Miguel Helft

"What you see on Google Translate is state of the art" in computer translations that are not limited to a particular subject area.

Few people say they think Google's Chinese-language search engine will survive the company's confrontation with China. But as Google prepares for talks with the Chinese government over its decision to stop cooperating with censorship laws there, the rest of Google's business and operations in China hangs in the balance.

Google's expected unveiling on Tuesday of a rival to the iPhone is part of its careful plan to try to do what few other technology companies have done before: retain its leadership as computing shifts from one generation to the next.

Google plans to begin selling its own smartphone early next year which means that Google and Apple may soon be engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Or, more precisely, handset-to-handset combat.

A look at the army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases.

Whenever it can, Google likes to have programmers solve its problems. But now it faces a dispute that even its ranks of lawyers and lobbyists are finding hard to smooth over.

YouTube appears to be mastering the art of turning video piracy into revenue for itself and its partners. For years, the clips of television shows, music videos and other copyrighted content that users uploaded to YouTube without permission were a source of tension between Google, which owns YouTube, and media companies, which owned the copyrights.

Google and its settlement partners — the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers — busily negotiating modifications that would address some of the concerns raised. Those negotiations are likely to accelerate now that the Justice Department has said that it too believes the settlement raises serious legal issues and has urged the court not to approve it without changes. Legal experts say the new round of discussions, and the government's intervention, are almost certain to delay an agreement that Google and the other parties were eager to see ratified quickly.

Google plans to introduce a long-awaited new version of an ad exchange, like a stock market, where advertisers and publishers can buy and sell advertising space, filling spots in Web pages on the fly.

Google, long seen as an enemy by many in the news industry, is making a bold attempt to be seen as a friend with a new service it hopes will make it easier for readers to read newspaper and magazine articles.