Google has been issued a patent for putting a data center in a giant shipping container, a system designed to make it easier for the company to relocate data centers based on economic and other logistical factors. For two years, we’ve been hearing about Google designing these things, but no one’s actually seen Google putting any into production. Now, Google owns the concept.
Of course, as Slashdot points out, Google wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. Robert Cringely explained how Larry Page heard the idea at a presentation sponsored by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. Called a PetaBox, it seems to be the same product, so why did Google get a patent? It is possible Google’s filing of the patent, on December 30, 2003, pre-dates all prior art, but that’s going to annoy a lot of other companies who’ve had the same damn idea.
It has been pointed out by a bunch of people that, even if Google doesn’t deserve this patent, there might be nothing wrong with the company having it. If Google isn’t evil, then it would only push for the patent so no other company could grab the idea and cost Google a lot of money by suing them. If Google is evil, then even though it created this tech for internal purposes, not for a product, it would go around suing everyone, including Sun.
Guess this is a good opportunity to test that whole “Don’t Be Evil” thing.
Google Enterprise launched two things today. First, they put out version 5.0 of the yellow “cheese box” Google Search Appliance. The new version has an enterprise connector framework for connecting to intranet services, platforms, applications, databases and hosted services (like Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM FileNet) as well as enhenaced security.
Also launched, Google Enterprise Labs, where enterprise customers can download new experimental features for the Search Appliances and Google Mini systems. It launches with a search-as-you-type application that can be applied to any text field that queries the Appliance and shows rich preview, complete with thumbnails and category grouping. Also, it has Do-it-Yourself Keymatches, which lets users add smart answers to the top of search results, and Parametric Search, which accesses your metadata to provide seperate sidebar navigation through that data.
Compete released a study on search quality, determining that Google users click on a search result 65% of the time, while Yahoo users click 75% of the time and Microsoft users click 59% of the time. Now, there are multiple reasons why a user will click, good and bad, so this doesn’t mean that Yahoo users get better results, but the stats do show siginificant differences between the engines.
Good reasons you don’t click a search result:
Universal Search/Ask3D type results give you the information right there on the page, eliminating the need to click elsewhere to get the information. Smart Answers will also do that. Yahoo has the least amount of this useful info, which could explain their high score.
Good search results and snippets - if an engine has the information right there in the snippet, again, users will not click a result, since they already have the answer.
Bad reason you don’t click:
Irrelevant results - Users get pissed off and give up, stop searching, or try a different search engine.
Secondary searches - Users refine their queries, or run second searches when the first one doesn’t have the specific information they’re looking for.
Google has released to the world (well, to AdSense publishers) the option to embed YouTube players with ads and make money off them. You can’t just embed any video you like, so I can’t embed my occasional “Best of YouTube” posts and make money specifically from the video player, but instead you choose from a number of YouTube’s content partners like lonelygirl15, EmergencyCheese, Ford Models, LockerGnome (Chris Pirillo), smosh and many others, or you can enter a list of keywords for Google to auto-choose videos for you from.
The video embedded above is a sample video from Google explaining how the program works. The player below is targetted to the keyword “google”:
As you can see, a small banner ad appears in a space on top of the player, and while you watch videos, an ad overlay appears at the bottom that can be closed. The playlist appears as the flowing overlay at the bottom, as it does in many YouTube videos.
Obviously, not getting to choose the videos in the player severely limits the usage of the player. It can be placed on keyword specific pages, and little else. If there’s a Chris Pirillo video I really like, even though he’s a YouTube partner, I can’t share that video as an ad unit, because I can only broadly select his channel, not any specific videos.
Also, the argument for YouTube only advertising with partners only works with ads on YouTube.com, that users who upload video should get to decide if video appears beneath their content, and YouTube should decide which videos are worthy of advertising. If I want to put ads around my own videos on my own external site, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to, especially since this program links my YouTube account to my AdSense account.
Also, the ad unit uses a Script tag, another mistake. Google continues to limit certain uses of their ads by wrapping them in JavaScript, preventing those ads from appearing in places that ban JavaScript, like WordPress blogs. I had to install a plugin just to show you those videos in this post. YouTube became successful because it made embedding dead easy, and Google is removing that ease with this program.
Still, it’s good to see this getting started. Hopefully, Google will figure out that the appeal of this program in its current form is limited, and fix it soon.
The YouTube AdSense unit can be activated in your AdSense account, and is then available on YouTube itself at this link. It is currently only available to English-language publishers in the U.S..
Google has added six more cities to its Street View for Google Maps, which lets you see and browse along street-level photographs taken by a panoramic camera-topped van. They are:
Chicago (parts in high resolution)
Pittsburgh
Philadelphia
Phoenix (high res)
Portland
Tucson (high res)
They also added to Street View the ability to pan upwards in photographs, to gawk at the tall buildings. Jordan McCollum has screenshots of some nice buildings.
Google made this video to promote the new cities, but be warned the song may be painful to, uh, anyone:
If you love the song (why?), go ahead and download it.
