Googlization of Everything

From HorizonMuseum

Selected RSS Feeds Museums Fresh and New(er) Ideum Museum 2.0 Museums and the Web Musematic New Media Initiatives Rhizome Libraries/Knowledge Management Lorcan Dempsey Research Buzz Hanging Together Stu Weibel Dan Cohen Learning Brainstorm Nonprofits NTEN NetSquared Social Computing Many2Many Collective Thoughts General Technology Ars Technica Google Alert "Museum Technology" Googlization of Everything BBC CNet News Engadget Forbes The New York Times O'Reilly Radar ReadWrite Web SlashDot TechCrunch Technology Review TED Talks Videos The Washington Post Wired Yahoo

Googlization of Everything

• Gooogle big winner in US search; MSN big loser (Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:31:12 -0700)
  PC World: MSN Taking the Brunt of Google's US Search Blitz Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service Tuesday, August 12, 2008 8:10 PM PDT Google continued to grab U.S. Internet search market share at a record pace in July, with Microsoft's MSN search engine the biggest loser over the past year and a half, according to data from Hitwise. Google accounted for 70.77 percent of all online search engine queries in the U.S. for the four weeks ending July 26, Hitwise said Tuesday. The figure is Google's tenth consecutive record high in monthly search share, and shows strong improvement over the 64.35 percent share it took in July of last year and 63.06 percent in January 2007. Microsoft's MSN search, by contrast, has taken the worst hit over the past nineteen months. MSN accounted for just 5.36 percent of all U.S. Internet search in July, down from 8.79 percent in the same month last year and nearly half the 10.35 percent share MSN held in January, 2007. The decline in U.S. search share may be one reason Microsoft was so keen to acquire Yahoo's search technology. MSN has seen a steady decline since February, around the same time Microsoft announced its US$44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo. The world's largest software maker abandoned its original offer. Yahoo's search engine fared a bit better than MSN's, but Hitwise research also shows a precipitous decline for Yahoo. The company's search engine took an 18.65 percent share of U.S. Internet queries in July, down from 22.13 percent a year ago. Yahoo held a 21.40 percent share of U.S. search in January, 2007. Ask.com was the only other search engine Hitwise broke out figures for. The Web site accounted for 3.53 percent of U.S. Internet searches in July, up from 3.21 percent last year. The remaining 47 search engines Hitwise tracks accounted for 1.69 percent of U.S. searches, the researcher said.
• Putting Captchas to good use: helping to search old books (Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:28:56 -0700)
  Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie-Mellon professor who invented the Captcha system that helps identify you as a human instead of a spamming computer, has rolled out a system that uses words from newspapers and books that the Internet Archive and others are scanning in. OCR software can't read a lot of old text. So this system reads sends these words for us to translate when we log in to comment on blogs or buy from Ticketmaster. Read about it inWSJ.com: Web-Security Inventor Charts a Squigglier Course By Ethan Smith Word Count: 946 | Companies Featured in This Article: Google, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Microsoft, Yahoo, New York Times PITTSBURGH -- The system of squiggly characters that must be typed correctly to gain access to certain Web sites has annoyed online users for years. Now, the primary inventor of the security technique wants to make amends -- by making Web users decipher even more squiggly words. Luis von Ahn devised the system of distorted images of letters and numbers in 2000 as a way for email providers, online ticket sellers and other Web services to weed out online undesirables such as computerized ticket scalpers and spammers. The droopy characters, called Captchas, are irritating to humans, but are usually indecipherable ...
