The DOJ has filed a response (thanks Gary) to Google's defiance on the issue of its search records subpoena. In short: No, you're wrong, we're right. And we're not violating anyone's privacy. Internetnews.com coverage.
This afternoon Google issued a press release which seems to say very little, on balance, save telegraphing the fact that Google felt its CFO was speaking a bit too loosely yesterday. This is not the first time Google has had to clarify its CFO's statements. Remember Reyes on click fraud?
Since that statement, Google has made a point of saying that click fraud is really no big deal.
And now, after Reyes sounds the alarm about growth, Google issues this:
We would like to clarify and provide further information on these statements. As we have stated before, monetization improvements will continue to be a key factor in driving future revenue growth. We still see significant opportunities to improve monetization and intend to continue to focus our efforts in this area.
Moreover, as we have stated in our SEC filings, our revenue growth rate has generally declined over time and we expect that it will continue to do so...
Er, is this equivocation? A slap on the wrist via a press release? No matter what, it ain't good for Reyes. I am quite sure the triumvirate is, well, pissed at him right now. Paging Sue Decker....
Microsoft's CFO became famous in the 1990s for his predictions that the company would not grow as quickly as others wished. looks like George Reyes, CFO of Google, is taking a cue. Hey, wait, is this managing expectations on Wall Street, and providing guidance? Whatever it is, GOOG is taking a hit. From a sub required WSJ article:
Google Inc.'s chief financial officer, George Reyes, said the Internet giant's growth is slowing due to the "law of large numbers" and it will need to find new ways to boost revenue.
The comments, made at an investor conference, surprised Wall Street and triggered a selloff in Google's shares. In heavy trading, Google shares fell 9%, or $37.70, to $354 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
The company's 18-month effort to boost search monetization by tweaking the advertising system has realized most of the gains possible, Mr. Reyes said. Now growth is being driven mainly by organic factors, like query traffic growth, which he called substantial.
"We're going to have to find other ways to monetize the business," Mr. Reyes told attendees of a Merrill Lynch investor conference.
TechCrunch covers the launch of Edgeio, which is the creation of one of folks behind TechCrunch (Mike Arrington) among others. The service is a neat idea - you can tag your posts "listings" and edgeio finds your tagged posts and slurps them into a listings metaservice/site. It's a platform which just might disrupt the directory driven services like eBay and craigslist.
If you like Malcolm Gladwells's stuff, he's finally got a blog.
Jeremy agrees with Dion, all your data belongs to you.
Google names a director of its foundation and plans to digitize the National Archives' video collection, and Om has a bit more on Google Calendar.
Skrenta reminds us that search CPMs are much higher. yes, because in the end, most folks want to find...and then they do, that becomes a chance to search again, and so on...the point of intent drives many more pages of content, and I'd wager that the ratio is equal, if you add up page for page and CPM for CPM...
Google is in court a lot. It lost one on thumbnail images last week (see Paul's write up), but it's just the start of the process.
Boing Boing has recently been added to a blacklist of "nudity" related sites run by the US-based company Secure Computing, resulting in its being banned in entire countries - like the UAE, as well as many corporate firewalls. Here's the editor's searing response. I think it's well worth reading. From it:
Today, we've learned that Internet Qatar, the sole ISP in the State of Qatar, has also banned BoingBoing.
We've heard from librarians in Africa who want to watch the video of the American Register of Copyrights denouncing Congress, employees at the Australian Broadcasting Company, students, and workers around the world who can't gain access to our work.
At fault is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity -- even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands -- as a "nudity" site, which means that customers who block "nudity" can't get through.
Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a "nudity" site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692 -- that's 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618 -- 0.32 percent.
In fact, out of the 25,000+ Boing Boing posts classed as "nudity" by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.
....The question of keeping your child from viewing content you don't want them to see can be addressed more efficiently locally, with tech tools like the browser Bumpercar. As BoingBoing founder (and father of two) Mark Frauenfelder explains, "My daughter and I found a bunch of great kid-friendly sites and have added them to the 'white list.' As a parent, I have local control of the sites she visits instead of handing over control to a remote group of people that I don't trust to do my job of being a parent."
The fact is, there's no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in.
Update: I love this approach to the SmartFilter problem: BB is asking bloggers to post this image (at left) on their site as a protest, in the hopes that soon enough, SmartFilter will be all filtered out.
Lots of stuff I missed, lots going on. To wit:
Google Base has gone (Techcrunch) commercial (GoogleBase blog). Not unexpected. But an important step.
The Google Page Creator. Just a doodle, I'm sure...
The Journal has a free link on its curtain raiser for Google's analyst day this Thursday. From it: Google's annual analysts' day is shaping up as a test of the company's reluctance to provide financial guidance -- and of investors' tolerance of that tight-lipped approach.
Yahoo is going to stop allowing competitors to bid (SEW) on trademarked terms. This is clearly a differentiation play from Google.
More rumors, here and here, about Google Finance.
A fascinating Googler's blog here (hat tip to Threadwatch). We were debating whether or not to do a swapping of information with the group and give them some info on how things work at Google, as an exchange for answering our questions. We had decided against it, until the participants came in and sat down, at which point it became clear that a two-way exchange was preferable. I wrote up 3 slides in sixty seconds and delivered an impromptu 5-minute speech.
