The Vastly Different Approaches Of Google And Yahoo When It Comes To Newspapers

from the strategy-shift dept

About a month ago, Google dumped its program to try to help sell newspaper ads, admitting that it had been something of a failure. It wasn't a huge surprise why. Google entered the space assuming that it could reform the newspaper ad business the same way it revolutionized the online ad business. But it neglected to realize some of the massive differences in the markets. Meanwhile, the NY Times is noting that Yahoo's much more collaborative approach to newspapers is actually a shining success story for both Yahoo and its newspaper partners. Rather than trying to revolutionize the entire market, Yahoo is simply working within the process by which newspapers already sell print ads, to add targeted online advertisements as well. And it's working amazingly well.

In the meantime, with Google dropping its newspaper ad sales effort, it seems to be going to the other extreme: it finally started putting advertisements on Google News. For years, whenever angry newspaper insiders would complain about how Google News was somehow "profiting" off of their hard work, people would respond that Google didn't even put any advertisements on its news search engine. However, now that this has changed, pretty much everyone is expecting lawsuits to follow. Personally, I can't see how the newspapers would win such a lawsuit (and, think that they have much more important issues to spend money on), but given Google's willingness to cave to book publishers and authors, you can bet some newspaper publishers are hoping that Google will be forced to throw money in their direction as well.

Filed Under: ads, news, newspapers, search engines
Companies: google, yahoo

Google So Dominant That A French Town Might Need To Change Its Name?

from the or-hire-some-better-seo? dept

Apparently, the French coastal town of Eu is so upset that people can't find the town via a Google search, that it's considering changing its name. The mayor of the town is quite concerned about how this is impacting the town's tourism business -- which does show the cultural dominance of Google, these days, on some things. Of course, as the article notes, a search on Eu french town turns up plenty of results -- though, even those are currently dominated by stories like this one about the name search. Perhaps the town just needs to hire better SEO experts...

Filed Under: eu, france, search engines, seo, tourism
Companies: google

Internet Companies Apologize To China For Being Too Good

from the in-the-future,-we'll-miss-more-stuff dept

We noted that the Chinese government had called out a bunch of search engines for allowing access to porn recently, and I find it amusing to see that pretty much all of the search engines called out have issued apologies. What I'm wondering is exactly what are they apologizing for? The fact that other people put pornography online? The fact that they're too good as search engines and are able to find that content?

Filed Under: censorship, china, great firewall, search engines
Companies: baidu, google

China Adds Search Engines To Its Censorship-By-Guilt Plan; How Will Google Respond?

from the fix-it-yourselves dept

It's well known that the Great Firewall censorship brigade in China employs tens of thousands of people monitoring what's said across the internet -- but perhaps far more effective has been the fear factor imposed on various ISPs by the government threatening them with punishment, if they don't ban unacceptable content. Of course, the government doesn't define what exactly is unacceptable, leading the ISPs to over-ban in order to protect themselves. Mostly, this effort has focused on internet access providers, but it looks like the government is now expanding it to search engines as well, after the government publicly named and shamed both Google and Baidu for failing to prevent access to "undesirable" content such as pornography.

This may prove to be an interesting test for Google, which was widely criticized for its original move into China, whereby it agreed to block content as designated by the Chinese government -- while alerting users to the fact that the content is blocked. That was Google's way of striking a compromise, while trying to call attention to the censorship (perhaps in the hope that it would eventually cause the policy to be changed). However, if Google is now getting pressure to be more proactive in determining what's "unacceptable," rather than just blocking specific content designated by the government, things could get a lot trickier for Google. Of course, some might point out that this was the slippery slope that Google put itself on when it first made the deal to get into China.

Filed Under: china, great firewall, guilt, search engines
Companies: baidu, google

Argentinian Celebrities Succeed In Forcing Search Engines To Block Search Results On Their Name

from the internet-stupidity dept

Proving, once again, that common sense isn't so common, News.com is reporting on a series of orders handed down by judges in Argentina that have forced Google and Yahoo to completely block searches on certain Argentinian celebrities. Apparently, some Argentinian models who were upset that their pictures were showing up on some porn sites, sued both Yahoo and Google. For anyone who understands just about anything about how the internet works, it would be easy to recognize that this lawsuit was grossly mistargeted. Yahoo and Google have nothing to do with the content on the various websites they point to, but apparently Argentinian models and judges do not seem to recognize this.

So, the judges issued an injunction, demanding that Google and Yahoo block references to the models. This "win" caused other Argentinian celebrities who were upset with content online about them to seek out the same lawyer, who filed similar lawsuits over and over again. Each time, the court has issued an injunction, forcing Google and Yahoo to block results on those individuals. In some cases, they've tried to block specific results, but in at least one case, Yahoo has blocked all results on a search for Argentinian soccer star Diego Maradona. The blocks only impact the Argentinian sites, but it still seems fairly ridiculous.

Google is appealing the injunctions, saying that this really seems like something of a shakedown. The company is also trying to explain to the Argentinian government why it should put in place safe harbor laws that protect service providers from being liable for the content created by others. Of course, even without such laws in place, common sense should prevail. Apparently, though, common sense remains less common than commonly believed.

