April 29, 2009

Google Starts Small Business Network to Influence Government

Google has started an initiative called the "Small Business Network" which is designed to influence legislation regarding business. One of the first actions is to attempt to have a say on the $7 billion from the recent stimulus bill that is set aside for broadband.

Another important issue for the network will be promoting an open internet. This is something Google has been promoting for awhile, with its involvement in last year's spectrum auction, their support for freeing up white space tv spectrum, and their participation in the Internet for Everyone Initiative.

Of course, Google already has an ear with the President. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently appointed to President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 6, 2009

AdSense Publisher Sues Google - And Wins

"What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?"

That's what a Google litigation paralegal asked the judge in a Palo Alto small claims court judge this week. The judge ruled in favor of an AdSense publisher who brought a suit against Google for canceling his account without giving reason - and not paying up.

It's a tale that has been repeated on blogs and forums across the internet, and it's a problem that Google is notorious for being secretive about.

Aaron Greenspan signed up for AdSense in March 2008 in order to make a little money off of his site, Think Computer Corporation. Nine months later, Google canceled his account with no warning, no reason and no payment of the $721 Think Computer's site had earned.

Greenspan emailed and phoned a slew of people at Google only to learn there was no customer service for AdSense and no one that could give him an answer to why his account was canceled.

Many times, this kind of cancellation results when site owners use AdWords to send traffic to an AdSense-laced page. Greenspan had tried AdWords, but stopped the campaign months before he tried AdSense.

After getting nowhere with Google, Greenspan tried the justice system. Since lawyers aren't allowed in small claims court, litigation paralegal Stephanie Milani was sent by Google. When asked, she could give no reason why the account was terminated. Milani said that the $721 was refunded to the advertisers and reiterated Google's policy - that any publisher can be terminated at any time for any reason.

The judge asked if an account could be terminated because of their eye color. He then ruled in favor of Greenspan.

Enter Milani's question, "What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?" That sounds like a question for Google, not a small claims court judge.

Related Reading: Concerns Over Google's Monopolistic Actions Make Their Way to DOJ

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

February 13, 2009

FTC Updates Online Behavioral Ad Policy; Google Approves

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has updated their online behavioral ad policy. The report, which maintains a self-regulatory stance, got a unanimous vote with some concerns voiced by Commissioners Jon Leibowitz and Pamela Jones Harbour.

“This staff report, while commendable, focuses too narrowly,” Harbour said. “Threats to consumer privacy abound, both online and offline, and behavioral advertising represents just one aspect of a multifaceted privacy conundrum surrounding data collection and use. I would prefer that the Commission take a more comprehensive approach to privacy, and evaluate behavioral advertising within that broader context.”

“Industry needs to do a better job of meaningful, rigorous self-regulation, or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our Commission,” Leibowitz said. “Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can – and will – effectively protect consumers’ privacy in a dynamic online marketplace.”

In response, Google agreed with the report as well as with Commissioners Harbour and Leibowitz.

Writing on the Google Public Policy blog, Senior Policy Counsel Pablo Chavez said, "We agree with the statements of Commissioners Liebowitz and Harbour that individual companies and industry generally can and should do more to protect user privacy. Google will continue to engage in efforts to develop strong self-regulatory principles and will will continue to advocate for comprehensive federal privacy legislation."

Related Reading: A Leibowitz-Led FTC May Strengthen Spotlight on Digital Ads We May Not Need Standards But FTC, FCC Want To Gives Us Regulations Google Responds to FTC's Self-Regulatory Principles FTC approves Google's acquisition of DoubleClick FTC Warns of Impending Government Regulation of Web Ad Industry

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2008

SEW Experts: Suing Google over Yahoo

Yahoo's last ditch effort to generate additional revenue and thwart a hostile purchase from Microsoft might have provided sufficient impetus for a partnership six months ago, but we're a long way from the world we all knew then. The government, consumer watchdogs, and advertisers are all raising opposition to the Google-Yahoo ad deal. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Suing Google over Yahoo," Kevin Ryan explains why the drama is far from over.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 29, 2008

SEW Experts: Search Trademark Hobby Kit

Who owns the trademark when it comes to search? A lot of angry litigation stems from the huge dollars that big brands measure from clicks on their trademarked terms in search results. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Search Trademark Hobby Kit," Kevin Ryan asks if they're simply misunderstanding the search realm and buying funnel?

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 16, 2008

Google to Scramble YouTube User IDs and IP Addresses in Viacom Case

Yesteday, I reported that YouTube user viewing histories would not longer be handed over to Viacom by Google per an agreement by the two. I also wrote that User IDs, IP addresses, and Visitor IDs would still be handed over. What yours truly completely missed (i am afterall, only human) is that even that data will be scrambled. Here's the legalese:

When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the Order, Defendants shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID. The parties shall agree as promptly as feasible on a specific protocol to govern this substitution whereby each unique value contained in these fields shall be assigned a correlative unique substituted value, and preexisting interdependencies shall be retained in the version of the data produced. Defendants shall promptly (no later than 7 business days after execution of this Stipulation) provide a proposed protocol for this substitution. Defendants agree to reasonably consult with Plaintiffs' consultant if necessary to reach agreement on the protocol.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 5, 2008

Google Faces Louis Vuitton Trademark Case in Europe's Highest Court

The European Court of Justice (ECJ), Europe's highest court, will hear a case brought forth by high fashion retailer Louis Vuitton regarding trademark issues associated with Google's Adworsd program. The retailer previously won a case in France over the matter.

Louis Vuitton says that Adwords offers advertisers the ability to bid on terms like "Louis Vuitton fakes" and "Louis Vuitton replicas," but claims that Google does not have the right to offer their trademarked name as part of their search advertising program.

Similar cases brought forth in various states within the U.S. have yielded differing rulings.

No court date has been set and it could take up to a year for the ruling to be decided.

via NYT

Related Reading: Google Updates Trademark Rules for UK/Ireland Adwords Court Orders Negative Keywords Used To Block Trademark Terms Others' Trademark Terms In Meta Tags Illegal: Georgia Court Rules

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 4, 2008

SEW Experts: Who Owns the Brand?

For a whole lot of really good reasons, brands (particularly those with resellers) maintain an ongoing battle to protect their brands. And in the online world, they want to hold search engines accountable. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Who Owns the Brand?," Kevin Ryan notes that even if a group of advertisers did come together and pull their search advertising, all they will really accomplish is losing large amounts of directly accountable revenue by missing placements in top search sites. But Google is going to need the deep-pocketed advertisers currently being alienated by the lack of internal trademark policing. This could be a very large instance of mutual back-scratching, but the outcome will not be decided in court.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

Belgian Newspapers Want $77.5 million in Damages from Google

A Belgian newspaper group has filed a suit asking for $77.5 million in damages from Google. The group, Copiepresse, claims Google has violated copyright law by publishing their pages on Google News and caching pages from their websites.

Copiepresse first brought a suit in 2006 and The Court of First Instance in Brussels sided with the newspaper group. Google has appealed, but removed the pages from its News and main search sites.

But Google began indexing the pages on its main site again, which drove Copiepresse to bring its latest suit. Google maintains that its search products are legal.

What do you think of Copiepresse's lawsuits? Think they should just slap a robots.txt file on their site? Tell us how it is in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

February 13, 2008

Largest Legal Vertical Search Engine Launches: Public Library of Law

The world's largest legal vertical search engine launched today in a partnership with legal research provider Fastcase, Inc. Public Library of Law (pLoL) may be more of a directory than a search engine, even though Fastcase CEO Ed Walters says it makes"first-time legal research as easy as using Google."

That's what Yahoo and Microsoft said and look where it got them.

The PLol.org site indexes cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, Courts of Appeals and all 50 states (back to 1997); federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states; and regulations, court rules, and constitutions.

More than 2 million pages of cases previously available only by subscription make PLoL the largest free legal search engine online.

Last November, a Fastcase deal with PublicResource.org made 1.8 million pages of federal cases available in the public domain. Fastcase now boasts what it calls "free links to paid content." Now there's an original idea -- make blue links free!

While domains are at a premium these days, the combination of "LOL," "dot org," and "p" as in public cries out for brand rehab.

Google and Yahoo tried to help Fastcase sell legal docs to the general public via search back in September 2006. Fastcase powered "premium legal search" in Google and Yahoo by making their extensive law library – previously only accessible on a subscription basis – available for $4.99 per case.

We'd ask Fastcase the Dr. Phil question ("So how's that workin' out for ya?") but the answer arrived today.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:31 PM | Permalink

February 11, 2008

Israeli Town Suing Google

Seems Google is being sued by a northern Israeli town because Google Maps claims it was built on an old Arab village, according to the International Herald Tribune.

This one will be interesting to watch, though one would think a simple correction would suffice.

The information was put into Google Maps by a Palestinian doctor, Thameen Darby, "raised in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said his mother was a refugee from to the village Balad al-Sheikh near Kiryat Yam. He said his contributions to Google Earth are part of the "Nakhba -- Palestinian Catastrophe" information hub aimed to help displaced Palestinians understand their heritage or find the villages of their parents or grandparents," the International Herald Tribune reported.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:04 PM | Permalink

November 19, 2007

Google Gets Its Court Date In Australia

Australians are taking Google to court over the lack of clear division between paid and organic search results. The courts set the date for the hearing at June 23, 2008.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC), a government watchdog, had some initial problems with their brief but were allowed to represent and the new suit will be heard June 23.

"Separate allegations of deceptive and misleading advertising were first levelled against Google and Australian website Trading Post's parent company, Sensis, in July after the Trading Post was found to have purchased Google keywords using competitors' business names which were displayed on Google's sponsored links," ZD Net stated.

Google Australia claims the ACCC's allegations are an attack on all search engines and Australian businesses that use Google to connect with customers, ZD Net reported.

Sensis - "the search engine for Australians" - was also named in the suit and has suggested it may settle, ZD Net repoted.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:26 PM | Permalink

September 20, 2007

Viacom Would Rather Not Sue, Chief Counsel Claims

The Chief Counsel for Viacom, Michael Fricklas, stated at the Convergence 2.0 conference today, that Viacom would rather not sue, according to JackMeyers.com.

He hopes that a firm set of usage rules are developed and adhered to, he told the audience. The right filtering by companies like YouTube (that Viacom is suing for illegal content usage) would make sure content copyrights would not be violated.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:30 PM | Permalink

September 11, 2007

Australian Watchdog Suing Google Gets Judical Criticism

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was told its legal briefs were unclear and were ordered to submit summaries of their main allegations by the Australian judge overseeing the case, The Australian reported.

Google contends that it did not mislead advertisers or readers and "Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin said the company had said from the outset that the case was wrongly based," the Australian newspaper stated.

Posted by Frank Watson at 6:08 PM | Permalink

August 17, 2007

American Airlines Suing Google Over Trademark Violation

Seems American Airlines has not read about previous law suits over trademark terms as keywords. According to a report by TechDirt, they have decided to go to court and see how their lawyers fare against the well trained and precedent backed Google team.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:39 PM | Permalink

August 7, 2007

Others Join YouTube, Google Copyright Lawsuit

Viacom has company now that other companies have joined the lawsuit against Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, Reuters reported.

"The new parties include the National Music Publishers' Association, which is the largest U.S. music publishing trade association, the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football League Association and author Daniel Quinn," Reuters stated.

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:13 PM | Permalink

July 16, 2007

Google Responds To Aussie Fraud Claims

Google has responded to the "legal proceedings by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that Google has failed to adequately distinguish 'sponsored links' from 'organic' search results", the UK Telegraph reported today. Google spokesman Rob Shilkin told the UK Telegraph: "Google Australia believes that these claims are without merit and we will defend against them vigorously. They represent an attack on all search engines."

The court date is set for August 21.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:05 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2007

Australian Gov. Suing Google Over Misleading Conduct

The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is taking Google, as well as Trading Post Australia, to court over misleading and deceptive advertising, according to the press release on the Australian government agency's website.

Google Inc, Google Ireland and Google Australia have all been named in the suit.

"The ACCC understands that it is the first regulatory body to seek legal clarification of Google's conduct from a trade practices perspective," the press release states.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:41 PM | Permalink

May 29, 2007

FTC Looking at Google-DoubleClick Deal?

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, according to the New York Times.

The outcry of privacy experts and competitors made an investigation all but inevitable, according to the report.

Because the FTC is handling the investigation instead of the Justice Department, which shares antitrust enforcement duties, some sources are assuming that the issues are more privacy-related than anti-trust related. When the deal was announced, three privacy watchdog groups asked the FTC to investigate the potential implications on user privacy. The groups feared that the combination of Google's search history and DoubleClick's tracking of sites visited would "give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world."

But privacy is not an antitrust issue, so it will not be relevant to the investigation except in the ways those issues would relate to a reduction in competition.

"We are confident that upon further review the F.T.C. will conclude that this acquisition poses no risk to competition and should be approved," Don Harrison, a senior corporate counsel for Google, told the NYT.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:03 PM | Permalink

May 16, 2007

AdWords Gets Its Day In Court

An actual court date has been set in the Google versus American Blind and Wallpaper Factory, Inc. court case. The suit against Google's adwords will be heard on November 9, 2007.

"In an April 18, 2007 decision denying Google's motion to dismiss the case, the court wrote that '''the evidence suggests that Google used [ABWF's] mark with the intent to maximize its own profit ... [and] ABWF has produced sufficient evidence of likelihood of [consumer] confusion [to allow the case to be decided by a jury],''' it was reported.

Google's allowance of advertisers to use other's trademark terms as keywords has been contentious for quite some time. Even though the trademarked term cannot appear in the ad copy, it does allow the branded terms to be used.

The trial will be held in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. So the home court advantage goes to Google.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:16 PM | Permalink

May 1, 2007

Google Fights Back in Viacom/YouTube Copyright Suit

When Viacom sued Google in March for $1 billion as a result of alleged copyright infringement on YouTube, it accused Google of building a business on the backs of content owners, and turning a blind eye to the infringement.

News.com has posted a copy of Google's response (PDF), filed this week with the U.S. District Court in New York. In it, Google denies all of the allegations, and claims protection under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) Safe Harbors and fair use:

Viacom's complaint in this action challenges the careful balance established by Congress when it enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA balances the rights of copyright holders and the need to protect the internet as an important new form of communication. By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression. Google and YouTube respect the importance of intellectual property rights, and not only comply with their safe harbor obligations under the DMCA, but go well above and beyond what the law requires.

Michael Kwun, managing counsel for litigation at Google, told News.com and others in a briefing yesterday, ""There is a certain irony to the lawsuit. Viacom and others...were at the table when the DMCA was adopted. These are the very people who helped design this law. They are getting material taken down quickly and yet, suddenly, they don't want to live with the other end of the deal."

Viacom, in turn, said, "This response ignores the most important fact of the suit, which is that YouTube does not qualify for safe harbor protection under the DMCA. It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site and they are profiting from it. It is simply not credible that a company whose mission is to organize the world's information claims that it can't find what's on YouTube.”

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:22 PM | Permalink

April 6, 2007

Google Wins in Court

In a click fraud case filed against Google in Pennsylvania by one of the 556 plaintiffs that opted out of the July 2006 class-action settlement, Google won a victory not on any click fraud-related grounds, but on the strength of its AdWords contract. As legal blogger Eric Goldman reports on his Technology and Marketing Law blog, the case was brought in the wrong venue, and now must be re-filed in Google's home court in California.

According to Goldman: This case is a nice win for Google for two reasons. First, by upholding the mandatory venue clause, it should inhibit AdWords advertisers from suing Google all over the country. Therefore, all lawsuits will have to be in Google's home court, which raises the costs of lawsuits for most plaintiffs and gives Google some other home-court advantages.

Second, by holding that this plaintiff is bound by the AdWords contract and those terms aren't substantively unconscionable, Google can now invoke its risk management clauses (like the warranty disclaimers, limits of liability, etc.) to cut the economic heart out of the click fraud claim.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:00 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2007

Google Wins in KinderStart Case

Google has come out on top in a case filed last year by KinderStart.com, in which the kid-friendly search engine and parental advice site accused Google of "downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning."

The case was dismissed, according to technology law blogger Eric Goldman. KinderStart will also have to pay some of Google's legal fees, which usually is done when a case lacks merit or is deemed frivolous by a judge.

KinderStart had alleged a host of misdeeds, from free speech violation to unfair competition to defamation. Most of those were easily disproved at the time the case was filed, as Barry Schwartz outlined at the time. Goldman sees the judge's ruling as a clear victory for Google.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:05 AM | Permalink

February 27, 2007

Search Engines Are Allowed to Reject Ads

A Delaware court made it clear that search engines are allowed to reject an ad as part of their protected right of free speech, according to law professor Eric Goldman. The Langdon v. Google case was brought by an advertiser whose requests to buy political ads were allegedly rejected or ignored by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft because they attacked other candidates.

Goldman believes the precedent-setting influence of the case is limited, but it should help search engines deflect future cases filed by advertisers that go against their editorial policies.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:26 AM | Permalink

February 23, 2007

EFF Backs Google Trademark Advertising Methods

Google's allowing of advertising on trademarked keywords has received the support of the civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A Federal Appelate Court will decide if Google can allow advertisers to use trademarked terms as keywords so long as they are not mentioned in the actual ads.

Similar to the case dismissed against Geico, Rescuecom continued its legal battle and went to a Federal appelate court which should reach an opinion very soon.

The EFF supports Google as they see it as a part of first amendment rights.

MediaPost reporteds that in a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week, the EFF argues that there's more at stake than just competition between business rivals. The EFF makes the case that Google's policy of allowing people to purchase trademarked names also protects free speech rights.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:01 PM | Permalink

January 29, 2007

Google Fights for Its Trademark

Google has sued serial trademark litigant and self-styled "intellectual property entrepreneur" Leo Stoller for false advertising, unfair competition and RICO violations for claiming that Stoller owns the Google trademark (and that Google doesn't). Attorney-bloggers John Welch, Rebecca Tushnet, and Eric Goldman have details.

Stoller is notorious in trademark circles for the numerous oppositions he's filed to trademark applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)'s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB). He's perhaps more notorious for the number of requests of an extension of time he's filed with the TTAB -- more than 1100 between November 2005 and March 2006. As a result, the TTAB last year banned Stoller from filing any extensions for two years.

According to Tushnet, since there's no provision in trademark law penalizing false claims of trademark ownership, Google had to resort to other ways to go after Stoller. Google opted for "false advertising" claims against Stoller under the Lanham Act, but it may be troublesome for Google to prove that it has standing to bring those charges, since it's not in the trademark-licensing business.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 4:04 PM | Permalink

December 22, 2006

Australian Court Ruling Could Impact Search

The Australian Federal Court ruled the other day that a web site providing links to available illegal video downloads is culpible as well as the ISP that hosted the site.

Electronic Frontiers Australia, a civil-liberties group, said the ruling could have impact on search engines such as Google.

The Associated Press report stated:

The full bench of the Federal Court, the country's second-highest court, has upheld a lower court ruling that Stephen Cooper, the operator of the Web site in question, as well as Comcen, the Internet service provider that hosted it, were guilty under Australian copyright law.

They were accused of authorizing copyright infringement because they provided a search engine whose results linked to songs available for illegal download, even though the Web site did not store the music files directly.

Cooper had argued that his Web site performed a function comparable to search engines such as Google Inc., which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

EFA chairman Dale Clapperton said Australia holds internet users to a higher standard. The legal interpretation of liability is untested for search engines like Google.

Posted by Frank Watson at 10:31 PM | Permalink

November 30, 2006

Yahoo Turns Down Google's Request For Information On Book Search

The NY Times reports that Yahoo has recently rejected Google's subpoena for help with the Google Book Search project legal woes. Reportedly, Yahoo turned down Google's request for similar reasons mentioned by Amazon when they turned down the same request. If you are interested, I have posted the full court filing at my server as a PDF download.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:11 AM | Permalink

November 27, 2006

Q&A On Google's Belgium News Agreements

This week, news emerged about an agreement between Google and two Belgian author groups that were suing it over copyright issues. Below, a short Q&A on what this means for Google. Highlights: The case goes on with three other groups taking part, but large damages seem unlikely. The new deal gives especially seems to give Google photo rights. Google says it is not doing an about-face on opt-out in Denmark. More about these an other issues covered below, based on a talk with Google spokesperson Jessica Powell. Plus, some bonus stats on how much traffic newspapers get from search engines.

Q. The case was originally filed against Google by Copiepresse. What are the other groups that joined and when did they come on?

A. In mid-October, Sofam, Scam, SAJ  and Assucopie all joined the case after Google posted the Belgian court ruling in late September.

Q. Who remains as part of the case?

A. Copiepresse, SAJ and Assucopie.

Q. Has Google paid any fines in the case so far?

A. Despite rumors, Google reiterated again today that it has not been asked to pay any fines.

Q. If Google loses the case, will it have to pay any damages?

A. Google says it hasn't been asked to pay any fines.

Q. What do the new agreements with the author groups Sofam and Scam allow?

A. Sofam represents Belgian photographers while SCAM covers mainly audio/video content. Exact uses are being worked out. As with the AP deal, Google highlighted this as providing new uses rather than a solution to the legal challenges over spidering and thumbnail image use. "It's a way for us to use their content in new ways beyond what copyright law currently allows us without the permission of the authors," said Powell said.

Q. Was there a financial aspect to the agreement?

A. Google's not commenting. Google is definitely paying the Associated Press to use some of its content, as the AP itself has reported. However, the exact terms, mechanisms or amounts have never been disclosed. Google wouldn't get into specifics on the financial details on the two Belgian deals other than to say these were deals that will allow the search engine to use the content in new ways.

Q. Is Google talking with the other parties to the suit?

A. Google said it won't comment on discussions but that it's always open to dialogue.

Q. Did Google reverse course and go opt-in for Google News Denmark?

A. Google says it chose to only launch in Sweden and Norway and that going forward it is not planning on an opt-in model in Denmark or elsewhere. The reason, says Powell, is that the company believes Google News complies with copyright law. "If publishers don't want their websites to appear in search engines, robots.txt enables them to automatically prevent their content from being indexed. And we even go beyond that: if a newspaper doesn't want to be a part of Google News, they only need to ask, and we remove them."

Between The Lines Time

The use of news images is one of the touchiest areas for Google to deal with, as I covered more in my Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles article.

The Sofam deal might help solve some of Google's legal issues in Belgium. The group represents the rights of nearly 4,000 photographers in Belgium, Google said. Google did NOT say how this might translate into usage at Google News. However, potentially this means Google can have photos in Google News even from publication that it had to remove from Google Belgium by court order. The Sofam deal might provide legal cover there. Of course, if those publications are the only source of certain photos -- and they block use through systems like robots.txt -- that would still keep the content out of Google. I'm also following up more on this particular issue.

The deals do not restore access for Google to list textual news stories it finds. That means it has to remain hopeful that the legal case will go its way, if it wants to prevent some type of negotiations with the publishers that have opted-out.

If the case goes against Google, it doesn't appear to be facing in major damages. If these were to be levied, that should have happened when it lost the first time. Instead, the publishers will remain out of Google, making Google News Belgium less useful than it would be. However, they also deny themselves traffic from Google. Possibly Google might negotiate a payment-based system to include them. Equally possible, it might also decide to hold its ground and focus attention on other countries, to see if it can wait the publishers out.

If the case goes for Google, then it regain content that will help enhance Google News Belgium, unless those publisher decide to specifically block spidering, which Google would almost certainly honor.

Overall, the action in Belgium -- as with Denmark -- underscore that in smaller markets, Google (and other search engines) may come under increasing pressure to negotiate deals to list material. The players are fewer and have more power concentrated among them. Whether these will be lucrative deals remains to be seen. In smaller markets, Google might decide it's simply not worth figuring out some type of financial arrangement -- especially for Google News which carries no ads, so generates no direct revenue. That might bring about more non-financial arrangements where the publishers cooperate for the benefit of getting traffic and also being dealt with personally by Google, rather than impersonally through automated permissions systems like robots.txt

Traffic To Search Engines

As an aside, I got a request from another reporter trying to understand how much traffic newspapers get from search engines. My response:

There's no specific answer to this. It will vary from paper to paper. Places like the New York Times will likely get a lot, because they specifically work to generate search traffic. Papers such as those suing Google in Belgium are getting probably nil, since they were removed by court order from Google.

In general, surveys have found sites getting anywhere from 8 to 13 percent of traffic from search engines. That might not sound like much, but often the first visit leads to repeat visits.

