Category Archives: Google

A message from our (newly rich) founders

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On Jaiku’s front page this morning.

Wonderful Jaiku users,

Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!

While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

Note the formulation: “Jaiku is joining Google”. Touching, isn’t it.

There’s some surprise in the Blogosphere that Google went for Jaiku rather than the market leader, Twitter. Tim O’Reilly, however, isn’t surprised.

Google’s secret sauce

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Pascal Zachary get it right, IMHO:

Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”

The market for blather

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Jeff Jarvis wrote the definitive judgement on the New York Times decision to drop its paywall. It’s a good read, but what struck me most was this passage:

TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather).

This explains why I’ve never earned anything from putting Google Adsense on this blog!* The Google engine has always struggled to find appropriate ads to go alongside my bla.., er, deathless prose!

*Footnote: I’ve just checked, and so far I’ve earned $47.55 in over a year!

Ad Blocking and the future

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This morning’s Observer column…

I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…

Google’s stock price hits new high

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From SiliconValley.com

Shares of Google jumped to a new high today.

The surge comes on the heels of a few positive analyst reports and news Thursday that co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page landed on the top 10 list of Forbes’ richest Americans, tied at No. 5, each with a net worth of $18.5 billion, a value that keeps increasing as Google’s shares climb.

Google rose $7.16, or 1.30 percent, to a new high of $559.99. In July, its shares hit a high for the year of $555.00.

Regulatory teeth

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This may seem a strange image with which to illustrate a post on the Microsoft judgment, but bear with me. As my mother used to say when confiscating pocket-money for some misdemeanour, “it isn’t the money, it’s the principle”. I can’t imagine that even a $613 million fine will make much of a dent in a company that has a market cap of $300 billion and is sitting on nearly $50 billion in cash and marketable securities.

I can’t even get worked up about seeing Microsoft finally coming unstuck (though it couldn’t have happened to a nicer company), because in a way the caravan has moved on. The company’s monopoly hold on the PC desktop is still a reality, of course, but it’s a wasting asset in a networked world. The most interesting implication of the European court’s decision is what it might mean for other companies — Apple and Google, to name but two. Just as sharks are encouraged by the sight of blood, the sweeping legal success regulators have enjoyed in the Microsoft case may have whetted their appetite for more. Apple’s grip on the music-download market provides one obvious target (especially in view of the widespread European concern for ‘interoperability’). And Google’s stranglehold on “all the world’s information” will eventually put it squarely in the crosshairs of the European regulatory system. Stay tuned.

The text of the Court of First Instance judgment is here, btw.

More: I forgot to mention Intel as another possible target for Euro-regulators. And this week the European Commission is opening hearings on a complaint that the iTunes store violates competition rules by charging Britons more than other Europeans for downloads.

China’s Online Population Explosion

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The Pew Project has a new report out. It’s written by Deborah Fallows. summary reads…

There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China’s internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.

The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the Chinese population, for China itself and for the larger world. At the very least, the internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country’s widely dispersed citizenry. An expanding internet population might also increase domestic tensions that could spill over into China’s relations with the U.S. and other countries while the difference between Chinese and Western approaches to the internet could create additional sore points over human rights and problems with restrictions on non-Chinese companies.

Full report (pdf) here.

Steal this laptop

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Richard Charkin is a Big Cheese in Macmillan, the publishers. On his blog he admits to a heist. He posts a photograph of the Google stand at a trade fair (BookExpo America). Then, he continues:

There’s no computer where a computer should be to the left of the gentleman’s arm. You will also notice that there is no sign saying ‘please do not steal the computers’. I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.

Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.

‘If you don’t tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.’

I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers…

Well it’s one way of making your point. And an even better way of getting attention.

The Final Days of Google

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Marvellous columnGoogle is an amazing entrepreneurial petri dish. Yet at the same time, it is doomed to disappoint nearly every entrepreneurial type who works there. This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can’t help doing so.

For those who don’t know these details or have forgotten them, here’s the simple background: Google has made a huge effort to hire the best technical people it can find. Thousands of PhDs are now working in various Google labs, and many of these people were hired from other successful businesses. Google has also acquired a number of smaller companies, many of them for either their technology or their technical talent, and these companies bring yet more entrepreneurial DNA into the mix. The company has created a potent combination of straight-from-university geniuses, straight-from-start-up geniuses, and straight-from-Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/wherever geniuses. These bright folks work individually and in teams and 20 percent of their time is supposed to be devoted to pursuing new technical ideas of their own. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are sure (and for good reason) that their crew will generate in this 20 percent time thousands of ideas and technologies that the company can commercialize for decades to come.

It is a brilliant strategy and one that would appear to be almost foolproof. Alas, that’s not so, for Google’s strategy for business immortality is fatally flawed and will ultimately kill the company….

Read on: it’s great.

Google Trends

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Hmmm… The world is even odder than I had supposed. I’ve just been looking at what Google calls ‘hot trends’. Here’s how the company explains the list:

It’s a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What’s on our collective mind as we search for information? What’s interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you’ll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is hot. For example, the #7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season finale of The Office. Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily explained. Visit the Hot Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your own.

If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [melinda doolittle], [halo 3 beta], and [ge dishwasher recall] were on the Hot Trends list. If you don’t know why, maybe you’ll learn something.

Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

My problem is that even with the aid of this explanatory technology, I am still puzzled by many of the search terms.