• What information does Google collect and use for ad targeting? (Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:55:10 -0700)
  Here is the text of a letter Google sent to Congress, via theGoogle Public Policy Blog: August 8, 2008 The Honorable John Dingell Chairman House Energy and Commerce Committee 2125 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable Joe Barton Ranking Member House Energy and Commerce Committee 2322-A Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable Edward Markey Chairman, Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet House Energy and Commerce Committee 2125 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable Cliff Stearns Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet House Energy and Commerce Committee 2322-A Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 VIA HAND DELIVERY AND EMAIL Dear Chairman Dingell, Ranking Member Barton, Chairman Markey, and Ranking Member Stearns: Thank you for your letter of inquiry dated August 1st, in which you ask a series of important questions about the online advertising practices of a number of companies. We appreciate your continuing interest in protecting consumer privacy, and we welcome your efforts to learn more about the privacy protections that Google offers its users and the practices of the internet industry generally. As a threshold matter, given your Committee?s recent focus on deep-packet inspection in connection with advertising, we feel it important to state clearly and for the record that Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. We understand that many of the questions that you have posed to us and a number of other companies stem from concerns about that particular model for online advertising, but we believe that the vast majority of online advertisers ? like Google ? is not engaged in these practices. Letter to Messrs. Dingell, Barton, Markey, and Stearns August 8, 2008 Page 2 In our quickly evolving business environment, ensuring that we earn and keep our users? trust is an essential constant for building the best possible products. With every Google product, we work hard to earn and keep that trust with a long-standing commitment to protect the privacy of our users? personal information. The bedrock of our privacy practices are three design fundamentals: providing transparency, choice, and security. Another constant that we have found in our business is that innovation is a critical part of protecting privacy. To best innovate in privacy, we take the feedback of privacy advocates, government experts, our users, and other stakeholders. For example, we have participated actively in the Federal Trade Commission?s efforts to develop privacy principles relating to online privacy and behavioral advertising. Our hope is that the FTC?s privacy principles ? once finalized and written to ensure that they can be realized by industry and will provide consumers with appropriate levels of transparency, choice, and security ? will be adopted widely by the online advertising industry and will serve as a model for industry self-regulation in jurisdictions beyond the United States. Google also supports the adoption of a comprehensive federal privacy law that would accomplish several goals such as building consumer trust and protections; creating a uniform framework for privacy, which would create consistent levels of privacy from one jurisdiction to another; and putting penalties in place to punish and dissuade bad actors. We continue to welcome the opportunity to work together with you and other interested lawmakers on efforts to enact a uniform federal privacy law, as well as your support of industry efforts to establish robust self-regulatory mechanisms for protecting consumers? privacy. In addition, we believe that there are other aspects of individual privacy such as strengthening procedural safeguards for government access to personal information online that very much merit the attention of those who want to bring stronger protections to individual Americans. We have attached the questions that you submitted to us in your letter of August 1st, which appear in bold and italics and in each case is followed by our answer to the question. We believe that our answers are best understood in the context of broader industry practices, as are many issues relating to online advertising. Concerns about online advertising and its privacy implications cannot be solved by one company alone or by focusing solely on advertising practices. Moreover, both technologies and best practices for protecting privacy are changing rapidly, and this dynamism should be taken into account by policy makers as you examine this space. Should you have any follow up questions or comments, please contact Pablo Chavez, Senior Policy Counsel for Google, at 202.346.1237 or at pablochavez@google.com. Sincerely, Alan Davidson Director, Public Policy and Government Affairs Google Inc. attachment ATTACHMENT GOOGLE RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS FROM THE HOUSE ENERGY & COMMERCE COMMITTEE Has your company at any time tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers? Internet search, surfing, or other use? Like thousands of other internet companies, Google provides advertising based on consumers? activities online. We strive to do this in a way that provides value to our users and protects their privacy. Google offers three main advertising products, all of which are contextual in nature: AdWords, AdSense for Search, and AdSense for Content. AdWords is an advertiser-facing product that allows us to provide ads on Google.com in response to search queries entered by our users, as well as to provide ads on dSense for Content and AdSense for Search. AdSense for Search is a publisher-facing product that allows us to provide ads in response to search queries entered by users of our partners? search engines, including AOL and Ask.com. AdSense for Content is a publisher-facing product that allows us to provide ads to visitors of the Google content network ? third-party partner sites for which we provide advertising. AdSense for Content ads are provided largely based on the content of the page that is being viewed by a user. The vast majority of the revenue that Google generates comes from these three products. AdWords offers advertisers the ability to create text ads in an efficient and effective manner, which is one of the many reasons why hundreds of thousands of small businesses advertise with us. We also provide the capability to deliver display ads ? ads that incorporate graphics in addition to text ? and other types of ads through AdSense for Content, and we plan to enhance our ad serving and reporting capabilities with our recent acquisition of DoubleClick, a display ad serving technology company. Please describe the nature and extent of any such practice and if such practice had any limitations with respect to health, financial, or other sensitive personal data, and how such limitations were developed and implemented. As noted above, our core advertising business is providing contextual ads to our users. That is, we provide relevant advertising based on what an internet user is searching for as well as relevant ads based on a page that a user is viewing. So, for example, if a user searches for ?asthma,? we will provide search results responsive to the search query, as well as paid advertising that is relevant to the search query, including information about asthma medication, symptoms, and treatment. In a similar way, if a user is viewing a web page published by one of our third-party publisher partners on the Google content network that addresses the subject of asthma, then we may provide an ad that relates to the treatment of the condition. In addition, in the coming months we will enable industry standard functionality ? available today via DoubleClick and many other ad serving technologies ? on the Google content network. Among other things, we will enable advertisers to limit the number of times a user sees an ad through frequency capping. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again. In addition, we will provide reach and frequency reporting, which will provide insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads. More details about these enhanced capabilities are available at googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-enhancements-on-google-content.html. -1- We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers will not have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements. It also means that with one click, users can opt out of a single cookie for both DoubleClick ad serving and the Google content network. If a user has already opted out of the DoubleClick cookie, that opt-out will also automatically apply across the Google content network. Though it is not the focus of our business today, we also believe that behavioral advertising can be done in ways that are responsible and protective of consumer privacy and the security of consumers? information. To ensure the continuation and proliferation of responsible behavioral targeting practices, we are supportive of efforts to establish strong self-regulatory principles for online advertising that involves the collection of user data for the purpose of creating behavioral and demographic profiles. For example, we believe that the Federal Trade Commission?s (FTC) efforts to address this type of advertising through self-regulatory principles are appropriate and helpful. Likewise, we support the Network Advertising Initiative?s (NAI) recently-announced draft Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct for Online Behavioral Advertising, which includes limitation on the use of sensitive information to create profiles of individuals for purposes of third-party advertising. For both the FTC?s draft principles and the NAI?s draft code of conduct, we believe that the focus on data collected across multiple web domains owned or operated by different entities to categorize likely consumer interest segments for use in online advertising is appropriate. We also believe that a strong and easy-to-find mechanism to permit consumers to opt out of this type of data collection is a goal that all companies should aspire to achieve. Finally, we believe that special attention should be given to rules around the creation of profiles based on sensitive information such as health status. In what communities, if any, has your company engaged in such practice, how were those communities chosen, and during what time periods was such practice used in each? If such practice was effectively implemented nationwide, please say so. We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. Our advertising products do, however, make the ads of hundreds of thousands of small businesses and other companies available to internet users throughout the U.S. and around the world. How many consumers have been subject to such practice in each affected community, or nationwide? We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. We do, however, provide relevant advertising to hundreds of millions of people around the world. -2- Has your company conducted a legal analysis of the applicability of consumer privacy laws to such practice? If so, please explain what that analysis concluded. We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. Our privacy practices are governed by our privacy policy, which is available to the public on our home page and at www.google.com/privacypolicy.html. The policy is enforced by the FTC under section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, and by many state Attorneys General under their consumer protection statutes. Google?s policies and practices are designed to ensure compliance with applicable law. How did your company notify consumers of such practice? Please provide a copy of the notification. If your company did not specifically or directly notify affected consumers, please explain why this was not done. We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. One of our bedrock privacy principles is transparency, by which we mean that we are upfront with our users about what information we collect and how we use it so that they can make informed choices about their personal information. So, for example, the Google Privacy Center (available at our homepage located at www.google.com and at www.google.com/privacy.html) provides Google?s privacy policy, which underpins our practices and offers additional information about specific products. We have also been an industry leader in finding new ways to educate our users about privacy. For example, we have a Google Privacy Channel on YouTube, which is located at www.youtube.com/googleprivacy. The channel offers users privacy videos that explain our privacy policies in simple, plain English. And we provide additional transparency to our users about our privacy policies and practices through our official Google blog, which is located at googleblog.blogspot.com, and through our public policy blog, which is located at googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com. Please explain whether your company asked consumers to ?opt in? to the use of such practice or allowed consumers who objected to ?opt out.? If your company allowed consumers who objected to opt out, how did it notify consumers of their opportunity to opt out? If your company did not specifically or directly notify affected consumers of the opportunity to opt out, please explain why this was not done. We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. Some of our products can be used without registration; the user does not need to log in or authenticate to access and use the product. Our search engine ? Google.com ? is a good example of this type of unauthenticated use. Any user can visit the Google web site from any computer and use our search engine without providing us with any personally identifiable information (PII). For these services, -3- Google retains very few types of data: standard server log information that includes the uniform resource locator, the Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with the computer or proxy server from which the request originated, the time and date of the request, the operating system that runs on the computer, and the type of browser that runs on the computer. We also may collect a unique cookie ID generated for the computer from which the request originated. In addition, as noted above, advertising on Google.com is contextual in nature. It is not based on the web surfing history of an individual user or upon the demographic profile of a user. Advertising on Google.com also only involves first-party advertising. That is, there is no third-party involved in the serving of any ad on our search engine. Finally, as noted above, we do not collect additional user information to provide advertising on Google.com. In sum, advertising on Google.com is contextual, requires no PII, is not provided by a third-party, and does not collect any information in addition to the basic information collected to provide search results. In addition, we take further steps to prevent the identification of a user by further anonymizing unauthenticated search logs that users provide to us after 18 months. Specifically, we obfuscate both the last octet of the IP address and the full unique cookie ID, which, in some cases, can be used in association with other information to identify an individual. Further discussion of our anonymization efforts can also read the March 2007 announcement of the policy on our blog located at googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html. We also provide advertising through our AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content products, and we serve third-party ads through DoubleClick. We give users the ability to opt