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."

Google Advertising How Google determines ranks and rates of its sponsored links

Plain English article detailing main features of Google Advertising..

Behind the Curtain / How Google determines ranks and rates of its sponsored links: "Scott Kessler, a Standard & Poor's analyst, worries about what he calls Google's ABCs of risk: the absence of other means for making money; building competition; and click fraud, a practice in which competitors or scammers click on ads repeatedly, potentially costing Google and its advertisers thousands of dollars.
'It's one of the great questions people have to ponder with Google,' Kessler said about click fraud.
But before laying odds on Google's future, it helps to have a better understanding of the firm's deceptively simple business model. So, how does Google make all that money?

Google's advertising business appears simple. It takes just a few minutes and $5 to start posting sponsored links.

The tricky part comes as businesses battle for the top position on the first page of Google's results. Naturally, that's the sweet spot: An ad at the top of the page receives roughly double the clicks of others, said Michael Schwarz, a researcher at UC Berkeley.

But there is no way to guarantee that crucial spot. Where an advertisement appears depends on a combination of how much a business is willing to pay, and how much the ad has to do with the search.

That means that no matter how much an advertiser is willing to pay, the ad will not get top billing if the user is looking for something completely different...

In January, U.S. consumers used Google for 2.8 billion searches, or nearly 50 percent all of online queries, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That helped produce 41.1 billion sponsored links in January on Google and its partner sites. And the experience with click fraud hasn't stopped E-magine Networks and other businesses from continuing to use Google.

"I'm not trying to be angry with Google. I want to work with Google," said Dupell of E-magine Networks.

"It is not an evil corporation," he continued. "It may be a place where fraud does occur, but Google does refund the money back if it can be proven. ... They have made us a fortune and they've made our clients a fortune and they continue to every day."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to do it
Placing an advertisement on Google can cost as little as $5 and take just a few minutes.

1. Draw up a three-line advertisement, no more than 100 characters total.

2. Enter the keywords that will activate your sponsored link, such as "cheap airfare" for an ad about discount travel.

3. Bid in an auction for those keywords, determining how much you're willing to pay. The minimum bid is 1 cent per click. The maximum is $100 per click. You can't spend more than $250,000 a day.

4. Give Google your billing information and wait for your ad to appear."

Google Execs Paint Bright Picture - Forbes.com

Update 5: Google Execs Paint Bright Picture - Forbes.com: "Google Inc. provided stock market analysts with more color about its secretive operations Thursday, painting a bright picture that appeared aimed at defusing growth concerns raised by the search engine leader's chief financial officer earlier this week....

In his opening remarks, Google CEO Eric Schmidt assured the roomful of analysts that he sees "tremendous headroom" to develop an even more effective advertising approach.

Schmidt underscored his optimism at one point by saying Google someday might generate $100 billion in annual revenue as it expands into a variety of new advertising channels, including television, radio and publishing. The 7-year-old company's revenue totaled $6.1 billion last year.

"Our assessment is we are in the strongest position that we have ever been," Schmidt said later in the day...The upbeat remarks contrasted with Reyes' cautious commentary during a question-and-answer session at a Tuesday investor conference in New York. At that time, Reyes cited the difficulty that Google would have improving its advertising formula and advised the company's growth rate was bound to slow down - a prospect that set off alarms among investors and caused Google's stock price to drop precipitously

Reyes told analysts that Google's capital spending this year will be substantially higher than last year's $838 million investment. He indicated most of the money will be spent increasing Google's already formidable computing power so it can deliver more products and servers to Web surfers.

Google also plans to continue a hiring spree that expanded the company's payroll by an average of 7 new employees per day last year. Reyes said much of the hiring will be concentrated outside the United States as Google continues to expand internationally.

In another development, Schmidt identified Microsoft Corp. as the rival that most worries Google because of the way the world's largest software maker has aggressively attacked other technology upstarts in the past.

