Stories

A Million Nation States of One fears Google Balkanization

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Some stories just take forever to come true. 30 months ago, we revealed Google was going to introduce a weblog search engine – and this week, it finally did. The story, so obvious in retrospect, barely merits the term ‘scoop’. But now, as then, it has been eclipsed by a raging debate about the implications for bloggers and for the web in general.

A great many people see this as the perfect opportunity to improve Google search – and introduce some innovation into the world of web user interface navigation – by removing weblogs from the main Google index, and giving them their own tab, as Usenet enjoys now.

Google, along with rival search engines which aped its link based algorithms, has to wrestle with the constantly evolving techniques deployed to trick it into promoting certain web pages. It’s an arms race comparable to email spam, and one of the chief culprits is ‘blog noise’ – a catch all term for the irrelevant blog entries and all the extraneous plumbing that props them up: RSS feeds, empty pages, duplicate pages, TrackBacks, and so on.

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Meg Whitman’s $2.6bn spam goof?

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“eBay looks less fearsome when you’re upside down,” says the young CEO behind the online auction house’s great Chinese rival Jack Ma. To encourage new hires at his Alibaba.com, Ma asks them to perform handstands. Maybe that won’t be necessary for much longer, as eBay is a lot less fearsome – and a lot poorer – after splurging $2.6bn on Skype (and $4bn in total if Skype hits the numbers).

Couldn’t eBay have done something more sensible with $4 billion – like give the money back to its shareholders – or to the Katrina relief fund?

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What sealed Palm’s software fate?

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So, PalmOS ends up in the hands of an Japanese mobile browser company that almost no one has ever heard of. It’s a sad sign that expectations for PalmOS software have been so low, for so long, that PalmSource stock leapt 70 per cent on the news.

The origins of this decline have been well documented here at El Reg, we’ll only recap the key mistakes before raising a spectre that haunts this tale of Silicon Valley history: a spectre called Apple. 

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Google hires ‘Astro’ Cerf

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Vint Cerf, co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, has become Google’s latest trophy hire. The ad broker must be hoping that Cerf, hired for the PR position of “chief evangelist”, can add some gravitas to the operation after weeks of bad publicity. A poorly judged flounce saw Google vow to shun CNet’s reporters for a year, and the move snowballed into a series of articles unfavorably comparing Google to Microsoft. Silly they may be, but last week Google even found its ruthlessness parodied in a lead story at the satirical weekly The Onion.

“We expect great things to come from this,” Google engineering veep Bill Coughran told theSan Jose Mercury News.

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Burning Man, meet Drowning Man

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Silicon Valley’s freak-out meets Katrina, with a bump

The writer had found an elusive internet connection, and reaching beyond exhaustion was finding words to record the madness around him:

“We are operating on something beyond tired, beyond care, beyond recognition,” he wrote. “You just keep going, because you have no choice.”

New Orleans? No, Burning Man.

The writer was describing America’s greatest party, although word only seeped through about the disaster unfolding in America’s greatest party city, 2,000 miles away.

The Burning Man festival is a survival experience by design, not force majeure. Each year around 30,000 throng to a Nevada salt desert for a week, bringing their own food and water with them to create “Black Rock City”, and endeavoring to leave no trace behind them. It’s a celebration of creativity, community and endurance that for many in Silicon Valley is the highlight of the year – around two thirds of Burners are from the San Francisco Bay Area. By no means the largest festival in the world, Burning Man is still a truly astonishing visual spectacle, and the intensity of the experience leads Burners to host “decompression parties” on touchdown.

This year, however, the decompression shock has been particularly severe.

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File swapping MSPs – the future of digital music?

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Don’t expect Bono to descend from a cloud. Or orgasmic praise from the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. When PlayLouder quietly rolls out its music service in the UK, it won’t initially match the razzle-dazzle of the iTunes Music Store launch, Rhapsody or the other million dollar marketing blitzes.

But the initial, low-key ‘soft launch’ of the first legal file swapping service to be backed by one of the major labels is deceptive. PlayLouder MSP offers something quite revolutionary, and its fate is more likely to shape the future of digital music distribution than anything we’ve seen to date.

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Pimplier Batgirls and Sawdusty Barmen

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Whacking Google’s wordlist woes

Earlier this week the NCSA released a study that attempted to compare the respective merits of Google and Yahoo!’s search engines. (See My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!). Unfortunately, the only thing it proved was which search engine was publishing the most gibberish it had collected – a fact apparently lost on the researchers. The three academics insisted that because Google was returning more gibberish, it must be doing a better job.

Doh!

The phenomenon, we discover, is relatively recent, and it’s an unintended consequence of both search engines trying to make their searches more comprehensive. The trouble is that Google is returning pages which are nothing but great long lists of words as valid search results, when rarely, if ever, is this what the searcher is looking for. Unless you have a thing for strange combinations of words.

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My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!

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Last week Yahoo! claimed it had sailed past Google by indexing 20 billion web pages.

Because as much as a third of the wild wild web consists of artificially-generated pages of spam designed to promote commercial web sites, this isn’t much to boast about. Many of the fake pages are ‘splogs’, or spam blogs, or phoney catalogs, or simply pages of dictionary words. You can meet one of the perps here, in our story Interview with a link spammer.

And because few users have the patience to find the gem returned at position #12,711 in the search results, then the size of an index is meaningless.

More is never a substitute for better.

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FCC opens door to ISP wipe-out

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Re-monopolizing the phone service 

US telecoms regulator the FCC has signaled the end of the independent ISP, a move which will leave DSL provision concentrated in the hands of just a few large providers. The move, which turns local DSL provision from a regulated monopoly into an unregulated monopoly, also has repercussions for rural telephony providers, who will lose a chunk of subsidy, and has potentially chilling consequences for free speech.

Unless state regulators step into the void just vacated by the Federal regulator, however, every independent DSL provider will find itself at the mercy of the Baby Bells when its contract expires – and the Baby Bells have no compulsion to renew those competitors’ contracts.

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Google snubs press in privacy fury

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Google has thrown a hissy fit and blacklisted tech news site CNET’s News.com – vowing not to provide quotes or statements to the site for a year.

“Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story,” noted reporter Elinor Mills here.

The previous story, by the same reporter and published on July 14, drew on information largely gleaned from Google itself to note Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s political affiliations and hobbies.

“Like so many other Google users, his virtual life has been meticulously recorded,” wrote Mills. Since Schmidt is on the public record with a promise to build “a Google that knows more about you”, he’s hardly in a position to complain when his company is demonstrated to be functioning as designed.

“Shouldn’t he resign if he feels that searching through Google’s index is so evil?” wrote one correspondent to Dave Farber’s IP mailing list.

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