Antitrust claims against Google are nothing new, and the company stands accused of abusing its position and favouring its own products in search results in Europe. Today, Google's General Counsel Kent Walker responded to the European Commission's claims, saying they are "unfounded".

Google has filed an official response to the Commission, but a public blog post gives an accessible insight into the company's mindset. The EU is unhappy with the way Google displayed shopping links in search results, saying its own services are given undue prominence. Google says that far from being anti-competitive, the way it displays search results is beneficial to its users.

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If you were hoping to see Chrome notifications integrated into Windows 10, prepare to be disappointed: it's not going to happen. While the Action Center might seem the natural home for Google's web browser to display messages, developers have a different opinion.

In short, Chrome's notifications are staying as they are. Despite a campaign for Action Center support, the request has been labeled Won'tFix and there's no sign that this will change for some years to come. Chrome and Windows 10 have already clashed heads once, but this time Google seems unlikely to back down.

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Anything computer-related can be made social and shareable, and gaming is no different. Amazon's game live streaming service Twitch has proved immensely popular and now Google is ready to put up some competition with YouTube Gaming.

Starting tomorrow (26 August), head over to YouTube Gaming and you can start a stream of your own or watch other gamers play. Of course there will also be an app, and Google is aiming to create "the biggest community of gamers on the web".

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It's back to school time, at least here in the US. The big yellow busses have begun rolling, and kids are standing curbside, hopefully under the watchful eye of an adult. There are many things to consider this time of year -- what computer to buy, a phone they can use to call in an emergency. In fact, my colleague Brian Fagioli did an overview of his choices in technology for the student.

But software also plays a major role in this equation, with things like Windows, Office and Google Docs all being possible players in your child's life. One you may not have known about is Google Classroom, but it does exist and it's getting a back-to-school update.

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Microsoft’s Cortana is now officially available on Android. The company announced earlier this year that it would release its digital voice assistant to Android and iOS later this year. Prior to the official release, a private Android beta of Cortana leaked this July. Today the company releases a public beta client of Cortana for devices powered by Google's mobile operating system.

In case you’ve used Cortana on a Windows Phone handset before, it wouldn’t take much time to get settled with it on Android. It maintains the same interface and functionalities. In case you haven't used it before, Cortana is Microsoft's answer to Google's Google Now assistant. You can use Cortana to ask for directions, and get your queries answered, among other things.

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Bcache was first announced by ex-Google engineer Kent Overstreet a little over five years ago. Now the Linux kernel block layer cache is being used as the basis for a new open source filesystem. The focus is on speed, but it is also hoped that the file system could be used for servers and storage arrays because of its reliability.

At this stage, Overstreet describes Bcachefs as "more or less feature complete" and says that even at this early stage performance numbers are "good enough to be interesting". At the moment, features such as replication, caching, and compression are supported, and there is the promise of snapshotting in future releases.

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It's no secret that Chrome for Mac (OS X) is a mess. It eats a ridiculously high amount of memory, energy and shortens the battery life. Google announced earlier this year that it was working on a fix. And now it is delivering on that promise. The latest Chrome build -- available via Canary channel -- is significantly less resource hogging, and surprisingly faster at the same time.

The company has been hard at work improving the memory consumption in its Web browser while also making the tabs snappier. You can read about the development process and feedback at Chromium's developer website. The build dubbed 45.0.2454.46 is also significantly lighter on the battery and is no longer making the laptop crazy hot. In a recent build, the company was testing interesting internal processes like tab discarding in the background. The idea behind it is simple: make the tabs you haven't used in awhile idle automatically. This would, under the typical condition, free up a significant amount of memory.

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It's a little while since Google and Twitter announced a partnership that saw the integration of tweets into search results. When this feature started to roll out back in May, Twitter integration only applied to iOS and Android devices. Today it rolls out to desktop search results as well.

The new desktop integration means that it is now possible to search for hashtags, trending topics, and Twitter accounts with a regular Google search. Including real time events in search results is not new for Google, but Twitter integration adds a new dimension.

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The Right to Be Forgotten has proved somewhat controversial. While some see the requirement for Google to remove search results that link to pages that contain information about people that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" as a win for privacy, other see it as a form of censorship.

To fight back, there have been a number of sites that have started to list the stories Google is forced to stop linking to. In the latest twist, Google has now been ordered to remove links to contemporary news reports about the stories that were previously removed from search results. All clear? Thought not...

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Google might have a greater market share when it comes to mobile operating systems, but it is behind Apple on some of the essentials, and it shows.

That is the opinion of Wall Street Journal’s Dan Gallagher, who reflected on the Google vs Apple, Android vs iOS battle, as Google prepares the launch of Android 6.0, named Marshmallow.

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Six years and six updates later, Google's own programming language, Go, has reached version 1.5. Go 1.5 sees Google "removing the last vestiges of C code" from the code base, and the runtime, compiler and linker are now all written in Go rather than C.

Despite a massive overhaul to the code base, Google assures users that Go 1.5 maintains the promise that Go programs will continue to be supported by all subsequent releases. There is also a move towards mobile devices, with ports of the iPhone and iPad architectures and linking to the Go mobile project opening up the possibility of developing for Android and iOS.

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They say lightning never strikes twice, but they're wrong as Google reports that it's lost some data after the power grid serving one of its European data centers suffered four consecutive lightning strikes last Thursday.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) disks in the europe-west1-b zone data center, located in Belgium, suffered I/O errors in the strikes and 0.000001 percent of disks suffered permanent data loss. GCE allows customers to run virtual machines and store data in the cloud.

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Microsoft is pushing Bing heavily in Windows 10. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge, and while you can change this to Google (or any other choice), the process of doing so is far from intuitive -- you can’t simply pick "Google" from a list of options.

Cortana, Microsoft’s built-in personal assistant, is powered by Bing too, which means when you ask her a question she doesn’t immediately know the answer to, she’ll open up your default browser and display a list of results sourced from Microsoft’s search engine. There is a way to get her to use Google instead though, but you won’t find this in any Settings.

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There are significantly more spoken languages than countries, but the problem is that the internet frequently doesn't speak them all, leaving many users out in the cold. There are some ways around that, as both Google and Bing will try and translate things for you.

Now Google News is expanding its language options to become accessible to more of the world. Available languages will now include Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Thai.

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Chrome users who rush to install the latest build of Windows 10 have found that their favorite browser is broken. Build 10525 of Windows 10 prevents Chrome from working properly -- launch the browser and you'll be greeted by a series of notifications saying that plugins have crashed.

Additionally, when attempting to visit any website, all that is displayed is an error message that reads "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. Closing the apps and tabs that you don't need may help by making more memory available". The compatibility issue has been reported to Google so a patch will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime you can use this workaround.

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