Thanks to Gary and SEL, news that Yahoo has appointed Reggie Davis, a lawyer (bio thanks to Gary), to focus on click fraud. From the release:

Davis will serve as the company’s first senior executive dedicated to continually enhancing the quality of Yahoo!’s display and search listings marketplaces.

As vice president of marketplace quality, Davis is responsible for developing and executing a strategy aimed at driving more rapid innovation, greater transparency and faster delivery of product and service enhancements to build an even higher quality advertising network for Yahoo!’s customers. Davis will hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!’s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues. Davis and his team will also be responsible for increasing Yahoo!’s dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality related matters.

This just in from the LA Times:

News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends, according to people close to the negotiations.

The two companies enlisted help from some of Google's biggest Internet rivals. The News Corp.-NBC Universal partnership has deals with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and News Corp.'s MySpace to place videos in front of their collective audience of hundreds of millions.

Paid Content gets props for early coverage.

Tim has a nice post on how access to a vast corpus of books is changing academics. And how that is just the beginning...

Nah, they're not spinning out a newco with Yahoo, but it's a start. According to LiveSide:

Microsoft today announced the creation of a new group spun out of Windows Live, the Live Search and Ad Platform. Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search, formerly MSN Search) will join adCenter in a new group that will not report to Steven Sinofsky and Windows Live, but will be headed by Satya Nadella, and report directly to Kevin Johnson, the Platform and Systems division head.

Who doesn't love a good data visualization? This one's a doozy. From the writeup on Seed:

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data.

Link to the big map. Thanks, Bill!

(image)
Terry Semel knows he needs a win, and it sounds like he's got one. He told an AdAge audience that Panama would "some very exciting numbers" this quarter, according to Reuters. "I'm totally all smiles," Semel said. "We are very excited and very happy and I'm smiling broadly."

Wow, a lot in the feeds today. What I found particularly worthy:

Digesting Google's PPA ads, from TechCrunch. I am still digesting. This is good analysis. I am ambivalent about the new text link ad unit, so is Mike. "They’ve crossed a hazy ethical line here" he says. The NYT covers it but does not dwell on the link ad unit.

Yahoo, Google Revs are similiar from SEW. Yahoo is in no way out of this game. It's two ends to the middle, CPA/C to CPM.

Scoble continues to beat on his old employer's search results.

Kedrosky is a robot spammer, Google says! Slow down, Paul!

is Web 2.0 Over? from Venturebeat. Analysis of venture funding.

Google unveils the Plus Box. Click on the "plus sign" and you get more data. Innaresting.

The Kinderstart case is dismissed, Matt reports. Earlier coverage.

Where the ad growth is, from Lost Remote. Er...surprised?

Clarification from Google on net neutrality via GigaOm. This is not an easy issue to clarify...

Digg on Google clarifying its plan with phones. No hardware, folks.

Craig alerts me to a days old NYT search spam piece and related research from MSFT. From the Times:

Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them.

A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators. ...

....Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.

I'm not surprised, actually. It makes a lot of sense. The folks who are the best at this are the ones "winning," so to speak. Just like the big engines....

More:

The researchers found that for some keywords like “drugs” and “ring tone,” more than 30 percent of the results from major search engines were fake pages created by spammers.

They discovered that the average spam density — a measure of the percentage of Web pages that contain only advertisements — was 11 percent for 1,000 keywords they used in their research.

The researchers said large advertisers were to blame for a significant share of the spam problem.

As many of you know, in a previous life I ran the Industry Standard. My partner in editorial pursuits was Jonathan Weber, a man I hold in very high regard. He's running New West now, an innovative regional newssite based in Montana. He asked me to come to his New West Summit, and I certainly couldn't refuse. It looks like a great event. If you have an interest in how the economy of the Rocky Mountain region is changing, I highly recommend it. And it's not a bad place to be in June, I can attest to that. Jonathan is a consummate host!

Google is endlessly fascinating for us, and Henry Blodget continues the speculation with talking points for a debate about whether Google will become "King of all Media." He makes the (accurate) observation that Google may conquer distribution, but it does not create content, so it doesn't threaten traditional media companies. Yes, save this one fact: Traditional media companies either owned distrubtion, or depended on it for the bulk of their revenues (ie advertising in scarce distribution markets). But the debate continues...

