Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says.

Whether for real or for show, Google tried to make the world believe it would use Android OS as a bargaining chip during the company's terse, slow negotiations with China. Now, the company has seemingly abandoned that option.

FTA: "No IP addresses. I no longer store IP addresses at all. Not hashes of them. Not remnants of them. Nothing. I don't even log them."

Google Inc. has drawn up detailed plans to shut its search engine in China and is “99.9 percent” certain of going ahead with the closure, the Financial Times reported today, citing a person it didn’t name.

Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nea

Google's CEO says mobile smartphones are transforming the Internet, and defended his company's growing dominance over information on the Web.

Gadget nerds: Prepare to lose the rest of your day to awesomeness. PopSci, the web-wing of Popular Science magazine, has scanned its entire 137-year archive and put it online for you to read, absolutely free. The archive, made available in partnership with Google Books, even has the original period

Tips on how to communicate better and boost sales

Google’s Nexus One smartphone will launch in the UK in April with Vodafone.

A 1986 TV clip of a then thirtyish year old Eric Schmidt that is just amazing. The awkward smiles and huge glasses say a lot about the era as well as the nerd cred of Google’s CEO.