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Today, Google (GOOG) pulled off a real hat trick, as the company and its partners announced three major deals that shook up everything from GPS technology to smartphones and cloud computing. What's next, Google, smart-grid tech? Actually, that's not so far-fetched.

New York Times scribe Saul Hansell has an interesting story today on the rise of Android, the Google (GOOG) smartphone operating system that is ever-so-slowly eating into the client base for Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile system. Android, Hansell claims, has a number of substantial advantages over Windows Mobile. For one thing, it's free whereas Windows Mobile costs between $15 and $25 to install.

And Microsoft (MSFT) got there first. At the Web 2.0 conference this week, company execs announced that they had cut a deal with both Facebook and Twitter to start searching tweets and Facebook status updates, incorporating them into Bing's search results. PC World reports that you can already try Bing's new all-Twitter search service by clicking here.

Not that we feel too sorry for a company that's sitting on more than $20 billion in cash, but Google (GOOG) has stumbled into a new hornet's nest vis a vis its massive Google Book Search project. This time, it's in China.

Once again, everyone's favorite search engine saw Wall Street's bet and raised it, beating analysts' expectations when it announced its third-quarter numbers today. Wall Street figured Google (GOOG) would post revenue of $4.23 billion; instead, Bloomberg reports, the company hit $4.38 billion. The most impressive number came from its net income, which rose to $1.64 billion, an astonishing 27 percent gain over this time last year.

Google (GOOG) is moving full speed ahead on its remarkable Google Voice service, strongly suggesting that its users invite their friends and family to give the feature a whirl. If you use Google Voice, soon a friendly note will pop into your account, offering a quick and easy way to nag your friends into setting up accounts of their own.

After Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's (AAPL) board of directors, it was perhaps inevitable that this would happen. This morning, Google (GOOG) announced that Arthur Levinson, the Genentech chairman who sits on the boards of both Apple and Google, would end his tenure as director of the search giant.

Yesterday, Google (GOOG) alpha dogs Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin took the extraordinary step of being available to the press. Specifically, they showed up at the company's New York office and sat down for a 90-minute interview with reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and Search Engine Land, among others. Everything was on the table; no topic was taboo. And how did our esteemed colleagues respond? Churlishly, of course.

Yes, Google (GOOG) is supposedly reinventing online communication with its new Google Wave. And yes, it supposedly integrates every interesting and useful feature thought up by Twitter, Facebook, and every other next-generation communication tool out there. And yes, people around the world are desperately begging to be one of the 100,000 invited to beta-test the new service. But what does it actually do?