Category Archives: Google

Mr. Google’s Guidebook

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Nice whimsical piece by Tom Slee, don’t you know.

I shouldn’t complain. It’s nice that they visit at all – much better than rattling around here by myself – so I should be very grateful to Mr. Google for bringing these people to visit, but it does leave me wondering why he always sends them to look at this same corner of the house. I have a few other items lying around that I think are just as pretty but Mr. Google takes the visitors right by them without so much as a glance.

So when he brought me the sherry decanter the other day I challenged him on it. I thought it was an innocent enough question to ask of one’s butler. Little did I realize the terrifying journey I was embarking on with that one question. He explained that when you ask him a question he “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” That sounded a little presumptuous so I asked him how he could be so confident in his understanding and he replied, rather stiffly if you ask me, “If I did not give you exactly what you wanted then you wouldn’t have asked me in the first place would you?” There was something about the slow, pronounced way he articulated this that made me feel like Wooster to his Jeeves so I didn’t pursue the topic, fearing he would get upset. I wouldn’t want him to leave; it’s so hard to find good help nowadays.

As I sipped my sherry I realized that I don’t really understand the man. For a butler and travel agent he seems remarkably well-to-do, and yet when I ask why he works so hard (I happen to know he is butler at several other houses in the county as well as mine) he insists he is only interested in helping people and points to his family motto, which he keeps on a little card that he brandishes frequently. “Don’t be evil”, it says…

Google Adsense — or should that be Google Adinsensitive?

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From the Guardian‘s Letters and blogs…

The online Sydney Morning Herald of March 14 took the advert targeting issue, as discussed recently in Technology, to another level altogether. A report of a gruesome assault in a Sydney park was headed “Woman’s nose bitten off”. A link was provided – “Ads by Google” – to “Safe Cosmetic Surgery” from London. “Request a free brochure online now!” it urged, sensing there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Harold Lewis, Cobham

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for spotting it.

The Adsense logic engine produces weird results. When I’ve blogged about the quagmire in Iraq, for example, it often comes up with recruiting ads for the US Army. And whenever I write about the iniquities of the copyright thugs of the RIAA and the MPAA, Google invariably produces ads from legal firms offering their help in “protecting your intellectual property”.

Google goes after Sharepoint

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According to the New York Times Blog, Google is about to launch

a rival to Microsoft’s SharePoint, a program used for collaboration among teams of workers. Google’s program, called Google Sites, will become part of the company’s applications suite, which includes e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Like other elements of Google Apps, it will be free and require no installation, maintenance or upgrades.

With Google Sites, the company is taking on what Christopher Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said has become a $1 billion a year product. That’s a relatively small, but far from insignificant, portion of Microsoft’s business division whose mainstay Office suite is the No. 1 target of Google Apps. Microsoft’s business division brought in $4.8 billion in the most recent quarter.

Google Sites was built on top of technology created by JotSpot, a startup co-founded by Joe Kraus, who also co-founded Excite, the now defunct Internet 1.0 portal. Google acquired JotSpot, which had developed a set of “wiki,” or collaboration, tools in October of 2006.

Google hijacks Error 404

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Google has released a new version of its browser toolbar designed to hijack 404 error pages. It was spotted by a blog known as Seoker.com.

As Google put it, when you use its new toolbar, “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar ‘Did you mean’ with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.”

In other words, if you key in a web address and the server you’re visiting can’t find that address, the toolbar will, in many cases, ignore the 404 error page returned by the server, displaying one supplied by Google instead. This Googlicious error page will give you alternative urls, but it also includes a Googlicious logo and a Googlicious search box.

Plus, as Seoker.com points out, the search box is pre-packed with words from the url you keyed in. So Google has yet another means of tracking your behavior.

Of course, Google doesn’t see the irony here. With his own blog post, Google search guru Matt Cutts said that if toolbar users and webmasters don’t like this, they can do something about it.

The only problem is that webmasters generally won’t know anything about it because they won’t know it’s happening.

From The Register.

