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The U.S. government's idea that it can get any information from any U.S. company at any time by threatening to put the executives of the company in jail, and can keep that secret, means that, using Google's information, your entire history online can be tracked by the U.S. government.

However when the US federal government went on a fishing expedition to see what people searched for Google refused. "Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes". As for privacy: Google Anonymizing Search Records To Protect Privacy.

your entire history online can be tracked by the U.S. government.

Only Firefox with NoScript can prevent this. Since Google has been paying $50,000,000 each year to the Mozilla Foundation, the developers of Firefox, and since Google makes money through advertising, it seems likely that Firefox will eventually not allow add-ons like NoScript and Ad-Block.

WRONG! Big tyme. If I want to block Google Analytics, or whatever, all I have to do is to add the address I want to block to my Hosts File. Hosts files work with Linux, OS X, and Windows. I know, I've used one on all of these. And I don't see most ads.

NoScript makes your browsing much more secure, in addition to giving you the option to stop spying. It's amazing how many web sites run Javascript scripts linking the web sites we visit to other servers at other companies.

Thanks for the NoScript addon. I like being able to block scripts from some websites while allowing other websites to use them. On my Windows PC I had a firewall that allowed me to do this, but I know of no firewalls for Linux or Macs that does the same.

"We don't condone the practice of Google bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission." -- Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products for Google, Sept 2005.

It wasn't till January of this year that they started taking steps to fix it, 8 years after the problem started. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/01/quick-word-about-googlebombs.html Yet as we saw this week, people are still getting hit with malware sites.

302 Jacking was another problem that Google was warned of for around 2 years, and it wasn't fixed (well sort of fixed, still somewhat exists) till Google themselves got hit: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050526-084634

Now we have Google Proxy Hacking. They were warned of this in June 2006, still hasn't been fixed, and they have made no indications of doing so. http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking

So yes, let's just sit back and trust that they are putting some of their vast resources into fixing a problem, but exactly what have they done to earn this sort of good faith?

I think we are on the border of a time when any OS can be a success given a few things:

1. It has a word process that opens Word documents and the icon is on the desktop.

   Google Docs supposedly opens Word documents, and I imagine one of the icons on the desktop opens Google Docs. I just don't know which without mousing over it.

2. It has a web browser with an icon on the desktop.

   Firefox appears on this other screenshot. A Google search from the desktop or other icons like Wikipedia and Blogger should bring it up.

3. It saves documents locally and on the web with one click.

   Again, this depends on Google Docs, but supposedly it can save locally, and it shouldn't take too many clicks.

4. It plays DVD, flash, mp3s.

   As discussed and linked below, the OS bundled with the PC does play DVDs and mp3s. I saw no specific mention of Flash; but I can't imagine how the YouTube icon would work without it.

5. It lets folks use their ipods.

   It certainly does, with an icon on the desktop!

"I'm Going To F*king Kill Google" sounds like "responding to Google"?

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050905-135244

And Microsoft's long long history of these kinds of attacks on competitors does not make them a friend of consumers or a friend of businesses. They surely have done very little to be a friend to me and far far more to the contrary. And convicted monopolies can not protect their monopolies. It is illegal.

LoB

Working in the VoIP industry, I can see Google hurting a lot of the upcoming and established companies (Sunbelt, Packet8 watch out). I'm one for the corporation doing what's necessary to make money but this is certainly monumental and I have a feeling that networking will be next on the ISP/Broadband/FiOS like level for Google. They are (if you ask me) becoming their own worst enemy and it will be a peculiar show to see how regulation plays out in the next few months/years (remember the Ma Bell monopoly). I wonder in these days if say a company was facing regulatory pressure if they could just pack up shop and jump across the border. Imagine that Google based of its Tijuana headquarters. Then again, what the hell am I talking about... Google already greased pockets up... We at least they're not making cars yet.

That looks like a continuation of Yahoo's directory days. Back when they relied on their directory, and not search results, people would submit sites and Yahoo would review them and categorize them. After awhile the backlog got so long that Yahoo started charging $200 to guarantee a review, though category placement was still up to them. Guess they just carried the policy over to their search engine.