I also included two people on my response who I thought might have some better stats. Marshall Simmonds, chief search strategist for the New York Times Company, came back with this:

The one stat I can report is the NYT gets approximately 22% of its traffic from search engines. This number is very actively growing.

Bill Tancer, over at Hitwise, reported this:

Hitwise tracks 800,000 sites divided into 170 industry categories. One of those categories is our News & Media – Print category which covers Newspaper and Magazine websites (3,180 sites total). For the week ending 11/18/06 (based on our U.S. sample), Google was the #1 site sending traffic to the category at 13.66%, Search Engines as a whole were responsible for 22.44% of traffic for that same week.

That's a lot of traffic, however you slice it. There's no doubt things like Google News help build Google up as a company. But at the same time, Google News drives a ton of traffic to newspapers that are seeing the web as a new revenue source that might save them as print subscriptions dry up.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:35 PM | Permalink

November 26, 2006

Google Settles With Some Belgian Publishers Over Belgium News Inclusion

Via Techmeme, news that Google has settled with two Belgian publishing groups involved in a lawsuit against it over content included in Google News Belgium. This comes a day after Google's legal case was reheard in an appeal. The settlement, following what seems a similar settlement with AP earlier this year, seems to open the door that Google is going to continue making such appeasements rather than fight cases in court.

Bloomberg reports that Google struck an agreement with Sofam -- which represents Belgian photographers -- and Scam, which represents Belgian journalists. The agreement allows for Google to use content from these groups (or from their members). Whether they are being paid for this, what content or how it will be used is not explained:

"We reached an agreement with Sofam and Scam that will help us make extensive use of their content," Jessica Powell, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a phone interview yesterday. She declined to give details of the agreement or say whether it involved paying the groups for the content, and declined to say whether Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., was considering similar accords with the newspapers.

In September, Google lost a copyright case filed against it by another Belgian publishing group, Copiepresse. Google later had to post the ruling against it on Google Belgium. However, Google was granted an appeal for the case to be reheard, as it hadn't been represented in court the first time. The stories below provide more background on all of this:

• Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers (Long look at how the case happened and issues surrounding it)  
• Google Changes Mind, Posts Belgian Ruling  
• Google To Go To Belgium Court Finally

At some point, Sofam and Scam joined in the case. I see one reference to this back in October. Two other groups also apparently joined, since the Bloomberg report speaks to the settlement being with two of five total parties to the suit.

Those parties, led by Copiepresse, continue on in their action against Google. That action, as I've covered in my Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers article, is far more about trying to pressure Google into a financial arrangement to use Belgian news content than keeping that content out of Google itself. If it was just to keep content out of Google, the publishers could have easily done this through methods such as using robots.txt files.

Copiepresse seems confident of a legal victory:

Speaking on the phone from Brussels after the hearing, Margaret Boribon, the Copiepresse secretary-general, said she felt very happy with how things proceeded today. "I can't see how the judge could change his opinion,'' she said, certain that the court will uphold the September ruling.

Perhaps that legal victory will come, when the ruling is issued in late December or January, when expected. If so, it may not help Copiepresse in the real aim of a financial deal. Google may have enough content to make Google Belgium viable without the participation of the papers Copiepresse represents. They'd then be left in a situation of asking Google for reinclusion or going without the substantial traffic Google News can send web sites.

On the other hand, Google's settlement with the groups following on an agreement earlier this year with the Associated Press seems likely to fuel further publishing groups pushing for such arrangements, especially in smaller markets where key content is put out by a small set of publishers. Banding together and sticking with exclusion, they can severely hamper a news search service.

Norway Upset With Google News Over Copyright Laws covers how Google is being challenged in Norway. That hasn't developed into a legal case yet, but it's hard to see how Google's going to be able to say no to some type of agreement there. Pandia also covers how in Denmark, publisher opposition apparently created the unprecedented case of Google asking for permission to index news sites, rather than the normal case of spidering and requesting an opt-out.

Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles from me covers how in particular, Google's use of images for its news area is complicates issues and is making it harder for search engines in general to defend opt-out spidering, which I support. That article calls on Google to stop the inclusion of news images, as well as a pullback on showing cached pages and scanning of in copyright works without permission.

However, asking for permission to spider textual content for news search is likely to be as slippery a slope as cutting deals with publishers. It weakens the core legal position Google has argued over gather textual content from the web, most recently against suggested copyright changes in Australia that it said might make search engines unworkable.

As a reminder, Microsoft was also challenged in Belgium. Microsoft Removes Belgian Content Without Court Order covers this more and how Microsoft's reaction was to drop those publications. So far, it hasn't apparently cut a deal for reincluding them and perhaps may not feel a market need to do so.

Judge Gives AFP Case Against Google More Time covers how a copyright case against Google but Agence France Press over news inclusion is still ongoing.

I plan to follow up with Google Monday and see what further details I can gather on the case. I don't expect terms to be disclosed, but it would be good to know if a financial arrangement of some type was reached. That happened in the AP case, though Google was adamant the agreement there was not to allow it to solve a legal problem with spidering.

Many saw this as spin. There are other things the agreement would give Google aside from the right to spider, as my Google-AP Deal Not Pay-Per-Click & Some Further Details covers in more detail. However, it also conveniently solved the spidering issues for Google.

Postscript: See Q&A On Google's Belgium News Agreements for more on this story since it was written.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:04 PM | Permalink

November 24, 2006

Google Video France Sued For Copyright Infringement

Reuters reports Google France was sued by Flach Film, a French film producer, for copyright infringement. They claim their video, "The World According to Bush," was published on Google Video France, and viewed more 50,000 times, before Google removed the video. The French film producer estimates $648,700 in prejudice but Google said "our terms and conditions specify that users (Internet surfers) don't have permission to use videos which they don't own the rights to."

Google has put away $200M for copyright case legal issues with the YouTube acquisition.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:05 AM | Permalink

Google To Go To Belgium Court Finally

The AP reports that Google is finally going to show up in court to present their side of the case in the Belgium copyright suit. Google has never showed up to fight the publishers and papers in Belgium the first time the case was heard.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:58 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2006

Norway Upset With Google News Over Copyright Laws

Pandia reports that Google News is in trouble again over copyright laws overseas. Google News Norway was launched and publishers are upset that Google is placing copyrighted images in the Google News home page. Mediebedriftenes Landsforening, an association of Norwegian media companies, claims Google "cannot make use of photographs without a proper agreement." This form of syndication is in "violation with Norwegian copyright law," says Dagens NÊringsliv.

Google is also in trouble over copyright issues in Belgium (also see here and in Australia.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:04 AM | Permalink

November 15, 2006

Google Holding $200 Million In Escrow For Possible YouTube Copyright Cases

First Google was rumored to be keeping $500 million back from the YouTube sale to settle possible legal problems. Then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said they weren't. Today, turns out they are. Google holds back stock in YouTube deal from the Associated Press covers the details about keeping 12.5 percent of the stock swap for one year "to secure certain indemnification obligations." What Eric Schmidt Meant When He Said Google Wasn't Holding $500 Million From YouTube For Lawsuits: We're Holding $200 Million from TechDirt does a summary, plus gives you a funny headline about the entire thing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:12 AM | Permalink

November 12, 2006

Articles On Google's Copyright Conflicts From Me & New York Times

A Struggle Over Dominance and Definition is good New York Times article out today that looks at Google and whether it is a media company that conflicts with other media owners, especially in terms of using content from others without permission. It also sparked me to finally finish a long piece I've been meaning to do on Google, search engines and copyright issues. Search Engines, Permissions & Moving Forward In Copyright Battles is now up over at my personal blog Daggle, covering the important difference between indexing and reprinting, how robots.txt already provides a permissions system, why Google should stop scanning in-copyright books and also be a leader in dropping cached pages.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:58 PM | Permalink

November 9, 2006

Google Video Sued, Plus More Info From New SEC Filing

The Associate Press reports that Google Video was actually sued for copyright infringement but yet, Google did not reveal who actually sued them. The lawsuit was disclosed by Google via a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (link via Gary, but we do not know much more. PaidContent reports (site currently down), that Google may loan YouTube money prior to closing the deal with them, in order to help them settle or battle certain lawsuits.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:02 AM | Permalink

Google Sends Porn Worm To 50,000+ Subscribers

'Porn' worm sent to 50,000 after Google blunder from Silicon.com covers how Google accidentally sent a worm to the official Google Video Blog email list

The worm apparently, which came in the form of pornography sent to the group, which had over 50,000 subscribers at the time. The Kama Sutra email, also known as W32/Kapser.A worm, was "designed to overwrite files on infected computers on a specific date."

If you got this email and downloaded the file, it is important that you run antivirus software on your computer. Google promised to try to not do that again.

Postscript From Danny: Google has a post about it here, which gives them a chance to pitch getting free antivirus software through the Google Pack.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 7:43 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

Eric Schmidt At Web 2.0 On YouTube & Other Issues

John Battelle spoke with Eric Schmidt at Web 2.0 yesterday. What have we got? YouTube's growth made it a necessary purchase. No, money's not set aside to cover YouTube legal claims. Yes, you can have your date if you want it, users. No, Google's not trying to take out Microsoft Office. Plus some more below.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: We would never trap user data from ZDNet has coverage that has Schmidt saying:

• Google bought YouTube because it was growing faster than Google Video, and video was a "fundamental data type" to Google.
• Google's still figuring out ways to compensate content owners with video, a complex area.
• Google would support exporting personal data (search history, email, etc) to other providers, if it can be authenticated.
• Google's office products are "casual" and not aimed at Microsoft.

Google CEO denies rumor of YouTube legal reserve from Reuters quotes Schmidt as saying "not true" to a rumor that $500 million of the YouTube sales prices was set aside for legal claims.

@ Web 2.0: Day One Highlights: Ad 2.0; Google CEO; Skype Content from PaidContent covers Schmidt but also touches on IAC's Barry Diller saying in a separate interview that he doesn't expect Google will become a media monopoly or dominant player.

Web 2.0 Con: Liveblogging the "Conversation with Eric Schmidt" from Valleywag has a nice minute-by-minute rundown of the interview, for those that want more -- and covers that if Schmidt or one of the cofounders Larry Page or Sergey Brin don't agree on something, the cofounder wins. "I'm the one with the experience who's late. Left to their own devices they'd be early and right, but too early."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:34 AM | Permalink

November 7, 2006

Australia's Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google

AFP reports that Google has warned Australia that if they pass certain a new copyright law that it will set the country back to "the pre-Internet era." Google's senior counsel, Andrew McLaughlin, told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, "If such advanced permission was required [to index pages], the internet would promptly grind to a halt." I believe the issue here is that Australia wants Google to get copyright owners to opt in to having their content indexed, archived and cached, as opposed to opting out via a robots.txt file. Australia is not alone here; Belgium newspapers are fighting Google over similar copyright issues. This all just amazes me, seriously.

Postscript From Danny: See also my Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers piece that goes into great depth about how this is effectively already the law in Belgium, due to a court ruling there. The appeal on that case will happen later this month, but the threat alone also already caused Micrsoft to back out of some indexing.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:29 AM | Permalink

November 3, 2006

Google Working To Stop Lawsuits Over YouTube

The Financial Times reports that Eric Schmidt's Google is running from media company to media company trying to offer upfront cash, in sums of "tens of millions of dollars," to slow and "halt" the threat they pose to YouTube. FT.com says that Schmidt met with CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp and others recently. There are some more details over at paidContent.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:27 AM | Permalink

November 2, 2006

Google Says Belgium Did Not Send $43.2M Fine

Elinor Mills reports that Google has denied a report last week that it was fined $43 million for not removing all Belgian publishers' content from the engine's index and cache. Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes, told Elinor Mills at News.com in an email, "Google has complied with the Copiepresse judgment and we are not aware of any fine. We believe this story to be completely untrue."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:17 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

Google Click Fraud Settlement Payments Received

I reported this morning that Google Advertisers Receiving Settlement Payouts for the refunds they were rewarded based on the Google Click Fraud Settlement. The amounts of those payments are making many advertisers feel like they were ripped off. For example, one advertiser informed us that they paid Google over $480,000 over the past three years and only received a credit of $280. You can check to see if you received a credit by viewing your "Billing Summary" under each campaign in your Google AdWords account.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:45 AM | Permalink

October 31, 2006

Belgium Slaps Google With $43.2 Million Fine

Gary Price points to a Poynter.org report showing that Google has been fined €34 million (about $43,231,000 USD) for not removing all of the Belgian publisher's content based on a court ruling. Google claims they could not find all the publishers and asked the publishers for help in identifying the content that has to be removed.

Postscript: Google Says Belgium Did Not Receive $43.2M Fine.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

More Details On YouTube & Google Acquisition

Blog Maverick has some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal from a "trusted anonymous author" in a message board. Here are some of the excerpts:

The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement continues to flourish. The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow them down and lock in Youtube's position. Infringement lawsuits will be served on Youtube and the new proud parent Google in the coming months. Google will respond with two paths: an expensive legal fight or a quick and easy settlement with most choosing the latter.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:26 AM | Permalink

October 30, 2006

Google Appeals Federal Judge's Orkut Ruling

The International Herald Tribune reports that Google has appealed a federal judge's order to hand over the IP address information to Brazilian authorities. Google claims the "federal civil court did not have the proper authority" for such information. But Google spokesperson, Debbie Frost said Google will help Brazilian authorities identify individuals accused of illegal activities on Google's social networking platform, Orkut. This history goes way back, just start from here and keep clicking those links back to the previous stories. This amazes me that it is still going on since early this year.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:13 AM | Permalink

Judge To Rule By End Of Year On Kinderstart Case

Reuters reports that Judge Jeremy Fogel said he will take until the end of this year to rule on the Kinderstart case. The case was about how Kinderstart's ranking and PageRank fell and Kinderstart sued Google on numerous counts for the ranking drop. The judge recently said, "Assuming Google is saying that KinderStart's Web site isn't worth seeing. Why can't they say that? That's my question." So he will consider this and other questions in his ruling.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

Google "In Bed" With The CIA?

Threadwatch spots a disgrunt article named Former Intelligence Agent Says Google In Bed With CIA. Robert David Steele, a former CIA agent, "confirmed from his contacts within the CIA and Google that Google was working in tandem with “the agency." Steele said, “I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I'm hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off." Scary, very scary.

Postscript: Statement from Google on this, "The statements related to Google are completely untrue."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:36 AM | Permalink

October 26, 2006

Google Helping Racism By Refusing To Take Down Hosted Blogs

The Inquirer reports that Google refuses to tackle racist blogs hosted on Google's Blogger platform. These blogs have racist and neo-Nazi content on them from organizations based in New Zealand and Australia. Brian Stokes, co-founder of FightDemBack!, said that most of the time when his organization reports these types of sites to Angelfire and Tripod, he gets a response. But Google has not responded to his requests and flags. There are more details on this at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

Googling Google And Searching Yahoo

There is a strange feeling of deja vue with the Official Google blog entry 'Do you "Google"?' as we're once again looking at the way in which the word can be used. This last arose back in August over the apparent mis-use of the term by the Washington Post.

Apparently we're allowed to say "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting." since it's clear that I'm using the term in conjunction with the website, but I can't say "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting." Very bad apparently.

Does anyone but the lawyers care? Probably not, and even the Google Blog team appear less than interested given that their sign off comment on this one is "Thanks for your attention, and we look forward to serving your search-related information needs again soon."

Posted by Phil Bradley at 8:11 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

Amazon Turns Down Google's Request For Information On Book Search

Business Week reports that Amazon has turned down Google's request for information to help in it book scanning lawsuit. Amazon responded to Google's subpoena saying, that it would make Amazon's trade secrets public and it was "overly broad and unduly burdensome" on Amazon. In short, it is Amazon's way of telling Google to stop looking over their shoulder and work it out yourself.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:29 AM | Permalink

October 23, 2006

Litigation, Google And Copyright

The NY Times has an extensive article today on Google and those who would challenge it in the courts. It offers a broad overview of the legal issues surrounding Google, including those coming with the YouTube acquisition, and the company's attitude toward litigation, which is typically to fight rather than settle.

In addition, Charles Cooper at CNET writes what can only be described as an angry column about Google and "Web 2.0," content and copyright infringement. The article is entitled, "Web 2.0 as a metaphor for 'rip off'.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 12:22 PM | Permalink

Google's NetPAC Begins Donating Money

Mercury News reports that Google's NetPAC has begun handing out small $1,000 donations to three different Republicans. Google has given to Reps. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, Deborah Pryce of Ohio and Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. Google also gave two donations to Democrats, Rep. Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

October 19, 2006

Publishers & Authors Consolidate Lawsuits Against Google

MarketWatch reports that a judge has consolidated two different cases against Google to make the process quicker and more "streamlined." Book publishers and book authors have joined together to battle Google on the legal from for copyright infringement allegations over Google's Book Search Project.

Postscript: Steve Bryant at eWeek reports that the Authors Guild v. Google case is postponed six months to January 2008. Steve said, "Doesn't that mean that Google, in the meantime, will continue to operate Google Books as normal, which is exactly what the Authors Guild wants to prevent?"

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:15 PM | Permalink

October 13, 2006

Google Wins Case Against Maughan Over Search Results Snippets

Eric Goldman reports that Google has won the Maughan v. Google case where Mark Maughan filed a suit against Google for the content displayed in the snippets area under a search results listing in Google.com. A search on Mark Maughan Accountancy currently shows the number one listing from www.dca.ca.gov/cba/discipline/ma-me.htm. The snippet looks like:

The complaint was that a search like the above and other variations of it "generates a list of websites 'suggesting' he was disciplined by the California Board of Accountancy for 'gross negligence' and accepting a contingent fee for the preparation of tax returns, which he says are 'veritable scarlet letters in the accounting world'."

Google won the case, and was also rewarded $23,000 in attorneys' fees and costs.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:20 AM | Permalink

October 12, 2006

New Interview on Belgian Press vs. Google News (Microsoft Next?)

Sean Daly, from Groklaw, interviewed Margaret Boribon of Copiepresse on September 28th about their copyright lawsuit against Google, which targets the use of Belgian news in Google News, and cached copies of those articles. He has posted their discussion, in English and French, as well as some commentary and analysis of the litigation, including some late breaking news involving demands made by Copiepresse for MSN, and a potential new plaintiff.

I've written a brief synopsis of some of the points she raises in the interview at SEO by the Sea. Danny also talked with Margaret Boribon earlier in September.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 12:32 PM | Permalink

October 11, 2006

Google's "False & Deceptive" Search Ads

Ben Edelman's False and Deceptive Pay-Per-Click Ads analysis looks at specific ads on Google.com that seem to violate Google's editorial guidelines and perhaps US laws over "free" services being offered.

Edelman reviews ads that use the words "free" or make other claims that are said to be false.

He looks at "charging for software that's actually free" here, then he looks at "the "completely free" ringtones that aren't" here, and then reviews some "ads impersonating famous and well-known sites" here.

Finally, Edelman reviews the law, ethics, and incentives Google is faced with specific to these ads. He views Google and the search companies as the ones that really profit from such ads and suggests that Google "expand the policy to prevent these scams."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:55 AM | Permalink

October 10, 2006

Court Issues Notice To Google For Allegedly Spreading Hate In India Via Orkut

The Times of India reports that Google is in hot water over Orkut once again, this time for allegedly spreading hatred for India. The article says, "The Aurangabad bench of Bombay High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service Orkut." The problem is over a "We Hate India" community in Orkut that posted a picture a burning Indian flag.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:35 AM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

Yahoo Messenger Worm Targets Google AdSense Click Fraud

The Register reports that a new malware worm has been discovered that targets Yahoo Messenger, sends those users to pages with Google AdSense ads and clicks on them. The Google ads are specifically high priced keywords such as mesothelioma, which is a cancer caused from exposure to asbestos. More details on this worm at the Spyware Guide.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 3:40 PM | Permalink

October 5, 2006

Google To Subpoena Yahoo, Microsoft For Info To Help In It Book Scanning Lawsuit

Just in from Bloomberg, Google to Subpoena Yahoo, Microsoft on Book Scanning covers how Google hopes that gaining information from rival book scanning programs will help it defend itself in copyright lawsuits over its own scanning program. From the story:

Google, which doesn't disclose how many books it has scanned, also wants to know the title, authors and copyright status of books already offered through competitors' book projects, according to the documents.

The right to subpoena has been granted, but information is to be kept confidential and used only in the litigation.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:09 PM | Permalink

Google Won Keyword Trademark Lawsuit: Rescuecom v. Google

MercuryNews.com reported last week that Google won a major sponsored keyword trademark case against Rescuecom. Judge Norman Mordue of U.S. District Court, northern district of New York, went "against all four precedent rulings" on this case, said Eric Goldman. Specifically, the court said, "Defendant's internal use of plaintiff's trademark trigger sponsored links is not a use of a trademark...because there is no allegation that defendant places plaintiff's trademarks on any goods, containers, displays, or advertisements, or that its internal use is visible to the public." Eric Goldman explained that the court used the 1-800 Contacts precedent in this case to reject pretty much all of Rescuecom's claims. Bottom line is that this is a major win for Google and can be used in future cases as a precedent to those cases.

Postscript Barry: Here is a link to the court document as a PDF.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:32 AM | Permalink

October 3, 2006

A Look At Google's Copyright Battles

News.com has another great article named Copyright tussles for Google. It reviews some of Google's copyright cases and how Google is trying hard to win some of those cases for their current and future projects. From the Google Cache, to Google Images, to web search, book search and other indexing projects - Google needs to keep redefining the law to continue to build out their search engine. But you have to agree with the highlighted quote, "One of the challenges is, 'This is Google. What would the world be without Google?' We don't want the world without Google. We want the world without Google infringing our copyrights."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:02 AM | Permalink

October 2, 2006

Copiepresse Upset Ruling On Google Wasn't Visible Enough

Last week, Google complied with a Belgian court order and posted the ruling against it in a copyright suit on the home page of Google Belgium and Google News Belgium, along with many other places including many search results pages. Now via Google Blogoscoped, news that the plaintiff in the case Copiepresse thinks the ruling should have gone at the top of the Google News Belgium page, rather than the bottom.

An article about the issue in Dutch is here. I don't speak Dutch, sadly, consigning me to AltaVista Babelfish, which translated a key part as:

That happened also, but on the start page of Google news, the topicality part of the site, stands the sentence entirely below. And that does not like Copiepresse.

Anyone hitting Google Belgium couldn't have failed to notice the beginning of the very long ruling, as the illustration above shows. But over at Google News Belgium, that ruling wouldn't have been seen unless you scrolled to the bottom of the page, past all the stories. That's what Copiepresse seems to be upset about.

The order did require that:

The defendant to publish, in a visible and clear manner and without any commentary from her part

Copiepresse might well be able to argue that on Google News Belgium, the ruling there wasn't clear and visible by being at the bottom of the page.

Of course, putting the long ruling at the top of the page would have been unworkable. The ruling itself didn't allow Google to put anything on the page directing people to see the notice at the bottom since that might have been deemed "commentary" about the ruling.

What next? If Copiepresse presses for more and wins, perhaps Google might have to run the ruling in a column alongside news content.

Frankly, Copiepresse comes across as petty in complaining here. Google already had a good argument that publishing the ruling was unnecessary given the wide press coverage the ruling had gained, though the court was not convinced and required the ruling to go up anyway. After that happened, coverage of Google's loss was only magnified. The point was made very publicly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:22 AM | Permalink

September 28, 2006

Google Not To Deliver Orkut Data To Brazil Authorities

Google won't hand data to Brazil judge from the Associated Press reports that Google will not be meeting the deadline to provide Brazilian authorities with the data they requested on specific Orkut users. This comes after Google saying they will hand over the data to Brazil. So the question is, will Google be fined $23,000 per day by the Brazilian judge until they comply? Google has promised to issue a court explanation as to why they cannot provide the data Brazil requested. The AP article also quotes Debbie Frost of Google saying, "We have and will continue to provide Brazilian authorities with information on users who abuse the Orkut service, if their requests are reasonable and follow an appropriate legal process."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:55 AM | Permalink

September 27, 2006

Google Talks On Its Approach To Content & Copyright

Our approach to content at the Official Google Blog has Google explaining to the world how it works with content owners and its desire to respect their rights.

In terms of copyright, Google stresses that it generally sticks to what's known as fair use, though the post doesn't use those words. The idea is that it shows very short summaries of stories, pages, thumbnails of images but doesn't reprint this material, requiring people to clickthrough to the actual material from places like Google News.

