It's possible that Google have looked at the Google Video stats and seen that only a small proportion of videos are actually watched. For them to assume everything is still valid, worthwhile content people care about and move it over is probably a decent chunk of work, not to mention all the resources it would consume to do so.
So, putting the onus on the people who actually care about the video to do something with it is a pretty big cost-saver for them. I agree it would still be nice of them to do it though, even as a temporary measure so it's not "lost" when they down the service.
I don't go to Google News very often, but when I do the images I see are always 80 pixels by 80 pixels.
Now, I know that doesn't change the fact that the photographer had to be there and Did Work to take that photo and that it would be nice if there was some compensation if it's going to be used on a commercial site like Google.
But (anecdotal time) if I see that image and it looks vaguely interesting, I will click on it to see the full size image. I won't just look at that 80x80 image and go "strewth, great photo, glad I saw it!" because there's nothing to see in a photo of that size.
That small image then becomes total linkbait for me - I'll click through to the full article to the site that (presumably)/is/ paying you for the content. Which, I assume, is good for them and then good for you, because my click-through counts as a view.
So that's just my 2c. I can see your point, but I strongly feel that those small thumbnails encourage more people to look at your work. (Of course I'm working under the assumption they only have those 80x80 versions and that there's not a separate Google News thing that does capture the full size photo somewhere.)
That's what they're thinking. But, like it or not, metered Internet - properly, fairly metered Internet - is the solution to this problem.
ISPs should be selling you A Chunk of Data. They can figure out how much they should sell you based on their recorded average usage patterns, figure out prices, and then tell you that you get X GB per month for $Y.
And then their job is to fuck RIGHT off, and let you use it any way you see fit. You want to use it to download 1 megabyte of email a month, fine. You want to blow your whole quota downloading WoW patches and seeding them and playing the game, fine. The important thing is that they're neutral,
As long as there's this bullshit expectation that "unlimited data" is a real thing, ISPs will keep finding ways to justify crippling, throttling or otherwise screwing over customers. If you're not with an ISP that is truly neutral and is prepared to sell you an unfiltered connection then you need to change - unless you're one of those third world countries like the US where you are screwed by monopolistic telcos.
If you're a World of Warcraft player though, you might want to ask why Blizzard has to leverage your Internet connection - and thus your dollars - to help distribute their patches. You'd think that'd get covered by your monthly fee! If I was paying $10 a month or whatever a World of Warcraft subscription costs, I would expect my updates to come from high-speed HTTP servers and I would expect to not have to contribute my bandwidth to the pool so other people could download the patch.
Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge them the ability to do that. I think it's a great example of BitTorrent being used legitimately. All I know is, we mirror World of Warcraft patches for Australian users and every single patch release, they're hugely popular because users know they can just come to our site, download the patch in a quarter or a tenth of the time of the Blizzard Downloader, so they'll be up and playing much faster and they don't have to blow their precious limited monthly quota sending bytes to other WoW users!
I don't want to search my bookmarks through my url bar. I already have my bookmarks sorted by category.
That's great, if you don't mind using the mouse to navigate through your bookmarks. But in the middle of typing this post, if I think of something else interesting I want to look up, I can simply hit CTRL-t to open a new tab, CTRL-l to set focus to location bar, and then quickly type a few letters from various parts of the bookmark or previous URL and bam, the AwesomeBar will find it for me, then I can hit enter and I'm there.
If you're a keyboard/command line junkie it really has no comparison to using bookmarks. I still use bookmarks but they're much less of a high priority for me these days in terms of my day-to-day browser use.
The best part for me is on some of the sites we develop - for example, we'll have a URL like www.ausgamers.com/videos/view.php/57594 with a page title of something like "AusGamers videos - Batman Arkham City Gameplay Trailer". I can't remember the video ID (57594) and in my history I'll have a stack of these. But I can remember that it was a Batman video, so I can simply type "ausg vid bat" - and it will instantly look up exactly the page I want.
Once you get used to this style of navigation you'll wonder how you ever did without it. It takes a while - you need to remember to do it and then learn some basic muscle-memory stuff for your frequently used sites. But for my day to day browsing it has been a life changer - even though I initially hated it as well.
Thanks. Would love to know how they reached that decision - thinking about how I use it, I certainly click more regularly on tabs to switch between them than I do my quick bookmarks bar, so it seems like that should be the "first layer" of interface elements. I would love to see if they actually did some usability testing that showed the majority of users don't actually use it like that (using click-based heatmaps or something) - or if this was just a random decision by a group of developers who decided that "this is how it should work".
