google's tough stand against the country's government over Internet censorship and cyber attacks, but that doesn't doesn't mean they're prepared to exit the country along with Google. Far from it. Take Motorola, which launched a turnaround effort last year built around Google Android-powered phones like the Droid and Cliq.

But following the search giant's standoff in China, Motorola struck a search deal Google's arch-rival Baidu faster than you can text a donation to Haiti.

Google on Wednesday announced that it will encrypt Gmail at all times, not just during sign-on, and make the process an opt-out feature rather than opt-in.

At this point, Google only uses this encryption process, known as HTTPS, during the sign-in process in order to protect your password. HTTPS keeps e-mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and servers and is mostly used for things like banks and credit card company Web sites.

GOOD FOR Google. The company's decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine is more likely to mean the end of its China-based service than a breakdown of Beijing's political firewall. But more important than the question of whether Google.cn survives is the larger issue that Google has now raised for other Western companies and democratic governments -- which is whether China's gross and growing abuse of the Internet should be quietly tolerated or actively resisted.

Today on the Google home page, an animated apple is falling, over and over, with a satisfying plunk—a 367th birthday tribute to Sir Isaac Newton.

The English scientist was born especially tiny but grew into a massive intellect and still looms large, thanks to his findings on gravity, light, motion, mathematics, and more.

Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward.

Amid all the hubbub over Google DNS on Thursday, the search giant also released two more helpful tools to help you get a richer search experience and improve your language skills. Google launched its dictionary project, offering a feature-rich resource that goes beyond simple definitions of words; and its new translated Web search makes it easier to find Web pages written in more than 40 languages.

Dictionary