SiliconValleyWatch reports on a slight change of tack by Google. We were expecting the long-awaited launch of GBuy, a PayPal lookalike or even “killer”, but instead we’re given Google Checkout:

Google has launched Google Checkout, a payment system for online retailers that’s tightly integrated with Google AdWords. Checkout isn’t the rumored PayPal killer, but it does offer some compelling features for both merchants and online shoppers alike. … In fact, Google Checkout is simply an extension of technology the company has developed internally for its AdWords, Base, Picasa and other services.

Salar Kamangar, VP of Product Management at Google said, “There are more and more reasons for users to do transactions for Google products. We wanted to generalize that experience. It’s not about a universal wallet; it’s about making the checkout process streamlined with the fewest number of steps.”

Why is Google consistently underlaunching on its seed PR these days?

Yesterday’s entry in Google’s Official Blog was an announcement about the new Google Book Search beta which allows you to not just search for a book, you can search for a specific line of text from a book.

From the Google Book Search site:

When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we’ll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you’ll see the Snippet View which, like a card catalog, shows information about the book plus a few snippets - a few sentences of your search term in context. You may also see the Sample Pages View if the publisher or author has given us permission or the Full Book View if the book is out of copyright. In all cases, you’ll also see ‘Buy this Book’ links that lead directly to online bookstores where you can buy the book.

In addition to the search site Google has also launched an attached blog which features interesting tidbits related to Google Book Search.

Google Book Search Home Page

Google Book Search Official Blog

Today Google has launched six new personalized home page editions. These new pages are for readers in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand.

Google has included many great features including their gadget for the World Cup, which will allow football (soccer here in the states) fans to follow scores, standings and schedules for their favorite team.

All the other standard features you have come to expect from your personalized Google Home Page are featured as well including news, weather, GMail and your favorite RSS feeds.

The Google Toolbar has been available for Internet Explorer for quite some time. I use it more than any other browser accessory, by far. On March 28th Google added the Google Toolbar extension for Firefox to its list of available Firefox extensions. For me this was the final step in my move to Firefox as my default browser.

This makes a total of four Firefox extensions available from Google, all of which are extremely useful. Here is the list with basic descriptions from their respective sites:

The Google Toolbar allows you to search web pages faster and safer thanks to its many features. Among those features are Enhanced Search Box, Google Safe Browsing, WordTranslator, Subscribe to Feed, Send with Gmail for Gmail users, Custom Layouts and many more.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox, the newest addition, is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

Google Send to Phone for Firefox is an extension that enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. For example, you might text message yourself a phone number, an address, or directions that you find on the Web.

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.

All of these extensions are available from Google’s Firefox Extensions Home Page.