Why blame Google?

I read an article on the BBC site recently about Google limiting free news access to sites where you normally have to pay for content. The idea is to limit users to a maximum of 5 free articles per site for sites that participate in the First Click Free programme. After that, users will be redirected to register or pay. Apparently, Google is doing this because the newspaper industry is concerned that Google is benefiting unfairly from newspaper content. How so?

Some readers have discovered they can avoid paying subscription fees to newspaper websites by calling up their pages via Google. This is because Google searches frequently link directly to newspaper articles, bypassing some sites’ subscription systems.

So whose fault is it that users are able to access content for free that they shouldn’t be able to? Is it Google’s because they link directly to articles? Or is it the fault of the news sites for not getting their web developers to create their sites more securely? Have they heard about password control?

What’s your view?

Article

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Google Searchwiki

If you enable javascript on Google and you are a signed-in Google user, you may notice that next to every search term result, there are two new icons. Yes, you can now promote or remove search results! And at the end of the search results, you will see a speech bubble – yes, you can also comment on search results!

According to Google, this is known as Searchwiki.

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong.

What is the catch?

The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

My initial excitement takes a knock. Okay, so I can see other people’s seachwiki notes … provided they have it enabled and know about this. And, once I sign out of gmail, searchwiki is gone!

Does Google want me to be plugged in 247 into this thinking, pulsating, heaving cloud?

I am wondering: I am one of those people that uses Google to get to sites (apparently there is a large group of us out there); even if I can guess the url or know the url, I go to Google and type in the name of the website I am looking for, and then click on the first link.

So, provided I am signed-in, does Searchwiki now simplify my life? Otherwise, why would I want to customise my search results?

Let’s assume you are logged into Google. You can now promote our site:

As a side: did you notice the second search result? And then, what is up with the third one? I think I am going to use this as a my new tag line:

Do you shruder at such words because of your utter insanity?

Oops – is this plagarism?

You can also remove us from your searchwiki:

And lastly, you can make comments about us in your seachwiki by clicking the speech bubble:

Does this mean that we should regularly search for ourselves in our seachwiki to review the comments? Hmmm.

Read about what this potentially means for marketers from Seth Godin’s site.

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The REAL reason behind Chrome

Been reading up a bit about Google’s Chrome and came across this blog entry over at Computerworld. The author says Google isn’t creating a web browser, they’re creating a Web application platform that can run equally well on computers and mobile devices. He also claims that Chrome and open source browsers that adopt it’s features will open the way for users to adopt safe, efficient and fast web-based applications that are free.

My favorite quote from the article is this bit at the end:

Killing Internet Explorer isn’t really Chrome’s goal. No, killing Microsoft Office is Chrome’s goal.

Love it!

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Insane News: Viacom, GOOGLE & YouTube battle!

Shockingly I saw in on the front page of my morning paper was “YouTube told to reveal all users”.

Turns out that Viacom pursuing a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube because they claim that 160,000 unauthorized clips of television shows have been uploaded onto YouTube and veiwed more that 1.5 billion times, thus YouTubes success is solely based on this. So Viacom have gone to GOOGLE so as to obtain all users detailssuch as usernames and IP addresses. But experts are in up roar about this as this ruling threatens the privacy of millions of users – users like us!!!. We have been told that Viacom will notbe allowed to use this information for anything bar the lawsuit, but accidents happen and things often get misplaced.

Firstly, I thought GOOGLE didn’t keep such records, but as my wife said

Funny, they say they don’t track us, but you ever notice when push comes to shove they seem to be able to obtain all this information.

So, how many of you now are getting nervous??

More information

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Aprils fools from google

Their front page declares that you have now installed a new feature that will allow you to backdate an email to before you send it. You can backdate it all the way to “1st April” 2004 when google was brought online. Oh yes, it also mentions that they use an ‘flux capacitor’ to resolve issues around causality.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

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