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Microsoft Corp. found a new way to lash out at the world’s Google Inc. on Monday, extending the hostilities between two of the most prominent corporations in the technology industry.

Microsoft claimed Google has been misleading customers about the security certification of its suite of software programs for governments.

Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, David Howard, blogged on Monday about a newly unsealed court document that shows that “Google Apps for Government” hasn’t been certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act. Google’s website claims it has, and the company has attested to that in court documents.

“It’s time for Google to stop telling governments something that is not true,” Howard wrote.

The documents are part of a Google lawsuit alleging that it was improperly frozen out of competing for a U.S. Department of Interior contract to build a new e-mail system for 85,000 employees – a contract Microsoft won. A judge earlier sided with Google’s belief that the bidding was rigged to favor Microsoft, and issued a preliminary injunction with the two sides duke it out.

Google insists it’s not deceiving anyone, since a less-robust version of the product has already been certified under FISMA.

“We did not mislead the court or our customers,” the company said in a statement, noting that “Google Apps” received a FISMA clearance in July 2010, and that “Google Apps for Government” is “the same system with enhanced security controls that go beyond FISMA requirements.”

The documents show that Google is in the process of applying for certification for “Google Apps for Government.”

The controversy illustrates the wide range of complaints and tactics Google and Microsoft are using to attack each other. Their enmity has grown as Microsoft encroaches on Google’s search turf and Google goes calling on Microsoft’s customers to sell them programs such as email and word processing.

The maneuvering has ranged from a “gotcha”-type stunt in which Google accused Microsoft in February of copying Google’s search results, to Microsoft – long a target of antitrust complaints – filing its first formal antitrust complaint against a rival by arguing to European authorities that Google is abusing its dominance to freeze out rival services.

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Google famously gives its engineers “20% time,” allowing them one day a week to work on side projects that interest them. That arrangement launched one of the most critical online tools in the Japanese relief effort: Google’s Person Finder, which allows people to search for and post information about missing loved ones.

It never would have happened if a handful of Google developers hadn’t lobbied the company’s top brass to get involved in past crises.

In January 2010, as the devastating Haiti earthquake was unfolding, Google engineer Prem Ramaswami asked products executive Marissa Mayer what the company’s response would be.

“It looks like you just raised your hand,” Mayer responded.

Ramaswami gathered a handful of other similarly minded engineers, who decided to work around the clock to create the first Person Finder page. Just 12 hours after the quake hit, Google launched its landing page.

Google wasn’t the first to tackle the problem of finding missing people. More than a dozen other sites had similar tools — but none of them communicated with one another. If someone was looking for a loved one, they had to log on to multiple sites, each one its own silo.

To untangle the data spaghetti, Google engineers created the “Person Finder interchange format,” a common language for a hub that consolidated all the databases. The small, global team of engineers worked nonstop for three days.

“It was insane watching the product threads,” Ramaswami says. “People would work for 12 hours straight, and as they were falling asleep, they’d hand it off to someone else.”

After the 72-hour hackathon, the consolidated database went live, and sites like CNN.com began to link to it.

The tool quickly caught on, but Ramaswami and his team knew they would have to speed up the process for future disasters. Three weeks after the earthquake, he led a Google group into Haiti for crisis response education.

After five days on the ground, he and his team returned and met with Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to pitch a permanent, dedicated team to disaster relief efforts.

Page and Brin were happy to oblige. The Google Crisis Response Team is now a global unit with a handful of engineers. They are based mostly in Mountain View, Calif., and New York, but others are stationed around the world to ensure 24/7 coverage.

“One of the beautiful things about Google is that this organization is very supportive of this kind of activity,” Ramaswami says. “I work at a very special place. No manager has ever told me that I had a day job.”

The team has made quick improvements to its response: Person Finder was created and launched 72 hours after the Haiti earthquake, within one day of the February 2010 Chile earthquake, and within three hours of the February 2011 New Zealand earthquake.

Japan’s Person Finder tool was available one hour after the quake, the team’s fastest response to date. It now has nearly 250,000 records — more records than all of the previous Person Finder sites combined.

