In 2005, Google entered into partnerships with other companies and government agencies to improve production and services. Google announced a partnership with NASA Ames Research Center to build up 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of offices and work on research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry.[56] Google also entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company entered into a partnership with AOL of Time Warner, to enhance each other's video search services.

The same year, the company became a major financial investor of the new .mobi top-level domain for mobile devices, in conjunction with several other companies including Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson. In September 2007, Google launched, "Adsense for Mobile", a service for its publishing partners which provides the ability to monetize their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads, and acquired the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi, to "provide people worldwide with direct access to Google applications, and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their mobile devices."

In 2006, Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corp. entered into a $900 million agreement to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site, MySpace.

In 2007 Google, displaced America Online, who had been a NORAD Tracks Santa program sponsor since the year 2000, as a key partner and sponsor of the NORAD Tracks Santa program.[63][64][65] For the 2007 NORAD Tracking Santa season, Google Earth was used for the first time to track Santa Claus in 3-D.[66] During the 2007 NORAD Tracking Santa season, the NORAD Tracks Santa Web site received 10.6 plus million unique visitors from 212 countries and territories. In 2007, the NORAD Tracks Santa program made its presence known on YouTube at the NORADTracksSanta Channel on YouTube as part of the partnership with Google. The 2007 NORAD Tracks Santa infrastructure integration effort, in the words of Google's Official Blog, was, "In 2007, Google became NORAD's official Santa Tracking technology partner and hosted www.noradsanta.org. In addition to tracking Santa in Google Earth, we added a Google Maps tracker and integrated YouTube videos into the journey as well. Now, we had Santa on the map and on 'Santa Cam' arriving in several different locations around the world, with commentary in six different languages. The heavy traffic — several millions of users — put Google's infrastructure to the test, but with some heroic work by our system reliability engineers, the Santa Tracker worked continuously." In December 2008, BBC News interviewed Brian McClendon, engineering director for Google Earth and Google Maps on the NORAD Tracks Santa and Google's partnership and sponsorship as a "win-win" opportunity for everyone.

Google has developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 6 September 2008.

In 2008, Google announced that it was hosting an archive of Life magazine's photographs, as part of a joint effort. Some of the images in the archive were never published in the magazine.The photos are watermarked and originally had copyright notices posted on all photos, regardless of public domain status.