The example chosen by searchengineland is a good one. Search for Apple iPod and you get a page that is mostly links to Apple’s site.

If you search for the single word ipod you get more diversity – odd, since only Apple manufacture the ipod so you could argue that the searches are the same. Some people use ipod as a generic name for MP3 player, but that doesn’t seem to be reflected; all the results still relate to Apple’s device.

Personally I’d rather see diversity. I don’t see the need for this change, since the site summary with deep links works well when a particular domain closely matches the search term. You can see an example of this in the top result for the ipod search above. Note that it even has a link for “More results from apple.com”. What is the value of suppressing the results from other domains?

The overall impact is that big brands benefit, while smaller businesses and new entrants to markets suffer. It also makes independent comment that bit harder to find.

While to most of us changes like these are only of passing interest, to some they make the difference between a flourishing business and a dead one. Google has too much power.

Incidentally, I generally find Google significantly better than Bing, now its major competitor. However in this case Bing impresses, with categories such as reviews, prices, accessories, manuals and so on; and in the case of the Apple ipod search, a better balance between the official site and independents.

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This is poor practice for several reasons. It is annoying and disrespectful to the user, particularly when the same dialog has been passed many times before, bad for performance, bad for security.

Sun at least had the excuse that it needed whatever income it could get.

I know certain other companies do this as well with their free runtimes – Adobe is one – and I like it just as little. However, as far as I can recall Adobe only adds foistware on a new install, not with semi-automatic updates.

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After Google I/O 2010 that seems less likely. Google showed off the momentum behind Android – there are now over 100,000 Android activations daily, according to Vic Gundotra – and then gave a compelling demo of new features in Android 2.2, code-named Froyo, including:

• New Dalvik just-in-time compiler with 2-5x speed improvement in CPU-bound code
• Better Exchange support with account auto-discovery, calendar sync, Global Address List support, and device policy support
• V8 JavaScript engine in Android browser, 2-3x speed improvement
• Apps can backup data to the cloud, for instant restore on a replacement device
• Ability to make Android phone a portable wi-fi hotspot for your Windows, Apple or Linux machine
• Stream your home media library to your Android device
• Cloud to device messaging
• Crash reports with stacktrace uploaded for developers to review
• Some great demos of voice input combined with Google search and maps

In some ways the details do not matter; what does matter is that Google persuaded the world that Android mobiles would be more than a match for iPhones, but without the Apple lock-in, lock-out, and censorship.

Support for Adobe Flash is almost more a political than a technical matter in this context. I cannot help wondering whether Microsoft is working on Silverlight for Android; it should be, but probably is not. The Mono team on the other hand is there already.

Apple now has a bit of a PR problem; and while I am sure it will ride it out successfully and impress us at WWDC next month, the fact that it has a PR problem at all is something of a novelty.

Next came Google TV, with which I was less impressed, and not only because the demos were shaky. I understand the thinking behind it. You could almost see the $ signs revolving when Google mentioned the $70 billion annual spend on TV advertising. Google TV adds an Android device and internet connection to your living room television set, bringing YouTube to the largest screen in the house, enabling web browsing, and opening up interesting opportunities such as running Android apps, combining TV and web search, and overlaying TV with social media interaction.

It sounds good; but while I am a firm believer in the Internet’s power to disrupt broadcasting – especially here in the UK where we have BBC iPlayer – I am not sure that injecting the Web into TV like this is such a big deal. In fact, games consoles do this already. Sony’s Howard Stringer was at Google I/O to support the announcement, which has his company’s participation, but a PS3 already offers BBC iPlayer, Adobe Flash 9, and a basic web browser. I use this from time to time and enjoy it, but a TV is not great for web browsing since you are sitting at a distance, and wireless keyboards are a nuisance kicking round the living room – we tried that for a while with Windows Media Center. Activities like online shopping or simply Tweeting are easier to do on other devices.

Maybe it is just waiting for the right implementation. If it does take off though, I will be interested to see what the broadcasters think of it. What if Google manages to serve contextual ads based on the content you are viewing? That would not please me if I had invested millions in creating that content, specifically in order to attract advertising.

