Olympics and Trademarks

Yesterday (but not today), Google had the Olympic rings on its home page.  Unfortunately for Google, the Olympic rings are protected by law.  The law provides that no one but the United States Olympic Committee has the right to use the Olympic rings for "for the purpose of trade [or] to induce the sale of any goods or services..."  Even if Google is not selling anything, I think that they are definitely using it for the purpose of trade.  If you put aside the commercialization of the Olympics, keep in mind that corporations like Visa probably pay lots of money to use the Olympic rings in their logos.  It's not right for Google to use the Olympic rings on its page without paying.
As an aside, I like the logos that Google is using, because of all the blue and the nice artistic syling.  It's different from what they did for Beijing and Torino.

If I Were Westlaw/LexisNexis, I would be very afraid

Google Scholar now has searchable legal opinions. They're not that comprehensive right now, but they have a primitive equivalent of Keyciting/Shephardizing.

Update:
Here's a link to Google's blog entry.

Google Document Viewer

If you're on the Internet and don't want to wait to power up Acrobat reader, try Google Document Viewer on for size.
It can also create links for blogs.  For example, IRS Publication 17.

Status Page for Google's Cloud Applications

Google has set up a status page for its applications (like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, etc.)
See:
http://www.google.com/appsstatus
They really ought to have had such a status page since the beginning of Gmail, but I suppose late is better than never.

Stats on Google

Google posted some interesting statistics about searches during the inauguration.  It's neat (although not surprising) to see the drop in U.S. queries during President Obama's swearing in/speech.
Google also posted some interesting stats awhile ago regarding the election.  I had meant to post them earlier, but here they are now.

Need directions on Google Maps to London?

Tell Google maps that you want to go to London in the UK, and you will get this direction:

I saw this on another website, but thought it was funny
Obviously, someone at Google has a sense of humor (or is it humour?)

Easily add searches to your browser

I run searches a lot, and often they are not just on Google. However, Google has come up with a really easy way to configure their toolbar to run searches on practically any website. You just right click on the search box and select Generate Custom Search. You can then, by clicking on the "Manage" option from the search pulldown menu, choose to have this search appear either as a button on your toolbar, or if you don't want that, as an available search from a pull-down menu, as you can see from the screenshot on the right. There is no coding required. The only tricky thing is that it uses the web page's icon, so if you have a web page that doesn't have a custom icon, you are limited to which ones you can show as buttons on your toolbar since you won't be able to tell them apart. Penn State has this problem, the icon shown next to PennStateFullName is what would show up if I put that on my toolbar as a button.

New Google Toolbar

Google released a new Toolbar for Firefox last week. Finally, you can access your Google bookmarks from it. Before, you could still access your Google bookmarks, but it was a webpage, so it was slightly unwieldy, because you had to leave whatever you were doing to get to the bookmark webpage. Now you can do it all directly from the toolbar. Plus, if you go to another computer, you can quickly access your bookmarks on that computer on a website. Or, of course, you can install the Google toolbar on that computer.

Check Out Gmail's Page

A reminder to check out Gmail's page on Thanksgiving Day, they usually post some cute things on it.

Google Maps Will Call Businesses For You

Google Maps now has a neat new feature. You can now call a business using Google Maps. You find the business on Google Maps and then enter your phone number.
Google then calls your phone and then connects you to the business. I was expecting the call to appear on my display as a call from a phone number in Mountain View (where Google's headquarters is).
That was not the case though. The phone number came up as the business I was calling. Strange, because the business wasn't calling me at that point, it was Google, who was going to connect me to the business. After I picked up, it said "connecting" and rang the business. Having the number appear on my phone is useful because I would be able to capture the number of the business if I wanted to. I just thought that the caller id was set by who was calling you, so this was surprising. If I had a landline and paid for long distance, it would be more useful because it would save me on long distance bills.