Category: Policy

Google Guidance? Some Notes on the 10-Q

In its unusual S-1, Google famously said it would not offer traditional guidance to Wall Street. But this week the company offered a bit of it anyway, stating in their quarterly filing (filed on Monday) that revenue growth will not continue on the pace it has. Trends in Our Business…

GOOG10qIn its unusual S-1, Google famously said it would not offer traditional guidance to Wall Street. But this week the company offered a bit of it anyway, stating in their quarterly filing (filed on Monday) that revenue growth will not continue on the pace it has.

Trends in Our Business
Our business has grown rapidly since inception, and we expect that our business will continue to grow. This growth has been characterized by substantially increased revenues. However, although our revenue growth rate increased in the third quarter of 2004 compared to the second quarter of 2004, 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. 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. In addition, the main focus of our advertising programs is to provide relevant and useful advertising to our users, reflecting our commitment to constantly improve their overall web experience, and therefore steps we take to improve the relevance of the ads displayed on our web sites, such as removing ads that generate low click-through rates, could negatively affect our near-term advertising revenues.

Those revenue policies changes are worth watching.

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Dinosaur Disney Threatens to Sue Over Linking

Good God, how much tin does it take to fill Mickey's ears? Recall how worked up I got over the Kleptones mashup of Queen's A Night at the Opera? Well, many others did too, including Waxy, which linked to various mirrors of it, as did I. In any case, Disney,…

2364- PEWTER WEIGHT - MICKEY MOUSE BRONZE FIGURINEGood God, how much tin does it take to fill Mickey’s ears? Recall how worked up I got over the Kleptones mashup of Queen’s A Night at the Opera? Well, many others did too, including Waxy, which linked to various mirrors of it, as did I. In any case, Disney, which owns the rights to the original Queen recording, has now threatened to sue Waxy over the links. I know of one other organization that regularly threatens to sue when someone links to what they consider private intellectual property. They threatened me at Wired in the mid 1990s. Who were they? The Church of Scientology. Great company you keep, Mickey f*cking Mouse.

Link via Boing Boing.

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Will Google Ban Trade in Trademarks?

I'm noticing enough buzz on the topic to merit bringing it up here – folks on the boards are talking about whether Google might ban the practice of bidding on trademarked terms. The original rumour came from a Google UK source, reported on Corante, first mentioned on Webmasterworld, the grandaddy…

amblinds.jpgI’m noticing enough buzz on the topic to merit bringing it up here – folks on the boards are talking about whether Google might ban the practice of bidding on trademarked terms. The original rumour came from a Google UK source, reported on Corante, first mentioned on Webmasterworld, the grandaddy of the SEM/SEO discussion boards.

From that thread:

A friend of mine attended a Google University seminar at Earls Court (London, UK) on Thursday last week. Apparently one of the guys from Google said that they were planning to phase out affiliate bidding on AdWords ‘very soon’. The reason – showing several ads for the same merchant reflects badly on the user’s experience.

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Fiddling with Results?

SEW points out that a search on the new MSFT beta engine for more evil than satan returns Google as #1, and explains this history – apparently Google did the same to MSFT back in 1999. I find this disturbing in all sorts of ways. It shows that engineers at…

evilsatanSEW points out that a search on the new MSFT beta engine for more evil than satan returns Google as #1, and explains this history – apparently Google did the same to MSFT back in 1999.

I find this disturbing in all sorts of ways. It shows that engineers at any search company not only *can* fiddle with results, but at times when they find it convenient or funny (or perhaps in other instances, good for their business in some way) they *will.* Not a good precedent, in my humble opinion.

UPDATE: Google called me to inform me that they did not fiddle back in 1999, that the “evil” query back then returned MSFT on its own…not surprisingly…also MSFT posts on its blog that the initial results that brought Google to #1 for “more evil than satan” were a MSFTbomb, ie, not an inside job. Well, at least, not an official inside job…

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Google Image Search: Updated Only Twice a Year?

Florida was great, thanks to all who asked, but it's nice to be back in the Fall weather of Northern California. We start up the Searchblogging again with this interesting post from Slashdot regarding the troubling Abu Ghraib images: Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's…

abuFlorida was great, thanks to all who asked, but it’s nice to be back in the Fall weather of Northern California. We start up the Searchblogging again with this interesting post from Slashdot regarding the troubling Abu Ghraib images:

Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie’s boyfriend charles graner and note how you don’t get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread.”

Turns out, though, that all this really was, according to Sergey Brin, was an embarrassing shortfall in Google’s indexing process – essentially, he copped to Google only updating its image search every six months, given that the images hit back in early summer.

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Search For Contributors In Your (Or Whoever’s) Neighborhood

Fundrace: Now this is what I call geolocation search. Search for contributors in your area to either Democrats or Republicans. All based on public records. Powerful stuff. Update: Gary posts and points to this site as well as others… Hat tip: Metafilter….

Fundrace: Now this is what I call geolocation search. Search for contributors in your area to either Democrats or Republicans. All based on public records. Powerful stuff.

Update: Gary posts and points to this site as well as others…

Hat tip: Metafilter.

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Om Finds Another Yahoo/Google Patent?

Over on his site Om finds a new patent in Yahoo's arsenal that might have implications along the lines of the supposedly settled Yahoo/Google lawsuit. The patent Om found covers "displaying paid and unpaid listings on the results page after a search term is input." The settlement gave Google access…

Over on his site Om finds a new patent in Yahoo’s arsenal that might have implications along the lines of the supposedly settled Yahoo/Google lawsuit. The patent Om found covers “displaying paid and unpaid listings on the results page after a search term is input.”

The settlement gave Google access to a whole bunch of Yahoo patents, but I am not sure if this one – US Patent # 6,704,727 – was part of the deal. I have already sent emails to the PR folks at these two fine companies, and probably would know more on Monday.

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Patriot Act Update: Portions Ruled Unconstitutional

From Reuters via ABC: Part of the Patriot Act, a central plank of the Bush Administration's war on terror, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Victor Marreo ruled in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the power the FBI has to…

From Reuters via ABC:

Part of the Patriot Act, a central plank of the Bush Administration’s war on terror, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marreo ruled in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the power the FBI has to demand confidential financial records from companies as part of terrorism investigations.

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Google Clarifies On China and News

From their blog (and the first post of any consequence, IMHO): For last week's launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as…

google-blogFrom their blog (and the first post of any consequence, IMHO):

For last week’s launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC — if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China.

We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all. It was a difficult tradeoff for us to make, but the one we felt ultimately serves the best interests of our users located in China. We appreciate your feedback on this issue.

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Google News And China

I was on the Google campus when the AP's Google News China story broke (it's been followed by the Merc and others). I've been hanging back and not commenting as it percolated earlier in the week (ie this Slashdot thread), waiting for something which advanced the story. David Krane, who's…

greatwallI was on the Google campus when the AP’s Google News China story broke (it’s been followed by the Merc and others). I’ve been hanging back and not commenting as it percolated earlier in the week (ie this Slashdot thread), waiting for something which advanced the story. David Krane, who’s been helping me with my interviews on the campus, mentioned the story and I asked where things stood.

David explained that Google made the decision to omit a small number of Chinese government banned sites (about eight) because to include them would create a damaged user interface experience. Google China users would see results and links, but be unable to click through to the actual pages, because China in fact filters those sites – they can’t be seen behind the Great Firewall of China.

This line of reasoning is echoed in the Merc’s coverage:

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