Google is smart

April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. manipulated a U.S. government spectrum auction by bidding just enough to trigger rules that will open a nationwide set of airwaves to any device and then walking away, Republican lawmakers said.

The so-called open-access requirements, also backed by consumer groups, may have shortchanged taxpayers by discouraging more companies from bidding, Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, said today at a hearing.

``Google was successful in gaming the system,'' Upton said. The rules were a ``social engineering'' experiment by the Federal Communications Commission that prevented the spectrum swath, known as the C-block, from raising billions of dollars more, he said.

Google offered $4.71 billion for the C-block, surpassing a $4.6 billion threshold that activated the rules. Verizon Wireless later won the airwaves with a $4.74 billion offer. Google, the most-used search engine, said that while it was prepared to win the airwaves, its main goal was to ensure the open-access rules took effect.

Republican Representatives Cliff Stearns of Florida and John Shimkus of Illinois echoed Upton's comments. Shimkus asked whether Google had ``duped'' the FCC by bidding primarily to trigger the open-access rules.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said the agency wasn't duped, adding that the rules weren't designed to prevent any company from bidding.

``My goal was to make sure that whoever won the C-block had an open platform,'' Martin, a Republican, told the House telecommunications subcommittee.

More Choices

The rules aim to boost consumer choice by requiring the C- block winner to let any legal wireless handset or program use the network. Opening the network to more devices may help Mountain View, California-based Google sell more advertising on phones by expanding consumers' access to mobile Web content.

The auction raised a record amount of revenue and created ``historic new rights'' for wireless subscribers ``as a direct result of Google's bidding,'' company spokesman Adam Kovacevich said.

``By any measure, that's a huge success for consumers, and we're proud of our role in helping make that happen,'' Kovacevich said today in an e-mailed statement.

Google said months before the auction that it would bid enough to trigger the open-access rules if the agency adopted them, Democratic FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said.

``They put over $4.6 billion of their capital at risk,'' Adelstein said in an interview after the hearing. ``That's not a game. That's real money that could have come out of their pocket if Verizon hadn't come out and bid more.''

The C-block comprises about a third of the auctioned airwaves, which will become available when television broadcasters switch to digital signals in 2009. The auction, which ended March 18 after two months of bidding, raised $19 billion, exceeding government projections of as much as $15 billion.

'Semantic Web,' remember this term

Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.

The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other.

Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same way, the "current craze" for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would eventually be superceded by networks that connected all types of things — not just people — thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the "semantic web".

The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web's development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data — not just a web page — so that it can "communicate" with other information.

Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that Google and other search engines help the user to navigate, the "semantic web" will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.

"Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you wouldd know not to claim it as a tax deduction.

"It's about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life."

One example frequently given is of typing a street address which, if it had "semantic data" built into it, would link directly to a map showing its location, dispensing with the need to go to a site like Google `maps, type in the address, get the link and paste it into a document or e-mail.

The challenge, experts say, is in finding a way to represent all data so that when it is connected to the web, links to other relevant information can be recognised and established — a bit like the process known as "tagging". One expected application is in the pharmaceutical industry, where previously unconnected pieces of research into a drug or disease, say, could be brought together and assimilated.

Mr Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at CERN, the European Organsation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, would not be drawn on the type of application that the "Google of the future" would develop, but said it would likely be a type of "mega-mash-up", where information is taken from one place and made useful in another context using the web.

Existing "mash-ups", such as progams that plotted the location of every Starbucks in a city using Google maps, were a start, he said in an interview with Times Online, but they were limited because a separate application had to be built each time a new service was imagined.

"In the semantic web, it's like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitute on a map, and anyone can 'mash' them together and use them for different things."

Mr Berners-Lee, who is now a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a collaborative project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, sought to put into context the rapid growth of social networking sites in recent years, saying that once the semantic web was rolled out they would be thought of as one of many types of network available.

"At the moment, people are very excited about all these connections being made between people — for obvious reasons, because people are important — but I think after a while people will realise that there are many other things you can connect to via the web."

He also spoke about what he described as one of the key challenges of the web today — confronting the security risks associated with large databases of information that were attractive to criminals and identity fraudsters.

