Pakistan has lifted a ban on YouTube after Google said it would offer a localized version the government claims will allow it to ask for the removal of material from the Web site it considers offensive. The country has ordered YouTube to block the site in 2012, following a controversial video, called the "Innocence of Muslims," surfaced.

Google has made it easier for users of its Drive cloud storage product to move files into the correct folder to find later. The company on Thursday announced new features. For example, when users access files shared with them, but not mirrored in their Google Drive account, they now will see an “Add to Drive” button.

Google released a report this week showing why self-driving cars are not quite ready to hit the road, as the Obama administration announced a $4 billion program intended to help the industry get more autonomous cars safely on the road, CIO reports. The proposed federal budget for 2017 will be used for pilot programs in specific transportation corridors in the United States to jumpstart programs.

iProspect India, the digital performance agency from Dentsu Aegis Network, has hired Niti Beri to lead the paid media based from the agency’s Gurgaon office. Prior to this, she was in charge of the digital marketing accounts under Google India for five years, but began her career in management at Satyam Computers.

Everett Sizemore advises marketers to start with a content audit and specifically refers to catalog content including Home, Categories and Products. Marketers should analyze and think about removing inactive or unproductive redirects, 404/410 codes, Robots Noindex meta tags and other options, depending on the situation. Great content is key, but prune the post. Scroll down a third of the way through the post to "The real reason you should prune your eCommerce site" to learn more.

Luxury isn’t about the price tag, or the functionality or purpose of a product. It’s about the status, the symbol and the association, writes Rose Horsfall. She outlines unique and complex issues faced by luxury fashion brands online, and discusses tactics such as tips to personalize content, increase conversions rates, and connect a variety of media to create consistent messages.

Google X will take on a shorter name, X, and a nice new logo meant to capture the X blueprint of incubating a radical solution to some of the world's biggest problems. X becomes a miniature Alphabet, sprouting startups with a focus on hardware. Mark Bergen explains in a detailed analysis of the company's future and the future of the projects.

Google just hired a former senior adviser to President Obama to lead its global public policy team. “Caroline Atkinson, who left her position as a White House deputy national security adviser last month, will join Google in March and be based in Washington,” The New York Times reports. “Her most pressing task will be to temper concerns by antitrust enforcement officials in the European Union.”

Actually, when Paul Morley wrote this article published in 2013, he referred to David Bowie as the human equivalent of a Google search engine, "a portal through which you could step into an amazing, very different wider world." He wrote how Bowie "flooded plain everyday reality with extraordinary, unexpected information, processing the details through a buoyant, mobile mind, and made intellectual discovery seem incredibly glamorous." Read on.

Jennifer Slegg shows marketers what Yahoo's test of Google ads in search results looks like when serving them up in the sidebar along with extensions such as sitelinks and reviews. She found several examples, such as one with ratings in the sidebar and below the entire ad, rather than the usual position below the title. Slegg explains.