google category
People who liked to spend their time clicking on links to see whether those links lead to something, less curious
Did Google, the world’s largest web-search engine, peak last November 6th, when its share price hit an all-time high of $742? Some people on Wall Street seem to think so. They now value the firm at around 40% less. Part of the blame belongs to the general turmoil in the stockmarket. But the bigger part, investors fear, is that Google, at the ripe old age of nine, might already be over the hill.
The scare started when comScore, a research firm, reported in late February that Google’s “paid clicks” had decreased by 7% during January, and were flat compared with the same month a year earlier.
In other words, surfers who searched the web via Google itself, or who visited websites that belong to Google’s advertising network, clicked slightly less frequently on the little text advertisements that Google often places on these pages. The idea that this disappointment was some sort of seasonal blip faded on March 26th when comScore reported that the numbers for February were no better. The search engine seems to have stalled. (…)
The ratio of paid clicks to searches dropped even faster than the number of paid clicks: it was down by 16% in the month of January.
{ The Economist | Continue reading }
Well, for one thing, you’re kind of pompous and self-centered and people don’t like you, and worse, you’re a terrible CEO and you don’t have any clue about how to run that place and in fact you’re not running it, Larry is, but just the fact that you all have to pretend that you run it speaks volumes about how messed up the place truly is. It’s not a company, it’s a cult. (…)
You’ve got these weirdly smart and semi-nasty super-spoiled children who really believe they’re superior beings who shouldn’t have to work too hard and who really don’t take criticism well (because they’ve never received any in their sheltered little lives, and it just totally knocks them on their ass) and on top of all that they are almost entirely incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. You’ve got an entire corporate culture built on ADHD and entitlement. Nice work, frigtard.
Plus you make a big deal of only hiring these super-high-IQ kiddies and the fact is that most of them truly are smart, but then you put them into this horribly dull and easy drone work on AdWords and AdSense. (…)
And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world’s smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently.
{ fakesteve.blogspot | Continue reading }
Add another one to the list of Google employee departures: Google VP Engineering Douglas Merrill has resigned, and will be joining UK and NY-based big music label EMI Group as President.
Advertising now everywhere
{ Celebrating the 50th birthday of the LEGO brick | Google home page, Jan 28 }
Just visualize: One elephant climbs up on top of another elephant, until finally, all seventeen elephants have constructed an enormous pyramid of pachyderms.
When David Kenny decided in the early 1990s to throw himself into the Internet, he came to Paris to learn from the master - the Minitel, at that time the only successful national digital network for commerce.
Now, Kenny, the chief executive of the digital advertising agency Digitas, comes to Paris to learn from another master: Maurice Lévy, the chairman of Publicis, which bought Kenny’s company for $1.3 billion a year ago.
For Lévy, who runs the world’s fourth-biggest advertising conglomerate, mobile phones are the next big thing in advertising.At a press meeting in Paris this week with Kenny, he said Publicis was exploring investments in Asia and the United States to build its mobile ad expertise. That would come on top of Lévy’s September acquisition of Phonevalley, a French start-up.
Mobile phones have four main attributes that make it what will soon be “probably the most important medium” for advertisers, Lévy said: They are global, personal and immediate, and there are billions of them.
“We already have close to three billion subscribers around the world,” he said. “It is already the largest medium in China, with 600 million phones. And if you want to target someone individually, we will know how to get access to that person.”
“If we look at mobile phones, it will not be so much advertising,” he said. “It will be much more ‘marketing services,’ ” a gentler way of combining what the seller and the buyer want at a particular time.
But as with Internet advertising, he said, those metrics need to be better. That is why Lévy is joining with Google, the Internet search company, to inject some of its programming rigor into how ads are targeted.
It seems to be written in the language of high-functioning autistic individuals
Google put silently two hidden messages in its 2008 logo.
1) In this message Google is showing a cable making 2008.
2) The second message shows “SYN SYN/ACK ACK” on the bottom of the logo in little colored dots.
The syn syn ack ack is referred as a “Three Way Handshake.” To establish a connection, TCP uses a three-way (or 3-step) handshake.
Your friend here is what we call a deluxe model hunting-and-eating machine
Google is testing a new Web service intended to become a repository of knowledge from experts on various topics, one that could turn into a competitor to Wikipedia and other sites.
If it attracts a following, the service could accelerate Google’s transformation from a search engine into a company that helps create and publish Web content. Some critics said that shift could compromise Google’s objectivity in presenting search results.
The service, called Knol, short for knowledge, would allow people to create Web pages on any topic. It is designed to include features that permit readers to submit comments, rate pages and suggest changes.
However, unlike Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit an entry, only the author of a “knol,” as the pages in the service would be called, would be allowed to edit. Different authors could have competing pages on the same topic.
Google said that a main idea behind the project was to bring attention to authors who have expertise on a particular topic. (…)
Several other services have taken different approaches in their efforts to become repositories of knowledge on various topics. They include Yahoo Answers, Squidoo, Mahalo and About.com, owned by The New York Times Co., which publishes the International Herald Tribune. (…)
Knol and Wikipedia would be different in other ways. While Wikipedia is a not-for-profit and ad-free endeavor, Knol has a more commercial bent: Authors could choose to have Google place ads on their pages and would get part of the revenue.
related { 47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine, more than twice the 22 percent of users who did in 2002 }
Riding: The Art of Keeping a Horse Between You and the Ground
Youtube has a huge problem and they have dug a hole so deep they are never going to be able to fix it unless they change their approach to copyright.
There is no reason to discuss further whether or not Youtube or Google Video is elgible for protection from the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act | PDF]. That topic will be decided by the courts. The question now is whether or not using the DMCA is a good business decision.