However, props for giving us the option to easily change back to the original style.
Seconded. Once you get used to the AwesomeBar it is easily one of the most useful things about Firefox. I went to Chrome for a while for the speed but found the Omnibar utterly bewildering and counter-intuitive; I could never get the hang of it even after trying it for a month to give it a fair go. I moved back to Firefox almost exclusively for the AwesomeBar because I found it really boosted my productivity (I'm a typing junkie and prefer to avoid using the mouse wherever possible so being able to hit ctrl-l and type in keywords is heaps more efficient for me than using the mouse to click nested folders to find a bookmark).
For those that want to skip the blogspam, the official Google post with a bunch of information is here.
I was excited at first because it looked like it included a feature I've wanted for ages - Firefox-esque 'master password' for your local password store, but it looks like it's just a locally stored custom passphrase for encrypting your passwords if you're syncing them to Google's online service - more info.
As I have so much invested in my saved online passwords I've been reluctant to make the permanent switch to Chrome for this reason - in the event my laptop gets lost/stolen I don't like the idea of having a huge amount of online stuff readily accessible in my browser. There's an interesting article here that provides some info on how it encrypts locally saved passwords (using a Windows API that encrypts based on your current Windows user + login; how it works on Linux I'm not sure), but I still would feel more comfortable with another 'master password' layer on top of that!
Reading the rest of the comments, it seems this is more a statement of fact than mere "European arrogance" - most people have commented on the weird attitude US has towards sex in mainstream media. I'll admit it certainly was my first thought as well; I just came back from a conference in the US and as always was amazed by the amount of violence on television, combined with the fact that anything remotely sexual in movies (like boobs) were cut out, along with almost ANY swearing at all.
Given that the US is probably the biggest single market for video games this is completely unsurprising to the rest of us. I hardly think its arrogance to point that out, but if you are going to persist you'll have to paint me with the same brush as an Australian.
As an aside, here in Australia sex + violence in video games is almost a sure-fire way to have your game refused classification (meaning it can't be sold) - it's why GTA3 was RC when it came out - because you could kill prostitutes after having sex with them.
I usually go to bed at around midnight. I noticed that if I worked late (right up until the point I went to bed) or played PC games until around the same time, I would simply be too wired to go to bed and just fall asleep.
Watching TV didn't seem to have the same effect though; I could stay up late watching the box and then walk into the bedroom and pretty much faceplant and sleep immediately.
I now try to have the PC off by 10pm to stop me getting tempted to just check one more email or have one last round of StarCraft 2, because of the effect it has on my ability to get to sleep easily at my preferred sleeping time.
I would happily shell out for something like that - probably a couple of them - to have lying around just to check stuff out online easily. I can happily live without the apps ecosystem of the iPad; almost everything that is an "app" that I'm remotely interested in is just a simple front-end to webstuff anyway.
I love the idea of an iPad for that reason, but I can't justify the expense.
Why is it that the police, aka public servants, are elevated to near untouchable status with these discriminatory laws ?
Because the majority of US citizens, aka the public, are willing to be distracted by smoke and mirrors and television as their civil liberties are stripped away, I guess
There's no real COPYRIGHT LAW reason why you shouldn't be able to - but the cost of doing another download has other costs that need to be accounted for (the cost of the bandwidth, the cost of making a new connection to the download servers, etc, etc). It's easy to assume that cost is zero, but I can imagine it being something that people take seriously when it comes to capacity planning.
And before any gamers chime in and say "well, that's bullshit, because Steam lets you download things as many times as you want" - a significant proportion of the Steam Content Server Network is paid for by companies (ISPs) that are not Valve that maintain local mirrors (I manage two in Australia; we have several others because the cost of bandwidth is relatively high, and so there are several ISPs that are voluntarily running them for Valve as a benefit for their customers and to help reduce their bandwidth costs - so Valve get all that bandwidth for free).
People with regular arms do that all the time - for no apparent reason, or for reasons that are truly terrible - they're drunk, they're speeding dangerously, they're too old to drive safely, they're exhausted, they're just plain old terrible drivers. At least with GoogleDrive, you know they'll have logs, will generally be able to look at what caused an accident, and then code around it for next time!
I look forward to robot drivers not just because I find driving a painful chore, but also because I don't like putting my life on the line every time I get in the car.
Insert statistics about how many more people die in car accidents than in [comparison point X] here.