Of course, in the case of cached pages, many including myself would argue that Google goes beyond fair use. Cached pages are an example where content can be viewed without clicking through to the original site, and the opt-out approach for that doesn't feel appropriate at all.

Google also notes there are cases when it wants to go beyond fair use, to make broader use of content where permission would be required. The deal with the Associated Press is cited as one of several examples here.

To me, this is also a way for Google to help defuse the idea that some publications have, such as the Belgian newspapers recently, that Google can be bought off to avoid lawsuits. To me, this is Google stressing that it will do content deals in some cases, but that these content deals aren't necessarily being done to avoid lawsuits, especially when it feels it is acting within fair use guidelines. That's my speculation and take on this, of course. Google didn't comment when I asked if this was the reason for raising the AP deals.

Moving past Google saying it respects copyright, it then stresses that it allows people to opt-out, even if it feels it has fair use rights. In general, I agree with this method, which Google along with the other major search engines generally follow. Trying to get permission from each web site to index it would be an impossible task, and one that's not necessarily even legally required. Opt-out through things like robots.txt is an effective way to protect rights holders plus benefit the public as a whole. I do hope they'll change cached pages to opt-in, however.

Google talked with me about the post shortly before it went live yesterday, to see if I had any questions. The main thing in my mind was if this was in response to the Belgian lawsuit. No, I was told. The post has been in the works for some time, apparently. Google's hoping it will help people better understand their approach to content.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:56 AM | Permalink

September 25, 2006

Google Changes Mind, Posts Belgian Ruling

Google has now posted the text of a Belgian ruling finding it violated copyright on the Google Belgium home page. The ruling has also been posted to the home pages of Google Images Belgium, Google News Belgium but not Google Groups Belgium.

Last week, a court ruled Google had violated the copyright of several Belgium newspapers by listing them within Google News. The court ordered the removal of those papers from Google, which the company quickly complied with.

The court also ordered Google to post the ruling on its Belgian web site within 10 days or face a heavy fine. Google appealed that punishment, but it was upheld last Friday.

Despite losing its appeal, Google looked ready to defy the order to post the ruling and take the fines, until a second appeal could be heard in November. Now, the company has reversed course. The ruling went up on Saturday. The company gave no reason for the reversal to Reuters:

A spokesperson for Google declined to elaborate on the reasons that made the company change its mind but said it would seek to cancel the ruling.

"We are pleased that a judge has given Google the opportunity to appeal the substance of this case. This will be heard in November," the spokesperson said.

From Dow Jones newswire:

Google spokeswoman Rachel Whetstone told Dow Jones Newswires the company had agreed to publish the ruling on its Web site after studying the court judgment.

Technically, Google never failed to comply with the court ruling. It has 10 days from receipt of the ruling to act, and it has done so within that time, saving it exposure to fines. As noted, a second appeal on the ruling will happen in November.

Past coverage is below:

• Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers: Explains when the ruling happened, how Google reacted to remove the publications more than they were probably expected and why if the fight were really about copyright, the entire court case could have been avoided through the use of a simple robots.txt file.  
• Google Loses Appeal On Posting Belgian Ruling: Covers Google losing the judgment on Friday about posting the text on its web site.  
• Publisher Groups To Test New Search Engine Rights Management System (Updated): Covers a new system that publishers have proposed that some suggest would have avoided the Belgian case -- except that as my previous story explains, existing systems would have stopped that well enough.

Also, I note that Microsoft's Windows Live is now operating illegally under Belgian law. For example, site:www.lesoir.be shows how pages from Le Soir -- one of the publications involved in the lawsuit against Google -- has pages listed in Windows Live, as well as cached pages. In fact, here's an example of an article from Le Soir about the Belgian ruling against Google that I can read at Windows Live through its cached copy. To date, no news that Microsoft is about to be sued.

Finally, over at Threadwatch, an interesting comment points out that Google might have been OK in Belgium if it didn't show cached copies of pages:

The truly critical essence of this Belgian court ruling concerns Google's caching functionality. Here, protected content is being displayed a) in modified form; b) more often than not in its entirety (i.e. not restricted to mere snippets); and c) without copyright holders' permission. In most countries this would be viewed as a flagrant violation of copyright law - and obviously this is the stance the Belgian court has adopted. (And yes, there's been a contrary ruling by a US court, but that specific case seems to be rather more complicated on closer view; also, there's some indication that it was decided on arguably faulty assumptions, but that's another story.)

It is interesting to note that the Belgian ruling specifically acknowledges Google's right to store third party content (no mean concession, that, and far from self-evident) for search purposes only. But displaying it in the cache for everyone to see constitutes an act of re-publication which, like it or not, demands copyright holders' express permission.

This is a very important point. Search engines make copies of pages in order to make content searchable, as my Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn't Reprint article explains in more detail. It's very difficult to argue this type of copying harms a site owner, especially when opting out is so easy.

Showing these actual copies through cached pages has long been disturbing for many people. While it's easy to opt-out of such display, it feels a step beyond what a content owner should have to do. With cached pages, content is literally being reprinted rather than made searchable. It seems absurd for the content owners to opt-out in that instance.

Within the US, cached copies has so far been upheld, something I disagree with. But if Google were to eliminate them -- along with picture thumbnails -- it sounds like it might have a better chance of winning in Belgium.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:51 AM | Permalink

September 22, 2006

Google Loses Appeal On Posting Belgian Ruling

Google loses appeal on posting court ruling from Reuters covers Google losing an appeal that it should not be required to post the ruling of a Belgian court over a copyright infringement lawsuit on its Belgian web search and news sites. It now will be fined 500,000 euros per day for each day it fails to comply. Google has a further appeal on the entire case, including posting the ruling, that will be heard in November. My past article Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers has more about that and the entire case.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:10 PM | Permalink

September 21, 2006

KinderStart Issues An Amended Complaint Against Google

Eric Goldman wrote that KinderStart has issued a 63 page second amended complaint against Google. KinderStart lost their first case against Google back in July of this year - that case was, in my opinion, ridiculous. This new complaint is even worse. The 43(B)log summarizes the complaints, calling many of them "incomprehensible." Eric Goldman says "I expect Google will file a motion to dismiss, which the judge will grant, at least in part (at minimum, to eliminate the Violation of Free Speech claim). I expect Google to go on the counter-offensive and renew its anti-SLAPP motions."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:51 AM | Permalink

September 20, 2006

Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers

I've had a long talk with the group that so far has successfully sued Google in Belgium over indexing, a talk that leaves me thinking they don't fully understand how search engines work and why their arguments over copyright infringement will ultimately fail. Then again, the case is really about trying to convince Google it should pay to carry their news content. A closer look at all this in the story below, as well as an update on the situation in general, including an appeal for Google that's been granted.

Let's go back to the beginning. In March, Copiepresse tells me it started legal proceedings against Google over its inclusion of Belgian news sources without explicit permission. The organization represents a number of publishers that were concerned over being indexed.

Information about the case, including a summons, was all set to Google in the United States, according to Copiepresse. A hearing was held in Belgium on September 5th, then the ruling came out last Friday, September 15. Google didn't take part in the hearings, for reasons it says it is still investigating.

The ruling required that Google do two main things within 10 days of receipt:

1. Remove French and German-language content from the publishers from Google Belgium's web sites or pay a fine of €1 million per day  
2. Publish the ruling on Google Belgium and Google News Belgium or pay a fine of €500,000 per day

Over this past weekend, Google says it complied with the first part. It removed links to at least these news sources, Google told me:

dhnet.be grenzecho.be lacapitale.be lalibre.be lameuse.be lanouvellegazette.be laprovince.be lecho.be lequotidiendenamur.be lesoir.be pressbanking.com votrejournal.be

It's been noted that Google did more than remove these sites from Google News Belgium. They were removed from Google Belgium entirely. Here are a couple of searches that demonstrate this:

site:dhnet.be site:grenzecho.be site:lacapitale.be site:lalibre.be site:lameuse.be site:lanouvellegazette.be site:laprovince.be site:lecho.be site:lequotidiendenamur.be site:lesoir.be site:pressbanking.com site:votrejournal.be

Some have thought this is an example of Google getting revenge, robbing these publishers of regular traffic they probably assumed was safe in a fight over Google News indexing. For its part, Google said its reading of the ruling meant that the sites had to be dropped entirely from Google Belgium:

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € per day of delay;

I've bolded the key part. Google says it interpreted "all their sites" as being all sites that it views the court having jurisdiction over, anything using the Google.be domain. In addition, Google has removed the sites from Google News worldwide, saying it is treating the ruling as it would any request to be removed from Google News. In those cases, you're dropped entirely, not on a country-by-country basis.

The sites do still appear in a searches via Google.com or other Google editions not aimed at Belgium. While these sites can still be reached from Belgium, Google considers them outside Belgian jurisdiction.

That view is sort of laughable, though I understand the reasoning well. It's unlikely that Google Belgium is actually being served up out of Belgium, so artificially pretending that Google.com another other Google sites are somehow "outside" Belgian jurisdiction makes no sense. However, this type of pretending isn't that unusual. It's a nice way for search engines to act like they are following the ruling of a particular country by making changes on "that country's Google." It's also a convenient way for particular courts to feel they've exerted jurisdiction over sites that that they might really not be able to control.

Overall, Google has complied with the first part of the ruling. As for the second, it hasn't posted the required notices and says it will wait for a ruling due out Friday specifically about that issue. It argued yesterday in a hearing for appeal that posting the notice on the home pages wasn't necessary given all the publicity the case has now received.

An appeal for the case overall was granted. It will be heard on November 24, and the entire matter is largely in limbo until then. I hesitate to consider the case a victory for Copiepresse given that the first hearing -- for whatever reason -- had no defense from Google at all.

This leads me to Copiepresse's complaint with Google. In the group's view, Google has illegally copied material without permission. It feels that in some way, Google should get permission before indexing.

Indexing, of course, is not copying. Search engines do read pages in to make them searchable, as my Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn't Reprint article explains in more detail. But indexing isn't reprinting pages, in the way some arguments try to make it. Google does show cached copies, something raised in the case. But cached copies aren't shown within Google News search, which was the main focus of this case (as an aside, one US court has ruled cached copies aren't an infringement, something I disagree with but something also easily rectified through no caching mechanisms).

I had a very long conversation about the permissions issue with Margaret Boribon, secretary general of Copiepresse, to try and better understand how they wanted Google to operate. Why not use commonly understood and effective mechanisms such as robots.txt files or meta robots tags to prevent indexing?

"If you do so, you admit that Google does what they want, and if you don't agree, you have to contact them. This is not the legal framework of copyright," Boribon said.

This is an age old issue in the search engine world. By default, search engines assume that permission is granted to index a document, in order to make it searchable. Technically, shouldn't they get explicit permission? Legally, that might make things safer. Logistically, it would never work. Many sites don't have clear contact details. Some domains themselves contain multiple sites. Moreover, there are millions of sites across the web. Contacting them all beforehand simply wouldn't work well.

I asked Boribon about this, how her group would propose search engines undertake such a task.

"I'm sure they can find a very easy system to send an email or a document to alert the site and ask for permission or maybe a system of opt-in or opt-out," she said.

Would it be OK for such a system to work automatically, I asked? Yes, that would be fine. A machine-to-machine connection would be OK, she said. So then, I asked, why not use the existing robots.txt or meta robots systems?

Both mechanisms are easy, automatic ways for publishers to declare if they grant indexing permission or not. In fact, I'd argue that both are a way for search engines to ask beforehand for the very permission that Copiepresse wants them to seek. Major search engines -- not just Google -- all request or check these blocking mechanisms.

Boribon rejected the existing solutions. One issue she had was that they weren't legally endorsed. That's true, but that's also something I think will change over time. In the US, we've had one case recently where opt-out solutions like tags have been accepted.

Outside the US, there have been some scatted cases, such as this one from 1997 in the UK involving news indexing. But none of these cases have seemed to stop the search engines.

The Belgium case could be different. What happens in one country isn't applicable to others. It may be that Copiepresse will prove its point that permission should be sought in advance. Alternatively, a court could endorse existing blocking mechanisms as having legal force.

That's what I think should happen. These systems pose an easy way for anyone who doesn't want to be in a search engine to stay out. If the issue with Copiepresse was really about not being indexed, all of the publications it represents could easily stay out through those solutions. Google -- like other major search engines -- doesn't index sites against their wills.

There's more at work here, of course. The publications DO want to be in Google. The action is simply an effort to force Google to the bargaining table and get paid for inclusion, from what I can see.

"Our purpose is not to be excluded. Of course, we want to be in the system, but on a legal basis," said Boribon. "We want to be remunerated."

Her group's view -- as is the view of the World Association Of Newspapers that she also referenced several times -- is that Google is exploiting sites. It is making money off these sites and giving them little or nothing in return.

Most search marketers hearing this have to stifle laughter or disbelief. That's because most search marketers want all the search traffic they can get. It's free, easy and converts well. They understand that search engines give them plenty of value and complain most when something happens to take that traffic away, as was the case with the Google Florida Update of 2003.

I'm not going to spin out the argument that search engines generate far more benefits from the indexing they do than harm. For one thing, I think this is self-evident given the sheer amount of concern of getting into search engines, rather than out of them. If you must have more argument, see my past post, Search Engines As Leeches, The Difference Between Paid & Free Listings & Keyword Price Rises.

The difference between most publishers on the web and those of Boribon -- or book publishers also suing over Google's scanning program -- is that they think they are special, in my opinion. They think they have content that is more important than other content on the web, content that is either entitled to more protection or that warrants payment for being included.

Several times, Boribon stressed that those who spent a lot of time and money on their works deserved to be compensated by Google. My response was that I don't care if content is worth €1 or €1,000,000. It is entitled to the same protections. To be fair, Boribon agreed when I made that point. Yet our talk still continued to be riddled with her references to the high value of some content or the concept that only some content had protected status.

I've been through this before. Why Don't Book Publishers Object To Web Indexing? covers how one book group, while admitting that copyright law should apply the same regardless of whether works are in digital or book form, still suggested that online works were somehow different:

I think the issue is much more acute where the content is not made freely available by its copyright owner - which is, of course, the case for all the in-copyright content Google are planning to digitise from libraries.

Skipping past copyright law, let's focus on payment for inclusion. Boribon said that Google had made special arrangements with Le Monde to include it in Google News, explaining that was one of many examples of Google targeting the most important sources for special treatment.

My response was Google has special arrangements with lots of publishers that have content that can't easily be indexed. If Le Monde required user registrations, Google couldn't spider the site without contacting them and being allowed in. Indeed, it's the same thing Google has done for the New York Times, as we've covered. It's something Google (and other search engines) does for even non-news sites, if they have important content that it thinks should be gathered.

Google is not paying Le Monde or the New York Times for these arrangement, however -- something that Boribon seemed to believe the case, and no doubt other publications do as well. Google confirmed with me it has no payment system like this with Le Monde. But such a belief highlights the huge education challenge Google faces, trying to help these publications that have mistaken notions of how it -- and all search engines -- operate.

Of course, Google does have one paid relationship with a news source that came to attention recently, the Associated Press. Google still hasn't explained exactly whether this was a relationship it did to prevent an AP lawsuit over being in Google News or a separate agreement to pick up some of AP's content for reuse.

Fair to say, AP's content is important enough and helpful enough to Google that it did decide to enter into an agreement to make use of it in some way. Boribon's group feels their content is important enough that it should obtain some type of agreement as well.

This is also an old story, in some ways. Tom Mohr in Editor & Publisher earlier this month was only the latest of those with the newspaper industry sounding a call for newspapers to band together to deny content in hopes of getting paid:

But what if 2/3 or more of the U.S. newspaper industry sits on one platform, managed by Switzerland Inc.? What if Switzerland Inc. decides to deny Yahoo! and perhaps Google access to newspaper industry content for three months, followed by a negotiation for better terms? That's the power of a network.

The World Association Of Newspapers had a similar call earlier this year:

Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, collect headlines and photos for their users without compensating the publishers a cent, according to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which announced Tuesday that it intends to "challenge the exploitation of content" by the Googles and MSNs of the Web.

The Belgian lawsuit is simply another step forward in pushing for that payment, exactly what Google CEO Eric Schmidt described as "negotiation being done in a courtroom" when I spoke with him last month:

Because of our scale and because of the amounts of money that we have, Google has to be more careful with respect to launching products that may violate other people's notion of their rights. But also, frankly, we find ourselves in litigation and the litigation was expensive, and diverts the management team, etcetera, from our mission. In the cases that you describe, most of the litigation in my judgment was really a business negotiation being done in a courtroom. And I hate to say that, but that is my personal opinion. And in most cases a change in our policy or a financial change would in fact address many of the issues.

In the end, I want honesty. If the Copiepresse or the AFP (also suing Google) feel Google doesn't have permission to index their content, then just use the easily implemented mechanisms to get out and stay out. Don't file unnecessary court cases, nor just single out Google as the whipping boy when Yahoo and Microsoft, to name only two search engines, operate the same way.

Is it about getting paid? Is it that these publishers think they are so important they should get money for being included, since links alone to their web sites make search engines more comprehensive. That's fine, but you don't need a court case for that either. Just opt-out. If you're worth it, Google and the others will come running to the negotiating table. If you're not, well, no one's going to miss you -- but you'll miss the search engine traffic, as the Belgian publications almost certainly are discovering to their horror now.

I don't want lawsuits that seriously threaten web search itself. Bourbon's ruling potentially applies to all content, not just news content, in Belgium. Anyone could sue Google and other search engines saying that robots.txt blocking isn't explicit enough. If that happens, Boribon's organization is going to find searching the web from Belgium is difficult, since there won't be any content in Google, Yahoo or other services at all.

That would be ironic, given that Boribon says she's a regular Google user. She's routinely using a service where virtually none of the content listed is there because of some explicit approval process. That's hypocritical, given her group's lawsuit. If they don't believe opt-out mechanisms are sufficient, then none of these member publications should be using Google or any search engine as part of their daily routines.

Postscript: V7N points at WAN to combat 'search engine spiders', which has the World Association Of Newspapers suggesting incorrectly that search engines have no technological solution to spider only some content. They absolutely do. Content can be flagged on a page-by-page basis, if that's what a content owner wants to do.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:23 PM | Permalink

September 19, 2006

Google's Political Action Committee: Google NetPAC

Via Threadwatch, Google will flex political muscles PAC to raise money for causes, candidates; lobbyists on board from the San Francisco Chronicle covers how Google has created its own Political Action Committee named Google NetPAC to to support candidates backing "an open and free internet." Google has some small footprints in Washington already, hiring a lobbying firm in the past to help push public policy in the direction Google wants it to go.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:43 AM | Permalink

September 18, 2006

Belgian Court Orders Google To Remove Content From Google News & Cache

Reuters reports the big news of the day that Google has been ordered by a Belgian court to remove all articles, photographs and graphics from French-speaking newspapers. Copiepresse issued the complaint and won the court ruling on September 5th. Not only does this require Google to remove content from Google News, the court order requires removing the content from the Google cache. ChillingEffects.org has a link to the full court order.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:23 AM | Permalink

September 14, 2006

Google Fights To Use "Gmail" Name In Germany

News.com has a great write up named Behind Google's German courtroom battle. Google had to stop using the name Gmail in the UK, the same thing is being fought over in Germany. Daniel Giersch, a German venture capitalist, has who has a six-year-old trademark registration of g-mail, will not give up his trademark to Google. The German courts have required Google to remove all references to "Gmail" on Google's pages within Germany. Google is trying to argue that "G-mail" is different from "Gmail" and they should be allowed to use the name in Germany. Google is not giving up on this battle, like they did in the UK.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

September 4, 2006

Google Says They Will Give Brazil Orkut Data

The Washington Post reports that Google will give over the Orkut data of specific users including; IP addresses with time and date stamps that can help trace a specific user and registration information including names and e-mail addresses. This comes after Brazil gave Google 15 days to comply or else be fined $23,000 per day.

Why turn over data to Brazil when Google famous resisted the US government earlier this year for a data request? Reports the Post:

"What they're asking for is not billions of pages," said Nicole Wong, Google associate general counsel. "In most cases, it's relatively discrete -- small and narrow."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:16 AM | Permalink

September 1, 2006

Google Has 15 Days To Provide Data To Brazil Or Be Fined $23,000 Per Day

AFP reports that Brazil has given Google Brazil 15 days to turn over the data on the Orkut users they have been asking for. If Google Brazil does not comply, they will be fining them $23,000 per day. Google has said that they would work with Brazil to shut down Orkut some communities but according to the court filing in Sao Paulo yesterday, those requirements have been 'unsatisfactorily met.'

We have a good historical round down of this whole Google & Orkut & Brazil issue here. Business Week also has a nice write up on the issues named Google's Brazil Headache, highlighting why Google is saying they'll comply if only the requests were sent to Google in the US, rather than Google Brazil.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:20 AM | Permalink

August 28, 2006

Google Sued Over Personalized Search Patent

Yonhap News reports that Park & Opc Co., a South Korean ISP, is suing Google over a patent dispute. Park & Opc Co. claims they have a patent on personalized search that Google has violated.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:30 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2006

Dutch Farmers Site Loses Court Case Against Google

Reuters reports that the Dutch farmer dating site has lost their court case in Amsterdam. The judge ruled that the keywords "farm" and "date" were too general. When Farm Date's owner issued the complaint, they did so because ads come up for sex and pornographic sites, which they claim is "very damaging for Farmdate's reputation."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:43 PM | Permalink

Google Joins Coalitions To Fight Child Pornography

The Google blog announced that Google has joined two coalitions to help protect children online. These coalitions combat child pornography and child exploitation on the Internet. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) release can be found here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:05 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

Brazil To Close Google Brazil's Offices Over Orkut Issues?

A post in our SEW Forums and a report from Xinhau says that Brazil's federal prosecution service is moving to close Google's operations in Brazil. So far, there is no other news about this that we've seen. An injunction is apparently being requested ordering the release of information from Orkut, with a threat for closure of Google's Sao Paulo office if they don't comply.

Postscript From Danny: Reuters has a story up now here: Google refuses to hand over data to Brazilian authorities. It covers that prosecutors want permission to file a civil lawsuit against Google, with a $61 million fine and the threat of closure if it fails to comply with the information request.

Postscript From Barry: For an historical line up of these events over time, see the links below:

- Aug. 16, 2006 :: Orkut Causing Trouble In Brazil Again - Jul. 21, 2005 :: Drug Pushers Using Orkut Arrested In Brazil - May. 25, 2006 :: Google Works With Brazil To Shut Down Orkut Communities - May. 18, 2006 :: Google Faces Criminal Charges For Child Porn & Racial Material - May. 3, 2006 :: Google & Brazil Fight Over Orkut User Data Rights - Mar. 10, 2006 :: Brazil Asks Google To Help Orkut To Stop Organizing Organized Crime - Mar. 9, 2006 :: Al-Qaeda Likes Orkut

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 5:21 PM | Permalink

August 18, 2006

Fighting For GoogleCheckout.com & More Google Complaints Against Others Who Registered Google-Like Domain Names

ResourceShelf has compiled sources of historical complaints Google has issued to those who have registered Google-like domain names. To do so, ResourceShelf searched through the "World Intellectual Property Organization's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) database and the National Arbitration Forum Domain Name Dispute Proceedings and Decisions database for the information. The most recent domains to be transferred to Google's ownership include; googlecheckout.com, googlematching.com, googleoutdoors.com. More details on how to find more of these names at ResourceShelf.

Postscript From Danny: Be sure to read the complaint resolution about Google Checkout. Some highlights:

+ Respondent states that her intended business name is not "GOOGLE Checkout," which ostensibly is identical to the disputed domain name , but rather the term "Go Ogle Checkout," which Respondent contends is not. She intends to use this term in conjunction with an online dating service....

+ Further, just some six days after Respondent registered the name, the media widely reported that Complainant planned on launching its online payment service -- as indicated by the articles, a copy of which appear in Exhibit A to Complainant's Additional Submission, that appeared in, e.g., The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press.

With respect to bad faith, Complainant points to the $ 1.25 Million price at which Respondent offered the names for sale as evidencing bad faith. Complainant contends that Respondent's reply, in and of itself, to Complainant's cease and desist letter is not bad faith, rather Respondent's unsolicited offer, in response, to sell the names is. Further, once Complainant rejected this offer, Respondent then reduced her offer to $ 375,000 which again shows Respondent's bad faith....

