Eric Goldman posted an excellent article last week on the stupidity of internet laws in Utah. This is a clear example of a failing legal system where legislation has gone out of control. Either way, give it a read on Eric’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

From BBC News, by Spencer Kelly

Type in a phrase, and we not only expect it to find millions of relevant websites, but we also expect it to list the best or most important sites first.

Woe betide a search engine that requires me to click to page two of the results before I find the site I am looking for.

Generally they do a decent job but, up until very recently, if you were to search on the term “miserable failure”, top of the Google search results was the official George Bush page on the official White House site.

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The Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has told Google to rewrite sections of its AdSense contracts which empower Google to unilaterally cancel any deal, and are considered unfair under Korean law.

AdSense displays adverts on a website and the owner of the website gets a share of the money made by Google. Because payments are based on the number of clicks each advert gets, the scheme is susceptible to click fraud, or allegations of fraud.

Humor University used the AdSense scheme, but from October to November did not get paid. When it complained to Google’s US headquarters it was told its contract had been terminated because of suspicious activities.

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Google will try to chill Microsoft’s post-Office launch glow today, adding Docs & Spreadsheets to its apps suite and pitching a pay per seat version of the bundle to corporate customers.

Google will charge companies, or individuals, $50 a seat per year for its Google Apps Premier Edition suite. Likes its free stable mate, PE now contains Google Docs & Spreadsheets, as well as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and the Google customizable Start Page feature. Unlike Microsoft, Google seems to have a working currency converter, with UK punters being charged £26 a seat.

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Anybody who vaguely has something to do with Google is aware of Google’s Master Plan; the brainwave of Google employees on a whiteboard at the Google headquarters.

The University of Applied Sciences ulm, in Germany, has now made and released a movie about this. It isn’t about the Master Plan in specific, but more about the information gathering of Google and the always rising question regarding privacy. Does Google maintain it’s own mission: Don’t be evil?

Are the film makers going too far in their vision on the future or will it really reach the stage they predict…

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Google Inc. lost a copyright lawsuit Tuesday to Belgian newspapers that had demanded that it remove headlines and links to articles posted on its news site without their permission.

The ruling, if it stands on appeal, could set a precedent for how Web search engines link to copyrighted material in the tumultuous arena of online news, according to the Belgian copyright group that launched the case.

Google said it would appeal, claiming that its Google News service was “entirely legal” and that the Belgian ruling did not set any precedent.

The Brussels Court of First Instance ruled that Mountain View, Calif.-based Google could not rely on exemptions, such as claiming “fair use,” because it says it reviews news articles when it displays headlines, a few lines of text, photos and links to the original page.

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The founder of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, is developing a Wiki-based search engine to compete with established commercial search engines from Google and Yahoo.

Jimmy Wales announced plans to develop the search engine, to be named “Wikiasari,” or “Wikia,” for short, in a Dec. 23 online posting.

The Wikimedia Foundation of St. Petersburg, Fla., which manages the Web site Wikipedia.com, emphasizes that the search engine project is not associated with the foundation.

Wales said that current search engine technology, using complex algorithms to complete searches, is “broken.”

“It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability (and) lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that,” Wales wrote.
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NASA Ames Research Center and Google have jointly announced the signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA’s information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

“This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars,” said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at Headquarters in Washington. “This innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA’s space exploration work accessible to everyone,” added Griffin.

“Partnering with NASA made perfect sense for Google, as it has a wealth of technical expertise and data that will be of great use to Google as we look to tackle many computing issues on behalf of our users,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google. “We’re pleased to move forward to collaborate on a variety of technical challenges through the signing of the Space Act Agreement.”

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Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, was born in Moscow in 1973, and the first words out of his mouth were Russian. Yet neither Russian nor the Russian market has come easily to Google.
Rambler Media’s site is the third most visited site in Russia, trailing Yandex and Mail.ru. Google stands at eighth place.

Created in Silicon Valley by Mr. Brin and Larry Page, Google has adapted its search engine to dozens of languages, selling billions of dollars in advertising around the world. But in Russia, Google is behind the curve, trailing local Internet companies in executing searches and collecting rubles on the ads linked to those searches.

Mr. Brin left Russia with his family in 1979, and Google set up its Russian site three years ago and opened its first sales office there only one year ago, giving its rivals a long head start. But the company’s development has also been slowed by cultural and language issues, company executives — and rivals — say.

“Google promised they would destroy everything, but look at where they are,” said Irina Gofman, chief executive of Rambler Media, one of Google’s Internet portal and search service rivals in Russia. “They are not that big.”

In many Western European countries, Google is the most popular Web site and by far the most popular search service; in Russia, though, it barely breaks into the top 10. According to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic, 28 percent of Russian Internet users on home or office computers visited Google sites in October, making Google the eighth-biggest Internet brand.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 9, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

The acquisition combines one of the largest and fastest growing online video entertainment communities with Google’s expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising on the Internet. The combined companies will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos, and will offer new opportunities for professional content owners to distribute their work to reach a vast new audience.

“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”
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