Google vrs KinderStart - Case Dismissed

Time to "Fetch" and other Federated Search Tools

Adobe Apollo Officially Launched

Who Created the First Blog?

iFilm Infringement Could Blut Viacom's YouTube

I've read this once, and want to read it again, but I think he gets the main point: Google knew what it was getting into when it bought YouTube - the battle for the future of video on the web. It might be a public, legal suit, it might be the threat of one which gets the parties to a business agreement. But it's far from over.

News from Yahoo on mobile search:

Today we are launching Yahoo! oneSearch on our Yahoo! Mobile Web service, which is accessible to the more than 85 percent of you in the US who can use a browser on your mobile phones.

If you ever tried using mobile search before today, you’re familiar with the list of links you get as your search result, just like those you’re used to getting on your PC. But is that what you really want on your phone, where networks are not yet DSL-fast and some of you have to pay to load every page? All the consumers we’ve talked to back us up on this: You want instant answers, right on the results page — not a list of links. That’s just what Yahoo! oneSearch does — we give you the answers you want in just one search.

Eric Schmidt interviewed by students at Stanford.

Google offers "themes" for personalized home page. Cheesy, but, interesting. d

A meaning-based search launch, CognitionSearch.

Google introduces pay per action test. Huh.

Posted by Ardan Arac, Associate Product Manager, Search Quality

We're very excited to unveil Plus Box, a new search feature that lets you see more information about individual search results. Whenever you see the plus box icon - - click on it to see the additional rich data expand below the original search result. With Plus Box, you'll get a visual snapshot of related information, so it is faster and easier to find exactly what you're looking for.

Right now, we're showing two types of Plus Box results: stock information and maps. You can find a plus box next to the home pages of companies listed on NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX. Clicking the plus box icon for any of these companies displays the latest stock price, chart, and company information. Searching for stock prices on Google becomes much easier—for example, look up Apple to find their stock information next to Apple's corporate home page. If you want to see a more detailed company profile, click on "More information" to go to Google Finance.



You'll also find Plus Box results when a business comes up in search results and we are able to map its address. The Plus Box link tells you the address of the business and clicking the icon or the link shows you the address on a map. To see this at work, search for Babbo.



You won't see this feature yet for all businesses, but we're working hard to increase its availability. If you're a business owner and would like to see something like this associated with your website, here's how to get your information to us.

We'll be using Plus Box for other kinds of information in the future, so stay tuned and keep an eye out for the .

Posted by Jessica Ewing, Product Manager

Whenever I get a new cell phone, the first thing I do is change the background theme. It seems like such a small thing, but for whatever reason adding a beach or a dancing pig or something else makes me feel like it's my own.

We wanted to offer you a way to add some personality to your Google homepage, too, but we had to ask ourselves some tough questions. How do we add personality without taking away from the information? How do we make sure people don't get sick of looking at the same theme every day?

Today we're releasing six themes for the personalized homepage that try to solve these challenges: a city, a teahouse (super cute -- this one is my favorite), a winter scene, a sky, a beach and a bus stop. All of our themes are dynamic: they change with your own local time of day, current weather conditions or season. If you add the beach theme, for example (changes with time of day), it will ask you for your Zip code and adjust itself to match your local sunrise and sunset times. So if you happen to be stuck in a windowless office, you can at least crack open a cold one and watch the sun set over your desktop.

You can add a theme by first setting up a personalized homepage. One your homepage is set up, click the "Select Theme" link on the right-hand side of the page. From there you can choose between the classic theme and the six new themes we've designed. We hope this feature makes the Google homepage feel a little more like, well, home.

We implemented our themes using a CSS framework so we can scale, and plan to push out many new themes beyond these six. So tell us what themes you want to see.

I've got an all day non-work related commitment Tuesday, so posting will be light....

Odds are if you're reading this blog, your spring break plans involve hot coffee and 8AM traffic. But on Ask.com Web Search, we're clocking Spring Break queries like crazy.

We can still remember back when Spring Break meant something. That's why, for our curiosity and your edification, we've taken a couple of data cuts from the weeks just before. It's an interesting portrait of what Spring Break's about:

Spring Break: Top Searches

More people searched on "When is Spring Break?" than the next twenty queries put together. But once searchers got past that--or remembered that they owned calendars--the breakdown was a pretty accurate reflection of what most of us think of when we think of Spring Break:

Spring Break: Top 10 Destination Searches

With 28% of all queries, Panama City, FL wins by a landslide. Even the Travel Channel agrees.

