From BBC NEWS…
Google is to ban adverts for essay writing services – following claims that plagiarism is threatening the integrity of university degrees.
About time, too. Stand by for squeals of protest from purveyors of bespoke essays to clueless undergraduates.
From today’s FT.com
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Now why am I not reassured by this prospect?
The article goes on to discuss the implications of Google’s personalised search offerings. It also reports that
Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives.
One of the non-exec directors of Autonomy is Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness.
I followed a link to an interesting wiki aimed at cancer sufferers and their families and friends. The wiki hosting company has signed up for Google Adsense. Guess what kinds of ads the Google servers place on the page?
According to this presentation, over 2.7 billion searches are performed on Google every month.
Idly doing a crossword today I concluded that the only possible solution to a particular clue was ‘Lothario’. I Googled it to see whether it was plausible — and then noticed this ad, carefully placed by Google on the right-hand side of the screen.
It’s the kind of thing that got Lord Browne, the former CEO of BP, into trouble.
This morning’s Observer column…
The strange business of the ‘takeover’ that never was – that of Yahoo by Microsoft – raises some interesting questions. First, who benefited? The story originated in an unexpected place – the New York Post, a lively tabloid publication owned since 1993 by Rupert Murdoch, where one would rarely look for a big technology story…
From today’s New York Times…
Speaking at the annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, said Google’s long array of initiatives was organized around three ideas.
“Our next strategy evolution is to really think about three components,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Search, ads and apps,” he said, using a common shorthand for applications, or software programs.
The move is less a strategy shift than a new message — a way for Google to talk about its disparate initiatives in a way shareholders and the public can readily understand.
“It is worth saying that our underlying mission has not changed,” Mr. Schmidt noted.
The first two — search and ads — are well known to shareholders, and they account for virtually all of the company’s success. The third — apps — puts under one umbrella Google’s growing business of offering an eclectic mix of software.
Mr. Schmidt said the unifying theme behind the seemingly disparate programs was that they resided on the Web, rather than on users’ PCs, and were available wherever there is an Internet connection.
The programs include photo storage, social networking, online calendars, e-mail, instant messaging, word processing and spreadsheets. Most are free, and many compete with paid offerings from Microsoft. But Google has started charging businesses for some of them. “That is a business that looks like it is going to grow very nicely for us,” Mr. Schmidt said.
But a shareholder proposal to force Google to resist censorship in countries with authoritarian regimes like China was defeated “by an undisclosed tally”.
Surprise, surprise. Corporations don’t do ethics, any more than my cats respect fledglings’ rights.
Interesting NYT report…
ON YouTube, copyrighted video clips of movies and TV shows are far less popular compared with noncopyrighted material than previously thought, according to a new study.
On their face, the results could have serious implications for YouTube’s owner, Google, and the media companies, most notably Viacom, with which it has been negotiating. But not everyone agrees.
Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).
The Vidmeter report is here.
This morning’s Observer column…
Wearing his best public-spirited citizen look, Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the New York Times that Google’s proposed acquisition would ‘combine the two largest distributors of online advertising’ and thus ‘substantially reduce competition in the advertising market on the web’. Between them, Citizen Smith continued, Google and Doubleclick deliver ‘over 80 per cent of the adverts delivered to website publishers, so their combination in a single company has big ramifications’.
Call me Panglossian, but this is encouraging news. One looks forward to General Counsel Smith advising his employer that its 92 per cent control of the market for operating systems also has ‘big ramifications’…
The latest thing from Google.