Gotta run...more coming....
Interesting note from an entrepreneur - what he's learned from his logs.
Just back from the week off, and much is up in the search world. I'll have a roundup later in the day, but the top news for now is Ask, which has declared its intention to become the Fox of the search engine world - in other words, to come into the game late, with low odds, and hope to strike ratings gold. We knew this play was coming - it was clear when IAC and Diller bought Ask. Now the company has declared. Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask.com. throws down the gauntlet in the release:
“People deserve a search engine that gives them the tools to get what they need faster, not just a bunch of links on a page. Ask.com takes search to the next level.”
You're not sure they're serious? Diller is keynoting this week's SES conference, for goodness sake (I won't be there, focusing on FM then traveling to London later this week). More on all of this in the Ask Blog here.
Gary Price, who is joining Ask from SEW, has some interesting thoughts here.
A summary of the news: As expected, Jeeves is history. It's now Ask.com. Teoma.com is no more, it's been rebranded as "ExpertRank". Ask has a new homepage, a new customizable "toolbox" function, an upgraded Maps feature, and some other features which you can read about in their release here.
What I find interesting is Ask's decision to compete based on differentiation of approach to sponsored listings.
From the release:
Ask.com now has the fewest ads of any major search destination on the first screen of results. With Smart Answers, Ask.com is also the only search engine to place editorial results above advertisements.
More on this as it develops.
I'll be taking this coming week off, spending it with family for our kids' winter break. I plan to stay online, but not post very much. Happy searching.
If you haven't heard about this, it's a cool idea. Scoble has created a seedbed for testing speed and comprehensiveness in blog search tools, and along the way, has found out other interesting things about search in general. From the post:
Damn, brrrreeeport is the top search on Technorati and there are 420 posts there. Wacky.
What’s an even better deal is that Google says there are now about 14,000 results. What the f___? I HATE the lies that are going on on search engines. Quick: click through and tell me how many entries there really are. Hint: it isn’t 14,000. Funny that Google’s blog search can only find 382.
MSN says there are 1,369 results. Yahoo says there are 1,010 results.
I don't get it. Why not do what we thought they'd do? I wasn't really paying attention, and you probably all know this, but turns out MSFT Office Live is, well, NOT Microsoft Office Live (tcrunch). It's just hosting and email services by another name. What the f?
That's the general idea of the proposed "Global Online Freedom Act of 2006", the details of which you can find in this article and here (sponsoring congressman's website).
Besides blacklisting Iran, China, and Vietnam (hey, that war really worked out, didn't it?!), the legislation would declare:
- U.S. firms which create, provide or host Internet search engines would be forbidden to locate their search engines within designated Internet-restricting countries.
- U.S. firms would be forbidden to alter the search engines in response to requests from Internet-restricting countries or make changes that produced search engine results within restricting countries that differ from results elsewhere.
- U.S. search engine providers must transparently share with the U.S. Office of Global Internet freedom details of terms or parameters submitted by Internet-restricting countries.
- U.S. businesses maintaining Internet content hosting services can personally identify users only for cases of legitimate law enforcement purposes as determined by the U.S. Department of Justice.
OK, so where the hell is *our* right to know? Will all this information, all this back and forth, will it be public?
I love reading Xooglers. But this post, well, I don't buy it.
The post explains how, because Googlers are generally an exceptional lot, praise was hard to find, and when it did come, it came in a very understated fashion. OK, amongst the ranks, I can buy that. Golden geeks tend to shy from overt idolatry. But they are also human beings. And human beings tend to manage up, period. I'd love to believe that folks spend all *not* telling Marissa, Larry, Sergey, and the other members of the founding class that they are brilliant, but...I don't buy it.
Women.com: It's a vertical search thing. (paidcontent)
Prefound.com: It's in Kentucky (land of Fark and Bourbon), so I already like it. Has a model that pays "Featured Finders."
Want to know how much content on an engine is sponsored v. organic? So did this academic.
The Amazon Music Player. (NYT)
Homemade kitty exhaust fan (just to see if you're paying attention) (Make)
Matt M. groks Megite.
Guess what? Search is still growing and growing and growing! (SEW)
Reader Bob noticed a bar code scanning phone, which is part of the technology needed to make my local search/physical search wine anecdote happen. Cool!
Searchblog is my passion. It's also one hell of a lot of work. And as much as I'd like to claim that I'm doing the best job in the world, I'm clearly not - there's so much more I'd like to do.
Thanks to FM, which is selling the ads on my site (yeah, OK, I started the company, and it's the reason I'm so busy, how's *that* for recursive), I now have money coming in that amounts to more than just a beer budget. So, I'm spending it, on getting help.
In other words, I'm looking for a special someone who wants to be a Searchblog assistant editor. And, to help make this happen, I'm open to making it a full time position, by combining it with a role at FM helping our authors. Here's a link to the job posting. If you know anyone who might fit this bill, especially folks who are into search, internet companies, the works - why please let me know.
MSN offers free prizes for searching.
Google launches a Google China Blog. It's Chinese to me. But they do give me link love, which is quite nice. Barry posts on SEW that the first posts seem to be about Valentine's Day. Not exactly topical.
