SEO News & Updates

Google Maps Further Expands Coverage now in PAKISTAN

2007-09-17T20:06:00.000+05:00

Google announced expanded Maps coverage of Latin American and Asian countries on its LatLong blog. Recently added countries include:

Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen

Beyond the basic mapping coverage, Google has been relying heavily on My Maps (user and third party content) for data in countries where structured local data and business databases don't exist or are otherwise hard to acquire. In that regard, the company has reported significant contributions from users in many such situations (see., e.g., Hotels Moscow).

I was recently in Northern Europe (where one would expect good coverage) but was still pleasantly surprised so see how well it worked there for maps and directions, as well as local business information.

Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday

2007-09-17T20:05:00.000+05:00

The AFP has clearly been waiting for September 15, so it could trot out today's "Google is 10 years old" story. But the company itself doesn't count tomorrow as its 10th birthday. In fact, knowing exactly when Google's birthday is depends on your point of view. Some milestones to consider below, which make Google as old as 12 and as young as 9. Plus, more special Google birthday logos.

Google The 12 Year Old
January 1996

This is when Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on BackRub, what later become Google. Use this month, and Google is 12 years old.

Google The 10 Year Old
Sept. 15, 1997

This is when, as the AFP reports, Google registered google.com.

Google The 9 Year Old
Sept. 7, 1998

This is when Google officially incorporated.

Google The 9 Year Old
Sept. 27, 1998 (Current Official Date)

Back in 2005, Google declared that Sept. 27 was its birthday. But wait -- what happened with that Sept. 7 date? Well, in 2005, Yahoo came along and freaked Google out by announcing an index that was larger than Google's. It had been ages since anyone did that. Quite a debate ensued, and I did a long write-up about it then.

Things got resolved by Google doing some PR. They announced that for their "birthday," they'd gotten bigger -- but were also dropping the count of pages from the home page, which helped (thankfully) defuse the size wars that often meant nothing about search quality.

It's Their Party, They'll Party When They Want To!

So there you have it -- Google's birthday is whenever it wants to be. Indeed, back in 2006, the When is Google's birthday? page in Google help was changed to say:

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google's history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

Previously, it had said:

Google's official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we're just getting started. To discover more about Google's history, please visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

Google Birthday Logos

How about those special birthday logos? Google's been putting them up consistently since 2002. The first year, it happened on September 27, then shifted to September 7, then back to September 27 from 2005 onward. I'd expect to see a special ninth birthday logo showing up on the 27th of this month.

4th Birthday: 2002

Celebrated on September 27th, 2002.

5th Birthday: 2003

Celebrated on September 7th, 2003.

6th Birthday: 2004

Celebrated on September 7th, 2004.

7th Birthday: 2005

Celebrated on September 27th, 2005.

8th Birthday: 2006

Celebrated on September 27th, 2006.

Google Launching Presently Presentation App Next Week?

2007-09-17T20:03:00.000+05:00

PowerPoint haters unite! So, Techcrunch says that The Inquirer says that Google is thiiiiiiiis close to launching Presently, a web-based alternative to PowerPoint. With consulting firm CapGemini now pushing Google Apps hard, can we finally say goodbye to Microsoft’s Office Suite?

Some speculate that the app will be unveiled next week at TechCruch 40 (formerly TechCrunch 20, but I guess the start up life is going well). After all, Google is on the list of Who’s Coming, as is rival Microsoft Corporation. Interestingly, the speaker that caught our attention is MC Hammer. Yes, folks, The Hammer.

If the Presently rumor is true, Searcharazzi suggests that they scrap the current keynote and have The Hammer, Marissa Mayer and Michael Moritz put on a little show of "U Can't Touch This" for the Microsoft team. Ye-ouch!

Google has officially acquired Postini

2007-09-17T20:02:00.000+05:00

As of today, Postini becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, and we couldn’t be happier about it. (Here's the FAQ.) Since July 9, when we announced the agreement to acquire Postini, plenty of businesses have told us how much they respect Postini and how the acquisition makes sense for customers of both companies.

We view this as welcome news, but also a sign of things to come. With the more than 100,000 businesses on Google Apps, 35,000 businesses and more than 10 million users of Postini products, we see great potential on both sides. We're committed to continue to deliver the type of innovative and useful business products our customers have come to expect. And we plan to announce even more product offerings in the very near future.

Separately, both companies shared a vision for what the world of hosted applications can become for businesses of all sizes. Together, we look forward to achieving it.

Google denies ownership of users' words

2007-09-17T20:00:00.000+05:00

Google has denied suggestions that the terms and conditions for its Google Docs & Spreadsheets service mean that it owns any user's content published in the application.

Google Docs is part of the Google Apps platform, which offers a Web-based calendar, e-mail and document management system, and allows users to publish and share documents. Google recently announced a partnership with global consulting firm Capgemini to promote its services to the corporate sector, which has remained an elusive market for the service.

The controversy centers on Google's use of the word "public" in its terms and conditions for Google Docs.

One clause states, "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services."

In response to the concerns raised, Google Australia issued a statement, which reads, "We don't claim ownership or control over content in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, whether you're using it as an individual or through Google Apps.

"Read in their entirety, our terms of service ensure that, for documents you expressly choose to share with others, we have the proper license to display those documents to the selected users and format documents properly for different displays. To be clear, Google will not use your documents beyond the scope that you and you alone control. Australians' work documents and (soccer-oriented spreadsheets) are not going to end up shared with anyone unless the user expressly wants them to be!"

Concern about the subject initially was raised in a blog posted on August 28 by ZDNet's Joshua Greenbaum, who said: "I know that user agreements are typically ignored by most users, but anyone in the corporate world who ignores this risks seeing their IP in a Google marketing campaign, or worse." ZDNet is owned by News.com publisher CNET Networks.

A Google Australia representative responded that "CNET wrongly claimed if content was published using Google Docs, that Google had the right to publish that for marketing purposes. We have no right to share or publish that, unless you're intending to publish that yourself."

Public or private?
Matt Asay, general manager of open-source content management vendor Alfresco and a member of the CNET Blog Network, also questioned Google's use of the word "public," suggesting that its interpretation would ultimately be determined during litigation.

"Is it private, if I share (content) with my company?" Asay asked in a blog posted on August 30. "Maybe. Is it private, if I share it with my family? Maybe. It's an open question, and guess who decides? Google (or, ultimately, a court), not you. Why? Because the system doesn't provide a way to define what is private and what is public."

Asay suggested that rather than amending its terms and conditions, Google should offer users a "make this public" option in the interface to ensure that the intended meaning of public and private is communicated.

David Vaile, executive director at the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia, said Google should give a clear and explicit definition of what is "public," and also offer an interface that lets users control the attribute on a page-by-page basis and reminds them of this status.

Now on News.com

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Highlighting potential for the term "public" to be contested, Vaile said it can be construed in different ways, depending on the legal context. For example, in a defamation case, for it to be deemed "public," only one other person needs to hear of it or become aware of it. "It doesn't necessarily need to be in a public place, but it is beyond you and the subject you were referring to."

However, Vaile said Google should be credited for its attempt to set out the terms and conditions in plain English.

"A lot (of terms-and-conditions statements) are by lawyers, for lawyers, aimed at litigation rather than communication. You have to give people credit for dealing with a difficult problem--to be clear yet specific enough to cover all the possibilities," Vaile said.

On the other hand, Vaile said Google offers two sets of terms and conditions--a universal set and another for its Google Docs service.

"There seems to be some disconnect between Google's universal terms and that for Google Docs," he noted. "As a question of contractual interpretation, there's some serious legal confusion whether Google's terms of service are meant to be read together or whether the Google Docs terms are meant to read separately...By having two identically named documents, you've created legal confusion, and it breaks best software practice by having multiple documents."

Google calls for web privacy laws

2007-09-17T19:58:00.000+05:00

Google has been attacked for its own privacy policy

Search site Google has called on governments and business to agree a basic set of global privacy rules.

Without global standards the health of the internet was at risk, the firm's privacy chief Peter Fleischer told a UN agency conference in Strasbourg. He said that the rise of the net meant vast amounts of personal data was now regularly shipped around the globe.

That information often passed through countries with insufficient or no data protection laws, he said. "Every time a person uses a credit card their information may cross six or seven national boundaries," Mr Fleischer said before the event.

Hostile past

Three quarters of countries have no privacy rules at all and among those that do, many were largely adopted before the rise of the internet, he said. Europe, for example, has strict privacy regulations, but these rules were set out in 1995, largely before the rise of the commercial internet, he said. In contrast, the United States has no country-wide privacy laws, instead leaving them to individual states or even industries to set up.

"The minority of the world's countries that have privacy regimes follow divergent models," a copy of his speech said. "Citizens lose out because they are unsure about what rights they have given the patchwork of competing regimes."

Google has previously come under repeated fire about its own privacy policies. In June, rights group Privacy International rated the search giant as "hostile" to privacy in a report ranking web firms by how they handle personal data. A month later, the firm said it would change its policies so that its cookies, tiny files stored on a computer when a user visits a website, would auto-delete two years after a user's last visit to its site. Previously they were set to delete in 2038.