It may be developers that make or break Google TV. Add a few compelling apps that work best in this context, and we will all want one.

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The consequence of doing this, according to Google:

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

I then saw a report saying that Google has indeed penalised the Daily Express. I checked the page rank of the Daily Express home page here and found that it is indeed lower than could be expected.

While it is difficult to say what the page rank should be, Alexa shows the Express site as among the top 15,000 worldwide and in the top 1000 in the UK, with over 4,000 incoming links.

Although the Daily Express is not to my taste, I have misgivings about this process. A significant proportion of web traffic comes via Google, and lower search rankings have a direct effect on traffic and therefore business. Exactly how Google determines search rankings is a commercial secret, even though the gist of how it works is well known. There is not much you can do if mistakes are made, other than to complain to Google and hope someone pays attention to you.

There is nothing illegal about selling paid links, and the article highlighted in the Express is marked as “Sponsored”. While it is right for Google not to count these links as genuine recommendations, I am less sure about whether there should be additional punishment for running them. It puts too much power to make and break other companies into the hands of Google.

Of course we don’t know if the low ranking is a result of the paid links or not; that is speculation. Nor do we know how closely the published page rank corresponds which how Google actually determines the order of search results. Looking at Alexa’s report, there’s no conclusive evidence of declining traffic, though Alexa’s figures are based on a relatively small sample.

Still, I get a ton of these paid link requests and this kind of story makes me glad that I always turn them down.

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Using Chrome doesn’t mean sharing more information with Google than using any other browser

says a spokesman in this video, part of a series on Google Chrome & Privacy.

What then follows is links to four other videos describing the various ways in which Google Chrome records your web activity.

If you subtract the spin, the conclusion is that Google retrieves a large amount of data from you, especially if you stick with the default settings. Further, it is not possible as far as I know to use the browser without sending any data to your default search provider, most likely Google. The reason is the Omnibox, the combined address and search box. Here’s what Google’s Brian Rakowski says in the video on Google Chrome & Privacy – Browsers search and suggestions

For combined search and web address to work, input in the Omnibox will need to be sent to your search provider to return suggestions. If you have chosen Google as your search provider, only around 2% of the search input is logged and used to improve Google’s suggestion service. Rest assured that this data is anonymised as soon as possible within 24 hours, and you always have the option of disabling the suggest feature at any time.

However, even if you disable suggestions, what you type in the box still gets sent to your search provider if it is not a valid web address, in other words anything that is not a complete URL (though Chrome will infer the http:// prefix).

It is also worth noting that Google does not only get your data via browser features. Most web pages today are not served from a single source. They include scripts that serve data from other locations, which means that your browser requests it, which means that these other locations know your IP number, browser version and so on. Two of the most common sources for such scripts are Google AdSense (for advertising) and Google Analytics (for analysing web traffic).

Even if you contrive not to tell Google in advance where you are going, it will probably find out when you get there.

It is important to distinguish what Google can do from what it does do. Note the language in Rakowski’s explanation above. When he says input is sent to your search provider, he is describing the technology. When he says that data is anonymized as soon as possible, he is asking us to trust Google.

Note also that if you ask to send in auditors to verify that Google is successfully anonymising your data, it is likely that your request will be refused.

There are ways round all these things, but most of us have to accept that Google is getting more than enough data from us to create a detailed profile. Therefore the secondary question, of how trustworthy the company is, matters more than the first one, about how it gets the data.

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The talk was an informative and open insight into Google’s future direction. It was centred on mobile; but since Google now regards the mobile phone as the primary device for how we interact with the world, that was no limitation. Google is putting mobile first, said Schmidt, because it is the meeting point for the three things that matter: computing, connectivity and the cloud. He believes that phones will replace credit cards, for example, as they are smarter and more secure for financial transactions.

Google’s strategy is to combine the near-unlimited power of server-side computing with its database of human behaviour, to create devices that are “like magic. All of a sudden there are things you can do that were not previously possible.”

