Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying -- until now.

Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.

Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MMI) (“Motorola Mobility”) today announced that at the Company’s Special Meeting of Stockholders held today, stockholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the proposed merger with Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) (“Google”).

Campus EBookstore and its' affiliated college stores are thrilled to announce an agreement with Google eBooks to distribute eBooks in Canada, and soon in the United States. Google eBooks is a new form of cloud-based digital book system that allows readers to access their libraries on almost any device from one single repository regardless of where the books were purchased.

To help bridge language barriers between you and the news of interest to you from around the world -- and to bring you more diverse perspectives on foreign events -- we’ve added a new “translate” button to the expandable story boxes in the U.S. English edition of Google News.

Every day, news organizations and journalists around the world dedicate significant time and resources toward some of the most critical types of coverage: exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops and exclusives, and various special projects that quite clearly stand out. Today, during a Google News workshop at the Online News Association conference in Boston, we introduced a new content tag for the US edition that will help us better feature this “standout” content and give even more credit where credit is due.

Right from the start: As submitting your site is a very critical issue, we have to break a rule of thumb: Don’t be amateurish and submit your website at the Google “Add URL” webpage.

When it comes time to order or line-up the websites that are listed under a specific category to present to a searcher, Google relies on a sophisticated method called PageRank. Many argue that so much time has passed since Larry Page and Sergey Brin created PageRank and that technology is far more advance now, that PageRank is old and outdated, however, it was a good system then and is still a good system now. There may have been some ‘tweaking’ or adjustments made to PageRank, however the basic concepts are still paramount to how Google operates their search engine.

Alongside working on improving the Google News design for smartphones, we have also been looking into enhancing our offering for tablet devices. Today, we are launching a few minor enhancements to Google News for Android tablets and iPads.

The battle for the eyeballs of social media network users is intensifying, with Google launching a demo version of 'Google+' (called Google Plus), the search engine giant's renewed attempt to take on Facebook in the social networking arena.

“This is just the beginning...We're just getting warmed up...launching what we call a field trial period, an invitation-only approach to help smooth out the rough edges,” said an official Google post on the demo site.

Google is the number one search engine on the planet; everyone who uses the Internet, and even the rare ones who don’t, have heard the phrase ‘just Google it’ in their quest for up-to-date information about anything and everything.

An organic search could sometimes be called a ‘natural’ or ‘pure’ search because the results brought back by the search pages are based on keyword relevancy and content, not on who paid the most money to be featured at the top spot (like those found on Overture.com).