Posted by Varun Kacholia, Software Engineer



Four months back Google Notebook launched, enabling you to collect and organize information as you find your way through the Wild West. Since then, we've gotten a ton of great feedback and learned what features you'd love to have -- and we've put that feedback into action. For starters, you can now collaborate on a notebook with fellow notebookers (of course, you can still share your published version with the entire world if you want to).



There are many other great features, like a much slicker drag-and-drop UI to let you organize better, a trash bin for all your deleted items, and the ability to undo your last action. And we realize a lot of you wanted to see your notebooks on your personalized homepage. Now you can, through the Google Notebook module for your Personalized Homepage. Add it to get quick access to your notebook, either for that upcoming trip to Bora Bora or your "to-do" list.



If you haven't tried Google Notebook yet, we bet you'll love it. And as always, we would love to hear your comments, because that helps us make it even better.

Posted by Rachel Whetstone, European Director of Communications and Public Affairs



You may have read recently about Google being taken to court in Belgium. Whilst we aren't allowed to comment on the judgment itself, we thought you may want to know the facts of the case -- what actually happened, and when -- and the issues it raises.



In August Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It argued that our search engine and news site breached these publications’ copyright.



In September a court ruled in favor of Copiepresse and ordered us to remove these publishers’ content from both Google. be and Google News. We did this within the time specified. The court also required Google to post its ruling to the home pages of Google.be and Google News Belgium.



Last week we asked the court to reconsider its decision and requested that the requirement to post the ruling on our home pages be suspended. The court on Friday 22nd September agreed to reconsider its ruling in November this year, but maintained the requirement that we must post the initial judgment to our home pages for five days or face a fine of 500,000 Euros a day.



As the case will be heard in November, we can only offer general comments on the larger issues it raises at the moment. Any legal discussion must be pursued in court. Nevertheless we do feel that this case raises important and complex issues. It goes to the heart of how search engines work: showing snippets of text and linking users to the websites where the information resides is what makes them so useful. And after all, it’s not just users that benefit from these links but publishers do too -- because we drive huge amounts of web traffic to their sites.



Of course, if publishers don’t want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It's nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines.



Google News is no different than Google web search in this regard: We only ever show the headlines and a bit of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s website. And if a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News we remove their content from our index –- all they have to do is ask.



We hope that this explanation helps, and will keep you posted about any developments.