out of data collection from a DoubleClick advertising cookie that we serve in connection with advertising through AdSense for Content and DoubleClick ad serving. More specifically, users are able to opt-out of the use of the DoubleClick ad serving cookie in several ways. First, users can opt out by visiting the DoubleClick opt-out page located at www.doubleclick.com/privacy. Second, Google?s ads privacy microsite has an above-the-fold opt out button located at www.google.com/privacy_ads.html. Finally, users can opt out of the DoubleClick cookie?s data collection through the NAI?s opt out page located at www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp. How many consumers opted out of being subject to such practice? We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. There are many ways that users can opt out of ads provided by Google and from providing data to Google in connection with viewing an ad provided by Google. For example, with respect to ads provided through DoubleClick or AdSense for Content, users can opt out of data collected by the DoubleClick cookie by visiting the DoubleClick opt out page located at www.doubleclick.com/privacy, Google?s ads privacy microsite at www.google.com/privacy_ads.html, or the NAI?s opt out page located at www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp. -4- Did your company conduct a legal analysis of the adequacy of any opt-out notice and mechanism employed to allow consumers to effectuate this choice? If so, please explain what that analysis concluded. We understand this question to be focused primarily on the implementation of deep-packet inspection advertising practices by a small number of U.S. ISPs in partnership with a privately-held online advertising company. Google does not deliver advertising based on deep-packet inspection. Google?s policies and practices are designed to ensure compliance with applicable laws, which are vigorously enforced at both the state and federal levels. What is the status of consumer data collected as a result of such practice? Has it been destroyed or is it routinely destroyed? Google anonymizes its logs data after 18 months. This means that we anonymize IP addresses and cookie IDs associated with searches conducted by unauthenticated users after 18 months. It also means that we anonymize the IP address and the cookie ID collected in association with the DoubleClick cookie after 18 months. Specifically, we obfuscate both last octet of the IP address and the full unique cookie ID, which, in some cases, can be used in association with other information to identify an individual. Further discussion of our anonymization efforts can also read the March 2007 announcement of the policy on our blog located at googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to- further-improve-our.html. Is it possible for your company to correlate data regarding consumer Internet use across a variety of services or applications you offer to tailor Internet advertising? Do you do so? If not, please indicate what steps you take to make sure such correlation does not happen. If you do engage in such correlation, please provide answers to all the preceding questions with reference to such correlation. If your previous answers already do so, it is sufficient to simply cross-reference those answers. Google does not correlate data regarding use across our products to offer advertising. For example, when we serve a contextual ad to a user of Gmail, our email service, that ad is based only on the text of the page that a user is viewing, and it is not based on any information from any other product such as Google Calendar or Google Search. If we were to correlate data regarding use across our products to offer advertising, we know that we would have to do so in a way that protects the privacy and security of our users, an endeavor to which we are deeply committed. * * * * -5-
• Knol or Wikipedia? Hands down: Wikipedia (Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:27:56 -0700)
  Cathy Davidson writes: I've been following the development of Knol and, well, I don't like it. Despite all Google's efforts to put its own media and content-provider right up there with Wikipedia when I do a Google search, I find Knol entries typically self-promoting and lacking all of the interesting debates that make Wikipedia exciting. They also tend to be very Western-centered, more infomercials than information. It's clear Google is doing everything to promote its own "authorized" news source. In an article in the New York Times for August 11, 2008, "Is Google a Media Company?," Miquel Helft knows that Knol, which Google owns, is rekindlign fears among some media companies that Google is edging in on their turf. But it is more than that. Google searches seem to turn up Knol results more than other results, although Google denies that it is fudging. Yet, as this image shows, even in its second day of existence, Knol's entries were turning up right under Wikipedia in Google searches. Remember back in the day, how people worried about "pipes" and "content," and wanted them kept separate. Google these days is pipes, content, the whole shebang, more and more. But the larger issue is what Knol is about. it's less about "authorship" and "credentials," to my mind, than self-advertising, self-promotion, and single-minded and narrow-minded points of view. What I love about Wikipedia is precisely that multiple points of view prevail. Take a look at the Wikipedia essay on "the senses" and you'll see what I mean. The fact is, our "five senses" goes back to Aristotle and we still believe in them and teach them to children even though there is nothing sacrosanct about them at all. Here's part of that long and interesting Wikipedia entry: "There is no firm agreement among neurologists as to the number of senses because of differing definitions of what constitutes a sense. One definition states that an exteroceptive sense is a faculty by which outside stimuli are perceived.[1] The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste: a classification attributed to Aristotle.[2] Humans also have at least six additional senses (a total of eleven including interoceptive senses) that include: nociception (pain), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception & kinesthesia (joint motion and acceleration), sense of time, thermoception (temperature differences), and in some a weak magnetoception (direction)[3]. One commonly recognized catagorisation for human senses is as follows: chemoreception; photoreception; mechanoreception; and thermoception. Indeed, all human senses fit into one of these four categories.Different senses also exist in other organisms, for example electroreception. A broadly acceptable definition of a sense would be "a system that consists of a group sensory cell types that responds to a specific physical phenomenon, and that corresponds to a particular group of regions within the brain where the signals are received and interpreted." Disputes about the number of senses arise typically regarding the classification of the various cell types and their mapping to regions of the brain." If I search for "senses" on Knol, I get a list of arguments from dull to duller, and none of them tell me what I want: "Marketelligent Declaration" by Bhupendra Khanal, "Counting Carbohydrates for Diabetes" by David Edelman, "Ten Common Sense Portion Control Strategies for Long-Term Weight Loss" by Eric White, "A Hearing Aid Compatible Headset Can Reopen the Sense of sound," "Common Sense About Difficulties in the Bible," "Writing Well: Use Your Senses." Knol flaunts authorship and credentials. Really? Not in the list above. It has a long, long way to go before it is anything close to interesting in the Wikipedia way---but Google may well be sending you there first because, of course, hits mean revenue, hits allow for better data collection, hits allow for target marketing. ...