Google’s Crisis Response team launched a new Picasa-based tool for the Japanese crisis. It allows people in emergency shelters to share photos, taken with their mobile phones, of the list of names of those housed at that shelter. The team is in the process of manually adding the names from those photos to Person Finder.

Google has also parked a link on its homepage to a Crisis Response website that includes Person Finder, maps, news updates and a list of relief organizations collecting donations.

Despite their recent successes, Ramaswami says the team is still learning and adapting. For instance, the Person Finder tool launched for the September 2010 floods in Pakistan was a failure: Those most affected by the flood had no Internet access.

For guidance, Google’s team is looking to non-government organizations like the Red Cross that have years of crisis response experience.

“We’re very new to this, but as engineers, we think we can look at it from a completely different angle,” Ramaswami says. “Our end goal is to get information disseminated in a way that can help people. I think Google’s mission fits very nicely with that.”

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Google posted quarterly sales and profit that trumped Wall Street expectations Thursday, boosted by a rebounding advertising market.

The search giant’s net income was $1.96 billion, or $6.06 per share, in the first quarter, up 38% from $1.42 billion from the same period last year.

Excluding one-time charges, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company earned $2.18 billion in the first quarter, or $6.76 per share, up from $1.64 billion a year earlier. That easily beat analysts expectations, which called for earnings of $6.60 per share.

Google’s revenue surged 23% to $6.77 billion. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, which are the advertising sales that Google shares with partners, the company reported sales of $5.06 billion, beating the $4.95 billion in revenue expected by analysts.

Sales were lifted by a recovering advertising market.

More Internet users clicked on ads in the first quarter, Google said. The number of paid clicks on ads served on Google’s Web site and its partner Web sites increased 15% from last year and 5% from the fourth quarter of 2010.

Additionally, “large advertisers have come back in force,” Patrick Pichette, Google’s CFO, said in an earnings call.

Advertisers paid 7% more per click for ads on sites owned by Google and its partners in the first quarter than they did a year ago, though the cost per click was down 4% from the fourth quarter of 2009.

“Google performed very well in the first quarter,” said Pichette in a statement. “Going forward, we remain committed to heavy investment in innovation — both to spur future growth in our core and emerging businesses as well as to help build the future of the open web.”

0:00 /0:50Google’s new things

The number of Google employees also grew during the quarter. The company employed 20,621 full-time employees as of March 31, 2010, up nearly 800 from Dec. 31, 2009.

“We expect to continue hiring aggressively throughout the year,” Pichette said in the earnings call. “Now that this infrastructure is in place, you can expect to see us continue to invest heavily in this form.”

Due to an ongoing dispute about government censorship of its search engine, Google announced last month that it would pull out of its mainland China office and operate an uncensored version of its site in Hong Kong.

To ease worries about the impact this decision may have on business, Pichette told investors that leaving mainland China was the “right call” and wouldn’t affect future sales.

The decision “clearly has us staying in China; we have just changed our strategy,” he said. “What we’ve really done is, we’ve stopped censoring, but the access to Google is still available.”

While Google declined to disclose details about the sales of its Nexus One phone, introduced in January, the company acknowledged that it has been “a profitable business.”

“We’re very happy with the device uptake and the kind of impact this has had on the industry,” said Jeff Huber, senior vice president for engineering.

Huber added that Google is seeing more than 60,000 Android smartphones sold and activated daily.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission was reportedly preparing to challenge Google’s merger with mobile advertising giant AdMob on grounds that it would violate antitrust laws.

In response to the accusation, Pichette said Thursday that the mobile advertising industry is “incredibly competitive” but that Google is working with the FTC and is “very positive about making this transaction happen.”

Google agreed to buy AdMob, which provides display advertising technology for mobile Internet sites, for $750 million last November.

No more Schmidt: Pichette announced that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will no longer be participating in the company’s earnings calls.

However, he said investors should not read into this decision.

“Eric is everywhere, he’s very public,” said Pichette. “The fact that we’ve decided to streamline our process just for earnings doesn’t mean that [Eric] is not available.”

Despite the company’s positive first quarter results, shares of Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) were down more than 4% in after hour trading.

Investors will be eyeing Google’s competitors Yahoo! (YHOO, Fortune 500) and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), which are scheduled to announce their first quarter earnings results next week. To top of page

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