Turkey flights

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s the metaphors and similes that get me. It’s a shotgun marriage, declared one commentator, ‘with Google holding the gun’. Putting Microsoft and Yahoo together, said another, was like trying to produce an eagle from an alliance of two turkeys. This is unfair. Microsoft isn’t a turkey, but a profitable, boring mastodon that entertains fantasies about being able to fly. Yahoo, for its part, is an ageing hippy who invented hang- gliding but aspired to fly 747s and then discovered that he wasn’t very good at it. The mastodon hopes that by employing the hippy it will learn to hang-glide. The hippy’s feelings about the whole deal are plain for all to see…Update: The NYT (and lots of other sources) claim that the Yahoo board has decided to reject the Microsoft bid, on the grounds that it undervalues the company. Ho! If this is true then what’s likely to happen is that (a) some big Yahoo shareholders will revolt and (b) Microsoft will wage a proxy war with the aim of eplacing the Yahoo board at the next AGM. This one will run and, er, ruin. There are also ways you can get to buy ar-15’s from Palmetto State Armory where you can make sure you are safe and also get the right equipment.

Sneak preview of Google’s mobile phone software

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The Register has been given a sneak preview of Google Android.

The real magic is the Android runtime called Dalvik. This is a custom virtual machine designed to be a better embedded OS. It’s a register-based Virtual Machine, and therefore more efficient in an embedded environment than a traditional Java Virtual Machine; core libraries interact with the Java Harmony project. You may write in Java, but the byte code is Dalvik.

Dalvik uses .dex byte code files and Java class files are converted to .dex. The .dex structure allows processes to share system classes, saving memory…

Just thought you’d like to know.

Google moves to kill Microsoft-Yahoo deal

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Now there’s a surprise. The last thing Google wants is serious competition (even if it’s unlikely that a MS-Yahoo merger could provide it). It’s almost enough to make one feel sympathetic to Microsoft.

This is going to get very boring over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to be one of the few companies that still funds basic research. It’s just announced that it’s opening a new research lab next door to MIT. Headed by a woman too. Hooray!

So is it really a big deal?

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A Newsnight journalist rang me on Friday evening, just after we’d arrived in deepest Suffolk, to see if I’d be interested in coming on the programme to talk about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. I declined gracefully on the grounds that (a) I like being in deepest Suffolk, and (b) I wasn’t sure the story was such a big deal anyway. Now, it looks as though I’m not alone in thinking that. Here’s John Markoff of the NYT on the subject:

SAN FRANCISCO — In moving to buy Yahoo, Microsoft may be firing the final shot of yesterday’s war.

That one was over Internet search advertising, a booming category in which both Microsoft and Yahoo were humble and distant also-rans behind Google.

Microsoft may see Yahoo as its last best chance to catch up. But for all its size and ambition, the bid has not been greeted with enthusiasm. That may be because Silicon Valley favors bottom-up innovation instead of growth by acquisition. The region’s investment money and brain power are tuned to start-ups that can anticipate the next big thing rather than chase the last one.

And what will touch off the next battle? Maybe it will be a low-power microprocessor, code-named Silverthorne, that Intel plans to announce Monday. It is designed for a new wave of hand-held wireless devices that Silicon Valley hopes will touch off the next wave of software innovation.

Or maybe it will be something else entirely.

No one really knows, of course, but gambling on the future is the essence of Silicon Valley. Everyone chases the next big thing, knowing it could very well be the wrong thing. And those who guess wrong risk their survival….

Update: Newsnight ran a piece with Charles Arthur and Robert Scoble. See it on YouTube here.

Google’s loss is the Digger’s Gain

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I always thought the MySpace/Google deal was a work of genius — for Rupert Murdoch. It’s beginning to look as though I was right.

The stock market may be fretting over Google’s disappointing earnings, but somewhere Rupert Murdoch is smiling.

One of the weaknesses that Google’s management highlighted in its conference call was advertising on social networks. The company said its traffic acquisition cost, the money it pays to sites on which it places ads, rose in the fourth quarter because of required minimum payments it must make to certain sites.

“We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as we would like,” said George Reyes, Google’s chief financial officer, implying that the sites on which the minimum payments are due were social networks. By far, the largest social network on which Google sells ads is MySpace, which is owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2006, Google agreed to a three-year deal to sell ads on MySpace, committing to pay a minimum of $900 million.

People involved in that deal said that Google never assumed that it would earn its $900 million back from that deal, but it appears to be losing even more than it had expected.