Ask.com joke at Google's expense

Ask.com have published a parody of sorts in response to Google telling the world how to use the word "google".

* "Ask" does not mean "ask." Ask means "Web search" and "search tools" and "smart" & "up-and-coming-growing-market-share-but-still-relatively-small-why-not-check-it-out."

* You may ask Yahoo and ask Google.

* You may not "Ask" on Ask Yahoo or Yahoo Answers, though you may "ask."

* You may ask Ask, but you may also search with Ask. A full question like "How old is Madonna?" will bring her age directly on the results page, and a keyword search for "Madonna photos" will work just fine.

* Regardless of gender, you may, of course Ask Directions, for example. You can also Ask Blogs and Feeds and other stuff.

In India: Wordmasters 2006

A contest to find Indian folk with the best English skills, is being run by Google. Maybe Google will start Google Articles, where webmasters can pay 10c a page for original articles churned out in India....

100 Billion Web Pages Indexed?

Google has indexed around 24 billion web pages, out of an estimated 200 billion in existence.

Google has patented the technology to reach 100 billion, so I guess that it will happen....

Google Syndicated Search - what is it?

I have no idea, but Google has registered lots of domain names, so it could be something. Garett Rogers suggests:

Google Blog Search could be the recipient of a new name (something similar to Google Syndicated Search), or they are working on a separate service to aggregate all RSS/Atom feeds it can find — not necessarily just blogs.

...Another possibility (and the one I think is more likely) is support for the OpenSearch format created by A9.

One More Time: Please Don't Say "Googling"

Several months after Google mentioned the same to The Washington Post, they have reiterated in their blog, that if you say Googling to explicitly mean using the Google search engine, that is ok, but:

Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only "Google" on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to "search" on Yahoo or any other search engine.

Is this just lawyers being paranoid, or would anyone be daft enough to actually say such a thing?

YouTube: no change. GoogleVideo: foul-mouthed

One article says:

You have to click to enable the comments on Google Video, and you may want to keep some mouthwash handy to gargle with when you're done. On-topic comments are rare, with most folks preferring to post crass racist and/or political items, as others contribute only to pimp their own uploads.

It also says:

Then you have the overt trampling of intellectual capital. Just check out the "Top 100" list, and you'll find clips from networks like ESPN and Discovery Channel. They aren't just being used without permission. No, it gets worse. Third-party sites are overlaying their own website addresses as watermarks on videos that they clearly don't own. It's pretty disgraceful to see that Google is letting that kind of thievery shoot up in popularity.

Another article points out that copyright policies at YouTube have not changed since Google purchased the site:

YouTube hasn't changed at all, only people's perceptions or expectations of it. The company states in its user agreement that uploading copyrighted material is illegal, and a similar warning appears before you upload a clip. But of course, fewer than 1% of its users upload anything. No wonder they don't know.

Custom Search Engine!

This is neat, and will spark a frenzy of niche search services that can provide better results than Google itself.

The Custom Search Engine lets you decide which sites are searched, lets you tag those sites, and lets you design the layout to suit your own site. And you can share in the AdSense revenue.

Google going mobile?

In 2 years since it went IPO, Google has purchased 1+5 companies, including four that specialize in mobile software - so a deal with one or more cellphone providers (or whatever the next generation is) seems on the cards. They include

Dodgeball.com - mobile social networking service
Zipdash Inc. - traffic information
Reqwireless Inc. - web browsing and e-mail on mobile phones

More here

YouTube removes 30,000 Japanese clips

Copyrighted clips, because they were asked to. The first company to sue Google over this could easily win the case. There's no way Google can argue that they never knew copyrighted work was on their site. Unlike the search engine itself, which only points folk to where the copyrighted info resides, YouTube is currently completely bypassing the copyright holders, for profitable purposes. The onus is on Google to stop such clips from being uploaded in the first place.

It looks like Google will ask copyright holders to ad a watermark to their videos that identifies it as copyrighted. Although this is a great idea for the web in general, I suspect many/most won't bother, not initially anyway.