Speaking at the Strasbourg Unesco conference, Mr Fleischer called for countries to adopt principles agreed by some Asia-Pacific nations. The APEC guidelines have nine principles that aim to protect the individual and safeguard data collection. They have been accepted by countries ranging from Australia to Vietnam.

"If privacy principles can be agreed in such divergent countries, then we think that is a model for the rest of the world," Mr Fleischer said before the speech.

Yahoo Buys BuzzTracker News Site

2007-09-17T19:56:00.001+05:00

Yahoo is buying news aggregator BuzzTracker (Kara Swisher reports for $5 million). Yahoo sees the acquisition improving and expanding its news coverage in a number of ways. BuzzTracker founder Alan Warms becomes GM of Yahoo News.

Warms' decision to sell to Yahoo, as reported on the Participate Media blog was largely about monetization and scale:

The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple. As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors.

BuzzTracker covers a mix of traditional news outlets and blogs and will augment Yahoo's more traditional news approach. Yahoo News is the leading online news destination in the U.S. according to comScore.

Here's related coverage of the differences between traditional news and user-generated news sites.

Google CFO to retire by year-end

2007-08-29T08:53:00.000+05:00

George Reyes has served as chief financial officer since 2002.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- Google Inc. said Tuesday that George Reyes plans to retire as chief financial officer by the end of the year, and that the company will begin a search for a replacement.

Reyes, 53, has served as CFO of Google (Charts, Fortune 500), the world's leading provider of Web search and online services, since 2002. He helped spearhead the company's initial public offering in August 2004.

Video

CNN & Google Sign Multi-Year AdSense Deal

2007-08-29T08:48:00.001+05:00

Google announced that CNN has partnered with them on a multi-year deal for displaying Google AdSense contextual ads on CNN.com.

Under this deal, "Google will serve as the exclusive provider of auction-based text advertisements throughout CNN.com," according to the press release. AdSense is available to both large and small publishers. However, one would assume that Google is giving CNN a larger share of revenue than a typical AdSense publisher.

Google already powers search on the CNN.com site, though the international version uses Yahoo, as ResourceShelf's Gary Price reminded us of. Yahoo signed a deal with CNN back in 2004 to power search results, but that deal may have expired at some point without notice.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that they now officially support adding non-English domain names to Google Webmaster Central.

2007-08-29T08:46:00.000+05:00

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that they now officially support adding non-English domain names to Google Webmaster Central.

So if you have a domain that looks like http://北京大学.cn, you will be able to add it and very the site in Google Webmaster Tools. Now Google supports Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) within the tool. If you used a workaround in the past, you do not have to update anything. Google will do that for you.

Google buys stake in Chinese social Web site

2007-08-21T13:05:00.000+05:00

SHANGHAI, China (Reuters) -- Google Inc revealed on Monday that it had acquired a stake in Chinese community Web site Tianya.cn, indicating a foray by the global search leader into social networking in the world's second-largest Internet market.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed the stake holding by email, but declined to give further details. Various local media reports on Monday put the estimated size of Google's stake at anywhere from less than 10 percent to up to 60 percent. Other media reports have said Google may be eyeing acquisitions in China.

Google is rushing to close the gap with rival Baidu.com Inc , which dominated the search market in China in the second quarter with a 58.1 percent share, according to research firm Analysys International. Google followed with a 22.8 percent share and Yahoo China with 11.6 percent, Analysys said.

China is the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States, with around 162 million Web users. Venture capital investment in Chinese social networking sites has bloomed since Google bought top online video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion late last year.

In another move to diversify its platform in China, Google -- which recently established an engineering research center in Shanghai -- has also won preliminary approval from Beijing for a licence to provide Internet content in the country.

Baidu recently won approval to do its own reporting rather than simply show news search results, while Google is promoting a Chinese-language map search service and online word processing programs. Both are trying to build online library services.

American Airlines seeks damages from Google

2007-08-21T13:03:00.000+05:00

The airline says it doesn't want to prevent the display of search terms but wants Google to stop selling its trademarks.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- American Airlines, the world's largest airline, said Friday it was seeking damages from Internet search leader Google Inc. for selling search words involving its name.

The dispute relates to Google's practice of selling search terms, such as "American Airlines" or "AA.com," to other companies for advertising.

Video

Google Launches Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

2007-08-18T08:57:00.000+05:00

Google announced the launch of the Google Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

This center will educate both novices and experts on click fraud, Google's prevention methods, what Google considers click fraud, as well as links to other resources to learn more about recent updates on click fraud and traffic quality.

On the Tech Talk page, they link to Google's official blog, Inside AdWords blog plus to Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder's blog and Matt Cutts' blog.

Last week Yahoo launched their Traffic Quality Center.

Fast Search To Fire 148 Employees

2007-08-18T08:53:00.000+05:00

Fast Search & Transfer lets go of 148 employees from Pandia reports that Fast Search and Transfer will be letting 148 employees go this year.

The employees who are being fired are reportedly being compensated for the downsizing. Fast Search & Transfer have reportedly hired 400 employees in 2006 and 2007. The company's CEO, John Markus Lervik, feels the downsizing will help the company improve their overall bottom-line.

Google Hiring Independents To Collect Business Info For Maps

2007-08-08T09:21:00.000+05:00

The Google Local Business Referral Program is an initiative to gather contact, business hours and other information on businesses for listings in Google Maps - where Google is using independent contractors to gather their information. Basically they are paying $10 a confirmed listing.

The information gathering job requires people to sign up for it through their Google accounts and to have access to a digital camera to take a photograph of the business. At $10 an entry organized people could be making $30 plus dollars an hour - great salary for people in lower cost of living communities.

Google Tests New "Show More" & Related Words AdSense Units

2007-08-08T09:20:00.000+05:00

Google AdSense has been busy testing new AdSense units this weekend, with two new formats spotted in the wild.

The first comes via a DigitalPoint Forums thread, where dozens of publishers are noticing related words at the bottom of their normal AdSense units. Here is an image of one ad in action. Notice the related words at the bottom of the ad:

These resemble AdSense link units placed in the bottom of regular text ad units.

The second Google AdSense test is a "show more" link found at the bottom of Google ads. I found this at iBrowseHere.com , and here is a screen shot of it in action.

Clicking on the "Show More" link takes you to a new page with related ads.

In a related now, there was a outage that took down all Google PPA ads over a 24+ hour period this weekend.

Gmail Is Looking For Videos

2007-08-08T09:19:00.002+05:00

Gmail is looking for creative people with a video camera and the Gmail M-velope to help illustrate how an email message travels around the world.

Take a look at the collaborative video they started, and then film what happens next. A selection of the clips will rotate and add the best ones to the video. The final video will be featured on the Gmail homepage and seen by users worldwide.

Yahoo Adds Search Suggestions To Toolbar

2007-08-08T09:19:00.001+05:00

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that downloads of the Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer will now have "as you type" search suggestions functionality.

Yahoo has been on a search suggestion frenzy lately, last month launching search suggestions on Yahoo.com and beta testing Yahoo Search Assist.

It's Not Just Google That Treats Underscores Like Dashes

2007-08-03T08:14:00.000+05:00

Last week's news that Google is now is treating underscores URLs as word separators, as it does with hyphens, quickly spread through the SEOs and webmaster communities. But what about the other search engines?

I immediately contacted them to find out how they treat underscores and hyphens. Finally, the results are in. Yahoo and Microsoft (and now also Ask.com), the other two of the big three, confirmed that they do treat underscores the same as dashes or hyphens in the URL.

Let me step back and explain this a bit more.

Some SEOs believe that the keywords in the URL of a page have some limited impact on the ranking of that page in the search engines. So if you sold blue widgets, and you had a page at www.domain.com/blue-widgets.html, those keywords are sometime perceived to help - while keeping all the other factors in ranking a page equal.

In the past, Google treated hyphens but not underscores in a URL as a word separator. So in our example above, the blue-widgets part would be seen as two different words: blue & widgets.

If it were like this, blue_widgets, then Google would have seen it as one single word: blue_widgets.

Now Google treats underscores the same way as hyphens. As for Microsoft, Ramez Naam told me:

We treat underscores as word separators in URLs. Always have.

Priyank Shanker Garg from Yahoo told me:

For URL tokenization (separating words in URLs), we treat dashes or underscores identically, but these are not our only tokens and we take a more general approach to finding words in URL.

I also asked Ask.com, but they've yet to send a reply.

Postscript: Peter Linsley of Ask.com has now given me a response, they treat underscores as word separators also.

For the record, we also treat underscores as word separators in URLs.

LookSmart CEO David Hills Resigns

2007-08-03T08:13:00.000+05:00

A recent SEC filing reports that LookSmart CEO David Hill announced his resignation on July 26th, to be effective as of yesterday.

LookSmart swiftly appointed Edward F. West, the current chair of its board of directors, to take over for the time being.

LookSmart loses its head from the Australian IT has some more details on the loss, explaining that Hills became the CEO in October 2004. He decided to leave LookSmart to start his own online media advisory services firm.

Edward West, the interim CEO, said:

We are deeply appreciative of Dave's industry experience and contribution to LookSmart during his tenure with the company.
He has guided the company through many challenges and successfully restored the quality and growth of its Advertiser Solutions business.