I came into this thread to basically make this same point, but I figured someone else would have already mentioned it so I'm surprised that I didn't see it until I got to the bottom of the page. I am a gamer and I've had the same home PC (and laptop and work PC) for over 3 years now. I just last week upgraded my video card (to a mid-range ~$200 thing) just so I can get a few more frames in some of the games that I play regularly, but that was a luxury rather than a necessity - I've been playing those games for months quite happily and simply got jealous of my flatmate's PC smoking mine. I would have been happy to continue playing as it was though, but I figured it was a reasonably cheap simple upgrade.
I reckon whether these devices have Internet access is more important than the actual specifics of the device.
Surely for most of these sorts of communities, either a laptop or an e-reader is going to be fantastically advanced technology. I don't really like the idea of giving them e-books or laptops unless they have access to the Internet because it just makes it to easy for authorities or other evil minded people to give them only access to a closed pool or walled garden of knowledge.
I tend to imagine a similar project in North Korea - give everyone e-book readers and they'll no doubt be pre-loaded with the propaganda of the state. Without Internet access for people to be able to read more on certain topics and discuss them and debate them with others, they'll just get a version of reality that is skewed depending on who is controlling their information.
As we've seen in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya (and no doubt more to come) Internet access is one thing that these sorts of authorities (where control is hugely important) hate and fear, precisely because it puts information in the hands of people that can then use it to make informed decisions about what is best for them.
Interestingly (as noted above) TrueCrypt has a warning on creating encrypted volumes on volumes that do wear-leveling, which I assumes includes most SSDs these days?
I don't get this. People can't wait a few seconds for buffering? A few seconds for some data from some computer that is probably hidden in a data centre somewhere, thousands of kilometers away to get turned magically into a signal that is then transported to you over the biggest computer network ever created by humanity, then it is beamed somehow to you no matter where you are - walking down the street, sitting in your car at traffic lights, or lying in bed.
I can wait a few seconds; I spend them thinking "...how the fuck!@? This is awesome!@#"
That's what I always thought. Then we put streaming videos side by side with downloads and we saw roughly 10x as many people wanted to stream the video compared to downloading. So now we focus our effort on streaming when it comes to video.
I certainly prefer downloading for the reasons you describe, but I find myself streaming when I see it is an option and I know that the streaming mechanism is something reasonably decent (ie, I won't have to keep pausing for buffer).
Nokia's best decision I think was Meego/Maemo, and it's what got me interested in the N900. I am amazed by how many different applications I can install on the N900 that appear to just be simple ports/modifications of the native, regular Linux codebase.
Meego/Maemo offered up the riches of the Linux ecosystem along with a reasonably comprehensive development environment. I got my N900 shortly before Meego was announced, and I was/pissed/ because I knew it meant Maemo development would basically grind to a halt, which is basically what happened - but it gave me hope that they'd identified their strategy and that their partnership with Intel on it meant they'd be in it for keeps.
If I was a shareholder, I'd be pissed. So much wasted investment. What about the billions they spent on Ovi Maps? Presumably that investment is now worthless because they'll have to use Bing maps or whatever the MS thing is.
As a customer though, I'll just vote with my feet. I'm not interested in the locked-in ecosystem of Apple, which is why I have an Android and why I'm not interested in MS.
It's actually part of Google's webmaster guidelines that you don't do this. I am not sure if it is grounds for removal though:
# Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
As an example of hilarity; I looked into getting a used shipping container a few months ago to use for storage. Turns out even old beatup ones are pretty expensive. For weeks after that, I would see sidebar ads for shipping containers 'everywhere'. Even today I coudl get one if I go to the 'wrong' site. I was never seriously in the market for containers, but it's a competitive market, and they are persistent.
That, to me, sounds like a very pro-advertising story (almost - the fact that it went on for weeks after that is probably indicative of a broken algorithm somewhere; if you hadn't made a purchase it probably should have given up).
Imagine if you were looking seriously and one of those ads that came up on some site/was/ for a shipping container that met your needs? There would have been little reason for you NOT to click, other than petulance.
I think we're in a weird spot at the moment but more targeted advertising is smarter advertising - it means there's less wasted space trying to sell you things you will never ever need (like feminine hygiene products, if you're a bloke), or have proven repeatedly you don't want (eg, if you buy a lot of books but they're all science fiction, there's no point in showing you ads from the teen vampire romance section).
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible that Google have looked at the Google Video stats and seen that only a small proportion of videos are actually watched. For them to assume everything is still valid, worthwhile content people care about and move it over is probably a decent chunk of work, not to mention all the resources it would consume to do so.
