Google gives the world a little Halloween treat this year by making classic scary stories searchable online. They’ve gathered a number of spooky classic tales, including Dr. Jecklyl and Mr. Hyde, as well as Dracula, The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, Frankenstein and more, and put them all up on a special page for easy access.

Just go to www.google.com/scarystories, where you will find 26 classic scary titles. Here you are able to search and view the full-text of these stories. Additionally, a number of stories with a little “download” button next to them will allow you to download a PDF version of the book so that you can print it out and read it at your own leisure.

If you find a title that you’d like to buy, Google Books makes it easy for you to find available hard copies.

Over the past few years, Google has been pumping out product after product, most of which are still in “Beta” stage at the time they are released. Eric Schmidt admits that Google has been so aggressive in introducing “a blizzard” of new products that “it’s confusing to almost everyone.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is leading an initiative to see fewer products launched, but with more features. The concern is that with so many new offerings, “You’ll have to search for our products before you can find them,” Brin said.

Could this mean that Google will start releasing things NOT in Beta stage, but rather in a final fully functional version? I’d say, don’t count on it just yet. While they may slow down the release of new products, they’ll probably still be Beta products.

Personally, I think this is a good move by them, and it shows that they are maturing as a company. Many people don’t know even half of Google’s product offerings, and they could afford to spend more time getting the word out about them to people other than just us techies and librarians.

According to TechCrunch, Google is in talks with YouTube, finalizing an acquisition deal that would put YouTube in the hands of Google for a mere $1.6 billion dollars. So why would either party be interested in such a deal? Google has about $10 billion in cash on hand, while YouTube has significantly less, and is quickly burning through its stash with extrodinarily high bandwidth bills each month. YouTube also has a massive audience that Google’s advertisers would l-o-v-e to tap into via AdWords. Such advertising would also significantly increase profits for Google, as well as investor confidence in the company.

Other reasons for Google’s interest YouTube include wanting to keep it out the hand’s of its competitors, who have expressed interest in acquiring the company in the not-so-distant past. Viacom, News Corp., Yahoo, and Microsoft are all said to be interested in YouTube.

Google already has a video service, dubbed “Google Video,” which ranks third amongst the major online video services. It is unclear if this acquisition occurred, whether Google Video and YouTube would meld together into one, or remain seperate entities.

Neither Google or YouTube has confirmed or denied the rumors. The rumors apparently came from a reliable, undisclosed source who contacted Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame.

The newest member of Google Labs, Google’s playground for new ideas, is Code Search, an ambitious project that aims to index billions and billions of lines of code.

Code search gives users the ability to search for publicly accessible soruce code. According to Google, source code lives in two ways on the internet: in things like zip files and gzip, or in software control repositories such as SourceForge, Google’s code hosting, and other places. They aim to index source code found in all of those places.

Google won’t just be indexing the zip file, but they’ll also be opening it up, unzipping it, and indexing all the individual files within in it.

The regular Googlebot crawler is being updated to recognize these zip files, and although they are unable to give an exact figure, Google says that Code Search already contains billions of lines of code. Such a staggering number makes you wonder how easily this code will even be able to be searched. But fear not, the smart people at Google have set it up so that Code Search can be searched by software license, programming language, and by file name. With all three of those in place, you should be able to find the code that you are looking for. Users may also search by regular expressions and patterns of words.

Launching alongside Code Search is the Code Search API, which will allow coders and programmers to further extend the project.

There will be no AdSense ads in the Code Search results, at least at first, and the results will not show up in regular Google searches.

Some potential uses of Google code is for developers to look and see where there code is being used. This may help to combat plagerism and software license use infractions.

Most of the code indexed by Google is open-source, and they believe that very little of it is proprietary since it is all posted in public places. However, with anything, there does remain the possibility that some people may post other people’s code illegally. Therefore, there may be some proprietary content included in the Code Search index. Luckily though, they have created a way for such instances to be reported so that they can be removed from the index.

You can access Code Search directly at http://www.google.com/codesearch,via the Google Labs page, or by clicking “Advanced Search” on the Google web search.