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Google today permanently launched Google Groups (out of its beta testing).
This enhanced product enables users to create, manage, search and browse web-based groups, as well as subscribe to and track favorite groups.
Building on the foundation of the original service that currently includes more than 1 billion searchable posts from the Usenet archive, Google Groups now offers users the ability to join and follow discussions among different groups, keep in touch with family and friends, and share information more easily.
Using Google Groups, people can search and participate in a variety of discussions. Users looking for advice on treating carpal tunnel or disputing a cell phone bill can find discussions from other people who have experience in these areas.
In addition, family, friends, and official organizations like schools or community centers can keep their members informed via email lists and announcement-only newsletters through Google Groups.
“Google Groups enables users to easily gather groups of friends, acquaintances, and those sharing interests together, and communicate with them directly via email, newsletters and message boards,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president, Product Management, Google Inc.
“These online communities connect people with information they care about, and that furthers our commitment to enhancing the online experience for Google users.”
Source: Search Engine Journal
Yesterday it was reported on a SEW forum thread that discussed a quote from a supposed Google representative saying that PageRank is for Entertainment Purposes only.
GoogleGuy has strongly commented on that forum post and others saying:
"I'd strongly disagree with the statement that the toolbar PageRank is for "entertainment purposes only"-- millions of toolbar users use the PageRank display to judge the quality of pages".
"I think it's also a little irresponsible to quote John Galt claiming to talk to some random person at Google, and then for somebody to quote it as a response from Google, which makes it sound more official."
"I'm happy to refute that this is any sort of official stance".
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google has launched a new search engine that specifically focus on the needs of scholars and scientists.
The Google Scholar index is based on a subset of the regular Google index. This service enables you to search specifically for "scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."
The search algorithm is apparently a little bit different from the regular one.
There is also a special search query syntax rule to be learned. If you want to find a specific article it is best to combine a search phrase (in quotes) with the last name of the article's first author: author:einstein "theory of relativity".
If a search result is marked [citation], that means that Google has found a reference, but that the article is not available on the open Web. This also applies to books. Some of the articles will not be available for free on the Web.
For the time being the service will not include Google Adword text ads.
Source: Pandia
Google just filed a lawsuit against one of its AdSense publishers, claiming that company defrauded it by clicking on its own ads to generate revenue.
The case, filed in Santa Clara County Court, also alleges that Houston, Texas-based Auctions Expert International were in breach of their contract with Google for intentionally manipulating the advertising program.
AdSense allows for “unobtrusive and context-sensitive advertising,” according to Google, by linking a web user’s queries with similar advertising. “The advertiser pays Google for the user’s click and Google, in turn, pays the majority of the money it receives back to the website author,” Google said in its legal filing.
The AdSense agreements, though, expressly bar any company from clicking on its own sites in order to create ad revenue or to pay other people to click on the company’s sites.
“[Auctions Expert] flagrantly abused the AdSense Online service by artificially and/or fraudulently generating ad clicks,” the complaint stated. “These clicks were worthless to advertisers because they generated significant and unjust revenue for the defendants, who were paid by Google as if the clicks were legitimate.”
Pay-per-click fraud has been a hot topic recently for Google over the past year.
In March, 32-year-old Michael Bradley was arrested by the FBI after he developed a piece of software called “Google Clique” that roamed the Internet, clicking on AdSense advertisements.
Bradley first tried to sell his software to the search company for $100,000, and then, when Google failed to respond, threatened to release the program to the “top 100 spammers.”
Google also mentioned the subject in its April IPO filing with the SEC as a potential threat to its stock viability.
“We have regularly paid refunds related to fraudulent clicks and expect to do so in the future,” said Google. “If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase.”
Calls to Google attorney David H. Kramer, with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, were not returned as of this posting.
The case is Google Inc. Vs. Auction Expert International L.L.C., et al., CV030560.
Source: Search Engine Journal
A pornography publisher based in California sued Google for copyright infringement violations Friday, accusing the search engine of failing to remove from its search results pages thousands of photographs posted on the Internet without permission.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Perfect 10 Inc. alleged that Web surfers can find its copyrighted pictures of nude women for free by performing Google searches.
The company said it has sent 27 formal requests to the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to remove the offending Web sites from its index and stop displaying the photographs in its search results, but was not satisfied with Google's response.
"It's very difficult to make money when all of your pictures are given away worldwide for free," said Perfect 10 President Norm Zada.
A Google spokesman declined to comment, saying the company had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.
Perfect 10 is represented by attorney Russell Frackman, who also represented major record companies in their lawsuits against file-sharing networks for copyright infringement.
Federal law places the burden of identifying copyright infringement on the copyright holder. While Google is not compelled to ferret out violations, it is required to respond to violations brought to its attention.
Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said Google has typically responded quickly to remove infringing works from its database.
Google has sometimes been accused of being too aggressive in responding to complaints of digital copyright violations. For example, the search engine company was accused of censorship after, at the request of the Church of Scientology, it removed from its searchable index Web sites criticizing the church.
"Google gets tons of notices and generally listens to them," Zittrain said. "I'd be surprised if they weren't listening to these."
In an earlier case, Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp., the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2002 that search engines could not display full-sized images without linking back to the Web site upon which they were posted.
But they could display smaller versions of the images, called thumbnails, without infringing copyrights. Google displays its results in postage-sized images, but links to Web sites that Perfect 10 says illegally display full-sized images.
Source: Detroit Technology News
Google, best known for its wildly popular search engine, is invading Microsoft's turf, including its stronghold: the computer desktop.
Analysts say Google's aggressive ambitions could pose a formidable threat to Microsoft because it gets to the heart of what drives Microsoft's dominance: its control of the user experience through the Windows operating system.
If successful, Google could help refashion computing, making people less reliant on storing information on the Microsoft-powered PC on their desk and more dependent on free Web-based e-mail and search functions that can be accessed anywhere from any device regardless of the operating system.
Under such circumstances, the risk for Microsoft is that the computer desktop as we know it could cease to exist, said David Garrity, an analyst with Caris & Co. The question, Garrity said, is whether computer buyers may one day decide that they no longer even need a Microsoft operating system.
The two companies are already battling it out on fronts including Web search, free e-mail and better ways for searching individual computers. Analysts say that's evidence Microsoft should - and likely is - taking Google much more seriously.
"They'd be mad not to," said Niki Scevak with Jupiter Research.
Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said the company's goal is to organize information and make it universally accessible, and that goes far beyond search.
But she downplays the suggestion that Google's tools could eventually overtake Microsoft's ubiquitous software, saying the company doesn't currently have such plans but "it's hard to speculate" what the future might bring. Chief executive Eric Schmidt has, however, ruled out developing a Google browser to compete with Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer.
The Google-Microsoft competition is good news for consumers because it means more choices and better products.
For instance, Google's expansion into e-mail already has forced Microsoft and others to dramatically increase free storage. Analysts say it's also prodding Microsoft to improve products customers have long complained about.
As it became clear that Google and other search engines were increasingly gaining control over people's time online, Microsoft's MSN online division rapidly began developing its own search technology. Microsoft had previously outsourced that job.
Web search isn't the only place where Microsoft is playing catch-up. In June, Microsoft launched an Internet browser toolbar that blocks pop-up ads and enables search, years after Google had created its own.
And after Google announced plans for Gmail, a free e-mail service touting massive amounts of memory, Microsoft said it would boost free memory on its Hotmail accounts. Adam Sohn, a director with MSN, said to expect more Hotmail improvements soon, but he wouldn't provide details.
Microsoft also has promised its own system for searching desktop computers, responding to frustrations over how difficult it is to find things like e-mails and family photos on increasingly cluttered computers. Google launched its desktop search product last month and said users should expect more improvements to that product.
Then there is ad delivery, where Microsoft recently extended through June 2006 a contract for Yahoo Inc. to place relevant ads alongside its regular search results. Ad placement alongside search results is Google's main cash cow.
David Smith, a vice president with Gartner Inc., says the chain of events illustrates that Google is proving to be customer-driven while Microsoft tends to be more driven by competitive threats.
Microsoft denies that Google has been the impetus for improvements in its products. Sohn says the company is simply responding to customer feedback. He also downplays the Google competition, saying Microsoft has always faced plenty of foes.
"There's lots of innovation and competition, and it's way bigger than just Google, who I think everybody's excited about and focused on because they're a little bit newer," Sohn said.
Google, meantime, has signaled that it will fight Microsoft's moves into its turf. The day before Microsoft launched a test version of its Web search engine, Google said it had nearly doubled the size of its search engine index. And this week, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened an office in Kirkland, not far from Microsoft's Redmond campus.
Mayer said the goal is to attract employees who don't want to leave their hometown.
Asked if that meant the company was recruiting Microsoft workers, she said: "Not in a specific or targeted way, but we are looking at technical workers in the Seattle area who are interested in working for Google."
Still, Scevak said it's still too early to say if Google will ultimately be able to pull off a massive shift in allegiance. While many people turn to Google for search, he says plenty of others could see no reason to leave Microsoft products, such as Hotmail - especially if Microsoft is willing to match Google's improvements for free.
And while Google has been the first to desktop search, he says many users may still prefer to wait for Microsoft's more familiar product.
"It's at a very, very early stage," Scevak said.
Source: The Miami Herald
Google announces the availability of the Google Deskbar API (application programming interface).
Google's technology makes it possible for software developers to build their own features, or plug-ins, for the popular Google Deskbar.
For instance, a developer could use Google Deskbar APIs to create a movie search command that enables users to search their favorite movie site by entering a movie name into the Deskbar search field and typing a special command such as "Ctrl'M." Other examples include:
- Locate and play a music play list on your hard drive
- Solve algebraic equations
- Send instant messages from the Deskbar (example: type "AIM
- [screen name] [message text]")
Results will be displayed within the Google Deskbar mini-browser which appears to the bottom right of the user's computer. New features developed with the Google Deskbar API will be displayed as an option in the Deskbar main menu.
The Google Deskbar API is in the experimental, beta phase. We invite developers to use the service and encourage them to send us their input and feedback. Plug-ins can be written in any .NET language, such as C# or Visual Basic.NET.
More information about the Google Deskbar API can be found here: http://deskbar.google.com/help/api/index.html.
Source: Google
Google just opened a new office down the road from rival Microsoft's headquarters as it seeks to lure local engineering talent.
Google, which competes with the world's largest software maker in Internet search as well as for employees, has leased space in Kirkland, Washington, less than 8 km from Microsoft's Redmond headquarters.
Alan Eustace, vice president of engineering at Google, said that the only reason to start a remote engineering office is to hire really talented people, that the Seattle area has an amazing amount of technical talent, but that in some cases Google has had difficulty hiring people, because they did not want to leave the Pacific Northwest for California's Silicon Valley.
Eustace also said that the new office, which takes up an entire floor of a building in downtown Kirkland, will have perks similar to those in other Google offices.
Google is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and also has engineering offices in New York, Santa Monica, California, Zurich, Bangalore, India and Tokyo.
So far, about 10 Google employees are working in Kirkland in a space that could hold at least 200 more people. Some engineers with ties to Seattle would be moving up from Mountain View as well.
Google is inviting local friends, family members, civic leaders and press to an invitation-only party on November 18, but declined to say whether Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was invited.
Source: Reuters
Google warns that increased competition could see revenue gains at a slower pace in the fourth quarter.
Search engine Google has seen share prices more than double since its August initial public offering, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that while it believes revenue will continue to grow, the growth rate will not keep accelerating as it has been.
Google's lost $5.50, or about 3 percent, to $167 in pre-market trading on Inet following the filing.
"Our revenue growth rate has generally declined, and we expect it will continue to do so as a result of increasing competition and the inevitable decline in growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels," said the company's filing.
"Consequently, we believe that our revenue growth rate from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2004 may not be sustainable into the fourth quarter of this year and in future periods. "
The company's filing also said it was offering to repurchase 23.4 million shares of stocks that had been held by current and former employees and contractors, as well as 5.2 million unexercised options.
That share repurchase offer is more than the 19.6 million shares it sold in its IPO. At current market prices the company will not have to repurchase any of the shares, since its offering only the price paid for the shares, between 30 cents and $80 a share.
But the offer stays open through December, so if the shares were to have a sharp fall in the next six weeks, the company could face some additional share repurchases.
Source: CNNfn.com
Google now works with inexpensive cellphones, not just the more costly ones with Web access and more features.
Over the last month, the popular search engine company has quietly turned on a new service that lets people use most newer cellphone models to get snippets of information by sending short text messages to a special five-digit number, 46645, which spells GOOGL on a phone keypad.
People looking for a list of pizza or Chinese restaurants in Back Bay, for example, just have to send the message "pizza 02116" or "Chinese 02116."
Within 10 seconds or so, Google shoots back one or more text messages listing restaurants with addresses and phone numbers from its Google Local page.
Related services from Google let users get a phone number by sending a message containing the desired person's first and last names and city, area code, or ZIP code; they can also use Google's Froogle shopping site to get a price quote by sending a text message with "price" followed by the item's name or Universal Product Code number.
Google's is among a handful of new services that give consumers a much cheaper, on-demand alternative to paying $5 to $15 for a monthly subscription to a plan like Verizon Wireless's Get It Now, Sprint's PCS Vision, or the mMode service offered by the former AT&T Wireless Services Inc., which is now part of Cingular Wireless LLC.
With the Google service, users pay their carrier for only the cost of text messaging, typically 10 cents a message or less when subscribers buy monthly "buckets" of 100 or 500 messages.
The Weather Channel last month activated a service that offers 36-hour weather forecasts when people send a text message containing a ZIP code or city and state name to the number 42278, which stands for 4CAST.
The Weather Channel, part of closely held Virginia media company Landmark Communications Inc., charges 75 cents per use, added to subscriber's phone bills, plus a charge for each text message.
Also last month, San Francisco start-up UpSnap Inc. launched a way for wireless subscribers to get free directory assistance listings for businesses as an alternative to paying $1.25 or more for calling 411 on their cellphone.
Users have to start at the upsnap.com website, where they register their phone number and soon get a text message.
By keeping that message in their inbox, users can respond to that message with the name and either ZIP code, area code, or geographical location of a business.
UpSnap sends back a new reply message with the phone listing. Recent tests, however, showed the service can take several minutes or even hours to generate replies.
Like Google, the service is free except for the text charge from the phone company. The company makes its money from advertising.
Source: The Boston Blobe
Buy.com and Google launch an advertising partnership that delivers Google AdWords to Buy.com's customers.
As part of the agreement, Google's targeted, text-based ads appear on Buy.com's website through the Google AdSense program.
The partnership between Google and Buy.com furthers both companies' mission statements, which are customer-centric," stated Neel Grover, president of Buy.com.
"By adding Google's targeted ads to Buy.com, we are giving our customers additional, highly-relevant resources with which to make an informed buying decision."
Google's relevant, targeted ads are now incorporated throughout Buy.com's website, including top-tier technology pages such as the computers and electronics homepages, as well as the popular entertainment and leisure stores including Books, Music, Sports, DVDs, and others.
In addition, customers searching on Buy.com will receive Google advertisements on the search results pages.
"Google's relevant ads are designed to improve the user experience on Buy.com, while providing the company with an additional revenue opportunity," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of World Wide Sales and Field Operations.
"This agreement also adds Buy.com to the Google Network and extends the reach for Google AdWords advertisers to another quality website."
Source: Buy.com press release
Almost everyone wants better high-speed Internet access and more bandwidth and performance.
Monday was a day when Silicon Valley's heaviest hitters put aside their business plans and day-to-day worries and riffed on the future of technology, innovation and U.S. competitiveness.
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt imagined a personalized iPod-like device, and Intel President Paul Otellini looked forward to the day when wireless technology will finally make high-speed Internet ubiquitous.
The occasion was an ``innovation summit'' organized by the technology industry's advocacy group, TechNet. Google hosted the event at its Mountain View campus, and PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose moderated the panels of valley chief executives and other luminaries.
Rose's show taped the discussions, which will air beginning this week as four episodes. Rose's show airs weekdays on KQED (Ch. 9) at midnight.
Panelists included venture capitalist John Doerr, Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel, Chambers from Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorna.
The marriage of wireless technologies and the Internet was a common theme. Doerr said his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has invested in half a dozen companies involved in wireless technologies.
And Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said he is eager for the day when everyone has an intelligent, Treo-like device that uses the Web to help schedule trips, manage time and organize the fire hose of information that bombards people daily.
``Our lives are overwhelmed with information coming at us,'' Joy said. ``We hunger for something that will help us make sense of the chaos.''
Schmidt, of Google, picked up on that theme later. ``The next killer device is a clearly a personal one,'' Schmidt said. ``The one I personally favor is putting all the world's information into the equivalent of an iPod, which will be possible in the next five to 10 years. And if you can't quite do that, your wireless connection will help you get what you need.''
Lobbying the government is a key part of TechNet's mission, and Doerr and others spoke to the limited but crucial role the government should play in helping spur innovation.
``There are three things we need the government to do,'' Doerr said: Invest in research, invest in education, and foster an environment where innovation can thrive.
Nearly all the participants agreed that the lack of widespread high-speed Internet access has held back adoption. U.S. broadband penetration is below 50 percent and lags behind other developed nations, such as South Korea.
``A country like Korea is totally broadband,'' Semel said. ``It all comes back to broadband. It changes everything we do.''
Rose asked why broadband penetration in the United States is so low relative to the rest of the developed world.
Doerr cited the physical vastness of the United States, high prices and what he said were conflicting government regulations. But Joy said the lack of competition in many areas has stalled the spread of high-speed lines.
``We didn't have government leadership saying we need to do this,'' Joy said. ``If there wasn't strong competition between the cable and phone companies, broadband didn't get rolled out.''
The country's competitiveness with other countries also found its way into many discussions. As they have repeatedly over the years, executives said the United States must invest more heavily and intelligently in its schools.
``The U.S. is falling behind in education,'' Chambers said. ``You look at China, and they will guarantee that 25 percent of their college students will graduate with a degree in the computer sciences. I think that's the biggest challenge we face.''
Source: Mercury News
Google's GMail just added 2 new features in their beta mail feature that includes POP3 support. Also available is email forwarding capability.
Downloading the mails only available on GMail website is now possible.
They have made some intelligent options available when you enabled pop support in GMail. You can chose to receive only the new mails to be available for pop download.
So if you already have 100s of Megs of mails stored in GMail, you can avoid downloading them at all! GMail have pop-enabling tutorials available for many popular mail clients on their website. I personally tried GMail POP on Opera’s excellent M2 Mail client and it worked flawlessly.
The other functionality is mail forwarding. Nothing special in this other than the fact that using GMail filters, only those mails that satisfy certain conditions could be set to be forwarded to another mail account.
Now the catch is, since GMail is still in beta stage and Google does not clarify anything about it… it is not sure if POP and mail forwarding would be available when it is publicly released. But if it is… it can be real bad news for many paid for mail services out there.
Another thing worth noticing is that GMail mails sent through POP did not include any footer or advertisements (in my tests)! Maybe Google would have some other plans for us in the future. On the other hand, maybe it is an indication that POP would not be free once the public release of GMail is out.
Source: Search Engine Journal
"Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it's invaluable for queries that only return a few results", says Bill Coughran, V.P. of engineering at Google.
You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but Bill Coughran does.
He says it's a measure of how many pages Google has in its index and gives an indication of how broadly it searches to find the information people are looking for.
Yesterday, that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made him smile.
Now when Bill searches for friends who previously generated only a handful of results, he now sees double that number. These are not just copies of the same pages, but truly diverse results that give more information.
The same is true for obscure topics, where you're now significantly more likely to find relevant and diverse information about the subjects. You may also notice that the result counts for broader queries (with thousands or millions of results) have gone up substantially.
However, as with any search engine, these are estimates, and the real benefit lies with the queries that generate fewer results.
The documents in Google's index are in dozens of file types from HTML to PDF, including PowerPoint, Flash, PostScript and JavaScript. Together, these pages represent a good chunk of the world's information, but hardly all of it.
That is why Google keeps building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what it finds.
So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road. The real test is how well the search engine company does in finding what you want from within those pages.
"We'll keep improving that too", says Bill Coughran.
Source: Google's blog
Google's credibility for its news tool came under fire again, following its use of press releases from far-right UK political group the British National Party.
Web users can sign up to receive Google news alerts on specialist subjects. The aggregator scans around 4,500 sites for selected keywords, and emails relevant stories to the user.
But the inclusion of press releases has been criticised by many journalists, who argue that such material is designed to inform a news story and should not be interpreted as news itself.
However, a defiant Google defended its position. "It is our policy to include press releases in Google News as we believe press releases can be valuable resources in pointing to the origin of a news story," said Ema Linaker, spokesperson for Google UK.
"We clearly mark press releases as such to inform the user of the origin of the information."
She added that someone researching the BNP, for example, might be interested to know what kind of news they are pursuing.
Recent press releases published by the BNP included http://www.bnp.org.uk/news_detail.php?newsId=6 an attack on Labour peer Baroness Valerie Amos for her work in international development.
"Surely, as someone who so obviously hates what Britain stands for, could there be any better vocation than giving billions of taxpayers' hard won cash away to the Third world?" said a report published on the BNP site on 28 October.
Another press release http://www.bnp.org.uk/news_detail.php?newsId=2 criticised Thames Valley police for their involvement with the local Muslim community during the festival of Ramadan, and called the Inland Revenue 'leeches' for sponsoring local radio show during the event.
The unsophisticated nature of the search engine’s news service is apparent from the fact that a recent Google Alert on the late DJ John Peel picked up a tribute from the BNP site http://www.bnp.org.uk/news/2004_oct/news_oct44.htm.
"I think it's disgraceful to say that this is a legitimate site to link to," said Jenny Lennox, online organiser for the National Union of Journalists.
"They have a right to put out press releases, but they are not a news agency."
"Within two links you can be on pages that give their [the BNP's] distorted history of the British Isles," Ms Lennox told dotJournalism.
Martin Hamer, web journalism lecturer at Sheffield University, suggested that Google should separate press releases from bona fide news stories.
"I feel it is dangerous having an automated news process like the Google one as clearly things sometimes get through that shouldn't," said Mr Hamer.
"Good news organisations do not have news editors and sub-editors for nothing. A lot goes into the editorial process and that is obviously not reflected here."
Source: Journalism.co.uk
UBS downgraded shares of Google on reasons that the search engine company could see reduced growth and profit margin degradation in 2004.
The brokerage set a price target of $160, almost $25 below its Thursday close and a stark departure from other Wall Street research houses who have touted the shares at $200. Google was recently down $4.20, or 2.3%, to $180.50 in Instinet premarket trading.
"We consider Google a great company but believe investors will see better entry points in the future," UBS wrote. The brokerage predicted the company will see slower growth, margin deterioration in 2005, and a lower valuation as investors switch their focus from earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to free cash flow.
It also noted that the float of shares available for trading is going to grow by 233% before the end of the year.
While conservative relative to other analysts, the UBS model implies a multiple of 60 times 2006 free cash flow, hardly a stingy estimate. In focusing on that metric rather than EBITDA, the brokerage cited the company's absence of net operating loss carryforwards and a need for "very large" capital expenditures, an obligation not captured in the latter.
UBS warned that growth in revenue from keyword search could be crimped if local advertising doesn't pick up, and argued that operating margin will fall to 50% in 2005 from 57% in 2004 because of a higher research and development expense and depreciation.
"We could be overly aggressive in our assumptions, but we suspect that Google will hire as many high-quality engineers and other employees it can find regardless of margin impact in the short term," the brokerage wrote.
In a separate report, UBS initiated Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news - research) with a neutral rating, saying the company is fairly valued at current levels. Its $37 price target comes out to 30 times 2006 enterprise value divided by EBITDA.
Source: The Street.com
After some differences and a falling out a few months ago, LexisNexis and Google are now talking joint ventures.
The first project will provide users of Reed's Kellysearch business information website with some of Google's links to advertisers.
Kellysearch lost customers to Google as subscribers tried to get the same information they found on LexisNexis, but without paying for it.
Chief executive Sir Crispin Davis says the company has won many of them back.
'For the last year or two we have had a lot of discussion over whether Google is an ally or a competitor,' he said. 'But there is a logic to working with Google in one or two areas. Google brings its size and we bring our content.'
LexisNexis collates news from 32,000 sources and had sales of £1.25bn last year. Yahoo! and Microsoft alliances are in the pipeline.
Source: This is London.co.uk
After some differences and a falling out a few months ago, LexisNexis and Google are now talking joint ventures.
The first project will provide users of Reed's Kellysearch business information website with some of Google's links to advertisers.
Kellysearch lost customers to Google as subscribers tried to get the same information they found on LexisNexis, but without paying for it.
Chief executive Sir Crispin Davis says the company has won many of them back.
'For the last year or two we have had a lot of discussion over whether Google is an ally or a competitor,' he said. 'But there is a logic to working with Google in one or two areas. Google brings its size and we bring our content.'
LexisNexis collates news from 32,000 sources and had sales of £1.25bn last year. Yahoo! and Microsoft alliances are in the pipeline.
Source: This is London.co.uk
Google will offer its Desktop Search feature to Mac computers, introducing Google technology to a loyal group of computer users that are'nt using the Windows operating system.
Google’s chief executive did not lay out a set schedule for the Mac ready desktop search, but did confirm that it would be on the way soon when asked.
“We intend to do it,” Schmidt said at a University of California-Los Angeles conference celebrating the Internet’s 35th anniversary.
Reuters reports that Schmidt added that the Google Mac Desktop Search “had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the fundamental differences between the Mac OS and Windows.”
Google desktop search currently works with only computers running off of Windows and comes as a 450 KB download file and installs locally on the system.
It places a system tray icon, which runs consecutively in the background indexing files on the system. The background-running crawlers monitor the files and internet/chat sessions and keep the index up-to-date by indexing the system when the system is not busy.
Google Desktop Search has turned some heads in the online privacy sector because of its ease of use and tracking on public computers, but has been raved by the searching community as a sound alternative to Windows search tools. Search Engine Journal’s Sushubh Mittal recently reviewed a week of using Google Desktop Search, here’s a snippet:
"Knowing Google and its other services, I had little doubt that the new tool from their stable would be incredible. A week using it and I am not disappointed. It consumes manageable system RAM, gives me results in a format I am most used to watching (Google’s web results) and best thing of all it will only improve from here".
Agreed, the software support is limited. You can search through only the most popular file formats. PDF and many other formats are currently not supported.
However, it is just the beginning. Google learns fast and we can be sure an update would cover-up most of the requisitions. But one thing is for sure, they need to start realizing that there are browsers in the market other than Internet Explorer and some people do use email clients which are not from Microsoft’ stable.
They seem to have taken the popular approach in the first beta supporting what an average computer user would be using in day-to-day life.
Source: Search Engine Journal
One of Google's earliest investors, Ram Shriram, sheds some light on the real reasons Google is such a success.
Shriram said there is no magic formula to success. Rather, it comes from continual small ``block and tackle'' moves. Oh, and it helps to have a little book called ``Ram's Book of Mistakes'' to guide the way.
Shriram -- who worked at early Internet companies like Netscape, Amazon.com and Junglee -- became a prominent angel investor by writing an early check to Google's founders in 1998, and then advising them one day a week while they were still in a Menlo Park garage. He held about 2 percent of Google's shares, and made $22.6 million at Google's IPO offering. He held an additional paper value of $969 million in stock as of Friday's closing.
Shriram spoke in Santa Clara with Sridar Iyengar, president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs.
Here's what he said:
• Success is pretty much a crapshoot; there are too many unknown facts in a company's early life to make all the right decisions. But good, quick judgment calls on several fronts help multiply the chances of beating the odds.
• Not even the wise man can see it coming: ``I had no premonition of the things to come,'' Shriram said, about meeting the founders in 1998 for the first time at the office of Stanford University professor Jeff Ullman, when he tested their search engine. For two months, he didn't think any more about it, until they called him.
• It's the people, stupid. Shriram helped co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the Menlo Park garage by consulting his ``Ram's Book of Mistakes,'' which he said he started eight or nine years ago to help remind him of all the bad decisions he'd made. Bad hiring decisions are the most fatal.
• It's all in the grooming. Shriram set out to make sure Page & Brin hired only the very best, or ``A'' people. He cited the well-known Silicon Valley tenet: Hire only A people, and they'll hire other A people. If you hire the B person, they'll hire C or D people. Someone asked a good question: How did Shriram decide who are so-called A people? Grooming is a part of it. ``I try to find out who their mothers are,'' he said. If they are raised well, they're more likely to make good citizens, employees and entrepreneurs.
• Shriram counseled the audience: ``Be bold and dynamic,'' noting that there are huge opportunities afforded by the new Internet economy -- in China and India, especially.
• Enterprise software is one sector that is slowing. When asked about comments by Oracle's Larry Ellison that the tech sector is consolidating, Shriram said Ellison was correct, but only concerning software: ``I'd say it's Larry's personal problem.'' He noted that Yahoo, Google and eBay had created 24,000 jobs, and that Internet companies had created $200 billion in stock market value in the last seven years. ``Not a bad achievement.''
• Launching a company is easy. The great thing about the Internet is, you can launch and test an idea easily and cheaply. If it doesn't work, you can go back to the drawing board. ``If you build your field of dreams, and no one comes, you can shut it down,'' he said.
• The trick is small engineering teams. ``Bite-size engineering projects,'' as Shriram calls them, where you can ``know and measure each person's output on a project.'' That allows you to remain innovative and to launch and scrap projects quickly.
Oh, and Shriram hasn't made a new investment in 12 months. And no, he's not publishing his personal ``Ram's Book of Mistakes'' anytime soon.
Source: Silicon Valley
One of Google's earliest investors, Ram Shriram, sheds some light on the real reasons Google is such a success.
Shriram said there is no magic formula to success. Rather, it comes from continual small ``block and tackle'' moves. Oh, and it helps to have a little book called ``Ram's Book of Mistakes'' to guide the way.
Shriram -- who worked at early Internet companies like Netscape, Amazon.com and Junglee -- became a prominent angel investor by writing an early check to Google's founders in 1998, and then advising them one day a week while they were still in a Menlo Park garage. He held about 2 percent of Google's shares, and made $22.6 million at Google's IPO offering. He held an additional paper value of $969 million in stock as of Friday's closing.
Shriram spoke in Santa Clara with Sridar Iyengar, president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs.
Here's what he said:
• Success is pretty much a crapshoot; there are too many unknown facts in a company's early life to make all the right decisions. But good, quick judgment calls on several fronts help multiply the chances of beating the odds.
• Not even the wise man can see it coming: ``I had no premonition of the things to come,'' Shriram said, about meeting the founders in 1998 for the first time at the office of Stanford University professor Jeff Ullman, when he tested their search engine. For two months, he didn't think any more about it, until they called him.
• It's the people, stupid. Shriram helped co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the Menlo Park garage by consulting his ``Ram's Book of Mistakes,'' which he said he started eight or nine years ago to help remind him of all the bad decisions he'd made. Bad hiring decisions are the most fatal.
• It's all in the grooming. Shriram set out to make sure Page & Brin hired only the very best, or ``A'' people. He cited the well-known Silicon Valley tenet: Hire only A people, and they'll hire other A people. If you hire the B person, they'll hire C or D people. Someone asked a good question: How did Shriram decide who are so-called A people? Grooming is a part of it. ``I try to find out who their mothers are,'' he said. If they are raised well, they're more likely to make good citizens, employees and entrepreneurs.
• Shriram counseled the audience: ``Be bold and dynamic,'' noting that there are huge opportunities afforded by the new Internet economy -- in China and India, especially.
