New Search

Objections are emerging to Google's Street View, a service that matches photos of locations to maps, including passers-by who were captured as the photograph was taken. The BBC notes that:

Privacy International, a UK rights group, believes the technology breaks data protection laws.

"In our view they need a person's consent if they make use of a person's face for commercial ends," said Simon Davis of the group.

Street View has already been launched in the US and includes photos of streets in major American cities. Photographing of areas in the UK, including London, is believed to have started this week.

Furthermore.....

If the group does not get the answer it seeks within seven days, Mr Davies said it would write to the Information Commissioner seeking a suspension of the service in the UK.

"We've spoken to Google in the past about this and received a snide response telling us to look more closely at their blogs.

"We've been told by engineers at Google that the technology is not ready to be deployed."

In the US it is legal to take photos of people on public streets. But Mr Davies believes that because Street View is being used for commercial ends anyone in the UK who appears in the photo needs to grant his or her consent.

I thought that was also true in the US if company logos etc are photographed, my understanding is that this makes quite an issue for rights clearance in the US for movies.

Must say, when I think whether I want the entire world to be able to look at my house iI don't embrace the idea with glee, there is a feeling that an element of privacy is being compromised. I loved Google Earth when it came out, but at its level of magnification - to date anyway - it seems more private. Its a very interesting area and thus should be - in my view anyway - tested in court just so some form of agreement can be hammered out, or else you can imagine a number of abuses can be added to it.

From the Wall St Journal:

Microsoft Corp. hopes to make gains on Google Inc. in the lucrative business of Internet search through a new service that pays consumers who buy items they find through the software company's search service.

They must've been reading Broadstuff - we noted last year, re matching YouTube, that organic growth via customer motivation was a real option:

Broadstuff Biz Case (expurgated version*)

Cost of Service build - $1m
Cost of Operation before breakeven - $100m
Cost of "persuading" critical mass of YouTube UGC videos onto new service = $5 / video x 50 million clips = $ 250m (added to their content)

No reason one can't apply it to search......for a while anyway.

Blimey - 2 posts on Techmeme on New Search at once....a meme is definitely bubbling up here - I noted this with interest especially from TechCrunch:

....stealth search engine Blekko (no logo, no website, just this and, apparently, some technology) raised a second round of financing.

The company raised $3 million in equity at a $23 million post-money valuation.

And a picture of a person with a brown paper bag over their head.

The timing is useful, as we pitch our New Search project on its first time out tomorrow. I think I'll just pass the hat round shall I

Now where did we put the paper bags...

Saw this in the FT today..........

The scale of Google’s victory over Microsoft in online advertising, sealed by the failure of the Yahoo takeover approach, is hard to exaggerate. By next year, half of the world’s online advertising – set to reach $55bn (£28bn, €36bn) in total – is expected to flow through Google’s systems. Of that, slightly more than two-thirds will come from advertisements that run on Google’s own websites. The rest represents advertising that the internet company, acting as a broker, places on other companies’ sites in return for a small cut of the action.

It is a stunning victory that raises two overriding questions. Will Google be able to use the respite provided by the disarray at Microsoft and Yahoo to carry its dominance of search over into other areas of online – and broader digital – advertising? And should it now be a cause for alarm that one company is in a position to control so much of the lifeblood of the internet?

To some extent, the Microsoft/Yahoo debacle merely confirms something that had already become apparent: the internet search wars ended almost as soon as they began, and Google won. It accounted for around 70 per cent of the estimated $16bn of advertising placed on search engines last year, a share that continues to rise....

(abridged)

...The eventual limits of the fast-growing search market, which accounts for almost half of all online advertising, are still impossible to discern, but it is already a business that stands comparison with the technology industry’s most fabled success stories. On the current trajectory, Google’s revenue – almost all of it coming from search – will probably surpass the income that Microsoft generates from the Windows operating system some time next year.

A similar point also made by Henry Blodget over here - but Blodget goes on to state - to my mind - a flawed assumption that flows through both posts:

- Both products are natural monopolies. Google's share of the search market should continue to approach Microsoft's share of the operating system market (90%+)

- Both products are wildly, fantastically profitable. Microsoft's Windows business has operating margins of 75%-plus. So does Google's search business (once you factor out the billions Google is spending on products that produce zero revenue).

Its not at all clear to me that Google has the same natural monopoly. I can use another search engine with my next search request if it is better than Google.

And the question then becomes, if other search engines start to take market share, can Google keep the same levels of margin and share of advertising?

Unthinkable though it may be, there is quite a groundswell of opinion that Google the Search Engine is not quite what it once was - which is matched by the rise in companies setting up New Search businesses.

And in my opinion Blodget, the FT et al are looking in the wrong direction - looking at Microsoft and Yahoo to build Google killing search engines is akin to looking at IBM and DEC to beat Microsoft - the real competition will come from new areas - unless Google buys them all first of course.

