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Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

Federal Court Rejects Viacom’s $1 Billion Lawsuit Against YouTube

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Viacom, one of the world’s most widely known media giants, recently attempted to file a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube only to get rejected by the U.S. Federal Court.  Viacom, like many other similar companies including Disney, NBC Universal and Time Warner, are trying hard to prevent TV clips and movies from being available on the Internet for free.

Louis Stanton, a district court judge, said that YouTube cannot be held responsible for individuals who post videos from popular productions, including Viacom, without getting approval from YouTube itself.

Viacom’s argument was that YouTube makes it “easy” for users to post video clips and difficult for copyright owners to monitor those clips that get posted without approval.  Judge Stanton simply rejected this argument based on the fact that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act eliminates the responsibility for websites of having to check user-generated content before it gets posted on the site.

YouTube has a reputation of removing clips that in violation of copyright laws immediately after they are posted, a fact confirmed by the judge.  Two years ago, YouTube actually removed 100,000 videos that violated Viacom copyright laws.

Viacom agreed to appeal the ruling in that it goes against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the views of Congress and the Supreme Court.  According to the ruling, individuals post 24 hours’ worth of video every minute to YouTube.  For Google, this ruling was an important win considering the number of people who turn to the Internet for information, content and communication.

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Google the Gaffe Engine

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Forced backgrounds? Really?

Google has been making some uncharacteristic mistakes that are driving users away.

The first blunder was last month when the Google logo was turned into a playable PacMan game. You might think this was not a bad idea at all, and it wasn’t—it was a wonderful surprise. The problem was that someone forgot to put an off button for the sound, and the game automatically would start (with sound) if a user loaded the Google home page, but didn’t navigate away (e.g. doing a search or logging into an account). They ended up correcting this problem later during the day, but the damage was done.

The second gaffe which went in effect yesterday was the forced background image for the Google home page. Initially it was an option, and was a welcome change; however, Google has decided that it’s better to force the picture on its visitors. What’s worse, there is no option to remove it, unless you are logged into your Google Account. Understandably, though apparently not to the decision-makers at Google, this forced change is at best irritating.

Hopefully Google will fix this problem soon, before it loses even more users to Bing.

For those of you who missed the PacMan logo, Google has kept it around: http://www.google.com/pacman/

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Google Tries to Help Those Contemplating Suicide

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Someone is watching

In an interesting addition to its search results, Google has introduced a new addition to queries which may indicate that someone is considering committing suicide. The new feature ads an entry at the top of the search results which provides information the 800 number for the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

It’s times like this makes people realize what an important role technology plays in their lives, and how a little ingenuity can impact fragile lives in a deep and profound way.

There is a good Karma point in this for Google.

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Google Personalized Search: The End of SEO?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

There is no shortage of Google or iPhone killers each and every year, but this time Google is not on the receiving end of the challenge. By the introduction of personalize search (even when users are not logged in), Google has thrown a wrench into the world of search engine optimization; or at least so it would seem.

There have been numerous forum threads and articles about how the changes that Google is introducing into their algorithm (e.g. personalized search, universal search, real-time search) will be the end of search engine optimization. As everyone knows, media is not prone to hyperbole or sensationalism, so the predictions must be true. They are not.

As circumstances are wont to do, they change. And with every such change come challenges, as well as opportunities. In the case of Google’s SERP changes, there is no difference. Even though personalized search will impact rankings for certain searches, it will just as likely create opportunities to drive traffic to websites. This very blog post has been, in part, created in response to how Google handles real-time search and will most likely produce results beyond the reach of search engine optimization.

So, we would like to ask the countless bloggers and forum participants to stay away from sensationalism as much as possible, and simply focus on how these (or any) changes produce opportunities, as well as to confine the dialogue to solutions to the challenges faced by Internet marketers.

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Wolfram Alpha

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

After many ‘Google Killers’ trying their hand and stirring the waters in the world of search engines, Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) has quietly settled in without much ado. Yet, as far as search technology is concerned, Wolfram Alpha has no claims at being the David to Google’s Goliath. It is a very specialized engine, and from the interaction we have had with it so far, does a superb job of returning useful and well organized results.

We hope to see even more interesting developments as Wolfram Alpha matures under the weight of early adopters.

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