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“So, yes we are IDIOTS — and please WRITE THAT DOWN,” insisted CEO Eric Schmidt in an impromptu interview on Friday, referring to Google management between the IPO filing and going pubic.

From Reuters (the whole audio interview, here):

THE IDIOTS RUNNING GOOGLE

Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells reporters:

“(During the 2004 IPO process), between the time we filed and the time we went public, the press was among the most unpleasant I have ever experienced.

“We (Google management) were ‘idiots,’ we were ‘useless’… I thought ‘God.’…It is a terrible feeling of being on the other side of that (press coverage).

“So we looked at (Google’s Web site) traffic and revenue and they were exploding… We had a very, very strong quarter right after the worst possible press about ‘the idiots running the company.’

“I don’t know what that tells you.

Schmidt then paused and begged the reporters to create a new Google press frenzy:

“So, yes we are IDIOTS — and please WRITE THAT DOWN.”

WE HAVE EVERY PROBLEM YOU CAN IMAGINE… QUICKER

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “We have every known problem that a growth company has — quicker…Write down all the obvious problems, we have every one of them. So we make a list of them (potential problems) and we anticipate them.”

Reporter: Are there any non-obvious problems?

Schmidt: “No. no.”

Reporter: Is it a list of 10-15?

Schmidt: “I would say it is about 20.”

Last week Websense, a security company, found a way to use Google search to identify and capture malware. The software exploits Google’s binary functions to view .exe files on Windows computers.

“The most interesting thing about Google’s binary search capability is not its security implications, but the fact that it shows that Google may be thinking about becoming a file searching service.” Johnny Long, a security researcher with Computer Sciences told PC World.

Websense planned to limit the release its software and findings for security. But now there’s Metsploit, a newly erected “hacker-friendly” malware engine, similarly piggybacking on Google’s engine.

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Can’t quite place that tune? Musiclens is a free German, search app. to find and explore music by varying the balance of several criteria –adjust between ear-busting to silent, or from instrumental to vocal; it also includes keyword and time period search.

Also, Last.fm music search recently went live, completing a beta phase begun last fall. Last.fm creates personalized radio stations by combining a user’s favorite songs with an algorithmic recommendation feed taken from a network of users with similar tastes.

Last is similar to Pandora in its offerings (with the addition of a social space and communication tools between users). But Last’s analytics rely on the frequency songs are played (by a user and their social network) and a folksonomy of tagging. In contrast, Pandora radio derives from the more ambitious Genome Music Project, which uses musical attributes and elements to create its search analytics.

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IM interoperability

Limited public testing is underway on integrated IM communication between Yahoo Messenger with Voice and Microsoft’s IM service. Combined, Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger would comprise the world’s largest IM community, and the first partnership of its kind.

Q&A with Hayden on Social Search and JetEye

David Hayden, co-founder of Magellan, talks about with SEL about his vision for the future of social search and his new project, JetEye.

So in a word, social search will be mainstream, because it represents the pursuit of knowledge over information, and the pursuit of knowledge must be a mainstream activity.



Watson customizable search

Watson, the free, contextual search sidebar by Intellext, is now customizable with sites like MySpace and the WSJ. Waston mines data in engines, social sites, desktops, blogs, news, subscriptions, and networks.

ExactSeek

ExactSeek search launches in beta, with an index of over 100 million documents and growing. ExactSeek accepts url submissions to its index, which provides a subject directory, covering the web, images, news, articles, and weblogs.

Baidu Space

Baidu, the dominant search engine in the world’s second largest internet market, plans to launch a blogging platform, on Thursday, with keyword search. It joins “formidable challengers” including “Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Bokee.com, Blogbus.com and BlogCN.com. (SEJ)”

Scaling chores at Google

“Google Engineering is different,” wrote Peter Norvig on the Google Research Blog in February. “We’re different, and we like it that way.” eWeek takes an interesting look at how Google extends its automatized mentality to the commonplace tasks of keeping books and files every business must handle.