+ 'Google' is now a verb in the dictionary. 'Go' and 'Ogle' are also generic terms in the dictionary, as is 'checkout', 'matching,' and 'outdoors.' I took three common names out of the dictionary and put them together and coincidentally they happen to spell GOOGLE in them, which is also a common word in the dictionary. Therefore, my domain names do provide a basis for distinguishing them from Complainant's mark....

+ On May 22, 2006, Complainant received a reply email (a copy of which appears in Exhibit 13 to the Complaint) from Respondent through which Respondent stated:

Hi there. I have received your email and do not actively have these domain names in use. ... I am the proud owner of these domain names and others. I am wiling to do a transfer of these domain names to the google property rights at a cost of my expenses and time and future loss of business. I would possibly be willing to accept an offer of $ 1,250,000.00 as a package deal for all three domain names....

+ Later, through an email dated May 23, 2006 (a copy of which appears in Exhibit 15), Respondent offered to sell the names to Complainant as a package deal for $375,000, and in so doing specifically stated:

I have done enough research to notice many other domain names with google's name (not owned by google) and they have active websites, making incomes off of these sites. ...

I am willing to transfer these names over without any further discussion for $ 375,000....

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:29 AM | Permalink

August 16, 2006

Orkut Causing Trouble In Brazil Again

Komfie Manalo reports that Brazil has threatened to bring Google to court over their social networking application, Orkut, again. Yesterday, the Federal Prosecution Service of Brazil, said Google refused "to cooperate with authorities about user information" on Orkut. Google said in the past that they would work with Brazilian officials to shut down Orkut communities that were participating and helping criminals traffic drugs and distribute pedophilia. Google says they have cooperated with Brazilian authorities, stating, they have "provided information to eight investigations, and kept secret information regarding 60 other cases since June."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:33 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

Farmer Dating Web Site Sues Google Over Porn Ads

INQ7 Network reports that the owners of Farm Data, "a respectable meeting website for farmers," is suing Google for the ads that show up for the query [farm date]. Basically, pornographic sites and sex sites come up for the term and Farm Date says that those ads are "very damaging for Farmdate's reputation." We should know the court ruling on August 24, I will keep you posted on it.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:34 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2006

Use Google But Don't Google Asks Google Trademark Police

Google's trademark lawyer has been busy apparently. The search engine is keen for people to use Google, but not to 'google' something. The search engine took offense at a comment in the Washington Post describing the word 'google' as moving beyond a specific product to becoming a descriptor of an entire sector. Google thinks that this is "genericide" and should be avoided.

According to the (hand addressed) letter sent to the Washington Post Google has come up with some examples or suggestions to linguistically aid us in the future. What is appropriate is "He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he's listed in the results.", and inappropriate language is "He googles himself." The example that has given rise to much mirth however is that it is appropriate to use "I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party", and inappropriate is "I googled that hottie."

So now we know, and it simply remains for me to ego-surf on the Google search engine to see if I'm considered a hottie.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 9:12 AM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

Reminder: AdWords Claim in Click Fraud Settlement Due Tomorrow

The approved click fraud settlement requires that you submit your claim at https://www.clicksettlement.com/ before the end of the day tomorrow, August 4th, 2006. So this is your chance, if, I repeat, IF, you want to be a part of this settlement. I have reported on the discussion forum coverage of this settlement, where AdWords advertisers have questions about the settlement, but you can also get more details at the FAQs page.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:10 AM | Permalink

July 27, 2006

Google Click Fraud Settlement Approved

Just got word from Google that the settlement in the class action lawsuit over click fraud has been approved. I'm dashing out, so this is just a short post to give you a heads-up. So far, I haven't seen any news stories on it. Settlement is here (PDF file), the $30 million in attorney fees is approved, apparently around 500 companies choosing to opt-out. I'll postscript more tomorrow or do a fresh post when stories appear. Google statement:

We're pleased Judge Griffin has affirmed the settlement as appropriate and fair to advertisers. We look forward to continuing to manage invalid clicks effectively and provide our advertisers with an outstanding return on their investment. --Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel, Google

Postscript: Short AP story here, MarketWatch here, Official Google Blog post here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:43 PM | Permalink

July 25, 2006

The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices

Last Friday, an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud was published as part of the ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive, detailed public look into how Google deals with click fraud that's ever come out. It finds that Google's efforts to combat the issue have been reasonable, though there are some eyebrow raising bits on how the author only finds the situation was in control by the end of 2005 and how it's impossible to fully know whether some clicks are invalid -- and thus, potentially -- impossible to prevent some types of fraud through purely automated means.

The report is long, a 47 page PDF file. Anyone interested in click fraud issues should give it a thorough read. But given how everyone's always busy, I thought I'd highlight below a number of sections that stood out in my review of the document.

The report is by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at New York University. To prepare it, he says in the Executive Summary at the beginning (page 1):

I have been asked to evaluate Google?s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. As a part of this evaluation, I have visited Google?s campus three times, examined various internal documents, interviewed several Google?s employees, have seen different demos of their invalid click inspection system, and examined internal reports and charts showing various aspects of performance of Google?s invalid click detection system. Based on all these studied materials and the information narrated to me by Google?s employees, I conclude that Google?s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable. In the rest of this report, I elaborate on this point.

Immediately, the first thing that comes to mind is that he makes no mention of talking with individual advertisers, which could lead you to think that if he's only talking with Google, of course he's likely to come away with the idea that Google is doing everything just fine.

When you read the report, it's clear this isn't the case. Google does come under criticism. It's also important to realize Tuzhilin was not employed by Google to create this report. He's an independent expert appointed to my knowledge by the court. Exactly how he was selected is unclear, and I do think it would be a better report if advertiser data had been involved. But there's still plenty of good stuff here to digest.

Page 2 covers his background and materials reviewed from Google to prepare the report.

Page 3 and some of page 4 covers those he talked with at Google. Interesting details are that Google's click quality team consists of about 36 people, one-third engineers looking to design detection systems and the remaining two-thirds dedicated to doing manual investigations of suspected fraud.

Pages 4 through 6 cover the history of the internet, search engines and Google, most of which isn't that necessary for most experienced search marketers. Page 7 talks about three main ways of purchasing advertising:

• CPM - cost per impression
• CPC - cost per click
• CPA - cost per action

Again, basic stuff. But it's worth touching on because of some of the current debate that Google and other search engines will be forced to go to CPA pricing to fully eliminate fraud.

On page 8, Tuzhilin lends some support of this, or at least the problems that others have raised with CPC:

Although currently popular, the CPC/PPC model has two fundamental problems:

• Although correlated, good click-through rates (CTRs) are still not indicative of good conversion rates, since it is still not clear if a visitor would buy an advertised product once he or she clicked on the ad. In this respect, the CPA-based models provide better solutions for the advertisers (but not necessarily for the search engines), since they are more indicative that their ads are ?working.?  
• It does not offer any ?built-in? fundamental protection mechanisms against the click fraud since it is very hard to specify which clicks are valid vs. invalid in general, as will be explained in Section 8 (it can be done relatively easily in some special cases, but not in general). For this reason, major search engines launched extensive invalid click detection programs and still face problems combating click fraud.

In response to these two problems and for various other business reasons, Google is currently testing a CPA payment model, according to some reports in the media. Some analysts believe that the conversion-based CPA model is more robust for the advertisers and also less prone to click fraud. Therefore, they believe that the future of the online advertising payments lies with the CPA model. Although this is only a belief that is not supported by strong evidence yet, Google is getting ready for the next stage of the online advertising ?marathon.?

What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? over at Publishing 2.0 from Scott Karp is a good roundup and debate on some of the issues of CPA perhaps as the solution to CPC issues.

I've posted lots of comments in Karp's post, but my personal view is this. Currently, Google is offering all three major payment systems: CPC, CPM and CPA. It is offering all three not just because of fraud issues but because advertisers have different goals with advertising, where different payment models may be required.

Building brand? You want impressions perhaps more than clickthrough, and suddenly CPM makes sense. Really savvy with conversion tracking? CPA might make more sense for you, as a way for you to feel less likely to be exposed to fraud and more likely to really be paying only for key traffic. Fairly rudimentary with conversion tracking? Doing low-cost CPC ads might make a lot of sense, for your situation. And beyond the three big ones, I'm sure we'll see other options emerge. The unifying goal around all of them, from Google's perspective, will be figuring out a way to help advertisers track that the ads are working according to some type of metrics that the advertisers want.

Skipping down past background on how AdWords works and the AdSense program (AdSense For Domains doesn't get mentioned, though it's a major program), page 13 starts in on what Google can tell about clicking activities.

Google is apparently making use of conversion data that advertisers provide to determine if fraudulent clicks are happening. My understanding was that conversion data was supposed to be ringfenced and not used by Google for anything, not even in the aggregate. But perhaps the policy has changed or perhaps I misunderstood this. I'll check on that (and also note that confusingly, the report says on page 34 that "None of the filters uses the conversion information that Google collects"). Certainly Google made no such restrictions when it launched Google Checkout. But even with conversion data, the report notes using this info isn't perfect.

Google collects various types of information about querying and clicking activities, including certain types of ?post-clicking? data about conversion actions on the advertiser?s website where the visitor is taken following the click. All this data accumulated by Google is extracted from various sources and contains comprehensive information about visitor?s activities on the Google Network.

As stated before, the conversion data ? the ?post-clicking? data about conversion actions on the advertiser?s website ? constitutes an important piece of this collected data. In particular, if the advertiser formally agrees to provide this information, Google collects data on whether or not the user visited certain designated pages on the advertised website that the advertiser marked as ?conversion? pages, such as the checkout page and certain form filling pages. This conversion data is limited to what the advertiser decided to provide to Google and is not as rich as the clickstream data collected by advertisers themselves on their websites. Also, many advertisers decide to opt out from providing this conversion data. In this case, Google does not have any conversion information and therefore does not know what happened after a visitor clicked on the ad. Nevertheless, this post-clicking conversion data is important for Google even in its limited form because it conveys some intentions of the visitors on the advertised website and provides good insights into whether or not the visitor is seriously considering purchasing the advertised product or service....

This ?raw? clicking data described above is subsequently cleaned, preprocessed and stored in various internal logs by Google for different types of subsequent analysis conducted on this data.

One inherent weakness of Google?s (or any other search engine) data collection effort that is important for detecting invalid clicks, is inability to get full access to all the clicking activities of the visitors of the advertised website. In other words, the conversion data that Google collects provides only a partial picture of all the post-clicking activities of the visitor on the advertised website. This data is important for detecting invalid clicks since better invalid click detection methods can be developed using this data. Unfortunately, Google (and other search engines) does not have full access to this data, unless the advertised website decides to provide its clickstream data to Google, which many websites are reluctant to do. However, this is not Google?s fault ? this is an inherent limitation of the types of data available to Google.

While it might not be perfect, the report also notes at the end of this section that no one has the perfect collection of information:

However, this lack of full conversion data available to Google is compensated by various types of querying and clicking data that Google can collect, whereas advertisers and third-party vendors cannot. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between the types of data relevant for detecting invalid clicks that is available to Google, advertisers and the thirdparty vendors. None of these three groups have the most comprehensive set of data pertinent to detecting invalid clicks, and each of them needs to settle for the invalid click detection methods possible only with the data that they have.

On page 14, the report addresses the frustration advertisers feel over the relatively non-granular nature of Google's reporting versus Google's need to keep some things carefully protected:

The smallest unit of analysis is one day. For example, the number of invalid clicks on an ad detected by Google (or any other related statistic) can only be reported on a daily basis (although there are certain alternative methods of obtaining aggregation granularity that is smaller than a day). In other words, advertisers cannot know if a particular click on a particular ad was marked as valid or invalid by Google, and Google refuses to provide this information to advertisers.

This is a source of contention and dispute between Google and the advertisers, and one can understand both parties in this dispute. On one hand, the advertiser has the right to know why a particular click was marked as valid by Google (when the advertiser thinks that it is invalid) because the advertiser pays for this click. On the other hand, if Google discloses this information, it opens itself to click fraud on a massive scale because, by doing so, it provides certain hints about how its invalid click detection methods work. This means that unethical users will immediately take advantage of this information to conduct more sophisticated fraudulent activities undetectable by Google?s methods.

This conflicting dilemma between advertisers? right to know and Google?s inability to provide the appropriate information to advertisers because of the security concerns is part of the Fundamental Problem of the PPC advertising model to be discussed in the next section. More recently, Google tried to bridge this gap between Google and the advertisers.

Page 15 spends time looking at various definitions of click fraud, bringing us to page 16 which raises the bigger issue that it is impossible to know the intent of ALL clicks, which is crucial to understand what chunk of them might be fraudulent:

Unfortunately, in several cases it is hard or even impossible to determine the true intent of a click using any technological means. For example, a person might have clicked on an ad, looked at it, went somewhere else but then decided to have another look at the ad shortly thereafter to make sure that he/she got all the necessary information from the ad. Is this second click invalid? To make things even more complicated, the second click may not be strictly necessary since the person remembers the content of the ad reasonably well (hence there is no real need for the second click). However, the person may not really like or care about the advertiser and decides to make this second click anyway (to make sure that he/she did not miss anything in the ad and his/her information is indeed correct) without any concerns that the advertiser may end up paying for this second click (since the person really does not care about the advertiser and his/her own interests of not missing anything in the ad overweigh the concerns of hurting the advertiser). Therefore, in some cases the true intent of a click can be identified only after examining deep psychological processes, subtle nuances of human behavior and other considerations in the mind of the clicking person.

Soon after this, on page 17, comes the first real bombshell to me. As said above, you can't detect the intent of all clicks. Given this, there's no reasonable way to be certain that technological fixes for click fraud detection are working:

In summary, between the obviously clear cases of valid and invalid clicks, lies the whole spectrum of highly complicated cases when the clicking intent is far from clear and depends on a whole range of complicated factors, including the parameter values of the click. Therefore, this intent (and thus the validity of a click based on the above definitions) cannot be operationalized and detected by technological means with any reasonable measure of certainty.

What? Didn't the report find Google was acting reasonably? Yes, and I think this is is because as the report goes on, it's because Google's not relying solely on automated means to stop click fraud, which might allow some clicks to get through, if that were only the case.

Page 18 picks of the issue even more strongly, and I've bolded this section because it deserves special attention. Note that the italics were originally included:

The last statement has one important implication: given a particular click in a log file, it is impossible to say with certainty if this click is valid or not in all the cases. This means that

• It is impossible to measure the true rates of invalid clicking activities, and all the reports published in the business press are only guesstimates at best.  
• The invalid click detection methods need to be developed without a proper operationalizable conceptual definition of invalid clicks.

The important word above is all the cases since in some cases it can be stated with certainty if a particular click is valid or not. For example, it is easy to detect a doubleclick using relatively simple technological means, assuming that the doubleclick is invalid.

Again, it seems to be a case that automation can catch some, perhaps lots of click fraud, but it can't catch all of it because the intent problem. Also crucial in the above is the stressing that rates we've been given from various sources are simply guesses, since the intent of clicks aren't know to some of these other sources.

Indeed, in the case of the recent Outsell report, you don't even have to worry about figuring out the intent of particular clicks. Click fraud stats from that report come from half the panel entirely guessing about what click fraud rates they might have -- guessing, because that half does not auditing of clicks at all.

Page 19 deals with ways of identifying invalid clicks, at least according to operational approaches -- IE, automated criteria. Do the clicks show some type of:

1. Anomaly from past clicking patterns for a site or ad?
2. Violate certain predefined rules?
3. Fall into certain classes of behavior that make them deemed invalid?

Page 20 explains that Google primarily depends on the first two approaches -- looking for anomalies and using rules -- but then gets into what it stresses as the "Fundamental Problem" of fraudulent clicks:

We conclude that there is a fundamental problem associated with the definition of invalid clicks for the Pay-per-Click model. This problem can be summarized as follows:

• There is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized in the sense defined above.  
• An operational definition cannot be fully disclosed to the general public because of the concerns that unethical users will take advantage of it, which may lead to a massive click fraud. However, if it is not disclosed, advertisers cannot verify or even dispute why they have been charged for certain clicks.

This problem lies at the heart of the click fraud debate and constitutes the main problem of the CPC model: it is inherently vulnerable to click fraud.

Page 21 poses solutions to the problem:

• The ?trust us? approach of the search engines. The search engines can assure advertisers that they are doing everything possible to protect them against the click fraud. This is not easy because of the inherent conflict of interest between the two parties: the money from invalid clicks directly contribute to the bottom lines of the search engines. Nevertheless, it may be possible for the search engines to solve this trust problem by developing lasting relationships with the advertisers. However, the discussion of how this can be done lies outside of the scope of this report.  
• Third-party auditors. Independent third-party vendors, who have no financial conflicts of interest, can work with advertisers and audit their clickstream files to detect invalid clicks.

These two approaches would still constitute only a partial solution to the Fundamental Problem because there is no conceptual definition of invalid clicks that can be operationalized.

Page 21 continues on looking at how Google does click fraud detection, covering a range of general preventative measure and more active things done when clicks actually happen.

On page 23, a look at filtering systems begins, ending with this summary that's positive for Google, at the moment. It also stresses that filtering will always come under new challenges:

The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic ?tuning? and ?maintenance? rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network. It also demonstrates that various recent efforts of the Click Quality team to improve performance of their filters produce only incremental improvements. Thus, the Click Quality team currently reached a stability point since additional efforts to enhance filters produce only marginal improvements.

Having said this, the Click Quality team also realizes that this is only a local stability point in the sense that major future modifications in clicking patterns of online users and new types of fraudulent attacks against Google can lead to radically new types of invalid clicks that the current set of filters can miss. Therefore, the Click Quality team is working on the next generation of more powerful filters that will monitor a broader set of signals and more complex monitoring conditions. These new filters will require a more powerful computing infrastructure than is currently available, and the Click Quality team also participates in developing this infrastructure. Their overall goal is to make click spam hard and unrewarding for the unethical users thus making it uneconomical for them and turning many of them away from Google and the Google Network.

At page 28, the expert notes that Google's filters are relatively simple in nature, yet they work:

The structure of most of Google?s filters, with a few exceptions, is surprisingly simple. I was initially puzzled and thought that Google did not do a reasonable job in developing better and more sophisticated filters. I was initially certain that these simple filters should miss many types of more complicated attacks. However, the evidence reported in the previous two sections indicates that these simple filters perform reasonably well.

Why? A variety of reasons, such unsophisticated attacks:

Although some of the coordinated attacks can be quite sophisticated, the majority of the invalid clicks usually come from relatively simple sources and less experienced perpetrators....Still, there are certain types of attacks that Google filters will miss; but these attacks should be quite sophisticated and would require significant ingenuity to launch. Therefore, there cannot be too many of these, unless perpetrators become much more imaginative....

The Long Tail / Search Tail even gets a mention, with the idea being that -- if I understand correctly -- most activity focuses around the same type of things that the filters work well to detect. IE, the filters do well at cutting off the head of click fraud -- and if tail activity gets through, it's relatively little in comparison:

Despite its current reasonable performance, this situation may change significantly in the future if new attacks will shift towards the Long Tail of the Zipf distribution by becoming more sophisticated and diverse.

At the bottom of page 29, the report starts examining whether Google is letting stuff slide to earn more money:

Since Google does not charge advertisers for invalid clicks, this means that it loses money by filtering out these clicks. Thus, there is a financial incentive for Google not to forgo some of these revenues and simply be ?easy? Long Tail Left Part Frequency Rank 30 on filtering out invalid clicks. Therefore, it is important to know if any business considerations entered into the filter specification process or is it entirely determined by Google?s engineers in an objective manner with a single purpose to protect the advertiser base. This is one of the important issues that I investigated as a part of my studies of how Google manages detection of invalid clicks....

The conclusion is that Google isn't trying to favor itself:

I have spent a significant amount of time trying to understand who sets these threshold parameters, how, and what are the procedures and processes for setting them. In particular, I tried to understand if it is an entirely engineering decision that tries to protect the advertisers from invalid clicks or any of the business groups at Google are involved in this decision process with the purpose of influencing it towards generating extra revenues for Google.

As a result of these investigations, I realized that it constitutes exclusively an engineering decision with no inputs from the finance department or the business units, except the following two cases:

• The first one was a special case when one particular IP address was disabled because of inappropriate clicking activities, and a business unit requested the Click Quality team to conduct an additional investigation since it was an important customer associated with that IP address, and restore it if the investigation results were negative. When I was explained what had happened, I felt that Google?s actions were reasonable in this particular situation.  
• The change in the doubleclick policy that was considered in Winter 2005 and implemented in March 2005. It turned out that the change in the doubleclick policy (i.e., not to charge advertisers for the immediate second click in a doubleclick) had non-trivial financial implications for Google. Being a publicly traded company at that time, this change would have had a noticeable effect on Google?s total revenues with corresponding implications for the financial performance of the company. Therefore, this policy change had legitimate concerns for Google?s management, and these financial implications have been discussed in the company. Still, despite its noticeable negative effects on its financial performance, Google decided to abandon the old doubleclick policy and not to charge advertisers for the second click, which was an appropriate action to take.

In conclusion, with the exception of the doubleclick, I found Google?s processes for specifying filters and setting parameters in these filters driven exclusively by the consideration to protect the advertiser base, and, therefore, being reasonable.

Doubleclick constitutes a special case. For me, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid, as I argued in Section 8, and the advertisers should not be charged for it. It is not clear to me why it took Google so long to revise the policy of charging for doubleclicks. Nevertheless, this policy was revised in March 2005 despite the fact that the company lost ?noticeable? revenues by taking this action.

I find the conclusion that Google wasn't trying to benefit itself doesn't mesh well with the expert's own concern/confusion/uncertainty about why Google took so long to change its policy on doubleclicks. Moreover, that entire policy isn't well explained. Way back up on page 20, there's this very brief mention:

It turns out that Google had a history associated with the definition of a doubleclick: at some point doubleclick was considered to be a valid click and advertisers were charged for it, while subsequently Google reconsidered and treated doubleclick as invalid.

And that's it until the section later in the report, where Google's effectively accused of footdragging on changing its policy, where business discussions about the change were made, but Google then seems to be given the all clear because eventually it did the right thing.

The entire matter is something that feels like it should have been explored more, but page 31 sheds light as to why this might have been difficult. Google's apparently had a complete staff change in relation to click fraud detection since it began charging by the click:

In this subsection, I will describe the history of development of Google filters. First of all, I would like to point out that most of the descriptions in this subsection are not based on documents provided to me by Google but rather on the verbal descriptions by the members of the Click Quality team based on their recollections of the past events and on the ?folklore? evidence since none of the team members I interviewed were even around or involved in the click fraud effort when the AdWords program was introduced in February 2002.

The section continues with detection divided into these groupings -- and I've bolded a key part:

• The Early Days (February 2002 ? Summer 2003). These were the early days of the PPC model and of the click fraud characterized by extensive learning about the problem and determining ways to deal with it.  
• The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 ? Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003, formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003, launch of new filters and the intent to take the invalid click detection efforts to the ?next level.? It ended with the development of the whole infrastructure for combating invalid clicks and the consolidation of Google?s invalid click detection efforts. This stage was characterized by significant progress in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes for accomplishing this task. Although the Click Quality team?s solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was ?under control? by the end of 2005.  
• The Consolidation Stage (Fall 2005 ? present). By this time, Google had enough filters and perfected them to the level when they would detect most of the invalid clicking activities in the Left Part of the Zipf distribution (see Figure 1) and some of the attacks in the Long Tail. They would still miss more sophisticated attacks 32 in the Long Tail, and the Click Quality team continued working on the neverending process of improving their filters to detect and prevent new attacks. The Click Quality team has also been working on enhancing their infrastructure and improving their processes....

What? Click fraud wasn't under control until the end of 2005, yet Google is said to have acted reasonably by the report? How does this make sense? The best explanation seems to be that as the report goes on, the author feels click fraud was an evolving problem, and that Google was reasonably reacting to prevent it even though it wasn't "under control" until the end of last year. In contrast, had Google been doing nothing, then it might have been deemed not to have been taking reasonable steps to gain control.