• Opting out of Google Cookies (Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:57:18 -0700)
  TechCrunch: All of a sudden, Yahoo and Google want to make it easy for you to opt out of their ad targeting on both their sites and across the Web. Yahoo announced a new one-click opt-out policy today, and Google made it possible to opt out of both Google and Doubleclick ad targeting with one click yesterday. At least Yahoo was honest enough to come out and say that the new policy was a direct response to Congressional scrutiny over the intrusiveness of online advertising and behavioral targeting. Google?s announcement was buried in a blog post about Doubleclick cookies. The truth is that both Yahoo and Google would rather take symbolic action themselves than be forced to take a more draconian one later. Who?s going to bother to opt out of ad targeting? Some people will, but the vast majority of people probably won?t. What would really mess up Yahoo?s and Google?s advertising ROIs is if Congress mandated that ad-targeting (via cookies) be opt-in. They?d surely get even fewer people opting in for those cookies than they will now get opting out. I know I?m too lazy to do either. ...
• Is the party over? (Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:55:23 -0700)
  SFGate: ... Google invested $1 billion in AOL in 2005 to secure its advertising business and push aside competitors Microsoft and Yahoo. The 5 percent stake valued AOL at $20 billion. But Google's announcement in an SEC filing acknowledged what many on Wall Street already believed: that AOL was probably worth something closer to $10 billion, reducing the value of Google's original investment in the company. Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research said the admission by Google is a sign that the search leader has been largely unable to capitalize on its bets, be they investments, acquisitions or internal initiatives. He said Google has shown a knack for overspending on acquisitions like YouTube and DoubleClick, the online advertising company. Google spent $3.1 billion on DoubleClick, the deal for which closed recently, and $1.65 billion on YouTube, which has yet to generate a profit for the Mountain View company. Now, with internal projects in clean energy, space exploration and a new mobile operating system called Android, Chowdhry wonders if Google has a winning recipe outside of its successful search business. "Other than search, what has Google done right? They have 1,001 products in beta, but what's been successful?" Chowdhry asked. "There has been a sequence of missteps and failures, and this is not the end. They miscalculated the valuation of AOL, and this is the first time they're admitting to it." Some analysts said there is some room for concern, considering Google's stock price over the past 18 months is largely unchanged. It suggests that outside of Google's core business, the company has yet to find additional ways to grow and drive new revenue. ...
• Breaking: Google Trends still dumb (Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:48:25 -0700)
  Los Angeles Times: John Edwards-related curiosity reflected in Google Hot Trends 05:47 PM PT, Aug 8 2008 As of this posting, one measure of national interest in the story of the affair between John Edwards and Rielle Hunter is Google's Hot Trends list. Fifty of the top 25 most popular Google search terms related to the Edwards affair story, including the top five queries. Several are variations on Rielle Hunter's name: Reille is No. 1, with Riley and Real among the runners-up; and her real name, Lisa Druck, is No. 5. No. 34 is the precise-sounding "42 year old rielle hunter" ? probably the result of mass copy-pasting from an online news story. Googlers are also searching for many of the scandal's major and minor characters, including Edwards' wife, Elizabeth; Edwards' former aide Andrew Young; Hunter's newborn daughter Frances Quinn Hunter; and even Wade Edwards, the son of John and Elizabeth who was killed in a car accident in 1996. Notably, even though it's opening day, the 2008 Olympics appear only once in the top 25, aced out by some websiteless entity called Eden Body Works. Also worth pointing out is No. 12, "endless yard sale," which refers, apparently, to a 654-mile-long yard sale this weekend from Ohio to Alabama. But hurry before the sale ends! Yawn. Next?
