Tag Archives: Google

China redirects searches to Baidu? OR NOT!

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TechCrunch is reporting today that China is redirecting internet searches from Google, Yahoo, and MSN and I assume all other engines – to Chinese search engine Baidu.   However I can’t find anything but little anecdotal posts to support this.   Looks to me like some videos and blogs have been affected, but that the big search engine issues may have related to a temporarily problem or testing of DNS stuff.

They suggest this may relate to the recent award given to the Dalai Lama I’d guess China is spending a lot of time thinking and experimenting with ways to maximize their search revenues, and this redirection, if it really did happen as dramatically as some suggest, would probably be testing ways to gather data on how well Baidu monetizes search compared to the agreements they have with other players.

Wait – here’s a blogger in Beijing, China saying that he’s getting to places TechCrunch says have been sent to Baidu, like Google.   Not sure what’s up …

Is this a false alarm?   I think so, though it might be another example of how China’s centralized socialist economy can create power and monopoly conditions the most ruthless old style US capitalists could only dream about.    Increasingly control of the online landscape is control of the business landscape, and as China’s massive economic expansion continues it will be very interesting to see how the China wields her power.

Note – I just edited this post quite a bit thanks to the new info.  Still dunno what’s going on.

G Phone Musings

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David Berlind has a very insightful piece about the upcoming offering from Google in the cell phone space.   Usually this is called the “G Phone” (or maybe “gPhone”?  “gee, Phone!”), and it’s certainly coming soon to a handheld device near you.  

It is still not clear if Google will actually endorse the hardware as well as the mobile software they’ve been working on, but there will be a phone by next year (I still predict it’ll be out in time for Christmas), and it will feature rich integration with Google maps, search, and probably a bunch of other clever Googley applications developed for the explosive mobile market.

Berlind notes that we are all seeking technological “religious experiences” with our devices, and the current crop of phones, even including the iPhone, do not deliver enough of them.

David is harder on the Apple iPhone than I have been but I agree that the holy grail ain’t here yet, and also agree that Google, learning from iPhone’s mistakes and all the hype and feedback about that project, might hit the cellular nail on the head with the gPhone.      I predict a major Google phone innovation in using advertising to defray the cost of calling.   This could take many forms but I think a clever integration of highly targeted advertising during web browsing and text messaging could be fairly inoffensive to users but provide a decent portion of the revenues that the carrier would need.   Frankly all Google needs to do is reduce the cellular cost enough to the customer that they’ll switch over from other carriers like ATT and Sprint.     These companies have done little to create brand loyalty and a better system will have users leaving in droves.

But we may have to wait until 2008 to find out how good the gPhone is going to be.  

Unless they are out by Christmas, in which case I may actually do my Christmas shopping early this year.

Google and Wikipedia combine to “bomb” NYC.

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Update – below was “fixed” with Wiki’s correction and Google’s refreshed index. Looks like the bogus snippet lasted about 1-2 days at Google – probably even less at Wikipedia because they have people reviewing the edits.
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Search credibility is still a challenge for Google and Wikipedia as today’s second result for the query “New York City” indicates:

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New York City– Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

new york city has just been hit with a nuclear bomb and it has destroyed half of the cityand has left thousands dead. george bush says the people involved …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City – 315k – Cached – Similar pages

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This is a very clear example of the challenges of information systems that have no human intervention in the routine editing process (Google) , or have defective human intervention (Wikipedia).    What happened here was a malicious change of the NY City page at Wikipedia followed by Google’s spidering of the bogus content.   I’m hardly a naive user but during my search tonight for NYC info I did a double take on this Google query result and quickly had to reason out that it was bogus.    Wikipedia’s been fixed and this will probably go away within days when Google refreshes it’s listing, but you can sure see how things can get out of hand fast online. 

A recent study suggested Wikipedia and Brittanica were about equally authoritative, and I do think this is an exception to the normal super quality at Wikipedia.

Social media frenzy may kill high quality content. Somebody fix this!

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The news last month that Microsoft may wind up offering Facebook $500,000,000 for a 5% stake is great news … for the tiny number of Facebook insiders who stand to gain from this move which would effectively value the social media giant at about $10,000,000,000.    For the millions of Facebook folks like me who provide the content and faces that drive Facebook it means … um … more advertising.   

Gee, thanks Facebook.   

When people wake up they may start to realize that we’ve got a potential crisis as small numbers of “info intermediators” like Google and Facebook scoop up the lion’s share of the online ocean of cash while the “info creators” are distinctly second class citizens in the big show.   Small time web publishers and mom and pops are in this group.  So are major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post and most other print outlets who tend to make relatively little online despite offering much of the web’s best content to date, especially now that the foolish paywalls of some newspaper outlets like NYT are coming down.   Having no paywall will allow them to make more, but it’s not clear to me they’ll make enough to keep all that high quality content coming.  

Print and newspapers are  hurting and that is going to continue.   That’s OK as long as websites and blogs continue to provide great insight and breaking news, but it’s about time the big players in the online world start working *a lot harder* to feed the hands that are feeding them.  It’s about time they realize that the best web ecosystem encourages high quality content and not just socializing for the sake of hanging online with friends.