Here's a news story from 1999 about it when it began:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 67091

Here it is today:
https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro

Yahoo might feel they're being open about this, even if it is in a contract small print or fast talking end of radio ad kind of way. I just noticed on every search results page they have a "(About this page)" link at the top that points to a page that basically says they do this.
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basic s-03.html

Even links to the program you linked to.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/choose.php

I saw something similar when I worked on a website for someone who hosts on Yahoo. The site was new so I figured it would just take some time for the spiders to index it. But for months afterward the site would show up higher placed and for more keywords on Yahoo than Google. For awhile the only way to find the site on Google would be to search for the company's name. And even that took a few months to happen. Today, three years later, the site comes up fourth on Yahoo and 22nd on Google for a search on it's major keyword - fender hook. Though if you add quotes around the keywords it drops out of Yahoo altogether and moves up to 21 on Google. So I'm not sure what to make of it.

Google has a large share of the search market, but it doesn't have all of it--i.e., there are viable alternatives: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 56431 And FYI, it's no longer Ask Jeeves. It's just Ask.

he did block Google. that's well document.

>>Allowing Google bot and not allowing 80% of the world population is called cloaking in my dictionary

no, if you read all the issues, most people could see his site, very few could not because scrapers were coming from those IP's. and 80% ... maybe 30% at tops and north america - europe - had full access.

anyway here is the view point from brett : http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051128-1616 06

1. Google Hires a well, known lobbyist firm to represent them.
2. Google Buys YouTube even though everyone under the sun knows that makes them a target for litigation.

Before the first result, is says "Search the Web with Yahoo!" and gives me a second search box. I'm using Firefox on Linux.

Yup, I see it. "Altavista" doesn't do that. "Jeeves" returns ask.com as the first link, but "ask.com" has the repeated input box.

A small test later.. the phrases I found which DO give you that extra "You can use yahoo" input box:
    google
    ask.com

Searches which DON'T ("+ com" indicates that I searched both with X and X.com):
    alltheweb (+.com)
    hotbot (+.com)
    teoma
    altavista (+.com)
    lycos (+.com)
    search engines

My exhaustive (ahem) data was taken from here, which I found with a google search for "search engines".

How does the link="nofollow" attribute render links invisible to search engines? It's up to the search engines to ignore or to regard them.

Because all the major search engines have agreed to respect "nofollow". In other words, it works the same way robots.txt does.

OP argued without links, but so did I.

Google may not technically be a monopoly however it's market share is rising and Google is plenty on it's way to becoming a monopoly.

Lastly, as the person who decides where my companies online advertising budget gets spent I have to tell you that Google overwhelmingly provides much of my traffic. Far more than those charts are showing. Many of my constituents have confessed similar circumstances.

P.S. This is a discussion, not a shouting match.

Memory:
Google
AltaVista
Metacrawler
dogpile
yahoo
MSN
ASK

try wikipedia: Yup a nice list on wiki at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine

try something obvious like...
www.searchengines.com (nope... some kind of placeholder site)
www.searchengine.com (yup-- appears to be a search engine).
www.searchweb.com (maybe-- looks like a placeholder page but sort of looks like search page)

Look at people that rate search engines
Typed this in since it seemed logical
www.searchenginerating.com (appears to be more about getting a high rating on search engines)
found this with a search engine
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 56451

Google has a near-monopoly on web searches

Leveraging your position in the market for one product to increase your competitive advantage in the market for another product is nothing new. The problem comes when you are so dominant in Market A that leveraging that dominance in Market B would cause others to be unable to effectively compete in Market B.

Google has a near-monopoly on web searches

44 percent is hardly a monopoly. Or a near-monopoly.

Agreed. And Google has nothing like a near-monopoly on searches. According to the search engine stats I've seen, Google hovers somehwere around a 45% viewer share. Sure, that's bigger than anyone else, but it's less than half of total searches.

