Look, you know I love Google, but I had to tell it like I see it, and I was underwhelmed by Google Video Search. Now, it looks like at least one person, Brad Hill of the Unofficial Google Weblog, agrees. One major point, is that Google Video Search seems so named to compete with Yahoo, and not for any practical reason. It is not a video search engine, it is a captioning transcript search engine. Google should release a video search engine. If Google adds the necessary features (actual video clips, older videos to make it an actual archive), it can be a great product, just one called “Google TV Search”, but this will never really be a video search engine.

Most embarrassing is the evident ploy of naming it Google Video simply to keep pace with Yahoo! Video, relevance be damned. I thought Google was all about relevance. I wouldn’t call this disingenuous gambit “evil,” exactly, but neither does it conform to the Google ethos as I understand it.

Search for david letterman at both sites. Yahoo! delivers 238 results—actual video clips available from disparate servers. Within two clicks of most search results, you are watching a video. Now over to Google Video, where 138 cryptic and unfriendly search results include text excerpts and accompanying thumbnails. One click takes you to a search result page for that TV program, and it includes every transcript match of your keywords. More thumbnails, most of which are irrelevant. No further clicks are available.

Google employee Mark Jen started blogging publicly, strongly criticizing his company. Well, all of his posts have been taken down, Did his bosses order him to remove them?

Google Blogoscoped posted about him at 4:19 pm Eastern time, and the posts were gone by the time I checked it out at 8:15. Here’s what Phillip said:

Googler Blogs About Work

If Google employee and blogger Mark Jen is what he says he is, then he’s very brave to be so critical of his workplace – and let’s hope Google Inc. doesn’t fire him (it might dirty down their bright image if they did).

This is Mark’s mission statement (case adjusted):

“First day on the job, first post on the blog: In the ever increasing chaos known as the blogosphere, I’ve decided to add yet another random stream. If nothing else, this blog will serve as a personal journal of my life at Google. Maybe one day, a collection of these postings and comments will compile into a book…”

And this is his first rant:

“Look at all these other fringe “benefits”: on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes… the list goes on and on with one similarity: every “benefit” is on-site so you never leave work. (…)

Google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like Google settle for being on par? Microsoft’s health care benefits shame Google’s relatively meager offering. (…)

Lastly, Google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what’s with the 50th percentile compensation? The packages would’ve been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let’s be honest here… a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn’t have the same value as the ones of yesteryear.”

I wonder if Mark writes his blog in the 20% of time Google gives every employee to work on unrelated projects of their own interest…

Google is notoriously tight-lipped, but do they actually forbid their employees from talking? I’m not exactly seeing trade secrets being spilled here. Where’s Google’s Scoble? They are going to catch a lot of flak if they keep acting quite so “evil”.

UPDATE: Here’s Mark’s MSDN blog. He must be really dissapointed, switching jobs from Microsoft, where he had freedom to speak, to Google, which is muzzling him. Frankly, I’m not sure if I would be able to stand for that if I were him.

Google is testing out a new functionality for AdSense that allows users who are not satisfied with the current ads being served to choose a different set of ads. This is a just unbelievable idea. Google is truly pushing the idea that its ads are more than just ads, they’re useful, and I commend it.

According to SEO Roundtable, you see a box like the one above right at the bottom of an AdSense skyscraper (or possibly on the side of a banner ad). It lets you choose from a list of topics Google determined to also be relevant, albeit not the most relevant. Google, besides trying to give readers ads they can use, is acknowledging that its keyword matching system often leaves something to be desired. You can currently see the new ads in action at this page (found via Digital Point). What’s cool is that after I selected a topic (which changed instantly without reloading the page), the list of topics was replaced by a simple search box, allowing me to select any topic I wanted, even completely irrelevant ones like “frogs”. Looking in the page source code, the ad is clearly identified as being of the “160×600_radlinks_search_beta” style. I, for one, hope that this comes out of the testing stage and becomes a permanent AdSense feature.