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On Sunday, Yahoo Travel launched Trip Planner, a CPC ad-based search that drives traffic to online travel booking sites (earlier glimpsed here in beta). Yahoo hopes to secure a foothold in an increasingly tight travel market by integrating user generated content, including sharable trip albums and photo journals. In a Forbes interview, a Yahoo rep says that although the growth in the online travel market is slowing as it matures, the pressure on travel sites to find new sources of traffic will only drive demand for Trip Planner.

[Update: A Yahoo! PR rep. felt that Trip Planner is better described as an “online travel research resource,” although it also serves the function of driving monetized search traffic.]

Yahoo Ready!

Mobile access to Yahoo mail, IM, and contacts is now live in Ready beta.

“Did you Mean” my company?

Companies can EgoGoogle to see if Google turns them up as a spelling correction for multiple terms. Of course, some companies will display as top results even when the terms are separated.

Free Live Calls

Windows Live Local offers free calls for listed businesses. Search and find a business, enter your phone number, and Live will call both parties. In beta, it’s available only in the US and cell phone charges still apply. Resource Shelf gives it thumbs-up on functionality, but speculates it could be the ‘click-fraud’ (annoy-competitors-to-death weapon).

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Clickfraud cost an estimated $800 million for advertisers in false hits last year, reports the Financial Times today, based on study by a media firm called Outsell.

And “more than a quarter of them have reduced their spending as a result…” Google, Yahoo and MSN, “have avoided putting a number on the incidence of click fraud but Outsell said it averaged 14.6 per cent of all clicks billed to advertisers, even after Google and others had filtered out those ones they believed to be invalid. The 14.6 per cent equates to $800m of the $5.5bn US search engine market in 2005.”

However the number could be off by magnitudes in either direction, Danny Sullivan points out that “half the advertisers in the survey also reported they do nothing to audit whether they have click fraud happening or not. So Outsell asked them to estimate the percentage of clicks that are fraudulant, and half of them essentially guessed — and that’s making up this industry stat? It could be far less or far more than this guesswork is stating.”

EBay just changed its policy to exclude Google Checkout from its accepted payment options, keeping PayPal in clearer pastures. eBay Strategies, lists the ins and outs: “In reality it’s a credit card gateway (and the same one eBay spends millions with as the top google AdWords user) and credit cards are specifically allowed along with gateways (verisign/cybersource/authorize.net, etc.)”

Definitely a hamper on that big IF of Checkout’s success that Om talks about, on the potential it could play in Google market development towards a pay-for-performance or cost-per-action system.

Sunday night, loyal diggers were online submitting sentimental screenshots of the 2.0 face. And when Digg was unavailable during the transition, one digger created a commemorative mirror of the down page (complete with rolling midi). On Monday, at 6 am (PST) Digg 3.0 went live with three new non-tech news categories, the addition of video (the first non-news container), and tighter tracking tabs on friends’ digging activity.

The expansion into World & Business, Entertainment, Science and Video, is Digg’s effort to attract a wider member base, though Technology will remain the default feed. Within hours, aside from a host of reviews, Digg users built hacks on version 3—one, for instance, returning the category bar back to the right-side of the screen. Here are a couple great synopses and reviews of the changes to peruse. Or you can listen to Kevin Rose present 3.0 himself—including more udpates to come.

The real revolution will come with a second push in July, when Digg introduces two new infosthetic features that visually display in detail what stories are getting relatively hot/cold, how many users say so, who says so, and if those diggers share common interests. Digg Incoming will allow users to scale vetting the +2000 incoming stories that come in daily (or rather make it possible for any one digger). New diggs will drop down like stacking blocks in realtime for each story, making quickly and easily comprehensible the relative popularity of hundreds of stories, lined up alongside each other, at a time. The other upcoming data visualization Rose calls “Digg spy on crack”—referring to the current Digg Spy, a running screen of realtime user activity (showing diggs, undiggs, comments, etc.). The new spy will display the dynamic bunching of user activity around popular stories like the movement of bees aggregating around burgeoning/wilting flowers.

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