Google

You are about to get left behind. Starting on March 13th YouTube won’t care about you anymore:

Over six months ago, Google announced it would start phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 on Orkut and YouTube, and started pushing its users to modern browsers. The search giant has now given a specific kill date for old browser support on the video website via a page on Google.com titled Solve a Problem: Upgrading your browser:

Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won't work in older browsers.

I can’t recommend enough that you upgrade your browser, not just because of this, but mainly because of the security concerns. IE6 has long been a security nightmare. The newer versions of Internet Explorer are much better. Besides – it’s free to upgrade and can be done in less than 10 minutes.

I wouldn’t have bothered posting on this, but I went through my stats and realized I still have about 10% of my readers on IE6. I know C&L still has close to 7% also and when we do the big upgrade there in a few weeks a lot of the new functionality won’t work on IE6 either.

Technology is changing rapidly and the internet can’t hold back for those that aren’t willing to keep up. Like I said, the upgrade is simple and easy, so what are you waiting for?

Finally parts of the U.S. might see some real internet speeds:

Google says it will run fiber-to-the-home trials at the astounding data speed of 1 gigabit per second. They'll sell this service at "a competitive price" to 50,000 people, possibly rising to 500,000 people.

It's at this point that I'd like to toss around some choice slang that is not acceptable when printed under the NPR banner. But I can't. So I'll just leave it at this: Holy cow!

I can't get past that speed number: One gigabit per second. Google says that's about 100 times faster than most home broadband connections. I'd say it's more than 100 times faster. My DSL connection is certainly not running at 10 Mbps. This is the kind of number that makes you sit back and wonder, if they can do that, why isn't someone else -- a dedicated ISP, for instance -- already doing it?

Internet speeds in the United States suck to the point that the birthplace of the internet is now ranked 28th in the world for internet speed. When it comes to broadband penetration, the U.S. is slightly better, ranking at 20th. So why hasn’t the existing ISPs been doing anything? Simple – they are greedy. Infrastructure is a big cost and they don’t want to invest in it.

What we need is a big government project to bring the U.S. back to the lead of the internet revolution, something akin to the interstate project. Think of the number of people that will put to work stringing fiber optic lines all across this nation. The government can also offset these costs by coming up with a “leasing” type agreement, where ISPs pay a certain fee back to the government for each user. Other local companies would get tax breaks by providing the repair and maintenance on the new, national network.

The United States hasn’t embraced the online world like it should. It is a key component in the 21st century economy, with more and more people telecommuting to work now. An investment like this won’t only help employment in the short term, but also in the long term. It will make the U.S. a strong competitor in the technological economy and provide decent internet to the millions of Americans who are still stuck on the early 90s connection speeds of dial-up.

So big kudos to Google for working to push the U.S. to this goal. I just wish I could enjoy it, but fiber optics here in Butler County, Ohio is a bad word thanks to Republican corruption and greed that put a halt to our attempts to bring fiber optics to all area.

This is an interesting development in the browser wars:

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, used his personal blog to urge Firefox users away from Google and to use Microsoft's search engine Bing, instead. Dotzler cited privacy concerns, specifically pointing to comments recently made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Dotzler points out that Bing’s privacy policy is much better than Google’s.

What really makes this interesting news is that Firefox has had a long relationship with Google. Google is Firefox’s default search engine and even the default home page is nothing more than a modified Google front page.

In a world where people worry about their searched becoming public or used in a court, I would have to say that Bing might be the better choice. Personally I use both, but recently I switched Firefox to using Bing as the default search engine. This wasn’t for privacy reasons, but rather performance. I find Bing results load much faster and for the past few weeks I have been suffering from horrible hangs on Google’s page.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if after all this time and failed attempts by Microsoft that they finally make an impact on Google?

Image by Eric Schmidt / Google via CrunchBase

Eric Schmidt, the head cheese of Google, has written a lengthy article appearing in the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal. In the piece Schmidt not only clarifies the distortions Murdoch has been laying out these past few weeks, but also what Google is doing to help the news industry.