• Does "Google Insights" reveal anything important? (Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:05:48 -0700)
  The other day I slammed "Google Trends" as being pretty dumb. Now Google has offered a much more sophisticated version of Trends. ZDNet.com reports: If you are someone who can?t get enough data, Google?s new ?Insights for Search? (which I?m sure will be renamed to simply ?Google Insights? when they realize the current name is too long) is going to be a place that you want to visit. Google Insights for Search takes daily search data from the countries they operate in, and analyzes it to graph ?interest over time? by seeing how many searches have been done for your query compared to the number of all searches done on Google over time. The result page shows all the top searches for what you are looking at ? and it also gives you a nice map of the world showing you how ?hot? your query is across the world. This new service is great for many things. Many types of businesses or people can use the information from this tool to their advantage ? it can certainly give you an edge over your competition if used correctly. Google?s help page gives you a few scenarios where this tool could be very useful: I remain unconvinced. I understand that marketing people are always interested in measures of "hotness." But does it really matter? And do spikes in Web search terms really reveal anything important or valuable? Please, someone make an argument that will change my mind!
• Xploiting Google Gadgets (Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:59:49 -0700)
  InformationWeek Google Gets Raked Over The Coals At Black Hat Posted by Thomas Claburn, Aug 6, 2008 10:57 PM Robert "RSnake" Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, and Tom Stracener, senior security analyst at Cenzic, had some harsh words for Google at their Black Hat presentation, "Xploiting Google Gadgets." "Google cares more about tracking users than they do about consumer safety," said Hansen. Hansen said that four years ago, he found a Web redirection vulnerability that was being actively used by phishers. He alerted Google, eBay, DoubleClick, and Visa. Visa closed the hole in hours. DoubleClick had a partial fix in place in days. It took eBay several weeks to fix the problem. But Google still hasn't fixed all the vulnerabilities. Google and Hansen aren't on the best of terms. According to Hansen, Google threatened to take legal action for claiming that Google was a phishing site. And he said that someone from Google disparaged a previous critique of the company's security in a comment post that didn't identify the affiliation of the person commenting -- Hansen said the post showed an internal Google IP address. Hansen recounted his contentious history with Google to provide some context to the vulnerabilities in Google Gadgets. Google declined to comment about Google Gadget security when asked about it two weeks ago. When Hansen asked if anyone from Google was in the audience and was answered in the affirmative, he invited the unidentified Google employee to respond but was rebuffed. (It's hard to blame the Google employee for not wanting to take the bait.) Google appears not to take the issue too seriously. To demonstrate that, Stracener showed a screenshot of an input form for Google Gadget creation that includes a "Do Evil" checkbox, an obvious attempt to make light of Google's unofficial motto, "Don't be evil." The problem Google faces is that it doesn't have a way to make sure that Gadgets don't include malicious content. ...
• Pew study: Web search growing MORE important fast (Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:43:04 -0700)
  Pew: Pew: Daily Search Usage Approaching Email Levels According to a new report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, daily use of search engines is growing and starting to approach email usage levels. New research conducted by telephone among 2,251 US adults, age 18 and older, found that 49 percent of internet users use a search engine on a typical day, compared with 60 percent for email. In 2002, Pew's data showed that about 30 percent of people online used search daily. ... Education College graduate + -- 66% Some college -- 49% High school graduate or less -- 32% Income $75,000 + -- 62% $50,000 ? 74,999 -- 56% $30,000 ? 49,999 -- 34%
• How can Google beat Baidu in China? Free music! (Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:41:11 -0700)
  Los Angeles Times: Google offers free music legally in China Google's Music Onebox challenges Baidu.com, China's top search engine. By Michelle Quinn Los Angeles Times Staff Writer August 7, 2008 In China, Baidu is the powerhouse, the "it" girl, the search engine to beat. It's a treasure trove of music, most of it illegal. But Google Inc. may have found a way to increase its market share there -- by offering free music legally. The U.S. search giant launched a beta version of a Chinese music service called Music Onebox, which is available only in China at www.google.cn. "We are launching Music Onebox to give users an easy and legal way to find the music they're looking for, and to give music labels and publishers a new channel to distribute, promote and make money off of their valuable music content," a Google spokesperson said. The way it works: When visitors to Google's home page search for artists or bands, they are directed to www.top100.cn, a music site, to download or stream music. The site has financial backing from basketball wonder Yao Ming. Google said it would not share in the money made off of ads on the music service. Instead, the ad money would be split between Top100.cn and the music labels and publishers. The new service is a direct challenge to Baidu.com Inc., at a time when the company is under increasing pressure to pay up for facilitating music piracy, according to technology blog Ars Technica. So far, the selection at Top100 is limited. Google's Music Onebox is the YouTube model all over again, said Brian Zisk, executive producer of the SanFran MusicTech Summit: Make itself the center of media and then try to figure out how to monetize it. Except in this case, Google is using the lure of free music to draw people to Google. ...