"There are definitely better ways of managing that threat. I think we're soon going to see a new tipping point where different types of crimes become possible and lucrative, and it's something we constantly have to be aware of.

"One option is to build systems which more effectively track what information you've used to perform a particular task, and make sure people aren't using their authority to do things that they shouldn't be doing."

Google like a spoiled rich kid - they want everything

From GigaOm

Google, according to The Wall Street Journal is thinking about teaming up with Space Data Corp., a company that sends balloons carrying small (micro) base stations about 20 miles up in the air for providing connectivity to truckers and oil companies. The balloons burst almost every 24 hours and need to be sent up again and again. The electronic payload is retrieved by farmers after it drifts back using a small parachute. The farmers do it because they get $100 per payload retrieved, WSJ says.

The Internet giant — which is now pushing into wireless services — has considered contracting with Space Data or even buying the firm, according to one person…Google believes balloons like these could radically change the economics of offering cellphone and Internet services in out-of-the-way areas, according to people familiar with its thinking.

Given that there is only one anonymous source that is linked to Google, I remain highly skeptical of this plan. And if it is true, then it is yet another example of Google having more money than knowing what to spend it on, which in itself is a dangerous sign for its investors.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

From Haaretz.

Israeli town sues Google over claim it was built on Arab village
By The Associated Press

The northern town of Kiryat Yam is suing Internet giant Google for slander, a local official said Monday, because a feature of its worldwide map service shows the town was built on the ruins of an Arab village.

The dispute brings together two controversies, one old and one new. Officials from the town deny they displaced Arabs during the War of Independence, and Google is defending the practice of allowing any surfer to change information in its files.

Kiryat Yam is a town of 40,000 on the Mediterranean coast just north of the port of Haifa. An entry on Google Earth, a feature that allows users to zero in on locations around the world, alleges that the town was built on the ruins of Ghawarina, an Arab village.
...
Kiryat Yam was pulled into the dispute when a Google Earth user, Thameen Darby, inserted a note on the map saying it was built on the location of Ghawarina. Darby has inserted at least 10 such notes over Google's map of Israel.

"Kiryat Yam filed a slander complaint with Israel's police," said town official Naty Keyzilberman. "This obviously cannot be true, because Kiryat Yam was founded in 1945, he said, explaining the police complaint."

Darby, 30, a Palestinian doctor raised in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said his mother was a refugee from to the village Balad al-Sheikh near Kiryat Yam. He said his contributions to Google Earth are part of the Nakhba - Palestinian Catastrophe information hub aimed to help displaced Palestinians understand their heritage or find the villages of their parents or grandparents.

"As far as I can know, the Arab Ghawarina locality was in the place depicted," Darby told The Associated Press. He noted that he may have not marked the exact location and "if proven wrong by reliable sources, I will be quick to reallocate it."
...
Asked to respond to the police complaint, a Google spokesman said Google Earth depends on user-generated content that reflects what people contribute, not what Google believes is accurate. The spokesman would not give his name, in keeping with company policy.

The spokesman insisted that the altered map is not illegal, and Google's
policy is not to remove such postings.

Google looking to cockblock Microsofts Hostile Take Over of Yahoo?

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc would consider a business alliance with Google Inc as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo's strategy said on Sunday.

Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft's bid, which, at $31 a share, Yahoo management believes undervalues the company, the source said.

A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing.

Few natural bidders exist beside Google that could engage in a bidding war, and Google would be unlikely to win approval from antitrust regulators, some Wall Street analysts said on Friday....

Read On:

Google Universal Search - pretty pretty good

thanks to Searchengineland.com for this:

Google 2.0: Google Universal Search

Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.

The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.com and searching in English. Not everyone will see it at first, but over the course of the next several days, Universal Search should be more, well, universal. A new navigational interface has also been unveiled for Google and is covered more in the companion piece to this article, Google's New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide.

The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialized or vertical search will see new opportunities. To fully explain the importance to both groups, I'm going to work step-by-step through the concept of vertical search engines, how they're often ignored by searchers and search marketers alike, then how Google is going to make this content more visible through Universal Search.