Here is Mr. West's bio from the SEC filing:

Mr. West is 54 years old and currently serves as Managing Director of Sage Partners LLC, an advisory services firm, where he started a global venture development practice for promising early-stage companies in 2003. Mr. West served as Chief Executive Officer of Colarity Corporation, a customer knowledge management services company, from January 2001 to December 2003. From December 1999 to December 2000, Mr. West served as Chief Executive Officer of RealNames International, the global development subsidiary of RealNames Corporation, an Internet names and navigation platform provider. From May 1998 to December 1999, Mr. West served as Executive Vice President, Business Development, Sales and Marketing, at RealNames Corporation. From January 1996 to April 1998, Mr. West served as Chief Operating Officer of Softbank Interactive Marketing, a provider of marketing services and sales representation to Internet sites seeking interactive advertisers. Mr. West received an A.B. in Architecture/Urban Planning from Princeton University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Hat tip to Gary Price for spotting the SEC filing.

Google hires browser hacking guru

2007-08-01T09:11:00.000+05:00

Google has snapped up one of the sharpest minds in the hacker community, luring Michal Zalewski to help lock down its long list of Internet facing products.

Zalewski, a 26-year-old computer security whiz from Poland, joined the search engine giant about a week ago to work as an Information Security Engineer. He confirmed the move via e-mail but declined to discuss specifics about the new gig.

[SEE: Google’s anti-malware team comes out of the shadows ]

The Zalewski hire is significant on several fronts. It adds a brand-name hacker to Google’s security team (the company has been looking for talent at hacker cons) at a time when it is struggling to cope with gaping holes in its line of products and, in a roundabout way, stops the public release of zero-day browser vulnerabilities.

Zalewski, who has been credited in the past with finding several major vulnerabilities (buffer overflow in SendMail, weaknesses in TCP/IP ISNs, code execution hole in IE’s JPG rendering) has spent most of 2007 releasing details of severe holes in Internet Explorer and Firefox — constantly cracking the browsers’ security models.

In February, Zalewski paid special attention to Mozilla Firefox. On an almost-daily basis, he published proof-of-concept exploits for zero-day bugs in the open-source and forced Mozilla security engineers to constantly work on creating patches.

[SEE: Gaping holes exposed in fully-patched IE 7, Firefox ]

Microsoft’s IE did not escape Zalewski’s scrunity. Last month, he dropped exploits for several serious IE vulnerabilities, some of which remain unpatched.

Google Launches Campaign Optimizer For Automated AdWords Tips

2007-08-01T09:10:00.002+05:00

The Inside AdWords Blog announced the launch of AdWords Campaign Optimizer. This is an automated AdWords tool that gives you tips on how to improve your campaign, in just minutes.

When you run the tool, Google says it will "automatically analyze your budget, keywords, and landing page, and create a customized proposal for your campaign." You can then go through the suggestions in the proposal and pick and choose which ones you want to accept.

Some of the ideas that you may see in your proposal includes:

Change daily budget
Add new keywords
Change keyword matching options
Adjust keyword maximum cost-per-click bid
Change ad text

You should be able to access the campaign optimizer feature while in the campaign detail page. Just look for the "Optimize Campaign" link on that page.

Sprint Nextel to Use Google Applications On Its "WiMax" Mobile Devices

2007-08-01T09:10:00.001+05:00

Sprint Nextel Corp. said it would include a range of Google Inc.'s Web and communications applications on its coming "WiMax" mobile devices, a boost for Sprint as it rolls out the new technology and a breakthrough for Google in the U.S. wireless industry.

Sprint, the nation's third-largest wireless carrier by subscribers, recently announced it is teaming up with Clearwire Corp., of Kirkland, Wash., to build a nationwide WiMax network. The companies plan a rollout that will reach 100 million people by the end of 2008. WiMax is a long-range wireless technology that Sprint says will allow consumers to access the Web wirelessly from cellphones, laptops and other devices at speeds and prices similar to cable connections.

Sprint plans to offer a home page on its WiMax devices that will serve as a gateway for consumers to access the Internet and a variety of multimedia services. Under the deal, Google will provide the Web-search capabilities for that portal. Sprint also will integrate a suite of popular Google mobile applications, including Gmail email and Google Calendar.

Gates sees no Google threat in phone software

2007-08-01T09:09:00.001+05:00

Bill Gates does not see Google Inc. becoming a successful competitor in the market for software for cellular phones.

Gates told the Times it was unlikely that Google would be able to make inroads into Microsoft's share of the market for mobile phone software. "How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?" the Times quoted Gates as saying.

"They've introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So you're now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they're going to have the world's best phone and it's going to be free?" the paper quoted him as saying.

AOL Buys an Online Ad Company

2007-08-01T09:08:00.001+05:00

The AOL unit of Time Warner said yesterday it had agreed to buy Tacoda, an online advertising company that uses behavioral targeting techniques to track Web user habits.

The deal is the latest acquisition by AOL to bolster its online advertising tools after its decision to move away from its Internet access business and instead offer consumers free services supported by ads. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by the companies. A person familiar with the situation said AOL was paying $275 million in cash for Tacoda.

Tacoda’s technology allows brand advertisers to aim messages to specific audience segments based on the kinds of sites they have visited on the Web. The capability aims to help Web publishers capture one of the next big waves of growth for Internet advertising, which is drawing marketing dollars from other media outlets. The industry tracking firm eMarketer has forecast the market for behaviorally targeted advertising will increase to $3.8 billion in 2011 from $350 million last year.

Tacoda, based in New York, employs about 100 people.

Google 'the most improved brand'

2007-07-30T09:45:00.000+05:00

Google's brand value has grown 44% in the past year

Google is the brand that has gained the most in value over the past year, according a survey of global brands.

The report from Interbrand found that Google's brand value had risen 44% in the past 12 months to $17.8bn (£8.8bn), which put it in 20th place.

Coca-Cola came top of the league for the seventh year running, despite its value falling 3%.

Nokia is the highest-ranking brand from outside the US, while American brands made up more than half of the top 100.

BEST GLOBAL BRANDS 2007

1 Coca-Cola

2 Microsoft

3 IBM

4 GE

5 Nokia

6 Toyota

7 Intel

8 McDonald's

9 Disney

10 Mercedes-Benz

Source: Interbrand/Business Week

The brands are valued using sales and a consideration of how important the brand is in the sector.

In soft drinks, for example, branding is considered very important, while it is much less important to people buying garden tools.

The biggest faller was Ford, whose brand value fell 19%, putting it at number 41 in the league.

The report says that Ford's long-term decline demonstrates how an iconic brand can lose its way.

It highlights the carmaker's permanent discount policy in the US as a factor that has eroded the value of its brand.

Google's "Unavailable After" META Tag Now Live

2007-07-30T09:44:00.000+05:00

Google's Dan Crow announced today that the unavailable_after META tag is now live and operational.

Google To Add "Unavailable After" META Tag from about two weeks ago, explains in detail more about this tag and how it can be used.

Ask.com to let users scrub search records

2007-07-26T07:28:00.000+05:00

New AskEraser feature on Ask.com's portal will let users perform anonymous searches

Search portal Ask.com plans to make it easier for Web searchers to cover their tracks. The company is introducing a new feature to its Web portal later this year called AskEraser, which will let users perform anonymous searches.

When AskEraser is turned on, the Web site will not retain the data it typically stores during a search, said Patrick Crisp, an Ask.com spokesman. "We will allow users to select a privacy setting that says 'I do not want you to retain my data at all,'" he said.

If AskEraser is not turned on, the site will store the search query, the IP (Internet Protocol) address and some cookie information from the user, as well as the URL the user visited before coming to Ask.com, Crisp said. Search engines like Ask.com say that they retain this sort of information in order to improve their sites, but this practice has become controversial, with privacy advocates worrying that the data could be leaked or misused.

Last year, AOL researchers inadvertently disclosed data on about 650,000 of searches made on the company's Web site. New York Times reporters were able to track down one of the searchers, based on the information contained in the AOL database. Bowing to pressure, Google recently announced that it would make the data it stores about its users anonymous after 18 to 24 months.

Ask.com, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp., said it plans to implement a similar policy and will no longer link searches to IP addresses after a period of 18 months. That policy will be implemented by year's end, Crisp said. "We are eliminating the possibility of someone associating those queries with the person who made them."

AskEraser will be available on the Ask.com and Ask.co.uk Web sites by the end of 2007. It will roll out to other markets next year

Google expands newspaper ad sales

2007-07-19T08:29:00.000+05:00

Google Tuesday said it expanded its Google Print Ads test program to enable AdWords advertisers to buy ads in 225 newspapers. The print ads test originally debuted in November with a small group of about 100 advertisers and 50 newspapers. The search engine said any advertiser using AdWords can now participate and buy newspaper print ads by selecting the news outlets and placing a bid for the ad space.

See Google Results From Any Country With Firefox Extension

2007-07-17T08:40:00.000+05:00

RedFly Marketing developed a Firefox extension that enables you to see Google search results from any country.

It is well known that Google will change the search results for a keyword phrase based on the country you are searching in. This new Firefox extension easily allows you to see the localized search results, as if you are sitting in that country. This works both with organic and sponsored search results. For more information on this tool or to download it, visit here.