Another trademark suit a la American Blinds and Geico, Check N Go. (via Cnet)
AOL wants in on the "American Chinese" market. Timing, anyone?
Many folks have noticed that Google is testing click to call.
Very interesting question, Dirson: WILL GOOGLE BAN MOHAMMED CARTOONS FROM THEIR RESULTS?
Mat says: Check out shark jumping through internet history. Maybe "jumping the shark" has...er...jumped the shark? (And no, I wasn't flaming Google, I was speaking from personal experience.)
BIll Gates (BG):....Now in some ways, the digital world is superior. The ability to have anonymity is actually better when you want it. There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying the government’s corrupt and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.
FT: Unless you’re in China.
BG: No, in fact, it can even be done in China. Now China may not like that. ....There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking. It is an interesting thing that the tools of technology are creating a level of openness that is good in some ways. But there are these things where – like child pornography – it’s harder to block or track than it would have been in the physical world.
....
FT: Do you keep information on servers inside China?
BG: Our servers are all outside China. This whole thing of inside versus outside China, I never understand that, it somehow comes up in the Google discussion. I don’t get that at all. This is not about where the servers are. We don’t have servers inside China, we just don’t. It may be that for responsiveness at some point we’ll do that, but that’s not the way we work today.
FT: Should the US government establish guidelines to regulate how internet companies deal with censorship in countries like China?
BG: I think something like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a resounding success in terms of very clearly outlining what companies can’t do and other rich countries largely went along with that. That’s a great thing. I think – [it] may be that idea [will] come along. I hope the people who make those things are sophisticated and not over-simplistic.....
...Clearly people like ourselves are glad to go along with whatever reasonable things gets laid down. That’s why its part of the dialogue.
The internet overwhelmingly makes information available. It is not possible to block information, it is just not. You can make it so that the average person who just clicks on popular websites, with no extra effort, certain things don’t show up there. But in terms of actually blocking information… it’s bad news if you like to block libelous websites, or child pornography, or various things, copyright stealing. It’s very hard to do blocking. You can only take the very direct paths. And particularly if you put something up that says, we took this thing down, think of the time period between when you put it up and when it comes down and how people can cache that. It’s hard to block information. It’s so night and day versus when newspaper publishers and TV owners were small chokepoints that controlled the distribution of information.
Terrible story, but telling too.
Court papers released on Tuesday revealed Entwistle searched the internet for information on how to kill and commit suicide days before their deaths.
Are going on today. Live blogging will be available from various authors, Red State has a list.
Also, an interesting development within the Chinese establishment, an open letter criticizing the party's information policies from senior (but out of power) party officials.
Update: WaPo on the story.
Update 2: Gary has it all here.
Call me cynical, but this feels like a PR move, sound and fury, signifying, well...not much.
The State Department announced plans Tuesday to step up a campaign to combat efforts by foreign governments to restrict use of the Internet.
At a news conference, Josette Shiner, a top State Department trade expert, called the Internet "the greatest purveyor of news and information in history" but said too often the flow is blocked by government censors.
Shiner announced the formation of a task force that will consider, among other issues, the foreign policy aspects of Internet freedom, including the use of technology to restrict access to political content.
But I thought it would be Yahoo. Google grabs web analytics UI wizards Measure Map.
Dave's post here is fascinating, from it:
Given that there's a lot of interesting topical posts by influential or authoritative bloggers in those topic areas, we formulated an idea: Why not use these authoritative bloggers as a new kind of editorial board? Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display - a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR. The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the "A-list". We call this new section Explore, and we've seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.
(Caveat, something of a rant coming).
I've been unsettled about this whole China thing for a while, so to help me think things through, I called Xiao Qiang, a physicist who knows the China regime first hand, and has wrangled with it as the founder of Human Rights In China, then continued to think deeply about it as a scholar at the Berkeley China Internet Project, which was founded while I was still teaching at the school.
I caught Xiao at a good time, as he is leaving to testify in Washington Tuesday. He was ready to talk, and so was I, and together we puzzled through the rash of recent events - the two Yahoo incidents, the launch of Google.cn, the recent hearings in Congress, Google's defiance of the DOJ and the eerie parallels between the US's snooping for reasons of "National Security" and China's, Yahoo's call for help today, etc. If ever there was a critical mass building for some kind of action on this issue, why, it seems now would be it.
So what to say about all this? After all, can we really expect private companies to effect national and international policy? Perhaps if they banded together - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL (GYMA) - and said "Enough! We ask the Chinese government to respect the basic rights of humans to free speech and free association!" After all, besides the universal claim that "going into China, even censored, is better than not going in, in terms of total information available to the Chinese user," the real reason all these companies are going in is, well, their competitors are going in. What if they all agreed to hold hands and...not jump?
Oh please, I then say to myself. Don't be freakin' naive. Unity on an issue as freighted as national policy on China? This from a group of companies who can't even interconnect their goddamn IM networks? It'll never happen.
Let's set up the problem here, just for reference sake. After all, what's the big deal? Just like a sneaker company, Yahoo, Google, et al all have to play by Chinese rules in order to do business in China. If Nike can do it, why not Google?