 

Spring Break: Top 10 Places People are Searching From

Cities are numbered according to amount of queries.

Here's where things got really interesting. To wit:

(1) A surprising amount of people are searching from warmer climates like Orlando and Atlanta. Maybe that whole getting-out-of-the-cold theme we learned from The Sure Thing isn't as prevalent as we thought.

(2) Where are the Northwest and Midwest in all this? Chicago is the only midwestern city in the top 10 , with Chicago suburb Des Plaines coming in at #13 and Minneapolis at #17. Maybe they're all staying home and sledding.

(3) Louisville at #1?

So whether you're heading out for Spring Break, dreaming about it at your desk, or still sleeping off last Monday's Lil' Jon concert on the Boardwalk, here's to a great Spring.

--The Ask.com Team

Posted by Francoise Brougher, Business Operations Team

Tens of thousands of university students in Rwanda and Kenya are now on their way to using Google Apps. As a result of two separate partnerships that we've signed today with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network, nearly 20,000 students from the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology, plus 50,000 more from Kenya's University of Nairobi, are joining their colleagues at Northwestern, ASU and around the world with access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets under their university's domain for free.

Offering Google Apps in Africa means more to us than connecting students and teachers to conduct that special exchange of ideas, innovation and creativity so unique to universities (we should know). In Africa and in the developing world, it also means doing our part to make sure that everyone has access to the same services wherever they live, whatever their language, and regardless of income.

We can't be more delighted about our Google Apps partnerships with Rwanda and Kenya, and there are more to come.

Posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games

Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede and Tetris—remember when you could only play these games at an arcade? I would line up behind at least 6 people for my chance at Asteroids.

Time warp—now it's 2007. Games can be played anywhere and at anytime. In this mobile world, games have evolved to become a part of our lives. Unlike television, gamers can make games their own—customizing their experience in new ways—and we are helping them do that big time.

But of course developing these sophisticated games can be very expensive. Back in the 80s the cost of producing a single game was about $100K. Today it can cost $25M to produce a game. The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that have come up with some interesting new ways to introduce non-intrusive and targeted advertising in order to make gaming accessible and affordable for all.

Our charge at Adscape has always been to honor the game that was developed and find new ways to enable that game to continue so others can enjoy it. That's why we are so stoked to join Google—because these guys get it, and are committed to helping us continue our mission.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Mark Twain said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." We're pretty sure Twain's definition of pliable is different from ours. Building flexibility into search, email, and other Google products is critically important as we seek to organize the world's information, and it's only natural that we should continue to look for ways to make the use of such statistics more "pliable" as well.


Gathering data and creating useful statistics is an arduous job that often goes unrecognized. We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.

That's our definition of "pliable." Please stay tuned, and we'll tell you more as soon as we can.

Posted by Vanessa Fox

We love our webmaster community, and with Webmaster Central, we provide as much information and interaction about how Google crawls and indexes websites as we can, in 18 languages. We also regularly provide information and tips in our webmaster blog. The blog has been available only in English. Until now. We're very happy to launch our first non-English webmaster blog: the German Webmaster-Zentrale Blog. If you speak German, head there to read German versions of the English blog posts, as well as news and tips specifically for the German market. Willkommen!

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager

Everything is ready. All systems are go. We're now accepting applications for the third Google Summer of Code, Google's program for introducing college students to open source software development.

Not everyone knows it, but open source plays an enormous role at Google. Each time you use the Google search engine, you're using open source software. Google relies on the Linux kernel, GCC, python and Samba and commits code into each of those projects.

We also work closely with the open source developer community. Googlers have released hundreds of thousands of lines of code, both as patches to existing projects and as new and wholly open source projects, such as the Google Web Toolkit. We've funded great work at universities and we host many thousands of active open source projects on code.google.com's project hosting facility. Just shy of a year old, this hosting system has become one of the largest online development communities ever developed, second only to our friends at SourceForge.Net.

But back to the Google Summer of Code. Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.

