Microsoft launches advertisements on mobiles in battle with Google - Times Online

Microsoft has opened a new front in the battle with Google, the search engine group, in the increasingly ferocious struggle for control of the online services market.

The software giant has said that users of its popular e-mail and instant messaging tools on mobile phones will display advertisements for the first time. Those using Windows Live on phones will also see ads.

Mobile telephony is regarded as an increasingly important component of the digital advertising market as new devices, such as Apple's iPhone, improve the use of web-based services.

While it represents a small part of spending on digital advertising, it has significant potential because of the ability for advertising to be coupled with location using GPS.

Microsoft bought ScreenTonic, an advertising platform, which was an early leader in delivering advertisements to mobile phones, for an undisclosed sum last year.

Microsoft, whose share of the search market has slipped as Google's has grown, is trying to recover the initiative in the online advertising market, which is expected to double in size to $80 billion by 2010.

Google has built a $20 billion (£10.2 billion)-a-year business from online advertising, mostly from sponsored links next to search results. It began testing a mobile version of its search-based advertising service in 2006.

Mobile advertising spending in Western Europe is expected to rise from $1 billion in 2007 to $1.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer, the research firm.

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Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures

Not everything Google touches turns to gold. These are some of Google's biggest nonstarter Web services, software programs, and business moves.



Google Incorporated is arguably the most successful Internet company today. But Google didn't get to where it is without takings risks--some of which have failed spectacularly.

For example, remember the Google Accelerator, which was supposed to speed up Web surfing? (A dubious claim, but least it was free.) But you had to pay to get a Google Answer, and eventually people stopped asking. Google Video did so well that the company finally gave up and shelled out big bucks to buy YouTube. If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.

Some Google flops lasted no more than a day and then vanished without a trace. Other Google efforts have been left to languish like a neglected orphan inside Google's labyrinth of Web services. Still other dogs were released as betas nearly five years ago and are still trapped in Google Labs with apparently little hope of escaping the test tube.

Our list of Google's lead balloons is by no means exhaustive; if you have other candidates, by all means, point them out in our comments section below.
Artwork: Chip Taylor

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Google begins blurring faces in Street View | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.

(Credit: Google)

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant's all-seeing digital camera eye.

The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.

Dealing with privacy--both legal requirements and social norms--is hard but necessary, Hanke said.

"It's a legitimate issue," he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, "It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out."

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Web 2.0: Microsoft's Live Mesh To Reinvent The Platform

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Live Mesh, which will be demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco's Moscone Center West later Wednesday, is a platform. That's what Amit Mital, Live Mesh general manager, calls his company's new data and management service.

'Tis the season of platforms. Facebook has one. So does Bebo and MySpace. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) too has a platform, as does Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), not to mention Sun's Java.

The platforms differ in terms of scope and capabilities, but they're all at heart places to run software.

Currently, there are a lot more places to run software than there used to be, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones and other devices, and the simultaneous standardization that's required for such devices to interact with the Internet.

So it is that much of the buzz about platforms at Web 2.0 has to do with defining platforms: their relation to the Web, their capabilities, and their boundaries.

Microsoft's Live Mesh, in its current preview form, represents an effort to define the Windows operating system as a platform that spans PCs, the Internet, and Windows-capable devices. At its heart, it is a data synchronization service, but it is also a bid to define Microsoft as the source of cloud computing.

Indeed, Microsoft claims to have ambitions beyond the wedding of Windows and the Internet. "[O]ur vision of your device mesh extends far beyond this," says Mital in a blog post. "In the near future, we'll add support for the Mac and mobile devices, and then we'll build upon that foundation."

Microsoft, it seems, is embracing software as a service, rather than as a reason to commit to Windows. It remains to be seen however whether Windows users will occupy positions of privilege on Microsoft's evolving platform.

Mital characterized the debut of Live Mesh as "the beginning of an ongoing dialog with you that spawns lots of new ideas and opportunities."

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Google Founders Have Grown Up, CEO Says

It's official: the guys who founded Google are grown up.

That was the pronouncement Thursday from Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, who was hired in 2001 to provide mature, traditional business savvy to the Internet search company founded by whiz kids Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"The boys have grown up," Schmidt told a news conference ahead of the wildly successful company's annual meeting.