Well, let's break that one down. What happens when Nike gets itself into a PR pickle over, say, child labor or issues of environmental degradation or fair wages? Why, Nike simply pledges to do better, to spend a bit more to nominally clean up the environment, or to pay its workers a living wage, or to not hire children. Such practices cost Nike a bit more money, but don't raise any eyebrows in Beijing. Nothing wrong with a US company spending more in China, after all.
But companies like Yahoo and Google don't traffic in sneakers, they traffic in the most powerful forces in human culture - expression. Knowledge. Ideas. The freedom of which we take as fundamental in this country, yet somehow, we seem to have forgotten its importance in the digital age - in China, one protesting email can land you in jail for 8 years, folks.
But... should GYMA decide they wanted to create some kind of pact that actually, well, had an opinion about how those forces of freedom should be let loose in a place like China, well, we all know how that would fly in Beijing. Not to mention Wall Street, of course.
But, some protest, the US policy of constructive engagement is working! Look how the Chinese economy is booming! How a new middle class is rising up! It's only a matter of time before that middle class demands some form of democracy, and the US policy will be vindicated.
Oh, really? Really? If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you in Baghdad. The Chinese own a shitload of our debt, and are consuming a shitload of the world's export base of oil. As they consolidate their power, do you really believe they're also planning parades for us? I'm pretty sure they'll be celebrating decades of US policy that looked the other way while the oligarchy used our technology (and that includes our routers, databases, and consulting services) to meticulously undermine the very values which allowed us to create companies like Google in the first place. But those are not the kind of celebrations I'm guessing we'd be invited to.
So as I puzzle through this issue, understanding how in practical terms it's really not sensible to expect that some GYMA pact is going to change the world (as much as I might wish it would), it really, honestly, comes down to one thing: The man in the White House.
Until the person leading this country values human rights over appeasement, and decides to lead on this issue, we're never going to make any progress. Congress can call hearings, and beat up Yahoo, Google and the others for doing what everyone else is doing, but in the end, it's not GYMA's fault, nor, as much as I wish they'd take it on, is it even their problem. It's our government's problem. Since when is China policy somehow the job of private industry?
Until that government gives GYMA a China policy it can align behind, well, they'll never align, and the very foundation of our culture - free expression and privacy, will be imperiled.
After all, the Chinese leaders must be thinking, as they snack on our intellectual property, we're only protecting our citizens in the name of national security.
Just like they do in the US, right?
Update: The Tibetans are protesting Google. Ugh.
Today, at the 3GSM World Congress 2006, Microsoft Corp. announced the acquisition of MotionBridge, a leading provider of search technology designed specifically for mobile operators and the mobile Internet. MotionBridge, based in Paris, is a worldwide leader in mobile search technology that is currently available to customers through contacts with major mobile communications companies in Europe and North America.
“The emerging field of mobile search is strategically important and crucial to delivering on our vision for Windows Live™ of providing a seamless and rich information experience for individuals and businesses across devices,” said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft.
Over at NPR, Xeni of BB has a take on the Yahoo story featuring my colleagues at Berkeley, Xiao Qiang and Orville Schell. Worth a listen.
Update: Yahoo is asking for a coalition of the willing on this issue, SEW reports.
From the CMS (Via ABC):
The U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity...
...The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement, or ADVISE. Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security, part of its three-year-old Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment, or TVTA, portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year....
...What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information — from financial records to CNN news stories — and cross-reference it against U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" — linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va.
The storage requirements alone are huge — enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. ...
..For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.
...ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."
My take on TIA and all this is both in the book, and here.
after all, we just launched a beta of Gmail just for you suits!
Update: Forgot to add a link to this post, which predicted the cover...
For a good stretch, my intrepid sysadmin Scot had fought off the robotic legions of pagerank-sucking comment zombies, but they have scaled his javascript embattlements, and we are furiously falling back to fight another day. Bear with us as we figure out next steps...
Barron's has a reputation for hitting the darling of the moment in the groin, and this weekend that darling is Google. I have a WSJ sub, I'm not sure this link is open. If it's not, highlights:
INVESTORS HAVE BEEN FIXATED on Google the past few weeks, as its shares have tumbled nearly 25% from a peak of $475 -- and the fact is, there could be a lot more tumbling ahead. The share price could well be cut in half over the next year as the Internet giant grapples with growing competition from Microsoft and Yahoo!, increased pricing pressures in its online ad sales and mounting concern about what's known as click fraud.
..Over the next year, both Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN portal are expected to improve their search offerings. In the second half of this year, Yahoo! hopes to improve its systems so that search-engine ads are more relevant to search results and therefore more likely to be clicked....
...Last week, news came out that Amazon.com has jumped into the game through its network of "associates" -- Websites that have links to Amazon and receive fees when readers click the links and buy products. Amazon is offering to place ads from a third party on affiliates' sites; Amazon and the affiliates would then split the revenue generated by clicks on the third-party ads....
..Finally, there's the matter of persistent insider selling. As Google starts to spend the $5 billion it raised through two stock offerings in the past year and a half, its senior executives have aggressively sold shares. Co-founders Brin and Page have each sold more than $1.5 billion of stock. CEO Eric Schmidt sold $493 million. Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, sold $793 million, and Ram Shriram, a director, pocketed $442 million, according to Thomson Financial.