Page 32 looks at the early days and notes that for a year and a half, no new filters were added other than the three original ones that CPC-based AdWords started with. Why? Maybe click fraud was less understood at that time since it was so new (though Search Engine Watch was citing articles on the problem like this one from Wired as far back as 2001). That's one suggestion, along with Google having fewer resources, lacking the right infrastructure or click fraud being on a smaller scale. But these are all guesses, since as the author notes (again, I've bolded a key part):

Not a single person on the Click Quality team was either around or involved in the click fraud detection back in 2002. The only person from this era who is still at Google is on an extended leave and was not available for comments during my visits to Google.

It is hard to judge reasonableness of Google?s invalid click detection efforts between 2002 and summer 2003 because there is simply not enough information available for this time period for me to form an informed judgment about this matter. One exception is the doubleclick policy that I have described before. As I have already stated, the second click in the doubleclick is invalid in my opinion, and Google should have identified it as such well before March 2005 (however, the detection and filtering out the third, fourth and other subsequent clicks was there since the introduction of the PPC model, and advertisers were not charged for these extra clicks).

Again, I get confused by the report declaring that Google operated reasonably when it also states that it can't judge if it indeed acted reasonably for part of the claim period.

The middle period finds progress with far more confidence, as covered on page 33:

The Formation Stage (Summer 2003 ? Fall 2005). This stage started with the introduction of the AdSense program in March 2003 and the formation of the Google Click Quality team in the Spring/Summer 2003 (the first person was hired in April 2003 with the mandate to form the Click Quality team; several people joined the team during the summer of 2003, and the initial ?core? team consisting of Operations and Engineering groups was consolidated by Fall 2003).

During this time period, two new filters were introduced in Summer 2003 and one more in January 2004. These three new filters remedied several problems that existed since the launch of the first three filters and significantly advanced Google?s invalid click detection efforts. Besides the development of new and better filters, there was a separate effort launched to develop the whole infrastructure for doing the offline analysis of invalid clicks and managing customer inquiries about invalid clicks and billing charges.

Despite all these efforts, the new filters and the offline analysis methods still failed to detect some of the more sophisticated attacks (presumably from the Long Tail of the Figure 1) launched against the Google Network in 2004 and the first half of 2005. In response to these activities and as a part of the overall invalid click detection effort, Google engineers introduced some additional filters around Winter and Spring 2005, including the filter identifying the second immediate click in a doubleclick as invalid.

As a result of all of these efforts by the Click Quality team, a significant progress has been made in combating invalid clicking activities and developing mature systems and processes to accomplish this task. Although the Click Quality team?s solutions were still not perfect, based on the information provided to me by Google, I reached the conclusion that the invalid clicking problem at Google was ?under control? by the end of 2005.

And overall filtering is given this conclusion at the top of page 35:

Google put much effort in developing infrastructure, methods and processes for detecting invalid clicks since the Click Quality team was established in 2003. These efforts were not perfect since Google missed certain amounts of invalid clicks over these years and it adhered to the doubleclicking policy for too long in my opinion. However, click fraud is a very difficult problem to solve, Google put a significant effort to solve it, and I find their efforts to filter out invalid clicks as being reasonable, especially after the doubleclick policy was reversed in March 2005.

Page 35 then begins looking at "offline" or non-automated ways to find click fraud that's gotten past filters. By page 37, it gets into systems applied to review what happens on some AdSense sites:

Auto-Termination System is an automated offline system for detecting the AdSense publishers who are engaged in inappropriate behavior violating the Terms and Conditions of the AdSense program. It examines online behavior of various publishers and either immediately terminates or warns the publishers who are engaged in the activities that the system finds to be inappropriate.

Interestingly, the system is still relatively new, only about a year old, as explained on page 38:

The first prototype of the auto-termination system was built in the early 2005 and the system was launched in the summer 2005. Recently, Google has developed major enhancements to the current version of the auto-termination system deploying an alternative set of technologies.

Page 38 also starts a look at the manual review that the click fraud team does, with this positive summary coming on page 40:

I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google?s investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.

However, using humans also poses a bottleneck, as covered on page 41:

My only concern with these manual inspections is about scalability of the inspection process. Since the number of inquiries grows rapidly, so does the number of inspections required to investigate these inquiries. As stated before, Google tries to automate this process by letting software systems do a sizable number of inspections. Still, the number of manual inspections keeps growing significantly over time, based on the numbers that I have seen. This means that Google has a challenging task of expanding and properly training its team of inspectors to assure rapid high-quality inspections of inquiries in the future.

Page 41 also revisits the tug-of-war between advertisers wanting more transparency and Google trying to protect against click fraud by giving too much information away:

One of the complaints about Google?s investigation system that I keep hearing is that Google is quite secretive and does not provide meaningful explanations of the inspection results neither to the advertisers nor to the publishers. After examining how their inspection systems work, I can understand this secrecy. If Google provides such explanations, then the unethical users can gain additional insights into how Google invalid click detection methods work and would be able to ?game? their detection methods much better, thus creating a possibility of massive click fraud. To avoid these problems, Google prefers to be secretive rather than to risk compromising their detection systems and the advertiser base.

And this interesting tidbit on how when someone gets kicked out of AdSense, advertisers apparently get refunds:

Finally, I would like to point out that when Google terminates an AdSense publisher, all the clicks generated at that publisher?s site over a certain time period (valid and invalid) are credited to the advertisers whose ads were clicked on that site....

How well are things going? That begins to be addressed at the bottom of page 41, and here's a key statement from page 42:

The number of inquiries about invalid clicks for the Click Quality team increased drastically since late 2004. However, the number of refunds for invalid clicks provided by Google did not change significantly over the same time period. Therefore, the number of refunds per inquiry decreased drastically since late 2004. Since each inquiry about invalid clicks leads to an investigation, this means that significantly fewer investigations result in refunds. This statistic can be interpreted in several ways. First, it can be an indication that Google?s invalid click detection methods have significantly improved over this time period and that reactive investigations do not find any problems when searching for invalid clicks. Second, this statistic can mean that Google tightened its refund policies and is less generous with its refunds than it used to be. Third, this statistic can mean that more advertisers are looking more carefully into their logs and are more suspicious about invalid clicks since this problem received wide attention in the media and the public discourse in general. Therefore, they may request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities even if nothing really happened. I examined investigative activities of the Google Click Quality team and can attest that it consists of a group of highly professional employees who do their investigations carefully and professionally. Therefore, I do not believe in the second reason stated above. The third reason is quite possible since advertisers are indeed concerned about invalid clicks and request Google to investigate suspicious clicking activities more frequently than before. However, the number of inquiries increased so significantly that I would expect that the number of refunds would also increase somewhat. Since this did not happen, I attribute this effect to the fact that Google?s invalid click detection methods work reasonably well by now.

I've bolded the most important parts to me. The expert is saying that more advertisers are raising inquiries, probably because of increased concerns (which we know is the case from various surveys over the past two years) but that Google isn't refunding more. Nor is that Google just protecting itself, the expert says. To him, it's a case that the concerns aren't matching the reality. Click fraud -- bad clicks getting past Google -- do not appear to be on the rise.

Nor is click fraud getting past filters a major problem compared to the amount Google is proactively catching, the expert says:

The total amount of reactive refunds that Google provides to advertisers as a result of their inquiries is miniscule in comparison to the potential revenues that Google foregoes due to the removal of invalid clicks (and not charging advertisers for them).

Another interesting part is how Google is comparing traffic across its network to that from within Google.com, which is said to be a "gold standard" of a pure site. The network is said to compare well:

Another indirect piece of evidence provided to me by Google is that Conversions-Per- Dollar (CPD) rates on various partner sites of Google Network are not significantly lower than on their ?flagship? Google.com site. CPD is the statistic determining the number of conversions that occurred divided by the dollar amount spent on advertising. This statistic shows how effective advertising campaigns are for the advertisers. Since Google spent much effort over the past 4.5 years to make sure that Google?s AdWords program works reasonably well, it now serves as the ?golden standard? against which other programs are compared at Google. Since CPD numbers for other parts of the Google Network approach that of at Google.com, this is an indication that other advertising programs work as well as AdWords works on Google.com. Since other parts of the Google Network are affected by invalid clicking activities significantly more than Google.com, this is an indication to the Click Quality team that their efforts to combat fraud on other parts of the Google Network are as effective as on Google.com.

At the bottom of page 43 is an overall conclusion about that Google's doing a reasonable job with detection, as best as this scientist can tell. It also takes some slams at general reports of click fraud being widespread in the press as not being proven true or false yet. I've bolded the key paragraph for all this below:

As a scientist, I am accustomed to seeing more direct, objective and conclusive evidence that certain methods and approaches ?work.? Having said this, I fully understand the difficulties of obtaining such measures for invalid clicks by Google, as previously discussed in this report. Moreover, one can challenge most of the reports pertaining to invalid clicking rates published in the business press by questioning their methodologies and assumptions used for calculating these rates. Most of these reports would not stand hard scientific scrutiny.

Still, as a scientist, it is hard for me to arrive at any definitive conclusions beyond any reasonable doubt based on Points (1) ? (6) above that Google?s invalid click detection methods ?work well? and remove ?most? of the invalid clicks ? the provided evidence is simply not hard enough for me, and I am used to dealing with much more conclusive evidence in my scientific work.

Having said this, the indirect evidence (1) ? (6) specified above, nevertheless, provides a sufficient degree of comfort for me to conclude that these filters work reasonably well. Finally, this statement should not be interpreted as if I find Google?s effort to detect invalid clicks (a) unreasonable, or (b) not working reasonably well. It only states that Google did not provide a compelling amount of conclusive evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of their approach that would satisfy me as a scientist.

Finally, the measures (1) ? (6) above are only statistical measures providing some evidence that Google?s filters work reasonably well. This does not mean, however, that any particular advertiser cannot be hurt badly by fraudulent attacks, given the evidence that Google filters ?work.? Since Google has a very large number of advertisers, one particular bad incident will be lost in the overall statistics. Good performance measures indicative that filters work well only mean that there will be ?relatively few? such bad cases. Therefore, any reports published in the business press about particular advertisers being hurt by particular fraudulent attacks do not mean that the phenomenon is widespread. One simply should not generalize such incidents to other cases and draw premature conclusions ? we simply do not have evidence for or against this.

Page 44 has a section that restates conclusions in terms of economic aspects -- IE, any economic motivation for Google to hide or ignore click fraud:

First of all, most of the revenue that Google foregoes due to discarding invalid clicks comes from the filters since they identify most of the invalid clicks. The second source of the forgone revenues comes from the terminated AdSense publishers (as stated before, all the clicks made on the terminated publisher?s website generated over a certain time period are credited back to the advertisers regardless of whether they are valid or invalid). However, this second type of revenue is relatively small in comparison to the foregone revenues due to filters. The third source of the foregone revenues comes from the AdWords credits. However, these AdWord credits are miniscule in comparison to the other sources of foregone revenues. In summary, the most significant source of foregone revenues, by far, are Google filters. Hence their performance is the most crucial factor for the whole invalid click detection program (note that this observation does not mean that Google focuses mainly on this part of the invalid click detection program since other parts are also important)....

It makes no business sense for Google to go after these extra revenues and that the best long-term business policy for Google is to protect advertisers against invalid clicks. Policy reversal on the doubleclick is a good example of this. By not charging advertisers for the doubleclick since March 2005, Google lost a ?noticeable? amount of revenues. However, the revenues lost as a result of this action are insignificant in comparison to the revenues that Google risks to lose if it loses trust of the advertisers. Therefore, reversing the doubleclick policy makes sense not only from the legal, ethical and public relations point of view, but it is also a sound economic decision.

Finally, the beginning of page 46 gives this overall conclusion:

Google has built the following four ?lines of defense? against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.

Since its establishment in the Spring and Summer of 2003 the Click Quality team has been developing an infrastructure for detecting and removing invalid clicks and implementing various methods in the four detection stages described above. Currently, they reached a consolidation phase in their efforts, when their methods work reasonably well, the invalid click detection problem is ?under control,? and the Click Quality team is fine-tuning these methods. There is no hard data that can actually prove this statement. However, indirect evidence provided in this report supports this conclusion with a moderate degree of certainty. The Click Quality team also realizes that battling click fraud is an arms race, and it wants to stay ?ahead of the curve? and get ready for more advanced forms of click fraud by developing the next generation of online filters.

In summary, I have been asked to evaluate Google?s invalid click detection efforts and to conclude whether these efforts are reasonable or not. Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google?s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:58 PM | Permalink

July 24, 2006

Judge Hears Objections To Google's Click Fraud Settlement

The Associated Press reports that now that the independent report is out, a judge will consider the fifty-plus objections to the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement. The judge will hear out advertisers today and tomorrow before finalizing that settlement.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

July 21, 2006

Independent Report: Google Click Fraud Detection Practices Are "Reasonable"

The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud. The report was part of an agreement of the Lane's Gifts v. Google settlement and was performed by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. Obviously Google is pretty happy about this report and I didn't have time to go through the full 47 page report, but if you have time, I bet you as Search Engine Marketer can learn a ton about the AdWords system. Possibly, Danny will dig into this deeper next week.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:34 PM | Permalink

July 20, 2006

Google Scholar Trademark Case Settled Out Of Court

News.com reports that Google and American Chemical Society trademark case has been settled out of court. The case was brought up against Google for using the name "Scholar," when American Chemical Society has a similar product named "ACS’s SciFinder Scholar." The case was dropped and each side will pay their own legal fees. No other details were provided and both sides have confidentiality clauses.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

July 14, 2006

KinderStart Becomes KinderStopped In Ranking Lawsuit Against Google

Kinderstart has lost its case over lost rankings on Google, though the company will be allowed to amend defamation claims relating to its PageRank zero score. If it does by September 29, I suspect that reattempt will go down in flames as well. But the entire case exposes vulnerabilities Google has created for itself with mixed messages over how keyword ranking and Pagerank work.

Google Sued Over Site Penalty By KinderStart.com covers the case being filed back in March and provides a link to the actual suit. It was heard in court earlier this month, and you can review the transcript and analysis of that hearing.

Judge dismisses suit over Google ranking from News.com covers yesterday's ruling, where the claims against Google were dismissed. The judge gave leave for KinderStart to revise on some claims, apparently in particular on the idea that KinderStart was defamed by being dropped to a PageRank of zero as reported by the Google Toolbar.

KinderStart now apparently hopes it can enlist other PR0 sites to file a class action lawsuit against Google (info is supposed to be here, but site is currently down). The KinderStart attorney said:

"The decision suggests that, if properly alleged, Google may be defaming a whole class of Web sites sacked with a '0' PageRank," he wrote in a statement. "If plaintiffs show Google manually tampered with even a single Web site's PageRank, Google's entire claim of 'objectivity' of search results and rankings could collapse."

Sure. Fire away with that class action suit. Two class action suits over click fraud, where defendants have real monetary claims arising out of actual contacts with the major search engines, have netted around $60 million for advertisers for over four years worth of advertising activity. Assuming a somewhat nebulous defamation claim won, I can't imagine the settlement would be for much.

Keep in mind that by default, the PageRank meter is still not turned on, to my knowledge. Toolbar users have to specifically enable it. I've never seen any stats or breakdowns on who uses the PR meter, but that seems to be mainly site owners concerned about SEO, rather than typical web surfers.

Still, the case highlights a Google vulnerability. Google has argued in this case that ranking is subjective, an opinion that it offers about web sites. But go to its technology page, and you get this:

PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google's technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

So what is it, objective or subjective, or argue what's most convenient, as John Battelle raised earlier. The answer to me gets confused by Google's outdated information online plus confusion between PageRank and ranking.

Ranking, or keyword ranking, is where a site appears in response to a keyword search. It's supposed to be an objective decision made by using a computer algorithm to sort through factors, though not said is how some of those factors might have subjective decisions made over them.

PageRank is a numeric score that counts how important a page is based on analyzing the links pointing to it. It is one of many factors that Google uses to decide where a page should appear when you do a keyword search. In other words, PageRank is part of what determines keyword ranking, but it's not the only factor, nor is it the same as keyword ranking.

But doesn't Google say that pages with a higher PageRank appear at the top of the search results. Yes, and it says this incorrectly. That's right, Google's statement on this is flat out wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong. WRONG.

Am I clear enough? But how can I say Google's official information is wrong? First, I can demonstrate it, as I've done before. Try this tool. Here's a search for cars. Notice how the movie Cars is ranked second. The home page for the site listed is a PR5, putting it above several pages ranking below it with a higher PR score. Got Firefox? Try Aaron Wall's new tool that makes seeing this type of thing even easier. End Of Demonstration.

Google has tons of things they've said publicly that get outdated like this or aren't explained properly by those charged to write up copy. In particular, Google has allowed PageRank to be a synonymous term to mean how a site ranks. You can see how this makes life confusing by the first paragraph in the News.com story about the case:

KinderStart, a directory and search engine for information related to children, sued Google in March after it fell to a "zero" ranking in the Google index.

Actually, I believe that two different things happened. KinderStart:

• No longer had good keyword rankings, not in the first page of results, but perhaps still buried further down unless it was banned completely. And if it was banned completely, that's not a "zero" rank but instead just called a ban.  
• Probably had a penalty put on it manually that produced a zero score in the PageRank meter.

The judge does not seem to be saying Google defamed the site through a lower keyword ranking. But he does seem to suggest that the PageRank score in the Google Toolbar meter might have that issue. From Eric Goldberg's nice write-up on the case (and he has a copy of the ruling there, as well):

Google?s statement as to whether a particular website is ?worth your time? necessarily reflects its subjective judgment as to what factors make a website important. Viewed in this way, a PageRank reflects Google?s opinion. However, it is possible a PageRank reasonably could be interpreted as a factual statement insofar as it purports to tell a user ?how Google?s algorithms assess the importance of the page you?re viewing.? This interpretation would be bolstered by evidence supporting Google?s alleged representations that PageRank is ?objective,? and that a reasonable person thus might understand Google?s display of a ?0? PageRank for Kinderstart.com to be a statement that ?0? is the (unmodified) output of Google?s algorithm. If it could be shown, as Kinderstart alleges, that Google is changing that output by manual intervention, then such a statement might be provably false.

I'm actually surprised the judge doesn't seem to know that Google does indeed change that output by manual intervention. That's what the entire SearchKing case was about. First some background on that:

• Google Sued Over PageRank Decrease: From Feb. 2002, overview of the case that was filed against Google.  
• SearchKing Google Rank Restored and The SearchKing Google controversy revisited: From Nov. 2002, on SearchKing beginning to rank again for some terms but the PageRank score itself apparently not back to "normal."  
• Google Asks Court to Dismiss SearchKing Lawsuit and SearchKing update: preliminary injunction denied: From Jan. 2003, on preliminary injunction being denied.  
• Court dismisses Google search-fixing case: From June 2003, on a court ruling that PageRank is Google's opinion and that what's "normal" is whatever Google wants it to be.  
• Four Years Later, SearchKing Regains Google PR: In April 2006, SearchKing regained PageRank.

The case involved another US District Court judge ruling that yes, Google had manipulated the PageRank score showing for SearchKing and that it had a constitutionally protected right to do so, to offer its opinion this way.

Of course, the ruling confuses PageRank and keyword ranking as I've explained above often happens:

PageRanks are opinions -- opinions of the significance of particular Web sites as they correspond to a search query.

Still, since the case was indeed focused about the PageRank meter, I suspect we're safe in knowing this was about PageRank scores getting protected status. And what the KinderStart case now tells us is that Google (and other search engines) also have the right to do keyword rankings however they like.

We'll see if the PageRank scores get challenged again. Certainly Google could short-circuit this by dropping the scores and the meter altogether (please do it). As explained, few people to my knowledge use them, and plenty of site owners are tired of newbie search marketers obsessing over them. PageRank was mainly a marketing tactic for Google that's long since been blowing up in its face.

If the meter doesn't go away, certainly Google needs to take a harder look at what it says about both the Google Toolbar and keyword rankings if it doesn't want to be vulnerable in future court cases (plus just be consistent with the public).

For example, what's a site owner told about a PR0 score:

A page may be assigned a rank of zero if Google crawls very few sites that link to it. Additionally, pages recently added to the Google index may also show a PageRank score of zero because they haven't been crawled by Googlebot yet and haven't been ranked. A page's PageRank score may increase naturally with subsequent crawls, so this shouldn't be a cause for concern. To learn more about PageRank, please see http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

There's no mention of the fact that you might have a PR0 score because Google has manually intervened to reduce it. And as for what it tells the general public:

Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar's PageRank? display to tell you how Google's algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing.

Again, it's more than just the algorithms being involved. Human are making decisions that impact that score, as well.

In short, Google is continuing to make statements that PageRank is objective to the public, but in two court cases now, it has said the scores are subjective. One case as supported its right to make subjective cases. The other has supported a defendants right to challenge if those subjective opinions are fair or defamatory. We'll see what happens next.

Finally, the entire human intervention thing with PageRank scores brings back the issue of Google long saying there's no human intervention in keyword ranking, such as they used to say about censorship:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand.

And similar to what they still say here:

Sites' positions in our search results are determined automatically based on a number of factors, which are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html. We don't manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.

As I've written before, Google does indeed hand manipulate results, but not in the sense of trying to reorder them. Instead, it manually intervenes in terms of banning some sites or putting overall ranking penalties on them. There's even been updated attempts to help site owners know when they've been banned through the Google Sitemaps program.

Overall, Google's got plenty of mixed messages out there that don't help on the PR front and potentially leave it vulnerable on the legal front, as this case has shown.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:48 AM | Permalink

July 10, 2006

Judge Orders Google To Disclose Advertiser's Information

Out-Law reports that Google was ordered by Justice Rimer to hand over the information on an advertiser to Helen Grant for copyright infringement. Helen Grant "complained that a Google advert led to a service which she claimed violated her copyright in a forthcoming book." A search brought up a site named Realityunlocked.com, "which offered a free download of an earlier draft of the book, and that the site violated the Trust's copyright." Google asked Grant to take the issue to court, this way Google does not have to worry about the privacy issues with handing over the information.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:33 AM | Permalink

July 6, 2006

Kinderstart Transcript Available

Eric Goldman posted the Kinderstart transcript and other case documents on his site. Recently, Kinderstart's case was heard in court and the judge requested Kinderstart to provide some more information. The full, 45 page, transcript of the June 30th hearing can be downloaded here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

July 5, 2006

Google Warns U.S. Legislators On Anti-Trust Complaints Over Net Neutrality

The Washington Post reports that Google has warned the United States, that if telecoms abuse net neutrality principles it backs, through a new law that might go through, it could consider an anti-trust action. If you want all the details, check out the Washington Post.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:46 AM | Permalink

July 3, 2006

KinderStart.com Case May Proceed To Court?

News.com reports that the KinderStart.com case might proceed to court, based on this past Friday's hearing. Kinderstart.com initially sued Google for a site penalty that downgraded the site's rankings in the Google search results. Kinderstart.com claims Google violated antitrust laws, "What Google is trying to do is take out the competition," Kinderstart.com's lawyer said. The judge gave KinderStart.com's lawyers until September 29th to make revisions to the complaint. The judge said, "You can't just file a blanket lawsuit and say, 'We think we're going to find some stuff.'" Also see news brief at ComputerWorld.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:55 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2006

Google Book Search Wins Victory In German Challenge

I wrote earlier this month of a French lawsuit becoming the third one I knew about filed against Google over its book scanning project. Turns out, there was a fourth one -- based out of Germany. But now we're back to three, as Google has just announced that the German one has been withdrawn.

It looks to be Google's first legal victory in the battles over the project. From Google, via its Inside Google Book Search blog (and also on its main blog):

WBG, a German publisher, today decided to drop its petition for preliminary injunction against the Google Books Library Project. WBG (whose legal action was supported by the German Publishers Association as an industry model) made the decision after being told by the Copyright Chamber of the Regional Court of Hamburg that its petition was unlikely to succeed. It's our belief that the display of short snippets from in-copyright books does not infringe German copyright law. Today the Court indicated that it agreed, drawing a comparison with the snippets used in Google web search. And the Court also rejected the WBG's argument that the scanning of its books in the U.S. infringed German copyright law.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:29 PM | Permalink

KinderStart.com To Be Heard In Court Friday On Google Penalizing Site

Webuser reports that the KinderStart.com lawsuit against Google for penalizing their site will be heard in court this Friday. It is not clear if there will be a ruling on Friday, the article does state that the judge "will rule at 9am in California (5pm BST) on nine counts, including whether or not Google should warn sites about changes in their ranking as well as on financial damages KinderStart is seeking." Can you imagine the buzz and controversy in the SEO community if Google loses the case?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:32 PM | Permalink

Google Loses French Lawsuit Over Vuitton Trademark

I just got word that Google lost the French lawsuit we reported on Monday involving the Louis Vuitton trademark. I do not have any more details at the moment, only that they lost. I will try to update this entry when I have more information.

