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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.
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