No, but "the Internet" isn't a product. Google has a near-monopoly on web searches,

Zune: http://seo.zunch.com/search_engine_usage_statistic s.htm
Pew Internet: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/167/report_displa y.asp
WebSideStory: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=33 34881

Three independent reports show that while they have a good share, Google accounts for less than 50% of all web search engine usage. Last I checked, that's not really a monopoly

One equivalent to ID3 for Jpegs is a standard put out by International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), known as the IPTC Information Interchange Model. (But people often call them IPTC tags.)

We use IPTCExt, which adds IPTC tabs to the file properties in Windows Explorer, and a quick google will find other programs that can edit them.

This suggests that Photoshop Elements 3 fully supports these IPTC tags. It's also well supported by ImageWalker.

To be fair google and yahoo are the big search engine players, MSN search is under 15% of the market compared to say googles at around 45% and yahoo at around 30%.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 56431

For those unfamiliar with Flickr, it's owned by Yahoo, who just loves them some patents.

Google's algorithm is interesting because after a large number of sites google bombed the Miserable Failure then Bush soon beat out 300 million pages for the top spot for just "failure". As a side note, how important is a search engine? Apparently the most popular term leading to whitehouse.gov is failure.

that would be true if they had a monopoly

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=21 56431

google have about 40-45% of the whole search market. That is not a mononoply.

Don't be so sure that all these "online sweatshop" workers are in third-world countries. There are large numbers of people in many countries, including the US, Canada, UK, etc. who are happy to "work" for 60 cents an hour, or even less, no matter how boring and repetitive the tasks required. And many of them aren't concerned about issues like ethics or legality.

A lot of it happens in a cottage industry created around what are often referred to as "Paid to Read Email" sites. It's also referred to as the "Get Paid To" or GPT industry. It started with "Paid to Surf" companies like AllAdvantage, and still continues on a much smaller scale today. To get an idea of how many of these sites are out there, a database at GPTInfo contains over 700 different sites.

There was an article about this industry published at Associated Content called The World of Paid to Read E-Mail Sites that offers a basic description of how things work. But it doesn't really look at how these sites can be used to pull off scams like this CAPTCHA data-entry thing and search engine click fraud. SearchEngineWatch describes them as Click Pirates, and in a lot of cases, that's exactly what they are. And they're most definitely not limited to third-world countries.

Danny Sullivan reported that Luis von Ahn granted use of his ESP Game through licensing. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060901-0943 09

Technically google didn't rip of the ESP game. From this article http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060901-0943 09 It seems Google officially licensed the game.

Remember the days when ads used to mention their "America Online keywords"? Now a Pontiac commercial is telling the audience to "google Pontiac".

That is probably part of why Google is concerned.

I think the reasoning behind this is that Google is attempting to preemptively stop any possible legal issues with their name. I mean, you run into issues when things are known by a brand name. Take for instance Kleenex, Jell-O, Frisbee & Hoover. You know what all these are and there's a fairly good chance you've called an imposter brand the same name.

What I speculate Google is worried about is that the verb "googled" becomes generic for search as in "I googled it." And the law says you can't trademark something that is generically used. Essentially, if a case occurred with a rival search engine putting "Just google it!" at the top of their page and the court said they could do that because 'google' is a generic term, then you would have precedent for millions of Google imposters seeking to make money off the Google name (since it just means search to the general public).

Google figures it already is a household name. The last thing they need is the media dumping 'google' as a verb in the papers because if they start putting it in headlines and stories--it's a much easier case for another company to claim it is part of the English language. Hell, it's already in two entries in the Oxford dictionary. I think you could already argue a case to use the word "google" to mean search on your site.

An analysis by a neutral third party has already been done. See Tuzhilin's report.

correct. the only major meta tag that the main search engines use is the Description, which it shows on the results pages, below the page's title. there are others, like the robots tag, that have limited uses. the keywords tag is pretty much useless, and in fact, if used incorrectly, can actually harm a website's ranking.

this bill is nothing more than some politicians trying to show concerned parents that they have a purpose, when in fact they're about as useless as keywords ;)

If you don't have time to read the full 47 page report, Search Engine Watch has summarized some of the most interesting findings.