Now billionaires, the two who formed the company, which has the motto "Don't Be Evil," were seen as "brilliant young founders," Schmidt said.

"They now function in the company as the senior executives with the kind of skills and experience --"

"-- We wish he had five years ago," Page said, finishing Schmidt's thought.

Page, 35, and Brin, who was born in the Soviet Union 34 years ago, made history in their 20s when they set up the Google search engine.

"Now we don't have to have the same kind of arguments," said Schmidt, who at 53 qualifies as an old man by the standards of the youthful Google campus.

"In fact, they really are running the companies that they founded at the scale and with the insights that you would expect of people who are no longer young founders but are mature business leaders," he offered.

Brin and Page ranked as number 32 and 33 on Forbes' 2008 list of billionaires, with more than $18 billion each, but Thursday they downplayed the effects of overwhelming wealth.

"I don't think at a certain scale it matters, but I do have a pretty good toy budget now," Brin said when asked about how vast wealth had changed his life. "I just got a new monitor."

Page mentioned an even more modest benefit: "I don't have to do laundry."

To which Schmidt, who favors a more traditional coat and tie to the founders' more casual dress, replied: "I think the clothes are pretty much the same."

Brin wore a black pullover shirt. Page wore a black jacket over a gray pullover shirt.

"Those aspects of their personalities have not changed," Schmidt said. "They care a lot about the principles of the company. They don't care a lot about the other things."

NO MORE ALL-NIGHTERS

Both Page and Brin got married over the past year but closely guard their personal lives. At the news conference, both said their work lives had certainly changed.

"One thing is that we have 10 or 20,000 people to help us," Brin said. "Certainly I am not pulling all-nighters all the time like we were when we were in the garage, when we were only three or four people doing everything."

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Google faces human rights votes

It cannot be easy to be the company that set out with the motto: "don't be evil".

Especially not now.

See Google shares in the past year Proxy statements for Google AGM

Google - whose shares currently trade at almost $600 (£300), more than $100 above its level a year ago - is facing two shareholder motions at its annual general meeting on Thursday.

Both insist the company needs to do more to fight censorship and support human rights.

The top three executives at Google control about two-thirds of the voting shares, so neither motion will get a majority.

But that is not the point of the exercise, according to Amnesty International, which will be proposing the first motion at the meeting.

"A lot of shareholders vote and don't attend the meeting but they may pay attention to what happens," says Amy O'Meara, director of business and human rights at Amnesty International USA.

We see technology companies continue to have very vague policies around human rights and frequent violations of their own policies Jack Ucciferri, Harrington Investments

"We're really looking at it as an opportunity to have an audience to hear what we think about these issues right now and to impress on Google that they really need to move much faster on these issues."

The internet censorship motion originally came from the New York City Comptroller, which looks after the pensions of city employees.

It calls on Google to "use all legal means to resist censorship" and to make it clearer to users if it has "acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access".

Google in China

Most of the criticism relates to Google's Chinese language service Google.cn, which was launched in April 2006.

The company argued that it was better to agree to the Chinese government's censorship rules than to refuse to service Chinese customers altogether.

Google believes the motion ignores what it has done for online freedom

Since then, companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have got together with Amnesty and other organisations and experts to form a multi stakeholder initiative on internet and human rights.

But Amnesty says that much more needs to be done.

"There are often national laws or opportunities within the law in China to stand up against requests by officials to do this kind of censorship and the companies like Google have just complied very easily," Ms O'Meara says.

"They haven't even tried from what we can tell."

Google's defence

Google is opposing the motion, on the grounds that its operations in China are already improving transparency and helping Chinese people access information.

It argues that adopting the proposal would hurt its users and business because it would have to close down Google.cn.

In the past year, it has also been trying to persuade US trade officials to treat censorship like any other barrier to trade.

A similar resolution at last year's shareholders' meeting received 3.8% of shareholder votes.

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BBC NEWS | Technology | Google denies staff 'brain drain'

Elliot Schrage was a senior executive at Google

Google has denied there is a brain drain of talent at the firm following the departure of its communications boss to social network Facebook.

Elliot Schrage's departure as head of global communications and public affairs is the latest in a string of senior Google staff to have quit.

Google spokesman Matt Furman said: "Elliot was a valued member of the Google team and we wish him well."

He added: "We have a deep management pool at Google."