Postscript: I was just sent this information from Bloomberg news. "Google Inc. must pay LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA 300,000 euros ($375,800) for breaching copyright rules with its advertising service, a French Appellate court ruled."

Postscript 2: News stories are finally now appearing:

• Vuitton tops Google in Paris court, International Herald Tribune
• Louis Vuitton says court upholds Google ruling, Reuters
• The Paris Court of Appeals Confirms Sanctions against Google for Trademark Counterfeiting, Unfair Competition and Misleading Advertising, Louis Vuitton Press Release

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Marine Selling "Google Water" For Military Families Charity

Boing Boing links to a US Marine who just got back from Iraq. The marine posted on his blog that he began selling "Google Water" on auction to raise money for The Fisher House, an organization that helps military families in need. Google and eBay shut down his auction, "due to copyright violations," but he still has some left over Google Water. He is looking to sell them for a bottle for $500 and give that money to the Fisher House.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:11 AM | Permalink

June 26, 2006

Follow-Up: School Couldn't Reach Google Until Injunction Filed

Catawba County Schools in North Carolina obtained an injunction to remove private material from Google because it had no luck getting action from the search engine after trying other routes, the district tells me. The school district also stressed that it didn't claim that Google had somehow hacked into its servers. Here's what Catawba County School's chief technology officer Judith Ray emailed me about the situation:

We asserted that Google had somehow bypassed our login information, not that they had hacked their way into the system. Hacking, to me assumes malicious intent and we never intended to imply that Google was doing anything other than spidering all the web sites available.

There is also miscommunication about "all users" being required to log in. The DocuShare server is a repository for both public and private information with logins being required for users who are authorized to view the restricted information. There are hundreds of pages of information that we share from DocuShare with users around the state. These are completely open and are not supposed to [be] password protected.

We did troubleshoot this situation by searching for the students' information at Yahoo, Dogpile, and AltaVista. We did not find any information on these three search engine returns and we attempted the searches over a three-day period.

We acted so aggressively with Google because, until the media got involved, we could not get beyond an operator at Google. We could not get operators to connect us with technical support, the legal department, or to anyone higher up in the organization. We were only given an email address to which we could submit a complain - which we did but got no response. Google has a link to submit an emergency request [see here] but on both Thursday and Friday of last week, the link took you to a dead page. Only when the news media submitted its own inquiry to Google did we get a call regarding the situation. And [Google] has been most helpful in working through this situation with us.

Of course, none of us who are employed with Catawba County Schools at the current time were involved when Xerox set up this server. We are trying to ascertain if the server was incorrectly setup/protected or if the appropriate include meta tags or strings were not included.

Google Blamed For Indexing Student Test Scores & Social Security Numbers from us earlier has more background on the injunction plus how I was finding pages from what the district said was a password protected area to still be available through Yahoo. As clarified above, some of these pages indeed didn't require a login to view.

Our story originally was headlined "Google Blamed For Hacking & Indexing Students Test Scores & Social Security Numbers" and said in one part, "the school [district] blames Google for some how breaking into a password protected area and indexing the content."

As stated above, the school district itself never appears to have said anything about being hacked, only that Google somehow got into information it believed was password protected, as it says on the home page of the district site:

We do not know how Google was able to access the secure, password-protected site. Once Google does access a site, it places a copy of the data on its own server. We immediately called and emailed Google, requesting the urgent removal of the link and site data. We have eliminated the link from our end and it appears that as of Friday night, June 23, 2006, Google eliminated the site from their end.

The hacking reference seems to come from the "Google 'hacked our website'" story at The Inquirer, which we linked to in our original story. While the headline says "hacked" in quotes, the story itself doesn't have anyone from the school district saying this.

Digg also has a School claimed google hacked it's private servers and then posted that data article. Again, the school district isn't alleging hacking, only that Google somehow got into information it believed was restricted. How that happened is still being investigated.

As for the reference to Xerox in the school district's explanation, in doing some investigating in our original piece, I noted that the server seemed to be managed by Xerox and shared by other companies as well, with material for those companies appearing to be hosted on the school district's domain. As noted, the school district doesn't know why this was happening, and it remains something they are looking at.

Finally, Google's had problems with the automated page removal tool before, though not that it was down but instead allowing people to remove pages from sites they didn't own. More on that in our 2004 story, Google Confirms Automated Page Removal Bug.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:35 PM | Permalink

Google To Also Lobby In Europe

Pandia covers that Google is looking to hire a "senior European government affairs and public policy leader," to lobby in Europe. Google has hired a lobbying firm in the states a few months back. More details on the story at Pandia.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:37 AM | Permalink

Google Vs. France Trademark Appeal Ruling Expected Wednesday

The International Herald Tribune reports that a Paris appeals court is expected to issue judgment on a trademark violation appeals case this Wednesday. Google is expected to lose this appeal once again, due to how France has treated Google in the past. Just look at these three selected stories we covered in the past on Jan 20, 2005, Feb 4, 2005, and Mar 16, 2005. If Louis Vuitton wins the case, they are expected to push to block the use of the Louis Vuitton trademarks at other Google local properties. But it is highly unlikely that they will have as much success on such claims outside of France, according to the report.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:09 AM | Permalink

Google Blamed For Indexing Student Test Scores & Social Security Numbers

Google "hacked our website" from The Inquirer points to Blame game from the Hickory Record, a story about how the Catawba County Schools in North Carolina has gained a temporary injunction for "Google to remove any information pertaining to Catawba County Schools Board of Education from its server and index and alleges conversion and trespass against the corporation." The school blames Google for some how getting into a password protected area and indexing the content.

Let me make this clear, Google cannot submit forms or type in usernames and passwords. Someone at the school must of left an opening for Google. The security hole came from possibly someone publishing the content publicly, somehow, or by letting down the security or by posting a hyper-linked URL with an embedded password in the URL.

I agree, Google should remove this sensitive information, which they did on Friday after the judge issued the temporary injunction. But Google should not be blamed for this.

Postscript From Danny: As Barry notes, this isn't a case of Google deserving blame. It cannot guess at a protected server's usernames or passwords, nor is it configured to try and hack its way in. If this information got into Google, that's almost certainly because it was left unprotected somehow despite the school's "very secure site."

Since the school says all personal information has now been removed and is protected, I'll explain more at what I guess happened.

The story mentions that somehow, information from the site's supposedly protected DocuShare server got onto the web. OK, where is that server? The story doesn't say, but this search at over at Yahoo gives the likely location:

docushare catawba

Fifth down is this:

DocuShare Authorization Error Not Authorized. You are currently listed as Guest, which means you are not logged in. ... Password: Domain: DocuShare Catawba County. Copyright © 1996-2003 Xerox Corporation ... docucentre.catawba.k12.nc.us/docushare/dsweb/View/Collection-1546 - 6k - Cached - More from this site - Save

That shows you that Yahoo tried to access a protected page on the DocuShare server at docucentre.catawba.k12.nc.us. Is this the secure server that Google somehow managed to penetrate? Probably, given that this search shows nothing at Google now:

site:docucentre.catawba.k12.nc.us

That search comes up with no matches. That's probably because Google responded to the complaint last Friday to remove all pages from this domain. But since no one contacted Yahoo, there's a good chance pages from the domain still show over there. And in fact, that search at Yahoo currently shows 13,500 matches.

Are any of these the pages the ones with sensitive information? I did some searches that I felt should bring up whatever the page was that Google was finding and had no luck. This means:

• Yahoo didn't have it, because it didn't crawl as deep
• Yahoo didn't have it, because Google really did somehow manage to get pass a password barrier
• Yahoo didn't have it, because I'm not guessing at the right words in the document

Yahoo clear has some information that the school district itself says:

This site was a DocuShare password-protected site that required all users to log-in

No, not all users had to log-in. If that was the case, you wouldn't see any cached documents at all, such as this one. Clearly, some content was accessible without being logged in -- which makes it possible that some content wasn't properly placed behind password protection.

Postscript 2: See our follow-up, Follow-Up: School Couldn't Reach Google Until Injunction Filed

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:51 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2006

Child Porn Suit Dropped Against Google

The Associated Press reports that the suit brought against Google for profiting on child pornography has been dropped. Jeffrey Toback, of the Nassau County Legislature, filed the suit in early May. Toback said he dropped the suit because "Google has offered to sit down and discuss the issues. They didn't want to do that while litigation was pending, so we're taking them up on their offer."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:35 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

New York State Sends Warning On Google Video Service

ResourceShelf notes a Red Herring article about the New York State Consumer Protection Board (CPB) warning parents about Google Video. The warning discussed that Google Video enables children to "easily access and view videos with sexual themes and off-color material" all for free. ResourceShelf also notes that the only video service mentioned in this warning is Google Video, not YouTube or Yahoo Video.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:18 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2006

Google Earth Won't Have Distribution Blocked

Google Earth is out in a new version with new features, as Greg Sterling will be detailing more on the blog later today. But meanwhile, Google escapes having an injunction against the software. Judge won't block distribution of Google Earth from News.com covers how Google is being sued by Skyline Software Systems over a patent dispute on terrain mapping. The judge in the case has denied a preliminary injunction request to block downloads of Google Earth.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:43 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

Lawsuit Over Killed Anti-China Ad On Google

Google Sued for Allegedly Refusing Anti-China Ad at Wired News covers a lawsuit filed against Google after it refused to carry ads from activist Christopher Langdon protesting against the Chinese government.

You'll find the lawsuit here. I skimmed it very, very quickly. The key part is this:

Google's rejection of all three of my ads denied my rights of free speech and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, Langdon is claiming constructional protection to say what he wants on Google. It's not going to happen. Google has no requirement to print what he wants or carry his ads any more than a newspaper might. The public forum/public property argument he makes won't hold up, I'd say.

The courts will decide, of course. I suspect he'll lose, but it will certainly focus renewed attention on Google's ad policies that he dislikes.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:19 AM | Permalink

Google Calls On Users To Lobby For Net Neutrality

Google cofounder Sergey Brin might not have been able to lobby all the US senators he wanted earlier this week to stop a bill that threatens net neutrality. But Google still has a big stick to wave -- its users. The Debate over Net Neutrality on the Official Google Blog urges Google users to call their representatives and ask that the bill be stopped (it's up for a vote this week).

The blog points to an open letter Eric Schmidt has written to Google users, bulletpointing three action steps -- call, sign online petitions and sign-up for a new Google Policy Alert list. That list is notable. It will give Google the ability to mobile users for future policy fights -- assuming they jump in on it, of course.

The really big gun has yet to be rolled out. There's nothing I see on the Google home page about the call to action. C'mon Google, if you're that serious about it, put something out where your users will actually see it, on the home page.

Searches on net neutrality don't bring up any Google house ads that target those in the US. They do bring up ads for the two online petitions Google is promoting: ItsOurNet and SaveTheInternet.com. No idea if these are free or discounted ads -- I'll check on this and postscript if this turns out to be the case. I suspect not.

Unofficially, Microsoft calling for action. At least Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is, in his Key network neutrality bill up for vote tomorrow.

Postscript: Net neutrality failed in a US House Of Representatives vote yesterday, sadly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:01 AM | Permalink

June 5, 2006

Google Stops New Ranking Lawuit With Anti-SLAPP Threat; Previous KinderStart Suit Continues Despite This

Google Avoids Another Lawsuit Over Rankings (For Now)--Roberts v. Google from Eric Goldman at his Technology & Marketing Law Blog looks at how a case involving rankings on Google got dismissed before going to trial, thanks in large part to a counter-suit that Google threatened.

Mark Roberts was claiming breach of contract, in part because of Google's add URL feature and help pages supposedly formed a promise that his pages (which he doesn't say but assumes are most relevant) should be top ranked. They were in 2003 but later dropped.

Google threatened to file an anti-SLAPP motion against Roberts, a means of effectively getting the court to agree that the case is without merit and recovering costs. I haven't read the actual documents in Roberts case, but from what Eric describes, I have no doubt it would be easy to dismiss any claims of promise or contract.

A somewhat similar case (over ranking issues and the laughable claims being made) involving KinderStart and Google apparently continues, despite Google having actually followed through with an anti-SLAPP motion on that.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:39 PM | Permalink

May 29, 2006

Political Actions By Google In Washington Seen As Naive

Threatening everything from net neutrality to regulating companies with operations in China, tech companies must take their cause to Washington. The LA Times details lessons learned by Microsoft over its antitrust woes and characterizes Google has having taken serious missteps by irritating Republicans in power with its employees modestly contributing nearly entirely to Democrats and under staffing its DC operations. Google countered that they are "not a partisan presence in Washington," and "recently announced the hiring of Bush White House aide Jamie Brown for a senior position." The general sense is that Google will take lessons learned from Microsoft and will continue to develop its lobbying efforts which began in earnest late last year.

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 9:50 AM | Permalink

Google Pressures CHMoogle Into Name Change

The chemistry search engine CHMoogle encountered opposition to its trademark filing by Google, and decided to resort to eMolecules rather than take on the search giant. Although eMolecules' attorneys could argue the different audience and content wouldn't cause consumer confusion, the complaint against them met its mark with CEO Klaus Gubernator. A legal proceeding would distract the company from its mission addressing the lack of "cheminformatics" in Web-wide search engines.

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 9:26 AM | Permalink

May 25, 2006

Google Works With Brazil To Shut Down Orkut Communities

The Associated Press reports that Google has finally agreed to pull the plug on some communities within Orkut, Google's social networking software. Google has specifically agreed to shut down any community that violates Orkut's terms of service. This includes "any illegal or unauthorized purpose" such as;

+ Drug Pushers Using Orkut Arrested In Brazil + Brazil Asks Google To Help Orkut To Stop Organizing Organized Crime + Google & Brazil Fight Over Orkut User Data Rights + Google Faces Criminal Charges For Child Porn & Racial Material

About time I guess.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:24 AM | Permalink

May 22, 2006

Google Sends Settlement Notices In Click Fraud Class Action Case

Google has now sent out notices to advertisers advising them of their rights in the proposed settlement in a class action case over click fraud filed against Google by Lane's Gifts. Information is available on the cicksettlement.com site that Google is directing people to. That's where people will go to make a claim beginning June 19. The site also explains how to opt-out of a claim or object to the proposed settlement.

From the announcement by Google in the Inside AdWords blog:

Now that the preliminary settlement has been approved by the Court, all members of the class are being notified about the settlement. On May 19 and 20, 2006 (PST), a settlement administration firm sent an email notification (from clicksettlement@xmr3.com and with the subject 'Important Legal Notice Regarding Your Google AdWords Account') to all advertisers who purchased online advertising from Google between January 1, 2002 and the present.

I recommend that you carefully review the information in the email and visit the site provided by the administration firm: www.clicksettlement.com. On the site, you will find links to the official settlement notice and settlement FAQs, both of which are in .PDF format. To view these documents, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

As we have said in the past, we work hard to manage the issue of invalid clicks, and continue to be very effective in detecting and filtering them in order to deliver outstanding ROI to our advertisers. The vast majority of invalid clicks are detected and filtered out before they reach our advertisers' bills; if advertisers detect additional invalid clicks, our click quality team investigates and provides refunds as appropriate. You can read more information about invalid clicks and how we manage them here and in the AdWords Help Center here."

Advertiser Files Complaint To Block Google Click Fraud Settlement and Advertisers To Get Notices From Google In Click Fraud Settlement Later This Month from us earlier this month cover how not everyone is happy with the proposed settlement.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Google Sends Out Class Action Settlement Info -- Do It Or Not?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:30 AM | Permalink

May 18, 2006

Google Faces Criminal Charges For Child Porn & Racial Material

News.com reports and Bloomberg.com has more detail on Brazil's Attorney General seeking to charge Google Brazil for the distribution of "child pornography and racial materials" by Orkut users, Google's social networking software.

The Attorney General says that Google did not hand over the source of the materials posts, after being presented with a court order to do so. Google claims that the Google Brazilian unit has no responsibility for the content of Orkut, since Orkut content is hosted in the US, Google Inc. must be issued a court order. Google just does not have much luck in Brazil or with Orkut.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:47 AM | Permalink

May 5, 2006

Google Sued For Allegedly Profiting On Child Porn

The LA Times & ABC News reports that Google is being sued by Nassau County Legislator, Jeffrey Toback (in Long Island, New York) for allegedly profiting on child pornography. The lawsuit "is a proactive step to keep children safe," Toback said and that the suit is not seeking monetary damages, it just wants Google to be more proactive on blocking out illegal pornography from both the paid and organic results.

It is important to note that only Google is being sued here, and not Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com. Also, Matt Cutts is famed at Google for writing the "safe search filter" at Google, I believe. Past coverage of pornography issues at the search engines include;

+ Google Removes Child Porn Post & Reports To FBI + Yahoo Sued Over Child Porn On Yahoo Groups

There is also many more stories on spam and porn issues out there in the blogosphere with Google.

Postscript: Eric Goldman from Marquette University Law School informed me that Yahoo went through the same thing and they won a motion to dismiss. He also says that the "lawsuit is almost certainly preempted by 47 USC 230."

Postscript: Eric has posted several updates including a link to the complaint (PDF) where he concludes that "this lawsuit is just a publicity stunt, and a pathetic one at that. Among other evidence of cluelessness, the complaint uses a wacky definition of "child pornography."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:43 AM | Permalink

April 27, 2006

Google Sued In Israel For Search Ad Trademark Dispute

EEFTimes.com reports that Google is being sued in Israel for enabling an advertiser to buy AdWords targeting a trademarked company's name. Matim Li, the company, is suing Google for $530,000 in Tel Aviv Magistrates Court. Google's issued statement is "the advertiser is the one responsible for the search words and the content of its ad." Just one more trademark case to hit Google, this time, it is by an Israeli company.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

April 21, 2006

Judge Approves Class Action Lawsuit Settlement of $90 Million

News.com reports that a judge from Arkansas has approved the $90 million settlement issued between Google and Google AdWords advertisers. Of the $90 million, $60 million will go to the advertisers and $30 million will go to the lawyers. Google said, "We are pleased that we were able to reach an agreement and are pleased the judge has granted preliminary approval." Of course they are pleased, this is a great outcome for Google.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:10 AM | Permalink

March 20, 2006

Google Sued Over Site Penalty By KinderStart.com

Reuters reports that KinderStart.com is suing Google over "downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning." There are a total of seven counts to the suit (download PDF);

1. Violation of the right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution
2. Sherman Act Section 2: Monopolization
3. Unfair competition under California Business & Professional Code 172000
4. Unfair competition under California Business & Professional Code 17040
5. Breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing
6. Defamation and libel
7. Negligent interference with prospective economic advantage

I have my additional thoughts here, but I would expect Danny to comment on this later today (he is a bit busy now).

Want to discuss, join the Search Engine Watch Forum thread named Google sued for penalizing site.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:37 AM | Permalink

March 17, 2006

Google Hires Lobbying Firm

Google has hired PodestaMattoon, a lobbying firm that has the son of U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill, Joshua Hastert, as a member of the firm. The firm will lobby on Google's behalf on the politics of China, privacy, government regulation and more. More information at SFGate.com.

PostScript: Here is a new nice take, from Kate Phillips, on Google becoming less of an outsider and more of an insider.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

Google Wins Copyright Court Case

News.com reports that Google has won the copyright infringement case issued against them by writer, Gordon Roy Parker. Parker posted a chapter of his book on Usenet bulletin board, which was then indexed by Google. Parker sued because Google archived the book and provided "excerpts from his Web site in search results." The judge ruled in Google's favor, stating, "When an ISP automatically and temporarily stores data without human intervention so that the system can operate and transmit data to its users, the necessary element of volition (willful intent to infringe) is missing." The full court documents can be downloaded in PDF format here.

Danny has once wrote about Parker's case back in October 2005, he named the entry Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn't Reprint. Danny linked to Ray's page named Why Am I Suing Google For $10 Billion?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

March 9, 2006

Google Subpoenaed to Reveal Identity of Person Who Posted at Google Video

According to the MercuryNews.com, Google has been subpoenaed by American Airlines to hand over the identity of the individual who posted a copyrighted training video. The video was titled "Flight Attendant, Upside Down" and was available for viewing at Google Video, but has now been removed. Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Google will most likely be required to "comply" with American Airlines request.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:46 AM | Permalink

March 8, 2006

Google Filings Against DOJ Request -- Including Declaration From Matt Cutts

I'm planning a deeper look at Google's rejection of the Department Of Justice search records request, which happened last week when I was on vacation. But a quick head's up. Many of you may have seen Google's blog post on the subject here, which in turn leads to their formal filing here (PDF). But that wasn't the only filing. Catching up on my feeds this morning, I saw that Gary compiled a full list of Google filings over here (PDF). My eyebrows shot-up when I saw Google's Matt Cutts had a long declaration as part of that package. I was planning to help spread the word more about this as part of an overall summary of what's in the various summaries, but Matt himself beat me to it with this blog post. So happy reading! I'll still be working on that general summary of everything hopefully for later this week.

NOTE: This was originally written on Feb. 22, but I've only just seen that it was left as a "draft" and never published. Sorry about that!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:55 PM | Permalink

February 14, 2006

Google Won Digital Envoy Suit on Location-Technology

News.com reports that Google has won the Digital Evoy suit reported back in May 2005. In that filing, Digital Evoy claimed Google "overstepped the bounds of a contract to use Digital's IP Intelligence" when it broadened the use of the technology to the Google AdSense product. The judge said; "Digital is not entitled to equitable relief on its claim for misappropriation of trade secrets, absent a showing of Google's willful misconduct."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:51 AM | Permalink

January 31, 2006

More on Google's Guy in D.C.

Back in October we pointed out that Google was opening a lobbying office in D.C. Today, Matt Marshall in Silicon Beat points to an article in the Wall Street Journal (subscribers only) about Google and other tech company lobbying efforts in D.C. The post is titled: Google's one employee in Washington.

The WSJ article itself includes comments from Alan Davidson, Google's D.C. employee, who says the company will soon grow its DC operation and who has already hired an outside lobbying firm to handle tax issues.

"Carrier control over Internet activity is bad for consumers," counters Alan Davidson, a telecom lawyer hired by Google last summer to build the company's Washington office. The proposal would stifle innovation of Internet services, he says. It also might add to Google's operating costs. "We're not worried consumers won't be able to reach Google. The real threat is to the next Google and to the services that are important for consumers," he says.

The hiring of Mr. Davidson, who served as associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil-liberties group, underscores Google's recognition that it can no longer ignore Washington. Recently, Mr. Davidson hired an outside lobbying firm to handle tax issues. He says he plans on "bulking up the operation" soon, characterizing a Google fight against the Bells as "a David-versus-Goliath story."

Postscript: If you're interested in tracking lobbying efforts by Google and other companies and organizations, a service such as PoliticalMoneyLine can be a big help. Most services are fee-based but others are free.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:51 PM | Permalink

January 27, 2006

Judge Sets Hearing Date in Google Subpoena Case

Declan McCullagh's: Court date set for Google lawsuit, says that U.S. District Judge James Ware has announced that a hearing regarding the subpoena asking Google to turn over search records to the U.S. Department of Justice will take place one month from today, February 27, 2006, at 9am in California Northern District Court in San Jose.

Ware also set a date of Feb. 6 for Google to file a legal brief with its arguments, and a Feb. 13 date for the Justice Department to submit its reply. Ware is no stranger to technology cases. He heard the Sex.com case in 2001, a spam lawsuit in 1998, and a legal spat between RealNetworks and Microsoft in 2004.

A brief bio of Judge Ware is available from the Federal Judicial Center.

I've posted a copy of the actual court filing with the schedule here (PDF). I've also placed a copy of the latest court docket (as of Thursday, expect updates) on the server.

You can find the full text of other key court documents filed to this point in this blog post.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:24 AM | Permalink

January 24, 2006

New Poll Finds Web Users Want Google to Keep Data Private; Full Text Access to Report Also Available

Elinor Mills at News.com clues us into a poll conducted over the weekend and reported by Verne Kopytoff in the in the San Francisco Chronicle and Michael Bazeley in the San Jose Mercury News that shows 56% of those surveyed don't want Google handing over any info to the government.