Granted these folks all continue to have substantial holdings in the company, and most of the sales were part of pre-arranged selling programs that Google asked these executives to establish at the time of the IPO. Still, it's notable that none have purchased shares in the wake of the recent stock pullback. Investors might be wise to follow what they do and not what they say.
If ever I've seen one. Google "olympics."
(Thanks, anonymous reader!)
Update: Staci reminds me that this is an announced deal...)
Gary Price, Search Engine Dude extraordinaire, is leaving Search Engine Watch and going to Ask, where he'll be Director of Online Information Resources. It's a loss for all of us and a big win for Ask, we'll miss him at SEW, but he'll keep his ResourceShelf site up and running, he tells me! Congrats Gary!
Yahoo has rev'd MyWeb 2.0. I think the idea is right on, but does anyone else sense that 360 and MyWeb are, well, a bit ahead of Yahoo's own audience curve?
From the InternetStockBlog, a note about Blue Nile's earnings, an echo of the FTD call last year.
Blue Nile reported a surprisingly weak 4Q05, in our view, blaming both weak jewelry industry fundamentals and what CEO Mark Vadon called irrational pricing in the pay per click advertising market (although we will continue to believe he said “eRational”). On the conference call, Mr. Vadon stated, “We saw extremely aggressive increases in the cost of online advertising. Our cost per click on Google for example, rose by over 50% from a year earlier. While the cost of online marketing grew significantly in Q4, we remain disciplined in our spending, in order to maintain profitability on new customers rather than to chase unprofitable growth, as some of our competitors have done.”
If you had any doubt that Google plans to be a major force in the market that Microsoft dominates, this should erase them. Why do I say this? Well, because Google's new version of its Desktop software includes Tic Tac Toe, of course. And everyone know that clever operation system companies *always* include a game in their offerings...
Meanwhile, TechCrunch gets into the privacy and other implications.
Scoble asks: Why do search engines lie? He writes, after realizing that the number of results never is, in fact, the actual number of results:
Why aren’t there any truth in advertising laws for search engines?
Just wait, Robert. There will be.
For the second time in one year, I got an email from Google's outbound sales force, on account of being the band manager for Boing Boing, which is a pretty high traffic site. Clearly, Google's cold calling sales force has been mining Alexa or somesuch for lists of prospective new AdSense clients.
In her emails (the first of which came via BB's founder Mark Frauenfelder), Google's rep told me that Google had some special programs for Boing Boing that I might want to take advantage of. Well, I'm open minded, and willing to try it again (for more on the last time we went around this bend, read this.)
Google's salesperson was very pleasant and responsive, but it seems to me she had not run my name through, well, Google, nor did she have the data from the last time I spoke to an AdSense sales rep, in which I disclosed that I was the dude behind Searchblog and that Boing Boing had some issues with AdSense, not the least of which was performance and AdSense's TOS. Now, I'm not looking for special treatment, but had she used Google or had a history of Google's contacts with Boing Boing, she might have realized that I was, well, a bit engaged in this discussion. What follows is an edited, rough paraphrase of our conversation. Caveat: We talked about more stuff, but not all of it was worth reporting here...
Me: Hey, nice to meet you.
Her: Likewise.
Me: So what are these cool advertising programs that Boing Boing might take advantage of?
Her: One is called AdSense, and one is called AdSense for Search.
Me: Yeah, I know about those. But what's the special part?
She: Well, it works like this. You put code on your....
Me: Don't mean to interrupt, but I know about how it works. We've tried it before on Boing Boing and it doesn't work too well for us.
She: Really, why not?
Me: Well, Boing Boing is pretty eclectic, and it's hard for networks like AdSense to figure out what ads to run. I am sure if we ran it for months on end, the permalink pages might start to have better CPCs, but..
She: Well part of what we can do is help you to optimize your site for AdSense.
Me: Really? What does that entail?
She: Well, we can give you tips on where to put the ads, what placements work best, how to best categorize your site, things like that.
Me: Right. Well, I'm aware of that kind of stuff. Can you provide me with a better deal?
She: A better deal?
Me: Well, one of the things that publishers wonder about AdSense is what is the split? How much of every dollar goes to us, and how much to you?
She: Well, we don't divulge that information, but if you look at our SEC filings, you can see our numbers...
Me: Yes, I know about your TAC, and it averages in the high seventies to low 80s, but that number is very difficult to understand - I know that you have set deals with sites like Ask and AOL, and those probably skew the overall TAC. I wonder if you are making up that high TAC by, well, dialing down the TAC with smaller publishers like Boing Boing. I mean, we have no idea if you are giving us high seventies, or taking 60 percent all for yourself!
She: We can't get into numbers, but we can say that we give the majority of the revenue to our publishers.
Me: Huh. That's the first time I've ever heard that - so more than fifty percent?
She: We can't give exact numbers out.
Me: Sure. I understand. That's your policy. Well, it's great of you to contact us, and we'll talk about it, and get back to you. Thanks.
She: Great! Let me know if there is anything I can do.
Me: OK, bye!
She: Bye!
