Google's Global Morass
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Congress weighs a bill to restrict cooperation between U.S. companies and digital dictatorships.
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There is some confusion about threats posed by the new search tool. Google says common sense is enough of a patch. By Thomas Claburn.
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Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
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Online search leader Google Inc. is becoming more bookish.
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Googleâs top minds offer a peek inside the ever-changing algorithm that provides search results for half a billion users.
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The dominance of Google in the search space is almost written in stone in North America, but there may yet be some populous spots in the world where the market is wide open. Now its main Chinese competitor has launched a new assault.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. bills the latest twist on its online maps as "Street View," but it looks a bit like "Candid Camera" as you cruise through the panorama of pictures that captured fleeting moments in neighborhoods scattered across the country.
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Born 10 years ago, the Google Internet search engine has grown into the electronic center of human knowledge by indexing billions of web pages as well as images, books and videos.
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Yahoo! and Microsoft need each other -- to populate the world with Googlephobes.
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Google's recent acquisitive phase has been quite the whirlwind. Here's a recap of the companies it's aqcuired over the past year.
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By Robert Verkaik In a mission statement that raises the spectre of an internet Big Brother to rival Orwellian visions of the state, Google has revealed details of how it intends to organise and control the world's information.
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By Kevin Crowley Google Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, above, started work on what would become the world's largest search engine in 1996 as part of their PhD projects.
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Misses opportunity to enlighten CISAC Google gave a keynote speech to the biggest global gathering of authors' societies today.â¦
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So UnGooglerific Think Microsoft trails Google in the "wow" department by a country mile? You're right.â¦
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Google's plans for an inventory-reduction service could be worth billions to global companies.
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What struck Microsoft executive Marshall Phelps at a recent series of conferences in developing nations was that government, business and academic leaders often asked him, "How can we invent the next Google?"
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Hitwise&#8217;s Bill Tancer recently posted about the distribution of Google&#8217;s traffic across its many properties. As you might expect and has been historically true, that distribution is dominated by search.  Right now, Google owns the &#8220;brand&#8221; in search. But Yahoo and Microsoft have more &#8220;diversified&#8221; traffic across multiple properties. Without some more effort and &#8212; dare I [...]