• Enterprise software is one sector that is slowing. When asked about comments by Oracle's Larry Ellison that the tech sector is consolidating, Shriram said Ellison was correct, but only concerning software: ``I'd say it's Larry's personal problem.'' He noted that Yahoo, Google and eBay had created 24,000 jobs, and that Internet companies had created $200 billion in stock market value in the last seven years. ``Not a bad achievement.''
• Launching a company is easy. The great thing about the Internet is, you can launch and test an idea easily and cheaply. If it doesn't work, you can go back to the drawing board. ``If you build your field of dreams, and no one comes, you can shut it down,'' he said.
• The trick is small engineering teams. ``Bite-size engineering projects,'' as Shriram calls them, where you can ``know and measure each person's output on a project.'' That allows you to remain innovative and to launch and scrap projects quickly.
Oh, and Shriram hasn't made a new investment in 12 months. And no, he's not publishing his personal ``Ram's Book of Mistakes'' anytime soon.
Source: Silicon Valley
Google's stock is trading near the $200 mark, and investors have to wonder whether many of those buying the stock near such a high price could be money managers, the same managers who once turned the IPO down and said they would never buy any shares.
And it's not just day traders and mom-and-pop investors accumulating Google shares.
Even though Wall Street veterans know that all hot IPO issues eventually come back to earth, and that Google faces long-term challenges from formidable rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo, trading data suggests that institutions are indeed among the buyers.
On Thursday, Google was the most active Nasdaq stock, as measured by the dollar value of the shares traded. Trading volume in the stock has exceeded 10 million shares for seven straight days.
"With this kind of volume, it's not just retail demand," said Mark Lehmann, head of securities at the San Francisco investment bank JMP Securities.
That likely means some deep-pocketed investors have had a change of heart.
While some big fund firms - most notably Fidelity, which accumulated 5 million Google shares by early September - were early believers in the stock, many others rejected it for reasons that had nothing to do with its price.
When the Mountain View search firm held investor meetings in New York, San Francisco and other cities ahead of its August offering, many in the big-money crowd expressed indignation that the Web search company had decided not to play by the old IPO rules.
Those rules, which gave managers of mutual funds and hedge funds inside information on and access to hot IPO's, enriched many during the tech boom of the late 1990s.
But Google, as everyone knows, did things differently.
At those meetings, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page adhered to the letter of federal securities regulations, which restrict executives of companies in IPO registration from sharing any information that is not contained in its public prospectus.
That brought indignation from those managers who already were peeved that Google had estimated its IPO auction would value its shares in a range between $108 and $135 a share. The nerve!
Some made it clear, as they were leaving the Google meeting room at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, that they wouldn't be interested in Google at any price because the company wouldn't play ball with Wall Street.
Their comments are a reminder that while Google's battle with Wall Street was marked by antagonistic relations with big investment banks, some of the company's most vocal critics were institutional investors.
No fools, they knew how much institutions had to lose if a successful Google offering prompted other companies to use auctions to give retail investors an equal shot at IPO shares.
So far, the auction trend has yet to materialize. But the torrid performance of Google shares since the IPO is evidence that holding onto the old ways can lead to missed opportunities.
Source: CBS MarketWatch
Just as Keyhole started to generate some interest, Google just acquired the company for an undisclosed amount.
With Keyhole, you get a satellite image of the world and can view streets in the major cities and political hotspots, while finding local hospitals, restaurants and libraries.
Unlike traditional mapping technologies like MapQuest, Keyhole creates a dynamic 3D interface for geographic information.
Keyhole is a great tool for anyone, from a travel agent to a 13 year old studying geography. With an Internet connection, users enter an address or other location information and Keyhole’s software accesses the database and takes them to a digital image of that location on their computer screen.
The interactive software then gives users many options, including the ability to zoom in from space-level to street-level, tilt and rotate the view or search for other information such as hotels, parks, ATMs or subways.
Keyhole’s technology combines a multi-terabyte database of mapping information and images collected from satellites and airplanes with easy-to-use software.
Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president, Product Management adds “This acquisition gives Google users a powerful new search tool, enabling users to view 3D images of any place on earth as well as tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest.
Keyhole is a valuable addition to Google’s efforts to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Google also announced, effective immediately, a price reduction for Keyhole 2 LT from $69.95 to $29.95.Keyhole was founded in 2001.
Keyhole customers include consumers, large and small businesses and public agencies. Current Keyhole users will benefit from the expanded resources and operational scale made possible by the integration into Google. Their service will continue uninterrupted.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google's new Desktop Search feature is really fast and efficient. But is it capable of too much power?
Introduced last week as a free download, Google Desktop Search (http://desktop.google.com) keeps track of files on your computer's hard drive in much the same way that regular Google finds information you want on the Internet.
After installing Desktop Search, when you go to the Google search page in your browser, the first results you see are your own files. If you're searching for information about Detroit, for example, you get a list of e-mail, Word documents and plain-text documents on your computer that contain the word "Detroit."
With Desktop Search, I no longer have to ponder where I saw some piece of information: In an e-mail? On a Web page? In a document?
A single Google query now covers everything I've seen on my computer since installing the program, as well as whatever is available on the Web.
This is hugely valuable, yet occasionally creepy. Desktop Search does three things in particular that could compromise your privacy when someone else uses your computer.
First, the software keeps a copy of all your AOL Instant Messenger conversations. Until now, AIM conversations with your buddies disappeared from your computer the moment you closed the discussion window. Desktop Search, however, makes a copy of AIM conversations and keeps them forever.
Second, the software keeps its own copy of all your Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail messages -- even after you delete them from within Outlook or Outlook Express. In other words, a confidential company memo will still pop up during Google searches after you've emptied the Deleted Items folder in Outlook.
Third, the software keeps a copy of every Web page you visit and lists those pages in search results with the date and time of your visit. This even includes Web pages that are supposed to be secure from prying eyes, such as those run by online banking sites.
That means if someone else uses your PC and enters the word "bank" or "brokerage" in Desktop Search, they could uncover your confidential financial information.
There are controls within Desktop Search to block each of these three search features, but it's not immediately obvious how to find them, and many users will never bother to learn.
On the other hand, many users will find these same features very useful. If you're getting important work or school information through IM, not just gossip, the Desktop Search archive could be a lifesaver. Similarly, we've all had the experiences of accidentally deleting an important e-mail and being unable to find our way back to a crucial Web page.
Desktop Search is officially a so-called beta, or unfinished prerelease program. That gives the company room to make improvements, and Google has already said it's working on password protection, so only you or anyone you give your password to could search your personal files.
Despite the beta status, I would recommend Desktop Search now to anyone who's having a hard time keeping track of the many types of information that accumulate on a computer.
You'll need a PC running Windows XP or Windows 2000 with 500 megabytes of free space on the hard drive. Desktop Search doesn't work with older versions of Windows or the Macintosh.
You'll also need to be patient at the start. Desktop Search works in the background to keep an index of your personal files and requires five to 24 hours of computer running time after installation to fully catalog your hard drive.
I called several experts on Internet security and privacy last week to see whether the far-reaching power of Desktop Search would stir up controversy. The consensus, for now at least, is no.
The experts know how many threats exist in malicious software that hides its intent to steal personal information. Google Desktop Search doesn't disguise itself. The program shows its presence with a small icon in the Windows system tray that looks like a child's swirly lollipop.
Still, I wouldn't recommend installing Desktop Search on any computer you don't own, such as PCs at work or school. If you think there's a risk of strangers using a machine you own, disable the part of Desktop Search that keeps copies of secure Web pages.
Source: Detroit Free Press (Freep.com)
Google's stock soared for a third day Monday, increasing the company's market value above that of Yahoo, to more than $50 billion, just two months after Google's IPO.
Google rose $14.97, or nearly 9 percent, to $187.40, boosting the Mountain View, Calif. company's market capitalization to $50.8 billion. Shares of Yahoo edged up 24 cents to $35.20, for a market cap of $47.8 billion.
Google's shares have more than doubled since they debuted in August at $85 each. Read recent IPO report as Google sets new milestones.
The stock continued to ride the momentum generated by its quarterly earnings report last week, when Google said it had more than doubled sales and earnings.
While analysts widely applauded Google's strong sales growth for the third quarter, Janco Partners analyst Martin Pyykkonen commented that the stock is "priced to perfection."
Pyykkonen said he would be reluctant to recommend picking up the stock at current levels. He rates Google shares "market perform."
In fact, Google's rapid climb has prompted some of the company's IPO investors to sell their shares and take profits.
Connor Browne, associate portfolio manager of the Thornburg Core Growth Fund, (THCGX: news, chart, profile) said his firm sold its Google shares near the end of the third quarter when the stock was trading "near $130" a share.
"It hit our price target in a hurry," said Browne, whose fund holds $80 million in assets and whose firm, Thornburg Investment Management of Santa Fe, New Mexico, manages more than $10 billion.
At the IPO price of $85 a share, Google's forward-looking price-to-earnings ratio and other metrics the firm uses to evaluate stocks "looked cheap" compared to those of more-established Internet firms like Ebay (EBAY: news, chart, profile) and Yahoo, Browne said.
"We valued it based on what we thought it could do" over the next five years, said Browne. "We didn't think it was cheap near $130," he said.
At Bear Stearns, analyst Robert Peck said he expects the stock will settle into a less volatile range once investors tweak short-term expectations and long-term projections.
"Although fundamentals remain strong for online advertising, we are concerned about current volatility in the stock," Peck said. He maintained a "peer perform" rating on Google shares.
Last week, the Internet search giant said it earned $52 million, or 19 cents a share, for the third quarter. In the same period a year earlier, earnings were $20.4 million. Read full details on Google's earnings report.
Google exceeded analysts' expectations for revenue and cash flow in its first quarterly report as a public company.
Quarterly sales doubled to $805.9 million from $393 million a year ago, underscoring the expanding business of search advertising on the Web. Excluding traffic-acquisition costs, Google generated sales of $504 million, topping analysts' average estimate of $456 million.
Source: CBS MarketWatch
Once it has built its business model through generic search listings, Google might soon want to expand into brand advertising.
Speaking to investment analysts on the company's first-ever earnings call last week, Google executives said its fledgling effort at distributing graphical ads was an important initiative for the company.
Google has begun to test the display of graphical ads on Google Image search.
"Currently, it is a small component of our business, but we think it has a very exciting future," CEO Eric Schmidt said of graphical ads.
Google's image search engine has indexed more than 880 million images from the Web. A Google spokesman said the test began recently.
"It's a limited test and we're serving the ads on a small percentage of queries," the spokesman said.
In May, Google began offering advertisers the opportunity to display keyword-targeted graphical ad units on the pages of participating publishers in Google's worldwide AdSense network, which consists of thousands of Web sites.
Publishers can choose whether or not to display the image ads and where they appear on the page.
Google said its ad system would determine whether to display an image ad over a text ad based on relevance and performance.
"I think what you're seeing with our foray into image ads and other products is that we are serving a larger and larger base of advertisers and users," said Larry Page, a Google co-founder and president of products.
The company spokesman declined to say how many sites have chosen to run the image ads, which do not include animation. However, none of Google's large AdSense partners, like NYTimes.com and Forbes.com, are displaying them.
"We are only starting to get more and more publishers, and more space for them," said Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and the company's president of technology. "I think that's something that's going to need to evolve, because there are a number of technological features that need to be added to them."
Graphical ads, traditionally used by brand advertisers, could signal a move to diversify its advertiser base beyond direct-response marketers to attract brand-advertising dollars. The Google spokesman also declined to say how many of its 200,000-plus advertisers had chosen to run image ads.
"I think they've realized that no one will buy search to do branding, so they need a new offering," said Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein.
Jeff Lanctot, vice president of media at ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish, said image ads have piqued some advertisers' interest in AdSense content ads.
"I think Google is actually pretty well-positioned to garner brand dollars," he said. "They have significant reach through their content network and they have smart targeting."
For now, the graphic ads shown through AdSense are priced on a click basis. Display advertising is often sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis. Stein said Google is unlikely to simply adopt CPM pricing, but could instead have a hybrid system that charges a flat fee for impressions on top of click charges.
Page told investors that the company has a direct sales force that works with major advertisers that typically spend the most on brand advertising.
"I think it is really a natural transition for us," he said of selling image ads.
The Google spokesman said the company is selling image ads both through its direct sales force and its agency relations team, led by Chris Theodoros. Lanctot said Theodoros made early efforts to build strong relationships with agencies that will likely pay off as it rolls out new products to meet advertiser needs beyond direct response.
The move into display advertising would come as that part of the online ad market has started to perk up. While much of the industry's growth in the past year was driven by search, display advertising showed 24 percent year-over-year gains in the second quarter, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Schmidt said any moves Google makes would keep with its mantra of only serving relevant ads that users find useful.
"We just don't do untargeted ads," he said.
Source: DM News
A security hole that could have placed users of Google's desktop search feature in a vulnerable position has been eliminated, according to the company.
Google on Thursday fixed a security flaw in its Web search service that could have allowed malicious hackers to modify its pages.
According to a report posted to the Bugtraq Security Focus list on Wednesday, Google's new Desktop Search tool did not prevent a hacker from inserting JavaScript, a programming language, into the Web address of its page image, or logo.
That vulnerability could have allowed any rogue third party to change the appearance of Google's Web page to ask for personal data such as credit card numbers from its visitors, what's known as a phishing scam, according to the warning.
Google said it has fixed the problem. "Google was recently alerted to a potential security vulnerability affecting users of our Web site," a company representative said. "We have since fixed this vulnerability, and all current and future Google.com users are protected."
The warning came only a week after Google released its newest product -- a tool to search the files on a PC alongside Web pages. Security experts have scrutinised the technology, with some interesting finds. Last week, security consultant Richard Smith found clues that could point to a coming instant chat client from the search giant.
Jim Ley posted, in his Web log, the warning about Google's script-insertion flaw, which he said has affected Google's main site for as long as two years. But with the addition of Google Desktop, the flaw became more serious, he said, because "it places the results of a desktop search into the output of a regular Google search."
He said that the flaw could have allowed third parties to make a record of all the searches people make.
The flaw primarily had affected people using Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser, Ley said.
Source: C-Net News
It is relatively easy to snoop on networked computers which could be running Google's desktop search tool.
The search-engine firm recommends loading it onto only stand-alone machines.
People who use public or workplace computers for e-mail, instant messaging and Web searching have a new security risk to worry about: Google's free new tool that indexes a PC's contents for quickly locating data.
If it's installed on computers at libraries and Internet cafes, users could unwittingly allow people who follow them on the PCs, for example, to see sensitive information in e-mails they've exchanged. That could mean revealed passwords, conversations with doctors, or viewed Web pages detailing online purchases.
"It's clearly a very powerful tool for locating information on the computer," said Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant in Cambridge, Mass. "On the flip side of things, it's a perfect spy program."
Google Desktop Search, publicly released Thursday in a "beta" test phase for computers running the latest Windows operating systems, automatically records e-mail you read through Outlook, Outlook Express or the Internet Explorer browser. It also saves copies of Web pages you view through IE and chat conversations using America Online Inc.'s instant-messaging software. And it finds Word, Excel and PowerPoint files stored on the computer.
If you're the computer's only user, the software is helpful "as a photographic memory of everything you've seen on the computer," said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products at Google Inc. The giant index remains on the computer and isn't shared with Google. The company can't access it remotely even if it gets a subpoena ordering it to do so, Mayer said.
Where the privacy and security concerns arise is when the computer is shared.
Type in "hotmail.com" and you'll get copies, or stored caches, of messages that previous users have seen. Enter an e-mail address and you can read all the messages sent to and from that address. Type "password" and get password reminders that were sent back via e-mail.
Acknowledging the concerns, Mayer said managers of shared computers should think twice about installing the software until Google develops advanced features like password protection and multi-user support.
In the meantime, users of shared PCs can look for telltale signs.
A multicolored swirl in the system tray at the lower right corner of the computer desktop means the software is running. A user can right-click on that to exit the program — thereby preventing it from recording Web surfing, e-mail and chat sessions.
Users can also surf on non-IE browsers like Opera and Mozilla, although the software may index Web pages already stored before the software gets installed.
Managers of public access terminals can also install software or deny users administrative privileges so they can't install unauthorized programs, such as Google's. In fact, many libraries and cybercafes already do so.
Herb Jones, owner of Herb's Cyber Cafe in Oblong, Ill., tried out the desktop search program on his computer and likes it — but he won't install it on his two public terminals. In fact, he's written software to prevent customers from installing programs like it. "Otherwise, they can put on their own files if they want, a worm, a virus, anything, and you're shut down," Jones said.
The FedEx Kinko's chain is also taking preventive measures. It's deploying software designed to automatically refresh its public access terminals to a virgin state for each new customer. So any errant software would disappear, as would any personal settings, files or Web caches, said Maggie Thill, a spokeswoman with FedEx Kinko's.
But policies do vary, and no precaution is foolproof, warned Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association and director of public libraries in El Paso.
"We do our best to protect our patrons and computers and network, but as you can imagine, thousands of people can use public computers in a given week," she said.
The new Google tool would not only aid people in spying on past patrons on public PCs. At home, parents could record their kids' instant messaging conversations or view a spouse's e-mail. In the office, employers could index what their workers are up to.
If each user has a separate logon to Windows, Google Desktop Search will be stymied, however. That's because only one person can install and use the software on a given computer.
Google's software's power relies on centralizing what's already saved on computers; most browsers, for instance, have a built-in cache that keeps copies of Web pages recently visited. The difference is that Google's index is permanent, though users can delete items individually. And the software makes all the items easier to find.
Neel Mehta, leader of the X-Force research and development team at Internet Security Systems Inc., said the threats are real, though there are plenty of other products available for spying — ones better at doing the recording secretly.
"It's not designed to be an illicitous tool," Mehta said of the Google software. "It's designed to be a search engine."
Source: Information Week
Google expects to add well over 350,000 new advertiser accounts until 2008, according to internal documents obtained by The Chronicle.
The growth reflects the search engine's confidence in remaining a beacon for online marketing. But it also illustrates the maturing of the search industry because the rate of adding accounts is expected to slow over time.
Google, in Mountain View, will be in the spotlight Thursday when it issues its first quarterly earnings report as a public company. Analysts will be looking for any indication about its future.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's two maverick founders, have vowed to provide little help. They said that they will talk only about broad trends in their industry, not the company's financial outlook.
"A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour," the founders explained in their now-famous letter to shareholders earlier this year.
Analysts who follow Google grumble about the decision. They must rely on their own calculations to evaluate the stock rather than getting guidance from management.
Everyone agrees that Google is expanding rapidly. The questions are how much and for how long.
The internal Google documents obtained by The Chronicle give unusual detail about the matter. They include advertising forecasts that have not been publicly disclosed.
Google predicted that the number of advertiser accounts will jump from 280,000 this year to 378,000 in 2005, according to the documents. From 2004 to 2008, the number of accounts is expected to more than double to 652,050.
Google made the forecasts as part of its specifications for a new billing system that was to be built earlier this year by BFS Finance, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Bertelsmann AG. The numbers, labeled "assumptions," were intended to help in designing the project.
A Google spokesman declined to comment other than to say that the company has thousands of advertisers.
The figures in the documents show that Google expects to continue adding clients at a rapid pace. They also reflect the difficulty of maintaining the current expansion rate, analysts said.
Google expects its advertiser accounts to grow 35 percent between 2004 and 2005, according to the internal documents. However, Google estimates that the growth rate will decline to 15 percent between 2007 and 2008.
"Clearly, adding close to 100,000 customer accounts per year is pretty significant," said Scott Kessler, an analyst for Standard & Poor's. "But the number of customer accounts is going to be increasingly less relevant over time."
Kessler said Google's future growth will be tied largely to higher ad prices. Customers will bid up the price of the ads, putting more money in Google's pocket, he said.
That's already happening in the search industry overall. A study by Morgan Stanley showed that ad prices for queries with two or three words, such as "APR credit card," nearly doubled to $1.84 per click between April 2003 and March.
Google sells ads on its Web site and those of its partners. They are increasingly featured in areas outside traditional search such as Google's e- mail and blogs.
Companies of all sizes advertise on Google. They range from small mom and pops that sell political novelties to corporate giants such as EBay, Target department stores and Sam's Club discount retail warehouses.
Google's future growth also depends on luring new users and expanding its ad network to new products, Kessler said. Recent releases include a feature that allows users to search books from cover to cover and desktop search software to help users sort through documents and e-mail on their hard drives.
These new products don't yet include ads. However, analysts believe they will soon.
Google's internal documents don't explain how the company forecast the growth in advertiser accounts nor were any related revenue figures disclosed. There was no way of telling whether the numbers have been updated since they were published.
Google held its high-profile initial public offering in August, selling its shares for $85. Since then, the stock has soared 74 percent, finishing regular trading at $147.94 Tuesday.
Google will follow Wall Street tradition in hosting an earnings conference call, scheduled for Thursday at 1:30 p.m. Management is expected to make a presentation and answer questions.
That Google's executives refuse to give financial guidance hasn't stopped analysts from making their own predictions. Those polled by Thomson/First Call expect the company to earn an average of 54 cents per share for the third quarter, excluding unusual items.
Analysts had expressed some doubts about Google after its last earnings report, which came out while it was still a private company. The firm's revenue increased 11 percent from quarter to quarter at the time, far less than previous quarters.
Yahoo's third-quarter results, reported last week, have revived confidence in online advertising. The Sunnyvale Web portal met Wall Street expectations with the help of a robust advertising revenue, then modestly raised its financial guidance.
Google isn't alone in declining to provide financial guidance. A few other companies follow similar policies, including the Washington Post Co. and IAC/InterActiveCorp., which controls several Internet companies including online travel agent Expedia.
David Garrity, an analyst for Caris & Co., said Google may eventually be pushed to make some disclosures about its future. He said they would help analysts and investors hold Google's management accountable for reaching certain targets.
"At some point in time, there will have to be some sort of milestones," Garrity said. "They don't necessarily have to be financial, but people want to have some idea of what the company is shooting for."
Google's advertisers
Here is Google's internal forecast of how many advertiser accounts it will have.
2004 - 280,000
2005 - 378,000
2006 - 472,500
2007 - 567,000
2008 - 652,050
Source: SF Gate
Speculation is rampant that Google will soon enter the Instant Messaging (IM) arena. Such rumours aren't new, but gained momentum as some interesting facts have been discovered.
First, although few people seem to realise it, Google already owns an instant-messaging (IM) client called Hello that it picked up this summer with its acquisition of photo-sharing service Picasa.
Meanwhile, code uncovered in the Google Desktop Search tool released Tuesday suggests that the company may have broader plans to integrate IM into its growing list of products.
Richard Smith, a well-known security consultant, said he examined the code in the desktop application and found included in the program files a new protocol: "google_im://". (A protocol allows desktop software to interact with the Web browser.) "This is a good sign there's an IM client," he said.
A Google representative said the protocol flagged by Smith does not hint at a pending Google IM product; rather, it is merely a component used to capture IM data from America Online Instant Messenger and make it searchable on the desktop.
Smith also unearthed some of the history behind the desktop search application, the most ambitious new product launch for Google since its $1.7 billion initial public offering earlier this year.
For example, before it was named Google Desktop Search, the software was code-named Total Recall, according to a file name detected in the software by Smith. Google confirmed the handle and said the project had also previously taken the code name "Fluffy Bunny".
Right or wrong, the guesswork is a seemingly irresistible sport among technology buffs and investors, driving endless speculation about Google's next steps and perpetuating a Wonka-like mystique about the company. Google, founded in 1998, has also been rumoured in the last year to be working on a Web browser, a thin-client operating system, and a searchable digital archive of library and reference material, supposedly code-named Project Ocean.
To be sure, it's not a stretch to imagine Google's future. Just look at its past. In six years, the company has gone from a straightforward search engine to a Web portal extraordinaire, with an advertising network, comparison shopping service, email and Web publishing products.
Perhaps half the fun in the conjecture is the detective work involved in tracking a highly secretive company.
Smith ran a string utility search on the binary files in the desktop application, found the protocol "googlemail://" and next to it "google_im://." He speculated that the Google email protocol could eventually help the desktop application interact with the company's free Web-based search service, Gmail.
Web loggers at the Digital Life conference in New York were atwitter with the possibilities of a Google IM tool.
Google has incorporated Picasa's photo-sharing technology into its Blogger Web publishing service to help people publish photos to their blogs. But it has largely kept Picasa's IM technology under wraps.
"It's a good bet that as Google integrates Picasa better with the rest of its services, Hello will be its chat client, with full feature support for Gmail and Google Desktop. And if you are worried about security, Google claims that it's more secure than AOL Instant Messenger," said Nathan Weinberg, who runs the InsideGoogle blog.
Source: C-Net News
Google just gave a sneak preview of its next steps to improve Internet search, and clustering technology played a critical role.
During a panel discussion of research lab leaders at the Web 2.0 conference here, one of Google's top researchers previewed the search company's work in clustering both entities and words as a way to better glean users' intentions and distill information on the Web.
Another space in Google's research net is statistical machine translation for turning Web pages into other languages, said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google.
"[We're] trying to go just beyond keywords and the linking structure of the Web, the innovation that we brought to search, and get behind the deeper meaning," Norvig said during his presentation.
In clustering, Norvig demonstrated a six-month-old project called "named entities abstraction," where Google's researchers are analyzing the company's large Web index to extract entities—such as the name of a company—from the structure of content and then decipher their relationship to one another.
For example, Norvig said, researchers are looking for ways to break down sentences by looking for a phrase like "such as" and grabbing the names that follow it. The goal is to not only pull out the name but also its clusters, so that a name such as "Java" can be associated both with the computer language and with language in general, Norvig said.
"We want to be able to search and find these [entities] and the relationships between them, rather than you typing in the words specifically," Norvig said.
With word clustering, the focus is on making the search engine better at understanding the multiple meanings of a word, Norvig said. Google started working on word clustering about three years ago.
Apropos of the heated U.S. presidential election, Norvig demonstrated a prototype of word clustering with results both for President Bush and for his Democratic contender, Sen. John Kerry.
Bush appeared in clusters for words around "president" and "White House," to name some examples, but the results drew laughter when he also appeared in descriptive categories such as "idiot" and "chimp."
"This is what the Web says, not my opinion," Norvig said following the laughter.
Kerry appeared within groups for "senator" and for his wife, "Teresa Heinz Kerry," as well as for "Bob Kerry," a former senator with whom some people may confuse him.
None of the clustering approaches is publicly available, though Norvig said in an interview following the panel that they may become Google Labs betas in the future.
Google Labs often prototypes features and services publicly that, sometimes, become new offerings. News alerts and Google's local search are among the labs' graduates.
"Certainly one application for clusters is in results pages, and it may be something we do at some time," Norvig said in the interview.
A growing number of search startups have targeted the automatic clustering of search results. Vivisimo Inc., one of the best-known startups that recently launched Clusty search site, groups results gathered from other search engines into clusters, or categories, as a way of drilling down into results.
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While it might make sense for startups to deploy clustering technology today, Norvig said, Google still views the technology as too immature. It is most useful only for a small percentage of search results, he said, so Google is focusing on improving the technology and increasing its usefulness.
"Our take is that the state of the art is not there yet," Norvig said.
With machine translation, Google is bringing to bear its formidable Web index—which at last count included 6 billion documents, images and items—as well as its computing resources. Google is well-known for having one of the largest clusters of Linux-based servers, which number in the thousands.
Google already provides a Web-page translation feature, but Norvig said it is based on technology from a third party. Its research project is based on homegrown technology that eventually could translate Web pages and links more automatically, he said.
Source: SF Gate.com
Another securities analyst downgraded his rating on Google from hold to sell Monday.
Not surprisingly, he wasn't from one of the investment banks that underwrote the deal.
Despite all the reforms intended to separate research from investment banking, it seems Wall Street analysts are still unlikely to slap sell signals on companies their employers take public.
So far, analysts from five of the firms that underwrote the Google IPO have issued "buy" or equivalent ratings on Google and two rate it hold or neutral. None has a sell on the stock.
Among non-underwriting firms, the opinions are more widely dispersed: Three rate Google a buy, seven rate it hold/neutral and four recommend selling the stock, according to data from Bloomberg and Thomson Financial via Starmine.
The latest sell recommendation came Monday from Mark Mahaney of American Technology Research in San Francisco, who questioned whether Google's earnings for the quarter that ended in September will be strong enough to meet "what we believe may now be overly aggressive expectations."
On Monday, the stock fell $2.47 per share to $135.26. Mahaney writes that Google's share price rally -- it is up almost 60 percent since it premiered at $85 -- leaves it trading "at no material discount" to Yahoo, "and we believe a discount is warranted."
He also says new search technologies from Snap (an Idealab company) and Yahoo Local "highlight how competitive and dynamic the online search landscape is."
Finally, Mahaney says there are signs that Google is becoming "increasingly momentum driven," which means "there may not be near-term support for the stock on any correction."
Last Tuesday, Google stock jumped 2.5 percent on nothing more than Legg Mason's disclosure that it owned 4.3 million shares, or almost 13 percent of Google's stock.
"The skeptical translation is that somebody bought at $135 on the news that Legg Mason bought at $85. Sounds like fast-money to us," Mahaney writes.
About 2 million of Legg Mason's Google shares are in its flagship Value fund, run by noted manager Bill Miller. He is one of the few value-fund managers who have invested in Internet stocks such as Amazon.com.
Legg Mason is Google's second-largest outside shareholder after Fidelity, which owns about 15 percent of its Class A shares.
Fidelity Growth Company Fund, because it holds more than 5 percent of Google, had to disclose that it owns about 1.8 million shares, but Fidelity has not said where the rest of its Google shares reside. That news will trickle out slowly. Fidelity's funds disclose their entire portfolios about 60 days after the end of their fiscal quarters, which vary by fund.
Some of the major investment banks involved in the IPO -- such as Deutsche Bank Securities; Goldman, Sachs; and Piper Jaffray -- have yet to rate Google.
Analysts from underwriting firms couldn't comment on Google shares until late September, by which time they were at $118.
It's possible that some analysts who wanted to slap a buy on it at $85 or $110 "got jammed, like a batter with an inside pitch," says Mahaney. "Now, to have a buy, you have to argue why it should be worth $150 or $160. It's hard to make that argument," he adds.
But if they wait for a correction, they may be able to rate it a buy.
In other words, don't hold your breath waiting for Google's underwriting firms to issue sells.
The firms that have rated Google a sell include Mahaney's, which does brokerage but no investment banking; Janco, which does both; Soleil Securities, which distributes research produced by independent analysts and boutiques; and Spelman Research, which publishes research for which the rated company has paid a fee and research that has not been paid for.
Google did not pay for its rating, says Spelman President Guy Cohen.
Source: SF Gate.com
Google releases software that will simultaneously search files on a computer hard drive, as well as on the Internet.
Other companies have released desktop search products in the past year, and competitors Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are expected to follow suit.
But Google's integration of the product into its home page, and the company's strong brand awareness among Internet users, ups the ante in what is expected to be a tough battle with Microsoft over search technology.
``This is the newest extension of the browser wars,'' said Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox, referring to Netscape Communications' epic battle with Microsoft in the 1990s. ``Microsoft has to be worried.''
Google was to announce the software at the Digital Life conference this morning in New York.
Andy Beal, vice president for the search engine marketing firm WebSourced, said until recently, search companies were focused on providing the most useful Internet search results.
``Now the race has moved to who has the most bells and whistles,'' Beal said. ``How can you distinguish yourself from your competitors?''
Called Google Desktop Search, the software is a 400-kilobyte file that Microsoft Windows users can download to their computers (a Macintosh version is not yet available). The software is accessible through a Web browser and the ``Desktop'' link that is automatically added to the Google home page.
Once the software is installed, users can perform simultaneous searches for Web and desktop files directly from google.com, or they can limit the search to the desktop. The end result is a hard drive search that looks nearly identical to a typical Google Web search.
