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- Google Trends fooled againJanuary 7
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NYTimes.com:
Google Trends Falls Victim to Disturbing Stunt By Miguel Helft Google Trends, a service that shows the relative popularity of search terms, fell victim to what appeared to be an ugly stunt on Tuesday: a sketch of an airplane flying into two towers appeared as its second most popular item under Hot Trends, its list of the fastest-rising searches at any given moment. TechCrunch and Search Engine Land both grabbed screen shots of the Google Trends page before the offending query receded in popularity later in the day. Google said little about the incident. "Hot Trends is automatically generated by algorithms and machines that are there to detect hot or breaking queries," said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. "We saw lots of queries from a number of different places in a short period of time" for the offending sketch, Mr. Sticker said. He declined whether the queries appeared to be the work of individuals or bots. This is the third time that Google Trends has had to deal with such stunts in recent months. In July, a swastika appeared on Hot Trends. A week later, the list was attacked again. Search experts said the repeated incidents are something of an embarrassment for the world's No. 1 search engine. "It's not a good thing for Google," said Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land. After last summer's incidents, Google
- Baidu.com Accused of Rigging SearchJanuary 6
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Businessweek.com:
Beijing - For months, the Web site China City Map ranked among the top results for the Chinese term "provincial map" on Google (GOOG) and other search engines, including China's No. 1 player, Baidu (BIDU). Then in August, salesmen representing Baidu asked the site to buy ads that would appear after a user typed in words related to maps in China. Chief Executive Michael Chen declined, figuring he was doing just fine without the ads. But in September, the site vanished from Baidu's results, though it still ranked high on Google and Yahoo! (YHOO) Traffic dropped by 90%. "If you have problems with Baidu," says Chen, "you're basically dead." Chen isn't alone in feeling Baidu is abusing its position as China's search leader. Salespeople working for Baidu drop sites from results to bully companies into buying sponsored links, say some who have been approached. Former clients say their rankings fall precipitously after they stop buying search-related ads from Baidu. At least one Baidu salesperson acknowledges they're right. "The key is whether a company buys Baidu's sponsored links," says Zhong Hongjun, a salesman from a company that represents Baidu in the central city of Wuhan. "If they don't, the search engine won't find them. If they do, they'll be in there." Baidu denies the accusations. In a written response to queries, the company said: "We never bl
- Interview with Vint Cerf of GoogleJanuary 2
- Back on August 13 2008 I interviewed Vint Cerf, Google's Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist. It was a brief but rich exchange. Here is the text: SV: Good morning, Vint. As you know, I am writing a book called The Googlization of Everything. VC: By that I suppose you are using "Googlization" as a proxy for search in general. SV: Well, yes, in a way. But that's only because of the ways that Google itself has moved itself into so many important parts of our lives. By all recent statistics, Google is the dominant search engine in the United States and a significant and growing presence in the rest of the world. Is Google becoming synonymous with the Internet itself? Is Google as an interface merging with the Internet itself, creating a unified experience? VC: We are not as prominent as the statistics suggest. The use of Google varies significantly by place. In China, for instance, we are latecomers. Languages have specific properties. Chinese, Korean, Slavic - they all have different spacing rules and word endings that you have to know about if you are going to do search. That's why we need native language experience and have offices all over the world. SV: What about the cultural power of Google and search in general? Jonathan Zittrain wrote a few years back that the battle to control domain names would not last too long as control over search terms and keywords would displace a good domain name. It's better to
- Writing the Web's Future in Many Languages - NYTimes.comDecember 31 2008
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NYTimes.com:
December 31, 2008 Writing the Web's Future in Numerous Languages By DANIEL SORID The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States. The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn. So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad's predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from the cellphone maker Nokia and the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool. ...
- Merry X-mas!December 25 2008
- Here is a nice post from the Official Google Blog about how Google took over the Santa tracking efforts on the Web. Yes Virginia. Even Santa has been Googlized.