Forget Googling for the best site to get flight information and the best fare comparisons—soon, you'll just be able to use Google. Google has purchased flight information company ITA in hopes of incorporating ITA's services into new Google tools. Given the wide use of ITA's tools in the travel industry, however, Google may run into problems trying to close the deal

ITA is known for providing some of the best fare comparison searches (my favorite is the flight matrix), and its services are used often by travel agencies and airlines. In fact, ITA's software powers Farecast, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for use in Bing Travel. It is also used by major travel sites such as Orbitz and CheapTickets.

Some worry that Google will kill off ITA's ties to Bing and other flight booking services once the deal goes through—it would be a major loss for the air travel industry if Google decided to keep ITA to itself. However, Google claims on its announcement page that it plans to "honor all existing agreements, and we're also enthusiastic about adding new partners."

It sounds as if Google plans continue to license the technology out while simply giving itself home field advantage; if users can do everything they need at Google, there's less need to head to another site to get the same information. 

This is the same reason why the deal might receive some critical scrutiny from the government, though—as noted by IDG, competitors are likely to complain that Google has full control of a vital piece of the airline industry.

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When your credit card gets too much activity from random parts of the world, your bank usually shuts it off, or at least gives you a call to make sure all those charges are legit. Now, Google is implementing a similar strategy across all elements of your Google account: if the company detects what it considers to be suspicious logins for your Gmail, Google Calendar, Blogger, Buzz, or other Google accounts, it will flag your dashboard and let you decide how to proceed.

Google has been doing this for Gmail users for several months already, following the high-profile attack on Google's servers coming out of China. Numerous Gmail users—especially those who were of particular interest to the Chinese government—found that their accounts had been accessed by people overseas. As a result, Google decided it was a good time to start flagging users when their accounts were accessed from geographic locations that did not seem to be normal, and it has apparently been working so well that the company decided to add the feature to all Google accounts.

Google has decided to call off its efforts to redirect all China users to its Hong Kong search site, sort of. Instead of automatically sending searchers straight on to google.com.hk, the search giant once again serves up a Google China home page—complete with a faux search box image that sends users to the Hong Kong site when they click in it.

The change may seem minimal, but Google hopes it will be enough to appease the Chinese government—and to keep its license to operate an Internet business in the country.

Twitter has settled charges with the Federal Trade Commission for failing to safeguard the personal information of its users. The FTC says that Twitter had "serious lapses in the company’s data security," and as a result, Twitter must have its information security program independently evaluated every three years. 

The company also cannot mislead consumers about its security and privacy policies for 20 years. (No word on what can happen once year 21 rolls around. All bets are off?)

The FTC had originally accused the social media service of making private tweets and the login credentials of users easily available to "hackers" between January and May of 2009. During that time, someone was able to gain administrative access to Twitter's system (and therefore access to thousands of user accounts, passwords, direct messages, and more) simply by using password-guessing software. That user reset numerous user passwords, allowing others to access those accounts.

During the economic crisis, the online advertising market took a corresponding dive, a trend that has left sites considering ways to get users to pay directly for content. Traditional print outlets are at the forefront of this trend, led by major sites like The New York Times and various properties in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. empire. 

In the UK, The Times is rolling out its paywall and now demands that anyone intent on reading its content register an account. According to research done by the traffic metrics firm Hitwise, simply demanding registration has already cut into traffic at The Times.

Right now, The Times isn't charging for content, although it plans on doing so in the near future. As of mid-June, however, the site started requiring that anyone who wished to view an actual article register an account. Ultimately, these accounts will be used to try to extract payment for viewing an article's content.

Just a day after Google and Twitter called the legal concept of "hot news" obsolete, the major news heavyweights have collectively thrown their hat into the ring in support of the nebulous restriction. 

The Associated Press, New York Times, Time, Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, Advance Publications, and others submitted their own amicus brief in the ongoing legal case between theflyonthewall.com and Barclays Capital. They aren't taking a side in the dispute, but they do want the ability to tell others not to re-report "their" facts.

After offering it as an experimental service, Google has now formally added optical character recognition capabilities and PDF import to its online Docs service.

The tools couldn't be simpler to use—a simple check box in the document import dialog—and Google would seem to be ideally positioned when it comes to OCR technology, which it uses heavily for its book scanning efforts. Sadly, the end results are disappointing, with frequent errors in the OCR and little of the formatting brought in from PDFs.

Google and Twitter have weighed in on the "hot news" doctrine, which grants newspapers in some states a time-limited, quasi-property right over facts they report, arguing that the legal concept is old 'n' busted in the instantaneous Internet age. 

The companies filed an amicus brief in the legal case between financial website theflyonthewall.com and Barclays Plc, claiming that Internet chatter cannot be contained and that restricting the spread of news content could hurt the public.

Free-riding fly

A US federal judge ruled back in March that The Fly had misappropriated content from major analyst firms—Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Merrill Lynch—to get a "free ride" on their stock recommendations. 

The firms (and the judge) believed that they had invested time and resources into researching the market, and The Fly was making money off of their hard effort by offering subscriptions so that users could access The Fly's near-realtime writeups of the analysts' work.