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Hoping to attract talented Chinese programmers to Google Inc.’s planned research and development center in Beijing, the company said Monday it will host a programming competition, called the Google China Code Jam.

Joining the herd of Web sites jostling to cash in on the holiday shopping season, online search engine leader Google Inc.em> is adding a tool designed to make it easier for consumers to map out their local trips to the mall.

Google Inc. is giving $3 million to the U.S. Library of Congress to help set up a system for creating digital copies of rare documents from around the world – the latest step in Google’s crusade to expand the amount of information that can be indexed by its Internet-leading search engine.

An equipment failure knocked out access to the Google search engine for Internet users on the West Coast of the United States early Thursday, a company spokesperson confirmed. Sporadic outages began around midnight Wednesday, Pacific time, and were the result of a piece of malfunctioning network hardware.

Google Print Unveils Collection of Public Domain Books from Libraries at University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, and the New York Public Library