Engineers View

Steve Rubel notes that Google has added a blog search to their Google News tab.

"Google has made a small, but important change to Google News. On the top right hand part of the page next to the Archive Search there's now a link to Google Blog Search."

Maybe this will lead to Google pulling blogs from Google News? Until that happens, check out Lee Odden's tips on how to get your blog listed on news search engines.

hris Mesinna provides a rant about how Google is evil and their integration of Dodgeball with Google Accounts is the latest sign of their evilness.

"Don’t say I didn’t warn you, but now when you try to log into your favorite neighborhood spyware, you’ll be greeted by a prompt to login with either your old skool Dodgeball account credentials or your Gauth account (the one that you use for Docs, Gmail, Gcal, Orkut, or other Google Services like YouTube (whoops — did I just say YouTube?)."

After reading this, I commented on Chris' site mentioning that I couldn't think of any companies Google could buy and integrate with my Google account that would really freak me out. Having now given it a bit more thought, a few may come to mind:

What do you think? Are their other companies or industries that would be poor fits for integration with Google Accounts? What comes to mind? Or, does the benefit outweigh the privacy concerns when it comes to credit scores, health records, or government intelligence?

Wouldn't it be cool if you could easily build a search engine on your blog or website tailored to the topics and areas you know and love the most? You're not alone if you'd like that -- we've heard from partners large and small, and users across the web who want access to the Google search platform, and want to customize and make it their own.

We're thrilled to tell you that the search for your own search engine is over. Today we are launching the Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, it's a simple and straightforward product to use and understand. In a matter of minutes you can create a search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests; looks and feels like your own; and, if you choose, you can make money from the traffic you receive through Google's AdSense program. You can even invite your friends and trusted community members to add to and help build your search engine.

Finding specific information has never been so easy, and there's no programming knowledge or cost involved. We worked with a few initial partners to demonstrate the power of the customization features. Check out the search engine RealClimate.org built to better connect their users to the environmental science information they are looking for. Intuit created a search engine for their JumpUp.com site, finding that it met the needs of their small business customers. But the Custom Search Engine is not just for businesses. Since Shashi is passionate about wine, he created a "wine search engine" and put it on his wine blog so his friends can search for wine-related topics from there.

You can build a Custom Search Engine on any topic you like. Give it a try.

MarketWatch ran a story last week about YouTube that's been making the rounds. In the piece, MarketWatch reveals that YouTube turned over user data to Paramount so that the film studio could file a lawsuit against a young filmmaker who had produced a 12-minute version of Oliver Stone's Twin Towers using his own actors and working from a leaked script. It's an interesting story, but not for the reasons you might think.

The case itself is old news. Paramount filed their complaint against Chris Moukarbel on June 16 of this year, alleging copyright infringement that caused the studio "great and irreparable injury that cannot be fully compensated or measured in money," according to court documents. Moukarbel settled with Paramount, and Judge Royce Lamberth signed off on the settlement on August 1. The case itself was straightforward: shooting a film based on a "bootleg" script currently being used by another director is going to get you in trouble. Surprise!

But it's the YouTube angle that has people talking. For whatever reason, people have convinced themselves that YouTube is different. Posting copyrighted content, though it remains illegal, is widely seen as behavior that cannot get the uploader into trouble. So YouTube takes down the infringing clip when someone complains—big deal, right?

When YouTube also turns Moukarbel's information over to a movie studio, people are shocked, but they shouldn't be. In fact, that this case has aroused comment at all is interesting, because it's the sort of thing that happens every day to companies across the country.

Investigations by Google found that BMW's German website influenced search results to ensure top ranking when users searched for "used car".

Google has now reduced BMW's page rank to zero, ensuring the company no longer appears at the top.

BMW admitted using so-called "doorway pages" to boost search rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users.

BMW's activities were revealed in a blog by Google software engineer Matt Cutts.

If Google says all doorway pages are illegal we have to take this into consideration BMW spokesman

BMW's German website, which is heavily reliant on javascript code unsearchable by Google, used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with key words to attract the attention of Google's indexing system.

However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google's results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the key words.

'Do not deceive'

A BMW spokesman admitted the company used the doorway pages, a practice known as search engine optimisation and banned by Google.

But the spokesman insisted the company's intentions were honourable.

Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users Google website guidelines

"We did not provide different content in the search results to the final website," Markus Sagemann told the BBC News website.

"However, if Google says all doorway pages are illegal we have to take this into consideration."

On Google's own website the company lists a series of quality guidelines.

First among those is a requirement to design websites for users, not for search engines.

"Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as 'cloaking'," Google says.

Google confirmed that BMW.de had been removed from search results, adding that it would not tolerate any attempts to manipulate searches.

"The quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google," the company said in a statement.

Google would continue to strive to protect the accuracy and quality of its results, it added.

It wasn't long ago that we were all excited about the possibility that Google was going to get into the office suite software business. Then, the theory was that Sun and Google would get together and make OpenOffice.org the king of the world.

Instead, we got "Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment."

"Gag me with a spoon,"as Moon Unit Zappa used to say. This was not real news.

Then, there were the stories about a Google operating system. That turned out to be Google Pack. This was Google's most uninspiring software offer to date. If, of course, you don't count the stillborn Google Accelerator, which was, in a word, awful.

Now, we have a story from the Register in which freelance journalist Ben King proclaims, "Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop."

According to the report, it will be an "Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as 'Goobuntu.'"

King goes on to state, "Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project."

 

However, entering the desktop software world would be a huge step. Making Goobuntu as easy to use as XP will require a lot more development. It's unlikely to be ready for showtime any time soon, and it's possible Google itself hasn't finalised where the project should go.

Whatever Google's intentions, the input of Google engineers and developers, writing new features and fixing bugs, will be a huge boost to the Ubuntu project.

Ubuntu, funded by the South African internet multimillionaire and occasional cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth, is already emerging as a leader in the desktop Linux world.

It has built considerable momentum in the Linux community, and is starting to appear more widely. Shuttleworth is seeking to persuade white-box PC manufacturers to start shipping machines with Ubuntu preinstalled.

It is top of the Distrowatch download chart, is installed on up to six million computers, and doubling every eight months, according to estimates from Shuttleworth's company, Canonical.

It has spawned a number of different offshoots, including Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu (for schools).

The word Ubuntu means "humanity to others" in several African languages, including Zulu and Xhosa. It's one of the founding principles of post-apartheid South Africa. The origin of the word 'Goobuntu' is not clear, though it does not appear in online Zulu dictionaries.

The Goobuntu.com domain has been registered in the past couple of days, though presumably not by Google. It now redirects to a Cuban portal. Perhaps Google will have to think of a new name for the system before they launch it to the wider public.