The Mountain View company says it gets 1,300 resumes every day. That adds up to nearly a half a million a year from people who want to come and work at the Googleplex HQ, famed for its free gourmet lunches and on site massages.

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly sees its latest recruit as something of a coup, telling staff in an email: "Hey everyone. I am writing to you from India to share the really good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team."

"This is a really important role for us and one that we've been trying to find the right person for a while."

"Elliot's role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications."

Exodus

In the last few months those that have jumped ship to Facebook from Google include leading executives such as Sheryl Sandberg, who is now the network's chief operating officer, following time as vice president of global sales at Google.

Is the Google campus losing its allure?

Other hires from Google to Facebook include Ben Ling who is now director of platform product marketing and Ethan Beard, a former director of social media and now director of business development.

Gideon Yu was previously the chief financial officer (CFO) at YouTube who left shortly after Google acquired it in 2006 and has moved to Facebook to become its CFO.

Facebook has even managed to poach a Google executive chef, Josef Desimone.

A host of other senior engineers and managers have also left in recent months. Some have gone on to start up their own companies or join other early stage ventures such as Zillow, FriendFeed, Twitter and Xobni.

Such defections are being seen by some recruiters in a partially negative light.

John Pulsipher, president of Silicon Valley recruitment firm Wollborg/Michelson, told BBC News: "It does of course not look very good for Google."

He added: "But for a start up company it's great. They are always going to be attracted to the big names that helped take a start up like Google to the top.

"They are seen as stars given where they came from. They are like artists who have had a hit song and are also expected to have a hit song the next time out."

The Google of yesterday

So why has Google lost something of its cachet among the technorati workforce?

Facebook is hot just now but everybody knows that hot can get cold John Pulsipher, Silicon Valley recruiter

Some commentators have noted that it is no longer the firm it once was.

Far from being a search engine firm with idealistic goals to 'do no evil', it has morphed into a behemoth that rivals other large tech companies.

It now has 16,800 employees worldwide. And the opportunities to strike it rich have diminished. Google's stock option package is not as tempting as it once was now that shares are trading close to $600.

Perhaps more importantly for some, Google no longer has that "anything goes" approach that most start ups possess.

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BBC NEWS | Technology | Alarm at Google Yahoo partnering

No firm deal with Google has actually been announced

Regulators in the US are being urged to investigate any potential online advertising and search partnership between Google and Yahoo.

The call by a coalition of 16 American civil rights and rural advocacy bodies comes despite the fact no firm deal has actually been announced.

"We all suffer in such mega mergers," Gary Flowers of the Black Leadership Forum told BBC News.

The justice department is examining a trial the companies did in April.

It has been widely reported that it is looking into the anti-trust implications of last month's two-week test.

However, the department says it has no comment on the coalition's demands because there is no definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google at the moment.

But reports say that the two companies are presently hammering out the intricacies of a future potential advertising and search agreement, and are sharing their plans with antitrust regulators.

At Google's shareholder meeting on Thursday, Chairman Eric Schmidt said: "If there were a deal [with Yahoo], we would anticipate structuring the deal to address the anti-trust concerns that have been widely discussed."

'Never positive'

This assurance is not good enough for the coalition which is made up of the League of Rural Voters, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Agriculture Movement.

It also includes the Black Leadership Forum, an umbrella group of 36 civil rights organisations including the NAACP and the National Urban League.

In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thoma Barnett, head of the Justice Department's anti-trust division, the coalition argues that such a deal would give Google almost 90% of the search advertising market and strengthen its influence over internet users' access to information.

"We face a possible future in which no content could be seamlessly accessed without Google's permission," the letter states.

The effect Mr Flowers says of such large partnerships is never positive and would for the black community, as for other communities, "condense competition, increase prices and limit new business opportunity on the internet".

'Do no evil'

League of Rural Voters' executive director Niel Ritchie claims that the do-no-evil mantra may no longer apply in today's marketplace in which Google's reach is apparently without bound, touching more and more aspects of our everyday lives.

"We believe the government should give this agreement very careful scrutiny," he says.

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Google questions Verizon 'open network' | The Register

Google wants to make darn sure that when Verizon opens up its wireless network, it actually opens up its wireless network.

In a new petition (PDF) to the US Federal Communications Commission, the world's largest search engine questions whether Verizon is planning to sidestep the commission's new open access rules, urging Kevin Martin and crew to put an extra clamp on the mega telco.

