Google is slowly turning its Maps application into a wiki and that looks to be a very good thing. Sidewalk—and later Citysearch—only ever had enough staffing resources to scrape the surface of any particular city. Google Maps, on the other hand, has the entire online populace at the ready. While Citysearch in recent years has opened its site to community reviews, it has not given users control over all the data. That's where Google Maps is headed.

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The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has teamed up with Google to give anyone with Web access a chance to see what life and conditions are like in a refugee camp. The initial iteration centers on Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Darfur.

Web surfers can explore camps through the visual, textual, audio and video information that's layered on top of the bigger picture. Pop-up windows throughout the images of the camps tell you what's going on, and what's needed. You can also move in close enough to examine the infrastructure, including schools and other facilities.

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Woe is the Internet on April 1. For it is on this day where sites large and small rack their brains for the perfect Fools' Day prank, briefly vindicating those that continue to hold the belief that the Web serves as nothing more than a sloppy ocean of untruths and nonsense.

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At this point we've known for a while that the much-talked-about gPhone isn't actually going to be a single device, but a whole slew of them running Google's Android platform, but that doesn't mean the buzz is dying out. Now CNET says there's a new race heating up, as Google and Apple vie for the attention of independent software developers.

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Yahoo yesterday joined Google’s recently launched OpenSocial network. OpenSocial is built on APIs that let developers build applications to run on any participating social network. It gives the programs access to user data, relationships, and event postings across the board. For example, if the wildly popular Facebook application Scrabulous had been built for OpenSocial, it would work on any network under the OpenSocial umbrella, not just Facebook.

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Google says the US government is ignoring a precious natural resource. And no, the search giant obviously isn't talking about oil. Google, along with other big companies, wants the US government to open up unused air waves. The company says this could lead to people across the country surfing the Web on handheld devices at gigabits-per-second speeds.

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Yahoo surprised analysts yesterday, announcing that it is on track to meet its expected earnings for 2008. This changes the fight between the Sunnyvale-based company and Microsoft, which recently offered to pay $42 billion to swallow it up. Now Yahoo has a bit more leverage, and may be able to convince investors that it’s not in such bad shape after all. The company says it expects to double its cash flow and increase its revenue by 50 percent, mostly from banner and video advertising.

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For years, Ask.com has been trying to supplant Google as the Internet’s search leader, but this week the company has announced that it is headed in another direction. In truth, Ask never really got all that close.

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Google's CAPTCHA appears to have been cracked. On closer inspection, however, it seems Russian spammers have solicited humans to do the solving and to pass those accounts on to the computers. Websense Threat is reporting that one out of every five attacks of this kind on Google has been successful. Why is this an alarming development? Let's take a look at the CAPTCHA in order to understand.

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A handful of start-ups are getting ready to challenge Google’s predominance in the Web sleuthing world by offering what’s known as “semantic search.”

The companies—Powerset, Hakia, Cognition Search, Lexxe—are trying to develop a search technology that would allow you to look for material on the Web while writing like a normal, educated human, instead of just entering keywords, and dropping all the in-between stuff that gives us those wonderful things called sentences.

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