The fundamental business issue in claiming protection behind the DMCA is that it requires Youtube to not know what videos are on its site. Unless an uploader is copyright owner that has signed a deal with Youtube giving them knowledge of the videos they will be uploading, by law Youtube can’t have any idea what videos are on the site or where.
Think about that for a minute.
How hard is it to sell advertising around content when you have no idea what the content is ? Its impossible. (…)
So what is happening amounts to Google basically subsidizing the hosting of video for the entire internet. Fortunately for Google, they are probably the only company that could afford to lose that much money a year which has to run into the 100s of millions of dollars per year at this point.
Unfortunately for Google, even with their new attempts to protect copyright, it doesn’t change the particulars of how they have to follow the DMCA and what their advertising sales options are.
Which leads to this question. Should Google start proactively checking uploaded videos for copyright violations and if they did, how would it change Youtube and its relationship with copyright owners, visitors, advertisers and their bottom line ?
It wouldn’t be a technical challenge to review for copyright. It wouldn’t be a financial challenge in hiring and training the thousands it would take to review the videos after all, this process would allow Google to finally know what content they have and sell ads around the videos.
photo { James Bond in Venice | Moonracker, 1979 }
‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ — Seneca
Google has $110 million of revenue loss per year associated with the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. That’s because the company makes a lot of its money by selling ads on its search results page. People who are “feeling lucky” never see that page, and therefore Google’s ads, because the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button automatically directs them to a non-Google site.
Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google): “I sometimes use it, though rarely.”
photo { Sean Duggan | Lucky Motel, Las Vegas }
Remember, Ginger Rogers Did Everything That Fred Astaire Did, but Backwards and on High Heels
The Wall Street Journal and a couple other mainstream media outlets are just now picking up the idea I have been pushing for a couple months that Google is likely to bid and bid high in the upcoming auction of 700-MHz wireless spectrum. The search company has done its best to make Wall Street and the mobile operators believe that it doesn’t really intend to bid or will at most bid the auction reserve price just to make sure that someone bids higher and the spectrum is used. Not so. These Google regulatory head feints are more intended to win the 700-MHz spectrum for a lower price. The price wouldn’t matter so much if it could be paid for with Google stock, but the Feds demand cash, so the price does matter somewhat.
So Google announced this week its mobile phone OS, which is very real and they’ll gladly license it to whomever, but it would be incorrect to believe that Google has no plan to use its own mobile OS on its own network. But since that network doesn’t yet exist, since Google needs to get handset makers moving with it, and since announcing the software the way they did this week may lull mobile operators into thinking Google doesn’t still lust for that 700-MHz spectrum, well it all makes sense from a tactical perspective.
But once the spectrum is won and the network is built, say by 2010 or 2011, Google will have a very different relationship with the other mobile operators. That’s because Gphone (its a network service, understand, not a device), like Gmail, will be free.
Think for a moment of the impact a free mobile phone service will have on the mobile phone market. Why would I continue with Verizon or AT&T or Sprint or T-Mobile or Alltel or whomever if I could get the same or better service for free? Yeah, but the way to make the service free is by running ads on it and those ads would be contextually linked somehow to where or who you were calling and isn’t that creepy, especially for business customers?
Yes and no. Like Gmail, Google can sell a higher-end product probably minus the ads. People might find they actually LIKE the ads if Google does its job really well and isn’t too intrusive. The ultimate result, of course, is near-total Google dominance of the mobile ad space and — this is REALLY big — transferring some significant portion of the market caps of all those mobile operators right onto Google’s hips. Thanks to consumer parsimony and telephone number portability, Google over the course of a couple years would become the dominant U.S. mobile operator. And no matter what handset or protocol those customers use, the ads will be there and Google will be raking in the dough.
photo { Garry Winogrand }
Let It Roll, Get Bold, I Just Can’t Hold
When Wired’s Fred Vogelstein asked Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt why he had joined the Apple board, this was his answer:
Google’s architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don’t have this supercomputer I’m talking about, which is the data centers.
You can see how easy it is, then, to gin up a strategy whereby each company plays to its strength. Google handles the back end and Apple the front end. Google runs the macrocomputer while Apple supplies the microcomputer.
But instead of taking this easy way out, let’s run to the other side of the room to get a longer view of this relationship. If we do we’ll see that it is actually quite classical in its form. I wrote many years ago that the best start-ups are composed of symbiotic combinations of hippies and nerds. Hippies have the grand vision while nerds mind the details. Each is less without the other. Think of Jobs and Woz in 1976 and now Jobs and Schmidt (or, more properly, Apple and Google) in 2007. Apple is driven by design, which is entirely subjective, even emotional, while Google is driven by the almighty algorithm, which is only following orders.
So why haven’t we seen the fruit of this cooperation? Other than placing Google in the first position on the Safari search bar, there doesn’t seem to be all that much Google yet in Apple’s work. (…) Maybe these things just take time. Or maybe Eric Schmidt has never before had to deal with anyone as brilliant and vexing as Steve Jobs. (…)
Apple isn’t going to be satisfied making clever little interfaces to a world of information provided — and owned — by Google. Schmidt see that Apple doesn’t have the supercomputer, but Jobs just as firmly believes that Google doesn’t know how to run the supercomputer it has, and besides, he can rent a supercomputer anytime he wants one, so there.
This is not to say that nothing is happening between Google and Apple. I’m sure that plenty is afoot. But I am just as sure that there is an almost continuous conflict over both vision and control, with Steve wanting both.
Why, for example, haven’t we seen the vaunted GooglePhone? Because we HAVE seen the vaunted iPhone, that’s why. Steve couldn’t let Google introduce a phone in the same year that Apple did. He would (and probably did) do anything in his power to stop or delay it.
related { SNL iPhone sketch | another iPhone sketch }
photo { Steve Jobs, 1984 }
