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The murky world of Mozilla and Google

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When the Mozilla Foundation turns to the public for money, it happily assumes the mantle of a penniless public institution asking for charity. Over 10,000 FireFox fans drew deep into their own pockets to place an expensive two-page advertisement for the browser in the New York Times 15 months ago.

But the Mozilla Foundation’s commercial wing, Mozilla Corp., is awash with cash, its accounts reveal. It’s just that in the spirit of openness and full disclosure – it er, … doesn’t like to talk about it.

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Google offers MS-style Seattlement for click fraud suit

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Google will pay $90 million to settle a class action click fraud lawsuit. Any web site operator who was also a Google ad network partner who can show improper charges over the past four years will be eligible for damages.

Google announced the news on a part of its site devoted to trivia, such as rating soft drinks. According to a weblog post from Google counsel Nicola Wong, doing her best to be folksy, “we’re very near a resolution in that case, so we thought we’d offer an update.”

How nice.

The case was brought by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles, an Arkansas merchant, and also names Yahoo! In December 2004, Google’s CFO George Reyes called click fraud “the biggest threat to our business model.”

The judge has yet to approve the deal. Avoiding a court trial will save Google some blushes. The Wall Street Journal notes that “spare it from having to disclose further details of its ad system and antifraud measures in court.

And the terms of the deal are likely to raise eyebrows, too.

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Google outspooks the spooks with Total Information Awareness plan

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Google wants to mirror and index every byte of your hard drive, relegating your PC to a “cache”, notes on a company PowerPoint presentation reveal.

The file accompanied part of Google’s analyst day last week. Google has since withdrawn the file, telling the BBC that the information was not intended for publication.

The justification for this enormous data grab is that Google would be able to restore your data after a catastrophic system failure.

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77% of Google users don’t know it records personal data

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More than three quarters of web surfers don’t realize Google records and stores information that may identify them, results of a new opinion poll show. The phone poll, which sampled over 1000 internet users, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute following the DoJ subpoenas last week. This suggests that the battle for internet privacy is … Read more

GoogleNet flickers into life

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Five months after announcing its first Google-branded hot spots, covering San Francisco’s Union Square and main public library, Google is enhancing the service. The ad giant briefly made a beta of a proxy server, Google Secure Access, available for limited download today before withdrawing the link. The proxy is intended to protect 802.11 wireless users … Read more

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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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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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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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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