404 - File Not Found

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2 156431

And in other news, I'm warning Ferrari not to take away the Aston Martin that's in my driveway. It's there. Really. Ok, so no one but me can see it, but I'm warning you, Ferrari, BACK OFF!!!

What monopoly in search? Google has less than 50% of the market for search, and they have a significant competitor in Yahoo search marketing (used to be called Overture) not to mention the banner ad people such as doubleclick, although I couldn't find any comparison of the services relative market share.

Google has not attempted to artificially raise the barrier to entry of the search market, unless they are involved in something i am unaware of, you can get some clever people together, some big hardware and a gigantic pipe and make your own search engine or pay per click advertising. Same for payment processing; Google are not engaging in dumping of Google Checkout, it is infact more expensive than it's biggest rival Paypal.

(Full disclosure: I have used paypal to pay for things, google & yahoo to search, and I block all adverts with adblock plus and filterset.g)

And you know this is true because? http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/ 2165081

According to these, this useful application is potentially something that evolved based on smaller projects and a common code-base.

Admittedly, I've never used a spreadsheet for more than its basic functions (organizing data in columns for personal finances or some of the homebrew programming projects I work on), but if X% of Excel users are only utilizing Y% of the program's capabilities (where Y is a significantly small percentage of the program's full feature-set), any company can come along, produce a simple app which elegantly handles the most-sought-for features, and voila, competitor. From what I've seen of the managerial staff at work, the only thing Google Spreadsheets is missing to be a 'real' (read: truly useful for aforementioned X% of users) spreadsheet app, is a chart wizard.

I certainly hope that other companies, particularly Yahoo, which has been implicated in providing information to US authorities, will feel pressured by Google's recent announcement to be more candid about their own policies regarding operations in the US. If our big Internet players were to stand up for what is right, it'd be a powerful statement for human rights.

Yes, the link is fake.

But you did know that Amnesty has a record on every major country, right?

Honestly, I am not sure how complying with local laws can be construed as 'doing evil'. I don't regard Google as evil when they comply with US laws. Yes, the government may be evil and the laws may be ugly (DMCA anyone?), but regarding a company doing business in such a country as evil? I don't hear many calls for Google to pull out of the US. Do you?

Did you know that Google censors search results in Germany and France too? And again, I don't hear many calls for Google to pull out of Germany or France.

Yes, I understand that China is a sensitive issue. But things aren't as clear cut as some people (in general, not you in particular) seem to think.

Google registered a domain, so therefore they must be planning a service around it? Wow. Let's take a look at some other domains Google has registered...

Gbrowser.com - I wonder how that's doing.
Googleblows.com - Hm.. so much to speculate on.
Googledoodle.com - A drawing platform, maybe?
Googleporn.com - It's about time!

Here's my favorite: Googlemotherf**ker.com.

Google regularly buys domain names just so others won't. The fact that they bought googlecheckout.net might just mean they don't want someone else masquerading as a Google checkout service.

If I remember correctly, Yahoo! search engine used Google technology.

Yahoo used Google results for its searches between October 2002 & Feb 2004. They have used their own search engine (acquired with their purchase of Inktomi in 2003) ever since.

Read all about it at Search Engine Watch

There's definitely a difference for some searches (and both are superior in my experience to MS's offering)

Google is not a monopoly, nor is it near a monopoly. Search Engine Ratings

It has 42% of all searches and has only 14% more market share than Yahoo. It seems pretty obvious that the search market is very competitive. They got Firefox to default to them because they paid Firefox. It is not anti-competitive to pay people for including your product in a release. Google does not own Firefox, they don't make any money from Firefox, and they are not unfairly leveraging themselves into a previously competitive market through Firefox.

Don't be confused, Google has no morals - it is a publicly traded company with a goal of profit.

If they thought they could run more ads with no repercussions, they'd be all over it.

The fact is, they probably can't. I'm sure it's drawn much debate within the Googleplex, but the general consensus is that there are many types of ads that could negatively affect the general AdWords experience.

The secret key to the AdWords recipe is CTR - Click-through Rate.

