Google Avoids Surrendering Search Requests

ALBERTO R. GONZALES, in his officialcapacity as Attorney General of the United
States,Plaintiff,v. GOOGLE, INC.,Defendant.
The full 21-page order PDF "this case raises three vital interests:

(1) the national interest in a judicial system to reach informed decisions through the power of a subpoena to compel a third party to produce relevant information;

(2) the third-party's interest in not being compelled by a subpoena to reveal confidential business information and devote resources to a distant litigation; and

(3) the interest of individuals in freedom from general surveillance by the Government of their use of the Internet or othercommunications media.In aid of the Government’s position

Google Avoids Surrendering Search Requests - Forbes.com: "A federal judge on Friday ordered Google Inc. to give the Bush administration a peek inside its search engine, but rebuffed the government's demand for a list of people's search requests - potentially sensitive information that the company had fought to protect...

... District Judge James Ware told Google to provide the U.S. Justice Department with the addresses of 50,000 randomly selected Web sites indexed by its search engine by April 3...." The judge " though, decided Google won't have to disclose what people have been looking for on its widely used search engine, handing a significant victory to the company and privacy rights advocates."

Click Fraud: Review of Google case

Click Fraud: An Industry Crisis? Kevin Lee explains the Google settlement and click fraud. He explains which advertisers may be eligible to collect from the settlement and " whether you should opt in to the proposed settlement and whether you need help managing the click fraud problem going forward"

Three adwords campaign features increase the likelihood of click fraud:

Participation in Google's broader networks.
High CPC (define) keywords in popular markets
Monthly budgets under $20,000 in a competitive marketplace with privately held players

Lee concludes:

"click fraud caught by the engines' filters and clicks that escape detection are quite different across segments, keywords, and bid prices. For some marketers, the occasional fraudulent click can be regarded as a cost of doing business; for others, it may be a major issue."

Want to Work for Google ?

Only in the States,and only if you are "fit", shame.

Google hiring AdWords Seminar Leaders - JenSense.com "Google is apparently sending out invites to its pool of Google Advertising Professionals for AdWords. Those that receive an invite are encouraged to submit a resume, a video and an application form in order to secure one of the paid spots. Those that are selected as speakers will apparently also be given access to contacts within the AdWords teams and to inside information about coming AdWords features.

Supplemental club: Big Daddy update debate

Many sites have seen a noticeable drop in traffic & sales numbers primarily from Google traffic over the past couple of weeks from the end of feb into march.

Webmaster world hosts a long discussion with all the usual "moral panic" symptoms..

Quote "around FEB 21st where 1000s and 1000s of legitimate sites lost all their pages except their homepage."

Pretty hysterical until Google guy steps up to soothe all those fevered brows...Supplemental club: Big Daddy coming - Part 1 Google Guy writes: "It's like old times. :) ... Based on the specifics everyone has sent (thank you, by the way), I'm pretty sure what the issue is. I'll check with the crawl/indexing team to be sure though. Folks don't need to send any more emails unless they really want to. It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index."