Google Releases Playable PAC-MAN Doodle

Google has released a really cool playable doodle of PAC-MAN to celebrate the game's 30th birthday.

The Google Blog offers all the fun details. "Today, on PAC-MAN's 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it's too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the 'Insert Coin' button or just wait for a few seconds."

Google says it has included all the original sounds and graphics of the original PAC-MAN along with an easter egg for Ms. PAC-MAN.

"We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys)."

Google Launches Encrypted Search Option

Just in time for the weekend and hours-long browsing sessions at home computers, Google's given privacy advocates a gift. This afternoon, the search giant released the encrypted version of Google Search it mentioned after admitting to collecting sensitive data sent over Wi-Fi networks.

A post on the Official Google Blog shared all of the relevant details. Interestingly, the post was written by Evan Roseman, a software engineer, rather than Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, or perhaps Marissa Mayer or even Eric Schmidt.

Still, Roseman explained, "When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you're searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience . . ."

Later, Roseman added, "Today's release comes with a 'beta' label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won't see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don't support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience."

It seems possible that this development will leave Bing and Yahoo looking unsafe to some users. Let us know in the comments section what you make of the encrypted search option, and perhaps (since Google probably won't share much data) some polls and surveys can sort out other people's opinions next week.