If Advertiser A is willing to pay $10/click, but only gets a 1% CTR, Google's EPM for that advertiser would be only $100.

If Advertiser B is only willing to pay $1/click, but has a targeted ad drawing a 14% CTR - Google's EPM is $140.

So now they made 40% more AND didn't waste an important ad slot AND provided a better user experience.

A better user experience means MORE people look for their place to click within the screen-region of AdWords, providing an even higher overall CTR.

If you look at some heat maps for Google searches, on most commercialized SERPs (result pages) - their CTR is well over 23%.

This means is the average CPC (cost per click) is [!random example!] $0.55, they are earning an average $126.50 EPM.

Google does 91M searches/day (source).

91,000,000 / 1000 = 91,000. 91k * $126.5 = $11,511,500.

Oh, yeah.. this doesn't include the content network, or the domain network, or search partners (AOL, Ask.com, et al).

$$$

Of course all countries wants companies to respect their own local laws:
- US forced european airline companies to disclose private informations about passengers like credit card number, address or choice of meal. But privacy is really a great concern in Europe and disclosure can only be done on a case by case basis (http://www.epic.org/privacy/intl/passenger_data.h tml).
- Yahoo! was sued in France because it was possible to find nazi goods on their site (http://www.lapres.net/yahweb.html). France also have freedom of speech but has laws to regulate "hate speech". Google also filters content of its french site like it does in China (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php /2165101).

In the same western governments creates a lot of business partnerships with emergent countries but don't speak a lot about human rights. "The end justifies the means."

1) Ask.com has phone listings on web results pages
http://www.ask.com/web?q=phone+listings+for+steve+ smith+San+Francisco+&qsrc=1&o=0

2) Ask.com has news searches
http://news.ask.com/
Localized by Zip

3) Ask.com offers search by domain
site:

4) Ask.com has image searches. In fact, the image dbase was just
revamped and highly lauded.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3580061

5) Ask.com maps are amazing. Move the location pointer to a new location and watch the location change.
Ask.com offers walking and driving directions. ften different especially in large cities
Add intermediate stops. Click the green button and watch the directions animated. Btw, the quality of the aerial imagery is awesome. Read the maps help page for more features.

6) In terms of music, Ask.com Smart Answers are amazing and helpful.
http://www.ask.com/web?q=aerosmith&qsrc=0&o=312

These posts have more about what's new, enhanced, etc. http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/03/askcoms-new-l ook-scores-big-points.html http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3587686 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6317186.ht ml The image database has also been revamped. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3580061

These posts have more about what's new, enhanced, etc. http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/03/askcoms-new-l ook-scores-big-points.html http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3587686 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6317186.ht ml The image database has also been revamped. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php /3580061

Google still indexes over 25000 pages by them [...] They appear to be just a linkfarm.

Interesting. Given that Google is only around 40% of search engine traffic, it's odd that a Google demotion would remove 70% of KinderStart's traffic. That suggests that Google is just bringing KinderStart's ranking in line with other engines. And combined with your notion, that would make KinderStart a link-farm optimized for distorting Google.

No wonder Google nailed them.

already hacked.

But you don't think it's dangerous that a site that has a de-facto monopoly on searches is doing this?

You mean their shocking, world-gripping monopoly where they have 36.5% of all search traffic and switching is as easy as typing a slightly different URL into your browser?

I agree that we should keep an eye on them, but your unjustified alarmism is ridiculous.

"Most of the world uses them as their only search engine. "

According to the stats I've seen (e.g. Nov 2005 from NetRatings/SearchEngineWatch http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2 156451) in the US, Google had a 46.3% share, Yahoo 23.4%, MSN 11.4%, AOL 6.9% with the rest being MyWay, Ask, Earthlink, Dogpile, Netscape,iWon, and "others." And the totals seem somewhat volatile with Google at 36.5% and yahoo at 30.5% and MSN at 15.5% just shortly before that.

While Google does indeed have a large share, it isn't even a majority anywhere that I've seen. The only point is that not everyone (or even a majority) uses Google. At least for the US.

And I've actually switched back to Yahoo myself recently. :-)