Juan Carlos Perez

Expect Google Inc. to increase its family of enterprise products in the coming 12 months by retooling some of its existing services aimed at individual users in the mass market, a Google executive said.

In a setback for Microsoft Corp., a Redmond, Washington, defector and high-ranking Google Inc. executive will be able to help the Mountain View, California, company set up a research and development facility in China in the coming months while a case over his hiring comes to trial in January 2006, a judge decided.

Google Inc. will continue expanding beyond its core search engine and push further into Web portal territory when it launches an instant messaging (IM) service with voice communications capabilities. The consensus has been that Google has to branch out from its search engine roots and build a suite of online services as varied as the ones from portals Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and America Online Inc.

America Online Inc. (AOL) is giving its AIM instant messaging software a complete overhaul, including a major redesign of the user interface and a remodeled underlying code architecture.

With rampant viruses, spyware and worms on the loose, customers must truly trust a technology vendor before downloading its software to their PCs. To strengthen that confidence and improve customer interactions at one of its Web sites, Intel Corp. teamed up with the MIT Sloan Center for eBusiness and Sloan School of Management professor Glen L. Urban, who specializes in trust-based marketing on the Internet.

Yahoo Inc. is expected to launch on Wednesday the first upgrade to its desktop search tool, adding the ability to index data from Yahoo's instant messenger archives stored on users' PCs and from users' address books residing on Yahoo's servers.

Google Inc. is set to launch on Monday an updated version of its desktop search tool whose enhancements include the ability to search the full text of Adobe Systems Inc. PDF files and the metadata of multimedia files, a Google executive said.

America Online Inc. (AOL) has launched a local search service designed to let users of its search engine find information tied to a specific place, such as business listings, movie times and events.