25% of all USA online ad spending!

No other site/service has ever achieved this before, but now Google has: $4B of the expected $16B in 2006.

The report shows what a difference a year can make.

In 2005, Yahoo and Google had virtually the same amount of U.S. ad revenues. Yet by the end of 2006, Google is expected to pocket almost twice the amount of U.S. ad revenues as Yahoo, according to the new eMarketer report.

AdSense: Section Targeting

If your web page is displaying AdSense ads more related to the extra words on the page (menu, footer, other ads), than the meaty content - you can let AdSense which words on the page it should be looking at to determine which ads to serve:

Google can read special HTML tags that let it know you want to emphasize a page section, or have it ignored.

More info at Google FAQ

Blogger Down for 2 Hours

A "network malfunction" caused the outage yesterday. Lots of recent problems for Blogger. Being down for 2 hours is 2 hours too much. Report at PC World

Google's official blog hacked

A hacker broke into Google Inc.'s main official blog and posted a false message on Saturday, saying that the company had decided to cancel a joint project with eBay Inc.

The intrusion marks the second time this year that Google's official blog has fallen into unauthorized hands. In March, Google staffers deleted the Google Blog by mistake by mistake and someone briefly took control of the Web address.

In Saturday's incident, someone exploited a bug in Blogger, the Google Web log publishing service on which Google Blog is hosted. The hacker published a note riddled with grammatical and spelling errors that said Google had ended its click-to-call advertising project with eBay because it was "monopolistic."

The next day, Karen Wickre, from the Google Blog team, alerted readers about the false posting and said the Blogger bug had been fixed, without detailing the breach. More...

YouTube Acquired for $1.65 Billion in Stock

Official Press Release.

Of note:

* YouTube is described as "the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience". Perhaps nobody at Google and YouTube are aware or all the copyrighted material

* YouTube will retain its distinct brand identity, strengthening and complementing Google’s own fast-growing video business. So, it will remain as it is, except for Google ads?

Jessica Simpson Topless in News

One doesn't expect to see a woman's breasts when searching Google News, but it happened, and the screenshot is here.

Google in Talks to buy YouTube

for a bargain price of $1.6 Billion. Excellent news for the current owners & venture capitalists. For Google, is it a good move or bad?

Good Move
----------
Google has the cash in the bank, doing nothing.

As News Corp discovered, if you get in before numbers peak, and monetize it, you can earn back more than what you paid for it.

Bad Move
---------
A lot of the content breaches copyright. Checking the legality of each upload is expensive. It's not like searching Orkut spaces for the word "nazi". Google seem to enjoy pushing the legal boundaries, but this could be the next Napster.

Google Video already has 11% of the market, so whatever they plan to do to improve YouTube, why haven't they done that with Google Video already?

SearchMash - Stealth Site

The Plan: Run a search site with no mention that it is a Google beta, and that way, opinions won't be swayed by the Google brand.

The Failure: Anyone who visits has heard about it via news items like this one.

The Cool: The layout/design is very 2.0. Results can be dragged & dropped, although Google has yet to think of why we would wish to do this.

SearchMash
News Article at SEW

Drinker finds self on Google Earth

It's a marvelous indication of the age we live in - a geezer from the UK drank beer in his backyard, and then saw himself on Google Earth. OK, it's more than a little blurry, but technology will improve, and one day we'll be able to scan such services to see/prove where we were at a particular time, and what we were doing, and with whom

PageRank - Answers from Matt Cutts

It's a long page of Q&A regarding PageRank, but in a nutshell he is saying that PageRank is constantly calculated, but they export the ranks to the Google Toolbar every 3-4 months. So, if you see your PR suddenly jump from 4 to 5, don't expect lots of extra traffic - you would've already been getting it for up to 3-4 months.

First premises have been purchased

The garage (and accompanying 1,900-square-foot home) that Page & Brin leased 8 years ago, the "birth place" of Google, has been bought by Google for an undisclosed sum. Nearby houses are worth approx $1 million. Maybe it will become a little museum?