``The integration into the main Google look is essential,'' said research librarian Gary Price, who watches the search engine industry closely. ``Overall, it's very impressive.''
Like other, similar tools, the Google software performs a one-time comprehensive index of a hard drive after installation and then updates the index any time a new file is created.
The software can index the content of most common types of files, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Outlook e-mail messages. The software also keeps a record of a user's Web surfing history, and it logs all AOL Instant Message conversations.
The software does have limitations. It cannot search across computer networks, it cannot search the text of PDF files. And, for now, it can only search e-mail messages from Outlook or Outlook Express.
The program, oddly enough, cannot index messages from Gmail, Google's e-mail service. Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said that because Gmail is written in the Javascript programming language, the desktop software cannot access its files. But engineers are working on an HTML version of Gmail that can work with the desktop searcher, she said.
Like Gmail, Google's desktop search may raise privacy concerns. Some users may be uncomfortable with instant message conversations being recorded, though they can disable that feature. And there may be another rude awakening:
``If you thought that it was easier for people to find out about you on the Web, this makes it real easy for a co-worker to pop over to your desk and search your hard drive lickety split,'' said search engine expert Danny Sullivan.
The Google announcement follows a flurry of Internet search developments this year, including Yahoo's creation of its own search engine, the unveiling of Gmail, and a bevy of other product upgrades by nearly every player in the industry.
But Google's move is especially significant because it signals that the Mountain View company may be readying itself to challenge Microsoft's ownership of the computer desktop.
Rumors have been circulating that Google may be developing a Web browser; the company has refused to confirm or deny them.
Now, by integrating desktop searching capabilities into its browser, Google is ``blurring the lines between the desktop and the Internet,'' said Joe Wilcox, senior analyst with Jupiter Research. That suggests Google is trying to position itself as the primary gateway to the increasing amount of digital content that people access every day.
``More and more it's about content, whether that's written in a file on a desktop, or multimedia or on a blog,'' Wilcox said, ``and who is going to control the information and provide the utility to access the information.''
Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch Web site, said the new tool once again raises the specter of a potential Google operating system, where users would store all their digital files on the company's servers and access them through a specialized interface.
``It raises the question, what is the desktop?'' Sullivan said. ``I think down the road, it opens the possibility of moving your stuff over to Google, where you can always access it and they'll back up copies for you. I think it seriously changes the dynamic in a very Google-esque way.''
For their part, Microsoft executives have vowed to make search technology a top priority. The company's MSN division is developing an Internet search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo. And the company has promised to make desktop file-searching a key feature of Longhorn, its next operating system.
Microsoft Windows' file searching capabilities are considered mediocre at best, opening the door for quicker, easier-to-use tools such as Google's. But when Microsoft eventually releases its new operating system, with embedded search capabilities, the company could gain a clear advantage.
That's because Microsoft's search technology would be readily available on the desktop, while Google and other companies would need to persuade users to take the extra step of downloading software.
Moreover, Microsoft's technology will leverage a powerful new database system the company is developing for Longhorn, potentially making it far more robust than anything a competitor could provide with a small downloadable program.
One feature Microsoft is developing, called Implicit Query, automatically displays a list of items or files -- Internet links, e-mail messages or music files -- related to whatever task the user happens to be working on. The company is also looking at ways to personalize search results based on what the operating system knows about users.
But Wilcox said Google's reputation for fast, reliable results may ultimately make it difficult for Microsoft to convince people to use its technology. Wilcox conducted a survey last year that found the majority of business Windows users change their default Web search setting away from MSN to other search engines.
``What I see is Google leveraging its strength,'' Wilcox said, noting its popularity with Web users. ``If Microsoft can do the research and catch up, then anything can happen. . . . Microsoft can improve search in two years. But if people are already using Google, it will be hard to get them to change.''
Source: Times Leader.com
Google is starting its Froogle.co.uk shopping search engine in Britain. The company says it already has many merchants signed up to provide goods through its new shopping service
The service, which is now live at www.froogle.co.uk and contains a range of goods in the low millions
Froogle is free to both merchants and to buyers. In order to have their products included, retailers need to provide a feed containing a description, an image and a price. Current prices therefore depend on how often companies update the product listings they submit to Google.
Cosmos Nicolaou, Google's Engineering Director told us, 'We have been waiting for the market to mature before launching Froogle in Britain which as been driven by the takeup of broadband. We have decided to launch the product now to catch the Christmas buying season.'
As with many of Google's spin-offs Froogle remains 'in beta'. Nicolaou explained that while the product was stable, 'we are still listening to feedback it indicates to people that we might change the interface or something later on'.
Britain has caught the online shopping bug in a big way. According to research firm IMRG, 20 million British shoppers will spend £17bn online this year and the figure is set to rise to £80bn by 2009. Meanwhile figures from NOP suggest that some 10 per cent of all purchases in the UK are now made online.
Source: Computer Buyer
Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are visiting India and want to hire online sales and support personnel and engineers for its new R&D centers in India.
They did not give details about the number of people they plan to hire in India.
They were reported to have said that Google is committed to grow faster in India where it is seeing a huge potential. Page also was reported to have said that India will turn into one Google's "larger destinations".
They were reported to have said that they will hire depending on finding the right talent.
Google has two development centers in India, in Bangalore and Hyderabad, focusing on research and development for its widely popular search engine.
The Bangalore center will focus on research for its search tool and products like Gmail, while the Hyderabad facility will house the online sales, human resource and services functions.
The activities in Google's Hyderabad center is significant as it's a first step to it providing localized services like the Google Local service that it launched in beta recently. The service allows users to search for local shops and addresses that have their presence on the web.
On a lighter note, the billionaires answered to a question during the select media briefing that they would love to take the autorickshaw back home to California because of its maneuverability.
Source: TechTree
Google just launched Google SMS, a beta version of a new service that lets users of wireless devices query the Google search engine for specific information.
Examples of the information that can be found are: business or residential listings, specific product prices on items and word definitions.
Google SMS also can be used to solve mathematical calculations, to look up area codes and postal codes and to receive snippets of Google search engine results.
Google expects to modify and improve the service during this pilot period based on user feedback, a company executive said.
"We have presented our best guess of what would be good [for this service to have] but we are open to change and to learn [what people want]," said Georges Harik, who is in charge of new projects at Google and whose title is director of Googlettes, the term the company uses to refer to this type of effort.
"A core belief at Google is that we try to learn more from real usage rather than trying to figure out everything ourselves," he said.
Using a mobile phone or a handheld device that supports SMS (Short Messaging Service) text messaging, users can tap Google SMS through specialised queries that trigger very specific replies.
For example, entering the word "pizza" along with a postal code prompts Google SMS to return related business listings in that geographical zone. Likewise, entering a person's name along with a city, state and/or postal code yields residential phone listings.
Google SMS taps the company's Froogle comparison shopping service when users enter the word "price" along with a product name, or when they enter an "f" (for Froogle) and a product name. Users can obtain word definitions by entering the word "define" followed by a word.
The Froogle link could be very useful if a user is at a store considering whether to buy a particular product, because the user could check the item's price in other stores, Harik said.
Users can also receive snippets of the regular Google search results one gets when using the search engine from a regular PC. To do this, users should enter the letter "g" followed by their query. They will receive excerpts from the results, which can be useful in finding the desired information.
Because Google SMS responds to queries phrased in specific ways, users should not attempt to use it with the free-form queries supported by the regular Google search engine.
Google SMS is based on text messaging and does not require a browser on the wireless device. By the same token, it does not return full search-engine-type listings with links to websites, as the regular Google service on the web does.
Google SMS only returns text-based information, so features such as ringtones or pictures are not supported.
Google does not charge for the Google SMS service, but wireless provider fees for text messaging apply.
Google SMS currently only works with US wireless services, including AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint PCS.
For now, queries can only be filed in English. There is no timetable yet on when Google will extend this service to other countries and to other languages, Harik said.
Users can send suggestions for improving the service or report problems to this e-mail address: sms-support@google.com.
Users should receive Google SMS query results within one minute typically. The maximum number of results per query is three. If a user is unsatisfied with those three results, the query should be tweaked to try to obtain different, more relevant results. The maximum number of search-engine snippets per query is two.
Source: Computer Weekly.com
Google investor and board executive John Doerr said despite a lot of speculation, Google will not enter the Web browser market.
But Doerr did say others probably would. "Browsers are going to come back. We'll see a lot of innovation," said Doerr, speaking to a roomful of attendees at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
He added that as new browsers come onto the market, Google's application protocol interfaces and advertising network will be there to plug into and support them.
Doerr later joked, however, that just because he was on the board of Google didn't necessarily mean he knew what they were doing.
Though reluctant to talk in depth about Google's future or IPO, Doerr gave guidance as to where the company will likely go, including making more information searchable, growing internationally and becoming "the Google who knows you".
Doerr was interviewed on stage during the first evening of the conference, a gathering for internet executives to ponder the web's next phase of development after the boom-and-bust cycle of the late 1990s.
Many executives from the internet's early days - Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, Broadcast.com's Mark Cuban, Idealab's Bill Gross - were here to give their visions of the future and new technologies that will harken it.
Bezos, in an earlier presentation, said that the internet's early development was about making sites useful to consumers, but now it's about making the web useful to computers.
He was referring to software known as web services, which allow incompatible systems to communicate or exchange information. Web services have played an increasingly important role in helping the online retailer expand its business and ring sales outside of its retail network.
For example, Amazon's new search venture A9.com is built by several application protocol interfaces that tap into Amazon's own "search inside the book" feature. Amazon started a web services division two years ago and it now has more than 65,000 registered users who tap into its retail database.
"The ability to build very thin front end [businesses] and use them to tap into these powerful back ends, I'm very interested in that. You'll see a huge amount of creativity unleashed there," Bezos said.
Doerr said that he believed that many services of the first iteration of the web were being reinvented now, much in the way Google reinvented search while many other internet portals abandoned search R&D in the late 1990s. "Most of the old web-based services are in the process of being systemised reinvented, even the browser," he said.
More broadly, Doerr said he thought of the next phases of internet development in terms of the scientific theory known as string theory, which posits that there are seven parallel universes.
The "near" web represents the PC; the "far" web stands for television; the "here" web represents mobile devices; the "business to business" web for XML, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and other backend technologies; and the "weird" web is for 3D experiences or virtual worlds that could be developed.
Doerr said he had yet to come up with the seventh.
Source: Silicon.com
Today, Google quietly launched a new search technology designed to help book publishers sell online.
Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will host a press conference on Thursday to demonstrate the technology at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, an important showcase if the Internet search engine is to recruit the heavyweights of the book publishing industry.
Since going public in August, Google shares have risen more than 60 percent to end Tuesday at $138.37. Speculation has been rife that Google was planning a new search technology, and possibly a Web browser, as it seeks to diversify a business model dependent on selling advertisements related to users' search queries.
The new service, dubbed Google Print, is incorporated into Google search queries. When users search for many book titles, they get "book results," URLs that lead to book excerpts, at the top of the list of ordinary search results. The book excerpts will carry a link to buy the book from a choice of online book retailers.
Google started testing the service last year. Amazon launched a similar, though ad-free, service last month, called A9, that is partly based on Google's search technology. It is also possible to search inside books from Amazon.com.
A Google spokesman in Germany on Wednesday downplayed questions that Google Print would be a rival service to Amazon's.
The spokesman, Stefan Keuchel, said the two companies plan to continue their business alliance and that Google plans to link to a variety of online retailers, including Amazon, for users who wish to purchase books.
Keuchel added it was too early to predict potential revenue from the service. But Amazon has said the "search-inside-the-book" function has helped it sell more books.
The challenge for Google is to recruit a critical mass of publishers to rival Amazon's head start.
Google said it would not charge book sellers who would like their sites listed alongside the search results. It makes money on the service by selling targeted ad links related to the search query. To entice publishers, it plans to share ad revenue with them.
"It's an advantage for publishers because it offers them the possibility to promote books online. And for users, it gives them the advantage of accessing information about authors and books and even to read a little from the books," Keuchel said. "We're trying to index every book there is, and make it searchable for our users."
Google has been trying to diversify its revenue by expanding into online commerce, with mixed success.
Source: C-Net News
Google launched its new Canadian version of Google Local earlier this month.
It's a sub-site of the popular Google Canadian search engine (www.google.ca) that lets you search for services and products in your own city.
Having tried it out, I can't say it's going to blow anybody away. It's not new technology. But it works.
Sure, if you're looking for a shop in Regina that sells, say, oatmeal soap, you can just plug some search terms into any search engine and see what pops up.
The problem is, when you do that you get a lot of hits that aren't quite what you're looking for. (Oatmeal soap made by somebody named Regina, for example.)
Google Local filters out the irrelevant links, but perhaps does too good a job. For instance, "Oatmeal soap" gets zero hits, something that's hard to believe.
Surely somebody in town sells the stuff? How does Google Local compare to, for instance, the Web site of Saskatchewan phone book company Direct West?
For starters, Direct West is very good at what it does. Its search engine ( at www.mysask.com) allows you to quickly find phone numbers if you already know the name of the company. It also lets you find home phone numbers for most people in Saskatchewan.
It also has a neat reverse phone number function. If you plug in "bagel," you can find out where all the Great Canadian Bagel Stores are in town.
However, if bagel isn't in the name, you won't get a number. Google Local, on the other hand, gives you a variety of local bakeries that supposedly sell bagels.
But Google Local isn't perfect, either. In one test, I tried to find where I could find an external hard drive enclosure (a gadget that lets you take a hard drive out of your old computer and use it with your new computer).
Google had some good suggestions, but it also referred me to a local vacuum cleaner shop.
Making it easier to find what you're looking for, Google Local provides high-quality maps.
Overall, considering it's a brand-new service, I'd rate it a solid B. It raises the question of whether there are other Web-based companies that will open up local branches.
For instance, it's surprising that the on-line auction company, eBay, hasn't branched out to individual communities by now.
It's already a household name and the company has an excellent reputation. One could imagine the impact it could have if people auctioned their surplus goods locally through eBay rather than holding the more traditional garage sales. eBay Local is going to happen, sooner or later.
It's a favourite hobby-horse here at Cyberbeat and we'll say it again -- the Internet is great way to connect people to the world but it's even more useful as a local service.
Source: Canada.com
A few days ago, Google explained their position on news in China and the inherent censorship of certain news stories on the Chinese version of Google News.
Google News has also been looked into in the United States because of political bias reports.
Some people seem to think that the Google News algorithm is serving better political play and supportive articles for George W. Bush on searches for “Bush” than they do for John Kerry on searches for well, “Kerry.”
While the US version of Google News is giving results from all sorts of different news services, Google News China is practicing true censorship by excluding non-Government approved (non PRC) news resources.
Coming under fire from various blogs, free speech activists, and non-censored news channels, Google responded yesterday on their own Google Blog:
There has been controversy about our new Google News China edition, specifically regarding which news sources we include. For users inside the People’s Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country.
This was a difficult decision for Google, and we would like to share the factors we considered before taking this course of action.
Although Google News China does not include non-PRC news for those within the People’s Republic of China, Google does however offer non-PRC approved websites for Chinese web searchers on its Google China search engine. Google remarks:
For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it’s clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China.
What does this mean? A searcher in Beijing looking for Falun information may see the search results in Google, and perhaps even a Google cached page, but Chinese government blocks prevent searchers from directly accessing those sites.
More from the Google Blog on their Google News China development and difficult choices:
For last week’s launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC.
Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible.
For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology.
For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem.
Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories.
So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC – if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page.
Source: Google and the Search Engine Journal
With Google's quiet period having ended Tuesday, analysts whose firms took the company public can better evaluate reports and recommendations for investing in the high-flying search company.
But investors will find researchers' predictions of the company's revenue and earnings as wide-ranging as a Google search for "confusion." Analysts say the questions will remain until Google itself points toward some answers.
"Without management guidance, you're going to see more variance in the numbers," said Stephen Jue, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. "When they report their third-quarter numbers, there's likely going to be a big surprise to the upside or downside."
Google, whose founders indicated in their IPO prospectus that they planned to offer little financial guidance to Wall Street, is expected to earn 26 cents a share for the third quarter on revenues of $452 million, according to a consensus of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call.
But the range is large. Analysts' estimates vary from a loss of 9 cents a share in the third quarter to a net profit of 37 cents, according to First Call.
Compare that with Google's archrival, Yahoo. Analysts expect Yahoo to report a third-quarter net profit of 8 cents to 10 cents a share, according to First Call. Yahoo, which provides financial guidance to Wall Street, will report its third-quarter results Oct. 12.
"When a company does not provide guidance, it tests the measure of each analyst's work," said David Garrity, an analyst at Caris. "One approach is to size the market opportunity...and translate that into revenues and potential earnings."
Analysts are mixed on whether and to what degree Google's share price could suffer, if it misses analysts' estimates by a wide margin. After all, investors have previously been warned that the company does not plan to issue financial guidance to Wall Street and that it will be positioning the company for long-term growth.
"The stock will get hit equally hard (when compared with those companies that do give financial guidance), and I would not rule out the possibility it could be even more volatile," Garrity said.
Jue, however, said investors are expecting a lot of volatility in the stock, anyway, given that there is a small number of shares outstanding. Google has 271 million shares outstanding, compared to Yahoo's 1.4 billion shares. For Google, every couple million dollars in net income affects its earnings per share by 1 cent, Jue said.
"I think investors will be more forgiving, since Google said they are focusing on their long-term prospects," Jue said.
Issuing a value to Google will be difficult for investors, Heath Terry, a Credit Suisse First Boston analyst noted in his research report.
"Valuation is likely to be the most difficult issue for investors in Google for a variety of reasons, including the lack of transparency, the dual class structure (of the stock) and what is expected to be an unusually wide range of initial analyst estimates," Terry said in his report. Credit Suisse, one of the lead underwriters in the Google offering, initiated coverage on the company Tuesday with an "outperform" and placed a 12-month target on the stock price at $145.
Google traded Tuesday morning at $122.34, up $3.98 a share.
The company is expected to announce its third-quarter results the week of Oct. 18.
Source: C-Net News
Danny Sullivan posted a thread at SEW forums named News Search & Biases, where he points to an article written at OJR.org named Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories.
The article discusses how Google News seems to be favoring the conservative papers over the more left-wing, liberal papers. The logic is as follows: Do a search at Google News on Kerry and your likely to see articles that are in opposition to Kerry.
Now do a search on Bush at Google News and you will find news that favors Bush. How is it that Google News, an algorithmic search technology, can be a conservative over a liberal?
The article gives an excellent theory as to the answer to this question.
They quote Ethan Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who offers a possible answer to this question.
Basically, he says that the main stream (conservative) papers often, when discussing Kerry, put “Kerry” in the title of the article.
Whereas, the liberal papers do not. In addition, the liberal papers often use Kerry’s full name in the article content and if you do a search on John Kerry as opposed to just Kerry in Google News, you will find more liberal papers discussing Kerry.
Source: Barry Schwartz,
Search Engine Roundtable
Google went ahead with its news website, despite threats of legal action and allegations by local media of copyright infringement.
The controversies arose after the launch of Google's Hong Kong news on Thursday. The website for Hong Kong news cites news summaries and uses photos from local Chinese language media, including newspaper, radio and television, and provides hyperlinks to their websites.
In its own news report yesterday, Ming Pao said it had issued a letter through lawyers to ask that the US search engine giant stop such practices. Ming Pao said Google had not sought consent from the newspaper before using its news summaries, which it said might infringe copyright.
The head of RTHK's corporation communications unit, Sze Wing-yuen, said the government radio station would ask Google not to use its news until "the matter was cleared up". "We have to strike a balance between copyright and public interest," Mr Sze said.
The chief editor of Sing Tao electronic daily, Raymond Chan Wai-man, warned of "follow-up actions".
Google has been trading on Nasdaq since last month. Its stock rose 18 per cent above its initial public offering price on its debut on August 19, ending just above US$100 a share.
Kevin Pun Kwok-hung, associate professor in computer science and law at the University of Hong Kong, warned that Google might infringe copyright if the news summaries were detailed enough to make the material "copyrightable".
"There is a possibility of criminal liability under the Copyright Ordinance if a reproduction is carried out for commercial purposes and the party knows that it is an infringement of copyright," said Dr Pun, who specialises in information technology law.
The Customs and Excise Department said yesterday it would investigate if it received any complaints of piracy.
In a telephone interview yesterday, a spokeswoman for Google in the US, Debbie Frost, said: "We are a law-abiding company. We feel that if publishers do not want to be included in Google news for whatever reasons, they can always come to us and we can take them out.
"We are very respectful of their rights ... [But] we have no plans to do that [suspend the website]."
Ms Frost refused to comment on the legal issues but described Google's news service as a "digital newsstand".
"When you go to a newsstand, there are hundreds of newspapers and you are looking at the headlines and find out which one you want to read and to buy," she said.
"People read the headlines on Google and choose which website they want to visit. After you click on the link, you will be immediately taken to the website of a publisher. The information is not on Google but is on the publisher's website. Our role is to help you to find the website."
It was "very rare" for publishers to ask to be removed from the Google website, which she said was a convenient vehicle to channel readers to their websites.
"What we found over the past two years since we launched Google news is that publishers tend to like that and they can benefit from the extra traffic provided by Google," she said.
Source: Asia Media
Google has long prided itself on its extensive talent base of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians who work with complex search algorithms for retreiving Web pages on the Internet.
You can’t miss the three new 50-foot-wide beige banners hanging from the ceiling of the Harvard Square subway station. But you may need a Massachusetts Institute of Technology degree to have the foggiest idea what they mean.
“(First 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e).com,” is all the banners say.
It may take a few seconds for commuters to realize there’s a math question being asked here. But T riders passing through this stop in the shadow of Harvard University may be more likely than average Bostonians to recognize “e” as an important irrational number — kind of a distant cousin of pi — widely used in calculus and other higher mathematics.
Rosemarie Yevich, an atmospheric chemistry researcher at Harvard who passed under the banners on her way to work Wednesday afternoon, was intrigued and planned to ask her daughter, Helen, a Harvard sophomore studying applied mathematics, what the expression meant.
“Either that, or I thought I’d check where I could find the answer. I thought I’d Google it,” Yevich said.
Instead, Yevich was delighted to learn from a reporter that Google itself is behind the ad. And because an earlier version began appearing on a billboard next to Highway 101 in California’s Silicon Valley in July, now you can use Google — as well as search engines like MSN.com, Yahoo.com, and Lycos.com — to search a variety of weblogs and Internet sites where the math challenge in the oddball ad campaign is discussed.
However, anyone who solves the puzzle (by combining the first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e with “.com” and entering it into a Web browser) discovers that the website named for the solution, www.7427466391.com, only gives you directions to another website with another vexing math problem. Solve that, and you get to an internal Google page that praises “your big, magnificent brain” and invites you to apply for a job.
As long ago as the heyday of Wang Laboratories and IBM, big high-tech companies have often used mass-market media to communicate messages that only ultra-geeks can understand — and can feel proud they do.
“This Google ad works on a micro level, and it works on a macro level,” said Fritz Kuhn, a senior vice president of Boston advertising firm Hill, Holliday. “The target-audience people who are going to see it are going to say, ’That is my language, that is directed at me.’ For the rest of us, it just burnishes the image of Google: I can’t work there, but, wow, those guys are smart.”
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., isn’t talking about the ads. But MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the banners went up late last week and will hang for a month.
“The limit to our growth is our ability to get the best talent on the planet and get them working on the toughest computing problems around,” Google engineering vice president Wayne Rosing said in a Reuters interview earlier this year.
E — formally known as the base of the natural logarithm — begins 2.718281828 and goes on forever. An indication of how much Google brainiacs love e: When they filed for their initial public stock offering, they put down as $2,718,281,828 the amount they hoped to raise.
The dull, mathematically dense banners seemed to attract few eyeballs Wednesday.
“It’s a good idea, but I think they’re going to miss an awful lot of people who don’t even want to look at it,” said Clare Putnam, 41, of Somerville, student program coordinator at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Ed Arnold, 31, of Watertown, a drummer with the band Amun Ka, had no idea what the banner meant until a reporter explained it. But then Arnold said: “Advertising is all about targeting who you want to get. If they’re trying to get very intelligent mathematicians, that’s the way to go.”
Source: Express India and the NY Times
Google's latest update of its toolbar includes a Browse by Keyword feature.
Looks like Google is trying to assure placement within the browser one step at a time. The latest update of the Google toolbar includes “browse by keyword,” meaning if I type in “how do I kill this hangover” into my IE URL field, I will get Google resutls for the response.
Keyword browser searches are not new, and most PC’s defulat with a partner for this function (HP/Compaq and Yahoo for example), however, Google adding it to the toolbar only kicks up the steam of the search browser wars.
SlashDot reports “The newest release of the Google Toolbar (Internet Explorer only) comes with a Browse by Name feature. It lets you enter keywords in the browser address bar, and when Google decides this is a sure bet you will be directly forwarded to the right page. Is this the return of Internet Keywords?”
Google toolbar seems to serve the number one most relevant site for this function. I would do otherwise, serving Google search engine results along with Google AdWords ads to further distribute the Google SERPS to users.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google is actively hiring for the recently opened research and development centre in Bangalore India, its latest engineering facility outside its California headquarters.
The company, which hit the news for its IPO plans recently, is expected to hire about 100 professionals initially. Legendary for hiring practices, Google says, ‘‘We’re looking to hire talented software engineers, top programmers and visionary computer scientists.’’
Sample this: Google on its website has posted resumes for one to understand what kind of experience they are looking for. They say the hiring standards in India will be exactly the same as in the US, which includes a rigorous, technical interview.
Earlier, the search engine had been careful to clarify to the press that they are not outsourcing. ‘‘We will not take any jobs away from US workers,’’ Google had emphasised.
The R&D centre in Bangalore, which now seems poised to be fully functional, means business. The Bangalore office’s charter is to innovate, implement and launch new Google technologies and products. ‘‘Anything is fair game and the team here gets to decide its agenda.’’
The focus will be on fundamental areas of computer science, including information retrieval, distributed systems, machine learning, data mining, theoretical computer science, statistics and user interfaces.
Google promises India a one virtual campus wherein Bangalore professionals can relocate to other centres worldwide; and also, an engineer can rise to be a vice-president ‘‘purely based on technical accomplishments. No need to get into management to advance career’’.
Presently, Google has 21 offices worldwide, the ones outside of the US primarily being sales offices. More than 1,000 employees work at Google, about half at technical, or engineering related jobs.
Google hit the news recently with its Initial Public Offering that is expected to value the company at as much as US$25 billion.
Source: Express India.com
Google is now allowing its AdSense publishers place up to three contextually targeted ads for each web page in a specific site.
Google AdSense had always stuck to their guns about one AdSense ad per web page, however, web users may be getting used to AdSense amnesia and glancing over the text ads, which have become normal web advertising over the past year.
Google announced their multiple ad units news in their AdSense publisher’s newsletter:
“To provide even more value to your users, and to help you further monetize your web pages, we’re allowing publishers to place up to three ad units on every web page.
Our system will automatically recognize the additional ad units, and will serve unique ads to each.
Your ad units can each have different color palettes, formats, and alternate ad URLs, providing you with the flexibility you need to incorporate Google ads into your site design.”
Source: Google
If you believe some comments made recently in forums, discussion boards and blogs, Google would be developing an instant messaging solution.
The gist of the speculation is that in addition to leveraging its existing assets and expertise in search technologies, IM would allow Google to complete a communication platform that includes Gmail (its Web mail system) and Orkut (its community networking portal).
Reports also indicate that Google's IM platform and client would be based on the open source Jabber protocol.
Google officials were unavailable for comment to either confirm or deny the rumor.
“I would love to see Google get involved in the IM world. They have enough pull on the Internet to possibly convert people en masse to Jabber, which is what Jabber needs.” --Sean Egan, lead developer, Gaim.
The Jabber Software Foundation (JSF), however, was available for comment. Peter Saint-Andre, executive director of the JSF, told InstantMessagingPlanet">InstantMessagingPlanet.com that the JSF always welcomes implementations and deployments of the Jabber protocols, which is also known as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
"It is all speculation at this point, but if Google should choose to offer an IM service based on Jabber/XMPP technologies, they would be a welcome partner in the Jabber community's continuing efforts to ensure interoperability in instant messaging," Saint-Andre said.
He went on to detail that many high-profile companies such as IBM, HP, SUN and Oracle have already adopted Jabber/XMPP technologies, though he admits that the Google adoption would have a different sort of impact. "Google's impact would perhaps be more dramatic as their offering is likely an open, consumer-oriented service and their brand recognition is obviously at historic levels," Saint-Andre said.
Members of the instant messaging community, including the leading open source instant messaging client implementation Gaim, are enthusiastic about the opportunities that Google may bring to Jabber/XMPP.
"I would love to see Google get involved in the IM world," Gaim lead developer Sean Egan told InstantMessagingPlanet.com. "They have enough pull on the Internet to possibly convert people en masse to Jabber, which is what Jabber needs. Gaim and plenty of other clients already support Jabber, so Google's IM users would have a wide selection of clients as soon as it launched."
"This could potentially be what brings Jabber into the eye of the general public," Egan said.
Part of the wild speculation surrounding the Google IM rumor also supposes that beyond being a potential tipping point for Jabber, a Jabber-based Google IM platform would supplant the already established public IM clouds of AOL, MSN and Yahoo.
Radicati Group Market Analyst Genelle Hung, however, doesn't buy into that hype despite the support a Google IM platform would inevitably get. "There would probably be a lot of grass-roots support — especially with consumers being unhappy with the 'big 3' [AOL, MSN, Yahoo!] for constantly changing their protocols and thus causing third-party clients such as Trillian and Gaim to break," Hung said.
"An IM client based on open standards and APIs might be just what is needed to push further for IM standards and interoperability. However, I cannot believe that everyone on the other clients would hop over to the Google IM service anytime in the near future (should it happen) as IM is one of the "stickiest" and most loyalty-inducing features on the market today."
Jabber Software Foundation's Saint-Andre also agrees that a Jabber-based Google IM product wouldn't force the other IM services into nonexistence. He said he also sees a potential for industry standardization based a Jabber/XMPP Google service.
"In the short run, it is difficult to see why the IM services provided by AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo would disappear simply because Google started its own IM service," Saint-Andre said. "On the other hand, Google entered the search engine market at a time when Yahoo! dominated a very crowded market. Moreover, the existence of an open IM service offered by a company of Google's stature would combine with the large number of enterprise deployments to put significant pressure on the existing consumer services to offer true server-to-server interoperability."
IM Security and management vendor FaceTime Communications sees the situation somewhat differently. FaceTime Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Products Jonathan Christensen said he believes that the recent move by the MSN, AOL and Yahoo! to allow for interoperable enterprise gateways is a simple fact that should not be overlooked. Christensen explained that big three vendors have now made a move to standardize on SIP/SIMPLE and open source Jabber protocol XMPP is not part of that equation. SIMPLE, Christensen argues, already has a lot traction, owing to its SIP roots, that cannot be overlooked.
"If Google were to announce and run a Jabber-based system , rather than a tipping point for Jabber it would just be another point of fragmentation in the marketplace and another force potentially slowing consolidation in the industry," Christensen said.
That said, Christensen does recognize the fact that Jabber Inc has recently announced that it was working on providing an XMPP to SIP Gateway, to allow for interoperability on IBM's Lotus IM product (SameTime). It's unclear and unknown at this point if Google would go with a commercial implementation from Jabber Inc or work with the open source version of Jabber from the JSF.
Outside of speculation, there is a currently little known reality about Google's current IM capabilities. It actually already has an IM tool and it's publically avaialbale — it's not even a Google Beta or a Google Labs project.