He gave an illuminating example: Google voice search. You speak into your phone, and Google transcribes your voice and performs a search. Voice recognition is nothing new, but the difference in the Google demo is that it works. Here’s how. The problem with voice recognition is that one word sounds very like another, especially since we do not speak with precision and every voice varies. Computers cannot understand exactly what we say, but they can use dictionaries to come up with a set of possibilities for what we said, one of which is likely to be correct.

The next step is the brilliant one. Google takes this set of possible phrases and compares it to recent Google searches. If one of them matches a popular search, then it is likely to be what you said. Bingo. Google now does this in four languages, with German demonstrated for the first time yesterday.

It works on the assumption that humans are not very original. We tend to do similar things, and to be interested in similar things. Therefore, as Schmidt noted, if you are a tourist walking around a city with your location-aware phone, Google does not only know where you are; it also has a good idea of where you will go next.

Another cool demo is for image recognition. We saw this in two guises. In one, you hold up your phone and do an image search using the camera as input. Result: information about the building you are looking at. [Or maybe the person? Hmm.]

In another demo, you point the camera at your foreign-language menu as you ponder which incomprehensible dish might be one you could eat. Back comes the translation in your own language.

Note that these demonstrations are not really about super-powerful phones, but rather about the other two factors mentioned above, the power of cloud computing combined with a vast database of knowledge.

Schmidt’s blind spot is that he does not really see privacy as an issue. He mentions it from time to time; but he is clear that he regards the trade-off, that we give our personal data to Google in return for these cool services, as worth it. I posted a remarkable quote yesterday. Here’s another one, from late on in the address:

Google will know more about the customer because it benefits the customer if we know more about them.

What Schmidt fails to do is to extrapolate the implications for stuff other than cool services. One is what happens if that huge database is used dishonourably. Another is the huge competitive advantage it gives to Google versus everyone else; Google has this data, but rest of us do not. A third is how that data could be used in ways that disadvantage us. An example is in insurance. Insurance is about pooling risk. The more data insurance companies have about you, the more accurately they can assess the risk, which means a wider range of premiums. If by some mechanism insurance companies are able to analyse Google’s data to assess risk, they can refuse to insure, or charge high penalties, for the higher risks. We won’t necessarily enjoy that, because it means more us may find it impossible to get the insurance we want at a price we can afford.

Google’s business strategy

That’s the technical side. What are Google’s business plans? Schmidt made some interesting comments here as well, many of them in the question and answer session.

Google does not plan to become a mobile operator. Schmidt received some fairly hostile questions on this topic. Since Google positions operators as dumb pipes, stealing their talk minutes and insisting on an open web for services, who will invest in infrastructure? Schmidt denies positioning operators as dumb pipes, but does not leave them room for much other than infrastructure; he says they might have a role in financial transactions.

How do we (both Google and the rest of us) make money? Two main areas, according to Schmidt. One is advertising. He says that online advertising spend is currently one tenth of the total, and that this proportion must grow since “consumers are moving from offline to online.” In addition, mobile advertising will be huge since you can target location as well as using other data to personalise ads. “The local opportunity is much larger, and largely unexplored,” he says.

The other big opportunity is apps. The number of apps that need to be installed locally is constantly diminishing, he says, leaving great potential for new cloud-based applications and services.

As for Google, Schmidt says it wants to be part of everything you do:

We want to have a little bit of Google in every transaction on the internet

Thought-provoking stuff, and a force that will be hard to resist.

So who can compete with Google? Making equally capable phones is easy; building an equally good database of human intentions not so much, particularly since it is self-perpetuating: the more we all use Google, the better it gets.

No wonder Microsoft is piling money into Bing, with limited success so far. No wonder Apple’s Steve Jobs is concerned:

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: "It’s bullshit." Audience roars.

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Think of it as an opportunity to instrument the world. These networks are now so pervasive that we can literally know everything if we want to. What people are doing, what people care about, information that’s monitored, we can literally know it if we want to, [pauses, lowers voice] and if people want us to know it.

A comment full of resonance. Who is “we”? You and I? or Google? The enthusiasm for knowing everything about everything, the reluctant-sounding concession to privacy at the end. The sheer bravado of it; the word “literally”, which means in actual fact, without hyperbole; and yet which is obvious hyperbole.

