Category Archives: Google

You just can’t please some people

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From The Register…

[Google CEO] Schmidt is very proud of the company’s international growth, and he says there’s still “tremendous potential” for further growth outside the US. In Q4, overseas revenue hit $2.32bn, which amounts to 48 per cent of the company’s overall revenue. In Q4 2006, international dollars accounted for only 44 of overall revenue.

No, you needn’t do the math by yourself. Total revenues for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2007 were $4.83bn. That’s a 51 per cent jump from Q4 2006. Meanwhile, Q4 profits were $1.2bn, a 17 per cent jump from the previous year.

Believe it or not, this is bad news for Google. For just the third time in the past 14 quarters, the company failed to meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

So, even though world domination is a distinct possibility, Google’s stock price is on the way down. At least for the moment.

Social Search

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From Technology Review…

Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo earlier this week, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.

Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user’s social network with Web search results, “so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph.” He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user–such as a public LinkedIn profile–and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google…

The Davos gabfest

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It’s that time of year again — the world’s bosses have gathered in Davos to do some schmoozing and pretend they have social consciences. Bill Gates delivered his plea for a kinder, gentler capitalism*, for example, which is bit like hoping that wild boars will learn to respect suburban flower-beds.

Needless to say, the Google boys are there — and there’s a substantial YouTube presence as a result. See, for example, the Davos question where the fat cats post their answers to the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies and individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.

*Footnote: latest kinder, gentler capitalist results. Microsoft sales up 30%, profits up 79%.

Are IP addresses personal data?

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The EU appears to think so — according to Tech Review:

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address ”then it has to be regarded as personal data.”

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of ”whois” Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.

Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the time it stored search information to 18 months. It also reduced the time limit on the cookies that collect information on how people use the Internet from a default of 30 years to an automatic expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, said it was ”absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the last two figures from the stored IP address made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations.

”It’s one of the things that make computer people giggle,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told The Associated Press. ”The more the companies know about you, the more commercial value is obtained.”

Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic

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I don’t have an iPhone but I do have an iPod Touch which runs most of the iPhone software and I’ve been blown away by the version of the Safari browser that runs on the iPhone/Touch. It’s the first time I’ve ever found it acceptable to browse the Web on a handheld device. Accessing the Web on my BlackBerry is like having one’s teeth pulled without anaesthetic. It’s simply dire.

Looks like I’m not alone in this:

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.

The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.

The iPhone has taken the frustration out of browsing on a mobile phone, said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company.

Other companies confirmed the trends, if not the specific data, observed by Google. Yahoo, for instance, said iPhones accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic. And AdMob, a firm that shows billions of ads on mobile Web sites every month, said it saw traffic from iPhones surge drastically around Christmas.

“Consumers are going to demand Internet browsers” as good as Apple’s, said Vic Gundotra, a Google vice president who oversees mobile products…

The stats are significant: Google is seeing almost as much traffic from a device that has 2 per cent of the phone market as from Symbian phones which have 63 per cent of the market. There’s a lesson there, Nokia.

Google statistics

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Interesting list compiled by Jeff Jarvis…

• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.

Not that we didn’t know this already. But the stats still amaze me.

Me too.

Google vs. Microsoft

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Useful New York Times review of the current state of play.

“For most people,” [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.

To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

Google: Knol thyself

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Google is taking aim at Wikipedia…

Google Knol is designed to allow anyone to create a page on any topic, which others can comment on, rate, and contribute to if the primary author allows. The service is in a private test beta. You can’t apply to be part of it, nor can the pubic [sic] see the pages that have been made. Google also stressed to me that what’s shown in the screenshots it provided might change and that the service might not launch at all…

If they do launch it, then the emerging comparisons with Wikipedia will be intriguing. GMSV has a thoughtful take on it.

Now you may be thinking, “Don’t we already have a collaborative, grass-roots, online encyclopedia … Wiki-something?” Indeed we do, as the Google guys are well aware, since Wikipedia entries tend to show up in that coveted area near the top of many, many pages of Google search results. But Google’s plan is based on a model that highlights individual expertise rather than collective knowledge. Unlike Wikipedia, where the contributors and editors remain in the background, each knol represents the view of a single author, who is featured prominently on the page. Readers can add comments, reviews, rankings, and alternative knols on the subject, but cannot directly edit the work of others, as in Wikipedia. And Google is offering another incentive — knol authors can choose to include ads with their offering and collect a cut of the revenue.

Some see this as a dagger in Wikipedia’s heart, but from a user perspective, I think they look more complementary than competitive, both with their weak and strong points. Search a topic on Wikipedia and you’ll get a single page of information, the contents of which could be the result of a lot of backroom back-and-forth, but which, when approached with a reasonable degree of skepticism, offers some quick answers and a good jumping off point to additional research. Search a topic in Google’s book of knowledge and it sounds like you’ll get your choice of competing knols all annotated with the comments of other users, and if there are disagreements or differing interpretations, they’ll be argued out in the open. So it’s the wisdom of crowds as created by readers vs. the wisdom of experts (or whoever is interested enough in glory and revenue to stake that claim) as ranked by readers. I can see the usefulness and drawbacks of both.

Where this does represent a threat to Wikipedia is in traffic, if Google knols start rising to the top of the search results and Wikipedia’s are pushed down. Google says it won’t be giving the knols any special rankings juice to make that happen, but the more Google puts its own hosted content in competition with what it indexes, the more people are going to be suspicious.

All kinds of interesting scenarios present themselves. It’s not just the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of ‘experts’. It’s also the Jerffersonian ‘marketplace in ideas’ on steroids. Just imagine, for example, competing Knols on the Holocaust written by David Irving (and I’m sure he will submit one) vs. one written by Richard Evans or Deborah Lipstadt.

‘Default to public’, and its implications

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Interesting Guardian column by Jeff Jarvis.

According to the marketing firm Alloy, 96% of teens and tweens use social networks; they are now universal. And I think this means that they will maintain friendships longer in life. Which, in turn, could lead to richer friendships. No longer can you escape relationships when you move on; you will be tied to your past – and to the consequences of your actions. I hope this could make us better friends.

But because you can’t escape your past, this also means that you could do one stupid thing in life, forever memorialised in Google, and you are embarrassed in perpetuity.

The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, jokes that we all should be able to change our names and start fresh at age 21. But I think we’ll be protected by mutually assured humiliation: we will all have our moments of youthful indiscretion and so we will have to forgive others’ if we want them to ignore ours. So you inhaled – so did I, what of it? That will be the golden rule of the social internet. And I say that could make us more tolerant.

There are other benefits to living life in public and, as a result, collaboratively. When the photo site Flickr began, its co-founder Caterina Fake said it made the fateful and fortunate decision to “default to public”.