Reporters Without Borders is claiming that Yahoo aided in the jailing of a Chinese dissident in 2003, the second such accusation for Yahoo (more on the first - a journalist - here). The organization is requesting that Yahoo disclose its dealings with the Chinese government. From the report:
Reporters Without Borders called on Yahoo to supply a list of all cyberdissidents it has provided data on, beginning with 81 people in China whose release the worldwide press freedom organization is currently campaigning for.
It said it had discovered that Yahoo customer and cyberdissident Li Zhi had been given his eight-year prison sentence in December 2003 based on electronic records provided by Yahoo. “How many more cases are we going to find ?” it asked.
“We were sure the case of Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years last April on the basis of Yahoo-supplied data, was not the only one. Now we know Yahoo works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police.
“The firm says it simply responds to requests from the authorities for data without ever knowing what it will be used for. But this argument no longer holds water. Yahoo certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals. The company must answer for what it is doing at the US congressional hearing set for February 15.”
BB coverage here.
Links I could not get to today...
Gravee launches. Model includes paying content providers a share of CPC revs, as well as an affiliate play. I have not grokked....
Google launches integrated Gmail/GTalk.
Ford's Kermit Superbowl ad was cute, but GM bought the keyword and profited from Ford's investment.
A reader tipped me to this over the weekend, but I could not confirm it till just this afternoon, and out of respect for the folks who worked with and for Udi, I decided not to post without confirmation. I pinged five other sources since, and Udi confirmed this afternoon. He is leaving A9 for Google. More as I have it.
Update: My initial coverage of Udi and A9 is here. As I've said in the past, Udi is one of the leading lights in the search world, on nearly everyone's "Top Brains in Search" list. And now he's gone to Google. I have asked him for an interview and very much hope he'll agree, so we can all hear why he left Amazon - which is clearly making moves toward Google's space, and vice versa - and went to Google.
Udi will be replaced by Dr. David Tennenhouse. From Amazon's release:
A9.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today named Dr. David Tennenhouse the company’s new Chief Executive Officer.
Tennenhouse is a renowned technologist and seasoned executive. He joins A9.com from Intel Corporation where he served as Vice President of the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research. In addition to building Intel Research, he developed Intel’s proactive computing vision, drove several Intel Capital Investments and laid the technical ground work for its new Digital Health Group.
Prior to joining Intel, Tennenhouse was Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Technology Office where he guided programs in several areas, including search, datamining, information management, machine learning and distributed computing. Additionally, Tennenhouse held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Sloan School of Management.
PS - How long do you think John Doerr can remain on the boards of booth Amazon and Google?
From the Journal: Default Lines Pressuring Microsoft, PC Makers Team Up With Its Software Rivals (paid reg)
From the article:
Google is in serious negotiations to get its software installed on millions of Dell PCs before they are shipped to users, according to people familiar with the matter. Under the deal being discussed, Google, of Mountain View, Calif., could pay Dell fees approaching $1 billion over three years, these people estimate. The terms might change and the discussions could fail.
....Already, a consumer setting up a new H-P computer, for example, has the option to sign up for Earthlink's broadband access, AOL's online service, Symantec antivirus software and videogames from a start-up company named WildTangent. Those companies pay H-P a set fee or a share of revenue, say executives at the companies. H-P also auctions off its space: Google pays it $1 for every PC that ships with a Google toolbar -- a strip that sits atop a browser and enables users to easily operate Google's search engine -- and another 75 cents the first time a home-computer user taps the service, says a person familiar with the matter.
Under a scenario Google and Dell are discussing, Dell would set up PCs to run a few Google products straight out of the box, including software to search PC hard drives and its toolbar browser.
Congress is meeting on the issue, Om runs an op-ed on his site.
I met with the CEO of Turn.com a couple of weeks ago, but on the downlow - it wasn't ready for public consumption quite yet. Why? Well, it's a rather audacious startup - Jim Barnett, former head of AltaVista, is running it, and it's got some heavy backing. The plan? To compete directly with AdSense. How? We'll seen soon enough, Jim tells me. BizWeek's blog has outed the new company, however, so now you know as well....
Craigslist got a dressing down in a local paper recently. Rich Skrenta disagrees with the premise. Well said!
But the the real problem with these sour-grapes articles is that they don't shed any real light on why Craigslist has succeeded, where so many other similar efforts have not. Over-analyzing Craig's personal habits makes for catty reading but isn't going to help us understand his takeoff curve in new markets.
To understand how and why something works, study the thing itself, not the maker.
All the recent talk about net neutrality and how the telcos are planning to leverage their pipes against the threats of Google et al reminded me of a story I heard recently about AT&T/SBC and our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle.
According to sources that are very well informed inside the paper, SBC (now AT&T after the merger) is quite upset with the way a Chronicle columnist has been covering the company. Now SBC is pretty much the top Old School corporation around here (the SF Giants ballpark is named after it, for example), and it spreads its advertising budget around like oxygen in an intensive care ward. I'm told that annually, SBC spends around $5 million with the Chronicle.
But recently, SBC has turned off the spigot. Seems Chronicle columnist David Lazarus pissed them off one time too many, and for whatever reason the paper would not muzzle the recalcitrant journalist. In what appears to be retribution, SBC has pulled its ads.
