Google Acquires Security Company, GreenBorder

Googlified reports that Google has acquired GreenBorder Technologies, an online security company, on May 11, 2007.

Ionut adds that GreenBorder protects against virus, spyware, and trojan threats by watching the Internet session from the rest of the PC and earlier Internet sessions. If GreenBorder protects an application, the application would be highlighted in green.

It is possible that Google may use their technologies to detect sites with these threats and display more advanced malware warnings in the future.

Google Registers ClimateSaverPC.com: Signs Of New Google PC Coming?

Gary Price notes, as does Garett Rogers at Googling Google, that Google now owns the domain climatesaverpc.com. Garett speculates that Google may be thinking about building and selling personal computers that are green friendly, i.e. are climate and earth savers.

We know Google has been active in environmental issues, though it has repeatedly stated to have no plans to sell hardware.

Google Launches 'Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR)'

As promised at its "Searchology" event last week, Google has launched cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). It's now been added as a new feature to Google Translate and went live yesterday.

As Chris Sherman previously wrote, Google is playing a bit of catch-up with this initiative; Yahoo has been doing this on a more limited basis since 2005. Regardless, it appears to be a useful service, chiefly for non-English speakers seeking information from English-language sites.

As Google Engineering VP Udi Manber said, when he introduced the service last week, the goal is to open up the Web "universally to the whole world." And although it works from 12 non-English languages into English, there's also reciprocal functionality allowing English speakers to translate non-English pages. In other words, I can now search for hotels in Paris on French-language pages or bars in Moscow from Russian sources.

The languages currently supported are: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified). The service is based on automated (machine) language translation and native speakers or those conversant enough in the non-English tongue will undoubtedly find awkward translations. But it's a helpful tool (especial the side-by-side presentation of results) to compare pages. In addition to the new Search Results translation feature, Google Translate continues to offer its long-standing Text and Web translation (again like Yahoo's Babelfish), so it can equally be used as a foreign-language dictionary.

Here's the official Google Blog Post explaining the service, Search without Boundaries.

Microsoft: We Don't Need Yahoo (Now), aQuantive Deal 'More Of A Merger'

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) ran an article quoting Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, who made the following statements at a Goldman Sachs Internet conference:

"Yahoo has a great business. Kudos to them, but we're bigger globally. We have half a billion people . . . I still don't think it's the end of inning one. Google is a good product and a good brand, and you can't just match that. You have to do something big and bold and different. Nobody's really done that yet."

The article goes on:

As for advertisers, the aQuantive deal will help Microsoft get to hundreds of thousands of advertisers -- like Google -- from its current level of about 50,000, he said. Targeted advertising in display is the exploding market, compared with search-based advertising, he said, and aQuantive has the technology to be a major player in the targeted display placement market.

Mehdi said that the company's assets and those from aQuantive would permit Microsoft, among other things, to begin to offer "integrated" display and search campaigns.

Regarding the aQuantive acquisition and the staggering purchase price SEW's Kevin NewcombSeattle PI post that documents an exchange between Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Group, and the audience at a JP Morgan technology conference. In that speech, Berkowitz describes the aQuantive buy as "more of a merger": points to a

"I look at it more as a merger. ... There are certain acquisitions you acquire to look at and say, 'OK great, there's lots of cost synergies, and how are you going to do that.' We look at the aQuantive acquisition as one of revenue opportunity and relationship opportunity. ... We didn't have a strong publisher-facing relationship. ... We have a very strong advertiser connection but we didn't have the tools for the advertisers. So we look aQuantive as an additive, or more of a merger of businesses, and that for us is really exciting, because it's getting us into places we weren't in before."

It very much remains to be seen whether aQuantive fills in all the blanks for Microsoft and justifies some of Mehdi's assessments. While it definitely enhances the company's advertising and client servicing capabilities; it clearly doesn't help the company in terms of search market share or brand.

Ad & Subtract (Google Announces Purge of Ad-Heavy Websites)

Google is trying to clean up its search results by cracking down on dubious Web sites that contain little content but lots of ads. The search giant has notified a number of Web publishers in the last few days that they will be dropped from its popular "AdSense" program starting June 1.

The cut-off notices jolted the online ad world, where hundreds of thousands of people make money in exchange for allowing Google to place ads on their Web sites. Google's AdSense software has made it easy for advertisers to piggyback on any Web site - no matter how obscure - that attracts an audience. For example, on a travel Web site, Google's AdSense will automatically serve up relevant travel-related ads on that site. Web site publishers then get paid each time a visitor clicks on one of the ads supplied by Google.

The easy money has led to a rise in "made-for-AdSense" Web pages that critics say clutter up the Internet and divert online searches. These content-free sites, which often are nothing more than links to other sites and a bunch of Google ads, exist solely to exploit AdSense. "The economy has built up to game the Google system," said Darren Chervitz, the director of research for Jacob Asset Management.

Web site publishers do it by pocketing the difference between what they pay Google to drive traffic to their site and the amount they get for running Google ads. For instance, a publisher can bid on a cheap search term, say, "purple raincoat" so that its site purporting to be about raingear is displayed each time someone searches for the term on Google. The publisher may pay a nickel to Google each time someone clicks on the link to their Web site, which may be nothing more than a picture of a purple raincoat. The publisher makes money if, on average, they collect a dime each time a user then clicks on one of the Google-supplied AdSense ads. Although Google still makes money off of these sites, they don't like them because they hurt the quality of search results and reduce the "click through" rate for advertisers. "If advertisers get a bad return on their investment, they will stop spending money," said Jeremy Schoemaker, an AdSense expert who runs the popular ShoeMoney.com blog.

Search experts said Google routinely cuts off publishers who run afoul of AdSense rules, but they believe this latest round of notices was a more widespread effort to clean up its ad network. "I don't really remember where this many people reported it at one time," said Chris Winfield, president of Internet search marketing firm 10e20.

Google confirmed that it had sent out notices, but characterized it as part of an ongoing review. "In some cases, violations of our program policies will result in termination from AdSense," Google said in a statement.

Google defends data policy

Google will tell Brussels it needs to hold on to users' search data for up to two years for security and commercial reasons after being warned it could be violating European privacy laws by doing so.

The world's top Internet search engine on Friday said it would respond by June 19 to a letter from a European Union data protection advisory group expressing concern it was keeping information on users' searches for too long. "The concern of EU law is that a company that collects data on its customers should keep it as long as it is necessary, but not longer," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, told Reuters in a telephone interview. With every search, Google gathers information about a customer's tastes, interests and beliefs that could potentially be used by third parties such as advertisers, but the company stresses it never passes it on.

Google last week received a letter from the Article 29 working party, a group of national advisory bodies that counsels the EU on privacy policy, which asked the company to justify its data retention practices. "I will tell the working party that Google needs to hold on to its log database to protect itself and the system from attacks and refine and improve the effectiveness of our search results," Fleischer said. He said Google, at its own initiative, had decided in March to limit the time it kept engine search information to between 18 and 24 months. The company previously had no set time limit. He called on rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft to clarify their data retention practices and policies. "Will the working party focus on other players in the industry?" Fleischer asked.