So, putting the onus on the people who actually care about the video to do something with it is a pretty big cost-saver for them. I agree it would still be nice of them to do it though, even as a temporary measure so it's not "lost" when they down the service.
I don't go to Google News very often, but when I do the images I see are always 80 pixels by 80 pixels.
Now, I know that doesn't change the fact that the photographer had to be there and Did Work to take that photo and that it would be nice if there was some compensation if it's going to be used on a commercial site like Google.
But (anecdotal time) if I see that image and it looks vaguely interesting, I will click on it to see the full size image. I won't just look at that 80x80 image and go "strewth, great photo, glad I saw it!" because there's nothing to see in a photo of that size.
That small image then becomes total linkbait for me - I'll click through to the full article to the site that (presumably) /is/ paying you for the content. Which, I assume, is good for them and then good for you, because my click-through counts as a view.
So that's just my 2c. I can see your point, but I strongly feel that those small thumbnails encourage more people to look at your work. (Of course I'm working under the assumption they only have those 80x80 versions and that there's not a separate Google News thing that does capture the full size photo somewhere.)
If a blog takes a newspaper story and rewrites it as their own, it's fair use, but if a newspaper does it....
That's what they're thinking. But, like it or not, metered Internet - properly, fairly metered Internet - is the solution to this problem.
ISPs should be selling you A Chunk of Data. They can figure out how much they should sell you based on their recorded average usage patterns, figure out prices, and then tell you that you get X GB per month for $Y.
And then their job is to fuck RIGHT off, and let you use it any way you see fit. You want to use it to download 1 megabyte of email a month, fine. You want to blow your whole quota downloading WoW patches and seeding them and playing the game, fine. The important thing is that they're neutral,
As long as there's this bullshit expectation that "unlimited data" is a real thing, ISPs will keep finding ways to justify crippling, throttling or otherwise screwing over customers. If you're not with an ISP that is truly neutral and is prepared to sell you an unfiltered connection then you need to change - unless you're one of those third world countries like the US where you are screwed by monopolistic telcos.
If you're a World of Warcraft player though, you might want to ask why Blizzard has to leverage your Internet connection - and thus your dollars - to help distribute their patches. You'd think that'd get covered by your monthly fee! If I was paying $10 a month or whatever a World of Warcraft subscription costs, I would expect my updates to come from high-speed HTTP servers and I would expect to not have to contribute my bandwidth to the pool so other people could download the patch.
Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge them the ability to do that. I think it's a great example of BitTorrent being used legitimately. All I know is, we mirror World of Warcraft patches for Australian users and every single patch release, they're hugely popular because users know they can just come to our site, download the patch in a quarter or a tenth of the time of the Blizzard Downloader, so they'll be up and playing much faster and they don't have to blow their precious limited monthly quota sending bytes to other WoW users!
I don't want to search my bookmarks through my url bar. I already have my bookmarks sorted by category.
That's great, if you don't mind using the mouse to navigate through your bookmarks. But in the middle of typing this post, if I think of something else interesting I want to look up, I can simply hit CTRL-t to open a new tab, CTRL-l to set focus to location bar, and then quickly type a few letters from various parts of the bookmark or previous URL and bam, the AwesomeBar will find it for me, then I can hit enter and I'm there.
If you're a keyboard/command line junkie it really has no comparison to using bookmarks. I still use bookmarks but they're much less of a high priority for me these days in terms of my day-to-day browser use.
The best part for me is on some of the sites we develop - for example, we'll have a URL like www.ausgamers.com/videos/view.php/57594 with a page title of something like "AusGamers videos - Batman Arkham City Gameplay Trailer". I can't remember the video ID (57594) and in my history I'll have a stack of these. But I can remember that it was a Batman video, so I can simply type "ausg vid bat" - and it will instantly look up exactly the page I want.
Once you get used to this style of navigation you'll wonder how you ever did without it. It takes a while - you need to remember to do it and then learn some basic muscle-memory stuff for your frequently used sites. But for my day to day browsing it has been a life changer - even though I initially hated it as well.
Thanks. Would love to know how they reached that decision - thinking about how I use it, I certainly click more regularly on tabs to switch between them than I do my quick bookmarks bar, so it seems like that should be the "first layer" of interface elements. I would love to see if they actually did some usability testing that showed the majority of users don't actually use it like that (using click-based heatmaps or something) - or if this was just a random decision by a group of developers who decided that "this is how it should work".
However, props for giving us the option to easily change back to the original style.