And Microsoft and Yahoo will not collapse overnight - one thing Microsoft and Yahoo could be usefully doing is nurturing new search plays methinks - but they will probably need to create new business groups to do so, avoiding current peanut butter conspiracies.

TechCrunch on the gradual failure of Old Search:

As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns

TechCrunch also quotes Nova Spivack, Radar Networks CEO who believes semantic search is the answer.....:

Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.

...and then asks:

So how do we get beyond keyword search and Google’s PageRank? There are many approaches being tried: social search, tagging, guided search, natural-language search, statistical methods, open search, semantic search, and (way out there) artificial intelligence. They all have their problems.

How Indeed ?

The issue increasingly is not finding - as anyone who is using aggregators like FriendFeed will know, you wind up with a firehose - the issue is filtering to get the needles you want.

We too are building new search systems, we believe we have learned quite a lot since building a specific type of search system to a BBC requirement last year.

This is going to be a fascinating space over the next few years.

Alex van Elsas talking about a Popular Mechanics article on the survival of Google search, based on a single anonymous VC's point of view (interesting, given the scorn passed on VCs' ability to see innovation )......anyway, sez the original article:

So what is my VC friend talking about? The larger the Web grows, the more important search becomes, right? That’s probably so, and as a note of clarification, he changed his statement slightly to say, “Search, as we know it, is dead.” What he means is that, with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

Alexander raises the obvious retort:

This is the Walhalla of search, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A Social Network owners wet dream. But it’s just too good to be true. I don’t buy it. I’m not saying that knowing things about a person might help a service provider provide more targeted results, but I don’t know of a single example where this has been implemented successfully. Every social network site is hogging data to accomplish just this. Whether it is to target ads or to provide the user with search capabilities. But it is likely to fail at least as often as it will succeed. Google provides me in 80-90% of the time with the answer I’m looking for. If a search engine that knows about my profile fails half of the time, I wouldn’t bother using it.

And at times like this I turn to Slashdot, where in the comments to this proposition, in response to the righteous cry that.....:

For myself and most people I know, the internet is about acquiring information about things we aren't familiar with, not about rehashing information which we already know. Whether that information be used for personal enjoyment - learning something new for the sake of learning something new - or for personal research

....The clear eyed response is:

Then you are not using the internet correctly. Don't you see? You aren't meant to want to "learn" anything new - all you should be using the internet for is buying things, passing meaningless chatter with "friends" to enable advertisers to better target you - and then look at those adverts. If you are using it for anything else then you are a p2p criminal who funds terrorists and you should be banned by your ISP.

The internet isn't a knowledge tool (at least as far as the global corporates are concerned), it is one giant shop where "consumers" go to buy things or be influenced to buy things. If "Facebook" genuinely cared about their users then Beacon would have been abhorent to them - instead they insipidly conceived and silently implemented it without their users consent. I am amazed anybody gives characters like that a single piece of information, they are absolute sharks.

So Google, by increasingly filling its search results with page 1 links to comparison shopping engines and Ads, is spot on the zeitgeist

Updata - much richer discussion on this Popular Mechanics page here

(Disclosure - we, as are so many others, are working on Next Generation search engine technology precisely because of both the flaws of the 1st generation ones, and the dichotomy between commercial desires and what customers actually want)

The BBC reports that the EC is likely to take on board the findings of a report on Search Engine data protection.

The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months, while MSN does the same after 13 months.

The body said search companies were not clear enough on data protection.

Google said its privacy policy "strikes the right balance" between privacy, security and innovation.

Sorry guys, we've been working on and off with datamining and data analysis systems over at least 10 years, and it is very hard to think of any search scenario where the customer benefits from more than 6 months data storage. Ad scenarios, sure - but not user search.

The EC have fortunately seen through the fluumery on this one, and they have also struck a blow for appropriate, rather than all, data.

The report also said search engines did not need to gather additional personal data, beyond the IP address of a machine being used, in order to deliver basic search results and advertisements.

The report issued a set of obligations to search engines firms, including:

- Search engines should get informed consent from users if they correlate personal data across different services, such as desktop search

- Search engine providers must delete or anonymise (in an irreversible and efficient way) personal data once they are no longer necessary for the purpose for which they were collected

- Personal data should not be held by search engines for longer than six months

- In case search engine providers retain personal data longer than six months, they must demonstrate comprehensively that it is strictly necessary for the service

- It is not necessary to collect additional personal data from individual users in order to be able to perform the service of delivering search results and advertisements

- If search engine providers use cookies, their lifetime should be no longer than demonstrably necessary

- Search engine providers must give users clear and intelligible information about their identity and location and about the data they intend to collect store or transmit, as well as the purpose for which they are collected

The report also warned that if search engines enriched personal data about users from third parties they could be breaking the law unless customers had given explicit consent.

The guidelines are, in my view, sensible - in fact I suggest the Search Engines go with it or else they will risk being nailed by user backlash when people eventually do work out what is going on.

