The search engine is taking its quest for knowledge offline at a secluded British hotel

Latest development to emerge from the 'Google X' laboratory

US Outlook Waiting for Google's quarterly figures to land in your inbox is a bit like going to press the "I'm feeling lucky" button on the search engine's website. Usually, you get just the result you were hoping for. But sometimes, like this week, you get a very disappointing surprise.

It all started with a search engine, albeit a near-ubiquitous one, but Google soon became known for dipping its fingers in a great many pies, pervading almost every aspect of modern life with its vast range of apps and services.

Google is to face an in-depth investigation which will seek to establish whether it has abused its dominance of the internet search market.

What do escalators, asprin and yo-yos have in common? They're all victims of 'genericide'. Rhodri Marsden explores the perils of ubiquity for products – and the complex legal battle it provokes

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google for the past 10 years, made a public mea culpa for the company's failure to crack social networking, and for its ceding control of swaths of the internet to Facebook.

A Russian Larry Page?

The view from the Google campus at Mountain View changes all the time. Co-founder Larry Page now takes the reins as CEO from Eric Schmidt, who guided student wizards Page and Sergey Brin along the way towards a monster corporation.

The co-founder of Google faces a heavyweight fight with federal regulators as he steps into his new role

Very few of the first British pop stars had a sultry, moody image: like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, they were eager to please. In Cliff Richard's band, the Shadows, though, there was a skilled and cantankerous bass player, Jet Harris. His presence gave them a rough edge and Harris continued with this persona, which was the real thing, once he was sacked from the group and had become a solo star.

US Outlook: Has Google just picked the wrong chief executive? Eric Schmidt, the Silicon Valley veteran who has been Obi-Wan to Larry Page's Luke Skywalker for the past decade, declared on Twitter that it was a case of "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" I'm not sure he is right about that. Without proper oversight, Larry Page could turn out to be the great squanderer of shareholders' money.

So now we have a definition of the acceptable face of banking, courtesy of none other than Lord Mandelson.

He will never make a showman. But as Google's co-founder steps up to be its CEO, can he display the business nous to match his genius as an inventor?