First off here is Schmidt talking about Murdoch’s claims:

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper's Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

The claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

That is exactly what I have been saying all along. Google isn’t “stealing content”, they are simply indexing very small tidbits of it so people can easily find it, and they do find it at a rate of one billion per month. I don’t think that’s something any serious news publisher would want to turn away.

It sure looks that way:

Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced.

The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.

Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.

Considering Murdoch has gone after Google simple indexing their site and displaying the headline and the first few words, I don’t know if this would really be caving, but rather an attempt from Google to find a common middle ground. If Google stands by this policy then it would give them some extra ammo to fight Murdoch with.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Microsoft has approached News Corp. about de-listing their sites from Google, which would be an apparent escalation in the search engine wars.

It appears that Microsoft isn’t limiting this to just News Corp either. It’s reported that they are approaching numerous online publishers and offering to pay them for content if they delist from Google. One publisher approached by Microsoft said this is all about “Microsoft hurting Google’s margin”.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is their latest attempt to give Google a run for the money. Here are the October search engine market shares, and as you can see Microsoft has a long way to go to beat out Google:

Bing has increased at the same rate that Google has, but what is interesting is that it appears their shares are coming from Yahoo. In July of this year Microsoft and Yahoo entered a deal for Yahoo to use the Bing search engine on their sites in exchange for a split on advertising revenue, so Yahoo’s decrease in the market share also directly effects Microsoft.

Of course the whole basis of this plan depends upon the belief that Google is actually “stealing” content, something that is in serious debate in both the tech and legal worlds. If this war does escalate and end up in the courts then we could finally see a ruling come out on exactly what the “fair use doctrine” covers – something we have been running blind on for years. Given the fact that Google only reproduces the headline and first few words of an article and that this use is both for research and archival purposes, it appears that Google would have a very strong case in the courts. To really solidify their case and put the final nail in the coffin of this war, Google could remove advertising from the news section of their search engine, which is the only questionable part of “fair use” when it comes to their service. Even better would be for Google to spin off the news part of their search engine and make it a non-profit partnered with Google. Google can surely afford it, and this would destroy any battle Microsoft or News Corp may be planning.

Whatever happens with this, it is clear the Murdoch still isn’t set on removing his sites from Google. I just checked again and what I reported a couple of weeks ago still stands – News Corp sites have explicit directions asking Google to index them. This could also be used against the Murdoch/Microsoft plan. What would happen if Google showed that News Corp sites saw a large percentage of their visits originate from Google? I know that they have records of those kind of metrics, and it would be interesting to hear News Corp argue that they didn’t mind Google increasing their online visibility all these years for free.

I had almost forgot about this deal between Google and MySpace, a NewsCorp company. In 2006 the two entered into an agreement. Basically Google would get exclusive search advertising rights in exchange for $900 million over three years. MySpace also had to guarantee a minimum amount of traffic.

That was all three years ago and in the world of the internet, that is an eternity. Now things have changed. MySpace was one a thriving website, one of the best known. Today Facebook has taken the lead and MySpace is on a constant downward spiral.

That’s the deal and then there was this news last week:

MySpace, once the centerpiece of Rupert Murdoch’s digital strategy, has fallen “significantly” short of expectations and is jeopardising [sic] a critical $900m internet search agreement with Google.

Weaker traffic means the News Corp division is now expected to receive about $100m less from a deal that had underpinned investors’ confidence in the MySpace acquisition, executives revealed.

So because Murdoch’s company couldn’t live up to their end of the deal now he might be out some big bucks. Perhaps that is some motivation behind Murdoch singling out Google in his search engine rants. Murdoch is now saying that he will be pulling his content from Google in a matter of “months”. I don’t know why he wants to wait. Google has already stated he can do it now.

There has been a lot of talk today about Murdoch wanting to have Google stop indexing his news sites. I’m not going to go into the piss poor business decision this is, but I do need to highlight this:

Mr Murdoch also indicated that he would use legal methods to prevent Google and other search engine “news aggregators” from taking his newspapers’ material.

Really – going to sue Google over this? Let’s take a look at how much Fox News tries to keep Google out.

When a search engine goes to a website it reads a file called robots.txt. This is like an instruction manual for search engines on what to search and not to search. You can view my robots.txt file here.

