It's being tossed around in the Dell (NASDAQ:DELL)world these days that its year-old partnership with Google,Inc.(NASDAQ:GOOG) is causing web surfers who mistype website addresses and search results into the Google "toolbar" on a newer Dell PC to land at a page dominated with more ads than real information results. On normal PCs, Google searches would land at a normal Google page with a few sponsored links at the top (and sides) and real Google results below that.

Some are calling this tactic by Dell (and Google, by association) an act of "spyware" since results differ entirely on Dell PCs and non-Dell PCs when the same consumer mistake happens. What is the deal here? Is Dell trying to scrounge some extra cash by having its customers click on ads they probably never asked for? Of course, customers have to be using Internet Explorer (pre-installed on a Dell PC) for this to happen.

The culprit here is a "browser redirector" that sends customers mistyping a website address (or typing one that does not exist at all) to a Dell-branded page loaded with Google ads. Dell has a right to do this, although the practice seems a little sneaky and not in the best interest of the consumer. If a website address is mistyped, the customer should be told that -- not blanketed with ads that were never asked for in the first place. Is this a bad customer practice? By many measures, yes. One wonders if Google knows about this, and how "don't be evil" figures into this situation.

Google again climbed down the search engine ladder today as GOOG shares dropped about 20 lbs. (for those wrestlers out there) to close the trading day at $367.23, a decline of $8.28 or 2.21% for the day. After yesterday's share drop of over 2% as well, GOOG has sunk a little over 5% in the last two days. Egad, hold on to your computers. Google still has some share price to sluff off in order to reach a level of proper valuation in my opinion. I am not alone here, folks.

With Google producing some excellent and user-friendly products these days, it's all being funded by search advertising -- for now. Although, finally, Google is expanding beyond the browser and inked a deal with XM today to install automated advertising from the Google AdWords system into non-music channels on the nation's largest satellite radio network. So, my theory of Google becoming the world's largest advertising company (at least revenue-wise) is starting to take shape. XM Radio is one heckuva start.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

Google has just released an update to the Google Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Normally, an update of this sort is good news, except this time, non-Google search engine providers could have issues with a new "feature" in the updated Google Toolbar. This feature (or bug, really...I think) blocks attempts from programs and other toolbars to modify the default search engine from Google. In agreeing with this blog post, imagine the hailstorm of nightmares this would cause Microsoft if it was to do the same thing with its MSN Searchbar.

Is this in the spirit of Google "doing no evil", or was this "feature" simply an oversight by a programming and testing team prior to release (that's hard to imagine)? Will Yahoo! and Microsoft go nuts when this feature becomes public knowledge? Both companies should, really. Unless Google fixes the Google Toolbar problem which takes out the "blocking" feature from the memory of a computer where the Toolbar has been installed, any search provider could be up in arms about this.

I'll be staying on this until there is an official response from Google, but rest assured, this is no small potatoes -- Internet searches from the Google Toolbar that land consumers at Google's search engine for search results ends up bringing the search giant billions in revenue every quarter. Those are huge potatoes.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

With all of Google's popularity, it's not surprising it attracts hucksters and criminals seeking to steal a piece of the pie. Google's Toolbar, which is probably installed on hundreds of millions of PCs, is used to perform Google searches right from a customer's browser bar instead of actually visiting www.google.com to perform a search. It's no small potatoes that Google was recently miffed at Microsoft's decision to default to Microsoft's search engine when a customer performed a search using the built-in search function in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.

So, I am kind of surprised it took this long for online criminals to make a Google Toolbar lookalike meant for the purpose of stealing personal information more than giving customers search results. With spam emails circulating recently advertising a free download of the Google Toolbar, the actual program installed is a piece of malware that is intended to turn an unsuspecting user's computer into a "zombie" computer used to itself become a spreader of viruses and other junk.

What is Google doing about this problem? Not a lot -- yet. With Google Toolbar being used so frequently by millions of computer users, what can it do? The best remedy is to always visit the official site of Google to download any software. But, then again, so many people are duped every day by clicking on things that come into their email inboxes, it seems this nastiness will never see an end.

Google and Adobe are jumping into each other's playground with the announcement that Adobe will be bundling the Google Toolbar with many (if not all) Adobe products for the life of the agreement. Well, this is significant for this reason -- Adobe controls two of the most widely-used technologies on the internet today: the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (used to read online documents) and the Macromedia Shockwave player (a de-facto multimedia player for rich media content like web advertising and short video segments).

With Adobe and Microsoft recently having a small tiff over the inclusion of PDF publishing in the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 productivity suite, this new deal with Adobe and Google is just another shot across the bow for Microsoft in its efforts to fend off the competition. Although I think Adobe was completely off its rocker by insisting that Microsoft take out native PDF publishing capabilities from its newest Office software suite (everyone else with PDF publishing capability doesn't seem to cause Adobe issues), this is no small deal for Google. It just gets the Google Toolbar installed on Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox -- which run the majority of all web browsing activity in the world today.

[Disclosure: I own MSFT shares as of 6-22-06)

In what will surely be a blow to Microsoft's attempt to stem browser attrition by launching IE7, Google has just wednesday afternoon begun a passive campaign to promote Firefox.

Though not directly challenging Microsoft, the recommendation to its user base of Firefox over internet explorer will go a long way with regards to undermining Microsoft.  As Lita notes, Microsoft’s IE browser currently holds 84.7% of the market but is down 3.9% from last year's 88.6% market share. Firefox currently holds 10% market share, up 3.3% from last year's 6.7% share. Of course there is attribution from new users, but the analogous rise of Firefox's market share coinciding with IE's loss of market share highlights well the threat to Microsoft this new Google/Firefox alliance portends.

The additional kicker for Firefox is that the passive ad-campaign which would normally cost in the millions of dollars is being done for free by Google.  The strategic alliance then clearly benefits Firefox, but what of Google?

Google is clearly not just the benevolent behemoth out to help start-ups, as Sarah noted earlier this week the "who-is" behind the "Evil-Empire" is becoming more ambiguous as the future harkens.