Seconded. Once you get used to the AwesomeBar it is easily one of the most useful things about Firefox. I went to Chrome for a while for the speed but found the Omnibar utterly bewildering and counter-intuitive; I could never get the hang of it even after trying it for a month to give it a fair go. I moved back to Firefox almost exclusively for the AwesomeBar because I found it really boosted my productivity (I'm a typing junkie and prefer to avoid using the mouse wherever possible so being able to hit ctrl-l and type in keywords is heaps more efficient for me than using the mouse to click nested folders to find a bookmark).
Shit! Post wrong link to the official Google post; it's actually http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/speedier-simpler-and-safer-chromes.html
For those that want to skip the blogspam, the official Google post with a bunch of information is here.
I was excited at first because it looked like it included a feature I've wanted for ages - Firefox-esque 'master password' for your local password store, but it looks like it's just a locally stored custom passphrase for encrypting your passwords if you're syncing them to Google's online service - more info.
As I have so much invested in my saved online passwords I've been reluctant to make the permanent switch to Chrome for this reason - in the event my laptop gets lost/stolen I don't like the idea of having a huge amount of online stuff readily accessible in my browser. There's an interesting article here that provides some info on how it encrypts locally saved passwords (using a Windows API that encrypts based on your current Windows user + login; how it works on Linux I'm not sure), but I still would feel more comfortable with another 'master password' layer on top of that!
Reading the rest of the comments, it seems this is more a statement of fact than mere "European arrogance" - most people have commented on the weird attitude US has towards sex in mainstream media. I'll admit it certainly was my first thought as well; I just came back from a conference in the US and as always was amazed by the amount of violence on television, combined with the fact that anything remotely sexual in movies (like boobs) were cut out, along with almost ANY swearing at all.
Given that the US is probably the biggest single market for video games this is completely unsurprising to the rest of us. I hardly think its arrogance to point that out, but if you are going to persist you'll have to paint me with the same brush as an Australian.
As an aside, here in Australia sex + violence in video games is almost a sure-fire way to have your game refused classification (meaning it can't be sold) - it's why GTA3 was RC when it came out - because you could kill prostitutes after having sex with them.
I usually go to bed at around midnight. I noticed that if I worked late (right up until the point I went to bed) or played PC games until around the same time, I would simply be too wired to go to bed and just fall asleep.
Watching TV didn't seem to have the same effect though; I could stay up late watching the box and then walk into the bedroom and pretty much faceplant and sleep immediately.
I now try to have the PC off by 10pm to stop me getting tempted to just check one more email or have one last round of StarCraft 2, because of the effect it has on my ability to get to sleep easily at my preferred sleeping time.
Sir, I would like to buy your $100 tablet!
I would happily shell out for something like that - probably a couple of them - to have lying around just to check stuff out online easily. I can happily live without the apps ecosystem of the iPad; almost everything that is an "app" that I'm remotely interested in is just a simple front-end to webstuff anyway.
I love the idea of an iPad for that reason, but I can't justify the expense.
Why is it that the police, aka public servants, are elevated to near untouchable status with these discriminatory laws ?
Because the majority of US citizens, aka the public, are willing to be distracted by smoke and mirrors and television as their civil liberties are stripped away, I guess
There's no real COPYRIGHT LAW reason why you shouldn't be able to - but the cost of doing another download has other costs that need to be accounted for (the cost of the bandwidth, the cost of making a new connection to the download servers, etc, etc). It's easy to assume that cost is zero, but I can imagine it being something that people take seriously when it comes to capacity planning.
And before any gamers chime in and say "well, that's bullshit, because Steam lets you download things as many times as you want" - a significant proportion of the Steam Content Server Network is paid for by companies (ISPs) that are not Valve that maintain local mirrors (I manage two in Australia; we have several others because the cost of bandwidth is relatively high, and so there are several ISPs that are voluntarily running them for Valve as a benefit for their customers and to help reduce their bandwidth costs - so Valve get all that bandwidth for free).
Which videos are they?! We're not encouraging the Streisand effect as should be required!
People with regular arms do that all the time - for no apparent reason, or for reasons that are truly terrible - they're drunk, they're speeding dangerously, they're too old to drive safely, they're exhausted, they're just plain old terrible drivers. At least with GoogleDrive, you know they'll have logs, will generally be able to look at what caused an accident, and then code around it for next time!
I look forward to robot drivers not just because I find driving a painful chore, but also because I don't like putting my life on the line every time I get in the car.