Google though its acquisition of Blogger last year also acquired a company called Picassa, which also offer an instant messaging service. The IM technology is called Hello and is currently focused on instant messaging between people to share pictures and now to post pictures to a blog. Hello is currently available only for Windows and uses a proprietary protocol.
Source: Internet News.com
Short queries using Google can turn up sites that have posted critical credit card information to the Internet.
The lists of financial information include hundreds of card holders' names, addresses and phone numbers as well as their credit-card data. Much of the credit-card data that appears in the lists found by Google may no longer be valid, but CNET called several people listed and verified that the credit cards numbers were authentic.
The query, the latest example of "Google hacking," highlights increasing concern that knowledgeable Web surfers can turn up sensitive information by mining the world's best-known search engine.
"It seems like everyone has their own trick," said Chris Wysopal, vice president of research and development for digital security firm @Stake. "This is really searching for data that should be secret but has been exposed either through misconfiguration or by someone who has stolen it."
There is no shortage of ways to search Google to find such data. Whole sites spell out how to search for financial information and describe software vulnerabilities and vulnerable configurations on Internet machines. Google is the tool of choice because its powerful search options, such as the ability to search for a range of numbers--useful in finding credit card data--is not present in other companies' search engines.
Google would not comment, citing the quiet period before the company's initial public offering. However, a company source did say that the search firm has a tool for Web masters to remove pages from the archive, if they find that parts of their site violate laws or regulations. Moreover, the company has decided to allow anyone to request the removal from search results of any document that includes a Social Security or credit-card number--a note to help@google.com with a link to the page will suffice, the source said.
Keith Ernst--a Durham, N.C., resident and, ironically, a worker at a financial antifraud company--found himself on the receiving end of a data leak earlier this year that resulted in his debit-card number being posted on such a list. Before Ernst canceled his card, the number had been used for a variety of charges. A foreign student had attempted to pay college tuition with the stolen number.
"It was very unsettling to see those charges come up on your account," said Ernst, who normally works to prevent fraud from happening to others. "It was interesting, to say the least, to be on the other side of the issue."
Ernst's information is now posted to an Arabic bulletin board with more than a hundred other people's financial records, at the beck and call of a simple search on Google. His credit union refunded the charges and now he only uses credit cards to make Internet purchases, because fraudulent charges using a credit card are not immediately debited from his bank account.
The FBI could not immediately comment on whether the agency was investigating the sites listing financial information. The sites seemed to be spread out over the globe: One had a Russian domain name, another was written in Arabic, and a third was based in the Netherlands.
The rise of such Web sites has convinced @Stake's Wysopal that major credit issuers should start using Google as a security tool, searching for vulnerabilities and leaked information before other, potentially malicious, people find the data.
"Shouldn't Visa be proactive and do these searches on a daily basis?" he asked. "The bad guys are doing it, so why aren't the good guys doing it and beating them to the punch?"
The sentiments echoed statements made at the Black Hat Security Briefings in Las Vegas last week, where security researchers and hackers were surprised to learn the extent to which Google can pinpoint weakly secured servers and databases.
Visa already has many sources to pinpoint fraud, said Rosetta Jones, a spokeswoman for the company.
"When we run them against a database, it is very common to find that, in most cases, we have known that the credit card was stolen," she said.
While the company may not use Google to track when sites containing credit-card information appear, it has moved to have many such sites taken down when tipped off to the situation. So far this year, Visa has had 20 sites pulled from the Web for trafficking in stolen credit cards.
With 4 billion Web pages on the Internet, Google is not able to police its archives very effectively, a source at the company said.
The firm has legally positioned itself as an intermediary of content beyond its control, which releases it from being held responsible for any content the company archives or to which it links.
That means consumers are left to carefully watch their information. Yet, the degree to which fraud has become more common makes consumers like Ernst fatalistic.
"I am sure that the information is out there," the fraud-fighter said.
Source: C-Net News
Google's right to use the name "Froogle" for its online comparison shopping search engine came into fire Friday, when an arbitration panel rejected the company's challenge of a website named Froogles.com.
Two of the three judges on the panel of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, rejected Google's argument that Froogles.com was "confusingly similar" to Google.
"The dissimilar letters in the domain name are sufficiently different to make it distinguishable from Google's mark," the panel found. The name Froogles.com "creates an entirely new word and conveys an entirely singular meaning from the mark."
The search-engine company's loss has no immediate impact on its use of the name Froogle. But it means that the Froogles.com name will remain with Richard Wolfe, a disabled Holtsville, N.Y., carpenter who started the Web shopping site in March 2001, before Google introduced Froogle in December 2002.
But in a separate proceeding in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Wolfe has challenged Google's attempt to register Froogle as infringement of his Froogles.com mark. And in Wolfe's application to register Froogles.com, a trademark office attorney, like the ICANN panel, determined in March that Froogles.com isn't confusingly similar to any other trademark, including Google.
"Google's right to continue to use the Froogle mark is seriously in question," said Wolfe's attorney, Stephen Humphrey. "To the extent they continue to use the mark, they are infringing on Richard Wolfe's trademark rights," Humphrey alleges.
However, the third judge on the ICANN panel dissented, saying the additional letters in Froogles.com "do not distinguish the domain name" from the Google trademark. The name Froogles.com could cause users to believe that the site is affiliated with Google, the judge wrote.
Wolfe is using a confusingly similar name in a bad-faith attempt to compete with Google's business, the judge concluded.
Google didn't immediately return calls and an e-mail asking for comment. But the decision by the ICANN panel, which arbitrates disputes over Internet names, doesn't preclude a challenge in U.S. District Court.
A court would likely hear the case anew rather than as an appeal, according to the ICANN panel's general counsel. Only a handful of cases arbitrated by the panel have been subsequently taken to court.
Humphrey wouldn't comment when asked what Wolfe's next step would be. But he said, "The trademark case continues. We have a lot of options right now."
He added, "This is a variation on David versus Goliath, and the stone has been slung."
Wolfe has said that he would consider settling the matter as his legal bills mount, but that his goal has always been to continue developing Froogles.com.
"It still amazes me that I should have to go through this at all," Wolfe said. "I started my shopping service called Froogles almost two years before Google started a shopping service called Froogle. What more does anyone need to know?"
Recently, Microsoft Corp. paid $20 million to settle a trademark case it brought against Lindows Inc. In return, Lindows will change its name.
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., has filed 18 domain name disputes at the ICANN panel, challenging names like "googlesex.com," "google.biz" and "googleme.com." It has won every challenge but Froogles.com.
Source: Forbes.com
Google describes itself as a good employer that pampers its employees with free meals and generous stock options that could soon be worth millions of dollars.
But a lawsuit filed earlier this week by a recently fired Google manager contends the company has cultivated a culture that discriminates against older workers and fosters serious morale problems.
The civil complaint, filed Tuesday in Santa Clara Superior Court, alleges Mountain View-based Google fired Brian Reid, 54, as its director of operations in February 2004 because he didn't fit in a culture emphasizing ''youth and energy.''
Google denied the allegations. ''We believe Mr. Reid's complaint is without merit and will defend against it vigorously,'' spokesman Steve Langdon said. He declined to discuss why Reid lost his job.
Wrongful termination suits alleging age discrimination are common in corporate America, but Reid's complaint could prove awkward for Google, an unorthodox company that has depicted itself as a progressive employer since its founding nearly six years ago.
Google co-founders Larry Page, 31, and Sergey Brin, 30, emphasized their devotion to the company's workers in a letter attached to the company's plans to launch an initial public offering of stock later this year.
''Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything,'' the letter said. ''... We will reward them and treat them well.''
Reid said company executives initially gave him no reason for his termination until Shona Brown, vice president of business operations, told him he was incompatible with Google's youthful atmosphere.
After he left, Reid said, he learned he was replaced by someone around age 30. The firing cost Reid his annual salary of $200,000 and 119,000 Google stock options with an exercise price of 30 cents per share.
Based on estimates of Google's market value, Reid's stock options probably would have been worth about $10 million after the company's IPO. The suit seeks to recover lost compensation and punitive damages.
Source: Monterey Herald
Google’s acquisition of Picasa last week resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of visits to its website.
These statistics come from Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service.
The company's software, which enables consumers to organise and share photographs online, complements Google's ongoing mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.
When Google placed a link to Picasa on the Google UK homepage (www.google.co.uk) on July 16th, Picasa experienced a staggering 6,000% increase in visits among UK sites.
Key points
--- Picasa increased its rank among all sites from # 16,300 on July 9th to # 313 on July 16th.
--- On July 16th, Picasa was the 2nd most visited site within the Hitwise Photography category (up from # 152 the previous day), ahead of Jessops, Kodak and Canon.
--- On July 16th, Picasa received over 45% of visits from Google.co.uk (up from less than 10% a week earlier), with 25% originating from Google.com
Source: Net4NowT
Google added a feature to GMail, its free e-mail service that lets people import their address book contacts from rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.
Since the weekend, Google's free e-mail service, called Gmail, has been letting its users transfer their address book contacts from Yahoo Mail, Microsoft's Hotmail and AOL Mail.
Yahoo allows immediate exporting of its contact lists onto other clients such as Gmail, but for Hotmail and AOL in particular, people have to build their special files through a spreadsheet, which means the process would normally involve more steps.
Gmail's software also lets people add contacts from Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client, a feature supported by Yahoo and Hotmail as well.
A Google spokesman confirmed that the tool, and other new features, launched over the weekend. He declined to comment further, citing the company's quiet period before it goes public later this year.
The launch of the feature illustrates the rising tide of one-upmanship surrounding free e-mail.
Google in April began offering a test version of Gmail that included 1GB of free storage. The launch altered the free e-mail landscape, dominated by Yahoo and Hotmail, and caused Yahoo to increase its own free storage limit from 4MB to 100MB. Hotmail then raised its storage limit from 2MB to 250MB.
While Yahoo and Hotmail have the advantage of many years of service and millions of users, Google's entry could shift the balance of power. In fact, Google has launched a number of properties, such as its Orkut social networking site and Google News, that have put it in closer competition against the Web portal giants.
Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said the new tool doesn't change the competitive balance among the services. "Yahoo Mail users have enjoyed the ability to both import and export address book information for years, and we hope that others in the industry will share our commitment to providing consumers with a highly useful and convenient service," she said.
Microsoft did not immediately comment on the new features. The Gmail updates were first reported by Microsoft Watch.
In addition to its contact import tool, Gmail now gives users the option of including a signature at the bottom of messages. Gmail also began supporting Apple Computer's Mac OS X's Safari Web browsers, for versions 1.2.1 and newer.
Google also last week began promoting on its home page a link to Picasa, an online photo site that the company acquired last week, the spokesman confirmed.
Source: ZD Net
Scholarly research has improved a lot since the days of looking over piles of books at the library.
Search engines are starting to explore the particular opportunities within academic research.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most venerated American institutes of higher learning, made its own foray into the search market with DSpace, a joint project with Hewlett-Packard that was first launched in 2002.
DSpace is open-source software designed to assist colleges and universities in creating, managing, and maintaining digital repositories. There are currently about 125 schools using this software, but no tool existed that enabled searching across repositories instead of just within them.
Google and 17 partner schools have joined forces on a pilot program to enable searching among DSpace repositories.
In addition to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the other 16 universities involved are: Australian National University, Cornell University, Cranfield University, European University Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Minho University, the Ohio State University, University of Arizona, University of Calgary, University of Oregon, University of Parma, University of Rochester, University of Toronto, University of Washington, and University of Wisconsin.
The number of documents available for searching has been one point of contention for DSpace.
An April 2004 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education cited DSpace as estimating that each of the 17 participants had an average of 1,000 papers in its digital archive.
In Between—"a weblog on scholarly online publishing, open access, and library related technology"—published a look at available documents as of April 2004.
While some universities had considerably more than 1,000 documents (MIT had 3,565, but some with limited availability, and the Australian National University had 34,050, but none as texts) most hovered around 100 and many had considerably fewer.
For the pilot program, Google and DSpace have enlisted the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to facilitate searching by acting as a middleman between Google and the participating schools.
DSpace documents have all been tagged with metadata so that Google can sort through them more efficiently, but the Handle system that DSpace uses can be difficult for Google to manage, so OCLC plans to regularly gather DSpace metadata and convert it to formats that Google can more easily use.
Although both sides have been tight lipped about the project, representatives from DSpace have commented that the agreement with Google is not exclusive and that they are open to working with other search engine companies or even developing their own technology.
Plans with Google continue to move forward, though, and if all goes well with the pilot, then Google may launch the program under its Advanced Search section within the next few months. Other schools are encouraged to participate, and DSpace hopes to eventually include all 125 colleges and universities in the program.
Source: eContent Mag.com
Wishing to keep surfers from using rival search engines, Google this week added a new feature to its regular toolbar that lets users search the Internet by typing in simple words, not Web addresses.
Using Browse by Name, users can type "adobe reader" into Internet Explorer's address bar.
They would then end up at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html, a much harder address to remember for most people.
If the toolbar doesn't recognize the word(s), it does a standard Google search and displays the results. Typing “toyota pickups,” for instance, brings up a typical hit list of sites.
Although Google's toolbar has an auto-update option that grabs newer versions without user intervention, the pace is methodical; not all users had been upgraded to the newest version by Thursday.
The new toolbar, which is available in English and more than 30 other languages, requires Windows 98 or later and IE 5.0 or later. It can be downloaded free of charge from Google's Web site.
Source: Tech Web.com
Google is said to developing a new feature, allowing users to search the Web for video and audio clips.
The company has yet to announce plans for the new service, but Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made no secret of it during talks with investors and media executives at an annual retreat hosted by investment bank Allen & Co. in Sun Valley, Idaho.
A Google spokeswoman said she couldn't confirm the plan. As it prepares for its highly anticipated $2.7 billion initial public stock sale this year, Google has been seeking to diversify and expand its offerings amid heightened competition from the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft.
The search engines are announcing new features almost daily in a race to capture bigger audiences and more advertising dollars. In particular, they are competing for a growing segment of consumers armed with faster "broadband" Internet connections who are driving demand for multimedia content that moves beyond plain text.
When it comes to multimedia searches, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google trails some of its competitors.
Yahoo's AltaVista, one of the oldest search engines, already allows users to search for audio and video. Time Warner's AOL, which has paid-search partnership with Google, bought Singingfish earlier this year in a move to offer multimedia search capabilities.
In the past, Google and other search engines have expressed some trepidation about listing audio and video files because of legal concerns that some of the content may have been illegally copied and downloaded.
Google may decide to take its search function one step further by tapping into the growing popularity of legal music downloading. For instance, it could strike partnerships with record companies, which would sponsor links to legitimate song files available for downloading.
Another route would be for Google to host music files on its own site, allowing it to establish an online music business similar to Apple's iTunes service.
"One of the things I think they would try to do is take a new leadership role by rolling out an audio and video search function that is different," said Danny Sullivan, editor of searchenginewatch.com.
"You can't ignore it — there is tons of money to be made off of music."
So far, Google's forays into multimedia have been limited to audio clips from National Public Radio. Google News, which links to stories from news outlets around the world, features clips from such NPR shows as "Talk of the Nation" and "Fresh Air."
Source: NY Post
Citing superior legal rights to the "Googles" name in the children's arena, Googles, a children's website, has filed legal and trademark proceedings against Google, the search engine giant.
The filing challenges the registration of Google Inc.'s mark GOOGLE for children's and other products, email services and search engine.
In two separate actions, Googles, operated by Stelor Productions Inc., filed a notice of opposition to a trademark application for the mark GOOGLE for a long list of "Google" goods and services, including children's books, stickers and children's clothing.
It also separately filed a petition to cancel an existing registration for the mark GOOGLE for email and search engine services.
In both proceedings, Googles has asserted that consumers are and will continue to be confused, with the use of the search engine's GOOGLE mark for goods and services targeted for children.
In deciding to file the actions, Steven A. Esrig, CEO of Darnestown, MD-based Stelor Productions, which has the exclusive worldwide rights to the GOOGLES mark and characters, cited the increasing harm Google has caused to his children's business:
Since its startup, Googles has worked to develop story lines around its "Googles from Goo" alien characters, games, music recordings and other elements to expand its web presence.
In addition, the company has developed stickers, CDs, plush toys and other items to promote its website and generate income. It recently launched several Googles-themed children's songs on iTunes. Its future expansion plan includes attracting investors as well as licensing its concepts and characters for other children's entertainment media, including television.
According to Esrig, Googles seeks a co-existence agreement with Google Inc. "The web is a big enough space for both of us, but not if Google trespasses on our domain for children," he said. "Even though Google Inc. is bigger, better capitalized, and more widely known, the company can't continue to pretend we don't exist. We were first in this trademarked space, and Google has no right to seriously damage our brand and our business. That's what trademark law and intellectual property rights are all about."
Since its startup, Googles has worked to develop story lines around its "Googles from Goo" alien characters, games, music recordings and other elements to expand its web presence. In addition, the company has developed stickers, CDs, plush toys and other items to promote its website and generate income. Googles recently launched its GOOTUNES children's music label on iTunes. Its future expansion plan includes attracting investors as well as licensing its concepts and characters for other children's entertainment media, including television.
According to Esrig, Googles is on the brink of substantial business development, but the publicity surrounding the Google Inc. IPO and Google Inc.'s move into children's goods and services has deterred investors, licensees and entertainment partners from completing their transactions with his organization, Stelor Productions.
"In other words, Googles has been stopped cold by Google Inc.," Esrig said. "Their mark is confusingly similar to ours. The sole distinction between the two is that Google Inc. is using the singular version of our registered mark GOOGLES."
According to Stephen H. Sturgeon, a Washington, D.C.-based trademark attorney, differences in the size and public visibility of Googles and Google Inc. are unlikely to influence the outcome of this classic David-v.-Goliath confrontation.
"Trademark laws are designed to protect the small corporation," said Sturgeon. "It appears to me as if Googles has a solid case. They have rights they can use to stop Google's expansion."
The Googles from Goo is an educationally-based, environmentally friendly and scientifically-conscious animation and live-action hybrid targeted to children in the 2-10 year range.
Realizing the significant domestic and international parental demand for non-violent, educationally-based children's characters, Stelor Productions, which has exclusive rights to the Googles creative concepts and products, has developed the characters' storyline to include musical, video, written and gaming applications.
The Googles have a loyal following among children and their parents, who for many years have used the interactive website at http://www.googles.com . The site uses the mark "GOOGLES.COM."
Source: Yahoo News
Tim Yu, a Stanford University student, recently found that one of his family's computers was infected with a program called "BrowserAid/Featured Results," which was delivering additional and unwanted pop-up ads atop Google results.
He managed to rid the computer of that application, but a similar, unidentifiable program could not be eliminated.
"I removed it from the registry, but this one heals itself," Yu said. Spyware makers, he said, are getting more sophisticated.
And that's a problem for Google, as new strains of spyware attempt to profit from the highly popular search engine and its lucrative pay-per-click advertising program by altering search results pages or delivering pop-up windows with their own lists of text ads.
Spyware is a catchall term for software that installs itself on a PC without consumers' knowledge and that tracks computer usage, sometimes with criminal intent. A related breed of software, adware, is designed for less invasive, but more annoying, delivery of advertisements.
An entire industry of spyware and adware has sprouted up to take advantage of search engine ads, which are the most lucrative and fast-growing sector of online advertising. Sales from search advertising are expected to reach about $3.2 billion this year, up from $2.5 billion last year and just less than $1 billion in 2002, according to research firm eMarketer. Google alone is expected to rake in more than $1 billion from advertising this year.
The problem shows no signs of abating. A recent survey reported that nearly one out of every three computers scanned for Trojan horse programs or monitoring software like spyware was infected, according to security software maker Webroot Software. For some in the U.S. Congress, the threat is serious enough to warrant legislation designed to protect consumers.
Google in particular has drawn the attention of interlopers. Researchers for Lavasoft, which sells the popular spyware detection software Ad-aware, have identified one application that targets Google by altering the display of search results. The spyware, known as "Gloggle.Shing," carries a high threat level, according to Lavasoft, because the software installs itself in stealth mode when people visit certain Web sites, which the company did not name.
DestPatrol, another spyware fighter, has named "BrowserAid," along with many of its variants, as an application that affects search results. According to PestPatrol, the software installs itself via downloads from partner sites and delivers pop-up windows displaying ad links when a person searches at Google.
And at least one publicly traded Internet company is trying to distance itself from yet another spyware maker preying on Google and other major search providers.
LookSmart, an online search and directory service, said it recently investigated its business partners in an attempt to discover which company had disseminated its text ads over those of Google. The partner had apparently linked it to a Web site called Clickthrutracking.com without permission, allowing that site to display LookSmart text ads over the sponsored results of Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, as well as those of Google.
The San Francisco-based company sent a letter in June to all of its partners, aiming to bar them from working with Clickthrutracking.com.
The company would not disclose the name of the offending business partner, which apparently owns the domain Clicktrutracking.com. According to Whois domain name records, the company is called Search Request and is based in Phoenix. Calls to business license authorities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Ariz., do not reflect a company of that name or address operating in the state. The company's Web site is intermittently out of service.
"We have a blacklist of sites that (our partners) won't allow traffic from, and that list includes Clickthrutracking.com," LookSmart spokesman Dakota Sullivan said. "They will screen that traffic out, and if it slips through, we won't pay for the traffic."
LookSmart's temporary link to this distribution partner highlights the reach of spyware across the Internet industry. Untangling from spyware is becoming as hard for Internet businesses as it is for unsuspecting Web surfers.
The ranks of spyware and adware makers are on the rise, because the technology makes it relatively easy for someone to make money. Google, Yahoo and others collect fees from marketers each time people click on sponsored text ads. Marketers buy into the programs and bid for keywords in hope of reaching people who are searching for a particular product or service.
Major search engines and second-tier search providers distribute those text ads to third-party publishers and split the fees with them when people click. So if a spyware maker can arrange to place text ads over popular search engines, it is set to cash in.
"You would not believe the size and scope of the gray market in this arena," said Elliot Noss, president of Tucows, a downloads site. "It runs the gamut from light gray to dark gray."
The complexity of the ad distribution partnerships is illustrated in Yahoo's recent move to provide Web surfers with a tool to block spyware and viruses on the browser.
Yet the toolbar application does not block advertising software like that from controversial company Claria, formerly known as Gator and one of the largest providers of adware. Through its own tool called Search Scout, Claria delivers text ads from Yahoo's Overture Services in a pop-up window when people search on Google. As much as 30 percent of Claria's revenue is derived from Overture.
In another example of the cottage industry, Internet service provider 550Access.com introduced a toolbar in March that blocks certain ads from search results and replaces them with others.
Google also distributes its text ads to questionable areas of the Web through Applied Semantics, a company it bought last year. When Web site visitors type in a misspelled domain name, they might find a page of related sponsored ads from Google.
Google limited its comments for this story, citing its upcoming $2.7 billion initial public offering. But the company pointed to recent guidelines it published on its Web site regarding downloadable PC software and best practices for the industry to notify consumers of their tactics and give them a way to opt out.
Google has a stake in the business as a destination site that can be affected by third parties out to profit from control of the browser.
It's also an application provider that could be affected by legislation meant to ban types of spyware or adware. It develops the Google Toolbar and Deskbar, which help people access search results from a central point on the browser and desktop, respectively. The applications also "phone home" usage data to the company's server if consumers agree to let Google monitor their habits for the sake of improving the service.
Utah and Massachusetts have already enacted laws to restrict types of downloadable software from tracking users and delivering ads. But adware maker WhenU recently contested the Utah law and won a temporary reprieve.
"Google's goal is to provide users with the best search experience," according to a statement on the company's Web site. "We have recently published a set of software principles designed to foster discussion about defining and fighting spyware, and ultimately to contribute to a better user experience online."
Yet Google's IPO prospectus acknowledges--if briefly--the threat facing the company: "New technologies could block our ads, which would harm our business."
Technology experts urge consumers to scan their machines with security or anti-spyware software regularly. Programs they suggest include PestPatrol, Ad-aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy.
"Consumers should be aware of the applications and files residing and running on their machines," said Matt Cobb, vice president of core applications at Internet service provider EarthLink.
Danny Sullivan, editor of industry newsletter Search Engine Watch, said he's had several reports of adware that obstructed Google results over the last six to eight months, and he suspects that there are several different strains.
"The bigger issue is that for advertisers, your paid listings can be distributed in all sorts of ways you don't know about," Sullivan said, "and you may not have a way to discover where they're going."
Source: ZD Net
Google is preparing to publicly release some of its underlying software code, only months before it undertakes a multibillion-dollar stock-exchange float.
The revelation comes as Google considers Melbourne for the home of a regional research and development centre in an effort to triple its global workforce over the next 12 months.
The time has come for Google to "give something back", Wayne Rosing, the company's vice-president of engineering, told students while on a recruiting drive in Melbourne last week.
"There have been a lot of conversations in the company in the past two months about (how) . . . it's time for us to give something back. So our technical director, Craig Silverstein, has started a project to look at all the Google code and start figuring out what parts of it we want to give back," Rosing said.
"I'm not saying we're going to open-source Google, because that would be a little dumb when we have these Microsoft guys making noise," he said, referring to the practice of giving away the raw computer instructions to a software program.
He says it isn't fair for Google to draw smart people from all over the world and "just keep it all for ourselves".
"We need to have the tools out in the universities so the next generation can build on our work, too."
Google is making a policy decision to be more open, said Craig Nevill-Manning, director of engineering at the New York office, the other Google visitor.
"We're encouraging the software engineers to submit papers where it makes sense, particularly where it is landmark work and it is really important that other people know," Nevill-Manning said.
Rosing and Nevill-Manning were on a whirlwind recruitment drive, canvassing postgraduate students from RMIT and Melbourne University on Thursday night before presenting a seminar on Friday.
Google was in town to "assess the local talent", Rosing told the Thursday night gathering. "We could consider opening and looking for sites here. We're looking for a critical mass of talented people."
His audience was mainly software engineering students but the address also attracted some linguistics and statistics students - as well as those who sneaked out of work early in search of a new job with the dotcom star.
Later, Rosing told delegates he was using the night to gauge the viability of a local office and was "very excited" about the turnout of more than 200 people - the same number Google attracted to a similar night in New York.
He said Google will triple its workforce from, 700 to 2100, during the next 12 months.
The next day it was standing room only as Nevill-Manning addressed a 360-seat lecture theatre packed with Australia's industry and academic digerati - including representatives from Microsoft, Sensis and CSIRO - crammed alongside eager postgraduate students.
Google's consideration of an Australian research presence is "another tick in the box for Australia", said Australian Computer Society president Edward Mandla.
"Google is one of the companies that is leading in technology, and I think young Australians who are studying want to get their hands on the latest technologies and help develop the latest technologies.
"We've got to attract multinational companies here to set up research centres and to take advantage of Australia."
Victoria's Minister for Information and Communication Technology, Marsha Thomson, says Google's interest in Melbourne proves Victoria's ICT industry is on the right track.
"The recent Meta report found that Australia was second to India in attracting offshoring work from the US, and Google's interest is confirmation that we are achieving our goal of having a highly skilled ICT workforce," she says.
Source: F-2 Network
Search engine giant Google is perceived at renewing its support for the popular RSS news feeds format in some of its search services, marking the latest turn in a standards war over technology.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, lets online publishers automatically send Web content to subscribers, giving readers a powerful tool to compile news headlines on the fly from several sources at once.
Next to Atom, which launched as a challenger last year, RSS has become a leading candidate to form the basis of an industry standard for an entirely new style of Web publishing.
In January, Google seemingly chose sides, bypassing RSS support for most subscribers of its Blogger publishing tool in favor of rival Atom. But now, there are signs that Google may be poised for a change of heart, as support has grown inside the company to restore equal footing to both formats.
According to an internal Google e-mail seen by CNET News.com, the company has been considering the change and last month assigned at least one staffer to write a memo summarizing technical details relating to RSS. The request came amid a broader discussion touching on extending RSS support for new Blogger subscribers and Google Groups, which supports Atom but not RSS in a test version of the service.
"I did ask (a Google product manager) to develop a summary...about RSS feeds, including the ways they are produced and consumed, which platforms/devices they run on, and information on the various formats (RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom)," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, wrote on May 22. The message was part of a thread addressed to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and others.
As of June 4, it appeared no decision had yet been made on the issue. A Google representative declined to comment.
Were Google to support both RSS and Atom equally, it might help ease growing pains for a swiftly rising movement of Web publishing. It would also restore Google to the status of a neutral party in the midst of a bitter fight between backers of RSS and Atom, who have been divided since last summer when critics of RSS banded together to create the alternative format. Since then, many blog sites and individuals have rallied behind Atom.
Google is central to the debate because of its mounting influence in the online community and within Web publishing circles as the owner of Blogger.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which is gearing up for a $2.7 billion initial public offering later this year, recently redesigned Blogger with simplified features to help newbie Web surfers publish regular accounts of their lives online, a move to appeal to wider audiences.
Google also has plans to introduce a raft of community services, including e-mail discussion groups (Google Groups 2), free Web-based e-mail and search personalization tools, which could eventually tap the syndication format.
A slew of feed readers or news aggregators has emerged to take advantage of the technology and spur consumer demand. Newsgator, for example, lets people subscribe to various Web logs and news sites and have the feeds delivered to their e-mail via a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, at a cost of $29.
Topix.net lets people parse news into 150,000 different categories, even down to a ZIP code, and create their own information site. Pluck recently released a set of browser add-ons for Microsoft's Internet Explorer with an RSS reader. Many news readers support both RSS and Atom, although some support only one or the other.
Despite the fissure, RSS has been gaining allegiance among many computer makers and online publishers. In recent weeks, Time magazine, Reuters, Variety.com and Smartmoney.com have started supporting the format, syndicating their headlines to news aggregators and individuals.
In January, Yahoo started testing RSS feeds, allowing visitors for the first time to create personalized MyYahoo pages with automatic news feeds from third parties of their choice. Yahoo also supports Atom feeds. Computer companies including Microsoft, Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems also support RSS.
Two major versions of RSS currently exist. They are known as RDF Site Summary and Rich Site Summary, respectively.
The technology is becoming more important because it essentially allows Web surfers to get information how and when they want it, without surfing to Web sites.
People can set up a Web page and aggregate headlines from multiple sites, and click only on those that interest them. Publishers are embracing the technology to drive more traffic to their sites, amidst media overdrive on the Web. Many publishers and advertisers are even evaluating ways to make money from syndicating news feeds with ads or sponsorships. For example, publishers could seed advertisements into RSS and Atom news feeds.
Yet without interoperability between the news readers, consumers could eventually hit a brick wall. If a publisher's syndicated news feeds are available only in one format, then the consumer using another would have to install an updated news reader.
"From a layman's perspective, if this is going to move out of the geek space, these two warring parties need to come together and realize it's the applications that will determine the standard," said Charlene Li, principal analyst for Forrester Research. "It shouldn't be polarized into a Betamax vs. VHS discussion."
RSS was developed as a Web scripting format in the late '90s by a team of Netscape engineers and eventually came under the domain of Dave Winer's blog software company, Userland, when Netscape's RSS team disbanded.
Last year, Winer transferred the format to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where he is a fellow. RSS is also now available for use under a "creative commons" license, which frees it from commercial copyright claims.
Sam Ruby, an IBM software engineer, launched Atom last summer as a way of bypassing what he and other critics called Winer's de facto control over RSS. Industry watchers say the format is more robust than RSS, with more tagging capabilities in syndication, and is more promising because it's on a fast track to becoming an open standard.
Atom backers have proceeded with plans to bring their technology under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Detractors of RSS argue that the format is closed because it is essentially governed by one man, Winer.
In May, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced a proposal for a new IETF Atom publishing format and working group under the IETF. Ruby and others have said that the working group would draw on the experience of RSS to help create a single, interoperable format. Ruby could not immediately be reached for comment.