Thanks to some heavy lobbying from Google and friends, the FCC has attached an open access requirement to the so-called 700-MHz C Block, a prime portion of the US airwaves auctioned off earlier this year. Verizon ended up winning the auction with bids totaling more than $4.7m, and in theory, it must open the block to any device and any application. But Verizon has spent many years keeping its world as closed as possible.

Yes, Verizon has told everyone it will open up its entire network by the end of the year. But Google wonders if its rival is playing fast and loose with the word open.

In previous FCC filings, Verizon has advocated a so-called "two door" open access policy where open access doesn't apply to Verizon-sold phones, and Google argues that this sort of open access policy is less than open.

"Verizon has taken the public position that it may exclude its handsets from the open access condition," Google's petition reads. "Verizon believes it may force customers who want to access the open platform using a device not purchased from Verizon to go through 'Door No. 1,' while allowing customers who obtain their device from Verizon access through 'Door No. 2.' As Google previously made clear, Verizon’s position would completely reverse the meaning of the rule such that the open access condition would apply to none of Verizon’s customers, and thereby render the condition a nullity."

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Does Ballmer Need To Go?

Microsoft’s dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens to Microsoft? Or is this just a tactic to drive down the price of Yahoo’s shares so that Microsoft can go hostile with a lower offer? And if the deal really is dead, does Steve Ballmer need to start looking for a new job?

This last question may not be so hypothetical. Ballmer has been the big driver behind this deal at Microsoft—some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista (Microsoft’s core product), Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft’s board. And the “transformative” deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it.

One reading of Ballmer’s obsession with the deal is that he felt his job was on the line if he didn’t get it done. According to one secondhand account that leaked to us yesterday before the deal was called off, over the past week Ballmer increasingly has been “yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason” and is being “more of a tyrant than usual.” One executive on the Microsoft deal team supposedly made a comment about “not having to worry about Ballmer anymore” if the Yahoo deal fell through. What the exec didn’t know, though, was that Ballmer was in earshot, and he screamed back that the deal would go through and that he wouldn’t let the board “crucify” him.

As things stand, the fact that Ballmer was not able to close the deal could put his job in jeopardy. The big questions are: If he really does walk away, can he put this distraction behind the company? Or is it too late for Ballmer? If Microsoft’s board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Blll Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work (it needs the scale of Yahoo’s display and search advertising inventory to compete with Google). It is not clear how it can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions.

Maybe Ballmer backed down because he realized the deal was becoming too big of a distraction and he didn’t want to drag it out further given Yahoo’s continued resistance. (And save his job in the process). Or perhaps he thinks he can still get it done by making Yahoo’s stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer. (After all, if you are going to go hostile, you’d want to drive down the stock price of the target company to make your offer look even more attractive to shareholders). We’ll find out later this week.

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Microsoft's Failed Yahoo Bid Raises Pressure for Plan on Google

May 5 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.'s decision to drop its pursuit of Yahoo! Inc. increases the pressure on Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer to make his money-losing Internet business succeed against Google Inc.

Ballmer's bid for Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, signaled that Microsoft was making little progress against Google in Internet search advertising, said Charles Di Bona, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst. Ballmer withdrew his bid over the weekend after Yahoo refused a sweetened offer of almost $50 billion in stock, leaving investors asking what his online strategy will be.

``They've got to come out sooner rather than later with a pretty well articulated vision,'' said New York-based Di Bona.

The danger for Microsoft is that Google, owner of the most popular Web search engine and winner of the most online advertising dollars, will expand its dominance while Ballmer plans a new course. Google gained 10 percentage points of market share in Internet queries since June, providing 59.8 percent of the searches done in March, according to researcher ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia.

Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Internet unit, met two days ago in Seattle with Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, two people familiar with the negotiations said. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the largest software maker, offered to raise its $44.6 billion bid by about $5 billion, to $33 a share. Yang and Filo refused to accept less than $37 a share, the people said.

Microsoft was probably right to walk away because its return from the purchase would have been too small if it had paid more than $35, Di Bona said.

`Square One'

The text promotions that run next to search results account for more than half the $41 billion market for Internet ads. With Yahoo, Microsoft would have tripled its share of U.S. online searches and would have become the biggest seller of graphical- display ads on the Internet.