Sure, a company has the right to spend its ad dollars wherever it wants to. But SBC not supporting the home town paper, because it doesn't like the fact that that paper's columnist writes negative (but from what I can tell, pretty accurate) pieces? That just seems, well, misguided. After all, negative press is still press, and it's an opportunity to respond, to learn, to grow, to do better. Even if you disagree with the press, at least take the time to engage in a conversation.
So I called AT&T/SBC to get a response and ask if what my sources charge is true. But I only got this: "Our marketing strategy and media buying plans are proprietary."
Alright then.
Why am I writing this? Because this is your new competitor, Google. Get to know them. As you offer free WiFi to all of San Francisco (and, one might argue, the rest of the country/world), and undermine AT&T/SBC's broadband business (and wheel Vint Cerf out to argue the net neutrality meme), hard ball players like SBC are going to go after you, and rest assured, their motto ain't "don't be evil."
Caveat: I have friends inside the SF Chronicle, and because SBC isn't çommenting, this post represents just one side of the story. I hope SBC will change its mind and engage .... if it does, I'll update this post.
Here is Mary Sue Coleman's speech (pdf download from Searchblog), given right in the lion's den of the annual AAP meeting (they are suing Google, you will recall.) Kevin Kelly, who sent the speech to me, calls it eloquent. I have to agree.
From it:
It is this criticism of the project that prompted me to accept your invitation to speak — and explain why we believe this is a legal, ethical, and noble endeavor that will transform our society.
Legal because we believe copyright law allows us the fair use of millions of books that are being digitized. Ethical because the preservation and protection of knowledge is critically important to the betterment of humankind. And noble because this enterprise is right for the time, right for the future, right for the world of publishing, right for all of us. ....
...We were digitizing books long before Google knocked on our door, and we will continue our preservation efforts long after our contract with Google ends. As one of our librarians says, “We believed in this forever.”
Google Book Search complements our work. It amplifies our efforts, and reduces our costs. It does not replace books, but instead expands their presence in the marketplace.
We are allowing Google to scan all of our books – those in the public domain and those still in copyright – and they provide our library with a digital copy. We insisted on this for one very important reason: Our library must be able to do what great research libraries do – make it possible to discover knowledge. ...
...Let me assure you, we have a deep respect for intellectual property – it is our number one product. That respect extends to the dark archive and protecting your copyrights.
We know there are limits on access to works covered by copyright. If, and when, we pursue those uses, we will be conservative and we will follow the law. And we will protect all copyrighted materials your work – in that archive.
....
“We have to remember,” President Angell said, “that the library is the great central power in the instruction given in the University, and that the books are here not to be locked up and kept away from readers, but to be placed at their disposal with the utmost freedom...”
Be placed at their disposal with the utmost freedom. That’s what the technology of Google Book Search does with our books. ...
...I was particularly struck by one Ford official’s assessment of the absolute need for transformation: “Change or die,” he said. Change or die. ...
..At its essence, the digitization project is about the public good.
It transcends debates about snippets, and copyright, and who owns what when, and rises to the very ideal of a university – particularly a great public university like Michigan.
This project is about the social good of promoting and sharing knowledge. As a university, we have no other choice but to do this project.
From Yahoo news:
In a move that analysts say indicates a problem that still needs a solution, Google has removed BMW's German Web site from its index for violating Google's guidelines against trying to manipulate search results.
The move was first reported by Google employee Matt Cutts in a posting to his blog on Saturday. He said BMW.de had been removed last week because certain pages on the site would show up one way when the search engine visited the page but when a Web user opened the page, a redirect mechanism would display a completely different page.
Matt's post is here.
Ricoh is also a violator. You Have Been Warned.
From Chris Beasley's post:
Amazon is apparently looking into the feasibility of starting their own ad network like Adsense. They’ve been contacting select members of their associates programs, including myself, asking if we’d like to be beta testers. The way they want the beta test to work is to give you a special code for Amazon’s Keywords Recommends banners (the banners that you feed a keyword to and they show related products) and have this special code then show these new ads 50% of the time.
When I first heard about this I thought it’d be Amazon product listings displayed in an Adsense-like way and I figured it’d analyze your content for for products to serve, but they’d be Amazon products. Turns out I was wrong, they want their own contextual advertising network.
Not that this counting thing is a big deal, of course. For those keeping score in the Google v. Europe battles, Exalead is involved in Quaero. Exalead's press contact claims the engine will be at 8 billion docs by July.
A search engine for code and code related information, another domain specific search play. Launching today at the DEMO show.
As commentor Gary noted, there is already Koders.com (covered here), but Krugle CEO Steve Larsen told me that he feels his new engine is more robust...
The WSJ tossed this tidbit outside its paywall, so I'll link to it...From the article:
While Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt confirmed in press accounts (see here) that the company was building a payment service, Mr. Schmidt also denied it would directly compete with PayPal. Mr. Schmidt said Google didn't intend to offer a "person-to-person, stored-value payments system," which many people consider a description of PayPal's service.
Mr. Jordan (PayPal chief) says he and his team immediately "dissected the wording" of Google's statements. He says he doesn't believe Mr. Schmidt....