Yahoo hires first NZ employee to push Panama

2007-07-17T08:30:00.000+05:00

Yahoo will hire its first employee in New Zealand to help promote the Internet giant's fresh push into the paid-search market.

Arch-rival Google has become synonymous with searching the Internet, especially in New Zealand, and its AdWords service is believed to have about 85 per cent of the global market for paid search advertisements, which researcher Frost & Sullivan estimates will be worth US$1 billion (NZ$1.28 billion) by 2010.

Businesses pay to have advertisements and links to their websites displayed on screen when Internet users search the web by typing keywords into search engines that are relevant to what they sell.

Yahoo last week stepped its efforts to grab its share of the spoils, launching a long-awaited system – Panama – that underpins its paid search service. Businesses can now pay Yahoo to have their advertisements displayed in one or more of 16 different regions in New Zealand, whereas they previously had to pay for advertisements whenever their chosen keywords were used by any computer user in New Zealand or Australia. Breaking down paid adverts by region should reduce the cost and wastage involved in paid search advertising, especially if businesses do not offer a nationwide service.

Craig Wax, YahooSearch Marketing's regional managing director for Australia, New Zealand and India, says Panama also lets Yahoo activate keywords for customers in minutes rather than days, making it possible for businesses to use paid searches to support short-term, time-sensitive sales campaigns.

Paid search results were previously ranked in an order that was entirely dependent on how much advertisers had paid for their advertisement. Placement will now also take into account how popular an advert has proved.

Mr Wax would not say how much revenue Yahoo was earning from New Zealand advertisers prior to Panama, but it is believed to be negligible. "We expect it to grow quite a bit because we have not put a lot of focus on it up to now, because without 'geo-targeting' we did not have as strong a value proposition as we have today," Mr Wax says. "We now have a much stronger value proposition for New Zealand."

Panama can display up to 20 different advertisements for each customer and detect how popular each is, based on how many people click on each advert. It can then learn from this, displaying the more successful advertisements with greater frequency to reflect their higher "click-through" rates. "There is no question that search marketing is becoming increasingly complex and that requires a higher level of sophistication," Mr Wax says. "But at the same time, what we have done with this new system is we have built in some functionality that takes a lot of that analysis off the shoulders of the advertiser and lets the system do it.

"Larger advertisers are able to go in and set specific parameters or business goals they want to achieve around click-through rates, cost per acquisition and return on their ad spend, and then they can prioritise each of those and put in targets. "Then our system will optimise against those parameters in an automated fashion, based on the instructions they provide."

Google spokesman Rob Shilkin says Google also lets New Zealand advertisers target paid-search adverts by 16 different regions, and offers all the other features provided by Panama.

Another Googler Leaves Google

2007-07-17T08:28:00.000+05:00

Yet another Googler leaves Google.

Pedram “Gangsta-programma” Keyani, an Orkut engineer, resigned from Google last Friday.

On Friday July 13th, 2007 I resigned from Google in search of new challenges and risks. This was a hard decision to come to and I have been seriously thinking about it for the last few months. In the end I decided (with support from my wife) that I am at the point in my career where I can make risky decisions. I am young enough that I can jump off the ledge and not worry about landing on my feet or my head because either way I have time to pick myself up and try again.

July 13th, that’s a day after Jason Shellen announced that he will be leaving Google.

I sense something.

Well, good luck.

Google cookies will 'auto delete'

2007-07-17T08:08:00.000+05:00

Google has said that its cookies, tiny files stored on a computer when a user visits a website, will auto delete after two years.

Google's have made several privacy announcements

They will be deleted unless the user returns to a Google site within the two-year period, prompting a re-setting of the file's lifespan. The company's cookies are used to store preference data for sites, such as default language and to track searches. All search engines and most websites store cookies on a computer.

Currently, Google's are set to delete after 2039.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement: "After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies." He said the company had to "find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time."

So if a user visits a Google website, a cookie will be stored on their computer and will auto-delete after two years. But if the user returns to a Google service, and each time the user returns, the cookie will re-set for a further two years.

Privacy campaigners
Privacy campaigners want to give users more control over what the search giant holds on to and for how long. Google has pointed out that all users can delete all or some cookies from their web browser manually at any time and control which cookies from which websites are stored on a computer. There are also tools online which can prevent the company and other firms leaving cookies on a computer.

In recent months, it has introduced several steps to reassure its users over the use of personal information.

In March the search giant said it would anonymise personal data it receives from users' web searches after 18 months. The firm previously held information about searches for an indefinite period but will now anonymise it after 18 to 24 month. None of the other leading search engines have made any statements over anonymising IP addresses or shortening cookie lifespan.

Google to Launch "Unavailable After" META Tag

2007-07-14T07:54:00.000+05:00

Google is releasing a new META tag named "unavailable_after."

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

Yahoo.com Adds Search Suggestions

2007-07-14T07:48:00.000+05:00

A faster way to find what you're looking for. Introducing Search Suggest on Yahoo.com.

It works like this: When you do a search on Yahoo!, you'll automatically be given suggestions based on what you have typed - as you're typing. So, not only does this limit the number of words you need to type into a query, it may also present similar queries to shorten your searching time and get to what you're looking for quicker. Search Suggest isn't new, just new to Yahoo.com. We launched this feature in the Yahoo! Toolbar in Firefox a while back and you can get it directly from the Firefox 2 search box when you select Yahoo! as your search engine.

Let's say I'm trying to keep up with our illustrious "governator" here in California. I type "arnold s" in the search box and the suggestions pop up Arnold Schwarzenegger, which saves me from trying to spell out his last name. Or, I'm watching TV and wonder what song is in the background of a commercial that just came on. Problem is that I only remember part of the company name, "journey diamond". I type it into our new search box, and "journey diamond jewelry commercial song" is suggested right away - problem solved. Of course, the assistance it provides when I attempt to find some new bicycle tires, "mavic ksyrium" just after the first few letters, "mavic k" is much appreciated. Not only does the feature eliminate my embarrassment of misspellings, it makes for a much more efficient search experience.

The nice thing about the suggestions is that they're not obtrusive, so if you already know what you're searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way. But, when you experience those brain dead moments like we all do, it's the type of feature that just might get things moving again. If you don't like change, you can turn it off altogether by simply selecting "disable" in the bottom right corner of the drop down menu. And, if you're having regrets, you can reinstall it by selecting "more" above the search box.

Try it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

Google Buys Security Company Postini For $625 Million

2007-07-10T07:24:00.000+05:00

Google Inc. said on Monday it has agreed to buy Web-based security provider Postini for $625 million, expanding its package of online applications to compete with Microsoft Corp.'s Office.

Postini provides security and encryption services, protecting instant messaging, e-mail and other communications, to more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide.

Google said the deal would enable it to provide organizations with more Web-based services similar to its Google Apps package, which includes its e-mail service Gmail, Calendar, and Talk, its messaging service. Google has been expanding its range of services from Web search and advertising to include popular software applications for businesses, such as word processing, putting it in direct competition with Microsoft's Office package of applications.

Google said its Google Apps has been adopted by more than 100,000 businesses to date. "With this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in a statement.

Google said Postini will become a wholly owned subsidiary. The deal is expected to close by the end of the third quarter.

Google Search URL Parameters Explained

2007-07-06T10:46:00.000+05:00

Appending different parameters to the end of the Google search URL string can often extend the Google search results into something that may be more tailored for your specific search.

Joost de Valk created a Google Web search parameters cheat sheet (PDF file) that contains a comprehensive list of many of the different parameters you can add to the Google search URL.

Google Makes FeedBurner's TotalStats & MyBrand Free

2007-07-06T10:45:00.000+05:00

In light of Google's acquisition of FeedBurner, Google has made the two fee-based FeedBurner services free: MyBrand and Stats PRO.

FeedBurner Stats PRO gives you a more details look at your feed readers. The enhanced reporting includes subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, clickthrough tracking optimization, uncommon uses, podcast downloads, reach, aggregate item uses, on site statistics and much more.

The MyBrand feature allows you to control the URL your feeds. Instead of your feed URLs being under the feedburner.com domain, it would be under your domain. Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain from Danny explains the feature and its benefits in great detail.

Those who have FeedBurner PRO accounts will not be billed for June and forward. But those who do not have PRO account will need to upgrade to them, even though there is no fee. You can turn FeedBurner Stats PRO on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the "Item Views" checkbox to activate these PRO features. You can turn MyBrand on by signing in to your account, click the "My Account" link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click "MyBrand".

Search Illustrated: Google's Universal Search Explained

2007-07-06T10:44:00.000+05:00

Google recently made what Danny called "the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages."

Danny went on to write a massive, multi-part post explaining Universal Search and its implications for both searchers and search marketers. Today's Search Illustrated sums up Google's new approach in a simple, straightforward way:

Official: Google Acquires GrandCentral, Telephone Management Company

2007-07-06T10:42:00.000+05:00

Google confirmed that they have acquired GrandCentral, a company that lets you keep one telephone number as you move from home to home or job to job. Google said:

We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.
We're really excited to welcome the GrandCentral team to Google.

Techcrunch started the rumors and as we felt, they were dead on.