So the chatterati are full on about Google, Ad values declining and thence onwards to recession, depression and downright doom. (If you want to be truly Recursivist just go to Google Blogs and hit "Google Recession" ). The doom and gloom scenario goes someything like this - the NYT version:

Investors have focused with new intensity on Google’s so-called paid clicks, which grew at 30 percent in the fourth quarter, because the search and advertising giant earns the vast majority of its revenue from text ads, for which it is paid only when users click on them.

Umm...grew at 30% in Q4 - OK, thats a real problem? But soft, that ever reliable datasource ComScore has put the wind up the collective investing knickers:

investors were spooked by a report by the research firm comScore that said clicks on Google ads the United States were flat in January when compared with a year earlier.

More sanguine minds may like to look at this data from HitWise on Google traffic to shopping and retail sites - is that a cyclic pattern I see before me? Could I possibly predict that in January through March people buy less, as opposed to the peak before Xmas?.



Question therefore is why all the hullabaloo now. Is this real, or is this just overall recession anxiety projected on the seemingly recession proof Google (well according to their EU CEO anyway)....

Maybe there were people who actually believed all that recession proof tripe (apart from certain analysts of course, who were famous for writing one thing but believing another....)

As we noted before when Forrester claimed Social Nets were recession proof (just before all the data on Facebook etc audience collapse came out, of course - the world, as you know, rests on a molten core of irony) one should always head for the hills - or at least sell the stock - when such pronouncements are made, and wait for the inevitable discovery of the opposite.

So, following this Broadstuff Universal Stock Tracking (BUST) system, its clearly time to buy Google

Longer term however, you have to wonder about the people who perenially pimp Google - by definition margins erode in any market as competitors enter, and their core tech is old and increasingly less fit for purpose, spawning an increasing "new search" industry.

It is always good to read a Nick Carr post over morning coffee, especially one you can take issue with . Nick has written here (and in more detail here) about how Google utilises Complementary goods to drive its own demand:

Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income.

And thus Google is motivated to reduce the costs of the complements and therefore increase the demand:

It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, and giving away Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. To borrow a well-worn phrase, Google wants information to be free - and that is why Google strikes fear into so many different kinds of companies.

There are two main issues one can take with this approach:

Firstly, this is just another Fox and Rabbits ecosystem model - the problem for the GoogleFox is when all the rabbits are eaten (ie the price of information being near-zero drives information providers out the market). Can this happen - possibly, the total global Adspend (about $0.5 trillion) is not nearly enough to fund all services which today are paid for via subscriptions of various types, even if it were all online (only c 13% though rising at present). Google's own strategy appears to be to corrall rabbits - ie own or control access to a lot of todays' existing content - but we suspect even Google cannot Bunker-Hunt the whole Information market.

Secondly, the virtuous Googlenomic circle only works while they have search hegemony (see our note last year). Once there is search competition, then value can be added via premium complementaries as a differentiator, and the competition for Adbids sees profit in Ads slip away.

Competition is therefore something that interests Google exceedingly - they like it so much, they buy it up ...Sez Nick:

Many of the most innovative and successful of Google’s new ser­vices are, in fact, ones it has acquired rather than created. Those include the hugely popular video-sharing service YouTube, the Weblog publisher Blogger, the virtual globe Google Earth, the online word processor Writely (renamed Google Docs), the wiki developer JotSpot, the news syndication service Feedburner, and the Internet phone service GrandCentral. When it comes to innovation, Google is starting to look less like a sower than a harvester, less like an inventor than an exploiter.

With the purchase of Doubleclick its moving from Exploiter to Monopoly though.....anyway, Nick concludes his longer piece with:

Above all, Google teaches us, through both its successes and its failures, that smart companies — the ones that are not only consistently innovative but consistently profitable — exhibit three qualities. They hire talented people and give them room to excel. They measure progress and results rigorously and make course adjustments quickly. And they remain disciplined in their work and their spending, curbing the instinct to do too much at once. Of course, that sounds less like a radical rethinking of business verities than a restatement of them. Which brings us to a further lesson: Beware the inevitable hype about how the latest business trend or the newest overnight success “changes everything.” Yes, markets and technology change, sometimes with devastating speed, but through the turmoil, the underpinnings of business success remain fairly stable

There is another great success factor not mentioned though - market dominance. Question is - is this an industry where competition can grow naturally, or does the law of increasing returns mean that Google will keep first place unless it does something extraordinarily stupid (or stops buying all the promising small New Search companies). We rather suspect the latter is the case, given the small and waning share of any serious competition, in which event a more careful examination from an anti-trust standpoint is advisable.

(Don't get me wrong...I'm a Googlefan...its just that power corrupts, and absolute power....)

A fascinating short story by Cory Doctorow over here....here's an excerpt:

He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. "Maya," he said, "what do you know about Google and the DHS?"

She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. "Top of the light pole there; don't look," she said. "That's one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk."

In the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn't paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public—there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.

Google TV is different...it watches you

.....move over Jennifer Government