WebProNews

The blogosphere is abuzz with speculation about the seemingly imminent release of a Google payment service, hitherto in rumor beta as "Google Wallet" and now known as "Google Purchase," as fine-tooth combers notice some curious directory and domain activity. Oh yeah, and somebody has a screen shot.

The initial buzz, pointed out on blogs everywhere came when SearchEngineWatch's Gary Price pointed out that Google has modified its robots.txt file disallowing spider crawls of two subdirectories labeled "/purchases," and "/gwt." This is the same behavior that occurred before last week's launch of Google Reader.

Google Rumors and Shyam Prasad have both managed to capture screenshots after logging into the Google Accounts page at http://www.google.com/purchases, an avenue that appears to be only half paved, as of yesterday.

Tony Ruscoe conducted a subdomain investigation and was able to locate purchase.google.com last week, as well as few other interesting subdomain redirects to google.com. His list also includes fusion.google.com, locale.google.com, relay.google.com, and sandbox.google.com.