All Google All the Time

(MoneyWatch)  It now requires a determined effort to not mention Google on a daily basis, because the company is generating so much news it could easily justify a "Google Watch Blog" in English to complement the existing one in German.
Today, for example, there at least six news items worth mentioning about Google.

1. Google has cut its retention time for user logs in half, from 18 months to nine months. User IP addresses are anonymized at that point, a key step in protecting user privacy. This move comes in response to regulatory concerns in the European Union.

2. The U.S. Department of Justice has hired litigator Sanford Litvack to investigate filing an anti-trust case against Google for its advertising partnership with Yahoo this year.

3. Google says it plans to launch 16 low-orbit satellites by the end of next year, with the goal of extending Internet service to 3 billion people living with 5 degrees of the equator in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

4. The search giant is intensifying efforts to digitize old newspapers so they can be accessed online. Google already has been working with the New York Times and Washington Post on this project, but now is expanding to include smaller papers, including the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which at 244 years and counting is North America's oldest surviving newspaper.

5. Google and NBC are partnering to expand Google's ad technology for television. Although at first the search company will only have access to a fraction of NBC's inventory, the television industry is watching with keen interest to see if Google can provide targeted advertising on a media platform that is increasingly splintering into niche programming channels.

6. Despite all of this positive activity, the company's stock is getting hammered on the New York Stock Exchange today. As of this writing it is below $419/share, its lowest point since spring, 2005. Maybe investors continue to doubt that the hiccups in online ad revenue during the first two quarters this year are indicative of a longer term slowdown. Or maybe Google has gotten so big and diverse in its business activities that analysts and investors can no longer figure out where the company is headed?