...The Mountain View, Calif., Web-search giant, which has terrified Silicon Valley with its ability to quickly create new consumer products and services, is developing a rival service called GBuy. For the last nine months, Google has recruited online retailers to test GBuy, according to one person briefed on the service. GBuy will feature an icon posted alongside the paid-search ads of merchants, which Google hopes will tempt consumers to click on the ads, says this person. GBuy will also let consumers store their credit-card information on Google.
WebTod writes: Gossip about the rich and powerful is something new? It comes with the territory.
Two sources have confirmed that Lycos has laid off its search team, keeping just a skeleton crew to run the service. More as/if I know more....
Google, Skype, and Sequoia, others, fund 21.7 million into FON. Will it work out?Glenn and Om has a take. So does Dirson. Glenn is skeptical. Speaking to Google's supposed interest in blanketing the world with WiFi, he points out:
I argue strongly that Google will not become a Wi-Fi provider beyond San Francisco and Mountain View (at least not on any large scale) because their interest is high-margin businesses like advertising not low-margin ones like service provision.
Yes, but what if you need that distribution to run those high margin services over? More as the Superbowl buzz wears off.
My partner Tim O'Reilly likes to call data the "Intel Inside" of Web 2.0 - the idea being that if you own great data, you can license it all over the place. His favorite example is Navteq, the mapping company that powers all sorts of applications, including loads of auto navigation systems.
But now Google is getting in on the game. From the Reuters piece:
Volkswagen AG of Germany's American unit on Friday said it is working on a prototype vehicle which features Google Inc.'s satellite mapping software to give drivers a bird's eye view of the road ahead.
And, when Google gets into your car, you think, well, Google itself will be far behind?
(thanks KK)
Update: Many readers point out that Google is not providing data competitive to Navteq, it's only providing Google Earth satellite data. Yeah, well...not yet folks. But when that hybrid satellite data is populated with comments from the Force of Many on every store and location of note, and when Google buys or borrows and overlays the entire Yellow Pages, and when...well, when that happens, they sure as hell will be....not that that's the plan. Of course not.
Cnet picked up where Adam and I left off. (I hate to be pissy, but would it kill them to credit Adam with the idea?) Another story on the topic is here.
Also - BB finds that Google also is censored in Azerbaijan.
Traveling today, will catch up over the weekend. Headlines for your Friday morning:
It's a trifecta in earnings - First Yahoo, then Google, now Amazon is down.
ValleyWag has launched. This is Nick Denton's (Gawker) attempt to make the Valley worthy of public gossip. I'm not sure if the Valley is built with the same genes as Washington, LA, or NY. Should be interesting to watch.
Not content with just Google Video, CBS is going to sell its wares on its own site too.
ZoomInfo gets a people search patent.
Google's infrastructure and index update, BigDaddy, explained.
This is the statement from Google counsel Andrew McLaughlin. It's pretty comprehensive. It reviews Google's approach, and states:
"We believe that our continued engagement with China is the best (and perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there."
and
"Google supports the idea of Internet industry action to define common principles to guide technology firms’ practices in countries that restrict access to information. Together with colleagues at other leading Internet companies, we are actively exploring the potential for Internet industry guidelines, not only for China but for all countries in which Internet content is subjected to governmental restrictions. Such guidelines might encompass, for example, disclosure to users, and reporting about governmental restrictions and the measures taken in response to them."
I'd be very keen to hear about progress on this front.
And lastly, the statement concludes:
"There is an important role for the United States government to address, in the context of its bilateral government-to-government relationships, the larger issues of free expression and open communication. For example, as a U.S.-based company that deals primarily in information, we have urged the United States government to treat censorship as a barrier to trade."
Good luck there, guys.
From the Times: The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.
The Justice Department is balking at the request so far, administration officials said, arguing that the legal opinions would add little to the public debate because the administration has already laid out its legal defense at length in several public settings.
When the press cycle is down on you, folks look to pile on. CNBC has discovered the click fraud story, for example, claiming that the SEC is looking into it. Or, well, rather....it's "On their radar." Well....actually...."We need to be clear here: There is no formal or informal investigation of click fraud at any major search engine company, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. But with so much in the news, it’s only a matter of time."
OK, wake me when the news actually breaks, guys.
A boatload of European publishers claim search engines are "building [their business] on the back of kleptomania.”
From the FT: The group of publishers, which includes the International Publishers’ Association, the European Federation of Magazine Publishers and Agence France Presse, is seeking meetings with Charlie McCreevy, the European Union’s internal market commissioner, and Viviane Reding, the commissioner responsible for media. It would not rule out legal action to enforce copyright or “collective action.”....
....Mr O’Reilly likened the initiative to the conflict between the music industry and illegal file-sharing websites and said it was not a sign that publishers had failed to create a competitive online business model of their own.
“I think newspapers have developed very compelling web portals and news channels but the fact here is that we’re dealing with basic theft,” he said.
Oh Please! Stop driving in the rear view mirror, folks.
Tom wrote: "Wall Street Misses Google Numbers Again
That's what the headline should be..."
Reader Ed Brenegar writes: This is a year to change the customer relations game. With less commerce happening, presumably, there is more time for interaction. That interaction has to build the relationships...»
Yup, it makes the perfect gift for that officemate or colleague who you thought had everything... including you! If you order here, I promise to sign it, assuming we can figure out the shipping...
You can also buy the audio version here.
Check my book page for more info.
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