Winer himself has lobbied for a merger of the rival formats, in part because of concern that Google's dominance would influence a greater split in the Web publishing industry.
In a worst-case scenario, Winer described how in the future, people might need to download two different news reader applications to compile headlines from publications supporting competing formats.
Winer said that he's asked the company repeatedly to get behind RSS and quell confusion over competing formats, with no answer.
The "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would coalesce, but then things started to fragment, largely due to Google," Winer said. "RSS deserves Google's respect, and it's not getting it."
Source: C-Net News
Google yesterday extended its Adsense program to smaller businesses and is also testing a new "enhanced" search tool that provides web publishers with a flexible search tool to reflect the content of the site.
Adsense was previously offered exclusively to larger websites and portals that achieved a certain amount of web impressions, such as AOL and BellSouth. Now any web publisher can apply for the programme at www.google.com/adsense/.
Adsense delivers targeted text and image ads to websites, with Google sharing the revenue generated from ad clicks with the web publisher. The search tool is hosted by Google and requires no additional resources from the publisher.
These search results pages can also be customised with logos specified by the publisher and colour schemes that complement the website. Web publishers can also track the number of queries, clicks, click through rate, and earnings through a web-based account interface.
Google also announced it is trailing a 'Site-Flavoured Google Search'. The tool allows web publishers to select from a variety of categories to specify the interests that describe their website.
For instance, a computer site owner might select [computers > hardware] to describe their site. A user searching for the word "mouse" from that site will see results more relevant to the computer peripheral than the animal.
Source: Net Imperative
Google yesterday extended its Adsense program to smaller businesses and is also testing a new "enhanced" search tool that provides web publishers with a flexible search tool to reflect the content of the site.
Adsense was previously offered exclusively to larger websites and portals that achieved a certain amount of web impressions, such as AOL and BellSouth. Now any web publisher can apply for the programme at www.google.com/adsense/.
Adsense delivers targeted text and image ads to websites, with Google sharing the revenue generated from ad clicks with the web publisher. The search tool is hosted by Google and requires no additional resources from the publisher.
These search results pages can also be customised with logos specified by the publisher and colour schemes that complement the website. Web publishers can also track the number of queries, clicks, click through rate, and earnings through a web-based account interface.
Google also announced it is trailing a 'Site-Flavoured Google Search'. The tool allows web publishers to select from a variety of categories to specify the interests that describe their website.
For instance, a computer site owner might select [computers > hardware] to describe their site. A user searching for the word "mouse" from that site will see results more relevant to the computer peripheral than the animal.
Source: Net Imperative
Robin Li, Baidu's chief executive, confirmed reports that Google was among a group of foreign investors included in a recent overseas fund-raising by the privately held Chinese company.
But Li would not say how much was raised or how many shares the investors held.
Expanding its reach overseas, Internet search company Google Inc. has taken a minority stake in a leading Chinese-language search company, Baidu.com Inc., the Chinese company said Tuesday.
"Google does not have a controlling stake," Li told journalists in a conference call from the company's headquarters in Beijing.
Phone calls to Google were not immediately returned. Privately-held Google is planning to list its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange later this year. Industry and Chinese media reports have said Baidu is also planning to list its shares on the Nasdaq. Li refused comment on share listing plans. "My board has not authorized me to disclose any such information," he said.
Baidu is China's biggest independent Internet search engine and is one of Google's strongest rivals in China. Its music search tool is considered one of the country's best.
But it faces growing competition both from other Chinese search engines, such as Sohu.com, and from foreign giants like Google and Yahoo, which has an alliance with Beijing 3721 via a Hong Kong partner of the Chinese Internet service provider.
"From Google's perspective, it saw Yahoo acquiring 3721 and may have felt prompted to make a move," said Duncan Clark, managing director of the BDA China Ltd. consultancy in Beijing.
"Increasingly, they're going head-to-head in China," he said. Li said Baidu was hoping its alliance with the California-based search engine giant would help improve the Chinese company's technology, build up its brand name and expand its market share.
"We're both competitors and partners," he said. "Baidu has a better understanding of the Chinese market, and we hope to reinforce that advantage with the money raised overseas."
Google's investment in Baidu does not include management, Li said. "Google is a strategic investor. We don't have cooperation in operations at this stage," he said. "We keep our independence in management. Google does not have a seat on our board."
China's government strives to control online access to information and Web sites it deems politically sensitive or otherwise unacceptable. Yet, use of the Internet has continued to climb as the country embraces computers and other high-tech accessories.
Google is hugely popular among China's more than 80 million Internet users because of its wide-ranging search capacity. It has a Chinese-language search site, and launched its AdWords online advertising in Chinese in February, seeking to expand its own market share in the fast-growing market.
Most of Baidu's revenues come from companies that pay to be listed on its site.
Li said that for now, Baidu does not plan to build its own English-language Web site, although it might consider Korean and Japanese in the future.
"China is a huge market. For now, we'll concentrate on expanding here," Li said.
In Chinese, Baidu means "a hundred times," a phrase taken from a Song dynasty love poem. Li, who attended university in the United States and worked in Internet-related jobs before returning home, founded the company in 1999.
According to reports in the Wall Street Journal and other U.S. newspapers, Google helped lead Baidu's recent fund-raising round with venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet Ventures.
Li denied that the fund-raising had brought in $10 million, as reported, but refused to give a figure.
Source: Seattle PI.com
Search engine Google placed its reputation as the Web's first search engine, delivering relevant and fast search results, untouched by humans, or so it seems.
But with Father's Day approaching, Google Inc. is experimenting by promoting its own shopping site ahead of other online search results and ads.
That has prompted criticism from some industry experts who say that the giant search engine company appears to be compromising the unusually high standards that it has set for itself just as it prepares to sell stock to the public.
Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, said this was the first time he had noticed Google promoting its shopping service, named Froogle, by placing it at the top of the list of advertiser-supported search results.
For example, when computer users typed the phrase "Father's Day gifts" into Google earlier this week, Froogle often came up as the first listing. Google previously has said its ad rankings were based entirely on formulas combining the prices paid for ads and the popularity of Web sites among searchers.
"It is weird when Google shoves its own stuff in there," Sullivan said. "It is wrong, in that Google has taken a spot an advertiser was expecting to get. If you are an advertiser, you have a right to be upset. They ought to come up with something better."
Google declined comment about the recent promotion, citing the quiet period companies customarily enter leading up to their initial public offerings of stock.
Federal securities laws prohibit companies from saying anything that would hype the offering during the quiet period. Google has recently taken a liberal approach to that directive, talking openly about a number of new product initiatives, though it has been careful to avoid making revenue projections.
In another recent practice that is drawing criticism, Google manually altered the mathematically generated search results for certain products -- such as golf clubs -- that might typically be purchased as gifts for Father's Day so that the first thing coming up in a search under ads was a link to Froogle.
In this case, Google did not identify Froogle by name, choosing instead to label the result under the heading "Product Search Results." Only when users clicked on the link did they find it led to Froogle.
While Google considers this an experiment, some industry analysts said it appears to violate Google's own standards about disclosure and its description of how search results are derived. Andy Beal, vice president of WebSourced Inc., a search engine marketing firm, called Google's practice misleading since it makes it appear that the Froogle link came up because of its relevance, rather than because Google officials decided to list it on the top.
"If Google thinks there is nothing wrong with showing Froogle at the top, why are they not clearly labeling it?" Beal asked. "They should at least have a button that explains what it is and where these results are coming from."
Google's practice contrasts with that of Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) Type "Father's Day" in its search engine, and the first results that come back are labeled "Inside Yahoo" to distinguish them from search results for the rest of the Web.
"Google does hold itself to higher standards, and they are vocal about trying to establish guidelines and standards for others to live by," Beal said. "A case in point was their recent guidelines about software. If Google is going to set the standards, then by Google's own definition, they should have those results labeled as Froogle, and make it clear what those results are for."
Other industry experts said they saw nothing wrong with Google's promotion of Froogle, noting that the company was simply attempting to provide computer users with the most useful links for buying gifts. Fredrick Marckini, chief executive of iProspect.com Inc., a search engine marketing firm, said that with product searches becoming a more important task for search engines, Google is making life easier for online shoppers.
If Google decides to routinely favor Froogle in directing people where to go when they shop, Marckini said online retailers may be forced to take Froogle more seriously, marketing their wares through the service as they do on the search engine. Google allows businesses to list their products for free on Froogle. Google will apparently seek to profit from Froogle, as from its main site, primarily by selling ads.
"They seem to be true to their word. I don't think this is inconsistent with anything they have said," Marckini said of Google. "I think they are doing it in a clear attempt to improve the value of their search results."
Dennis Pushkin, chief executive of marketing firm MoreVisibility.com Inc., said Google appears to be laying the foundation to ramp up Froogle, which has been in a test phase, and make it an engine of profit. While Google is immensely popular and enormously profitable, its Froogle service is relatively small compared with other Internet sites and search engines specializing in product comparison, Pushkin said.
"This is the next stage of Google, and they are presenting the beginning of Froogle," Pushkin said. "The advertiser in due course is going to have the opportunity to advertise on Froogle."
Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor's, said Google needs to develop Froogle and other services if it is to continue growing amid heightened competition.
An April survey commissioned by S&P showed that Google remained the undisputed leader in search and that Yahoo was a distant second. Among 1,000 people surveyed, 48 percent said they used Google most, followed by Yahoo (20 percent), MSN (14 percent) and AOL (7 percent). Kessler said that it is likely the gap between Google and the others will narrow and that the leading search engines will increasingly come to resemble one another.
"We think Google will have difficulty replicating Yahoo's success in consumer content and services," Kessler wrote in a new research report. "With Froogle, Google has extended its search capabilities to comparative shopping.
But users of Google search somewhat less for information about products and services than those of other major search services. While Froogle is an application, Yahoo offers similar search functionality, as well as browsing capabilities, a shopping marketplace, and payment offerings."
Source: Yahoo News
Google dominates the desktops of Internet users, according to a nationwide consumer survey on search engines.
The survey's findings indicate that 48% of search engine users say they use Google most overall, compared to 20% for Yahoo, 14% for MSN and 7% for AOL.
However, Google could face challenges as it expands beyond search into offerings such as comparative shopping, social networking, and e-mail services, according to Part 1 of a pre-IPO report on Google also released today by Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services.
According to the survey, which was commissioned by Standard & Poor and conducted by InsightExpress, an online market research firm, search engine user satisfaction is quite high, with most users (83%) saying they are extremely pleased with the search engines they use, and two-thirds of users (67%) have been using their search engines of choice for more than two years.
Google is the most widely used search engine, primarily because of the relevance and accuracy of its results. However, more than six out of 10 Google users (63%) indicated they would switch search engines if a better service came along.
Importantly for Google's free e-mail service called Gmail, less than one out every four search engine users would be very likely (8%) or somewhat likely (15%) to sign up for and regularly use a new personal e-mail service if it offered unlimited storage and the capacity to search old e-mails, and would search e-mails to target advertising to users.
Scott Kessler, Internet Software & Services Equity Analyst and author of the report, notes that Google is the Internet search leader, whose appealing offerings and opportunities are offset somewhat by notable challenges.
"For 2004, we project Google's net revenues will nearly double, but its margins will narrow somewhat due to increased investment by the company," says Scott Kessler, Internet Software & Services Equity Analyst, Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services.
"At the same time, we believe Google and its shares will also face risks relating to commoditization of the company's offerings, difficulties related to its introduction of new products and services, and competition from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft.
Google also has a limited operating history, expects to invest heavily in new initiatives, is employing a largely untested price to process and distribute its shares. Based on comparisons to what we consider the company's closest peer, our preliminary estimate for Google's market value is $33 billion to $40 billion."
Part 2 of Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services' pre-IPO report on Google, which will address the anticipated Dutch auction process, as well as valuation in greater detail, is expected by August.
Source: Standard & Poor
Google has been a real success at home, but its biggest struggle may be unfolding on the shores of China, Japan and Europe.
The future of the premier search engine company increasingly will be fought abroad, experts say, because growth in revenue from online advertising is slowing in the United States. By contrast, it's doubling in many countries overseas, where the market is just ramping up.
Like its competitors, Google makes most of its money from advertising placed next to online search results.
Google is already the most popular online search site in many countries, operating 96 different Google Web sites in 97 languages.
But as the 6-year-old Mountain View company prepares to go public, it faces a host of challenges in making money from its leading position abroad.
Google must span cultural chasms among users in different countries viewing Web sites in their native languages, and woo foreign politicians anxious about giving it too much sway.
It faces intense competition from its more experienced archrival, Yahoo, and must decide to fight or ally with entrenched local competitors in foreign countries. It's unclear how soon Google will make money in some online ad markets that are just developing.
"That battle is yet to be played out," said Brian McManus, who leads the search business at InfoSpace, a company whose search engine uses both Google and Yahoo's results.
Google and Yahoo together hold a narrow lead in search-related advertising over most other players in Europe, but the race is wide open across most of Asia, says McManus.
Google won't comment on the skirmishes. In its filing to go public, though, Google warns: "Our inexperience outside the U.S. increases the risk that our international expansion efforts will not be successful."
The company has scrambled to open offices in 10 foreign countries in less than three years.
Google's revenues from abroad jumped to 29 percent of its total sales during the first quarter, up from 26 percent a year earlier. And it's likely to keep growing.
The U.S. search-related ad market remains the world's largest, but the international market for search revenues will grow to $1.9 billion in 2007 from just $200 million last year, estimates investment bank U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.
China is expected to be the market to watch. Its online ad revenue is still minuscule, but is growing 50 percent a year, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. So far, only 6 percent of China's population is online.
But Google's popularity has led to run-ins with Chinese authorities anxious to control public opinion on issues like Tibet and Taiwan. Beijing shut down Google in September 2002 without explanation, but a public uproar in China forced the government to back down.
Since then, China and Google have been on tenterhooks. Beijing has endorsed a local search engine, called Zhongsou.com, that has been backed by China's three main domestic Internet portals: Sina, Sohu and NetEase. (Sohu is launching its own search technology in July.)
In February, Google began offering advertisers a way to list ads next to its Chinese search results. While it has brought in millions of dollars in revenue already, Google has been unable to recognize those sales on its books, according to people close to the company. That's because it has no office or employees in China and no license to do business there. Google's executives have made multiple trips to Beijing to sort the problem out.
Now, Google is making an investment in one of China's largest search engines, Baidu, which means "hundred times." Google won't comment, but the investment was confirmed by U.S. investor Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested $10 million in Baidu. The move might give Google a way to secure its position in China and gain leverage over its chief competitor there.
Google must contend with cultural differences, too. In China, as well as Japan, the difficulty of typing Asian language characters on a computer means it's more tedious for users to enter terms in a search box like Google's, noted Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and early adviser to Google.
One of Google's biggest challenges in China will be marketing, says Guo Liang, a professor in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an expert on China's Internet. Unlike Yahoo, which translates as "elegant tiger," or Chinese portal Sohu, which means "search fox," Google has no Chinese name. Many Chinese Internet users "don't even know Google, especially in small towns," Guo said.
In Japan, currently the world's second-largest market in terms of search users, online advertising remains severely stunted. Moreover, Yahoo gained an early entry into Japan when one of its first investors, Masayoshi Son, built Yahoo Japan into the country's largest portal.
Two years ago, Google won a contract with Yahoo Japan to provide text advertising _ called paid listings _ beside Yahoo Japan's search results. But last week, Yahoo booted Google, instead taking paid listings exclusively from its subsidiary, Overture.
In the United Kingdom, the second-largest search advertising market by revenue, Google remains neck and neck with Yahoo. Last year, Yahoo's Overture subsidiary won the search business of U.K.'s largest Internet access provider, Freeserve, supplanting Google.
Still, while Yahoo has sewn up advertising alliances with Freeserve and other Internet providers, many users still switch over to Google to search, says Lee Colbran, who runs Fresh Egg, which manages ad campaigns for U.K. companies. "Seven or eight times out of 10, Google is going to be the search engine of choice," he said.
Germany is also hotly contested _ but there Google has gained the upper hand. Germany's former telecommunications monopoly, Deutsche Telekom, owns the premier Internet portal in that country, T-Online. That company first turned to Yahoo's Overture for its paid listings. But threatened by Yahoo's other portal offerings, T-Online last year dumped the contract, and signed up with Google instead. Yahoo has since dragged T-Online to court for breach of contract.
Ultimately, some countries might prefer to have search technology provided by homegrown companies, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.
"Search is essentially a U.S.-based business, similar to how Boeing once seemed to have the lock on the majority of aircraft orders," he said. "Europe reacted by supporting Airbus.
Similarly, we might see countries outside the U.S. react to help build or support local search technologies. That potentially could reduce gains by the leaders Google and Yahoo."
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Even if the two companies are acknowledged competitors, Yahoo has begun advertising on Google, using Google's AdWords program.
AdWords works by having clients bid on keywords that can be used to query search engines. These keywords, when searched, will cause Google AdWords to display text ads associated with the content of the search.
The keyword which Yahoo is using to advertise on Google is "RSS." RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a format for, according to XML.com, "syndicating news and the content of news-like sites." When users search the term RSS in Google, Yahoo's keyword related advertisement garners the top AdWords position.
If Yahoo's AdWords ad is clicked, the user is taken to a landing page for Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo's shopping portal. The landing page is a Yahoo Shopping SERP.
In Google's AdWords program, clients who won the keyword bid must pay the cost for the click to Google. This applies to Yahoo as well.
MarketingVOX suggests "the campaign may be an effort at keyword arbitrage. In keyword arbitrage, Yahoo would pay for clicks with the expectation that the Yahoo advertisers will pay more once the original Google visitor arrives."
Who says competitors can't work in unison to benefit each other. Google is receiving money each time Yahoo's RSS ad is clicked.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has the opportunity to sell items and gain click revenue from advertisers on their landing page, once the user reaches Yahoo's ad destination.
Source: Web Pro News
Google has been a real success at home, but its biggest struggle may be unfolding on the shores of China, Japan and Europe.
The future of the premier search engine company increasingly will be fought abroad, experts say, because growth in revenue from online advertising is slowing in the United States. By contrast, it's doubling in many countries overseas, where the market is just ramping up.
Like its competitors, Google makes most of its money from advertising placed next to online search results.
Google is already the most popular online search site in many countries, operating 96 different Google Web sites in 97 languages.
But as the 6-year-old Mountain View company prepares to go public, it faces a host of challenges in making money from its leading position abroad.
Google must span cultural chasms among users in different countries viewing Web sites in their native languages, and woo foreign politicians anxious about giving it too much sway.
It faces intense competition from its more experienced archrival, Yahoo, and must decide to fight or ally with entrenched local competitors in foreign countries. It's unclear how soon Google will make money in some online ad markets that are just developing.
"That battle is yet to be played out," said Brian McManus, who leads the search business at InfoSpace, a company whose search engine uses both Google and Yahoo's results.
Google and Yahoo together hold a narrow lead in search-related advertising over most other players in Europe, but the race is wide open across most of Asia, says McManus.
Google won't comment on the skirmishes. In its filing to go public, though, Google warns: "Our inexperience outside the U.S. increases the risk that our international expansion efforts will not be successful."
The company has scrambled to open offices in 10 foreign countries in less than three years.
Google's revenues from abroad jumped to 29 percent of its total sales during the first quarter, up from 26 percent a year earlier. And it's likely to keep growing.
The U.S. search-related ad market remains the world's largest, but the international market for search revenues will grow to $1.9 billion in 2007 from just $200 million last year, estimates investment bank U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.
China is expected to be the market to watch. Its online ad revenue is still minuscule, but is growing 50 percent a year, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. So far, only 6 percent of China's population is online.
But Google's popularity has led to run-ins with Chinese authorities anxious to control public opinion on issues like Tibet and Taiwan. Beijing shut down Google in September 2002 without explanation, but a public uproar in China forced the government to back down.
Since then, China and Google have been on tenterhooks. Beijing has endorsed a local search engine, called Zhongsou.com, that has been backed by China's three main domestic Internet portals: Sina, Sohu and NetEase. (Sohu is launching its own search technology in July.)
In February, Google began offering advertisers a way to list ads next to its Chinese search results. While it has brought in millions of dollars in revenue already, Google has been unable to recognize those sales on its books, according to people close to the company. That's because it has no office or employees in China and no license to do business there. Google's executives have made multiple trips to Beijing to sort the problem out.
Now, Google is making an investment in one of China's largest search engines, Baidu, which means "hundred times." Google won't comment, but the investment was confirmed by U.S. investor Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested $10 million in Baidu. The move might give Google a way to secure its position in China and gain leverage over its chief competitor there.
Google must contend with cultural differences, too. In China, as well as Japan, the difficulty of typing Asian language characters on a computer means it's more tedious for users to enter terms in a search box like Google's, noted Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and early adviser to Google.
One of Google's biggest challenges in China will be marketing, says Guo Liang, a professor in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an expert on China's Internet. Unlike Yahoo, which translates as "elegant tiger," or Chinese portal Sohu, which means "search fox," Google has no Chinese name. Many Chinese Internet users "don't even know Google, especially in small towns," Guo said.
In Japan, currently the world's second-largest market in terms of search users, online advertising remains severely stunted. Moreover, Yahoo gained an early entry into Japan when one of its first investors, Masayoshi Son, built Yahoo Japan into the country's largest portal.
Two years ago, Google won a contract with Yahoo Japan to provide text advertising _ called paid listings _ beside Yahoo Japan's search results. But last week, Yahoo booted Google, instead taking paid listings exclusively from its subsidiary, Overture.
In the United Kingdom, the second-largest search advertising market by revenue, Google remains neck and neck with Yahoo. Last year, Yahoo's Overture subsidiary won the search business of U.K.'s largest Internet access provider, Freeserve, supplanting Google.
Still, while Yahoo has sewn up advertising alliances with Freeserve and other Internet providers, many users still switch over to Google to search, says Lee Colbran, who runs Fresh Egg, which manages ad campaigns for U.K. companies. "Seven or eight times out of 10, Google is going to be the search engine of choice," he said.
Germany is also hotly contested _ but there Google has gained the upper hand. Germany's former telecommunications monopoly, Deutsche Telekom, owns the premier Internet portal in that country, T-Online. That company first turned to Yahoo's Overture for its paid listings. But threatened by Yahoo's other portal offerings, T-Online last year dumped the contract, and signed up with Google instead. Yahoo has since dragged T-Online to court for breach of contract.
Ultimately, some countries might prefer to have search technology provided by homegrown companies, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.
"Search is essentially a U.S.-based business, similar to how Boeing once seemed to have the lock on the majority of aircraft orders," he said. "Europe reacted by supporting Airbus.
Similarly, we might see countries outside the U.S. react to help build or support local search technologies. That potentially could reduce gains by the leaders Google and Yahoo."
Source: San Jose Mercury News
The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a combined hardware and software solution for online enterprises that require either public-facing or corporate intranet search technology.
On Wednesday, Google announced an upgrade to the service.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google claims that the new model is faster than previous versions, which have sold well in the past, but accounted for less than 5 percent of the company's $962 million in net revenue last year.
The new configurations will allow online administrators to search for more documents at a faster rate, while a redesigned crawler (continuous crawl, which was first deployed on the Google.com search engine) will continuously scan the database contents of either intranet or Web site content to ensure up-to-date indexes. Search relevance will also be improved by deploying many of the same search technologies refined for Google.com.
According to Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, Search Appliance's upgrades benefit from improvements to Google.com. He says the newer version deepens relevance and scalability. "[GSA] essentially implements improvements made to the Google search engine [like continuous crawl] into GSA. In fact, some of the improvements in GSA share the same code as the Google Web site," Girouard says.
A Google spokesperson further remarked that while the continuous crawl feature is not dissimilar to the so-called "Google Dance" that marks the period of 30 days or so needed for Google's crawlers to scan its entire index, updates with GSA continuous crawl are more constant--as even companies with large databases have far smaller indexes than the Google search engine.
"Search inside of companies has been a challenge," notes Girouard. "This was something a lot of companies came to us and asked for," he says. The Search Appliance comes in three main versions, and the number of documents the systems can handle increases with the price. List prices start at $32,000.
Girouard says GSA is for medium- to large-sized corporations with "hundreds, not tens" of employees. He says that several of GSA's customers already deploy GSA both internally and externally, and several GSA customers are also Google AdWords customers.
Whit Andrews, GartnerG2 research director, says that Google had to decide whether it would make sales at a certain level without "a lot of hand-holding."
Andrews says that with GSA, Google is finding a serious market for Web content providers that have more Web pages than they can handle, but don't want to spend a lot of money on a complex, expensive search provider. He notes that from their perspective, the thinking is: "Instead of changing the way we're going to sell this thing, let's sell to a market where the page count is bigger than [any given content provider] thought it would be."
Andrews says that the existing model makes sense for Google particularly because of its low price. "Pricing in the computer industry is agony," he notes, adding that other search vendors like Varity fight Google on improved, more sophisticated relevancy. Scale, he says, is not the hard part. Relevancy is the real issue, but the next issue is cost-efficiency, which is where Google's dependency outweighs relevancy concerns.
Microsoft Corp.'s Longhorn server application could be a potential competitor to Google in the company intranet space, as integrated Web and intranet search is considered one of its most attractive features. According to Andrews, Longhorn is too far away for it to present any problems yet.
"Realistically," he says, "I don't see a strong conflict between the two," as Google's main target with GSA is large corporations, while Microsoft representatives have reported that the Longhorn server will target small- to medium-sized enterprises.
While there is no direct advertising element included in the Google Search Appliance, Girouard notes that Web administrators for public-facing sites can fix the results returned for certain queries through Key Match, a GSA add-on that returns a given URL or set of URLs to the top of a list for certain queries.
Through Key Match, administrators can highlight partners, advertisements, and other promotions. GSA is currently used by some 500 clients, including Pfizer, Xerox, Nextel, Procter & Gamble, the U.S. Army, and the City of San Diego.
Source: Media Daily News
Californian senator Arnold Schwarzenegger will be deciding on whether Google’s Gmail should be cancelled before it is even born.
While the ironies will be apparent to anyone who has seen Arnie’s Terminator trilogy, Californian senators have approved a bill that limits Google's plans to scan messages and include ads based on what it finds.
Soon it will be up to the former action hero if the law will live or die.
Gmail has caused a storm in a tea-cup before it has actually been released. The scheme is still being tested by tame journalists and Google staff and is a few months away.
The normally secretive Google has said it was working with law-makers on a way to both answer privacy concerns and run a viable service. Lined up against it is Senator Liz Figueroa who introduced the bill to hobble the freedom Google had to use Gmail to sniff content.
The Bill, which now has the backing of California senators, will order Google scan messages in real time and ban it from producing records of what people are mailing each other about.
It would also ban Google from collecting personal data from Gmail messages and flogging it to other firms.
The bill now goes to California's Assembly for another round of debates and amendments. The final decision on whether it becomes law falls to Governor Arnie who can approve it or decide to terminate it.
Source: The Inquirer
Google is polishing and increasing the number of search tools that it sells to companies, schools and government agencies, hoping to mine new revenue sources as it strives to become less dependent on online advertising.
AP Wire reports that Google on Wednesday took another small step beyond its renowned online search engine releasing its most significant upgrade of a 2-year-old kit that’s sometimes called “Google in a box.”
The hardware-and-software package is supposed to provide prospective customers with everything they need to do a better job indexing and searching the information on intranets - a cluster of Web sites maintained behind security shields known as firewalls.
Google’s top-of-the-line system, priced at $175,000, will index up to 1.5 million Web pages and perform 300 search queries per minute - five times the capacity and speed of the earlier version, said Dave Girouard the company’s general manager of enterprise.
A less sophisticated version of the kit will sell for $32,000.
The original version of Google’s search kit is being used by “several hundred” customers, Girouard said. Google is hoping to drum up more demand by offering a more powerful product and making it even simpler to run - the company says the kit can be installed in about 30 minutes.
The market for intranet search products remains relatively small. The industry leaders, Verity Inc. and Autonomy Corp., combined to generate slightly less than $200 million last year. Google, meanwhile, posted 2003 revenue of $962 million.
Online advertising accounted for all but 4 percent of Google’s first-quarter revenue - a heavy concentration that has raised mild concerns among some industry analysts as the company prepares for a highly anticipated initial public offering of stock. The IPO is still several months away.
Although online advertising is expected remain its financial foundation, Google is trying to diversify.
The company reportedly is working on a product, code named “Puffin,” that would search information stored on the hard drives on individual computer users - an initiative that would intensify Google’s rivalry with software giant Microsoft Corp.
Google so far has declined to discuss the Puffin project.
Source: Search Engine Journal
While Google provides the highest percentage of all search engine traffic going to shopping sites, MSN Search drives the highest proportion of its own search engine traffic to shopping sites, Hitwise says in its recently released Search Engine Report.
Google sent 4.73% of all search engine traffic to shopping sites in April, compared to 2.73% from Yahoo Search and 0.66% from MSN Search, Hitwise says.
Hitwise includes in its shopping site category “classified” sites such as DineOutFreeToday.com and YourGiftCards.com.
The rest of the top 10 search engines in terms of their share of all traffic going to shopping sites in April:
Ask Jeeves, 0.22%
My Web Search, 0.16%
iWon, 0.15%
Dogpile, 0.12%
Google Image Search, 0.09%
Excite, 0.06%
Alta Vista, 0.05%
MSN gets bragging rights, however, to having the highest proportion of its own search traffic that goes to shopping sites.
Of all the searches that took place at MSN, 10.07%, of users went to shopping sites, edging out Google, at 9.26%, and Yahoo Search, at 8.85%, Hitwise says.
Source: Internet Retailer
Google could notch $2 billion in advertising this year from trade publications-related advertising.
The latest players to see a fearsome competitor lurking behind Google's meteoric rise are publishers of tightly targeted magazines. Google provides readers with tightly targeted content about specific trade niches as well as equally tightly-targeted ads.
Earlier this month at the annual conference of business-to-business group American Business Media, Pat Kenealy, CEO of tech publisher IDG, warned attendees about a foe he believed was underestimated.
The killer advertising app for Google -- as well as its search competitors like Yahoo! -- is its AdWords service, which allows marketers to buy paid-link placement next to searches conducted around keywords they identify. Marketers use AdWords to reach consumers with tightly targeted messages as consumers seek tightly targeted information, which is a decent thumbnail description of business-to-business publishing's model.
Google does not break out what percentage of its ad revenue comes from paid search, but analysts and observers believe it accounts for the lion's share. David Hallerman, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer, projected paid search ad-related revenues will reach $3.2 billion in 2004.
(A Google spokesman cited the "quiet period" before the company's planned IPO and said the company couldn't comment on advertising and competitive issues.) Google's own ad revenues, according to the prospectus for its initial public offering, rose 187% in 2003 to $916.6 million.
Some close observers of the media landscape say it's not just b-to-b publishers that face threats. "They are taking ad dollars away from b-to-b and consumer-magazine companies," said Reed Phillips, managing partner of media investment banker DeSilva & Phillips, and whose company advertises via AdWords.
Chicken Little pronuncements about how new media will magically make portions of established ones disappear are as old as radio, but in the specialized world of trade publishing there's at least some precedent for new technologies displacing modes of business.
A staple of the trade publishing world, pre-Internet, were high-priced newsletters that justified their price tags by aggregating obscure content for highly specialized audiences. The Internet itself made it simple for those seeking such information to do that on their own, and such newsletters took a serious hit.
And while the sky may not be falling, even those who insist targeted magazines are safe concede that search engines have significantly changed the playing field for information.
"Google has created a revenue stream from being the card catalog or the newsstand, not the magazine," Mr. Kenealy said. Those he addressed at the ABM convention "have spent less time than they should looking at what search does to the seeking and finding of specialized information."