Microsoft currently runs the Internet's third most popular search engine, ranking behind both Google and Yahoo Inc., but it has vowed to close the gap by improving its technology and luring new users by giving away free merchandise and services.
"

Pagerank update update

Great result for a little bit of effort on the linking aspect, my humble litttle gambling blog now has a pagerank of 4! Better work on some links for the main site which now shows PR2, not bad though....Gambling Housewife Free Horse Racing Tips may be not as impressive as my January tipping

SiteProNews: Google.cn: The Internet As Beijing Sees It

SiteProNews: Google.cn: The Internet As Beijing Sees It: "the last two or three years have shown us the inherent strength of the search engine - and none more than
Google. And I believe that an unintended consequence of Google's controversial stance in China has an awareness increase of just how influential search results can be. Comparisons of 'Tiananm en' searches are illustrating this. Several blogs are showing split screen stills of keyword results using 'Tiananmen'on Google Images. Google.cn shows picture after picture of a lovely park, while Google.com shows a screen full of those infamous images of a lone protestor in front of menacing tanks.

Just one example of real time censorship is being beamed live over the internet, brought to you by Google. It makes for
unintentional and terrible publicity for Google. Oddly timed,too, considering Google's righteous defense here in the United States against government intrusion into their own affairs.

From a business perspective Google's position is sound and totally understandable....

Could anyone actually believe that Google will protect Chinese Internet users if the powers in Beijing started making demands for private search information on Chinese searches? Google has entered China on Beijing's terms, compromised. When issues of ethics arise Google won't have much to say because they are clearly in China for the dough. The power of search, that we see in China, can - and let's be frank, will be used against the people someday. This would make Google, of "Do No Evil" fame - somewhat complicit.

Until some big changes occur in Beijing I foresee much awkwardness for the "Do No Evil" bunch's operation in China.
Simply put, the Party Leaders in Beijing have Google over a barrel - I suppose that means selling out. If they cared only
about profits, this article might not have even been written. But this is Google. And their product is a powerful tool and they've already yielded it to some very powerful folks in Beijing. This time it was to prevent the Chinese people from accessing certain information. As this tool of search continues to refine and become powerful, it's tough to say what Google will be asked for. Perhaps Google will be coerced into giving up the identities of their own users in China. It is anything but a farfetched scenario.

Is hypocrisy in big business expected? Sure, to some degree. But this is dangerous hypocrisy."

Google Takes the Road More Traveled

Google Takes the Road More Traveled: "Search Engine News > Google Takes the Road More Traveled...

A little more than a year after their attempt to shake up the IPO world by selling shares through a Dutch auction designed to give the "little guy" just as much chance at buying in as the big investors have, Google seems to be giving in to traditional Wall Street tactics and shifting their attention toward the big money buyers."

The Search Experience has a De Facto Standard -Google (for Now)

The Search Experience has a De Facto Standard (for Now): "Google: The User's Definition of Search

Google's interface has become the de facto standard for search. Even now, all three of the major properties have very similar search results layouts, with only slight variations to distinguish them. It's in those variations, the nuances of design and layout, where the differences in the user experience can be found. Everything is measured against Google, and at this point, Google's interface defines the ideal search experience...

Google has done a lot right (and a few things wrong) but perhaps the smartest move they've ever made is to pay meticulous attention to the search user experience. Whether they designed an ideal interface by intention, or whether we've just been conditioned to accept it as the ideal interface, it works for us"

Q&A With Google Time Magazine

A Little Q&A With Google: "Brin, Page and Schmidt, the trio that runs Google, are the cover boys of this week's Time Magazine. Asking questions like 'Can we Trust Google With our Secrets' and publishing a general Q&A with the threesome turns up some interesting tidbits of information, including a claim by the founders that porn makes up a tiny percentage of their overall search numbers... The article includes some interesting insight. For example, the decision not to run ads on Google's image search results because the estimated $80 million that it would produce in revenue each year isn't "worth it."

From the article:

Google's decision to launch a censored website in China was so jarring. (See "Google Under the Gun," TIME, Feb. 13, 2006.) Doing a totalitarian government's bidding in blocking the truth in order to make a few extra bucks is practically the definition of evil. Google acknowledges that it's in a tough situation but says it ultimately has to obey local laws. "There's a subtext to 'Don't be evil,' and that is 'Don't be illegal,'" says Vint Cerf, an Internet founding father who now serves as "chief Internet evangelist" at Google. "Overall, having Google there is better than not having Google there." But at what cost? Can Brin and Page live with the idea that Chinese Netizens can't access anything other than the official line on, say, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and that Google is part of the cover-up?

