Besides promising to keep the videos working for an additional six months, Google is refunding to the credit cards of anyone who bought anything from Google video, and letting them keep their Google Checkout credit. That means that if you bought a video from Google, you get six more months to watch it, you get your money back in full, and you get an equal amount of credit at stores like Buy.com. What a deal!
Good of Google to fix this problem, but boy are they taking a hit. They are giving up 200% of all revenues from the Google Video store, making it an obscenely unprofitable enterprise. The only hope: That the store was such a colossal failure that the actual dollars being refunded aren’t that high. My, what a sad ending to this story.
AdWords added a nice little bit of integration, connecting with Google Docs & Spreadsheets. You can now export your AdWords reports, with all the data you want from your account, to a Google spreadsheet. You can work with the data there and print it out (pretty useful if you don’t have Excel or another spreadsheet program) or have some real fun and work on it collaboratively with a bunch of colleagues.
Google has added some video to Google News. Now, Google News publishers who also partner with YouTube to put their video on YouTube, like CBS, can have their video appear on Google News. You can see a video right now if you click this link, otherwise try the different categories, searching for the word “video”. The video appears as a simple link, which, if you click it, expands to reveal the video.
You can see how Google gains over five points, Yahoo loses 1.3 percentage points Microsoft loses one, Ask loses a third of a point and Time Warner gains a third. The new system counts the top five search sites, the top fifty sites with search technology (like MySpace), major search verticals (like eBay and Amazon), partner search sites, search tabs (Google News, Google Images), local search (maps), and searches on international portals.
A little under 1/6 of Google’s searches come from YouTube and other Google sites. Mapquest gets more searches than AOL Search. MySpace search counts for about 2.5% of the entire market, and should be counted under Google, since Google powers it. Craigslist and Amazon are just under 1% apiece.
If you’re looking for a Bit Torrent download, there are lots of good places to go find it. One place you probably shouldn’t consider is Google, and not just because Google might list some really old downloads that aren’t actually available. As TorrentFreak discovered, Google is forced to filter out many pages indexed from torrent sites due to DMCA requests, like at the bottom of some of these search results pages.
Google probably shouldn’t be removing any of these pages, since there really aren’t any legal precedents establishing torrent files, which are pointers to downloads, as actual infringing material. Most sites like to say that since a torrent is just a pointer, it isn’t illegal content at all, and that arguement hasn’t really been defeated yet.
More interestingly is a look at the actual pages removed. If we look at the ChillingEffects.org page (which Google smartly always links to), there are some pages that certainly should not have been removed. In this case, the DMCA claim was made by JadeLiquid Software, which produces the WebRenderer line of Java browser components, and the listing of Webrenderer product keys on warez sites and within torrent files.
They used the DMCA to not only get Google to remove pages that listed product keys, and pages that linked to torrents that contained product keys, but to remove search results and tag pages that might contain links to torrent that contain product keys. The removal of search and tag pages (and sometimes, the domain root of websites) is far overreaching, as it censors pages that have content that may have nothing to do Webrenderer, and is an abuse of the DMCA, something that Google should not tolerate.
Just some of the overreaching removals on this page:
Now, I’m not defending these sites, because plenty of them are dirty crack sites that should be delisted, but under no circumstances does JadeLiquid have the right to remove the “latest updates” page of MiniNova or Torrent Spy, or the entire search results for “s” for MiniNova, or all searches for “er”. Does Google even read these things?