Others see the matter more bluntly. "If Google can slice and dice [information]," said one b-to-b publishing executive, "and give highly qualified users to very targeted advertisers, then what do you need a trade publication for?"
This executive and others saw consumer-enthusiast titles -- those aimed at lovers of bicycles and knitting -- to be less at risk. These titles depend more on "image" advertising, which Google has yet to fully exploit.
Two executives also said that such titles tend to offer more of an editorial personality than the average trade title, thus giving the reader, in one executive's view, "a much less information-only paradigm."
But in the years-long ad downturn for magazines, it's hard enough to find big-name consumer titles that substantially increased editorial budgets, much less consumer enthusiast titles, which must typically keep a tighter hold on costs.
"One of the questions about [paid search advertising] is not will they have raw numbers, but will they wind up having results and response?" asked Jack Kliger, president-CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., which publishes consumer enthusiast titles such as Boating and Popular Photography.
One former trade publishing executive, though, pointed out that paid-search links find consumers when they are seeking information to make a purchase, which may not be necessarily true if they're simply reading a magazine. "That is not the entire process of influencing a purchase -- there's still room for context," the executive conceded.
The bigger question, the executive added, was how much context was left in some tightly targeted magazines.
Source: Adage.com
Baidu has beaten Google, in becoming the fourth largest Internet website in the world in terms of web traffic, according to the latest Alexa traffic rankings.
Another leading Chinese search engine, 3721.com, ranked seventh.
Baidu.com claims that it has become the world's largest Chinese language search engine with over 300 mln Chinese language website pages, and over 60 mln page hits every day.
In China, it covers over 95% of Chinese netizens, with more than 80 mln users. According to Shanghai-based Internet research house, iResearch, Baidu.com has a market share of 48.2% in China in terms of search engine traffic, while the global Internet search giant Google.com accounts for only 29.8%.
Baidu.com has accelerated its expansion in China, with staff numbers doubled to over 300 from around 100 one year ago, Zhu Hongbo, COO of Baidu.com, told Interfax. Apart from traditional search services, the company launched or is planning to launch several new services.
The latest addition to its services, "Posted Message Bar", enables users to search messages on various Chinese BBS, while the under-testing "Download Bar" service enables users to share files with other netizens for free mutual downloads.
Other new services include weather information, with which a user can search a city's weather and have exact weather information displayed on the top of the search result list, rather than from a link to this information.
"All these new services aim to bring convenience to netizens. They are free of charge, but they will be helpful to boost our page views and improve our website popularity," Zhu pointed out.
Source: Interfax
Google claims that anyone accusing it's Gmail service of privacy violations simply misunderstands its methodology.
And now, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has responded with a dedicated Web page addressing the issue: "Gmail and Privacy," which can be accessed from the Gmail home page.
Gmail, Google's new email service, has come under considerable scrutiny since the company announced its intention to enter the email market in late March.
Because of its controversial ad model, in which an automated program scans user's emails in order to deliver contextually relevant text ads, Gmail has drawn the ire of consumer activists, privacy advocates, and even federal regulators nationwide.
"Some of the present dialogue," it says, "has been inaccurate, especially with regard to privacy concerns surrounding Gmail. Gmail does not represent a compromise or invasion of anyone's privacy," the company states.
Google created Gmail with the idea of turning the folder-based model of most email services into a searchable database/archive model. Currently still in beta-test mode, Gmail will be free to users, and will offer them virtually unlimited storage space, at 1 gigabyte per user.
The tradeoff for a free service with unlimited space, of course, is advertising--but these will be the less noticeable text ads that Google already displays on content sites across the Web.
Privacy advocates and certain government officials are wary that the program that scans user's messages to display context ads is in violation of the privacy of both the sender and the receiver.
However, despite these protests, many of Gmail's beta-testers, which include industry analysts and journalists, have dismissed privacy concerns as being wrong-headed. They say that those vetting concerns over the service have most likely not used it yet. The text ads, they say, have a benign, unobtrusive presence on the page.
According to Washington Post Columnist Leslie Walker: "I have been testing Gmail for weeks and find the value it delivers--including innovative sorting features and a gigabyte of free storage--outweighs any worries I have over Google's computers scanning my mail for such key words as 'flowers' or 'cameras,' then displaying ads alongside messages. I view it as an important experiment in the Internet's drive to make advertising more relevant," she says.
New York Times columnist David Pogue notes that Yahoo! and MSN Hotmail already bombard users with ads on their respective services. He says that Gmail's text ads are far less intrusive. "The ads are so subtle, so easily ignored, that it's hard to imagine anyone preferring the big, blinking slow-loading graphic ads that appear every time you check for messages at the Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail sites."
MSN's Slate magazine writer Paul Boutin writes: "Gmail isn't an invasion of privacy, and its ads are preferable to the giant blinking banners for diets and dating services that are splashed across my other Web mail accounts." He also adds that many Gmail critics fail to recognize that automated programs like Firewalls, antispam, and antivirus programs already scan the contents of incoming email messages.
Nevertheless, the privacy outcry over Gmail continues. According to a Washington Post report, dozens of privacy advocacy groups were undersigned in an open letter to Google urging it to reconsider its contextual advertising plans. The same report says that an international privacy group has also filed complaints against Gmail with governments in Europe and elsewhere. In the United States, California Senator Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) last month introduced a bill that would impinge upon Gmail's ability to scan messages.
However, late Tuesday, Figueroa revised the bill, hoping that the measure would be brought to a full vote before the Senate Legislature recesses on Friday. Among her revisions is a clause that would no longer require the consent of senders in order to serve text ads--a good thing for Google, as it was widely believed that establishing sender consent would be an obstacle to the deployment of Gmail in the state of California.
In addition, the bill allows email and instant messaging programs to scan messages--as long as providers do not retain the data for any reason, sell to third-parties, or show any employee or other "natural person." Also, if requested, it says providers must permanently delete advertising messages.
"This will be the first law in the nation to ensure this type of technology is never used to create files on consumers," Figueroa said in an interview.
Source: Mediapost
Search engine companies seem to be embroiled in a fight, trying to outdo each other, while at the same time trying to come up with a better mouse trap.
Microsoft said it is planning to extend its new Web search technology to include search for information contained on personal computers, e-mails and databases.
Google is reportedly working on a similar feature to allow searches on local hard drives on PCs, while it is already locked in competition with Yahoo in the local search segment.
Yahoo will use its community of users to deliver more customized search results, something that rivals such as Google and Microsoft will have a harder time doing, Chief Executive Terry Semel said on Thursday.
The comments come as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google position themselves for major upgrades over the next year as they try to attract more users and advertising revenue by enhancing their search services.
Terry Semel, a former Hollywood studio head credited with leading Yahoo back to a healthy Web property, reiterated that the online advertising market was poised for rapid growth as advertisers begin to follow media audiences to the Internet from television and other traditional sources.
"When ... you talk about local search, you're opening up a whole other arena of advertising," Semel, monitored by Webcast, told investors at the Goldman Sachs Investment Conference in Las Vegas.
Customized search is considered the next step in improving the relevancy and accuracy of search results. If search engines knew more about the interests and habits of Web searchers, experts say that search engines would be able to deliver much more precise results.
Semel also said that his goal was to enhance Yahoo's features, which include Web search, personals, shopping, and Web-based e-mail, so that visitors would spend more time at Yahoo's Web properties, increasing their exposure to advertising and the chance that they would spend more money.
Yusuf Mehdi, the executive at Microsoft's Internet unit MSN leading the charge on search, said that Microsoft had already started to discuss plans to integrate its new search technology with Longhorn, the code name for the next version of Windows due out in 2006.
"We will do an MSN search starting shortly with a beta and well before Longhorn ships, everything across local PC search, e-mail search, Web search, deep database search," Mehdi said at the same conference on Wednesday, referring to the test version of Microsoft's search technology due out later this year.
Mehdi said that search technology for the PC would appear well before the launch of the next version of Windows, although the details had yet to be worked out.
Ironically, Microsoft offers the ability to search for files within Windows, but Mehdi admitted that it could be done much faster and efficiently.
"Why does it take so much time to search the PC when you can index the whole Web and find it in milliseconds," Mehdi said.
Google is also aiming at offering its services on the desktop with a new search tool, code-named Puffin, to exploit the lack of fast search capabilities in Windows.
Source: Yahoo Finance
A report by Vividence (a market research firm in San Mateo, CA) found that Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Lycos were all about as successful in finding information for specific queries.
Despite its stellar reputation, Google's search engine performed no better than its online competitors in returning relevant results in a key category, according to a study released Tuesday. However, Google outperformed its competitors in the overall rankings of the survey by a wide margin.
The study's results are based on surveys of 2,000 Internet search users. They were asked to conduct a variety of queries that were intended to show how individual search engines performed and which of them generated the most user satisfaction.
The results among the five Web sites for so-called complex searches were virtually indistinguishable. In this category, users had to find the answer to four questions, including the leading cause of death in the United States for people in the age group of 25 to 34.
Google users found the correct answers 55 percent of the time. MSN and Lycos users came in at 54 percent, followed by Ask Jeeves at 53 percent and Yahoo at 52 percent.
However, Google trounced the others in terms of customer satisfaction for the category: 68 percent of its users were satisfied, compared with 59 percent for Yahoo, 56 percent for Ask Jeeves, 54 percent for Lycos and MSN, and 53 percent for Ask Jeeves.
"Google is getting a brand halo in terms of satisfaction," said Liz Edison, who oversaw the study for Vividence. "When there is actually a correct answer, no one is better or worse than the other."
The study comes as Google, based in Mountain View, awaits an initial public offering. The company's search engine is the most popular, with a 35.9 percent market share in March, followed by Yahoo at 30 percent and Microsoft at 15.7 percent, according to ComScore QSearch, a market research firm.
Gary Stein, a senior analyst for JupiterResearch said the study findings show that Google's lead position in search isn't assured. He said Google has the advantage of a strong brand.
However, he added, the company faces stiff competition now that the search industry has become one of the most lucrative on the Internet through the sale of targeted advertising.
"Less we forget, five years ago, no one had heard about this little company Google," Stein said. "I wouldn't call the game over."
According to the study, 3 out of 4 Internet users say they have a primary search engine. However, half said they use another Web site if they don't find what they want.
Google performed better in categories other than complex search. It beat all comers handily when users could pick their own search topic, looked for local information such as a nearby French restaurant and tried to track down product information, including the manufacturer's suggested retail price for a Ford Mustang coupe.
Among the reasons users for Google's high marks were the Web site's stripped-down graphics and clearly delineated advertising, according to the study. That pushed Google to the top in the overall ranking for customer experience. Yahoo was No. 2, followed by Ask Jeeves, Lycos and Microsoft's MSN.
Gary Price, a librarian and editor of ResourceShelf.com, an online guide for finding information, said the survey's results illustrate what he has been saying for a long time. Some search engines are better than others for different kinds of queries, he said.
"Google is wonderful, and it does a lot of wonderful things," Price said. "But it is not the end all and be all of Web search. Others do a good job."
Source: SF Gate.com
Industry insiders say Google is considering entering into a kind of intimate technological relationship with its users.
Google needs to expand its technology offerings into other areas if it's going to thrive, say many experts.
In particular, the company needs to defend itself from Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash., software giant plans to unleash the next generation of its Windows software, code-named Longhorn, sometime in 2006.
Many experts expect that Microsoft will seek to suffocate Google with a built-in function that can scour the Web or search any of a user's computer files, including e-mails and Word documents, all with a simple click of the mouse on a key word or phrase.
"It's clear to me that search is going to become more deeply embedded in the operating system. It's where the value is," said Michael Robertson, chief executive of Lindows, a San Diego company that competes with Microsoft by selling a version of the Linux (news - web sites) operating system.
Jeffrey Ullman, a Stanford University computer science professor who advised Google co-founder Sergey Brin, said the company has no choice but to fight Microsoft on its home turf. "If Microsoft controls the desktop, they'll probably strangle Google," he said.
Google refuses to discuss its plans, and the company is now in a quiet period surrounding its initial public offering. Microsoft also declined to discuss its search plans.
But Google hasn't been dawdling. It has talked with a number of industry players, including Lindows, about integrating its technology into operating systems, the core layer of software that runs a computer.
Lindows technology Ullman said he has looked at Lindows and believes it could be a good fit for Google. He has passed on his views to Google but does not know how Google will proceed.
Google is reportedly considering a half-step: an add-on desktop tool that will allow computer users to search their own files as well as the Web.
But some experts say that such a search capability would be inferior to one that is embedded in the operating system.
An operating system that incorporated Google technology would allow users to conduct Web or file searches from inside e-mails or documents with a single mouse click. More important, such an arrangement would allow Google to own all the search capabilities on a computer, driving traffic to its ad-supported search results.
Google's best chance to integrate itself into an operating system may be to work with one or more vendors of Linux, an increasingly popular operating system that works on open-source principles, which allow outside programmers to freely modify it or build new programs. Linux's main advantage is that it is cheaper and simpler in design than Microsoft's Windows.
But Microsoft software runs more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers. A Google-Linux partnership might not make much of a dent.
"That sounds to me like people fishing around for the next big thing, the big battle between Google and Microsoft," said David Thede, president of dtSearch, whose technology helps power a search tool from HotBot, a Google competitor.
Google could avoid a pitched battle at the individual computer level and instead seek to establish itself as a collection of Internet services, much like Yahoo is doing.
Google has been building one of the world's largest supercomputers, a network of as many as 100,000 low-cost servers scattered around the globe. Google could layer any number of products on top of that network, such as online document storage or a hosting service that would allow businesses or individuals to access applications from anywhere in the world.
Already, Google is experimenting with Gmail, an Internet e-mail service with lots of storage and the ability to search e-mails and the Web. It is also offering a shopping search function, social networking tools, online discussion groups and localized searches.
Experts believe Google could potentially turn its network into a full-fledged "online operating system" that manages everything, effectively allowing the user to bypass Windows. Users would simply go online for all their needs.
"That seems perfectly real and plausible to me," said Brad Templeton, a longtime technology entrepreneur and chairman of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There are many technically appealing things about centralization."
Rich Skrenta, co-founder of the search tool Topix.net, said Google appears to have a major advantage over its competitors in that its computing network appears to have been built using inexpensive hardware. If true, Google can quickly and inexpensively expand Z whenever it develops a new product that requires a lot of processing.
Centralization online However, some observers are skeptical that Google could persuade users to manage their personal and business lives online.
"This has been tried before, and it doesn't work," said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative. "People don't like not having physical control of their bits and bytes. You put your data on someone else's servers and it's fundamentally out of your control."
Besides, Raymond said, Microsoft has yet to emerge as a viable threat that would threaten Google's dominance. "I don't see enough there for Google to be erecting a business strategy against," he said.
Thede of dtSearch said Google has yet another option: try to succeed where Netscape Communications failed. "What about a Google browser?" he said.
Source: Yahoo News
Google's guidelines say software should follow common-sense rules of politeness: It should admit what it's doing, permit itself to be disabled and not do sneaky things like leak personal information.
In an attempt to cut down on misbehaving adware and spyware, Google has released a set of suggested principles for software makers to follow when writing programs that embed themselves on Internet users' PCs.
Google's software principles come as interest is growing at the state and federal level in regulating and perhaps even banning adware and spyware. Utah has already enacted such a law, and the U.S. House of Representatives and the Federal Trade Commission have convened hearings on the issue in the last few weeks.
In a sense, Google's move is a defensive, self-regulatory measure aimed at encouraging the mainstream software industry to find a way to make spyware and adware acceptable.
Google makes products for Windows, like the Google Toolbar and Google Deskbar, that transmit some information about Internet behavior back to its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, and these tools could be regulated by some of the broader laws being proposed. Among its other new ventures, Google appears to be making a sizeable bet on providing an ad-supported desktop search tool, as reported Wednesday in The New York Times.
Google's principles also are designed to focus criticism on pop-up adware applications like those created by WhenU and Claria (formerly Gator).
Those pose two problems for the search engine giant, which recently filed for an initial public offering: First, they may launch annoying pop-up ads when an Internet user is doing searches on Google's Web site, and second, their pop-up ads may not be blocked by the Google Toolbar.
If that happens, "you may have intentionally or inadvertently installed programs such as the Gator Ads Network or Kazaa on your system," Google advises its Toolbar users.
"Our goal is to encourage industry discussion," said David Krane, Google's director of corporate communications. "We're asking our partners to do the same and have asked for their feedback on these proposed principles."
Google's move follows an earlier attempt by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group, to define good and bad software practices. The group's guidelines say programs should allow themselves to be shut down and should not engage in "surreptitious surveillance."
Source: C-Net News
Yahoo released the results of a survey today which reveals that seventy percent of small businesses either have or will have an online presence by the end of 2004. The Yahoo Small Business survey was by Harris Interactive.
By comparison, in October 2002, only 35 percent of small businesses had developed their own web site, according to a Small Business Administration report.
The Yahoo Small Business survey, released today in conjunction with National Small Business Week, provides results of a national survey of more than 1,000 U.S. small-business owners and measured business-growth trends faced by owners of businesses with less than 100 employees.
The survey found that 35 percent of small business owners feel that having a web site is key to expanding their business, compared to 19 percent of owners who believe hiring additional employees is important for growth.
Additionally, most respondents (94%) feel that small businesses have a “moderate” to “very large” impact on the country’s economic growth.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Google is expected to introduce a new desktop search tool soon and is the clearest indication to date that Google hopes to extend its search business to compete directly with Microsoft's control of desktop computing.
Improved technology for searching information stored on a personal computer, the daily said, will also be a crucial feature of Microsoft's long-delayed version of its Windows operating system called Longhorn.
That version, not expected before 2006 at the earliest, will have a redesigned file system, making it possible to track and retrieve information in ways not currently possible with Windows software.
Google's move, the daily said, is in part a defensive one, because the company is concerned about Microsoft's ability to make searching on the Web as well as on a PC a central part of its operating system.
By integrating more search functions into Windows, Microsoft could conceivably challenge Google the way it threatened, and destroyed, an earlier rival, Netscape, by incorporating web browsing into the Windows 98 operating system, the paper said.
A Google spokesman declined to comment about the new search tool. Although Google's core business rests on huge farms of server computers that permit fast searching on the Internet, the company has already taken several steps to move beyond that business.
Last year, Google began testing a free programme called the Google Deskbar that makes it possible to search the Web by entering words and phrases in a small dialog box placed in the Windows desktop taskbar at the bottom of the computer screen.
Google also sells a computer search system designed to index and retrieve information created and stored by a single organisation.
Source: Sify.com
In 2003, as speculation grew that the internet search engine company would go public, Shamoon Rafiq began meeting investors in New York and telling them he was a venture capitalist and a college friend of Google's founders, prosecutors said.
A Dutchman who pleaded guilty to swindling wealthy New Yorkers by promising an inside track to Google stock and then blowing $350,000 (£198,000) of their money in a three-month spending spree on hotels, restaurants and gambling, could face more than five years in prison, it emerged today.
Mr Rafiq, who was working as a business development manager for British Telecom in the city, offered the lure of "preferred stock", available to the founders' friends and families at the pre-flotation price of $12 a share.
At least five investors, including a lawyer for a European telecommunications company, an investment banker, a senior brokerage executive and the chairman of a global telecommunications firm, wired $500,000 to his bank accounts.
Mr Rafiq could be sentenced to more than five years in prison for wire fraud under the terms of his agreement with prosecutors. The sentence would be two years less than he might have faced had he lost at trial.
Prosecutors are opposing Mr Rafiq's request to serve his sentence in the Netherlands under the terms of an international treaty governing Dutch citizens convicted in the US.
The scam began to unravel when the investment banker became suspicious and demanded his money back. The FBI arrested Mr Rafiq in New York in March.
Authorities said Mr Rafiq had spent the funds on a lavish lifestyle, including New York nightclubs, strippers, $100 tips for restaurant and hotel employees, and expensive watches for his friends.
Google filed its long-awaited plans for an initial public offering last month, aiming to raise $2.7bn with an offering that is expected to give it a market value of at least $20bn.
Source: Guardian.co.uk
A few years ago, judges and lawyers used Yahoo and AltaVista in an effort to get more information on an individual or a specific court case. Since the last two or three years, people working closely in the legal system are now using Google as their favorite search engine.
As a good example of this, more than fifteen years after his trial, a convicted drug dealer in New York state belatedly got a chance to clear his name--thanks in part to an Internet search.
A federal judge last November threw out Manuel Rodriguez's conviction and granted him a new trial after discovering evidence of potential jury tampering in a review of court records and queries on Web search engine Google. U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas said that his review of the 1988 court transcript, coupled with looking up jurors' names in Google, had revealed that the assistant district attorney had "improperly" removed Hispanics.
Internet search engines are having a profound influence on judicial research--a controversial trend that's so far garnered little attention outside legal circles.
Some judges call Web search a crucial research tool, but critics of the trend are warning that searches on Google and its rivals are no substitute for the painstaking process of evidence and testimony.
"A Google search that I conducted" suggested that a removed juror had "a Hispanic name," Maas wrote in the court decision overturning the conviction.
Rodriguez finished his sentence before his new trial could take place. But his case nevertheless offers a striking illustration of the growing clout of Internet search engines among the judiciary--a controversial trend that's so far garnered little attention outside legal circles.
In the United States and abroad, judges are turning to search engines such as Google to check facts, to look up information about companies embroiled in litigation, and to challenge statistics presented by attorneys in court. Dozens of judges have penned opinions describing Google as a valuable--and sometimes crucial--source of knowledge.
To be sure, Google has no monopoly in the legal system. Yahoo's search engine popped up in the landmark Napster copyright case four years ago, and Oregon police tried to track a criminal defendant accused of firearm violations through Yahoo searches. When AltaVista was in its heyday, it also was mentioned in a handful of cases.
But in the last few years, Google appears to have become the courts' favorite search engine. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company--which announced its plans for an initial public offering last month--accounts for 41 percent of U.S. search referrals, according to statistics compiled by research company WebSideStory.
In one case in Ohio, a judge who ordered a mother not to smoke near her 8-year-old daughter cited medical journals and a Google search that lists 60,000-plus links for "secondhand smoke" and 30,000-plus links for "secondhand smoke children." In addition, the California Supreme Court has Googled for evidence showing that stun belts, which jolt prisoners with 50,000-volt electric shocks, can be harmful and should not have been used in a criminal trial. And an enterprising federal judge in New York did his own Google search to demonstrate that a watch, jeans and handbag retailer named Alfredo Versace was infringing the trademarks of the famous Gianni Versace design house.
Some legal experts warn that Google searches are no substitute for the painstaking process of evidence and testimony. "If a judge is taking as proof facts that are reported in any public medium that pertain to individual actions by persons involved in a case, that is troubling," said George Fisher, a Stanford University law professor. "Those are the sorts of facts that are supposed to be proved in the courtroom under the rules of evidence."
What appears in Google's sprawling Web index can have a profound influence on legal proceedings. In the case of Rodriguez--accused of selling crack cocaine to an undercover police officer--Judge Maas supplemented his review of the trial transcript with Google research. Unfortunately for Rodriguez, though, the result was too late: He had already served his sentence in the Wallkill Correctional Facility in Wallkill, N.Y., and had been released.
After conducting a Web search, an Australian federal court last June denied a visa request from an unidentified man from Sri Lanka. The court said the man's claim to be a famous filmmaker worried about persecution at home was "exaggerated," after a query turned up a blank. "His name does not appear when put into a search engine such as Google," one member of the government tribunal wrote. "I would have expected--if he indeed has the notoriety and is as well-known as he claims--that his name would have appeared at least in some context."
Rules governing out-of-court research are ambiguous about the use of search engines and, in the United States, tend to vary by state. In general, though, appeals courts have leeway in the sources they use. "Often appellate arguments require going outside the record of a particular case, because a judge or a panel must weigh the ramifications. What does this mean down the road?" said Dick Carelli, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOC). "Tradition dictates that anything is fair game in terms of the research a judge or a judge's staff can do online."
While the U.S. Supreme Court has not cited Google as a research tool so far, its justices and their clerks often venture beyond legal treatises when drafting opinions. In one famous 1972 opinion, Flood v. Kuhn, Justice Harry Blackmun inserted a brief history of baseball that included a recitation of the names of about 80 prominent players.
Trial judges are more constrained. Rule 201 of the Federal Rules of Evidence says trial judges may take notice of public information only when they "resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned." Most of the cases reviewed by CNET News.com involved trial judges using Google.
The AOC has no specific guidelines about Internet research done by trial judges. "There's so much available to them for computerized research that's in-house, I would think the occasions (for Google searches) are rare," said AOC's Carelli.
"I'm not that comfortable with judges going off in their chambers and saying, 'Let's see what we come up with on Google,'" said David Post, who teaches technology law at Temple University. "The evidentiary requirements are very important. If a judge goes off in his chambers and does a Google search and issues an opinion, the parties have not had a chance to argue about what 40,000 hits means. That's an important safeguard."
The casual use of Google--instead of relying on more rigorous research techniques--has raised eyebrows inside the judiciary.
In a bitter August 2002 dissent, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown upbraided her colleagues for relying on Google when deciding that stun belts should not have been used in a trial. The majority opinion cited newspaper and magazine articles, as well as pieces written by law students, that reported accidental activations of the React stun belt.
"We could have waited for a case that raised these questions on an adequate record," Brown wrote. "Instead, the majority, rushing to judgment after conducting an embarrassing Google.com search for information outside the record, has tied the hands of the legislature, to the likely peril of judges, bailiffs and ordinary citizens called upon to do their civic duty."
Last month, a New York county judge took a swipe at out-of-court research. Judge Charles Markey said that when he had some questions about a U-Haul warranty issue, he did not use Google, MSN Search or their competitors "to fashion a factual argument to sandbag counsel."
In one court case involving Halloween costumes, Google was called upon as a kind of linguistic arbiter. Federal law says that imports of "fancy dress" clothing are not taxed, and the Bush administration decided that Halloween costumes should fall into that duty-free category.
The U.S. Court of International Trade disagreed. One of its judges, Evan Wallach, did a Google search of the term "fancy dress" and concluded: "The court found a Web page for the United States Power Squadrons in South Florida which described parties as 'fancy dress affairs with prizes for the best costumes...' Attached were photographs of participants in 'Roman' dress. The costumes were clearly home-made... There were numerous others examples in the United States showing similar usages of fancy dress for elementary school events and sale of cheap Halloween costume accessories."
Perhaps the most common type of case, though, that has lured courts to Google is the trademark dispute:
• One federal judge in Tennessee ruled that "Johnny's" was a generic word: "A search conducted on the two most popular search engines, Google and Yahoo, for the keyword 'johnny's' will retrieve a list of either 157,000 or 251,000 options of Web sites featuring everything from vegetable seeds to Irish pubs to military music lyrics. Even adding the additional keyword 'sauce' will result in a list of either 2,850 or 4,440 Web sites."
• A New York federal judge said a Google search had helped him decide that 24 Hour Fitness should not receive an injunction against a competitor that owned 24hourfitness.com. The judge said a search for "fitness industry" on the Internet revealed more than 1.6 million hits, mainly linking to sites related to physical training and conditioning.
• Google and other search engines helped a Maryland federal judge to reach the opposite conclusion. The court granted an injunction against a critic of mortgage lender Fairbanks Capital who had set up his own anti-Fairbanks Web site. But when the company's trademarked phrase was used in a keyword search in the Google search engine, approximately 349 matches were listed, the judge found. "The (critical) Web site is the first Web site listed. The Fairbanks Web site is not listed in the first 10 results on Google," the judge said.
• An Australian review panel decided that a private company could not trademark the color yellow when used for clutches and other vehicle parts. "There is nothing unusual about the colour claimed," the panel said. "A search of the Internet, Google.com: Accessed 12 November 2002, reveals that the colour yellow is commonly used in respect of containers or packaging for automotive parts."
The use of Google search in such trademark cases was applauded by Post, the Temple University professor. "There's a lot of talk in legal cases about what do words mean, what is their usage," he said. "This is a remarkable and more objective tool to find out how people use words...That opens up a world of wonderful possibilities. It's really exciting."
Source: C-Net News
Google is saying it's new ads will help advertisers visually engage their customers and be more relevant to Web site users.
In a key departure from its text-only advertising strategy, search engine leader Google said Wednesday that will it begin to accept the banner-like image ads that are common on other parts of the Internet.
The ads will appear on Web sites that carry Google advertising, not on the main Google search site itself.
"The idea is to help make advertising better and to make it more informational,'' said Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president of advertising sales.
Google's core business is selling ads on its own Web site alongside search results. But a sizable chunk of its revenue comes from selling ads that appear on other Web sites through a program called AdSense, where Google uses its technology to match the ads to the Web sites' content.
The AdSense ads typically appear grouped together inside boxes that run horizontally across the top or bottom of Web pages or vertically down the sides. About.com, IVillage and the New York Times are some of the larger Web sites that carry AdSense ads.
Some advertisers have viewed AdSense as less effective than placing ads on Google's main search site. Many advertisers have concluded that people using Google's search tool are more likely to be in a buying mode than someone perusing an online news story or reading a Weblog.
``The click-through rates were not as good,'' said Ron Belanger, vice president of search engine marketing for Carat Interactive, whose clients include Radio Shack and Hyatt Hotels. ``When the user is in that non-search mode, you need that extra oomph to grab them. My hunch is that this is going to put the AdSense product back in the game.''
Google said advertisers will be able to choose text or image ads, and Web-site owners can choose which type of ads to display.
Web-site visitors may not always see image ads, even if the Web-site owner has chosen to accept them. Google may alternate between the two types of advertising depending upon which kind receives the most clicks.
``We'll keep showing both until we determine which one performs better,'' said Salar Kamangar, a director of product management at Google.
Google's reputation has been nurtured in part by its repudiation of banner advertising, which many Internet users find annoying and intrusive. Indeed, at a time when the online advertising industry was suffering through a slump, Google demonstrated that small text ads that are relevant to search results or a Web site's content could appeal to both users and advertisers.
Although the new image advertising will not appear on Google's own Web site, the fact that the Mountain View company is now selling banner ads may alienate some users, observers said.
``It's kind of scary that Google is moving into a medium that they helped crush,'' said Andy Beal, vice president of search marketing for WebSourced. ``It's almost like they switched sides. They're saying they won't cave into the pressures of Wall Street. But I can't think of any other reason to do this other than to make money.''
Beal also questioned whether the image ads would be more effective than text ads.
``People got used to the fact that banner ads are a pain,'' said Beal. ``People have gotten used to tuning out banner ads. I don't know how Google thinks they can revive the perception of banner ads.''
But online advertising experts said Google likely realized that text advertising has its limits.
``The human mind gets quickly immune to things, and at some point they stop paying attention to text ads,'' said Roy de Souza, chief executive of Zedo, a San Francisco company that sells Internet advertising. ``But with graphical ads, there is variability as far as color and what not that you can do to appeal to people.''
Source: Kansas.com
According to survey results released today by Mosaic Media, 57.1 percent of Google AdWords advertisers want their ads to appear contextually in Google’s Gmail.
Gmail is Google’s free e-mail service that is currently in beta testing and is expected to go into full release this summer.
Google intends to place contextual advertising in personal e-mails, so if someone is talking about taking a trip to Vermont, hotel ads may show up alongside the text. In Mosaic Media’s survey, only 19 percent of Google advertisers gave a flat no to the concept of their ads appearing in personal Gmail correspondence.
The survey revealed, however, that advertisers don’t want to pay as much for Gmail ads as they pay for ads that appear alongside search results.
Only 30 percent said they are willing to pay the same cost-per-click (CPC) as they pay for search-results ads.
A full 50 percent said no to idea of paying the same rate as search ads. But if the rates are lower for Gmail, advertisers like the idea. Sixty nine percent say they would try Gmail at a lower CPC. And like good direct marketers, 69 percent would design a separate campaign for Gmail.