Gary Price has a nice list of competing and related businesses, to GrandCentral's business model.

Naver, The Google Of South Korea

2007-07-06T10:10:00.000+05:00

Crowd's wisdom helps South Korean search engine beat Google and Yahoo from the New York Times describes South Korea's most popular search engine, Naver.

Naver currently has a 77 percent share of all searches from within South Korea. Daum.net follows with 10.8 percent, Yahoo with just 4.4 percent and Google with a tiny 1.7 percent of Korean Web searches.

Why does Google fall short in South Korea? Wayne Lee, an analyst at Woori Investment and Securities, said "No matter how powerful Google's search engine may be, it doesn't have enough Korean-language data to trawl to satisfy South Korean customers."

Naver's founders realized that when searching in Korean, there was hardly anything to be found. So they set out to create the content and databases, so that when you would search in Korean, you would find quality content. Naver set up "Knowledge iN" in 2002, enabling Koreans to help each other in a type of real-time question-and-answer platform. On average, 44,000 questions are posted each day with about 110,000 returned answers.

The company is now the most profitable in South Korea and employs "27,000 workers, posted 299 billion won, or $325 million, in profit out of 573 billion won in sales last year. It has a market value of nearly 8 trillion won," says the New York Times article.

The house that helped build Google

2007-07-06T10:03:00.000+05:00


Enlarge	By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, Calif., served as Google's first headquarters. Now, Wojcicki is a vice president for the search giant.

The house that helped build Google from the USA Today looks back at how Susan Wojcicki's decision to let Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rent out space in her garage changed her life and ours.

Wojcicki purchased her 4-bedroom home on 232 Santa Margarita Ave. for about $600,000 and rented out the garage to Page and Brin for $1,700 a month (Google later bought the house). That decision helped create the most popular search engine in the world and changes Wojcicki's future forever.

Wojcicki became Google's 18th employee and is now the vice president of product management for Google. Her sister Anne married Brin earlier this year. Google invested $3.9 million in Anne's biotech company. Dennis Troper, Susan Wojcicki's husband, is Google's operations executive. Her brother-in-law, Gregor, worked in Google's finance department and her mom, Esther Wojcicki, consulted for Google on educational issues.

Susan Wojcicki is also responsible for helping invent the idea of Google AdSense. And she is now pursuing placing Google ads in newspapers, audio, TV and magazines.

All from renting out her garage to two kids.

Is Google Losing Its Magic For Employees?

2007-06-29T11:17:00.000+05:00

As Google Inc. exploded into a company of more than 12,000 employees, attracting a million resumes a year, the Internet giant rarely lost staff to start-ups or had prospective workers turn down job offers. Now, though, Google's magnetic pull on top Silicon Valley talent is showing signs of weakening.

Take Justin Rosenstein, 24 years old, a Google employee since March 2004 who invented its Web-site-building service, Page Creator. He joined social-networking start-up Facebook Inc. last month as a senior software engineer, and says Google's past success in hiring entrepreneurial people helps explain why it's seeing some of those people leave as it becomes larger: "That same caliber of people is naturally going to consider carefully whether it's at Google or somewhere else that they have the most potential to do big things and do them quickly."

Google had more than six times the number of workers at the end of the first quarter than it had at the same point in 2004, which some former employees say tends to slow decision-making and make it harder for individuals to feel like they're having an impact.

Another big consideration: Some highly lucrative stock options are beginning to finish vesting for thousands of employees brought on during a big Google hiring spree in 2003 and 2004, lessening the financial incentives to stay. Options granted during 2003 have average exercise prices as low as 49 cents, compared with the $526.29 price in trading at 4 p.m. on the Nasdaq market yesterday.

On top of all this, a new generation of Internet start-ups has matured enough to attract top technical talent and offer a real possibility of riches from a stock offering or sale to a bigger company. In contrast, Google's shares hit a record level this week, suggesting the stock simply doesn't offer the same potential gains it once did. The concentration of many of the start-ups within a few miles of Google's headquarters, which Google itself has exploited in the past, can make poaching staff a faster and easier pursuit.

But Google People Operations Vice President Laszlo Bock says the company's staff attrition rate has remained "pretty steady" in recent years at under 5% and the rate at which Google job offers are accepted is similarly stable, approaching 90% or higher depending on the position being filled. He chalks any perception that start-ups are gaining on Google in recruiting to the fact that the Internet giant is hiring many more people than in the past. With more staff and more hiring -- and steady attrition and acceptance rates -- in absolute terms there are more people snubbing Google for start-ups, he says. "So the start-ups experience it as a change, while from our perspective there hasn't been much of a change," adds Mr. Bock.

Still, Mr. Bock says Google executives spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract and retain top talent as the company grows in size. "We don't want to become a victim of our own success; we're aware of that risk," he says. Cautionary tales abound, as a string of other technology companies -- from Microsoft Corp. during the dot-com boom to more-recently Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. -- has seen hiring and retention challenges accompany massive growth.

It's unclear whether the latest departures will have any impact on Google's performance down the line. But the company acknowledges that creative and entrepreneurial people are the core of its success -- that's one reason Google lavishes them with extravagant free food and other perks. "If we do not succeed in attracting excellent personnel or retaining or motivating existing personnel, we may be unable to grow effectively," Google has acknowledged in regulatory filings.

Facebook, Mr. Rosenstein's new employer, is one company that professes having an easier time competing with Google for staff. Co-founder and engineering vice president Dustin Moskovitz says the 250-person start-up has managed to hire 10 out of the roughly 11 engineers who had rival job offers from Google since the beginning of the year, an improvement on the past. "There are lot of people [at Google] who are talking about leaving now and what they want to do next," says Mr. Moskovitz.

Mr. Rosenstein says he still loves Google, but was attracted enough by the "huge potential upside" at Facebook and other factors to leave "a lot of value on the table" in stock options that had yet to vest when he jumped. After leaving, he posted a note online for friends describing Facebook as "the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago." Similar factors are at play in other Google departures. Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive of video-search startup Blinkx, just hired a young engineer from Google. "Google was a big draw for exactly the sort of people we looked for a year ago, and that seems less the case now," he says.

Vanessa Fox, 34, a two-year Google veteran who created a service called Webmaster Central to help sites better manage their inclusion in search results, recently left the company and will begin working at online real estate start-up Zillow.com next month.

Two other Google defectors, Bret Taylor, 26, and Jim Norris, 26, started yesterday at venture-capital firm Benchmark Capital as entrepreneurs-in-residence and are working on their own Internet start-up idea. Two of the engineers who created the Google Maps service, they last year received the prestigious Google Founders' Award for their work. "Google has grown to be a larger company now, so I wanted to find our own destiny," says Mr. Taylor, who joined Google in March 2003 and estimates his net worth at under $10 million.

Bismarck Lepe, 27, is starting an interactive-video company called Ooyala Inc. with two other former Google employees. "We decided even Google, such an innovative company, wasn't taking an innovative approach at solving" a video-related problem they were working on, says Mr. Lepe, a four-year Google veteran. He began thinking about leaving when his initial options grant was about to vest completely in March, after four years.

"Google is losing a number of its very talented individuals -- some because they're frustrated and some because they're burned out," Mr. Lepe adds. He predicts any flow of staff out of Google will eventually slow, as the company finds ways to stem it and the wave of cheap options vesting passes next year.

Google's Mr. Bock, though, says vesting stock options have "not been in our experience a huge driver of people leaving." In addition, he says that the company is taking measures to try to keep employees satisfied. Google has begun experimenting with the creation of offsite "skunkworks" operations to develop cutting-edge products and separating out parts of the business to be run as more autonomous units within the company. It's trying to distribute authority for activities such as hiring and deal making farther down in the organization. Like other big companies, Google has also established a training program for employees it identifies as having leadership potential.

But Mr. Lepe says Google in the meantime has lost currency with young engineering recruits. "They just assume Google is now 'the Borg,' now 'the Man,'" says Mr. Lepe, conjuring groupthink bogeymen from 1960s radicalism to "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Mr. Bock points out that the company is on track to receive more than two million resumes in 2007.

Google Acquires GrandCentral, Telephone Management Company

2007-06-26T11:31:00.000+05:00

Techcrunch reported that Google has acquired GrandCentral, a company that let's you keep one telephone number as you move from home to home or job to job. Arrington said, "We have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed."

Neither Google nor GrandCentral confirmed this report as of yet. However, Techcrunch tends to be spot on with these reports. More coverage over at Techmeme.

Google loses Gmail trademark case in Germany

2007-06-26T11:29:00.000+05:00

Looks like Google will finally have to stop using the Gmail trademark in Germany. A German appellate court ruled against the company, says German venture capitalist Daniel Giersch, who brought the case against Google. The court is expected to provide a written ruling on July 4, according to Google and Giersch.

Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery business that goes by the name G-mail, which is short for "Giersch mail." Giersch says he only wants to use the trademark in Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Monaco.

A Swiss court also has ruled against Google.

Separately, Google had to rename its e-mail service Google Mail in the United Kingdom in 2005 after losing a trademark case there. Google's use of the trademark also is being challenged in Poland.

Google wants U.S. help fighting censorship

2007-06-23T10:12:00.000+05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google Inc. is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide.