Insert statistics about how many more people die in car accidents than in [comparison point X] here.
I came into this thread to basically make this same point, but I figured someone else would have already mentioned it so I'm surprised that I didn't see it until I got to the bottom of the page. I am a gamer and I've had the same home PC (and laptop and work PC) for over 3 years now. I just last week upgraded my video card (to a mid-range ~$200 thing) just so I can get a few more frames in some of the games that I play regularly, but that was a luxury rather than a necessity - I've been playing those games for months quite happily and simply got jealous of my flatmate's PC smoking mine. I would have been happy to continue playing as it was though, but I figured it was a reasonably cheap simple upgrade.
https://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/39841406323265537 for those that want to see it
I reckon whether these devices have Internet access is more important than the actual specifics of the device.
Surely for most of these sorts of communities, either a laptop or an e-reader is going to be fantastically advanced technology. I don't really like the idea of giving them e-books or laptops unless they have access to the Internet because it just makes it to easy for authorities or other evil minded people to give them only access to a closed pool or walled garden of knowledge.
I tend to imagine a similar project in North Korea - give everyone e-book readers and they'll no doubt be pre-loaded with the propaganda of the state. Without Internet access for people to be able to read more on certain topics and discuss them and debate them with others, they'll just get a version of reality that is skewed depending on who is controlling their information.
As we've seen in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya (and no doubt more to come) Internet access is one thing that these sorts of authorities (where control is hugely important) hate and fear, precisely because it puts information in the hands of people that can then use it to make informed decisions about what is best for them.
Interestingly (as noted above) TrueCrypt has a warning on creating encrypted volumes on volumes that do wear-leveling, which I assumes includes most SSDs these days?
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=wear-leveling
I don't get this. People can't wait a few seconds for buffering? A few seconds for some data from some computer that is probably hidden in a data centre somewhere, thousands of kilometers away to get turned magically into a signal that is then transported to you over the biggest computer network ever created by humanity, then it is beamed somehow to you no matter where you are - walking down the street, sitting in your car at traffic lights, or lying in bed.
I can wait a few seconds; I spend them thinking "...how the fuck!@? This is awesome!@#"
That's what I always thought. Then we put streaming videos side by side with downloads and we saw roughly 10x as many people wanted to stream the video compared to downloading. So now we focus our effort on streaming when it comes to video.
I certainly prefer downloading for the reasons you describe, but I find myself streaming when I see it is an option and I know that the streaming mechanism is something reasonably decent (ie, I won't have to keep pausing for buffer).
Nokia's best decision I think was Meego/Maemo, and it's what got me interested in the N900. I am amazed by how many different applications I can install on the N900 that appear to just be simple ports/modifications of the native, regular Linux codebase.
Meego/Maemo offered up the riches of the Linux ecosystem along with a reasonably comprehensive development environment. I got my N900 shortly before Meego was announced, and I was /pissed/ because I knew it meant Maemo development would basically grind to a halt, which is basically what happened - but it gave me hope that they'd identified their strategy and that their partnership with Intel on it meant they'd be in it for keeps.
If I was a shareholder, I'd be pissed. So much wasted investment. What about the billions they spent on Ovi Maps? Presumably that investment is now worthless because they'll have to use Bing maps or whatever the MS thing is.
As a customer though, I'll just vote with my feet. I'm not interested in the locked-in ecosystem of Apple, which is why I have an Android and why I'm not interested in MS.
It's actually part of Google's webmaster guidelines that you don't do this. I am not sure if it is grounds for removal though:
# Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
As an example of hilarity; I looked into getting a used shipping container a few months ago to use for storage. Turns out even old beatup ones are pretty expensive. For weeks after that, I would see sidebar ads for shipping containers 'everywhere'. Even today I coudl get one if I go to the 'wrong' site. I was never seriously in the market for containers, but it's a competitive market, and they are persistent.
That, to me, sounds like a very pro-advertising story (almost - the fact that it went on for weeks after that is probably indicative of a broken algorithm somewhere; if you hadn't made a purchase it probably should have given up).
Imagine if you were looking seriously and one of those ads that came up on some site /was/ for a shipping container that met your needs? There would have been little reason for you NOT to click, other than petulance.
I think we're in a weird spot at the moment but more targeted advertising is smarter advertising - it means there's less wasted space trying to sell you things you will never ever need (like feminine hygiene products, if you're a bloke), or have proven repeatedly you don't want (eg, if you buy a lot of books but they're all science fiction, there's no point in showing you ads from the teen vampire romance section).