A Google engineer was fired in July for accessing the private accounts of young teenagers.

Google employees have been found guilty by an Italian court over a video uploaded by a third party to the Google Video service.

Google's Buzz status update system - launched earlier this week - has journalists in a flap following the discovery that it automatically publishes a list of most common contacts.

Google's Social Search features - which pulls in content from users' social networking contacts - has official entered the mainstream, albeit in beta form.