From the SF Chronicle article: As part of the findings, 56 percent of respondents said they do not want Google to turn over any information to the government. More than three quarters of the respondents, or 77 percent, did not even know that Google collected information that personally identifies them. Google keeps records of IP addresses, which can be traced back to individual computers. In cases where the government is trying to prosecute a crime, according to the survey, the respondents were more open to Google sharing information. About 14 percent said that they were willing to give the government access in such cases, while 44 percent said that they were willing in only certain cases.

Mike Bazeley points out that many of those surveyed would stop using Google if they gave the government the data they requested.

From the Mercury News article: More than a third of the survey-takers -- 38 percent -- said they would stop using Google if the company ever turned over information about their searches to the government. The survey did not ask people for opinions about Yahoo, Microsoft or AOL.

The poll was made up of a random sample of 1,017 Internet users over the age of 18 and conducted by the Ponemon Institute [via email], a privacy research organization (aka think tank) group based in Michigan.

I'm interested to see if the search companies who handed over info to the feds (none of it with personally identifiable info as Danny clearly points out here) lose any market share and/or total number of searches in the future due to sharing data with the government.

Also worth a look (if you haven't done so already) is Danny's post: Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches; a statement from MSN along with plenty of reader comments on MSN Search's WebLog, a review of and links to the court filings, and some background reports on privacy, the Internet and related topics from the Congressional Research Service.

Postscript: Thank you to the The Ponemon Institute who have given us permission to post the the full text of the report containing the results of their recent poll (PDF).

Posted by Gary Price at 5:07 PM | Permalink

January 21, 2006

A Brief Look at Danny's Appearance on Nightline

Danny's appearance on ABC's Nightline is over and within minutes of it ending I was able to access the transcript (thanks TVEyes for the help) of the report. I'm not going to post the entire transcript here but rather share a few of Danny's comments that made the air during the 5 minute report. Of course, you can read all of Danny's thoughts in this blog post.

The story opens with background on the subpoena (we have plenty of that elsewhere on the blog), including comments from the US Attorney General who says: We're not asking for the identity of Americans. We simply want to have some subject matter information with respect to these communications.

and

a comment from Sergey Brin who spoke to ABC News earlier today: The idea there could be such a large overreaching, in my mind, request, based on something so far off and not related to security or anything like that, I think that's worrisome.

Comments by Larry Page were also made to ABC earlier this evening here.

So, with what one side saying one thing and another side saying something else, where is one to turn? Danny Sullivan. Of course, all of us already knew this important fact.

Reporter: We turned to Danny Sullivan, of searchenginewatch.com, one of the world authorities on search engines. yes there are world authorities on search engines. it's a multibillion dollar business and quite baffling to most of us and even to some experts.

Danny: They [engines] can still be mysterious in some ways.

The reporter then introduces Danny. Btw, this is the first time I have ever seen Danny's home office and it's way cool, reminds me of NASA mission control.

Danny: They seem to be trying to understand how likely it is that if you were to use a search engine you might run into pornographic content.

Danny: They haven't asked for any information that's going to violate anybody's privacy in any way, shape or form. Reporter: But Sullivan says the government request shows something important. The government has no idea what it's doing.

Danny: It's overkill, the amount of data that they want. They're literally going to get more than a billion searches in what they're asking for.

Reporter: Sullivan thoroughly reviewed the government's subpoena, available online (and summarized by yours truly here). He says the government did not ask Google to remove automated searches from the data, the searches requested by software as opposed to the ones made by you and me. Note: You can access the documents and a summary of them here.

Danny: For the searches to remain any automated searches that happen, some people use automation to query the search engines on a regular basis. Since they haven't asked for those kind of automated queries to be remove, it suggests they don't even know it happened, which maybe suggests they aren't educated enough to know how the search engines operation or how behavior is on the searches in the first place.

On Yahoo, MSN, and AOL Danny: I think it would have been good if they had pushed back. Think the amount of data, even though it wasn't violating anybody's privacy, was so large and was going to raise so many red flags down the line that they should have done it.

On Search and Search Engines Danny: They go in so many direction, it's difficult for anybody to keep track of absolutely everything they're doing. Sometimes I think the search engines themselves aren't quite certain which way they go at times.

Here's a screen cap of Danny from the report.

Congrats Danny!

Posted by Gary Price at 3:15 AM | Permalink

January 20, 2006

Google's Larry Page Comments on Privacy Matters

Along with Danny making an appearance of ABC News Nightline tonight, ABC's World News Tonight offered a look at the company a little while ago. A text version of the story is here. We learn about the corporate culture, etc. but we also here from Larry Page on privacy issues. The video is also now available.

From Larry Page: "Our company relies on having the trust of our users and using that information for that benefit," said Page. "That's a very strong motivation for us. We're committed to that. If you start to mandate how products are designed, I think that's a really bad path to follow. I think instead we should have laws that protect the privacy of data, for example, from government requests and other kinds of requests."

John Battelle is also quoted in the story. He says: "I think people are both fascinated and terrified, frankly," said John Battelle, author of "The Search."

Posted by Gary Price at 7:48 PM | Permalink

January 19, 2006

Court Documents & Summary Of United States Versus Google Over Search Data

Earlier we reported in Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No, Yahoo & MSN Said Yes that the US Government seeks to force Google to hand over search data. That story explains more about the situation, and there have been a number of postscripts from when it was first written. Along with that, we've been able to obtain copies of the three court documents filed in the case. Below you'll find links to each document, along with a summary of what's in each of them.

Alberto Gonzalez, as Attorney General of the United States vs. Google Notice of Motion to Compel Compliance (PDF File)

Two quick points. Remember, that this brief was filed by the Government and does not offer a response to their claims. I'm sure that will be coming. Second, I'm not an attorney and haven't played one on tv. My purpose was to summarize what was presented in the document.

• The motions requests that Google comply with a subpoena filed by the Attorney General and "produce" for inspection and copying the materials the Government is asking for.  
• After the lead government attorney conferred with Google, Google has chosen not to comply with subpoena.  
• Google is asking the court to make Google comply  
• The filing then goes into a background explanation about the Children's Online Protection Act (COPA) and how the government is developing its defense of the constitutionality of COPA. They believe that COPA is, "more effective than filtering software in protecting from harmful exposure to harmful material on the Internet."  
• In preparation of the case, subpoenas were issued to Google and "other entities" that operate search engines to produce two sets materials.  
• First, the subpoena asks Google to produce an electronic file contain, "[a]ll URL's that are available to be located on your companys' search engine as of July 31, 2005.  
• However, after "lengthy negotiation" the government changed and "narrowed" their request and asked for a "multi- stage random sample of one million URLS from Google's database ie, a random selection of the various databases in which those URL's are stored, and a random sample of the URL's held in those selected databases.  
• Second, Google was asked to "produce an electronic file containing [a]ll queries entered into the Google engine between July 1 and July 31 inclusive.  
• Again, after lengthy negotiations the government the government changed their request and asked for an electronic file "containing the text of any search string entered into Google's search engine for a one week period (absent any personal information identifying the person who entered the query).  
• Google has still refused to comply with these requests in any way.  
• The Government says that access to this information would be of "significant significance" in the preoperation of the their case.
Specifically why?  
• "The production set of queries entered into Google's search engine would assist the Government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current web users, to estimate how often web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering in screening that material."  
• This information would also help the Government understand what, "web sites people find through the use of search engines, to determine the character of those sites, to estimate the prevalence of harmful-to-minors material on those sites, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering software on that harmful to minors material.  
• The document continues into a discussion with plenty of legalese and citations and again points out the Google has failed to comply and lists some of the reason Google objects to this.  
• Google first objects to this on the grounds of relevancy.  
• Google also objects on the grounds that if they would provide what the government asks for, they would be required to produce information identifying the users of its search engines.  
• The Government claims that this is "illusory" since they have specifically asked for a random sample containing no personally identifying information to any search string.  
• The Government said that it has received compliance from search entities with files containing no personally identifying information.  
• Google also contends that the information they're being asked to produce is "redundant" since the Government has asked other engines to produce similar files. The Government argues that this "misunderstands" what's being requested. "The production set of queries from Google's database, in combination with similar productions from other search engine operators will assist the Government in developing a sample of the overall universe of search engines queries, while accounting for the potential of any variations in the type of queries that are entered into different search engines."  
• The Government says that since Google is the market leader, its response, "would be of value" in developing the Governments overall sample of queries.  
• Google says that complying would also force Google to share trade secrets because the total number of queries receives in a day is a trade secret. The Government adds that if this was the case, a district court has said that these numbers would not be disclosed.  
• Finally, according to the filing, Google says that it will be subject to an "undue burden" in complying. The Government claims that this is not the case whatsoever. The Government adds that they would be "willing to work" with Google to specify a multistage sample. They are also willing to compensate Google for its work and complying with the subpoena.  
• The filing ends with the Government saying that, "This court should require Google to comply with the subpoena on the same terms it's competitors have."

Declaration Of Joel McElvain (PDF File)

The second filing is a declaration by Government attorney, Joel McElvain, who I believe the lead attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in this matter. It also helps produce a timeline of events to this point. It includes:
• A copy of the original subpoena, originally signed on August 25, 2005
• Detailed info and definitions about Google was to submit to the Government.
• A several page letter, dated October 25, 2005, from Ashok Ramani, Commercial Litigation Counsel, Google sent to Joel McElvain with his objection to the subpoena. THIS IS A MUST READ!!!
Key Quotes and Passages from the Letter
• "It is against Google's competitive interest to be viewed as reflecting the whole world wide web."
• Worth noting that Google says that the government tried to use Archive.org/Wayback Machine and found the results unsatisfactory. From the letter, "...given the www.archive.org's stated purpose, one would expect them -- with an appropriate consulting relationship to create the results the DEFENDANT wanted.
• The Governments request is seen as redundant because they already has URLs from at least one other engine
• From the letter, "Though the search engines doubtlessly have some differences in the URLS, they store, what distinguishes Google from it's competitors is the sophistication of Google's search engine in locating and ordering relevant results."
• On the burden to Google. "Google would have to spend a disproportionate amount of engineering time and resources to (i) number (even in rough terms) in real time the URLs contained in its search database and (ii) extract based on that initial numbering the URLs selected by Professor Stark.
• Google also objects because it could "endanger" its "crown-jewel trade secrets." Specficially, they would have to disclose the approximate number of URLs in its database and "some" details on how it crawls URLs, "such as the number of servers, server distribution, and how often Google crawls the World Wide Web."
• More objections. "Google objects to the Defendant's view of Google's highly proprietary queries database as a free resource that Defendant can use, some levels removed, to formulate its own defense."
• "Moreover, Google's acceeding to the Request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services. This is not a perception Google is willing to accept. And one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome we cannot accept.
Next, we find another letter. This time it's from DOJ's McElvain to Google's Ramani. This later is dated December 23, 2005.
• The letter discusses how the Government is willing to narrow what's asked for in the subpeona
This is summarized in the Alberto Gonzalez, as Attorney General of the United States vs. Google section of this post.
• McElvain discusses how Google asked for and was granted two extensions to serve their objections to the subpeona until October 10, 2005. He then writes, "In our several discussions prior to the service of those objections we had offered to limit the scope of of the requests for production, and you had indicated Google's willingness to consider compliance with the subpeona along with the narrowed terms that we had suggested. Your written objection also reiterated your hope to reach a resolution regarding Google's compliance with the subpeona. However, shortly after the service of your objections, you telephoned me to inform me that Google would decline to comply with the subpeona.
• More conversations between the Government and Google take place on December 12th and December 21st to discuss the technical aspects of the request. Finally, on December 21st, MacElvain was informed that Google would not comply with the subpeona.
• The final document is a protective order in the ACLU v. U.S. case.

Declaration Of Philip B Stark (PDF File)

This document is a declaration by Philipp Stark, Ph.D who was the person to work on the project. Dr. Stark is a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Stark explains how he has had conversations with the USDOJ, Google and other search providers, "to develop practical approaches to sampling their databases or URLs and search queries."
• He adds that he has started to analyze the samples produced by search providers other than Google.
• He writes, "Reviewing user queries to search engines will help us understand the search behavior of current web users, to estimate how often web users encounter HTM materials through searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filters in screening those materials.

Stark goes on to add more about his approach while including Google results are directly relevant.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:18 PM | Permalink

Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes

NOTE: We're continuing to update this news through postscripts below the original story.

Via John Battelle and Google Morning Silicon Valley, the San Jose Mercury News article "Feds want Google search records" covers the Bush administration demanding last year that Google and other search engines turn over aggregate search information to help revive a child protection law. Google has refused to comply with the subpoena. A motion has been filed this week by US Department Of Justice to force Google to hand over the data.

In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do.

Here's a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.

Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.

Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you've asked for a lot of data that's not really going to help you estimate anything at all.

Far better would be to do some searches that you think children and teens are actually doing, such as by doing a survey of them. Then just go start searching on Google and the other search engines yourselves. See what actually comes up, especially when the filtering protection each service offers is enabled. That would give you plenty of data, plus it would be useful for everyone to have someone rigorously test the filtering systems that are offered. Serving subpoenas to get the data isn't necessary.

It's important to note that from what I read, the requests do not involve user data at all. Shutting off your cookies or purging your personalized search data wouldn't protect you with this request, because the request wasn't going after personal data. To stress again:

• According to the report, they wanted a list of one million web addresses. Not who went to the web pages and when, just a list of URLs picked randomly.  
• They wanted searches for one week. I haven't seen the court documents, but I'm guessing Google could have handed over a list of searches that were entirely unassociated with IP addresses, times, cookies and registration information. Nothing suggests that they wanted to know who did the searches in any way.

Having said this, such a move absolutely should breed some paranoia. They didn't ask for data this time, but next time, they might. Of course, it bears reminding that this type of data is easily obtainable from ISPs. So even if the search engines refuse to comply, your own ISP could be giving up your data -- or selling it.

Overall, I say kudos to Google for declaring the request overreaching and refusing to comply. I'm checking with the other major search engines to see if they handed over data.

I've spoken and written a bit about the idea that the search engines need to consider creating a clear "Search Privacy Bill Of Rights," spelling out clearly what protections they'll pledge you'll always have with your data and exactly how it will be used, destroyed and so on. I want to move ahead with more explorations of this -- and perhaps we need a similar one enacted by governments to spell out what they will and will not do with our highly private search data.

Moving Past Google Privacy Fears & Toward An Industry Solution from me last year gives you a lot of background on search privacy issues from over the years. There's an extensive reading list at the bottom.

After I put that out, I also created a thread at our Search Engine Watch Forums, How Should Search Engines Protect Privacy?. Unfortunately, that thread -- while it got lots of discussion -- never generated as many concrete ideas and suggestions about what should go in a Search Privacy Bill Of Rights as I hoped for. So I'm trying again. Got thoughts, comments, suggestions? Please visit our new thread, A Search Privacy Bill Of Rights.

Meanwhile, want to talk about this particular move by the Bush Administration? I have a different thread for that, Bush Administration Demands Search Records.

Postscript 1: I have queries out to AOL, Ask Jeeves, MSN and Yahoo to find out if they provided data. I'll note answers here or in a new post.

Postscript 2: I said above that a more accurate way for the government to assess how often children might encounter porn through search engines would be to conduct their own research. Indeed, they have. Government Report Says MSN Search Adult Filter Most Effective from the SEW Blog back in June covers this report (PDF format) that the US Government Accountability Office did back in June. From what I can see, it measured how often children might encounter porn through image search. To do the assessment, no subpoenas were required. From what I posted in our active Bush Administration Demands Search Records discussion at the Search Engine Watch Forums on today's news:

FYI, back to the idea of child filters on search engines, the US government has tested this, as Government Report Says MSN Search Adult Filter Most Effective covers. Note that to do this, they said:

We performed unfiltered 5-minute searches for six keywords: three keywords known to be associated with pornography and three innocuous terms that juveniles would likely use (a popular teenage singer/actress, a popular cartoon, and a popular movie character).

They managed to do this assessment (the US Government Accounting Office) without issuing a subpoena to anyone. Moreover, it has stats they say they want already produced and ready to go. Page 48 and 67 have details. The caveat is that this seems to have been a test of image search results (Yahoo was 92 percent non porn, MSN 76 percent, Google 64%). But you could do the same thing to measure web search.

Postscript 3: Here's the official Google statement from Nicole Wong, associate general counsel with Google. It's what they already told the San Jose Mercury News and are telling other publications:

Google is not a party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches. We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.

Postscript 4: MSN statement is below. It doesn't really answer the question, which was if they complied with a subpoena to hand over data similar to what Google's being sued over. Since it's not a denial, I'm reading this as a tentative yes, that they got a request and passed the data along. I've asked for clarification. The statement:

MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested. Microsoft fully complies with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and United States Law as well as Microsoft's terms of use and privacy policies in working with law enforcement. It is our policy to respond to legal requests in a very responsive and timely manner in full compliance with applicable law. MSN takes the safety of its customers very seriously and is committed to providing a safe experience for consumers. As stated in MSN?s Terms of Use and Subscription Agreements, Microsoft will comply with applicable law to edit, refuse to post, or to remove any information or materials, in whole or in part, in Microsoft's sole discretion.

Postscript 5: It's important to note this case is not about stopping child porn. It's about trying to get a law passed that would help the government shut down sites that allow children themselves to access porn. To prove a need for the law, the US government wants to show how much porn children might encounter through searches. It's easy to confuse these two completely different things. I did originally, corrected the first draft of my story, but I still had a section stressing the child porn angle. I've remove that from the story above. Here's what I pulled out, for those who care about such edits:

Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.

If you do, from talking with the head of a child porn fighting group in the UK, my understanding is that many euphemisms and code words are used that won't immediately register as child porn terms.

I can assume the Bush administration probably has investigators smart enough to know the euphemisms and other terms that those after child porn might seek. If you've got that list, just go start searching on Google and the other search engines yourselves. See what actually comes up, especially when the filtering protection each service offers is enabled. That would give you plenty of data, plus it would be useful for everyone to have someone rigorously test the filtering systems that are offered.

There are plenty of other ways to get samplings of non-porn searches that are done, to measure whether porn is showing up in response to these. Serving subpoenas to get the data isn't necessary.

Postscript 6: Ask Jeeves did not provide data, as they were not asked. Statement:

Ask Jeeves has not received requests for search data from the Department of Justice in this matter.

Postscript 7: Yahoo got a request, and I'm guessing compled. Guessing? The statement is below. At first, you'd think they didn't give any information. But that's not what it says. It says they gave no "personal information." That's easy enough, since as I noted above, the government didn't request any personal information. The aggregate data they wanted wasn't personal. Therefore, Yahoo may have handed that over. I'm following up. Statement from spokesperson Mary Osako:

We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy. We did not provide any personal information in response to the Department of Justice's subpoena. In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue.

Postscript 8: New statement came in about a minute after I posted above, making it clear Yahoo did comply:

We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy. We did not provide any personal information in response to the Department of Justice's subpoena. In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue. We complied on a limited basis and did not provide any personally identifiable information.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Bush Administration Demands Search Records.

Postscript 9: In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information -- and MSN which likely did the same -- it is important to note that it is not just spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any personally identifiable data.

Let me especially stress this. Want 1 million random web sites? There's no privacy issue in that. The government didn't ask for the "bad" sites or sites that were linked with any particular activity. They just wanted a list of sites, probably so they could do a survey.

It's a stupid request, of course. It's sort of like the government asking a major car dealership to give you a list of random license plate numbers rather than the Department Of Motor Vehicles. Surely the government can generate its own list without forcing a private company to do this.

How about those search requests? They are a list of searches with no user data associated with them. If that's a user privacy issue, then live displays such as listed here are a long-standing one.

Here's a better example. Infospace -- which owns the Dogpile meta search engine -- has sold raw search data to Wordtracker for years. I have never heard of anyone concerned about the privacy implications in that. This is because there aren't any. You can't see who did a search, IP addresses, cookies, etc. It's just a big long list of words.

To hammer home the point, look at this:

That's the live (and warning, unfiltered) search display from Dogpile as I wrote this postscript. See anything linking any individuals to those searches? No, and that's all the US government would have gotten, a raw list of millions of searches.

So why the hoopla? Why not give in? Two reasons:

• Competitive: Why give even raw search data out that possibly might fall into the hands of competitors. Even then, the lists from each major search engine will be pretty similar, so not that much of a worry.  
• Trust: The data, as I've written, isn't going to help the government at all in what they say it will do. Heck, if they really need that list, they could buy the data from Wordtracker. But by handing it over, the search engine loses the perception of trust with its users. They may not understand that it is not personal. They will understand the government made a wideranging request for information and that the search company didn't push back. That type of trust is worth defending in the face of an ill advised, useless government action.

Postscript 10: MSN says they aren't providing more specifics beyond the statement they gave above. Since that statement does NOT deny that they provided information, I can only assume that they did. Unfair assumption? Well:

• If they didn't get a request, as with Ask Jeeves, they'd say so (and probably breathe a sigh of relief that they didn't get one).  
• If they did get a request and refused to comply, I'd expect we'd have seen a court case by now, as we are with Google.

That only leaves that they got a request, and that they replied. If I'm wrong, I'll happily post a correction and new statement, if MSN provides one.

Postscript 11: Seth Finkelstein sent me a link to his Free porn, Google, spam, Internet censorship, and the Supreme Court post, which highlights something Gary and I have written about for ages. You can't trust search engine counts to prove anything. While counts themselves haven't been shown to be an issue in this case, Seth's post shows that they might be something the Department Of Justice is considering. From the Boston Globe article he points at:

Ordinarily, US Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson prepares for an appearance before the Supreme Court by acting out his argument before a pretend court. This time, for a case about the Internet, he added a new twist: searching online for free porn.

At his home last weekend, Olson told the justices yesterday, he typed in those two words in a search engine, and found that "there were 6,230,000 sites available."

The top lawyer who represents the Bush administration before the Supreme Court said the search's results illustrate how pornography on websites "is increasing enormously every day," a central point in his argument for saving an antipornography law that was enacted six years ago but has yet to go into effect.

Hmm. Six million porn sites available? OK, let me do it now on Google. Now I get a figure of 26,900,000. How porn has grown. Ah, but how many pages (the count is for pages, not web sites) do we have in all? Google doesn't report a figure. But if I search for -kfdjkkdjdkfjdkjdk9d09d09d0jdkfdkjkf, a word that doesn't exist, I get a count of 9.7 billion pages. I know that the count is much higher than this (read this to understand more), but let swing with that figure:

26.5 million / 9.7 billion = 0.27% of the web equals free porn

You want to take that figure to court to show there's a lot of porn? Please. But that figure still doesn't mean anything. A search for online porn at Google only shows you pages that have those two words on them. They could be pages writing about the evils of online porn, how to avoid online porn, why online porn should be banned. Consider this:

• no free porn = 16,100,000 pages

That's a heck of a lot of pages with "no free  porn" on them!

Fox News & Danger Of Citing Search Counts over at our Search Engine Watch Forums is another example of the fallacy of citing search counts to prove points. For more deconstructing of the Olson proof, be sure to read Seth's send-up.

Postscript 12: Court documents we've obtained so far are now up. Gary's also working very hard to summarize what's in them. See them over at his Court Documents & Summary Of United States Versus Google Over Search Data post.

Postscript 13: AOL appears to have been asked and complied, at least according to the ACLU. I'm still waiting to hear back from AOL. Via Google Blogoscoped, Feds take porn fight to Google from News.com summarizes the court documents. The ACLU challenged the law the US government seeks to revive, the Child Online Protection Act. An ACLU attorney told News.com that Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all chose to comply.

AOL disputes what the ACLU says -- but from what I read, that dispute is the same as Yahoo's original statement that they didn't give any personal information (Postscript 7 versus Postscript 8, above). Since the government didn't ask for any personal data, of course AOL didn't hand any over. But AOL says is did hand over search queries from a roughly one day period.

Postscript 14: Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing has confirmation that AOL, MSN and Yahoo all received requests from the Department Of Justice along with Google. Google did not comply, hence the legal action.

Postscript 15: AOL sends a statement now saying they didn't comply, though it still looks like they did in part, as I explained in Postscript 13. To say they handed over no personal data is a non-issue. The Department Of Justice demanded no personal data. It did demand a list of search terms, and AOL appears to have given some amount of these to the DOJ. The statement:

We did not -- and would not -- comply with such a subpoena. We gave the DOJ a generic list of aggregate and anonymous search terms. This did not include search results, nor any personally-identifiable information, and therefore there were absolutely no privacy implications.