Smaller acquisitions and investments in technology may not be enough to reverse the fortunes of the Internet unit, which lost $228 million last quarter.

``They're back to square one,'' said Chris Hickey, an analyst at London-based Atlantic Equities who recommends holding Microsoft shares. ``The fact that Microsoft wanted to do this deal shows what a difficult position they're in to start with. This reminded investors of Microsoft's poor market position and the long-term risk to its business from online competitors.''

Yahoo Shares

Microsoft fell 16 cents to $29.24 May 2 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have dropped 18 percent this year amid concern that sales of Microsoft's Windows software, which runs more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, are slowing and that buying Yahoo would prove expensive.

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Headhunter dishes on why people leave Google | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

We all know the story about why people work at Google. Innovative technology, market power, one day in five to noodle around with your pet project, lavish benefits, blah blah blah. But why do they leave?

The commute sucks.

Well, at least that's one of the five reasons headhunter firm Binc included in a list of five common gripes listed by departing Google employees Binc has interviewed.

If you're an engineer who wants to stay in Silicon Valley, leaving Google might not fix your commute, and it's pretty likely your new boss won't provide you with free Wi-Fi-equipped buses. So take that with a grain of salt.

Here are the other reasons for leaving:

• The stock options aren't looking so spiffy these days. Google's share price has dropped significantly since 2007.

• Google isn't a hot start-up anymore.

• It's bogged down by corporate culture. "The environment in which engineers were able to create their own products and services is decreasing since it has to go through a full review process that can take months before the product is released to market. Although engineers enjoy being creative, they might as well create a product/service that they can monetize on their own."

• Google is "not a dream job anymore...When Google was the revolution, it was the most amazing thing on the market, but it's not that anymore."

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A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search - New York Times

Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.

On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.

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DailyTech - The Ranting of a Madman: Google $5 Billion Lawsuit Dismissed Twice

Jayne's handwritten court documents (Source: Justia.com)

Pennsylvania inmate loses strange case in court of appeals

Pennsylvania resident Dylan Stephen Jayne saw his bizarre $5 billion “crimes against humanity” lawsuit against Google shot down a second time, this time by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Jayne filed suit against Google last September, seeking $5 billion in damages over claims that Google’s founders committed aided terrorists and violated his privacy – due to the fact that part of Jayne’s Social Security number is somehow visible when the Google logo is turned upside down. His complaint was submitted, handwritten, to a Pennsylvania Middle District court along with motions to expedite nearly every step of his case – including motions to expedite payment, filing exhibits, and even a motion to expedite previously filed motions to expedite.

Pennsylvania District Judge James Munley dismissed Jayne’s suit sua sponte (on its own) nine days after it was filed, on the grounds that Jayne failed to make any actionable claims.

A month later, Jayne sought to appeal – again submitting a handwritten Motion to Appeal, taking the case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The Appeals court chose to uphold the lower court’s decision, noting that Jayne’s claims – which invoked an obscure law that applied to state actors, to which Google does not apply – failed to demonstrate any instance of Google depriving him of Constitutionally-protected rights while the company acted “under color of state law.”

“It is clear that [none of the] criteria is satisfied here,” said the Appeals Court judge. “As explained by the District Court, Google and its founders are not state actors, and Jayne’s allegation concerning his coded social security number does not constitute a violation of the Constitution or federal law.”

Further, the court agreed that “any amendment of the complaint would be futile.”

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DailyTech - Google Researchers Devise VisualRank for Images

Google creates PageRank for images

When Google introduced its PageRank algorithm long ago it allowed web searchers to have a metric they could look at and easily determine the authority of a webpage. Google researchers are now saying they have developed technology to do for images what PageRank did for web pages.

The New York Times reports that a pair of Google scientists presented a paper called “PageRank for Product Image Search” at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing. The software technology is being called VisualRank and is at its core an algorithm that blends techniques for recognizing images and technology for weighting images and ranking them based on what looks the most similar.

Google already has an image search engine that is widely held to be one of the largest image databases online. The current image database pulls images based on clues from text associated with each image. This for instance is why you might get an image of President George W. Bush if you did an image search for Republican.

What the paper the Google researchers presented proposes is a method to actually rank images based on things in the image. Technology has been in place to recognize faces in images for a while, but identifying other things by computer in an image that humans can identify at a glance like a car or mountain has lagged.