Many of our former students are still actively involved with their mentoring organizations. Angela Byron, for example, started working with the Drupal project during Google Summer of Code 2005; she went on to become an organization administrator for the project for Google Summer of Code 2006 and now sits on the board of the newly created Drupal Association. Other students, such as Steffen Pingel, have been voted in as committers to their projects. Steffen began working with the Eclipse Mylar project for Google Summer of Code 2006 and was voted in as a committer just as he was completing his project work. Still others have gone on to internships or full-time jobs with us or other companies, including IBM and NetApp, or have even started their own consulting businesses.

This year we're happy to say that we're expanding the program to accommodate an additional 200 students and some additional open source organizations. If you're a college student who'd like to program over the summer for the good of open source, we're taking applications until March 24. We look forward to seeing yours!

Posted by Vinodh Kumar R, Software Engineer

Millions of Hindi speakers across India and the rest of the world have a reason to cheer: Google News is now available in Hindi.

Google News gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the web and presents a ranked one-page summary with all the links to your favourite news sources in the various sections. One of the interesting challenges we faced in this edition was the fact that not all our Hindi news sources are in UTF-8 format. Though we strongly back and urge the adoption of the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard by all Indian language websites, we didn't want to deprive our readers from reaching content on some of their favourite news sources which are not yet there. So we internally translate this information to the UTF-8 standard and do all the processing necessary to provide links to these sites. We hope that this edition will enable the huge Hindi-speaking Internet population to easily reach all of your favourite news content across the web, and also help news publishers to connect to their audience better.

We at the Google Bangalore office are pleased to launch our first Indian language edition of Google News -- and we will certainly be following up with more Indian languages in the future. On a personal note, this launch also marks the completion of a fun-filled and exciting first year for me at Google.

And now I'm off to tell my beloved family members and friends all the great news --or should I say Google News?

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel

When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we're pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.

Just as we continuously work to improve our products, we also work toward having the best privacy practices for our users. This includes designing privacy protections into our products (like Google Talk's “off the record” feature or Google Desktop’s “pause” and “lock search” controls). This also means providing clear, easy to understand privacy policies that help you make informed decisions about using our services.

After talking with leading privacy stakeholders in Europe and the U.S., we're pleased to be taking this important step toward protecting your privacy. By anonymizing our server logs after 18-24 months, we think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices. In the future, it's possible that data retention laws will obligate us to retain logs for longer periods. Of course, you can always choose to have us retain this data for more personalized services like Search History. But that's up to you.

Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details, and we hope to implement this new data policy over the coming months (and within a year's time). We’ll communicate more as we work out these details, but for now, we wanted you to know that we’re working on this additional step to strengthen your privacy.

If you want to know more, read the log retention FAQ (PDF).

Posted by Rhett Robinson, Software Engineer

We created the Personalized Homepage to help you gather all the things you care about on Google and across the web in one place. And since one of the things we all care about is communicating with friends, today we're excited to unveil a new version of Google Talk for your Personalized Homepage. The Google Talk Gadget lets you see your contacts and chat with your friends right on your homepage, and you don't have to download anything to start chatting. We've also added a few new features to make your chats a bit more colorful, like the ability to view YouTube videos and Picasa Web Albums photos in your chats. And just like many other gadgets, you can also add the Google Talk Gadget to your own webpage or blog.

To see the Google Talk Gadget in action on the Google Personalized Homepage, check out this short video. You can also read more about it on the Google Talk Blog. Then go ahead and add it to your homepage.

Posted by Berthier Ribeiro Neto, Engineering Site Director, Google Brazil

On March 1, we celebrated the Latin American coding community by hosting the first-ever Google Code Jam Latin America competition. Registrations definitely exceeded expectations: more than 5,000 eager programmers from around the continent signed up. The Code Jam consists of two online rounds, in which participants compete to solve three coding problems more quickly and accurately than their competitors. Then we invited the top 50, who came from across the region (and included one woman!), to compete in the onsite finals at our engineering office in Belo Horizonte.

This year's grand prize went to Fábio Dias Moreira, a student at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. The winner of the 2004 Global Code Jam, Sergio Sancho of Buenos Aires, took second place. Here's a photo of me with Fábio just after he'd won.



This Code Jam also featured Google engineering presentations and information about our R&D activities in Latin America. We're delighted that so many of the finalists expressed their interest in joining Google. If you're interested yourself, visit our global jobs page.

