ReadWriteWeb

Microsoft confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this morning that the formal competition law complaint it filed this morning with the European Commission is against both Motorola Mobility (MMI) and Google, its would-be parent company. The office of the EC's Competition office confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this morning it has received Microsoft's complaint and will review it in due course, but will not yet release a copy to the public due to court rules.

Today's move marks perhaps the final step in Microsoft's spectacular transformation from the de facto force of evil in all matters of intellectual property, to the champion of the oppressed and the standard bearer of the people. Wearing the black hat now is Google, which just two years ago considered a bold solution to the video patents problem: open sourcing the technology and dare others to sue.

Last year, Google added a new category of in-house search results for domestic U.S. flights to Google.com on the desktop. They're now available on mobile as well. It will take you all the way to checkout, but you can't buy tickets directly through Google. Yet.

Google acquired ITA Software, a flight info software company, for $700 million in 2010. ITA powers airline websites as well as booking services like Orbitz and Kayak. Google keeps buying up experts in different search verticals, just like it did with Zagat for restaurant reviews, to keep users on Google for online transactions from end to end.

The design of the search page on Google.com is one of the most iconic in the Web's history, but it's in the midst of major changes. Google has redefined itself with Google+. Its notion of Web search as an index of pages has grown to include people, places and things. In addition to the search box, the page now has a share box. It takes great design to introduce all these new features and interactions to Google's hundreds of millions of users.

At the same time, smartphones and tablets are changing the way users interact with the Web, and Google has to make that leap along with them. It has to strike a delicate balance between simplicity, consistency and usefulness. Fortunately, Google's hundreds of millions of users provide mountains of data its designers can use to guide their decisions. I sat down with Jon Wiley, lead designer of Google Search since 2010, to learn more about how Google pushes its user experience forward.

Google is trying to get developers interested in Dart with a technology preview of the Dart VM in Chromium, better known as Dartium. The plan is ultimately to include the Dart VM in Chrome itself, but no timeline has been given yet for that.

Google has been pushing pretty hard to move Dart forward. The company released a Rosetta Stone for JavaScript programmers called Dart Synonym at the beginning of February. However, developers have had to compile Dartium from source or find unofficial builds to test the code.

Google's having a down moment in the press. It can't catch a break. Every public, top-level decision it's made recently is either the end of "Don't Be Evil" or impossibly optimistic. After all, "Giant Company Falls From Grace" is the kind of headline industry reporters dream of writing, so we pounce on any scrap of evidence.

But lord knows tech news is an echo chamber. A successful meme like "Google sucks" tends to amplify. It's easy to laugh at blustery executive statements and paint a whole picture of Google's decline. But, surprise surprise, things are more complicated than what you read on the blogs.

It pays to be mobile, if you want to reach the last-minute planners. According to Google 62% of restaurant related searches on Valentine's Day were from "high end mobile devices or tablets."

Something to think about for restaurants or other businesses that don't have mobile-friendly sites.

YouTube is announcing more Google+ integration today. You can now prominently promote their Google+ profiles on your YouTube channel alongside other social feeds. You can also share videos and playlists by other users, as well as text comments, to your channel using a "Channel Bulletin."

Today's update also changes YouTube's new homepage and channel pages in response to feedback. Video titles are now more prominent, aggregated events offer an easier way to see more videos, and adding videos to playlists is cleaner. The annotations editor is also improved, with a full color palette, styles and an easier-to-use timeline.

If you think the smartphone you own today makes you more worldly, more cosmopolitan, then take a good look at this five-color geopolitical world map as perceived by BrowserRank.com. Using data compiled from StatCounter's latest projections of mobile operating system usage country-by-country (the firm detects browser usage, and then backtracks from there to decipher mobile OS), BrowserRank paints most of the world cyan. Cyan, it turns out, is for Symbian.

This week, Google improved search results for health-related queries. When it detects that you're searching for symptoms of illness, it displays a list of new search queries for health conditions that might be related. Google now crawls the Web and gathers health information from articles, producing this list algorithmically.

Clicking an item in this list sends you to a new search for that health condition with the Web results below. Google used to keep its own Google Health database for users to track their health and medical records, but it shuttered that program last year. Google has rolled up many types of searches into its own properties, but in the case of health, it has decided to do things the old Google way and let the Web handle it.

Google+ updated the Circles interface to make it easier to find people. The snazzy HTML5 circle controls now shrink down for smaller screens. The page now has a new left sidebar like the circles menu on the main Google+ page but with a few more options for managing circles.

The page now has a tab for the people who have you in their circles, as well as a tab for finding people on Google+ from Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, or you can upload your address book. The "Find People" tab also suggests related people or pages to follow. It's essential for a social network to help new users discover fun stuff to do, and Google+ is really cranking on this problem lately.