Google says censorship of the Internet poses trade barriers that should be fought with trade agreements.

The online search giant is taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S. trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce, such as tariffs.

Google sees the dramatic increase in government Net censorship, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, as a potential threat to its advertising-driven business model, and wants government officials to consider the issue in economic, rather than just political, terms."It's fair to say that censorship is the No. 1 barrier to trade that we face," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government affairs. A Google spokesman said Monday that McLaughlin has met with officials from the U.S. Trade Representative's office several times this year to discuss the issue. "If censorship regimes create barriers to trade in violation of international trade rules, the USTR would get involved," USTR spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel said. She added though that human rights issues, such as censorship, typically falls under the purview of the State Department.

While human rights activists are pleased with Google's efforts to fight censorship, they harshly criticized the company early last year for agreeing to censor its Web site in China, which has the second-largest number of Internet users in the world. The company defends its actions, saying the Chinese government made it a condition of allowing Chinese users access to Google Web pages. China has an Internet firewall that slows or disrupts Chinese users from accessing foreign uncensored Web sites.

Censorship on the rise

Censorship online has risen dramatically the past five years, belying the hype of the late 1990s, which portrayed the Internet as largely impervious to government interference. A study released last month by the OpenNet Initiative found that 25 of 41 countries surveyed engage in Internet censorship. That's a dramatic increase from the two or three countries guilty of the practice in 2002, says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who helped prepare the report.

China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and Thailand, among others, are increasingly blocking or filtering Web pages, Palfrey says. Governments "are having more success than the more idealistic of us thought," acknowledges Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Still, even government filtering isn't always successful. In a brutal regime like Iran, which filters Web content, there are nearly 100,000 bloggers, making Farsi "one of the most blogged languages in the world," says Palfrey.

Google's YouTube has become a common target for thin-skinned rulers. Turkey in March blocked the video-sharing site for two days after a complaint that some clips insulted Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Thailand continues to block YouTube after several videos appeared in April, criticizing the country's monarch.

Bloggers in Morocco said in late May that they could not access YouTube shortly after videos were posted critical of that nation's treatment of the people of Western Sahara, a territory that Morocco took control of in 1975. A government spokesman blamed a technical glitch.

Law school paper may have sparked idea

One likely source for Google's censorship idea is a paper written two years ago by Timothy Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, who argues that downloading a Web page hosted in another country effectively imports a service.

Drawing on that concept, Google envisions using trade agreements to fight back. The negotiated pacts would include provisions guaranteeing free trade in "information services." As is true of most trade pacts, the provisions would call for arbitration if there are violations.

The U.S. has a trade agreement with Morocco and began negotiating one with Thailand in 2004, although those talks were suspended early last year after a military coup. Columbia's Wu said the trade pact approach is likely to be more effective when governments are guilty of blocking entire Web sites or applications, such as Internet phone-calling, than when they filter specific content. Under World Trade Organization rules, countries can limit trade for national security or public moral reasons, Wu said, exceptions that authoritarian governments would likely cite when filtering politically sensitive material.

The company's trade initiative reflects Google's increasing acceptance of the value of federal lobbying. The company didn't hire a lobbyist until 2003, according to public filings, but paid the high-powered Washington-based Podesta Group $160,000 last year to work on Internet free-speech, tax and other issues.

Effort seems sincere

Human rights groups say Google's censorship efforts seem sincere, albeit motivated by bottom-line incentives. "Free expression is a unique selling point" for a company like Google, O'Brien said. Filtering and censorship "diminishes the value of their product." Yet last month at the company's annual meeting, Google's board recommended investors vote against a shareholder resolution urging Google to renounce censorship.

The resolution was defeated, although Google is already acting on some of the proposal's ideas, including working with other technology leaders, such as Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., to develop a set of principles on how companies should respond to censorship and other human rights violations when doing business abroad.

Human rights advocates, academics and corporate social responsibility groups are involved in the project, announced earlier this year. Meanwhile, Google's global growth efforts continue. YouTube said Tuesday that it plans to expand into nine other countries, including Brazil, France, Spain and Poland, offering local-language Web sites and highlighting videos of domestic interest.

In China, where Google is the No. 2 search engine behind the domestically based Baidu.com, the company said in April it will increase its investment as it works to create more content of interest to Chinese users.

Yahoo boss steps down from post

2007-06-19T07:31:00.000+05:00

Mr Semel admitted all was not well with Yahoo's financial performance

The chief executive of internet search firm Yahoo, Terry Semel, has quit his position and has been replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang.

In the post since 2001, Mr Semel has been under pressure for some time amid disappointing trading results and the growing dominance of rival Google.

The firm suffered a 16% fall in profits in the first three months of 2007.

Mr Yang helped launch the business, which now has more than 500 million users worldwide, in 1995.

Recent struggles

Mr Semel will take on the role of non-executive chairman but will no longer be involved in the day-to-day running of the business.

Yahoo has struggled in recent years, losing market share to rivals such as Google and being criticised for poor technology and a lack of innovation.

This is a time for new executive leadership

Terry Semel, former Yahoo chief executive

See Yahoo shares

It currently accounts for about 26% of all online searches in the US, well behind Google which has a market share above 49%.

Announcing his departure, Mr Semel said no-one at the firm was "satisfied" with the company's recent financial performance.

"This is a time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realise its potential," he said. "It is the right thing to do and the right time is now." In a statement, Yahoo acknowledged that the past year had been a "difficult one" for the business.

JERRY YANG FACTFILE

Born in Taiwan, moved to US aged 10

Developed website concepts while studying at Stanford University

Co-founded Yahoo in 1995

Estimated to have a personal fortune of $2.2bn

But it stressed that it had made progress in key areas such as developing advertising search functions and building its presence in video and on mobile platforms.

Mr Yang, 38, created the original Yahoo search engine in 1995 alongside partner David Filo before helping to launch the business on the stock market a year later. Since then, he has held a number of important roles overseeing corporate strategy, technological development and international expansion.

Microsoft link

Yahoo has repeatedly been linked with a deal with Microsoft to try and counter Google's increasing supremacy in the online search market. The two were reported to have held informal merger talks last year and to have revived discussions over possible co-operation earlier this year.

The two firms have dismissed the reports as speculation but, on both occasions, such talk led to a sharp increase in Yahoo's share price. Mr Semel joined Yahoo at a time when its fortunes were at a low ebb following the collapse of the dotcom boom and helped to lead a revival in its business. But Google's formidable growth and concerns about Yahoo's ability to respond has led to growing doubts about the firm's direction.

Yahoo's shares rose nearly 3% after news of Mr Semel's departure was revealed.

Google cuts data retention times

2007-06-13T08:38:00.000+05:00

Google is to cut the length of time it holds users' personal search data.

The move comes in response to a data protection group that wrote to the firm questioning its privacy policies.

The European advisory body, called Article 29, said Google's current data retention practices could be breaking European privacy laws. The search giant has said it will now keep personally identifiable search data for 18 months rather than the previous period of 18 to 24 months.

We are committed to data protection principles that meet the expectations of our users in Europe and across the globe

Peter Fleischer, Google

Google currently collects and stores information from each search query, holding information about the search query itself, the unique PC address (known as an IP number), and details about how a user makes their searches, such as the web browser that is being used.

The company says it needs this information to improve its different services and to help fight threats such as fraud, spam and malicious attacks, and to aid "valid legal orders" from law enforcement agencies.

It keeps this information for a set period before "anonymising" it - disconnecting the data from an individual.

New policy

However, some are worried that this collected data from Google and other search engines may be infringing on civil liberties. In May, working group Article 29, made up from data protection commissioners from around the EU, wrote to Google expressing particular concern over the length of time personally identifiable data was being retained on the company's servers. It said the search engine's policy did not appear "to meet the requirements of the European legal data protection framework".

In a response to Article 29's letter, Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer responded: "We are committed to data protection principles that meet the expectations of our users in Europe and across the globe." He said that Google believed their current policy complied with data protection law, but admitted a shorter period of data retention than existed at present was possible.

Mr Fleischer wrote: "After considering the working party's concerns, we are announcing a new policy: to anonymise our search server logs after 18 months, rather than the previously-established period of 18 to 24 months."

He said that the company could still "address our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts" within the shorter period. However, he added that "we also firmly reject any suggestions that we could meet our legitimate interests... with any retention period shorter than 18 months". Article 29 has said it will "carefully study" Google's letter, and will discuss it at its next session taking place on 20 and 21 June.

China's Sina, Google team up on China services

2007-06-12T10:46:00.000+05:00

BEIJING (Reuters) - Sina Corp., one of China's top Internet portals, and Google Inc. said on Monday they would cooperate on news, advertising and search services in China, the world's second-largest online community.

The partnership would initially allow Google users easier access to Sina's news content, the two companies said. They did not reveal any financial details of the agreement. "In the future, we can explore cooperation in advertising and search, and other areas," Lee Kai-Fu, the president of Google in Greater China, told reporters.

The two said details about how the cooperation would proceed were still being worked out. Although Google and Yahoo have been making inroads into China, analysts have said that domestic operators such as Sohu.com, Baidu and Alibaba held an obvious cultural and first-mover edge.