Posted by Sadeesh Kumar Duraisamy, Software Engineer

If you're not into cricket, read no further. But if you are, you must know that everyone has an opinion on cricket and each point of view is unique. You sometimes choose to share your views with friends and family over a ‘dinner and watching the cricket match’ get-together ritual. Your uncle often interjects with his usual support for Shane Warne's superb bowling, even though Shane is now retired and not playing for Australia in this year’s World Cup.

Whatever your favourite mode of cricket expression might be, the Google cricket campaign in India allows you to join in the world cup excitement in more ways than one. Howzzat?

Talk cricket on Orkut
Cricket discussions that started in the elevator can spill over to the Orkut network. Especially this season, in association with us, cricket expert and former Indian cricket captain Krish Srikkanth has created his own community on Orkut to interact with cricket lovers, debate the latest happenings and just share cricket views.

Express yourself on a blog
Write your own views about cricket on Blogger, and then publish and share them with the world online. If you would rather read about cricket than write, Krish has also created his own blog on this year's World Cup action. Get to know him and his take on the games and his memories of his 1983 victory at close quarters. And if you've taken a fancy to blogging, submit your own blog this World Cup season to our cricket blogging contest for Indian audiences.

Get cricket scores & news
If work or school are getting in the way of your cricket enjoyment, keep up to date with match scores and World Cup cricket news by personalizing your Google homepage with the latest cricket gadgets. If you prefer, you can also get cricket scores, exciting images and cricket videos straight to your desktop with Google desktop cricket gadgets.

So if you're a cricket aficionado, join the World Cup fun with Google. And if you're not? More for the rest of us to enjoy!

Microsoft adCenter is currently launching their ‘pilot’ offering of Microsoft Content Ads which is their contextual advertising solution that displays relevant ads to the content on sites within the Microsoft network in a similar fashion to Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network.

The more popular channels which are displaying these ads are MSN’s Health & Fitness, Tech & Gadgets, Travel, and Money; and Microsoft is planning on expanding the project, according to the adCenter blog.

Content Ads Choices
This week, some of our U.S. advertisers will receive an e-mail notification that their accounts will be upgraded as part of the adCenter Content Ads pilot program. If you receive this notice, your campaigns will automatically be upgraded to include distribution on content pages within the Microsoft network. Advertisers whose campaigns are upgraded will have control over their campaigns and have the following choices:

• Hybrid: Run your ads on Live Search and content pages using “hybrid” ad groups.
  Your existing ad groups will automatically be set to display on content pages at your current search ad bid prices. You can also set new bids for your content clicks through the beta site.
• Turn off Content Ads.
  Within the Ad Group Settings tab, under the Targeting section, click the Select a distribution method for this ad group link, and clear the Content check box. You can learn more about this option by reading our help article.
• Create content-only and search-only ad groups.
  You can create a unique destination URL or have content-specific ad creative.

If you choose to run your ads on content pages, you’ll also have the ability to set separate pricing for content clicks. Content Ads uses the same bid structure as your search ads—you pay only when someone clicks your ad. However, you also have the choice of setting different bid prices for content clicks by using the Separate Bid Pricing feature within the Advanced Bidding Options. You can learn how by reading our recent in-depth post of how to set separate bid prices for Content Ads. We’ve also made it easy to track your performance for Content Ads with reporting that provides details on search performance separately from content performance.

As of now, the Microsoft Content Ads are not being displayed outside of the MSN/Live.com network, unlike Google and Yahoo contextual units; “Microsoft Content Ads are displayed only on MSN published sites, no syndicated sites, delivering the MSN audience to the advertiser.”, but one hs to wonder when adCenter will be expanding their contextual ads to the smaller publisher and if these Micorosft Content Ads will pose a future threat to YPN and AdSense.

Some blog directories & search engines list blogs by catgory and some even go as far as classifying them locally, but a new engine called the Ageless Project classifies blogs by the birthdate of their author.

The oldest blogger found on the Ageless Project so far is a 95 year old born in 1911, and there are a good number of bloggers born before World War Two listed on the site.

ResearchBuzz notes that The Agelss Project has over 1,700 blogs indexed and there are restrictions and guidelines on the types of blogs which are listed and the advertising running on them.