Most of the respondents are active Google advertisers. A small percentage of respondents are not currently Google advertisers but plan to launch a Google campaign in the near future. The bulk of the respondents, 46.2 percent, sell goods or services to both consumers and businesses. Thirty one percent were business-to-consumer only, while 18 percent conduct business-to-business trade only.
Google announced the beta testing of Gmail on April 1. The announcement was followed by a storm of controversy about whether the placement of contextual ads in personal e-mails constitutes an intrusion on privacy.
Some claim that when you receive something for free, privacy violations don’t count. Some survey respondents were queasy about the privacy implications, with one advertiser saying, “The negative fallout from the invasiveness of this type of advertising is dangerous.”
Other respondents characterized Gmail as a misstep for Google. “It’s like ads on eggs. Who needs them?”
Most respondents expressed an interest in trying Gmail as long as the costs were not equal to search engine ad rates. “It sounds very targeted to me,” said one respondent.
Another noted that an ad that appears in search results is more valuable since the searcher is seeking results. “Gmail should be less expensive since it’s not like a search in which information is being requested.”
Source: Search Engine Journal
According to news from Google, the company is to release new search engine marketing tools that could expand its lucrative PPC advertising business and increase growth as it embarks on a long-awaited IPO.
The technology aims to enable Google to examine the Web sites of large advertisers and to develop automated lists of keyword combinations that are likely to turn up in search queries, the sources said.
If successful, the system will match more searches to advertisements, and thus boost revenue.
An analysis of search-engine advertising suggests there is significant room for growth in this area. Only 40 percent to 45 percent of the 120 million Internet searches a day in the United States are currently linked to an ad, according to research firm ComScore Networks. But such a service could also create new risks for Google, which has stumbled in the past with automated advertising efforts.
Google, which is preparing for a $2.7 billion initial public offering later this year, would not comment on the project. But executives at companies working with Google said such a service is in the works.
"There is something like that on the horizon," said Kevin Lee, chief executive of Did-It.com, a prominent search-engine marketing company that works with advertisers to test Google products before they are released. "All the search engines are experimenting with what is the best way to allow large advertisers to get the right number of listings into their engines."
Over just a few years, search engines have seen enormous success selling keywords, giving the highest bidder for a queried word the right to display ads above and to the side of query results.
As much as 95 percent of Google's $991 million in revenue last year came from the sponsored listings that appear on its Web site and on those of its partners.
Meanwhile, sales from U.S. search-engine marketing will reach a total of $2.1 billion in 2004, up from $1.6 billion last year, according to Jupiter Research. By 2008, sales are expected to hit $4.3 billion.
But search-engine advertising has barely gotten off the ground, and there are still many legal and business questions to be answered. For example, a limited number of keywords will always command the greatest interest. That means search engine companies face the specter of a revenue ceiling--unless they can put an ever-widening circle of obscure terms and phrases to work.
But that, too, could create complications. In seeking cheap alternatives to popular terms, marketers might be forced to manage massive lists of keywords. They may well have to push constantly to dream up previously overlooked combinations of search strings that work well for their products and services.
External factors could also curtail growth projections. At least one trademark holder has sued Google, seeking to prevent the search company from selling its trademarked words to advertisers. Google has already taken steps to bypass such concerns in the United States. But if the courts deem that trademarks are off-limits to Google and other search engines, sales could suffer.
As a result, Google and other search engines are highly motivated to develop ways of expanding their inventories of keywords. One way to do this is to use technology to automate tasks for large marketers, for example, to help them choose keywords in order to place ads on a search engine.
Google and Yahoo-owned Overture Services already offer broad-matching and phrase-matching tools. These let marketers buy one keyword, or a set of keywords, that can appear in many search variations. For example, with broad matching, a marketer can bid for exposure on the term "running shoes," but also show up on a query for "shoes for running." With phrase matching, that marketer might also show up in results for "purple running shoes."
Most large, sophisticated marketers are taking advantage of these tools to leverage search. Ninety percent of marketers with an annual ad budget of more than $1 million are using ad-matching tools from Google or Overture, according to Jupiter Research. Advertisers that show a preference for Overture, however, tend to use such tools more, Jupiter has found.
Now, Google wants to take the technology even further. Its proposed service would allow marketers to pay to have a Web page examined more often for inclusion in sponsored listings, according to one source.
Instead of having to bid on thousands of keywords, a large advertiser--such as Amazon.com--could rely on Google's search technology to automatically create connections between its Web pages and related search queries. Amazon would pay Google to examine thousands of its pages and to serve an ad whenever the software deemed it appropriate. Amazon would pay an amount previously bid at auction for those pages, whenever people clicked on its listings.
In this scenario, a Web surfer who searched Google.com for "Stevie Wonder" might see a sponsored listing for "Stevie Wonder at Amazon.com," for example. Amazon may not have bid on those granular keywords, but Google's crawlers will have found CDs and books on the musician during the engine's indexing and will have automatically placed an ad based on that query.
By contrast, Overture takes a slightly more human approach to advertising. It employs slews of account managers who help marketers invent new keyword combinations to drive people to their stores, according to an Overture representative. It also offers technology that lets marketers measure the effectiveness of their search campaigns, as well as of campaigns via e-mail, Google or banner ads.
"We work with advertisers closely to make sure they're bidding on the most possible keywords," said the Overture representative.
Similar technology has been put to use by Yahoo and others in so-called paid-inclusion programs, which increase the chances that Web pages will appear in search results in exchange for a fee. Yahoo's service promises that participating Web pages will be indexed more frequently than those on other sites, thus increasing the chances that searchers will find the most recently updated pages, for example.
In the same way, Google's proposed service would accept data feeds from retail marketers, in order to index those pages more often. But unlike Yahoo's paid inclusion, Google would not allow commercial listings to appear in its general Web index.
Experts said search companies run the risk of trading off relevance for reach. More-obscure terms may turn out to serve ads to an audience that is less receptive to clicking on them.
"With sponsored listings, you don't get to target the end of the tail--that big stream of searches that happen rarely. Because who's thinking of all those queries?" said Danny Sullivan, publisher of newsletter Search Engine Watch. "With paid inclusion, your site speaks for you. So the two need to have an intersection, and that idea has been to use automated tools to populate both services...The downside is that if you're automating, the targeting may not be as good."
Google has faced criticism of its automated marketing tools in the past. In one case, it served up an advertisement for a suitcase maker in a news article about a murder investigation in which body parts were discovered in a travel case.
Nevertheless, ad-matching technology could become essential as search queries get more complex over time. And as Web surfers get more savvy, they tend to enter more search terms for better results, according to search experts.
"The limitations of search-engine marketing are the burdens on marketers. Managing keyword campaigns is a nightmare...and lots of keywords are left on the table," said James Lamberti, a research director at ComScore. "A move from a manual to a highly automated process will be the next big shift for the industry."
Source: ZD Net
The Blogger site now includes a new "cleaner" interface, shared comments, author profiles, and posting via email.
Google has today unveiled its newly designed Blogger website, the free self-publishing service for web users and online 'diarists'.
The relaunch is the first major overhaul of Blogger since Google bought its parent company, San Francisco-based Pyra Labs, in February 2003.
Launched in 1999, Blogger helps consumers publish on the web instantly without writing code or installing software, using publishing tools.
"Blogger is committed to bringing more voices and points of view to the web," said Evan Williams, Blogger program manager and founder of Pyra Labs. "These enhancements make web publishing as easy as possible, delivering the power of blogging into the hands of more people worldwide."
Creating a weblog, or a blog, using the new version of Blogger takes three steps and just a few minutes, Google claims. The improvements also mean users can now publish to their blogs instantly from any email-enabled device, including cellular phones and handheld devices (PDAs).
Google says the new service also provides more than 30 templates for blog layout.
Source: Net Imperative
Analysts said that the decision to split the chairman and chief executive positions is probably a response to the broader trend in favor of better corporate governance.
Little noticed in Google Inc.'s filing to go public last week is the fact that Eric Schmidt, the Internet search company's chief executive, no longer holds the title of chairman.
The change leaves that position unfilled and raises the questions of not only who will be Schmidt's replacement, but also what exactly happened.
Separating the powers is intended to make boards more responsive to shareholders rather than a rubber stamp for management decisions.
"The point of having a separate CEO and chairman on the board is to create a balance of power," said Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate with Corporate Library, a private research firm in Maine focused on corporate governance issues.
Hodgson said that Google, which is based in Mountain View, appears to be preparing to bring in an outsider as chairman. If so, he said it would be "in line with best corporate practices."
Google's move follows the lead of several other companies that have split the chief executive and chairman jobs, including such technology firms as Siebel Systems and Dell.
In both cases, the chairmen are former chief executives. Hodgson complained that such chairmen are still allied with management and therefore not truly independent.
In fact, Hodgson said only 25 companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 actually have chairmen from outside the company.
They include such Bay Area companies as JDS Uniphase, the networking firm; Clorox, the consumer products-maker; and Solectron, the computer parts contractor.
"It's an increasing trend," Hodgson said, "but there's a lot of entrenched CEOs out there who don't want to give up power."
Whether Schmidt gave up the chairman's role willingly is not clear. Google's bylaws allow an employee to become chairman as long as the individual has the support of two-thirds of the board of directors, according to the company's filing for an initial public offering last week.
Analysts mentioned that Google bylaws may expressly give leeway for the chief executive to return as chairman if the effort to split the leadership roles does not work out.
Schmidt, the former chief executive of the software company Novell, was hired as Google's chairman in March 2001.
He relinquished the title last month, according to Google's filing, but remains a director and leads the executive committee. He continues as chief executive, a position he took in July 2001.
Google is already under fire over its management structure, which gives insiders overwhelming control.
The company has adopted a controversial corporate governance structure in which executives and directors hold stock carrying 10 votes per share, while retail investors will get shares that count for only one vote.
"Some of the expected backlash because of ownership and corporate governance could have swayed them to divide the chairmanship and the CEO," said Mark May, an analyst for Kaufman Bros., an investment bank.
Analysts were divided over who will replace Schmidt. They agreed that his replacement will probably be named before the company's shares begin trading publicly, which is expected in a few months.
Martin Pyykkonen, an Internet analyst for Janco Partners, an investment research firm, expects the chairman's job to attract a lot of interest, given Google's high profile.
And given the company's growth, the job will be time consuming, grappling with such issues as future acquisitions, new online features and an expanded computer infrastructure, Pyykkonen said.
Likely candidates will come from such industries as software or advertising, Google's main source of revenue, according to Pyykkonen.
Another analyst, Mark Argento, of ThinkEquity Partners, said that Google may have enough Silicon Valley types and may look elsewhere.
Serving on a company's board can be the first step toward becoming chairman. The directors on Google's board from outside the company, excluding the venture capitalists, include Ram Shriram, a former Amazon.com executive; Arthur Levinson, chief executive of Genentech; John Hennessy, president of Stanford University; and Paul Otellini, president of Intel.
Whatever the case, the analysts said that a new chairman will have to deal with Google's unusual management structure.
In the filing last week, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders and co- presidents, said they shared decision making with Schmidt, as a triumvirate.
"You will have to reconfigure the boardroom table so you can get them all at the end," said Argento, the analyst. He added that even at Google, which prides itself on being unconventional, "they can't have a lame duck chairman. It's not good business."
Source: SF Gate.com
In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Google said only US residents would be able to participate in the forthcoming IPO auction.
The company, whose mantra is to "make the world a better place" said: "We have not undertaken any efforts to qualify this offering in offers to individual investors outside the US".
THE UK Shareholders Association, the largest organisation of private investors in the UK, last night expressed its dismay that the millions of UK devotees of search engine Google are to be barred from investing in the US-based company when it floats later this year.
Therefore, individual investors located outside the US should not expect to be eligible to participate in this offering.
David Blundell, chairman of UKSA, told Scotland on Sunday: "Google publicly states that it is a global company. Why then should only US private shareholders be able to take advantage of its forthcoming flotation? A great many potential UK shareholders will be extremely disappointed."
In the US, financial intuitions are wary of a set of rules Google has laid down for its much-anticipated initial public offering, which fly in the face of accepted Wall-Street wisdom.
In the wake of numerous investigations into investment banks that doled out coveted IPO shares in the 1990s to favoured clients in exchange for future business, Google has decided to hold a Dutch auction, designed in part to shut out Wall Street firms from profiting from conflicts of interest.
Under the prevalent Wall Street system, a company going public fixes the amount of shares it wants to float and the underwriting investment banks set the price in advance - normally well below what the market will bear.
Shares are distributed beforehand, mostly to big institutional investors who often do business with the investment banks. Once the shares start trading they typically soar in price, so the original holders of the IPO certificates quickly cash them in for hefty profits.
Peter Thiel, founder of the hedge fund Clarium Capital, said: "Surprise, surprise, the shares go up a lot and the banks get a commission. And the only people who lose are the retail investors and the company, which doesn’t get as much money as it otherwise would.
"It’s high time that a company with the stature of Google does something like this because what it means is that the shares go to the people willing to pay the most."
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, maverick computer scientists who founded Google in 1995, will refuse to make quarterly earnings predictions and vow not to make management decisions as a quick fix for the share price.
Page and Brin are critical of what they clearly perceive as Wall Street’s old boy network. The word on Wall Street is that Goldman Sachs so disliked the auction idea that Google may have bypassed it to be the lead underwriter.
But with stated profits last year of $346.7m (£194.2m) on a 62% margin derived almost entirely from advertising, Google’s shares are expected to be so sought after that the underwriting banks, led by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston, still stand to profit even if they are cut out of shares allocation process.
Google hopes to raise $2.7bn with its offering. Such a large IPO has never been sold through an auction before in the US. Page and Brin said: "Our goal is to have an efficient market price - a rational price set by informed buyers and sellers - for our shares at the IPO and afterward.
"Our goal is to achieve a relatively stable price in the days following the IPO and that buyers and sellers receive a fair price at the IPO.
"Many companies have suffered from unreasonable speculation, small initial share float, and boom-bust cycles that hurt them and their investors in the long run. We believe that an auction-based IPO will minimise these problems."
Google intends to issue two classes of shares in order to keep management decisions firmly in the hands of the founders and their managers, who will receive super-voting shares.
Source: Business Scotsman
Google is growing rapidly and early projections of certain financial analysts attribute its profitability on par with that of its biggest competitors, most notably Yahoo.
Now that the once-secretive Google has taken the wraps off its financial data, how does it stack up against its rivals?
In a securities filing Thursday announcing plans for its $2.7 billion initial public offering, Google reported revenue of $961 million in 2003--up 176 percent compared with the previous year--and $105 million in net income.
Profit margins, excluding charges from interest, taxes, amortization and stock options, reached 64 percent, double Yahoo's for the same period, according to American Technology Research. However, Yahoo's 2003 margin did not include a full year of revenue from its Overture Services subsidiary.
The quarter ending March 31 showed Google with 59 percent margins, outpacing Yahoo's 48 percent--all this from a company that lost $6 million on $220,000 in revenue in 1999.
"These margins are extremely high for such an early-stage company," said Mark Mahaney, equity analyst at American Technology Research.
Using Yahoo's richly valued shares as a starting point, Google might be worth a breathtaking $51 billion. That's assuming investors would be willing to pay as much as 60 times Google's projected earnings for 2005 to snap up shares in its IPO.
More conservative comparisons with e-commerce giant eBay would set Google's market value at around $38 billion, or as much as $98 a share. That's richer than General Motors--not bad for a company that started up six years ago in a garage.
Such back-of-the-envelope calculations are premature, of course. Google did not set the number of shares it plans to offer or the price in Thursday's filing. Those details will be determined later, following an unusual auction in which individual investors will get a chance to bid on shares.
Nearly all of Google's money--95 percent--comes from advertising, which is witnessing a revival after suffering for years after the dot-com bust. Central to the advertising resurgence is paid search, a business dominated by Google and a competitor, Overture. The companies sell keywords to advertisers and then charge them a fee every time a user clicks on the link.
Google also has deals with other companies, such as America Online, to host keyword search results, offering them a revenue cut for every link clicked.
Last quarter, Google gained $370 million in advertising alone. Yahoo, on the other hand, made $635 million (including a one-time gain) on its mix of display advertising and paid search from Overture. AOL raked in $214 million on advertising last quarter, $74 million of which came from Google.
Microsoft did not break out its advertising revenue from its MSN division, but said paid search helped grow advertising by 43 percent from the same period last year. Microsoft uses Overture as its paid search partner but has begun to target Google's algorithmic search business.
While Google's success has prompted its competitors to follow suit, its trail of high-margin profits and surging revenue may not continue at it current pace, the company and analysts warned.
"Our net revenue growth rate has declined, and we expect that it will continue to decline as a result of anticipated changes to our advertising program revenue mix, increasing competition and the inevitable decline in growth rates as our net revenues increase to higher levels," the company stated in its public filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Google's reliance on paid search means its fortunes will fluctuate with the industry's highs and lows. To draw a comparison, Yahoo watched its full-year revenue plummet from $1.1 billion in 2000 to $717.4 million in 2001 because of the sudden collapse in online advertising dollars.
This drop sparked the exit of its former CEO, Tim Koogle, a complete revamping of its business, and the gutting of its freewheeling culture.
Although 83 percent of its revenue comes from advertising, Yahoo still counts 11 percent, or $88 million, from subscription revenue. Google does not charge subscriptions for any of its services.
In short, things at Google have been great. But the real test has only begun.
"You've got with Yahoo an execution record," said American Technology Research's Mahaney. "The numbers are great for Google, but you've got an unproven team. Let's see if they can deliver as well as Yahoo has as a public company."
Source: C-Net News
When Google learned Goldman Sachs' chairman and chief executive Henry Paulson had contacted one of the search engine's big investors, Kleiner Perkins, it deemed this as breaking the rules and bumped them from contention.
Google Inc. excluded Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the world's largest underwriters, as a lead manager for its planned $2.7 billion initial public offering because it was angry with the investment bank, Newsweek magazine said on Sunday.
Google asked investment banks pitching for the business, worth it said an estimated $100 million in fees, to come up with new ideas to conduct the underwriting rather than rely on old relationship banking habits, the magazine said.
It did not identify a source but quoted an unnamed executive at another Wall Street firm. Google officials were not immediately available and a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman declined to comment on the article.
Google on Thursday named rival investment banks Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston as lead underwriters for the offering.
Source: CNNfn and Newsweek magazine.
Google’s AdWords advertising sales for trademarked names and competitive business terms is being challenged again in the court room, this time in France.
AXA, the world’s No. 3 insurer, is taking Google to court next month in the latest trademark challenge to threaten the heart of Google’s business model advertising.
AXA, which posted $86 billion in revenue last year, is the largest company yet to take the keyword “hijacking” and trademark targeted advertising controversy into a legal court. A ruling may have a large effect on the way Google serves targeted AdWords ads in the EU.
According to AP wire: A preliminary hearing on AXA’s allegations of “brand counterfeiting” is scheduled for May 10 in Paris, a court official said. Both companies have confirmed that litigation is pending but declined to comment on the case or say how much AXA was seeking in damages.
Under French court procedures, details will not be made public until later in the hearings and court procedings. A source close to the insurer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the lawsuit was filed after Google sold AXA’s registered trademarks as advertising search terms.
Google searchers who typed “AXA” or “Direct Assurance” looking for search results were served AdWords text advertisements for other insurance companies which purchased such placement from Google.
Source: Search Engine Journal
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Google, the popular search engine company, registered for a $2.7 billion initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday.
Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston were named as the underwriters for the deal.
The company's IPO filing has been rumored for the better part of a year and recent speculation has created a buzz about Internet stocks not seen since online auctioneer eBay went public in September 1998.
Wall Street has been eagerly anticipating a filing from Google so investors could finally get a glimpse into the company's finances.
In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent.
For the first quarter of 2004, Google reported sales of $389.6 million, an increase of 118 percent from a year ago. Net income was $64 million, up 148 percent from the first quarter of 2003.
Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst with American Technology Research, said Google's numbers were incredibly strong, noting that its sales grew in the first quarter at a higher rate than Yahoo! and eBay.
Google's core business of selling search-based advertising, which allows companies to purchase ads tied to specific keyword searches, is one of the most lucrative and rapidly growing markets in the tech sector.
Google, founded in 1998 by former Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, has quickly become one of the most successful Internet companies, thanks to search technology that many experts say is superior to offerings from rivals.
Click http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/29/technology/google/index.htm to read the whole story on CNNfn.
Internet search firm Google Inc. has moved one step closer to its eagerly awaited initial public offering, choosing Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston to be lead underwriters, according to a published report Monday.
Plans surrounding the IPO will probably be announced this week, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
The IPO, widely expected to value the six-year-old firm at about $20 billion, would enrich Google's founders and early venture investors and give it a valuable currency for acquisitions as it takes on rivals Yahoo Inc. (YHOO: Research, Estimates) and Microsoft Corp.
Google's IPO is the most hotly anticipated IPO since the tech bubble burst in 2000.
The brainchild of two Stanford University graduate students -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who together hold 30 percent or more of the company -- Google revolutionized Web searching in 1998 by offering a simple and powerful way to find information based on the number of links to a page.
Credit Suisse First Boston, a unit of Credit Suisse Group and Morgan Stanley (MWD: Research, Estimates), would share in a pool of investment banking fees of almost $100 million, the paper reported.
Source: CNNfn.com
InfoSpace today announced it has extended its agreement to distribute Google search results through its network of Web search properties and partner Web sites until 2006.
The agreement includes distribution of Google's award-winning indexed Web search results, as well as targeted advertising from the Google AdWords™ Program.
"We're pleased to continue providing InfoSpace with targeted advertising and award-winning search technology, distributing Web search results and relevant advertising to the millions of users who visit InfoSpace's properties and partner Web sites each month," said Omid Kordestani, Google's senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations.
"Our relationship with InfoSpace increases the value we provide to our advertising customers by extending their reach to InfoSpace Web search users at a variety of popular sites across the Internet."
"We have worked hard to build a valuable channel for our search provider partners by developing first-rate products and signing agreements to power Web search at some of the most popular sites on the Internet," said Brian McManus, executive vice president, Search and Directory, at InfoSpace, Inc.
"The extension of our agreement with Google reflects the success of these efforts and will help us to continue delivering top quality search results to our users."
InfoSpace's metasearch technology searches the Web's leading engines and delivers the best results from each. The company's Dogpile search engine has received favorable reviews recently in the search industry and technology press.
In a feature titled "Web Stars: Best of the Web" in the February 2004 issue of PC World, Dogpile was named first runner-up in the Search Engines category, behind category winner Google. In addition, the Dogpile Toolbar took top honors in the Browser Toolbar Plug-Ins category to win a "PC World Best Bet Award."
Also in February, influential search industry newsletter Search Engine Watch named Dogpile "Best Metasearch Engine." Dogpile won the category both in the popular vote and with Search Engine Watch editors Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman.
InfoSpace Web search is offered through the Company's three search properties, Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com) and MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com), as well as the sites of leading distribution partners.
Source: Infospace Inc.
Google has been awarded ownership of the domain name froogle.co.uk, which was registered by a UK web hosting company the day after the world's most popular search engine launched Froogle as its product search service.
Google's apparent mistake was to launch its service on 11th December 2002 – and to seek to register the UK domain name two days later – which left a window of opportunity for LWD Internet to snap it up.
Although Google Inc. had froogle.com, froogle.org and other names, and is in the process of registering trade marks for the Froogle brand, it wanted control of the .co.uk name and got its lawyers involved.
For a while, it looked like the parties would settle: to avoid formal proceedings, a deal was struck comprising a payment by Google of £500 together with credit of £1,000 in a Google Adword account. But negotiations broke down, and no transfer was made.
So Google took its case to Nominet, the registry for all domain names ending .uk. Nominet operates a dispute resolution service similar to that provided by the World Intellectual Property Organisation for other disputes, particularly those involving .com, .net and .org domain names.
LWD argued that the registration had been in good faith, that the “timing of our domain registration and the launch of froogle.com was entirely coincidental.” But the panel didn't buy that argument, saying it stretched “credulity too far”.
Nominet panellist Keith Gymer agreed with LWD that Google had insufficient trade mark rights in the UK in the Froogle brand – which had only been launched in the US. However, he reasoned that, for the purposes of the dispute:
-- “It is not necessary that [Google] should have had sufficient Rights to pursue a trade mark infringement or a passing-off action, nor is it necessary that the Rights be in the UK".
He pointed out that the Nominet dispute Policy defines "Rights" as including, but not being limited to, rights enforceable under English law.
Concluding that LWD did register the name with some "speculative intent,” he ordered that it be transferred to Google.
David Woods, a dispute resolution specialist with Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM comments:
"The case provides a useful lesson for anyone launching a new brand. Bringing a case before Nominet costs the complainant a fee of £750 plus VAT. If lawyers are instructed, the complainant has their fees as well. These fees are not recoverable in the event of success in a Nominet or WIPO case. But disputes like this are often avoidable."
Woods points to another example, from 2000, when PDA-maker Palm announced its new MyPalm service before securing the corresponding domain name. It then had to buy mypalm.com from the owner, who had already been using it for e-mail.
"With domain names, the cost of registration is cheap. For a company with an international profile like Google's, it is advisable to obtain a range of defensive registrations before announcing any new brand. Google could have had the name for £10 if it had registered it before announcing the service."
Source: Out-Law.com
Google's IPO announcement is linked to the fact that the company will soon be required to publicly disclose more information about its search engine business, under a certain SEC rule triggered after closely held companies surpass a certain size.
Internet-search pioneer Google Inc. plans to announce within days that it will push forward with an initial public offering, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Google is expected to have to make such disclosures as early as next week. Lawyers have said that the disclosure requirements can be a trigger for companies to list their shares.
Major elements of Google's expected offering remain unknown, including its size, which banks have been tapped to lead it, and the extent to which individual investors will be able to participate. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
Rumors around the Mountain View, Calif., company's IPO have swirled through markets since October. Based on early chatter among bankers, the offering could value Google at as much as $25 billion , and spread nearly $100 million in fees across Wall Street.
Last fall, some of Google's prospective advisers estimated the valuation of the company could be in line with other Internet leaders. Those include Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), valued at $38 billion , Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) at $20 billion and eBay Inc. ( EBAY ) at $54 billion .
Source: Dow Jones News
With its release of the Google Search Appliance last year, the long-time leader of consumer Web search turned its attention to the needs of complex, data-intensive enterprises.
"People buy our product [because] our search results are better," Google Enterprise general manager Dave Girouard told the E-Commerce Times. "For the IT person, their customer is the employee. If it's an e-business, then their client is the visitor to the Web site. We really speak to the benefits of the end user, which is really how Google got started."
The search appliance -- which includes hardware, software and support -- interacts with an organization's datacenter to search either an intranet or a business' external Web site. Companies as diverse as Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas, PBS, USA Today, the U.S. Army and Sun Microsystems already have adopted Google's offering.
Dave Girouard, general manager for Google Enterprise, chatted recently with the E-Commerce Times about the Google Search Appliance, its target market, the vast opportunity within the enterprise search industry, and the environment at the Mountain View, California-based company's headquarters.
E-Commerce Times: How would you describe the Google Search Appliance?
Dave Girouard: At a simple level, it's a Google search engine in a box -- a box that has the entire Google search engine built into it. You install [it] in your datacenter, turn it on and set a couple of configurations. Then it creates a Google search engine within your company for all the information, documents and Web pages throughout your corporate intranet. It's also used broadly on public-facing sites for doing what we refer to as a site search.
ECT: What was the genesis of the Google Search Appliance?
It came about a couple of years ago because we had a lot of customers who said, "We really like using Google on the Web, and, gosh, we wish we had that same capability -- that same kind of Google-quality search results on our intranet -- because we find it's harder to find things on our intranet than it is to find things on the entire Web, which seems kind of silly."
Click http://www.crmbuyer.com/perl/story/33539.html to read the whole interview on the CRM Buyer website.
Source: CRM Buyer
The domain name of PartsExpress.com includes an unfortunate string of letters, "sex," which is enough to block the Web site from Google's 'Adult Content' filtered results.
PartsExpress.com proudly touts itself as the Net's No. 1 source for audio, video and speaker components--but online shoppers who rely on an optional feature in the Google search engine to block porn sites would never know it.
Ironically, PartsExpress.com is not alone. A CNET News.com investigation shows that Google's SafeSearch filter technology incorrectly blocks many innocuous Web sites based solely on strings of letters such as "sex," "girls" or "porn" embedded in their domain names.
Google's SafeSearch flaws are more than academic--they can have serious consequences for innocent Web site operators blocked out by them. Google is the most widely used search engine on the Web, and failure to appear in its listings can have a direct impact on sales for some companies, particularly smaller enterprises with limited marketing budgets.
Research company WebSideStory reported last month that Google claimed an all-time high in search referrals, 41 percent of the United States total, and the search giant's market share is steadily expanding.
"Traffic from Google can make or break a business," said Maria Medina, whose family-run clothing business at ALittleGirlsBoutique.com doesn't pass the SafeSearch censor. "Here I am, a mom of four children, creating an at-home business that sells little girl dresses and accessories, in order to spend more time with my children, and I have been filtered out as not being family friendly. Ridiculous."
Matt Cutts, the Google engineer who designed SafeSearch four years ago, said his algorithm looks for a "relatively small" number of trigger words in a Web page's address. If one of those words appears, the SafeSearch algorithm puts the address on a block list and does not take the next step of evaluating the content of the site. "We try to find the best trade-off of precision, recall and safety," Cutts said. "People who opt in to SafeSearch are mostly OK with us being on the conservative side."
Cutts would not disclose how many Web searches are done with SafeSearch enabled, saying only that it's a small percentage of the millions of queries handled by Google each day. But the sloppy filter stands out as a rare black eye for a company that prides itself on superior search technology and boasts on its payroll one of the world's highest concentrations of computer science doctoral degrees. Google claims SafeSearch "uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases" and filters out only Web pages "containing pornography and explicit sexual content."
"That's not very bright," said Karen Schneider, a librarian who runs the Librarians' Index to the Internet and has made a study of filtering software. SafeSearch is "certainly evocative of the very primitive CyberSitter-type tools of the mid-1990s--not a tool of fairly sophisticated development."
The Scunthorpe problem
For years, Web content filters have drawn criticism for inaccuracies. In a famously embarrassing incident in 1996, America Online's errant dirty-word filter prevented residents of the British town Scunthorpe from signing up as new customers. Google's SafeSearch makes the same mistake, blocking local news sites like ThisIsScunthorpe.co.uk and ScunthorpeDistrictCatsProtection.co.uk, a housecat-adoption site.
SafeSearch is "evocative of the very primitive CyberSitter-type tools of the mid-1990s--not a tool of fairly sophisticated development," says Karen Schneider, a librarian who runs the Librarians' Index to the Internet.
Other Web sites misidentified by SafeSearch because of "sex" in their domain names include ArkansasExtermination.com, which claims to offer the "best in termite and pest control." The owner of the business, who declined to give his name, said he was puzzled by Google's categorization: "My brother wrote the Web site. I don't know anything about that."
SafeSearch also marked as unsafe for children JewishSussex.com, a religious Web site; EssexCountyBeeKeepers.org of Topsfield, Mass.; BluesExcuse.SouthBurnett.com.au, an Australian blues band's site; BassExpert.com; and the Anglo-Saxon history site RomansInSussex.co.uk.
Gareth Roelofse, the Web designer of RomansInSussex.co.uk, said his filtering complaints are broader than just Google. "We also found many library Net stations, school networks and Internet cafes block sites with the word 'sex' in" the domain name, Roelofse said. "This was a challenge for RomansInSussex.co.uk because its target audience is school children."