LookSmart’s CFO Resigns, But Revenue Increasing

2007-06-09T08:07:00.000+05:00

Mixed signals from LookSmart today as their Chief Financial Officer John Simonelli has announced his resignation as CFO and Chief Operating Officer after a replacement is found and his responsibilities have been transitioned.

Dave Hills, President and Chief Executive Officer of LookSmart, said,

“John has been an effective partner during this phase of the Company’s development and we will certainly miss him. At the same time, all of us support his decision to spend more time with his family. We are confident in our operational and financial controls and processes which John played a key role in developing, and his willingness to remain on board while we find and integrate a replacement speaks to his dedication and enthusiasm for the Company. On behalf of myself, the Board and the entire LookSmart team, we thank John for his service.”

LookSmart also announced that given added visibility into the second quarter which ends June 30, 2007, it preliminarily expects that its financial results will meet or exceed prior guidance provided to the market.

In the second quarter, LookSmart now expects to report a total revenue increase of 25%-27% year-over-year.

Additionally, in the second quarter LookSmart continues to expect gross margins of 42%-43% and operating expenses to increase approximately 5% year-over-year.

Baidu Calls European Expansion Rumors "Groundless"

2007-06-09T08:02:00.000+05:00

Baidu denies plans for European expansion from InfoWorld reports that rumors of Baidu expanding to Europe are false.

Baidu, the Chinese search engine, released a statement saying, "Recent rumors alleging that Baidu.com is expanding into Europe are groundless." A UK Telegraph article recently sparked such rumors.

iProspect Releases Search Marketer Measurement & Performance Study

2007-06-09T08:00:00.000+05:00

Search Marketer Measurement & Performance Study from iProspect and JupiterResearch was released, providing an update to the search marketing landscape. Here are some key points learned from the study.

* 43% of SEMs cannot measure the ROI from SEO campaign
* SEO nets a higher ROI than paid search
* Traffic is the most common job performance indicator for search marketers
* However, 14% of SEMs are not evaluated based on SEM metrics for their jobs

Google Universal Search - Video and Maps Benefit

2007-06-09T07:56:00.000+05:00

Ccolumn in TIME this week is about Google's dominance of the search market which, as of this week, measures at 64.8% of all U.S. Internet searches, more than double the nearest competitor Yahoo! Search. They've had many requests for an updated Google Properties chart posted here, but decided to do a pre/post analysis of the recent Google Universal Search initiative announced May 16, 2007.

Percentage U.S. Visits to Custom Category of Top Google Properties

It appears from this early analysis that the big winners for this new format are YouTube and Maps, while Image Search and News (which under the older format were occasionally featured top of page) are on the losing end.

Sproose Updated

2007-06-07T10:15:00.001+05:00

Sproose, a social search engine that allows users to rank results which I wrote about back in February - Sproose, a social search engine has updated, making it easier for users to rank the index of results. Simply run a search, find a site that you like and click on 'I like it' to move it up the rankings. And move it up the rankings you can. I took a site that was listed in the 100th position and turned it into one ranked on the first page. While it's a nice idea, I think for one person to be able to manipulate results to that extent is slightly extreme. Yes, I know that it's only because there were a few votes and it won't happen in a subject area with lots of results, but until Sproose gets to the point I think it's a valid criticism.

I also found that I couldn't 'unvote' the page either; there wasn't an 'oops' button, and while I could remove a page, it was only removed from my version of the index, so I couldn't backtrack that way. I still think that there's some way to go before this concept starts to work properly, and it's a system that looks like it's open to abuse.

Google Announces Salesforce.com AdWords Alliance

2007-06-07T10:14:00.000+05:00

The rumors have been confirmed. Google announced a strategic alliance with Salesforce.com today.

The alliance will mean that Salesforce.com will build Google AdWords advertising tools directly into the Salesforce.com portal. Salesforce.com will resell AdWords services as a distribution channel for Google.

"The Web has quickly become the most powerful tool small and medium sized businesses can use to compete and win in today’s economy," said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer at Google. "Combining the power and simplicity of Salesforce with Google AdWords helps businesses find and keep customers to ultimately drive their continued success."

"The alliance of Google and salesforce.com brings together the world’s leading platforms to empower small and medium size businesses to accelerate and thrive," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "The Internet has completely changed the landscape for small and medium businesses and the alliance between Google and salesforce.com enables companies of all sizes to acquire new customers and streamline their business to experience unfettered success."

The full release can be found at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/salesforce_alliance.html.

Blinkx, Video Search Engine, To Power Ask.com Video Search

2007-06-07T10:13:00.000+05:00

Blinkx Strikes Ask.com Video Search-Engine Deal from CNNMoney.com reports that video search engine, Blinkx will power Ask.com's video search.

This deal will give Ask.com access to Blinkx's 12 million hours of audio and video content. Each time a user searches for Blinkx's content, Ask.com has agreed to pay a fee, according to the release. Reportedly, a Blinkx area on the Ask.com site will be how users access the audio and video content.

"Ask.com's momentum is impressive and we're very proud to be powering their new video search offering," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx. "This relationship further demonstrates our technology leadership in the video search space and is an exciting development for our 130 or so media partners whose content can now be accessed through Ask.com."

The full release is available over here.

Google Updates & Details Webmaster Guidelines

2007-06-07T10:12:00.000+05:00

Google has just updated their Google Webmaster guidelines page with clearer and more detailed guidelines.

If you scroll down to the quality guidelines portion and the "Quality guidelines - specific guidelines" section, you will notice that those specifics are now hyperlinked to more details.

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I may update this post with more information, after I dig deeper into the pages and listen to Matt Cutts at Google talk about it on the Penalty Box Summit session at SMX.

Google Updates AdSense Program Policies

2007-06-07T10:11:00.000+05:00

The Inside AdSense blog informed us that they have recently updated their AdSense program policies.

The two major changes according to AdSense include:

(1) Google now requires AdSense publishers to comply with "the spirit" of the AdWords Page Quality Guidelines.
(2) You can place up to three link units on a page.

I took a deeper look and compared the old version with the new version.

The new version added this line:

Publishers using online advertising to drive traffic to pages showing Google ads must comply with the spirit of Google's Landing Page Quality Guidelines. For instance, if you advertise for sites participating in the AdSense program, the advertising should not be deceptive to users.

And in regards to the link units, the old copy was:

A single link unit may also be placed on each page.

And it now reads:

Up to three link units may also be placed on each page.

Internet Retailer 2007 Thoughts From First Day

2007-06-07T10:10:00.001+05:00

Jim McCann, founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers, gave the keynote address. Closing in on $1 billion in annual sales, 1-800-Flowers has aggressively acquired other companies in past years and expanded far outside flowers into other gift products such as candy and wine. According to Internet Retailer, that growth has been expensive, and all is not good within the company. I find that easy to believe. McCann filled his 30 minutes with bad jokes and very little substance. He was either trying very hard to keep the company strategy under wraps or he does not have a company strategy. I suspect the latter. He ended his talk with a rather bizarre plea for help from the audience. No thank you–if I figure out a better way to sell flowers online, I do not feel like sharing it with Jim McCann. I would rather start a flower company.

The Chief Marketing Officer of Ebay, Gary Briggs, was the next speaker, and I was very impressed. Gary challenged internet retailers to step up their game and truly innovate rather than just copying each other. He specifically made a little fun of e-tailers whose complete marketing strategy seems to consist of offering free shipping. He shared much of the Ebay strategy for the future, and it is definitely innovative. They want to take advantage of the increased bandwidth in homes and push typical Ebay functionality from the browser to the consumer desktops. They are also introducting distributed shopping to partner sites. I found myself contrasting the tough, smart approach of Ebay to the apparent lack strategy of 1-800-Flowers and decided to buy Ebay stock.

The next speaker was a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University named Venky Shankar. He demonstrated perfectly why I do not like to see professor types at these kinds of conventions. The Internet is simply moving too fast for the universities to keep up with, and his presentation was a bit naive and was not current.

Ken Burke, CEO of MarketLive, then presented a new white paper about improving site conversion. He was very informative, and I plan to discuss this white paper in a future post. Along with MarketingExperiments, MarketLive performs a service desperately needed by e-tailers. There are very simple changes that can be made to about any ecommerce website that will probably generate incremental improvements to the site’s conversion rate, and the MarketLive white paper is full of recommendations for those kinds of changes.

After two forgettable presentations from Callaway Golf and Wal-Mart, we listened to a short debate about internet regluation between David MCClure of the US Internet Industry Association and Tod Cohen, an Ebay VP. Ebay is taking a lead in proposing legislation to outlaw 2-tier networks that will keep companies such as AOL from controlling what sites are displayed to their users. McClure believes that legislation is unnecessary because market forces will make such a scenario impossible. However, both McClure and Cohen agreed that the most dangerous problem facing Internet Retailers is the possibility of an Internet sales tax.