So what does the robots.txt file on foxnews.com say?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /printer_friendly_story
Disallow: /projects/livestream
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow: /printer_friendly_story
Allow: /google_search_index.xml
Allow: /google_news_index.xml
Allow: /*.xml.gz
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml

Well look at that. Not only is Fox allowing Google, but they are giving specific directions to Google to read files and index those items.

The best way to explain this I can think of is the example of a robber. Let’s say you open the door and ask the robber to come on in. You then walk him around your house, pointing out all your valuables for him to take. Now after he takes them and leaves you decide to go after the robber legally. Of course a robber would be a person engaged in illegal activity generally, something Google isn’t.

But the tech behind robots. txt isn’t the only way to stop Google from indexing your site. Google offers numerous ways to have your site removed from their search engine, and have already said they will gladly pull his sites out of there, if he so wishes.

There does seem to be something more sinister to Murdoch’s master plan than all this:

Asked how he reacted to the challenge of Google and others for newspapers such as his to remove their newspapers from search results, Mr Murdoch said that once they had in place the means to charge for news, “I think we will”.

He also challenged the idea that Google and others could take just the headlines and opening lines from his papers’ stories, indicating that he would not tolerate even that.

“[They use] a doctrine called fair use, which we believe can be challenged in the courts and will bar it altogether,” he said.

So Murdoch is planning on using Google until he decides it’s time to make people pay, after that it is all him. So how are you going to know what his new “pay sites” offer if you can’t even find them, let alone have an idea of what is published? One would think that a well written headline would be a sure seller for his new product, but apparently old Rupert doesn’t even want that. Instead it appears as though he is going after a “fork over the money then see what you get” model of business. Oh yeah – that will be a big success there.

I can’t wait for all this to happen. It’s a good thing I am not a big decision maker at Google because I would go ahead and save Rupert the very minimal headache of having to have his sites removed and just do it now. That includes all News Corp sites, including things like Fox Movies. Just imagine when someone wants to check out a trailer for some big new movie and decides to Google it? And let’s not forget about all the Fox affiliates out there. Hey they have a right to republish Fox items, so Google shouldn’t take a chance.

I also hope that Rupert does decide to file legal action against Google. Can you imagine the trial if it ever went there? The defense would just have to say “here are copies of documents placed on Fox servers by Fox people asking our software to index their site and place the information in our search results”. I think the only lawyer Rupert would be able to find to take this case if Orly Taitz.

Reports are that Microsoft and Yahoo have sealed the deal for Microsoft to offer their new Bing search engine as the default search engine for Yahoo. In my opinion this should give Google something to worry about. Bing is a very nice search engine. Microsoft finally broke out of their stagnant web presence with the new search engine, and now Google’s main competitor will use it.

Of course Google is so far ahead of Microsoft in other web services that I don’t know if it will pose as much of a threat as people are expecting. I really like Bing, but I still use Google for 99% of my searches. It isn’t a matter of preference, but rather a force of habit. Also we can expect to see Google take the nice benefits of Bing and improve on them. It’s all part of the competition that goes on daily in the internet business.

It amazed me a few weeks ago when a federal judge ruled that Google had to turn over the viewer logs for YouTube to Viacom, in Viacom's lawsuit. I read a lot of blogs that quickly blasted the decision as an invasion of privacy. It looks like they were following the tinfoil hat committee:

Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers.

Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site.

Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs' attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers.

Now I am not a lawyer, but this makes perfect sense. Viacom never planned on going after the millions of people who may have seen their content on YouTube. Think about it for a second - if they did these people have the ability to really hurt Viacom by simply turning off Comedy Central, not going to movies by Paramount, or boycotting any other product Viacom offers. Instead the decision was made so that Viacom could prove that people were using YouTube to watch the videos. It's part of the chain of evidence, and the ruling makes perfect sense.

Back to the bloggers for a minute. There are some on the left that really got to me. They were so quick to denounce this lawsuit and blast Viacom openly. Some of these bloggers are the very same that will fire off a nasty email to other bloggers when they feel like their content has been used without attribution. It's amazing how they love to apply double standards on this stuff.