• Wipe your home off Google Street View (Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:31:16 -0700)
  The Economic Times: Wipe off your home from Google's Street View to keep voyeurs at bay 7 Aug, 2008, 1553 hrs IST, AGENCIES MELBOURNE: People, who want to keep their homes away from the prying eyes of voyeurs on Google's Street View, can now get their house entirely removed from the smart feature that provides 360 degrees panoramic street-level views of the cities. The feature came into light after Hollywood stars like Winona Ryder started having their homes removed or the addresses changed on Google Street View to keep voyeueristic fans at bay. Winona Ryder's residence is listed as 1320 N. Doheny West Hollywood, although the Street View map lists it as 1314 N. Doheny Dve and is on the corner of Cordell Dve. A few clicks of the button are all it requires to wipe off your home from Google's Street View. However, Rob Shilkin of Google Australia said that the process could take a couple of minutes or a few days to come into affect, depending on the volume of requests. "The owner or the occupier can request for the image to be removed. Look for Street View 'help', and click on that and you will see 'report image,'" News.com.au quoted Shilkin, as telling the Courier Mail. Many interesting sites in Hollywood have been deleted to avoid people from doing a virtual reality tour of actors' homes, visiting movie locations or even seeing crime scenes. There have also been cases where entire streets have been wiped from Street View existence, such as large chunks of Rodeo Drive to prevent people from even window shopping online. In fact, many other avenues and streets in the plush suburb have also been blocked. "An entire street can be blocked if all the residents in that street ask for it," said Shilkin. However, this deletion is not limited only to private homes, for other major xites like the iconic Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood, which is chock full of Hollywood history and best known for the death of John Belushi, is seen in the distance on one angle in a frame of a neighbouring property but cannot be accessed from the front of the residence. There are also instances where numbers in the street have been duped, doubled up or wiped to create confusion. Here is some more reaction to Google street view in Australia: Google up the PM's house as Street View goes online Caroline Overington | August 06, 2008 IF you've ever wondered what kind of house Kevin Rudd lived in before he became Prime Minister, wonder no more. As of yesterday, there's a photograph of Mr Rudd's house on the internet, accessible to anybody with access to a computer (note to Kevin: the branches out front could do with a trim). The PM's house -- and many millions of others, including, probably, yours and your boss's -- has been made available for perusal on Street View, part of Google's ambitious plan to photograph the world. ... Here is some from The Netherlands (in Dutch). And here is some more from the UK: Sometime in the past few weeks, I was walking with a friend when we spotted a very funny looking car. We both immediately knew what it was and as the car drove closer by, our suspicions were confirmed: it was a Google Streetview car outside London. Feeling naughty, I shouted at the car as it drove by something along the lines of "there are privacy laws" and to my surprise an old man across the streed did the same! It was very funny how both of us knew what a Streetview car looked like! Then it hit me: the road we were on that the car was driving into was a dead end road. Picture time! So I dropped my stuff and asked my friend to watch them while I set up my phone and found a good spot to take some photos as the car drove back out again. So I watched as the car reached the end, did a U-turn and drove back out again. However, as it got close to me, the car pulled up into an empty parking spot and the driver came out. He shouted at me saying "I know you want to take pictures but I don't want to be in them." I obliged. While taking the photos, I talked to the driver a little bit. Here are some details from the notes I scribbled afterwards: * Google has a centre in Milton Keynes where this operation was based in. The drivers just showed up for "a driving job" (his words) and didn't know it was for Google until the arrived to pick up the cars. * The drivers were given training to use the computers inside the car. It's not hard: it's a large-ish touch screen (I guessed about 17in or maybe a 19in when I saw it) with a record and a pause button. * The screen is to the left of the driver in the passenger seat with a large server at the back in the trunk. The back seats of the car were removed - it was just a big space. The connections into the server were just power and ethernet. The ethernet seemed to be going up to the camera but I'm not sure if it ran to something else. * The camera is rain sensitive. It collapses in a very funky way and has to be covered. The drivers are under strict instructions to do so. * This particular driver was very sensitive to the privacy issues. He was having a personal conflict about the whole thing and was stopped by (his words) "10 people" that very day. Why? Because only recently had the BBC published an article about Google Streetview starting with Google's plans to launch a mapping tool in the UK could be referred to the Information Commissioner". No wonder the driver didn't want to be in the photo! Thanks, Geert!
