Category Archives: Google

Carr on Google

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Nicholas Carr is a very perceptive Blogger. He’s just posted posted two intriguing pieces about the Google AdSense program. The first explores the fine print of the AdSense contracts (which basically threatens dire legal retribution if a blog “reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill”).

Hmmm…, quite a few of mine could be said to be critical of Google.

The second of Carr’s posts examines the huge amount of free capital Google stacks up as a result of its rule that AdSense bloggers don’t get paid until their fees add up to more than $100.

Google PageRank Checker

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Hmmm… Here’s a site that claims to be able to estimate the Google PageRank of any web-page. Memex comes out at 6/10. Statusq gets 5/10. BBC Online gets 9/10 — higher than Amazon.co.uk (8/10) but dead-level with cnn.com (9/10) and BoingBoing.net (9/10). Google.com, needless to say, has a PageRank of 10/10.

I’m not sure I believe these results, because I can’t see how they’re calculated. And since the site is independent of Google and the details of the PageRank algorithm (as distinct from the general principles embodied in it) are secret, it’s difficult to see how one could check the computation.

Most expensive Google AdWords

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Not sure I believe this, but John Battelle posted the list, and he’s pretty reliable. He got it from here.

Recently updated highest paying keywords from Google. Top Ten:

$54.33 mesothelioma lawyers
$47.79 what is mesothelioma
$47.72 peritoneal mesothelioma
$47.25 consolidate loans
$47.16 refinancing mortgage
$45.55 tax attorney
$41.22 mesothelioma
$38.86 car accident lawyer
$38.68 ameriquest mortgage
$38.03 mortgage refinance

As ever, lawyers seem to be in the thick of things. To my shame, I didn’t know what mesothelioma was until I came on the list. (It’s the type of cancer you get from breathing asbestos dust.)

The prices are interesting too — they show why click-fraud is such a potential danger. A few hundred fake clicks on any of those AdWords could make a tidy dent in the advertiser’s cash flow.

Deconstructing Google AdSense

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My post on Bushisms led Google to place an ad for this outfit on the page. They sell “outdoor clothing shooting and stalking equipment”. Reminds me of the joke that was current when Bush’s Pa, George Snr., was running for president and Dan Quayle was his running-mate. “Bush and Quayle — sounds like the title of a hunting magazine”.

Google avoids surrendering search requests to government

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From AP Wire on San Jose Mercury News…

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge on Friday ordered Google Inc. to give the Bush administration a peek inside its search engine, but rebuffed the government’s demand for a list of people’s search requests – potentially sensitive information that the company had fought to protect.

In his 21-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Ware told Google to provide the U.S. Justice Department with the addresses of 50,000 randomly selected Web sites indexed by its search engine by April 3.

The government plans to use the data for a study in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration is trying to revive a law meant to shield children from online pornography.

Ware, though, decided Google won’t have to disclose what people have been looking for on its widely used search engine, handing a significant victory to the company and privacy rights advocates.

“We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring,” Google lawyer Nicole Wong wrote on the company’s Web site Friday night.

“What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies.”

The significance of the Writely acquisitiion

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More on Google’s acquisition of Writely, the web-based processing tool, about which I wrote briefly the other day. I’ve just come on an interesting (if slightly hyperbolic) essay describing the acquisition as Microsoft’s “Pearl Harbour”! I think that’s overblown, but it’s interesting to remember that Bill Gates chose Pearl Harbour Day way back in 1993 to alert his company to the threat posed by the Internet and Netscape.

Google sucks up to Wall Street

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This morning’s Observer column…

Google floated at $85 a share, which Wall Street saw as too high. Then the price began its apparently inexorable climb until January, when it reached $475 and some carpet-chewing stock-pickers began talking about $2,000 a share. The strategy of thumbing a nose at the Street seemed to be paying off, and the sainted duo could do no wrong. But then, finally, rationality intervened, the curve turned down and everything started to look different. There’s nothing quite like a falling share price to concentrate the analytical mind.

The turnaround also had a salutary effect on Google management. Gone was the aloof disdain for stockholders’ grubby obsession with short-term fluctuations in share price. In its place came an elaborate exercise in massaging the perceptions and expectations of analysts. In a series of high-level presentations, the Googlers explained that everything was hunky-dory, really; that they were on course for world domination and their rightful place in the sun as a $100bn company; that all that stuff about click-fraud was a storm in a teacup; and that they had tons of really cool stuff up their corporate sleeves…

Google buys Writely

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I’ve been using Writely for a while as an online word-processor that enables one to create documents on which colleagues can also work. Now comes the news that Google has acquired the four-person start-up that created the application. It’s just another step in the progress towards public realisation that the network, not the platform, is the computer. Or, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the PC is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet!”

More: Some useful comments on Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

The G: drive

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Another juicy morsel from the briefing for analysts — spotted by Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).  … As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache.

An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.

Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be accessed across applications.

Translation: Google is planning a remote hard drive for everyone. If your PC hard drive is C: then the Google drive will be G: And after a while you’ll stop worrying about whether stuff is on C: or on G: — until Alberto Gonzales comes data-fishing, that is…

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts it: “We want to be able to store everybody’s information all the time.” He means it.

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing out that it is Alberto Gonzales, not John Ashcroft, who is now Attorney-General of the US. (I’d got it wrong in the first version of this post.)