For another view on this, see The Onion’s piece on Google’s opt-out village.

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You had better follow that link too; because whenever I visit the profile when signed into Google I see this not-too-subtle banner:

“Your profile is not yet eligible to be featured in Google search results”. This statement with its bold yellow highlighting seems intended to make me anxious, though I’m not sure why I should care about this deliberate defect in Google’s search algorithms. Having said which, it is not actually true, as a quick search verifies:

Still, let’s presume that I believe it and want to fix it. I click the link to learn more. Does it tell me how to make my profile “eligible”? Not as such. Without making any promises, Google suggests that I should add more details,

For example, include details such as the name of your hometown, your job title, where you work or go to school.

It also wants a little link exchange:

Link to your profile on another website (for instance, your blog or online photo album)

and finally

Verify your name, and get a "Verified" badge on your profile.

I’ve been round the verify circus before; if you try to do it, you wander round the near-abandoned Knol for a while before discovering that it only works, some of the time, for USA residents.

Frankly, it all seems a bit desperate. My Google profile is just as I want it already, as it happens, though I could do without the big deceitful banner.

That said, this profile nonsense does nothing to allay my sense that Google has designs on me and wants more of my personal data and internet identity than I am inclined to give.

Buzz is a hard sell for me. I like Twitter, because it is single-purpose, works well – in conjunction with one of the many desktop add-ons such as Twhirl – and I never feel that it wants to take over my life.

Still, I am buzzing now, especially since I’ve linked it to Twitter so all my tweets arrive there too. We’ll see.

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I do not know what chances of success this venture has. Google does not instantly dominate any market into which it moves; the combination of Google Checkout and Google Shopping hasn’t killed off PayPal/eBay or Amazon as yet.

What interests me though is the impact of the rumour. It is not  only Google’s size and profitability; it is the fact that Google is for many (most?) people the portal to the Web, giving it huge power to reach any Web-based market.

The restraining factor is that it is difficult for Google to exploit that power without falling foul of legislation that protects free markets. When I search for a product on Google, I don’t see any evidence that it favours its own shopping site, for example; though having said that I am only one click away from the Shopping link at the top of the page that searches only Google’s site.

Still, drawing the line between what is and is not reasonable is hard to do. For example, what if Google had a “search for houses on sale here” link in Google Maps?

If Android and later Chrome OS succeed, Google may become the portal to more than just the Web. Its services will have geo-location data as well. Its data-gathering algorithms might learn our shopping and eating out preferences and guide us with uncanny prescience towards things that we enjoy.

I am not surprised that Google rumours have the power to move markets.

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Listening to today’s conference call, the rationale for the deal seems to be like this:

Maintaining a search engine is expensive. Yahoo has no appetite for it. So Yahoo saves some cash (in fact, makes some cash) while no longer having that cost burden.

On Microsoft’s side, it is convinced (probably rightly) that large scale is mandatory in order to compete with Google. As Ballmer put it:

the more searches you serve, the more you learn about what people search for and click on

When I was researching Bing, I was told that some of Bing’s features only work if there is sufficiently high usage. You cannot identify patterns of usage without a certain volume of data, which is easy to get for the most common searches, but not so much for those that are more specialist. The long tail applies – there are lots of niche searches.

The value of the data goes beyond search. Search and browsing patterns must enable some remarkable insights into human behaviour, which can inform product development.

A more humdrum fact is that advertisers like large audiences, and the combined search platform may appeal to some advertisers who would otherwise pass it by.

Microsoft is therefore relying on the combined value of the two companies’ search businesses being more than the sum of their individual values.

There is a risk though, which is that some users who like Yahoo’s current search engine may not like Bing so much. If they perceive Yahoo search as merely Microsoft search rebranded, they might jump ship, most likely to Google.

Still, you have to believe in your product. In theory, both companies could benefit from stronger search results and features.

It is important not to forget the context. Google is utterly dominant in search; this is two smaller players struggling to remain relevant in that market. I hope Yah-Bing succeeds because competition is good but the chances are that Google will sail on unperturbed.

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