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Sony has made a deal with Google to offer over 5000,000 book titles for their Sony Reader Digital Book. The content will be made available through the eBook store of Sony and will comprise of public domain titles from a book archiving project held by Google.

This collection can be accessed by users from their PCs or through Sony’s PRS-700 and PRS-505 reader devices. This move will increase the collection of the eBook Store to over 600,000 titles that will be accessible for download.

Sony’s digital reading business division president, Steve Haber believes they have focused their efforts to offer an open platform and make it extremely easy to search as much content as possible. This content can either be from their store or others, which can be borrowed, free or purchased. He also added that while working with Google, they can provide another avenue to book lovers and at the same time provide seamless experience from their store.

This move from Sony can also assist them to remain in competition with their rival, Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. In recent weeks, Kindle has attracted widespread attention following the release of their patent battle and new Kindle 2 model with the Discovery Channel owners.

Google’s recently launched Street View service has allowed users of the application to view pictures of thousands of streets and homes in the UK. The company has also added a 360 degrees swivel option that can even zoom in on homes. However, a home that has been spared in this application is that of Google’s UK boss Dennis Woodside.

The American’s £2 million home which is situated in west London cannot be viewed by the application. His residence, where he lives with his wife and two children, is located in a private gated development in Kensington. A spokesperson for Google, Laura Scott, said that Woodside’s home was not omitted purposely. It was excluded because it was situated on a private road and the application did not include private roads.

However, the company assured people that they will blur or remove images if they feel their privacy or security has been breached. This can be done by filling out a form on the website, by homeowners.

The service came about after the company’s staff spent many months photographing countless high resolution images with a fleet of cars that had cameras mounted on them, in 25 different UK cities. However, controversies have arisen due to some of the images the application includes.

In a recent report, records of around 22,000 cards have been exposed with the help of cached copies of data stored on an outdated cybercrime server. Australian based iTnews has reported that 19,000 out of 22,000 exposed details have been referred to UK and US cards. This data had come from the Google cache records of an abandoned internet payment gateway.

A security expert believes this information actually came from either an attack or a dump site used for credit card fraud. Someone from Vietnam had registered the cybercrime site which is currently not operational. The data that is viewable through the Google cache consist of credit card numbers, names, expiry dates and addresses of the accounts held with MasterCard, Visa, Solo, Delta and American Express.

It was first spotted by an unidentified Australian. The information was then posted on a thread at whirlpool.net.au which has now been deleted. Regular readers had separately placed the susceptible information in Google’s cache.

Trend Micro’s security consultant, Rik Ferguson explained that due to such things, Google can sometimes become a prey of their own efficiency. Google had indexed the entire accessible content from the dump server of the criminal in Vietnam. However, they unintentionally made the details of thousands of UK credit cards available on a casual browser while serving them from their own cache.

For the senior vice president of the New York Times, Martin Nisenholtz, Google’s ability to prioritise search results from sources like newspapers is a great benefit. This would save his site a lot of expense and trouble for search engine optimisation and providing readers with better information. Google’s Publishers Advisory Council has also been holding meetings with media companies to guarantee they are not taking away all their business.

In January, the vice president told the Online Publishers Association conference that when users searched for ‘Gaza’, they were provided with links to old BBC stories, Wikipedia and anti-Semitic YouTube videos.

Senior vice president for ESPN’s digital media, John Kosner, brought up the issue recently at the PAC meeting. He said the requests by most of the big media to have their sites prioritised overlook the reality that Google’s main search does not belong to news search. This brings up the fact that the first few results would not necessarily be recent news. For that there is a completely specialised news search.

Although the next meeting is scheduled for 30th April, it is not certain what new bargaining powers these news publishers will have. If things do not go their way, Google may apply extreme PRS negotiating tactics, which may result in the complete omission of news sites entirely.

At a time when marketers are drastically cutting back on advertising spending, Yahoo! has offered several tools that will help them target their ads more efficiently.

One of the new products introduced by the internet portal is to let marketers target users with a tailored display ad based on the terms they use on the search engine Yahoo! Another tool helps marketers customise ads based on the sites visited by the user and their activities on those websites.

In a statement, the senior vice president of the internet portal’s Advertising Marketplaces Group, Michael Walrath said marketers are looking for an increased accountability on every spent amount of money.

Yahoo! also has plans to introduce a search advertising tool next month that will allow marketers to control the time and day of the week they want their ads to be run and what gender or age group they want to target.

Yahoo!, who has been involved in a fierce battle with Google, is struggling to retain its market share against the bigger rival.

According to many press reports, the new Chief Executive of Yahoo!, Carol Bartz is expected to announce a major shuffle in the management team.