When Google's content network lacks content
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Let's go fly a kite Just how much money does Google make from so-called "domain parkers" - those clever characters who populate countless web domains with nothing but advertising?â¦
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The problem? Both Microsoft and Yahoo are weak where Google is strong: search.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either. AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections." Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it. Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill. They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.  Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power! Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.
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Most people missed the announcement about how Google Inc. wanted to burrow inside your brain and capture your most intimate thoughts. That's because it never happened.
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Until recently, it was difficult to find news archives on the web more than 30 days old. That's changed in a big way with the advent of Google's News Archive search.
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Google Inc. doesn't have all the answers &#151; a fact underscored by the Internet search leader's decision to abandon a 4-year-old service that hired researchers to field questions on everything from school homework to sports trivia.
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Video on the Internet has gone from being the next big thing to the current big thing. But murky YouTube videos are just the start Â there's a lot of room for improvement.
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A new Chinese news service launched by Google displays no results from websites banned by China's officials. The search engine that promises to do no evil says why include links that come up empty? anti-censorship advocates are watching.
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Robert Nardelli's plan to fix a bloated showroom network? Starve out the weaklings.
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Google has not had anything big for us since it went public some time ago. Now, it is back with some news that could worry biggies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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A reader dubs Google the internet's "dominant brain." Plus: We need a Verizon moves in on cable's NY broadband territory. In Epicenter.
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Google Inc. doesn't have all the answers -- a fact underscored by the Internet search leader's decision to abandon a four-year-old service that hired researchers to field questions on everything from school homework to sports trivia.
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Google is firing back at enterprise search vendor Autonomy, saying the company recently distributed a white paper that contains &quot;significant inaccuracies&quot; about&#160;Google&#39;s Search Appliance.The white paper, according to Google, states that Search Appliance &quot;does not index all your critical content.&quot;&quot;On the contrary, the Google Search Appliance was designed to search all critical content in the enterprise, including file shares, intranets, databases, and real-time business data - all from one simple search box,&quot; wrote Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager, enterprise search, on an official blog. Mangtani added that Google has also supplied connectors to products like SharePoint and Documentum, and an open-source content connector framework.The white paper does not appear to be available on Autonomy&#39;s Web site, nor is it provided through Google&#39;s blog post. Autonomy could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.Autonomy&#39;s document also claimed Search Appliance lacks enterprise-level security, according to Mangtani. It in fact supports a number of security access control systems and also allows security settings at the document level, he said. The latter &quot;ensures that end-users see only those documents in the results list to which they have access,&quot; according to Mangtani.In addition, the white paper noted that the search appliance&#39;s &quot;capabilities are still being honed,&quot; Mangtani wrote.&quot;This is certainly true: We are constantly working to improve the appliance, to make sure it offers ever increasing relevancy out of the box,&quot; he acknowledged.However, he added, &quot;The fact is that we employ thousands of engineers focused on search relevancy and quality. In the last three months alone, seven new Google Enterprise Labs experiments have been launched (by Google, not third parties as Autonomy claimed) to enhance the enterprise search experience.&quot;Meanwhile, a report released in December by the analyst firm CMS Watch also said the company&#39;s technology has certain shortcomings, among them a lack of &quot;advanced tuning controls found in most other enterprise search products.&quot;This is the second time Google&#39;s search team has responded to an Autonomy white paper, and overall the exchange is reflective of the tightening market for enterprise search.Microsoft&#39;s bid this month to buy Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a key competitor of Autonomy, was seen by some observers as a validation of the market.Autonomy, based in England and San Francisco, is one of the larger independent players in enterprise search. Fourth-quarter revenue released this week stood at $115 million, up 57 percent over the same period in 2006, it said. Adjusted net profits in the fourth quarter were $28.5 million, up from $18.4 million in 2006.
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One of the major issues plaguing search engines right now is the growing list of web documents available online. While no exact numbers are available, there are billions of search results to sort through. But, they can&#8217;t all be relevant both on material content and time &#8212; can they?  Of course they&#8217;re not, and Google [...]
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Google and the History of Link Building  I can't begin to tell you how sick I am of reading articles and posts that mention the two words "Google" and "penalty" in the same sentence!  So many webmasters are walking on eggshells these days when it comes to Google, and it just doesn't ...