There's another big question that makes Brin and Page squirm: Does Google have a master plan? To outsiders, it sometimes seems as if the company is investing everywhere, trying to be everything, often giving its products away. A few of the newer pursuits: a proposal to provide free wireless Internet service for San Francisco; an online video store selling TV shows and NBA games; a classified-advertising site; a project to scan every book ever published and make the texts searchable; a free desktop package loaded with software; free instant messaging and online voice communication; a $1 billion investment in America Online. (AOL, like this magazine, is owned by Time Warner.) In the past year or so, Google Inc. has doubled in size to about 6,000 employees to handle all the new work. Even the bullish Rashtchy acknowledges that "Google is a black box for most people."

Google partners with BearingPoint | CNET News.com

Google partners with BearingPoint | CNET News.com: "A partnership that's expected to be announced Tuesday between Google and professional services provider BearingPoint, formerly KPMG, aims to make searching across corporate and internal desktops and databases as easy as using Google's Web search page.

BearingPoint has thousands of consultants trained to help companies--including many Global 2000 businesses--install, integrate and customize the Google Search Appliance and the Google Desktop for Enterprise software, Chris Weitz, managing director for BearingPoint, said on Monday.

The Google search appliance is used to let employees at corporations, federal agencies and other organizations search for documents in internal databases and other sources that may be spread across different locations and that tend to be unstructured data hidden from Internet search engines. The Desktop for Enterprise software lets people search for data on their desktops. "

GBUY hits the mainstream newsPayPal Prepares For a Challenge From Google

WSJ.com - PayPal Prepares For a Challenge From Google: "PayPal Prepares For a Challenge From Google...

When Jeff Jordan learned last May that Web-search leader Google Inc. was building its own Internet-payment service, he reacted swiftly.

Mr. Jordan, who is president of eBay Inc.'s PayPal online-payments unit, immediately asked employees to unearth information about the Google service. Soon, PayPal employees were monitoring blogs, news reports and other data for information about Google's progress in payments. PayPal staffers even gleaned details about Google's plans during regular calls to customers who were eager to dish about how Google had reached out to them.

"It's a very legitimate competitive threat," says Mr. Jordan, 47 years old. "It's hard not to pay attention to what Google is doing."

PayPal must now contend with Google. The Mountain View, Calif., Web-search giant, which has terrified Silicon Valley with its ability to quickly create new consumer products and services, is developing a rival service called GBuy. For the last nine months, Google has recruited online retailers to test GBuy, according to one person briefed on the service. GBuy will feature an icon posted alongside the paid-search ads of merchants, which Google hopes will tempt consumers to click on the ads, says this person. GBuy will also let consumers store their credit-card information on Google."

Matt Cutts: robots.txt, Google, and SEO � New robots.txt tool

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � New robots.txt tool: "Sitemaps team just introduced a new robots.txt tool into Sitemaps. The robots.txt file is one of the easiest things for a webmaster to make a mistake on. Brett Tabke�s Search Engine World has a great robots.txt tutorial and even a robots.txt validator...

Part of the problem is that mucking around with robots.txt files is pretty rare; once you get it right once, you usually never have to think about the file again. Another issue is that if you get the file wrong, it can have a large impact on your site, so most people don’t mess with their robots.txt file very often. Finally, each search engine has slightly different extra options that they support. For example, Google permits wildcards (*) and the “Allow:” directive...

the robots.txt checker from the Sitemaps team is that it lets you take a robots.txt file out for a test drive and see how the real Googlebot would handle a file. Want to play with wildcards to allow all files except for ‘*.gif’? Go for it. Want to experiment with upper vs. lower case? Answer: upper vs. lower case doesn’t matter. Want to check whether hyphens matter for Google? Go wild. Answer: we’ll accept “UserAgent” or “User-Agent”, but we’ll remind you that the hyphenated version is the correct version.

The best part is that you can test a robots.txt file without risking anything by doing it on your live site..."

Matt Cutts: Bigdaddy update, Google, and SEO � Bigdaddy progress update

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Bigdaddy progress update: " Bigdaddy continues to roll out and is now available at three data centers. In addition to 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104, Bigdaddy is now up at 216.239.51.104. We’ve been going through the spam feedback and acting on it, and reading through the general search feedback as well.
...