"I think it would be nice if Google would have a 'white list' for sites like ours, but this would involve human man-hours, I guess," said Roelofse, who designed the site on behalf of the Sussex Archaeological Society and local museums.
Cutts, the Google software engineer, noted that the SafeSearch Web page permits visitors to contact the company with complaints. "In most cases it's a pretty unambiguous usage," Cutts said about the word "sex" in domain names and Web addresses. "No filter can be 100 percent accurate. We're always willing to take a fresh look at our filter and see how we can improve it."
Google is not alone in seeking to lure searchers worried about encountering online raunch and ribaldry: Yahoo offers a "mature Web content" search filter, and Ask Jeeves has set up a separate Web site for kid-friendly searches. But Yahoo's filter isn't as hypersensitive as Google's, and lists domains mentioning Sussex, Essex and Scunthorpe as acceptable.
The flaws in Google's filter have persisted despite research published about a year ago that highlighted overblocking in SafeSearch.
An April 2003 report from Harvard University's Berkman Center described similar but less extensive problems with SafeSearch. That report said some news articles and political Web sites were filtered.
David Drummond, Google's vice president for business development, said that at the time of its development, SafeSearch was designed to be overly cautious. "The thinking was that SafeSearch was an opt-in feature," Drummond said. "People who turn it on care a lot more about something sneaking through than they do about something getting filtered out."
"Plainly silly" blocking
CNET News.com evaluated SafeSearch by testing tens of thousands of random Web pages and identifying which ones were incorrectly listed as pornographic. The results showed that Google encountered many of the same problems that have plagued Internet filters for almost a decade. One 1996 analysis, for instance, showed that CyberPatrol blocked National Rifle Association and gay and lesbian Web sites, and CyberSitter cordoned off Usenet newsgroups such as alt.feminism and soc.support.fat-acceptance.
"People who opt in to SafeSearch are mostly OK with us being on the conservative side", says Matt Cutts, the Google engineer who designed SafeSearch.
"None of that surprises me," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) technology and liberty program. "The evidence that we put on in the library filtering case shows that it's very difficult to do filtering without being overinclusive, without blocking things that are just plainly silly. That's the reality of relying on blocking: You're going to block a lot of legitimate material."
The ACLU, which has warned against buggy filters since publishing a report on the topic in 1997, unsuccessfully sued to overturn a federal law compelling public libraries to install filtering products.
"In the end, the lists are proprietary," Steinhardt said. "Without access to the lists, you don't know precisely what's being blocked. You have to rely on the authors of the lists to have the right judgment."
The word "girls" also tends to lead SafeSearch astray. It incorrectly blocks the Web sites of the private school GirlsSchoolOfAustin.org; the bridesmaid dress shop DressyGirls.com; TatuGirls.com, a Russian band's site; and TheCalicoGirls.com, a Web site devoted to cat poetry.
"Porn" in a domain name can confuse SafeSearch just as thoroughly. It won't display Pornichet.org, devoted to improving tourism for the French seaside town of Pornichet; SpornGroup.com, a New York-based business consultancy; Sporn.com, which sells dog leashes; PornkRocks.com, a site devoted to the band Pornk; and Anti-Kinderporno.de, a German effort to oppose child pornography.
Aaron Wolfe, information systems director for SafeSearch-banned PartsExpress.com, said the company is planning to excise that unfortunate string of letters from its domain name.
"We are going to modify our domain name to Parts-Express.com," Wolfe said, adding that the renaming will also help "get around spam filters on e-mail servers."
Source: C-Net News
Google and RealNetworks announced today that the Google Toolbar is being distributed with RealPlayer 10 downloads.
By making the Google Toolbar available to the very large number of consumers who install the new RealPlayer 10 every day, Google Toolbar is sure to be popping up on the browsers of more everyday computer users and possibly the browsers of people who prefer Yahoo or other search engines.
With MSN, Yahoo, Amazon’s A9, UCMore, and other search related toolbars hitting the market left and right, this may start a “toolbar distribution war” among search engine companies.
RealPlayer 10 is the first free media player that enables consumers to play content in any of the major Internet media formats, including RealAudio, RealVideo, AAC, Windows Media, QuickTime MPEG-4 and MP3.
By including the Google Toolbar in the RealPlayer download options, consumers can choose to install the free web browser tool which enables them to quickly and easily search Google from any web page. Once Google opens its GMail email to the puplic, the Google Toolbar will be the ultimate place to promote the new GMail and access one’s inbox.
The downloading of the Google Toolbar will be opt-in, giving the RealPlayer audience the option to download Google onto their browser. If Google decided to sneak their toolbar on a browser, like many spyware and parasites currently do, they would be breaking some anti-spyware laws and form distrust among the Internet user community.
“By combining RealPlayer 10’s popularity with the Google Toolbar, we’re helping users worldwide improve and enhance their media playback and search experience on the web,” said Carla Stratfold, senior vice president, North America Sales, RealNetworks, Inc.
“Our relationship with Google demonstrates our commitment to partnering with best-of-breed products and services and leveraging our distribution power to reach consumers in all global markets.”
“RealPlayer 10 is a valuable distribution platform for the Google Toolbar,” said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations, Google Inc.
“We are committed to connecting users worldwide to the information they need, and by offering a free pop-up blocker and autofill capability to RealPlayer 10 consumers, Google further enriches their experience on the web.”
Source: Search Engine News.ca
InfoSpace today announced it has extended its agreement to distribute Google search results through its network of Web search properties and partner Web sites until 2006.
The agreement includes distribution of Google's award-winning indexed Web search results, as well as targeted advertising from the Google AdWords™ Program.
"We're pleased to continue providing InfoSpace with targeted advertising and award-winning search technology, distributing Web search results and relevant advertising to the millions of users who visit InfoSpace's properties and partner Web sites each month," said Omid Kordestani, Google's senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations.
"Our relationship with InfoSpace increases the value we provide to our advertising customers by extending their reach to InfoSpace Web search users at a variety of popular sites across the Internet."
"We have worked hard to build a valuable channel for our search provider partners by developing first-rate products and signing agreements to power Web search at some of the most popular sites on the Internet," said Brian McManus, executive vice president, Search and Directory, at InfoSpace, Inc.
"The extension of our agreement with Google reflects the success of these efforts and will help us to continue delivering top quality search results to our users."
InfoSpace's metasearch technology searches the Web's leading engines and delivers the best results from each. The company's Dogpile search engine has received favorable reviews recently in the search industry and technology press.
In a feature titled "Web Stars: Best of the Web" in the February 2004 issue of PC World, Dogpile was named first runner-up in the Search Engines category, behind category winner Google. In addition, the Dogpile Toolbar took top honors in the Browser Toolbar Plug-Ins category to win a "PC World Best Bet Award."
Also in February, influential search industry newsletter Search Engine Watch named Dogpile "Best Metasearch Engine." Dogpile won the category both in the popular vote and with Search Engine Watch editors Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman.
InfoSpace Web search is offered through the Company's three search properties, Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com) and MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com), as well as the sites of leading distribution partners.
Source: Infospace Inc.
Google has been awarded ownership of the domain name froogle.co.uk, which was registered by a UK web hosting company the day after the world's most popular search engine launched Froogle as its product search service.
Google's apparent mistake was to launch its service on 11th December 2002 – and to seek to register the UK domain name two days later – which left a window of opportunity for LWD Internet to snap it up.
Although Google Inc. had froogle.com, froogle.org and other names, and is in the process of registering trade marks for the Froogle brand, it wanted control of the .co.uk name and got its lawyers involved.
For a while, it looked like the parties would settle: to avoid formal proceedings, a deal was struck comprising a payment by Google of £500 together with credit of £1,000 in a Google Adword account. But negotiations broke down, and no transfer was made.
So Google took its case to Nominet, the registry for all domain names ending .uk. Nominet operates a dispute resolution service similar to that provided by the World Intellectual Property Organisation for other disputes, particularly those involving .com, .net and .org domain names.
LWD argued that the registration had been in good faith, that the “timing of our domain registration and the launch of froogle.com was entirely coincidental.” But the panel didn't buy that argument, saying it stretched “credulity too far”.
Nominet panellist Keith Gymer agreed with LWD that Google had insufficient trade mark rights in the UK in the Froogle brand – which had only been launched in the US. However, he reasoned that, for the purposes of the dispute:
-- “It is not necessary that [Google] should have had sufficient Rights to pursue a trade mark infringement or a passing-off action, nor is it necessary that the Rights be in the UK".
He pointed out that the Nominet dispute Policy defines "Rights" as including, but not being limited to, rights enforceable under English law.
Concluding that LWD did register the name with some "speculative intent,” he ordered that it be transferred to Google.
David Woods, a dispute resolution specialist with Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM comments:
"The case provides a useful lesson for anyone launching a new brand. Bringing a case before Nominet costs the complainant a fee of £750 plus VAT. If lawyers are instructed, the complainant has their fees as well. These fees are not recoverable in the event of success in a Nominet or WIPO case. But disputes like this are often avoidable."
Woods points to another example, from 2000, when PDA-maker Palm announced its new MyPalm service before securing the corresponding domain name. It then had to buy mypalm.com from the owner, who had already been using it for e-mail.
"With domain names, the cost of registration is cheap. For a company with an international profile like Google's, it is advisable to obtain a range of defensive registrations before announcing any new brand. Google could have had the name for £10 if it had registered it before announcing the service."
Source: Out-Law.com
Google and RealNetworks announced today that the Google Toolbar is being distributed with RealPlayer 10 downloads.
By making the Google Toolbar available to the very large number of consumers who install the new RealPlayer 10 every day, Google Toolbar is sure to be popping up on the browsers of more everyday computer users and possibly the browsers of people who prefer Yahoo or other search engines.
With MSN, Yahoo, Amazon’s A9, UCMore, and other search related toolbars hitting the market left and right, this may start a “toolbar distribution war” among search engine companies.
RealPlayer 10 is the first free media player that enables consumers to play content in any of the major Internet media formats, including RealAudio, RealVideo, AAC, Windows Media, QuickTime MPEG-4 and MP3.
By including the Google Toolbar in the RealPlayer download options, consumers can choose to install the free web browser tool which enables them to quickly and easily search Google from any web page. Once Google opens its GMail email to the puplic, the Google Toolbar will be the ultimate place to promote the new GMail and access one’s inbox.
The downloading of the Google Toolbar will be opt-in, giving the RealPlayer audience the option to download Google onto their browser. If Google decided to sneak their toolbar on a browser, like many spyware and parasites currently do, they would be breaking some anti-spyware laws and form distrust among the Internet user community.
“By combining RealPlayer 10’s popularity with the Google Toolbar, we’re helping users worldwide improve and enhance their media playback and search experience on the web,” said Carla Stratfold, senior vice president, North America Sales, RealNetworks, Inc.
“Our relationship with Google demonstrates our commitment to partnering with best-of-breed products and services and leveraging our distribution power to reach consumers in all global markets.”
“RealPlayer 10 is a valuable distribution platform for the Google Toolbar,” said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations, Google Inc.
“We are committed to connecting users worldwide to the information they need, and by offering a free pop-up blocker and autofill capability to RealPlayer 10 consumers, Google further enriches their experience on the web.”
Source: Search Engine News.ca
Russian Internet culture developed later than the Western Internet culture.
Russian law also took longer to surface online — as many international companies who came to Russia to do business had a chance to find out the hard way.
All the way back at the dawn of the Internet Age in Russia, some people were already thinking of profiting from Western expansion.
Coca-Cola, Nokia, Kodak, Audi, and most recently, Google, have all had to battle cybersquatters who had registered Western trademarks as domain names.
Google, the Internet’s favorite search engine, has had a Russian interface since the spring of 2002, but not until April 3, 2004, was Google Technology finally able to register a proper Russian second-level domain name (in the .ru zone) for its search engine.
Russian Internet users who typed Google.com into the location window of their browsers were automatically redirected to Google’s mirror at www.google.com.ru. www.google.ru was being used by Avalanche, a Russian company that got the domain from Denis Gledenov, an infamous Russian domain investor, reports Mosnews.com.
Source: Multi Reg
Privately held Google appears to have triggered a provision of the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act that requires it to disclose closely guarded financial details by the end of the month.
Rampant speculation about a possible public stock offering has turned Google into the most closely watched technology company in the world. Now the Mountain View Internet company may be forced to show its hand.
The filing, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, would reveal so much about the secretive firm that many experts believe Google might take the next logical step and file for an initial stock offering, reaping the financial rewards that go along with having to open its books.
``It's a terrible place to be in because you get all the disadvantages of being a public company and none of the advantages,'' said Scott Spector, an attorney with Fenwick & West in Palo Alto. ``I can't imagine the company wanting to be in that situation.''
Google officials have been tight-lipped about the reporting requirement and possible plans for an IPO, and they declined to comment for this story.
But many observers believe that Google has triggered the requirements to become a ``publicly reporting'' company. Companies must report financial results to the SEC once they have at least $10 million in assets and more than 500 shareholders of record, including employees who hold stock options.
Google's profits are thought to be $100 million or more. And the assumption -- reinforced by Google's Web site, which touts ``pre-IPO stock options'' to prospective employees -- is that the company has granted stock options to most of its more than 1,000 employees.
If those assumptions are true, then Google should have to start making quarterly filings to the SEC by April 30, which is 120 days after the close of its fiscal year.
Reporting companies must disclose the same information to federal regulators as publicly traded companies, including assets, liabilities, operating expenses and partnerships. But they do not trade their shares on the Nasdaq or New York stock exchanges.
``The notion is that once you have 500 shareholders, you are a public company,'' said Peter M. Astiz, a securities attorney with the Gray Cary law firm in East Palo Alto. ``The effect is you become public. They have to report all the same numbers.''
Most companies view this middle ground with disdain because they spend millions to comply with government regulations and get nothing in return. In fact, filing this paperwork can come with disadvantages. In some circumstances, employees or investor shareholders can start selling their shares on the over-the-counter bulletin board. Companies typically prefer to control when and how their shares are traded.
Companies that grow big enough to hit the filing requirement typically opt to become a publicly traded company first, attorneys said. That's because public stock offerings can enrich employees and investors, and they give the company access to cash that it can use to innovate or acquire other companies.
Google executives have appeared in no hurry to become a public company, in part because it would begin to lift the veil of secrecy under which they seem to enjoy working. What is more, the company's revenue stream appears strong, and it may not need the money that an offering of public stock would generate.
Also, Google may not want to undergo the cultural shift that takes place in companies when they have to meet analyst and shareholder expectations every quarter. Google may turn out to be the rare company that willingly files public financial reports but doesn't publicly trade its stock.
Levi Strauss is one company that does this. Its stock is privately held -- mostly by descendants of the Strauss family -- but the company files quarterly reports with the SEC.
Another option is for Google to dodge the public reporting requirement. In 2001, the SEC detailed how companies can do so: by disclosing their financial information only to shareholders.
``You've got to give them the same information that you would otherwise give if you were public,'' Spector said.
Preparing the financial information is costly, and companies run the risk of the information leaking to outsiders. But several companies have picked this option.
``I would think Google would move mountains to not go public this way,'' said Kip Weissman, attorney with the Luse Gorman Pomerenk & Schick law firm in Washington, D.C.
Google could also buy back its shares from employees and investors, but few experts said they believed that was likely to happen.
Source: Silicon Valley
When I want to optimize a page for top Yahoo! rankings, it just happens. Little to no effort = lots o distribution. I can't think of a single site I have ever worked on which has not got decent Yahoo! distribution. Google, on the other hand, either takes a bunch of money, time, or understanding to manipulate. Last November Google made changes that most SEO's still do not understand to this day.
Google is so far ahead of it's competitors that it is a joke. I think they honestly hold back tons of information and innovation (perfecting it in the background) just waiting for competition to have an exciting story to squash.
Yahoo! dumped Google. Google added a billion pages to it's index. Which got more coverage in general media...Google adding a billion pages.
Amazon A9 just launched. Google just launched the ability to target ads to your neighbor's house. Google's new technology will allow small people with low funds to cause huge ripples in social and political processes...I, for one, think it is fun to mix things up a bit :)
Internet search company Google is considering changes to its Gmail e-mail service amid criticism over privacy concerns, the company's president said.
Privacy groups and a California state senator have criticized the free e-mail service because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words.
Google President and co-founder Sergey Brin told the Journal his company will not make any "rash changes" to the e-mail service which is still being tested by thousands of users.
But he also said the idea of letting Gmail users opt in or out of the targeted ad service was an idea that "is being batted about. We certainly wouldn't rule it out," the Journal said.
In late March the world's top Web search company announced plans to launch Gmail -- a service that would offer users one gigabyte of free storage, more than 100 times the storage offered by other free services from Yahoo Inc.
Source: Yahoo News
In March, Google launched "Google Local", a service that helps surfers find local businesses by typing in a search term and a city name.
Google today will introduce capabilities for U.S. and international advertisers to reach Internet surfers by their city of origin, a move that represents the company's latest efforts for ad sales.
It also lets advertisers reach customers in their region, or within about 210 designated market areas in the United States.
Now, Google Local is circling in closer to consumers, tracking Web surfers' location down to the city level.
That means that advertisers (in the United States) can tailor promotions to hit people in a specific city, so, for example, a surfer in New York who searches for "sushi" may get results accompanied by ads for local restaurants.
Advertisers can also tailor ads so they appear on Google and its partner Web sites only when a visitor originates within a defined radius of a business' physical address; Google calls this feature "customized targeting."
For the first time, customized targeting will be available to international advertisers.
"This is a new way for small-business advertisers to step in at a level that's meaningful to them, which is around their business," said Sukhinder Singh, general manager of Google Local.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has been rapidly expanding local search during the past eight months.
Financial analysts and industry executives say geographically targeted search listings are prime real estate for local advertising, an estimated $12 billion annual business in the United States.
In 2004, less than $50 million of that market will go toward ads related to local Net searches, but over time the dollars will find their way to the virtual world, analysts say.
Google rivals Yahoo and MSN also are developing local targeting services for advertisers. CitySearch local city guides began offering a similar service for advertisers last year.
Singh said that Google will soon begin displaying sponsored listings on the Google Local specialty site, Local.google.com.
Source: C-Net News
Democratic Sen. Liz Figueroa of Fremont is drafting a bill asking Google to reconsider the e-mail service, in which users' incoming e-mail would be scanned for possible targeted advertising.
Senator Figueroa wants Google to abandon its proposed free e-mail service, calling Gmail an invasion of privacy.
For example, if an e-mail message mentioned a medical condition, then Google's software would display ads for specific medical products.
The advantage of Gmail is that it would provide lots of free storage for e-mail.
A British group, Privacy International, has complained about Gmail to the British information commissioner.
Google has said it will work with European authorities to address privacy and other concerns. The Mountain View, Calif.-based, company said users' e-mail would remain private because the process of scanning for key words would be entirely automated.
A Google news release said Gmail would offer each user storage capacity of up to 8 billion bits, or the equivalent of 500,000 pages of e-mail.
Source: Washington Times
In the past, people were unable to place Google AdWords bids on trademark keyword phrases.
However, Google has recently changed it’s trademark policy to allow people to bid on keywords which match trademark phrases of companies within the US and Canada.
Inside the US and Canada they will not allow trademark terms to appear in the ad copy. Outside those areas they will check ad text and keyword.
Google's AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure:
For companies in the US and Canada - "When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we will only investigate whether the advertisements at issue are using the trademarked term in ad text. If they are, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term from the text of the ad and prevent the advertiser from using the trademarked term in ad text in the future.
Please note that we will not disable keywords associated with trademark usage. In addition, please note that any such investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google".
Google AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure:
Trademark rights outside the US and Canada - When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, our review is limited to ensuring that the advertisements at issue are not using the trademarked term in the ad text or as a keyword trigger. If they are, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademarked term from the ad text or keyword list and will prevent the advertiser from using the trademarked term in the future.
Please note that any such investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google.
Source: Google.com
Google has long indexed university Web pages, but the new project will allow users to direct their searches to on-campus repositories of scholarly materials, sometimes known as superarchives.
Those archives contain copies of academic papers, technical reports, drafts of articles, and other work by a university's professors. Scholars can choose whether their works will be available to all Internet users or only to others on their own campuses.
Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions' collections of scholarly papers, according to university officials.
A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. If all goes as planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months, said MacKenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT's libraries. She said the search would probably be an option on Google's advanced-search page.
"A lot of times the richest scholarly literature is buried" in search-engine results, said Ms. Smith. "As more and more content is on the Web, it's harder and harder to find the high-quality stuff that you need."
The participating universities have tagged all the materials in their superarchives with "metadata tags" -- hidden codes that contain catalog information and summaries -- that can help a search engine like Google's sort through the material.
MIT has developed free software, called DSpace, that colleges and universities can use to set up superarchives. About 125 universities have done so, but no one had created a tool that searches across the archives, said Ms. Smith.
So far, each of the 17 participating institutions has, on average, about 1,000 papers in its archive, said Ms. Smith. But she said the collections are growing rapidly. "It's going to scale up pretty fast over the next few years," she said.
Ms. Smith said the universities also plan to work with providers of other search engines. "It's not like we're working on an exclusive arrangement with Google," she said, adding that the universities are neither being paid nor paying for the arrangement. "We may even do our own thing over time" to search across the archives, she said.
In the pilot test, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., a nonprofit library organization, has set up a search process that will serve as an interface between Google and the universities. "This will make it a lot easier to find a particular article," said Thomas Hickey, a chief scientist for OCLC.
Ms. Smith said that she hopes to include all 125 DSpace users in the search tool in the future. Officials at Google could not be reached for comment.
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Google says it needs to know what's in the e-mail that passes through its system so they can be sprinkled with advertisements that Google thinks are relevant.
Privacy advocates are concerned that there's one big flaw with Google Inc.'s free e-mail service: The company plans to read the messages.
Revenue from those targeted ads will pay for the Gmail service, which began a test last week, offering up to 500 times as much e-mail storage as competing Web e-mail programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The electronic letters will be read by computers, not by Google employees, but the specter of seeing an ad for an antacid beside a message from a friend complaining about stomach pain is enough to make some people nervous about the e-mail service.
"There will undoubtedly be some folks that will see this and freak out," said Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer for TurnTide Inc., an anti-spam company in Conshohocken, Pa.
The aggressive advertising strategy might put a damper on Google's biggest move away from its core business of Internet searches. After reading the privacy policy on the Gmail Web site last week, consumer-rights groups began sending complaints to the privately held Mountain View, Calif., company and began preparing to warn users to stay away.
"The privacy implications of going through and perusing a customer's e-mail to display targeted advertising could be the Achilles' heel for Google's services," said Jordana Beebe, communications director for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer group in San Diego.
The consternation caught Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, off guard.
"I'm very surprised that there are these kinds of questions," he said. Spam-filtering programs routinely scour e-mail for telltale words such as "Viagra," and companies monitor the messages of employees on their corporate networks.
In addition, Internet companies scrutinize Web search terms to serve up ads that are related to the topic a user apparently cares about.
Google's AdSense program goes a step further, placing such ads alongside content on Web sites that come up in search results.
But e-mail is a more personal form of communication, making targeted advertisements feel intrusive, said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. He likened the Gmail ads to a computerized voice interrupting a phone conversation about a vacation with a pitch for a travel agency.
"This is an expansion in a way that should bother people," Hoofnagle said. "Communications are sacred."
Consumer advocates are also worried about the potential for Google to link Gmail users to their Internet searches.
Google records the numerical Internet addresses of the computers that request each of the Web searches the company performs. But it hasn't had names or other identifying information to link those addresses to specific people and learn who, for example, is searching for "Janet Jackson halftime show."
Once users register for Gmail, Google could make that connection, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum in San Diego. And if Google ever compared the two sets of data, she said, "there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed."
Page wouldn't say whether Google plans to link Gmail users to their Web search queries.
Source: Baltimore Sun
Called "Gmail", the new Google service will compete with offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others, and move it closer to being a Web portal that offers a wide variety of Web services.
Larry Page, Google's president of products, stressed the service's search function, which will allow users to instantly find e-mail messages with the same type of technology used on the Google Web site.
"Being able to search e-mail quickly and easily is an important thing", said Page.
Google will begin testing Gmail among a small group of users this week, Page said. He did not say when the product would be available to the general public.
The service will be free with one gigabyte of storage, hundreds of times more than what other free e-mail services provide.
Google will make money off the product with small text ads placed in each e-mail message. The ads will be contextual, meaning they will be related to the content of the e-mail.
"This is a good way for us to make money and it's also un-intrusive", Page said. "The clicks that this generates will be good eventually for advertisers".
Like the Google Web site, Page said, Gmail will have a clean and simple interface and be easy to use.
Source: Mercury News
Google changed its home page to add a link to Froogle, while at the same time it tests personalized search.
The search results page has been changed, with Google's paid listings now separated from its algorithmic results by a thin blue line. Previously, paid search results were contained in colored boxes.
Google also unveiled the test of a personalized search engine that tailors results based on a profile users build. For example, a searcher self-identified as a soccer fan will receive different results than a hockey fan when both search for "world's best goalies."
The service, called Google Personalized, is available in the Google Labs section. It gives users 13 categories and 200 subcategories to identify interests. For example, the sports category breaks down into 19 sports.
On the results pages, searchers can choose the degree of personalization they want based on a slider, which dynamically changes their results as it is moved. Personalized search results that are moved up based on a searcher's interests are identified with a colored-balls logo.
Google Personalized is the result of a new algorithm Google built that reorders search results culled from its index of 4 billion Web pages. In regular searches, results are based on page-rank algorithms -- Web pages linked to by large numbers of high-quality sites are given prominence -- while Google Personalized adjusts results by weighting searcher interests.
The service marks the first time Google has built searcher profiles. The profile is stored on a user's computer in a cookie. It contains only the user's interests, not any personally identifiable information. A search profile is not transferable to another computer.
As a beta site, the personalized search engine does not carry advertising. Google's local search service recently graduated from a Google Labs project to more prominence on Google.
Personalizing search results is seen as key in figuring out what searchers are looking for. For example, customizing to interests can be used to determine whether an ambiguous search like "eagles" is looking for a band, a football team or birds.
Google rival Yahoo has made small steps toward personalizing search results. It lets users set the language for their results and the number that are displayed on the results page. Yahoo has spent nearly $2.5 billion on search-related acquisitions in the past 18 months, and its executives have tabbed personalization as a key Yahoo strength that can be applied to search.
More than 130 million users have registered with Yahoo to personalize other aspects of their Web experience.
The initial step to personalize results could yield further advancements. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last week that Google planned to add its Orkut social networking service to the site in the next year.
Social networks already have been used to hone the search experience. A startup called Eurekster lets searchers tap into their circle of friends and contacts to improve search results. It shows registered users which searches are popular among their circle of friends and gives weight to search results found relevant by others.
Google also rolled out a Web Alerts option that lets searchers receive automatic updates on specific searches. The search results are e-mailed daily or weekly. The tool builds on Google News Alerts rolled out last August.
Source: DM News
Google this month recorded an all-time high in search referrals in the United States.
On March 23, it accounted for 41 percent of all referrals, up from 36 percent for a similar day in March 2003.
Yahoo took second place at 27 percent, down from 31 percent a year earlier, while Microsoft's MSN placed third at just under 20 percent, up slightly from the earlier recording period. The Yahoo figures, however, do not include referrals from the Overture Services network, which Yahoo now owns.
Search referral is a term used to describe the visitor traffic that a search site sends to other Web sites. This can include referrals resulting from paid keywords, unpaid search results and banner ads on the search site. WebSideStory said its survey sampled 25 million unique browsers on March 23 and that the one-day results are indicative of search activity for the entire month.
"The main thrust is that the gap is widening" between Google and Yahoo, said Geoff Johnston, an analyst at WebSideStory. "Yahoo's given up market share, but Google isn't the only one stealing it. MSN is also making a move--they aren't shrinking."
Johnston added that the picture is even brighter for Google in some countries in Europe and Asia, where the company has as much as twice the market share that it has in the United States.
The WebSideStory figures are only the latest to confirm Google's leading status in the search field. Nielsen/NetRatings reported earlier this year that in January, 39 percent of active Internet surfers--or 59.3 million unique viewers--used Google to do searches, while Yahoo and MSN attracted approximately 30 percent each.
The market researcher said that three years ago, Yahoo had a U.S. search referral ranking of 37 percent, while Google came in at only 12 percent, behind MSN's nearly 15 percent.
But Google's rivals aren't sitting still. Yahoo last week said it will spend about $575 million to acquire European e-commerce site Kelkoo, its fourth major acquisition in a year and a half. Microsoft, meanwhile, has aggressive plans for new search-related services.
And Google itself is busy tinkering with its set of products and services.
Source: C-Net News
Google Personalized Web Search and Google Web Alerts, both debuting on Google Labs, enable searchers to specify what interests them and to receive customized results based on those interests.
Google Press Release
Changes to the Google interface improve the speed and accessibility of Google's search offerings, further demonstrating the company's focus on providing the best search experience for users.
Google Inc. today released three new innovative features that demonstrate the company's ongoing commitment to improving the search experience for users. The new offerings include a revolutionary search engine that uses user preferences to match search results to their interests, a service that delivers search results via email, and an enhanced interface for Google web sites worldwide.
Google takes the first step in providing personal search results based on users' preferences," said Larry Page, co-founder and president, Products. "We can deliver search results tailored to your interests or promptly email you new information on any topic. In addition, Google has a cleaner new interface and easy access to the comprehensive Froogle product search."
Google's personalized search services
Google Personalized Web Search and Google Web Alerts deliver customized search results based on preferences that users specify.
Google Personalized Web Search uses personal preferences to deliver custom search results based on interests selected by users. Users can control the degree of personalization in their results using a slider, and see the results change dynamically as the degree of personalization changes. For example, music enthusiasts will see different relevant sites for a search on (bass) than people who indicate an interest in the outdoors. More information about both services can be found at http://labs.google.com
Google Web Alerts are automatic updates for web users who want to stay current with topics that interest them. After specifying keywords they want to track, users can receive daily or weekly email with links to new web page results, plus top stories from Google News that are related to each query. For example, Google Web Alerts can be used to follow the progress of a favorite sports team or a business competitor, all without having to perform searches repeatedly.
Google interface enhancements
The Google homepages and search results pages worldwide have been modified to include links across the top of the search box, which directly connect users to other Google services including Froogle. These links provide a faster, simpler search experience. Also, with Froogle now available via the Google homepage, shoppers can directly search the web for products to buy.
Google search results pages also feature a cleaner look to better connect users to relevant information, additional Google search services and targeted advertising. As always, Google's sponsored links are clearly marked, so users can easily distinguish between advertisements and search results, which Google strives to make as objective and unbiased as possible.
Three additional search enhancements announced today include:
-- New Froogle home page and search results page - Froogle's simpler new design closely resembles the Google homepage and search results page. The new Froogle homepage also features links to recent popular product searches, such as (iPod cases) or (airzooka) instead of categories. These links enable users to see the variety of products that can be found via Froogle, from the most obscure to the most popular. Try a search on Froogle at http://froogle.google.com
-- A new number range (numrange) advanced search command enables users to specify that results contain numbers in a range they set. Users can conduct a numrange search by specifying two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces. For example, a user looking for information about DVD players between $250 and $350 or technical information on high capacity batteries, can conduct a search for (DVD player $250..300) or (50..1000 wh/kg battery).
-- Images now featured in Google News search results - Google News now displays thumbnail images of photos that relate to news stories. By including these photos, users receive more detail about any given event. Accessible from the Google homepage and at http://news.google.com, Google News provides users with multiple viewpoints on numerous stories from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide.
About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com
Google is a trademark of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Source: Google press release
Contact: Nathan Tyler, Google Inc.,
nate@google.com
