Google Stuff

Is Google beginning to feel a little heat from Bing? It sort of looks that way, given that it's created a bunch of ads (which they're calling "Search Stories") showing how various folks might consider using Google to satisfy their information requirements.

Whatever. We'll take any excuse to inject a little Gotham into our day.

Last week we suggested that it could be a bad idea for Ruppert Murdoch if he followed through on his threat to yank his holdings -- including the Wall Street Journal -- out of Google's listings. His issue: Google (and other content aggregators) were cribbing content for their own benefit, never mind that they inevitably drive a significant amount of traffic to the original site.

Today, we bring you the alternative viewpoints that say perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing.

The New York Times reports that the top three search engines -- Google, Yahoo and Bing -- provided 21.9 million pageviews to WSJ.com in October; with an ad revenue estimate of $24 per 1,000 pageviews, that equals $525,000 for the month and $6.3 million per year.

The flip side is News Corp.'s digital chief Jon Miller, who says that this traffic is made up largely of consumers "who more often than not reads one article and leaves the site." He calls this "the least valuable traffic to us," and suggests that pay walls would help balance lost revenue.

Meanwhile, John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, suggests that Murdoch "should go ahead and cut off Google if he wants. At a minimum, it'll be amusing to watch. But I doubt his content will be missed -- unless he can create greater value and benefit for the user than he has today."

There's actually a way to do that, counters TechCrunch, pointing to Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who suggests (via the following embedded video) that Murdoch would be well-served to work out an exclusive licensing deal for indexing his content with Bing.

"If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York Times content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing," wrote Michael Arrington. "This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites -- if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft, just as bidding wars have broken out in the past over the right to serve search ads into third party publishing sites."

Were this to happen, Google would have to make some hard choices about being what its dedication to not being a content company means. As usual, the ball seems to be in Murdoch's court.

Talk about holiday goodwill.

Yesterday, Google took last month's offer of free wi-fi on all Virgin American flights through Jan. 15, and extended it throughout 47 airports across the United States. (Oddly, though Buffalo, Des Moines and Oklahoma City are on the list, San Francisco is not.)

While travelers are online, they can opt to give to a charity designated by Google, and Google will match their contribution for a total of up to $250,000. The airport that gets the highest dollar amount contributed per passenger by January 1, 2010 will also receive $15,000 to donate to the local charity of its choice.

There's nothing to buy, and no usage figures (outside of money donated) will be tracked.

Google has all the information, including a complete list of participating airports, at the Free Holiday Wi-Fi Web page.

Yesterday we mentioned Rupert Murdoch's threat to yank his Web sites -- including the Wall Street Journal -- from Google search and Google News.

Today, we bring you the backlash.

DailyFinance's Jeff Bercovici says that such a move "would be colossally stupid, and not just because of the massive traffic declines and resulting lost ad revenue." Because journalists want to "have their work, read, discussed and linked to," he wrote, Murdoch's News Corp. would shoot itself in the foot as far as its ability to draw and retain talent. He points to longtime Newsday columnist Saul Friedman, who quit the paper rather than watch his column be hidden behind an Internet pay wall.

Bercovici is dead on in the first part of his analysis.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld points out that according to Hitwise, more than 25 percent of the Journal's Web traffic comes directly from Google or Google News, and that 44 perecnt of visitors to WSJ.com are new to the site, many of them directed there via Google.

"Never mind that in order to get people to pay for content," wrote Schonfeld, "they first have to be able to find it."

Where Becovici might be wrong is the part about the Journal and other News Corp. holdings suffering from an ensuing talent drain. It's easy to call journalists a vain bunch, caring only about mass visibility for their work, and to a degree, that's true. But this is a new era for journalism, and the Wall Street Journal is still one of the country's premiere brands and a decent paycheck by any industry measure.

The betting money here has a negligible amount of noteworthy defections over this topic, if any at all. (It must also be pointed out that the example of Saul Friedman isn't truly representative, as he is 80 years old and, if not considering retirement anyway, was at least in a position to stick it to the man that most younger journalists are not.)

Still, the fact remains that while Murdoch might not need the strength of Google to aid circulation, to turn his back on it would be a short-sighted mistake.

Glamour has named Google's VP of search and user experience, Marissa Mayer, one of 2009's women of the year. The decision, they wrote, is based on the fact that her aesthetic has become Google's aesthetic and that most everything the company does (from Gmail to Google Earth) runs through her office.