Filed Under: argentina, celebrities, liability, safe harbors, search engines
Companies: google, yahoo

Reminder: Google Is An MP3 Search Engine Too

from the as-if-you-didn't-know-that dept

We've pointed out many times in the past that the various Torrent tracker sites out there that the entertainment industry is suing are not particularly different than Google. All of them are search engines and can find unauthorized music for you. Some entertainment industry defenders get upset by this argument pointing out that Google's search isn't just designed for such files, but that's rather meaningless. A bunch of folks have been submitting a story from about a month ago (which is probably getting attention now because it made it to Digg's front page) about how easy it is to find MP3s on Google with some basic querying. This isn't new, and I doubt many people really needed this article to understand how to do this, but it does highlight the same point. If Google is equally as effective as various torrent trackers in finding unauthorized content, why aren't the entertainment industry giants suing Google for the same thing?

Filed Under: search engines
Companies: google

Belgian Newspapers Demand Google Pay $77 Million For All The Traffic Google Sent Them

from the of-all-the-ridiculous-lawsuits... dept

Back in 2006, we couldn't believe that a group of Belgian French-language newspapers could be so confused about how the internet works that they would sue Google for daring to send them more traffic. Of course, if the newspapers were so upset about Google sending them traffic, they could have taken rather easy (robots.txt) means of preventing the indexing -- something they finally did after someone explained to them how search engines work.

But, of course, that's not what it was really about. It's always been about the money. So, it should come as no surprise that the same group of Belgian newspapers is now demanding that Google pay them $77 million. Google should counter that these newspapers owe them every damn cent of ad revenue that was generated by anyone clicking through from Google to those newspaper sites -- plus an additional fee for being so kind as to "advertise" those newspapers websites to those who had never heard of them before.

Filed Under: belgium, copyright, newspapers, search engines
Companies: google

Man Arrested For Child Porn, Blames Google For Making It Too Easy To Find

from the well-there's-a-defense dept

It's amazing how little anyone is willing to accept blame these days. They always find someone else to blame for their actions. For an extreme example, a guy in the UK arrested for having more than 16,000 child porn photos is using the unique defense that it's all Google's fault for making it so easy to access the photos. His lawyer noted: "He feels that he would not have committed these offences if this information was not so freely available. He feels if companies like Google did not provide access to such sites, he would not have committed the offences." It's tough to see the court buying that kind of argument.

Filed Under: blame, porn, search engines

Random Scams Won't Take Down Google

from the nice-try,-though dept

Three years ago, reporter Tom Foremski tossed out his idea for how Microsoft could kill Google in an underhanded way: offer $100 million to whoever clicked on a random Google ad. The trick would be that no one (other than the person administering the prize at Microsoft) would know what the ad is. Foremski's theory was that this would lead to massive clickfraud and anger from Google advertisers. Of course, there are a lot of assumptions in there that likely wouldn't hold up in a real world test (with the biggest being that the whole deal would stop working the second someone "won"). However, now we've got Mark Cuban tossing out a suggestion for how to take down Google that seems to come from the same "wishful thinking" playbook. Cuban's idea is that Microsoft (with Yahoo) should offer to pay the top 100,000 sites in Google to get them to remove themselves from Google, and agree to be "exclusively" in the Yahoo/Microsoft listing. The idea is that the money would serve to pay for the lost traffic from Google -- but that's highly speculative.

If Microsoft actually tried this, it would be quite difficult for the Justice Department not to call an antitrust foul, first of all. But, at a more practical level, it just wouldn't work. It's based on the false premise that those top 100k sites are really the only sites that matter. If they all disappeared from Google's index, another 100k would quickly fill in to replace them. In fact, it would get more and more difficult to convince sites to leave Google's index, since the competition for clicks would get easier and easier as others did leave. On top of that, if this actually did happen, my guess is Google would continue to index those sites anyway forcing some sort of court battle over whether or not a site can actually block a search engine from spidering it entirely. These sorts of ideas are fun to think about, but once you think past the basic idea, it's not hard to recognize why the scams would never work. Beating Google is never going to be about a scam.

Now, I should add that I started writing up this post last night. This morning, the news came out that Cuban is included on the board slate that Carl Icahn has put up to try to force Yahoo to sell to Microsoft. The timing, obviously, is no coincidence. Cuban's blog post went up just hours before he was revealed to be a potential board member. However, just because this could, conceivably, put Cuban in a position to actually push Microsoft/Yahoo to implement such a plan, it doesn't make it any more viable. In fact, it makes it that much more questionable.

Filed Under: advertising, competing, mark cuban, search engines
Companies: google, microsoft, yahoo

isoHunt Tries The 'Just A Search Engine' Defense

from the let's-see-how-this-works dept

isoHunt, one of the BitTorrent tracker sites that the MPAA generated publicity for with a lawsuit a couple of years ago, has filed a response to the judge's request for more information on how BitTorrent and BitTorrent tracker sites work. The MPAA, of course, positioned isoHunt as a den of piracy. But isoHunt, following the lead of TorrentSpy, has pointed out to the judge that it's no different than a search engine, indexing the various BitTorrent files out there. isoHunt, itself, is never involved in copyright infringement and, of course, there are plenty of authorized BitTorrent trackers out there. It will be interesting to see a judge finally rule on this issue. TorrentSpy lost its case, but not over this issue. In that case, the guys at TorrentSpy destroyed evidence -- which is a huge no-no. Hopefully a judge recognizes why search engines shouldn't be blamed for infringement that results from the use of the website.

Filed Under: bittorrent, search engines, trackers
Companies: isohunt, mpaa