• The Challenge of YouTube Ads (Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:26:54 -0700)
  Chris Matyszczyk: So you create a search engine with a very basic all-text look. Then you make a fortune out of ads that look just like your search results. But then you buy YouTube. That's where the problems start. Because, well, the stuff on YouTube moves. You don't really have too much experience with moving stuff. You've never even bothered about ads for your own brand, moving or not. And, put kindly, you've never had that much of a design aesthetic. Such is Google's dilemma which is being played out all too clearly in some of its experiments with ads on YouTube. The formula that appears to have gained most visibility is the one in which a standard square display ad is the immovable object to the right of the video. Then, just as the fifteenth second of the video is past, a fifteen-second long animation appears in the lower portion of the video area. The thing is, the animation and the display ad are both advertising the same thing. They use the same elements, as if the site were given a little cut and paste kit from which to make everything. In my most recent wafting through YouTube's labyrinth, every music video I saw was linked to a promotion for Las Vegas. Every music video that had been legally uploaded by a music company, that is. (Examples were Nelly and Fergie's 'Party People', Rehab's 'Bartender Song' and V.I.C's 'Wobble'.) In addition, The Young Turks' political commentary was graced by moving appeals from the U.S Olympic team. While the Onion News Network was festooned with encouragements to watch the Discovery Channel's 'Mythbusters.'. What is strange about these ads is that Google isn't really testing whether the films can be interrupted by messages. It's testing whether the scrolling animation (which never reappears after the thirtieth second) plus the still version of it at the side can somehow cumulatively motivate. In a medium where users don't want to see ads at all, this is a little like you telling your Mom that you won't eat greens, her response being to give you big green beans and small green beans. It would truly be interesting to see whether animation standing alone below the film might have an effect. But it would have to be inventive, as well as relevant, animation. This current two 'fer feels a little mechanical and, dare one say it, desperate. ...
• More on Cuil and how we might search differently (Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:10:21 -0700)
  Caleb Tucker-Raymond at ?f writes of various librarian reactions to Cuil: ... One theme is, ?if you think Cuil is neat, you should try SearchMe?. SearchMe may fill some of the same discovery and serendipity niche that Cuil is vying for, but its immediate appeal is that it looks a lot like Apples? ?Cover Flow? browse interface for the iPhone/iTouch (and something similar in OS X 10.5). There is an obvious ranked order, which infodoodads Jane points out is helpful, but still means that browsing is an essentially unidirectional journey. Somewhat dishearteningly, most of the posts I?ve seen about SearchMe get no reaction. No one seems to be interested in analyzing what search engines are good for, only whether or not the interface is nice and if the results are good. The second theme in librarians? reactions to Cuil is that the main way that we?ve gone about evaluating Cuil is by searching for our own names. ... ... Here is a kind of irony; Cuil is claiming the moral high ground by treating user data as completely private, and yet librarians complain that they are too anonymous in Cuil?s results. I admit it, I searched myself on Cuil also. The initial results tell you a lot more about where and who I?ve been than where and who I am now, and that?s just the opposite of what Google values. Google?s paradigm props up the newest and the most popular web pages and clearly defines a hierarchy of value. Cuil doesn?t seem to care as much. Librarians should love this. We are always complaining that people value online information over print, digital over analog. We worry that too many people ?satisfice? their information needs with the first few hits from Google. Some of us even worry that ordering results any way but alphabetically implies too much value to the resources at the top of the list and limits patrons? freedom of inquiry by devaluing everything else. And when it comes to search engines - at least for those of us blogging and sending e-mail to discussion lists - we won?t have it any other way. The third theme is a defense of Google as a gold standard for search engines. ... ... We?re ignoring that people want it that way because Google does it that way, and we?re ignoring the fact that other ways to do it produce different results and are good for different purposes. It?s time we started treating search engines like reference sources: pick them up, feel the weight, read the introduction, look for specific sample entries, even read random ones, gauge the editorial position, check out the index and other appendixes, and finally think about what kinds of things we would use it for.
• When Google Owns You (Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:53:23 -0700)
  chrisbrogan.com: Nick Saber isn?t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn?t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn?t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message: Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?] That?s it. Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this: Thank you for your report. We?ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we?re unable to reveal any further information about this account. And that?s it. Suddenly, Nick can?t access his Gmail account, can?t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can?t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can?t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire. If he was doing something wrong/illegal/invalid, they might?ve said so (not thinking that he was). If he had been hacked, wouldn?t that be something vaguely apparent? I dunno, but it seems like that?d be the way. So, what happens now? What does Nick do? He?s sent a bunch of emails. But now what? Locked out of ALL of Google?s apps, the apps that I praise daily, the apps where Julien Smith and I are writing a book. Should we be doing that? I didn?t see a problem until this. What if we?re the next Nick? What?s your take? And what do you think of hands off customer service in this case?