"It's pretty hard to overstate her impact," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the brief story. "She built the team that designs the products we all use."

Of course, there are also mentions of her taste in designers (Oscar de la Renta and Armani), and her refutation of the “people with pocket protectors and thick glasses” tech-geek stereotype.

A more in-depth profile can be found in July's Vogue.

(Via TechCruch.)

TechCrunch took the time to point out Google's homepage today -- not because it's the third day in a row they're celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, but because there's a rare ad, front and center.

This is noteworthy because not only is Google's homepage spare -- there's a 28-word limit -- but they're continually fiddling with making it even emptier.

Apparently standards can be compromised when the tech world is talking about one of your own products. Google's advertising the new Droid phone from Motorola, which runs on its own Android software, and which was released today.

At least Google stuck to its guns in one regard -- even with the ad, the homepage checks in at 27 words.

About two years ago, the mediaosphere was all abuzz with wonderings about whether Google was going to buy the New York Times. According to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, whose new book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It just hit the bookstores, Google was at one point considering such a move.

From an interview with I Want Media:

I Want Media: Google is a media company in terms of generating advertising revenues, not producing content. Is there any indication that Google could enter content production?

Auletta: Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt told me that they had discussed buying the New York Times, but in the end decided that if they succeeded it would sabotage their identity as a neutral search engine. The reason they are interested in preserving the New York Times is that Google's search engine depends on good information, and the Times is the world's best newspaper.

Yesterday Google unwrapped its new music search feature, geared toward bringing individual tracks of music -- searchable by artist, song or album name, or even by lyric -- to the top of the search string, complete with opportunities to sample and buy.

Contrary to much of the speculation in recent weeks, Apple's iTunes store is not featured. Instead, MySpace's iLike and Lala serve up the audio samples.

Also included are partnerships with Pandora, imeem and Rhapsody to link through to their sites for songs related to queries.

At the official launch, TechCrunch conducted interviews with many of the players involved: Google Director Product Management Search R.J. Pittman, MySpace Music President Courtney Holt and LaLa founder Bill Nguyen. Watch them here.

BayNewser's sister site, Internet News, tells us that Google will soon be the official e-mail provider for the city of Los Angeles.

Gmail and other applications will be delivered to the city straight from Google's servers. The contract will pay $7.25 million over five years for contractor Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) to implement a system that runs Google apps for 30,000 users, including document archiving, spreadsheets, presentations, virus detection, disaster recovery and additional storage.

This is the first of what one can only assume that Google hopes to be many such deals. The upside for the city is clear -- Google maintains, updates and stores all the information. It's as hands-off a system as one could hope for, and a clear alternative to on-site applications like Microsoft Office, which is hosted on individual desktops and in-house network servers.

The downside, of course, is that the city is entrusting sensitive information to a third-party, in hopes that that information will not be compromised. ("It's unclear if this is cutting edge, or the edge of a cliff and we're about to step off," said Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz in the Los Angeles Times.)

To allay these fears, in unanimously voting to approve the contract, the council added an amendment stipulating that CSC will pay penalties for security breaches.

Los Angeles currently uses a system from Novell called GroupWise, which, wrote the Los Angeles Times, has a record of being unreliable, and which would require 90 dedicated servers operated by 13 staffers at a cost of $23 million over five years.

Google's newest offering? Search results that not only include relevant information out on Web sites but that also include any public information posted online by your group of friends.

The feature's called Google Social Search. Let's say, for example, you're searching for information on the Copenhagen Climate Summit that's taking place in December. Toss that into the Google search engine, and the results wouldn't only include links to the summit's home page and the most recent news stories about it. They'll also include any tweets, Facebook updates, blog postings, YouTube videos, and so forth posted by people in your social circle.

How does Google know who's in your social circle? It takes a look at your contacts in Gmail and, if you have a Google Profile, it includes the people you're connected to in the social networks that you've added to your profile.

The principle Google's using is one that's long been applied in the field of knowledge management—which, among other things, helps large companies work more effectively by, for example, employing tools that help surface anyone in the company who might have information useful on a project you're working.

And while these kinds of search results are clearly useful for users, they also help Google shore up its position by giving you one more reason to stick with Gmail and create a Google profile.

The most interesting question, though, is how Google will subsequently use the data it collects to research patterns among groups of people—rather than just of individuals—to create new services and advertising products.

In the meantime, this video explains the project.