All in all, I have learned a lot today. Fortunately, I have my laptop with me, so can get some work done during some of the less interesting speakers. More tomorrow…

U.S. online ad revenue up 26 pct in first quarter

2007-06-07T10:07:00.001+05:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. online advertising revenue grew 26 percent year on year to a record $4.9 billion in the first quarter of 2007, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The online advertising sector has seen strong growth in recent years as marketers put more money into online, and away from traditional areas such as newspapers and television. "The continued growth of online ad revenues clearly illustrates marketers' increased comfort with the extraordinary vitality and accountability of this medium," IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg said in a statement. The sector has been bolstered in recent months by merger and acquisition activity involving some of online advertising's biggest names. Last month Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy aQuantive Inc., an online advertising business for $6 billion, while advertising group WPP Group Plc. said it would pay $649 million for 24/7 Real Media Inc..

In April, Google Inc., said it would pay $3.1 billion for Doubleclick Inc., which offers a digital marketplace that connects ad agencies, marketers and Web site publishers. Investors are betting on increased growth in the online ad sector as broadband penetration grows and more services move to the Web. "We may expect continued strong revenue growth buoyed by an expanding broadband subscriber base," said Peter Petrusky, director at PwC. "(This) could translate into more users spending more time online and offers a platform for rich media and video ads that dial-up connections can't render."

Google Releases Audio Ads To Public While eBay Begins Radio Ad Auction Push

2007-06-07T10:06:00.000+05:00

Google announced they have completed their audio ad test and is now in the process of rolling out audio ads to all US advertisers. In fact, I reported on May 15th, that many advertisers began seeing the audio ads option within their AdWords console.

Today, EBay to Broker Radio Ad Time from the Wall Street Journal reports that eBay is getting into the audio ad (radio ad) auctioning business as well. eBay with Bid4Spots Inc. of Encino, California will begin allowing radio stations to auction off air time within the eBay media marketplace. More than 2,300 radio stations are expected to participate.

Google Acquires Multicore Programming Company, PeakStream

2007-06-07T10:05:00.001+05:00

Google shivs server crowd with PeakStream buy from The Register reports Google has purchased PeakStream, a start-up that sells tools for programming chips with multiple processing units.

The financial terms of the buyout were not disclosed, but rumors are that Google bought them on the cheap. Reportedly, PeakStream was not doing well financially and Google wanted to ensure the company's stability - so they bought them. PeakStream develops tools that help improve the performance of single-threaded applications on multi-core chips. Google has an interest in improving such tools, to help with their own servers.

"We believe the PeakStream team's broad technical expertise can help build products and features that will benefit our users," Google said in a statement. "We look forward to providing them with additional resources as they continue developing high performance applications for modern multi-core systems."

Yahoo Search June 2007 Update

2007-06-07T10:02:00.001+05:00

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are doing an index and ranking algorithm update. The update started last night and should be "complete very soon," said Priyank Garg of Yahoo Search.

Yahoo's last update was just a few weeks ago on May 22nd. That update was a minor update.

Ask re-writes web search rules

2007-06-07T08:08:00.000+05:00

Ask has revamped its search engine to help distinguish itself from rivals such as Google and Microsoft.

In the revamp it has added to the traditional list of links results from a wide range of sources including videos and blogs.The new page also lets users fine tune search terms to help them home in on the results they really want. The revamp follows a similar move by Google in late May in which it combined different search results.

Lost list

Ask's revamp involves both its main page and the layout of the results that any search produces. The Ask homepage has been cleaned up and the long list of different search categories has disappeared.

Now any search takes people to a page divided into three columns. The left-hand column lets searchers refine what they are looking for to make their terms either more or less specific.

With this feature Ask hopes to reduce the number of times users have to "hunt and peck" so they get the results they wanted. The search firm said research reveals that users typically have to try four times before they find what they set out to look for. The central column contains a familiar list of results plus adverts and the tools that let people save pages or get a sneak preview of websites. The right-hand column gives instant access to results from other categories such as images, blogs and video.

Search analyst John Battelle looking over the revamp said on his blog that it was "about time" that the list of "ten blue links" was abandoned. He added: " This is Ask, a perennial 4th place player in an increasingly one player market, doing what only a 4th place player can do: Throwing caution to the wind."

Google snaps up media distributor Feedburner

2007-06-02T08:04:00.000+05:00

Terms of deal for RSS technology pioneer undisclosed; estimates range at about $100 million.

Google Inc. said Friday it is acquiring Feedburner Inc., bolstering the Internet advertising leader's capacity to distribute both media and advertising to blogs and social network site users.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, a Google spokesman said, although various blog reports in recent weeks had put the price of a potential deal at about $100 million.

Video

The Google 'ick' factor

2007-06-02T08:02:00.000+05:00

Google Inc. bills the latest twist on its online maps as "Street View," but it looks a bit like "Candid Camera" as you cruise through the panorama of pictures that captured fleeting moments in neighborhoods scattered across the country.

In San Francisco, there's a man picking his nose on a street corner, another fellow taking out the trash and another guy scaling the outside of an apartment building, perhaps just for fun or maybe for some more sinister purpose.

Further down the highway at Stanford University, there's the titillation of a couple coeds sunbathing in their bikinis. In San Jose, there's the rather sad sight of a bearded man apparently sleeping -- or did he just pass out? -- in the shadow of a garbage can, with what appears to be an empty cup perched in front of him.

In Miami, there's a group of protesters carrying signs outside an abortion clinic. In other cities, you can see men entering adult book stores or leaving strip joints. (Watch candid moments on Google's mapping tool )

Potentially embarrassing or compromising scenes like these are raising questions about whether the Internet's leading search engine has gone too far in its latest attempt to make the world a more accessible -- and transparent -- place.

"Everyone expects a certain level of anonymity as they move about their daily lives," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group devoted to protecting people's rights on the Internet. "There is a certain 'ick' factor here."

Google is hoping to elicit "oohs and ahhs" with Street View, which was introduced on its maps for the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami earlier this week. The Mountain View-based company already is planning to expand the service to other U.S. cities and other countries.

The feature provides high-resolution photos to enable street-level tours so users can get a more realistic, 360-degree look at places they might go or spots where they already have been. To guard against privacy intrusions, Google said all the photos were taken from vehicles driving along public streets during the past year. The photos will be periodically updated, but the company hasn't specified a timetable for doing so.

"This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street," Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn said in a statement. "Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world."

Google certainly isn't the first company to venture down this photographic avenue. Amazon.com Inc. launched a similar mapping feature in January 2005 on a search engine called A9.com. That search engine's former chief executive, Udi Manber, now works for Google. And Microsoft Corp. began displaying street-level pictures on its online maps for San Francisco and Seattle late last year.

A9's photographic maps, which were abandoned late last year, raised privacy concerns about women being seen entering domestic violence shelters.

Hoping to avoid similar complaints, Google tried to identify potentially sensitive locations by contacting the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, much to the delight of Cindy Southworth, the group's director.

"We were thrilled that a major technology company like this reached out in this way to help protect these victims," she said.

Google also is offering a "help" button on all the street-level photos to provide a link for users to request the removal of an image that is objectionable or clearly identifies a person who doesn't want to be included in the visual tapestry. Company spokeswoman Victoria Grand said Google has fielded "very few" removal requests so far.

Eileen Diamond is hoping she can persuade Google to replace its current picture of a Miami street corner where protesters gather once a week to protest the abortions performed at A Choice For Women. The picture, still available on Google's maps Friday afternoon, includes a cluster of protesters standing outside the clinic, an image that clinic administrator Diamond worries will scare away potential patients or perhaps attract trouble makers to the facility.

"It's sort of disturbing because it's certainly not the kind of message we want to be sending out," said Diamond. "It's already very painful for our patients to come in. We want them to feel safe and protected."

As of Friday, Diamond said she was still having trouble finding the right way through Google's Web site to notify the company she would like the picture removed.

Privacy experts believe these kinds of ticklish situations are bound to arise as technology makes it increasingly easy to share pictures and video on the Internet, pitting the rights of free expression against the rights to personal privacy.

"What you have to do is balance out the perception against the reality and I think in this case, the perception is much scarier than the reality," said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, a policy group.

Because Google's street-level pictures were taken in public places, the company appears to be on solid legal ground, according to both Bankston and Weinstein.

But Bankston doesn't think the law necessarily absolves Google, particularly since the company has embraced "Don't Be Evil" as its creed. He worries that some people in need of psychological or medical help won't seek treatment for fear of being caught in the cross-hairs of Google's cameras.

"There's a distinction between what Google has a legal right to do and what is the responsible thing to do," said Bankston, who believes the company should have blurred the images of unwitting pedestrians before it posted the street-level pictures. "It's a problem we as a society have to grapple with, and I think we are just now seeing the fault lines emerge."

While he thinks some of the issues raised by Google's new service are prime fodder for a healthy debate, Weinstein worries that it might inspire overly repressive laws.

"It's a tough area, but it just seems there is no way around the fact that public spaces are public spaces," Weinstein said. "You don't want to create an environment where it becomes illegal to take photos in public. It can be riskier not to be able to see something than it is to be able to see something."

Google Acquires Security Company, GreenBorder

2007-05-30T08:38:00.000+05:00

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?

2007-05-26T09:51:00.000+05:00

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)'

2007-05-26T09:34:00.000+05:00

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'

2007-05-26T09:24:00.000+05:00

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 Newcomb Seattle 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)

2007-05-26T08:54:00.000+05:00

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

2007-05-26T08:18:00.000+05:00

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.