Yes, it is true that revenue sharing programs like Google adsense give publishers a nice share of revenues that come directly from activity at their websites.  However lost in this debate is the fact that *most* of Google’s money  (and virtually all of Myspaces), goes into the pocket of Google and Fox (owners of Myspace).   This is because most of the cash comes from searches done at Google.com rather than publishing affiliate sites, and Google keeps all that despite the fact it’s generated *indirectly* from the ocean of content Google has categorized.  Sure Google should make *a lot* from categorizing *your content* so effectively, but should they make 100%?   You can argue this arrangement is fine if the big players turn around and do things with that money that make the internet ecosystem thrive and grow in ways it could not without their involvement.  I think that argument was far more valid a few years ago than it is now.  Literally thousands of  startups are dying off as the Youtubes and Facebooks – built squarely on the shoulders of other people’s content  – scoop up the super gigantic big money.    It is not a problem that startups die – in fact it’s a good part of the ruthless evolution of things – but it’s problematic when the lion’s share of online resources from the work of so many are redistributed to so few.    Not because this is “unfair”,  but because this type of  inequity does not lead to optimal system efficiency and growth.

Social media in all its various and sundry forms is a wonderful development.  Finally we see clearly that people, not computers, will be at the heart of future online developments – probably for some time into the future.    Facebook users are now leading the innovation in this area, though Alice at NYT thinks this could lead to unintended consequences.

To protect this new socially charged online environment from the ravages of our silly, stupid and prurient human interests we’ll need better incentives than the big players currently offer to quality content producers.   Those incentives will ultimately shape the quality of online content for years to come.

Google’s Constitutional Amendment: The Right to Rank as you see fit

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Some of the most lively debate and controversy at search conferences surrounds the issue of Google ranking rights.   At Search Engine Strategies in San Jose the most interesting (and confrontational) session involved Michael Gray taking Matt Cutts to task on Google’s aggressive stand on commercially driven linking.    

The stakes of the “right to rank” question may become even higher in the context of a recent Microsoft v Google case, where MS is suggesting in their court brief against the Google Doubleclick merger that the merger will create something like monopoly conditions in the online advertising space because (according to Microsoft’s sources) Google+Doubleclick serve more than half the world’s online advertising.  

Although I don’t think MS is attacking Google ranking methods directly here it’ll be interesting to see if Google claims that since their algorithm does not rank the free “organic” listings on a commercial basis the suit has less merit than it would if they *did* favor sites in the organic listings.   

This would, of course, beg the key point that Google’s ranking power is now so high that it can make or break companies – offline as well as online – depending on how they rank in the organic “free” listings.   This confers on Google an obligation that IMHO they still do not take seriously enough – the obligation to minimize the collateral damage and maximize the correct rankings using, if necessary, more human intervention.     In short I’m saying that until the results are *so good* that only highly subjective opinions are coming into play Google needs to do *more* than is currently done, based on the principle that “with great wealth comes great responsibility”.    Ironically I think Google’s success has to a large extent insulated them from the growing criticism in the webmaster community.   Some of that criticism is self serving, e.g. spammers who are unhappy their tactics now fail, but much of the criticism is coming from users and newly minted webmasters or mom and pops who are frustrated because they can’t seem to get ranked properly for even the most obvious queries.   Google blames the spammers for this, but it’s a dynamic process and more transparency from Google – perhaps with stronger forms of site and webmaster ID for “official” or clearly white hat sites – could go a long way to solving the transparency problems.

Over at Matt Cutts’ blog he makes this point about a recent ASK court case decision in favor of a search engine’s right to rank as they see fit.  This point lies at the heart of the right to rank debate:

 Again, it makes sense that search engines get to decide how to rank/remove content in their own index…

I replied over there:

Matt …hmmm….wouldn’t you agree that this has some clear limits?   What would you call crossing the line on this freedom to rank however you see fit?
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If Google pulled what Yahoo did some time ago and essentially forced sites to pay for inclusion or be excluded would that fall within the sensical realm?  
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MSN is claiming (somewhat ironically and hypocritically, but correctly) that Google’s ad power is becoming close enough to a monopoly that remedies are in order.  Historically there has been trouble when a single company or country controlled more than half a resource – why no problem here?      

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Google + Doubleclick? Microsoft cries “Advertiser Monopolizer!”

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Dana Baran over at WebGuild blog has a great short article summarizing Microsoft’s case against a Google takeover of Doubleclick.   The chart (from the MS legal team?) has what appears to be an excellent summary of the total online advertising spend.  I assume this is for 2006 but not sure.   It shows approximately a 20 billion total ad spend with Google scooping up 30% followed by Doubleclick at 22%, Yahoo at 19%, Microsoft at 17%, and all the rest at 12%. 

Microsoft’s point seems to be that Google and Doubleclick should not merge because, as the two leading recipients of online advertising revenue, this would create a player with more than half the market and thus too much power over the marketplace and advertisers.