Bigdaddy involves new infrastructure and is not just a data push or algorithm update. Don�t take it as a promise, but I�d expect a new data center to be converted to Bigdaddy roughly every 10 days or so. "

Matt Cutts: on Big Daddy & possible sandbox behavior

Matt Cutts: on the SEO Rockstars show on webmasterradio.fm Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � I�m on webmasterradio.fm!: "show is live at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/index.php?showId=16 so go download the mp3. It�s a mere 70-ish megabytes. Highlights included an update on BigDaddy, some questions about possible sandbox behavior, my take on the new show Lestat before it heads to Broadway, SEO contests, and my current pet peeve (subdomain spam, which BigDaddy does better on). "

Matt Cutts: BMW reincluded Google, and SEO � Recent reinclusions

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Recent reinclusions: Cutts writes "I appreciate BMW�s quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties. The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index. Likewise, ricoh.de has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Google's index."

The phrase that jumps out at me is "The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW"...did BMW not have to submit "a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded." as posted earlier? It doesnt sound like it..

In comments it appears they did but there are still many questions:

" Can small sites without BMW’s financial clout expect comparable treatment from Google or can we consider this as just another newsworthy case study?"

"How convenient for BMW to be in touch with google. How exactly does the average webmaster get in touch with google? How often is the regular webmaster told why their site has been taken out of the google index? How quickly (or delayed) is the re-inclusion of banned sites?"

Cutts replies: "Our main goal has to be to give the most relevant results to our users; there is currently a trade-off between taking action to remove spam from our index vs. removing sites that lots of users look for with navigational queries. In my mind, the most scalable, robust direction to move in is to provide tools like Sitemaps and the webmaster console that allow everyone to diagnose and debug as much information as possible with their site. As we introduce features like the robots.txt checker, that helps every website owner equally, whether it be a mom and pop website or Nissan, Metallica, or the California DMV (all of which have had robots.txt issues in the past)....

we’ve been working on programs like emailing webmasters when we find quality violations on their sites...

it’s a pretty common idiom to have a Flash site and then provide a text version of a site; I wouldn’t worry about anything like that "

an entirely new way to optimize web sites... Visitor Enhanced Optimization - VEO for short

Internet Marketing Secrets and Strategies. Issue #85 February 02 2006: "Does Google trust you? Are you on the list of trusted sites? Do you ever wonder why some sites get the green light and rise to the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages) and why others never seem to get anywhere? It's all about trust....

In VEO you don't play against the search engine algorithm, you ignore it completely. You don't focus on keyword densities, you aim for a happy visitor. You don't sell sell sell products like an affiliate, you brand the site and soft sell the products through articles...

suggests that you have a passion for your topic matter. That you become an expert in your field. Learn it inside out and write about it, putting that content on your site. Advertise the site and build it into a strong brand while soft selling products in the background.

If all this sounds backwards and crazy, remember that Colin's inspiration and motivation, came from that long conversation with Google. It's as close as you'll ever get to them giving an endorsement.

VEO Report: "how to establish trust with Google' - It is not enough to pursue inbound links and tweak your content to match a keyword density formula. In fact these activities will likely erode trust with Google""

Google to Unveil New Chat Feature

Google to Unveil New Chat Feature - Forbes.com: "Online search engine leader Google Inc. is wedding its instant messaging and e-mail services in the same Web browser, hoping the convenience will lure users from the larger communications networks operated by its chief rivals.

The new chat feature to be unveiled Tuesday will provide users of Google's Gmail service with a list of contacts drawn from past e-mail exchanges and then signal who's available for online conversations...

Google hopes to make it even simpler to connect with an online contact by allowing users to initiate an electronic conversation within the same Web browser showing an e-mailbox, bypassing the need to switch to a separate instant messaging application."

Matt Cutts: on 410's 404's Google, and SEO

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO: "a good interview with the Sitemaps team. The most useful tidbit (which I didn�t know until now) is that Google treats a 404 HTTP status code (page not found, but it may reappear) and a 410 HTTP status code (page not found, and it�s gone forever) in the same way. I believe that we treat 404s as if they were 410s; once Googlebot has seen a 404 at that location, I think we assume that the document is gone forever. Given how many people use 404 instead of 410, that�s probably a good call for the time being."