Google researchers Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing told the New York Times, “We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework.”

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DailyTech - Google Looks to Conquer Mobile Phone Ad Market

Google, a champion of internet advertising, seeks to test its hand at cell phone ads

With more and more cell phones supporting capable browsers, a logical area of expansions is the advertising market for cell phone browsers. Most ads have trouble with cell phone browsers resolutions and are not conducive for the environment. This is troublesome as the cell phone internet industry today is what the internet of yesterday was -- financially unfueled.

In the early days of the internet in the 1990s, large companies sprang up promoting websites which reached massive values by only providing amorphous content and limited services. These sites made billionaires of people like Mark Cuban, but inevitably the bubble burst and the market fell apart.

Today much of the modern internet is driven heavily by advertising, similar to the offline news industry. If the internet is a vehicle, advertising is the fuel that drives much of it. And these days, cell phone internet connections provide little "fuel" to the internet. Google seeks to change that.

Google on Wednesday announced that it will be deploying small brand-image advertisements, which it is custom making. When the site detects a cell-phone browser, it will switch to displaying these ads. This, Google hopes, will help it conquer the vast new emerging market.

Google feels that its fate is inextricably tied to cell phones and other mobile devices as the industry continues to shift toward mobile sales and development. The company has heavily invested in developing an OS named Android, which it hopes will help standardize the mobile phone industry. And like most Google products, the OS will likely find a way to tie in ads for revenue.

The new system Google will be rolling out for mobile browser advertising will display images similar to those seen on PC browsers. The images will be scaled optimally to look appropriate on the small screen. Advertisers will pay on a per click basis, and are only allowed to link to pages optimized for mobile phones.

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Googlebot Submitting Forms to Find More Pages

The deep web is a term referring to all the kinds of pages that are live on the web, but not indexed in search engines for some reason or other. For instance, traditionally search engines mostly follow links in HTML, but from what we know they don’t understand JavaScript (yet) or submit forms. Now Google announced that they have started to experiment with submitting forms for some “high quality sites” by entering words picked from the site into the form’s text boxes, and by selecting different radio buttons, select boxes or checkboxes. Then when the Googlebot determines that web pages found in the results to that submission are valid, “interesting” and unique, they may add them to their search results index.

Google notes that they only do this form submission for “GET" forms. A form using GET results in a parametrized URL like example.com/show?foo=bar. The guidelines for webmasters are that a GET request should never actually change data on the server, like trigger a user registraton or something; for such things, webmasters should use POST, which the Googlebot will not submit. Google also note that they “omit any forms that have a password input or that use terms commonly associated with personal information such as logins, userids, contacts, etc.” Plus, Google say that pages they find will not reduce the PageRank of other pages on the site.

With this move, Google digs a bit deeper than before which may result in more relevant results for searchers, and a smaller “deep web.” And if webmasters misconfigure their scripts or robots.txt files so their site goes against net standards, it may also result in a bit of new confusion for some. On the other hand, this move by Google also has the potential to help webmasters who have such misconfigurations, especially those who aren’t very knowledgeable about web accessibility or SEO, and who don’t put up crawlable links to all their sub-pages (and in reverse, if Googlebot continues to be smarter about what it crawls, in the long run some web developers may also see less incentive to remove small inaccessibilities on their site).

[Thanks Miss Universe! Sketch drawn by MMOArt.]

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Google Defies the Economy and Shows Profit Surge - New York Times

"The American economy may be weakening, but Google said once again that the slowdown has not affected its business.


Easing concerns that its growth would stall, the Internet search giant on Thursday reported better-than-expected financial results for the first three months of the year, igniting a huge rally in its shares.

“We are obviously very pleased with another strong quarter for Google,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts. “It is clear to us that we are well positioned for 2008 and beyond, regardless of the business environment that we find ourselves surrounded by.'

Mr. Schmidt credited improvements to the company’s highly targeted advertising business for the growth, which was stronger overseas than domestically. For the first time, international sales accounted for the majority of revenue.

The results came as a relief to investors, who were bracing for a big slowdown in Google’s business. The company issued its report after the close of markets, and its shares surged more than $76.42, or 17 percent, in after-hours trading, to end the day at $525.96. They had closed d"

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