Postscript 16: MSN sends a statement today (Friday, Jan. 20) saying they complied with the subpoena:

Microsoft typically does not comment on specific government inquiries. That said, as you may have heard from the DOJ they did contact us in this case. We take the privacy of our customers very seriously. We did comply with the their request for data in this case in a way that ensured we also protected the privacy of our customers. We were able to share aggregated query data (not search results) that did not include any personally identifiable information.

Postscript 17: Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing has AOL saying they did not comply with the subpoena. It's hair splitting time on which way to go on this. As I explained in Postscript 15, the argument that AOL gave no personal data is a non-issue. No personal data was requested. They did give a list of aggregate and anonymous search terms. That's exactly what the subpoena requested. The amount they gave is uncertain. Google was asked to give search queries for all of July 2005, which was later negotiated down to a request for a week's worth of data. AOL probably gave less than originally requested but still likely a big chunk of information. No mention of whether any URLs were handed over. I still see this as complying, but I'll follow up more with AOL about it.

Postscript 18: See also The Day After: Points In The Search Trust Sweepstakes from me. It reflects back on some of the bigger issue points raised from the situation.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Bush Administration Demands Search Records.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:03 AM | Permalink

January 3, 2006

Click Fraud Case Against Google Continues Its Way Through Federal Court

In doing some research over the holidays I discovered that back in July a lawsuit against Google was filed by Steve Mizera in the Northern District of California in San Jose.

The full text of the July complaint is posted here. It alleged: + Breach of Contract + Negligence + Unjust Enrichment + Unfair Business Practices

The complaint was amended in October, removing the negligence and unjust business practices portions. The amended complaint is posted here. The court docket, as of today, is also available and posted here.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:26 PM | Permalink

December 28, 2005

Full Text of Complaint Filed in Jews for Jesus v. Google Case

Last week, Danny blogged about a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Jews for Jesus against Google regarding a blog hosted on their Blogspot service. Today (I haven't had a chance to read it yet), the complete complaint filed by Jews for Jesus with a federal court in the Southern District of New York became available online. I've posted the full text of the 48 page; PDF complaint here.

For more Google lawsuit news, I posted an item yesterday that discusses a patent infringement case against Google regarding some of the technology the company uses to power the VoIP portion of Google Talk.

Postscript: Eric Goldman, a law school professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee has posted an in-depth look at a case he says the case, "raises some complex and unsettled legal issues."

Posted by Gary Price at 3:36 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Google Faces Patent Infringement Lawsuit Over Google Talk

While doing some research, I've learned that Google is being sued for patent infringement over the VoIP portion of the Google Talk program. I've posted the full text (38 pages; PDF) of the complaint filed by Rates Technology in October here. A copy of the court docket (as of today) is posted here.

The lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of New York.

The suit includes two causes of action for patent infringement against Google.

Rates Technology says that two patents they hold (awarded in 1995, 2001) for minimizing the cost of long distance calls using the Internet are being infringed upon by Google Talk. Copies of these two patents along with one more mentioned in the filing are included in the complaint.

Rates Technology is asking for a jury trial along with: + Enforcement of the patents + Damages including the loss of profits so provide a royalty + A preliminary injuction against Google + Attorney's fees

So who is Rates Technology? That's a good question. Finding substanative material on the open web is a challenge. However, a web search did turn up this excellent blog post from TMCnet publisher Rich Tehrani, that Rates Technology, a company Tehrani says, exists, "to collect revenue from other companies" has also sued Nortel, Sharp Electronics and others over patents it holds. The post also includes has a blurb from a December 7, 1998 WSJ story about the company and recent comments (April 2005) from Rates Technology CEO, Jerry Weinberger.

The blog post also mentions that Weinberger and Rates Technology have patent agreements in place with 700-800 companies and have litigated 25 times in 15 years.

According to the court docket both parties will meet with Judge E. Thomas Boyle in early February.

I'm sure others who follow the VoIP space much more closely than we do (like Om) will have more to say.

We also learned last week that, if certain conditions are met Google Talk users will be able to chat with AOL Instant Messenger users as part of the new AOL/Google deal.

Postscript: One "fast fact" about Google Talk we blogged about after the release of the service was that some of Google Talk's voice technology is licensed from a Stockholm-based company.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:30 PM | Permalink

December 23, 2005

Jews For Jesus Sues Google Over Blogger Blog

Jews for Jesus Group Sues Google from Reuters covers Google being sued by the group in New York to force it to give up the jewsforjesus.blogspot.com blog hosted on Google's Blogger service. Haven't seen the suit documents, so it's unclear whether the "right" to the group's own name it demands only means it wants jewsforjesus not to be used as part of the address or whether it simply thinks the site shouldn't be allowed at all.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:54 AM | Permalink

December 14, 2005

Click Defense Out, AIT In as Lead Plaintiff in Click Fraud Case Against Google

At the end of June we posted a story (with several links) about a click fraud case filed by Click Defense against Google, we even have a copy of the complaint. Almost six months to the day later, the Reuters story, Google click fraud plaintiff gets 'cold feet' reports that Click Defense was "seeking to withdraw" as lead plaintiff in the case so they can focus on their Ft. Collins, Colorado based business.

The article goes on to say that the company, even though it doesn't want to be lead plaintiff, still wants to be part of the case.

"We are only withdrawing as a representative plaintiff," Click Defense Chief Executive Scott Boyenger said in a statement, adding that the company was doing so in order to focus on its business as a provider of technology used to detect "click fraud" in online-advertising campaigns.

Last week, AIT, an internet service provider has taken over as lead plaintiff. Their company web site is full of links to report click fraud. One link reads, "Click Fraud is Evil. Report Click Fraud Here."

"(Click Defense) started down the road and got cold feet, and we are jumping in their stead," Jay O'Dell, a sales executive at AIT, told Reuters by phone.

A hearing to certify the case is currently set for May, 2006.

The Fayetteville(NC) Observer has more on the case in the story, AIT sues Google. Fayetteville is where AIT is based.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:37 PM | Permalink

October 18, 2005

Google Ready to do Some Lobbying in D.C.

Zachary Rodgers offers some analysis of Google's new Washington D.C. lobbying office in the article: The Search Engine's Lobbyist.

Some companies do their own lobbying. Among enormous bubble-era start-ups, Google is actually late to the table. Yahoo!, eBay, America Online (through Time Warner) and MSN (through Microsoft) all have people in Washington. Naturally, not all these staffers work full-time to influence policy...Especially interesting for Google is that they're getting into businesses where the legislation is sketchy at best," said Stein. "They could clearly go the wrong way in Google's mind. It certainly makes sense for them to keep participating in the same way that GM is there thinking about mileage per gallon for SUVs."

We first blogged about Google's intentions to open a D.C. office about 11 days ago.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:01 PM | Permalink

October 14, 2005

In the Case of Google's Dr. Kai-Fu Lee: California Judge Sides (For Now) with Microsoft

The Associated Press, Reuters, and other sources report from that a California judge has sided with Microsoft and issued a, "tentative court ruling that would limit the search engine company's legal options for at least another three months," according to a report by Michael Liedtke from the Associated Press.

From the AP Lawyers from the high-tech titans appeared in federal court a few hours after Judge Ronald Whyte indicated he will pause a Google lawsuit that seeks to invalidate a noncompete agreement that's preventing Kai-Fu Lee from carrying out all his duties as the new director of the company's research center in China.

As soon as he took the Google job this year, Lee moved from Microsoft's home state of Washington to a Silicon Valley home near Google's Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters.

That transfer has become the pivotal point in the tug-of-war over Lee's services because Washington honors noncompete agreements while California law doesn't.

From Reuters But Judge Ronald Whyte of the U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose declined to say what his final ruling would be in the suit by Google, which is seeking to override the jurisdiction of a Washington state court in a related case. The stay order by the federal court, if maintained by Judge Whyte, would set the stage for the Washington state case to go to trial on Jan. 9, 2006, according to attorneys working for Microsoft.

Much more in the AP story: Judge Tentatively Sides With Microsoft and the Reuters story: Judge stays Google suit in Microsoft hiring case.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:55 PM | Permalink

October 3, 2005

Google Wins Age Discrimination Suit

Google Prevails in Age Discrimination Suit from the Associated Press covers Google winning in an age discrimination suit that was filed in July 2004. Brian Reid, one of AltaVista's founders who went over to Google, filed the suit when he was aged 54 and alleged that he was told by a Google exec that he didn't fit into Google's youthful atmosphere. Reid's firing from Google cost him stock options estimated to be worth $38 million. Reid's complaint against Google was also featured in John Battelle's new book The Search (page 233-234).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:47 AM | Permalink

September 26, 2005

Google Accused of Issuing Misleading Statements in Gmail Name Dispute

Do you remember a blog post from a couple of week's ago about a possible lawsuit by a UK firm against Google over the name Gmail? This Sunday Times article reports that the dispute is quickly turning into a war of words as Independent International Investment Research (IIIR), the company who has been contesting the use of the Gmail trademark, says that Google has been issuing "inaccurate and misleading statements."

From the article: Times Online today had sight of an e-mail exchange between Google and the chief executive of Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) - which is threatening legal action over the trademark for GMail. In the e-mails, the IIR takes Google to task over official comments it made in response to his case.

Much more in the article: Google accused of misleading in Gmail row.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:00 PM | Permalink

September 13, 2005

Google's Dr. Lee Can Recruit In China But Can't Work on Search or Speech Technologies

A ruling from a King County, Washington judge was handed down today that says Google employee (formerly of Microsoft) Dr. Kai-Fu Lee can immediately begin recruiting for Google's new research center in China but can not work on speech, search and other technologies. The ruling comes after Microsoft asked for the court to stop Dr. Lee from doing any work for Google until after the January trial saying that it would violate a noncompete agreement he has with Microsoft.

From a News.com article: In his 13-page ruling, Judge Steven Gonzalez restricted Lee to recruiting for Google in China and to talking to government officials about getting a license to do business there, but said Lee cannot work on technologies including search or speech. Lee also cannot set budgets or salaries or decide what research Google will do in China, according to the order.

If you would like to read the ruling, a copy of it (13 pages; PDF) is available here.

See Also: AP: Judge rules former Microsoft executive Lee can recruit for Google Forbes: Judge: Google Can Keep Microsoft Alum Lee--For Now

Postscript: Danny emailed me that the Google blog is touting the win while Microsoft has just posted this statement.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:08 PM | Permalink

August 8, 2005

Lawsuit Claims Google Overcharged Advertisers

Google sued over claims of excess advertising fees Source: Reuters Google Inc. is being sued over accusations that it overcharged advertisers who use the Web search giant's paid search advertising program...The proposed class-action suit, filed on August 3 in State Superior Court in Santa Clara, California, accuses Google of charging in excess of advertisers' "daily budgets," under which Google allows an advertiser to limit how much it spends each day.

Thanks to GB for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:51 PM | Permalink

August 3, 2005

Google Anticipated Potental Problems in Lee Hiring

The MS/Google "search war" (aka the hiring of Dr. Lee) continues with newly unsealed court documents showing that Google anticipated possible "issues" when they hired Dr. Kai-Fu Lee to lead Google China.

Via the Seattle Times:

When it hired Kai-Fu Lee, Google agreed to pay his full salary and let his stock options vest even if he couldn't work for up to 12 months because of a noncompete agreement he signed at Microsoft...Google declined to comment on the employment agreement, but spokesman Steve Langdon said the company is still on track to open the China lab this fall. Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said the employment agreement "underscores the fact that Google was aware that Dr. Lee had a noncompete agreement with us and had the expectation that by hiring him, he could be breaking that agreement."

Btw, several of the unsealed court documents (some heavily redacted) are available (PDF) via the Seattle Times.

• Employment agreement between Google and Kai-Fu Lee that provides for his salary even if he's prevented from working
• Notes from a May 18, 2004 meeting where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Kai-Fu Lee discussed search and competition with Google
• String of emails discussing Microsoft's new salary structure in China

Posted by Gary Price at 5:12 PM | Permalink

July 29, 2005

Google Seeks Patent On RSS Ads: Filed In Dec. 2003

Google's Advertisements in RSS Patent App in our SEW Forums covers how Google has applied for a patent on putting ads into RSS and feeds. You can discuss in that forum thread, plus Threadwatch has some talk.

Postscript (from Gary): It's important to realize that this patent app was filed with the US Patent and Trademark office in December 2003. In other words Google has been thinking about and developing methods to place paid advertising into RSS feeds for at least 18 months but likely much longer. However, it has only been in the past few months that Google started to test this type of service.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:14 AM | Permalink

July 28, 2005

Microsoft Gets Temporary Restraining Order in Google Case

A Washington State Superior Court judge issued a temporary restraining order today barring Dr. Kai-Fu Lee from performing his duties as the recently appointed head of Google China.

According to the AP,

Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez granted a temporary restraining order barring Kai-Fu Lee from working at Google on any product, service or project similar to those he worked on at Microsoft, including Internet and desktop search technology. In a statement e-mailed after the ruling, Google lawyer Nicole Wong called the judge's decision "only a temporary measure to maintain the status quo and to give the court more time to fully consider the parties' positions. "We are confident that once the judge has done so he will side with Google and Dr. Lee. Microsoft will not prevail in their intimidation campaign."

No word on the Google's countersuit in a California court.

A full text copy of the temporary restraining order is available here.

More in this News.com report and this blog post from yesterday.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:47 PM | Permalink

July 22, 2005

The Hiring of Dr Lee: Google Strikes Back

The Microsoft vs. Google "Search War" continues to escalate. Another lawsuit was filed yesterday, this time by Google.

Here's a review:

• Episode 1: On Tuesday we learned that Google has hired Dr. Kai Fu-Lee away from Microsoft to lead Google China
• Episode 2: Several hours later, news that Microsoft was suing Dr. Lee in King County, WA Superior Court. The lawsuit claims that Dr. Lee was breaching the Microsoft employee confidentiality and non-compete agreements by joining Google before the agreements had expired.
• Episode 3: Late yesterday, word that Google is was countersuing Microsoft in a California court.

Via the AP: Google retaliated with its own complaint in California seeking to override Microsoft's noncompete provision so it can retain Lee. In its suit, Mountain View-based Google contends the clause violates California laws giving workers the right to change jobs. Microsoft's restriction is "clearly an illegal restraint of trade," Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, said in an interview Thursday night. "Google is trying to create an environment for innovators. Microsoft is focused on litigation and intimidation."

The AP's Michael Liedtke continues: In its complaint, Google argues California laws should apply because its headquarters ? and most of its nearly 4,200 workers ? are in the state. What's more, Google said Lee already is registered to vote in California, pays taxes in the state and plans to buy a Silicon Valley home. But Google's initial announcement of Lee's hiring made it sound as if the engineer will be based in China, overseeing the company's new research office there. "I look forward to returning to China to begin this exciting endeavor," Lee said in a Tuesday statement. Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake McCredy described Google's complaint as a desperate act. "Microsoft is confident in our case and that Google's legal maneuvers will ultimately be rejected by the court," she said.

On a Related Note If you're in need of a smile, take a look at the great "Search Wars" logo that Philipp Lenssen has posted over at Google Blogoscoped.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:49 AM | Permalink

July 19, 2005

Microsoft Sues Google Over China Hire

It's time to take the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry to court.

In my post earlier today about Google expanding their presence in China by opening a research lab, I noted that Google had hired Dr. Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft where he was serving as a corporate vice president.

Well, it didn't take long for the folks in Redmond to sue Dr. Lee claiming he's breaching the Microsoft employee confidentiality and non-compete agreements by joining Google.

From a ZDNet article:

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said in an e-mail. "We are asking the court to require Dr. Lee and Google to honor the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working for Microsoft."

In an email to SEW, Google's David Krane tells us: "We have reviewed Microsoft's claims and they are completely without merit. Google is focused on building the best place in the world for great innovators to work. We're thrilled to have Dr. Lee on board at Google. We will defend vigorously against these meritless claims and will fully support Dr. Lee."

Postscript: Dirson points to comments about the lawsuit from an ex-Microsoftie now working at Google.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:13 PM | Permalink

July 8, 2005

Google Wins Domain Name Dispute

This news release points out that Google has emerged victorious in a domain name dispute.

"Google Inc., filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum on May 11, 2005 asserting legal rights to Web addresses [googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com] bearing close resemblance to Google.com. Ruling in Google?s favor, National Arbitration Forum arbitrator Paul A. Dorf found that the other party, Sergey Gridasov, registered the googkle.com and ghoogle.com on December 30, 2000 and the domain names gfoogle.com and gooigle.com on January 12, 2001?after Google registered its domain in late 1999. The other party was also using the disputed domain names to direct Internet users to Web sites that attempt to download viruses, trojan horses and spyware to the users? computers. The disputed domain names contain links to various products unrelated to Google.

You can read the full text of the decision here.

It will be worth monitoring to see if the Googlepex will begin asserting their legal rights over other registered domains that either resemble Google or include the word Google in the domain name.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:10 PM | Permalink

July 5, 2005

Google & Other Search Engines: The WMDs Of Copyright Infringement

The world seems to be waking up to the fact that search engines are potentially widespread copyright infringers, though it's Google, as usual, that takes the brunt of concerns. But for good reason, Google more than the other search engines is generating worry in new areas. A rundown on some good, recent articles on the subject.

For Soaring Google, Next Act Won't Be as Easy as the First from the Wall Street Journal (open access to everyone) is an excellent article that covers how the "opt out" approach to indexing that's been the norm in the search engine world is causing Google problems as it branches out into new areas.

Google Video's taping of television content without prior permission is said to have had executives at CBS and Warner Bros. extremely upset. "We're not just going to give this away for free," said a CBS exec, upset also not to have gained the "proper respect" as a potential partner. There are lots of other details on objections from others in the story and how Google went ahead even though it hadn't gained explicit permission that it was seeking.

The story also revisits what we've reported before, about some print publishers concerned over the Google digital library and Google Print programs. AFP concerns over Google News indexing is also raised.

Google's response to various concerns is that it is doing what fair use allows, that it allows publishers upset to opt-out even in some fair use cases and that as it expands, it will need to negotiate rights to certain types of content.

Boing Boing summarized a key part of Supreme Court's unsound decision at Salon that looks at how the Grokster case might impact Google. Of course, it's not just Google that would get impacted. It's any web search engine. The article highlights issues I've covered already, about how search engines are mass copyright infringers potentially, but that no one has really challenged them because web site owners seem to like the traffic they get.

The story missteps in suggesting that Google is a peer-to-peer copying tool. It is not. Rather than being like Grokster, which connected people but hosted nothing, Google and gang are much more like Napster -- which actually hosted material (see You Say Napster, I Say Grokster from Slate for more on the difference between the two). Napster, of course, lost its own lawsuit. Despite that, web search engines went on.

So taking a "sky is falling" line on Google in the wake of Grokster makes no sense. If Google and web search engines were going to take a fall, Napster would have been a key chop to fell them. Instead, forget Grokster and watch the most the traditional publishers -- print and video -- make against Google directly. That's going to be key, as I suspect will be what the search engines have already been allowed to do on an opt-out basis for about a decade now. More on that in my past post, Forget Google Print Copyright Infringement; Search Engines Already Infringe.

Finally, Click Here For Inducement Disclaimers from InternetNews.com looks at whether the mere act of running ads for program that might be used for copyright infringement might be considered inducement that lands Google in trouble.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:53 PM | Permalink

Google Wins Click Fraud Case Against Auctions Expert

Last year, news came out that Google was suing one of its own AdSense affiliates alleging click fraud. Google Wins $75,000 In Click Fraud Case from MediaPost covers how Google has won its case against Auctions Expert. The award happened in May but only seems to be coming to light now. Background on the case from when it broke via XBiz and Google gets gruff over click fraud from News.com.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:53 AM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

Google Targeted With Second Class Action Suit On Click Fraud

Google sued over "click fraud" in Web ads from Reuters brings news that Click Defense has filed a lawsuit against Google involving click fraud a few days ago and seek to have it made into a class action. The click fraud detection company says it has found rates of fraud reach as high as 38 percent. Yahoo is not named in this suit. Click Fraud Suit Names Google, Yahoo & Other Search Companies covers the first widely known suit of this type which involves companies beyond Google. Thanks to SEW Forums moderator Nacho who spotted the story -- he's also already got a thread up for people who wish to comment or discuss: Google Sued In Second Click Fraud Lawsuit.

Postscript: If you're interested in reading the complaint that Click Defense filed with the U.S. District Court, we've tracked down a copy. It's available here (PDF; 18 pages).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:12 AM | Permalink

June 21, 2005

Search Engine Domain Seizures In Australia

Misspelled Google case may end up in court from ZDNet Australia covers how Australian search engine marketer Peter Bojanac is considering a lawsuit against the au Domain Administration (auDA) for the domain googl.com.au that he registered but was "confiscated" by auDA.

The regulator's chief executive Chris Disspain said it was an obvious misspelling of Google and therefore its registration was against his organisation's domain policy..."They're in the process of deleting that domain name," he said. "I've requested the return of it, otherwise I'll take legal action against them." "Google have a trademark on 'Google'. They don't have a trademark on 'Googl'," he pointed out.

Earlier this month, auDA seized more than 1,000 domains from the Ansearch Australian search engine. More on that in this article from ZDNet Australia, auDA confiscates dodgy Ansearch domains. Our forum thread Beta Search Engine to be launched in Australia had some discussion and criticism of the registrations back in November.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:45 AM | Permalink

June 9, 2005

Gmerge, a Google Maps Hack is No More

At about the time that the AP published a story about how cool, useful and interesting some of the hacks using Google Maps/satellite images are, word that G had sent a takedown notice to the developers of one such service, gMerge, a service that created wallpaper from Google Maps.

It looks like that the Google developers "heard" what Google had to say and have removed the service from the web.

Of course, Google's satellite images and hacks are cool. However, they're not the only ones out there providing useful satellite tools. I've posted in the past about TerraFly (click on a satellite image, get local info) and World Wind, an open source tool that allows you to interact with satellite images from different repositories.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:32 PM | Permalink

May 27, 2005

Digital Envoy Suit Against Google Can Go Ahead & Full-Text Of Ruling

According to this News.com report Digital Envoy's lawsuit claiming that Google breached its contract with the company, can move forward after being denied a summary judgement in a U.S. District Court last week.

The two companies had a licensing agreement as far back as 2000 that relied on Digital's IP technology to pinpoint the physical location of Web visitors for Google so that it could better serve sponsored search results. (The parties no longer work together.) Digital balked when in 2003, Google broadened use of the geo-location technology to include serving targeted advertisements onto third-party sites in a program called Google AdSense.

If you would like to read the full text of the order denying the summary judgement, you can find a pdf copy of the document here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:43 PM | Permalink

April 15, 2005

Google Sues Froogles Over Its Name

Last July we posted an item to the SEW Forums about Google asking ICANN (the domain name organization) to not allow Froogles (a discount shopping site) to use the domain because it was "confusingly similar" to Google.

Google lost. The AP reported:

"The dissimilar letters in the domain name are sufficiently different to make it distinguishable from Google's mark," the panel found. The name Froogles.com "creates an entirely new word and conveys an entirely singular meaning from the mark."

Again, this all went down last July.

Today, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that Google has now filed suit against Froogles in a U.S. federal court alleging trademark infringement.

A David-vs.-Goliath saga pitting a Long Island entrepreneur against Internet giant Google Inc. may hinge on just that, according to papers filed this week in federal court..."Personally, I find it ironic that a company whose motto is 'do no evil' would put so much effort into trying to muscle me out of my business," [Richard] Wolfe [the owner of Froogles.com] wrote in an e-mail Thursday...Google spokesman Steve Langdon said federal court was the proper venue for deciding issues of "use and registration" of the trademark "in a single proceeding."

We've also tracked down the full text of the complaint that Google filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. You can access the filing (68 pages; PDF) here.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:39 PM | Permalink

March 22, 2005

Google News Says Au Revoir to Agence France Press Content

Less than a week after Agence France Press (AFP) filed a lawsuit against Google alleging copyright infringement of its content by Google, the folks in Mountain View will no longer index AFP material and remove old AFP content from the Google News index. The eWeek article: Google to Drop AFP from News Index, provides more details. If you would like to read the complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in DC, we've posted it here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:17 PM | Permalink

March 16, 2005

France: Google Loses Appeal of Trademark Case

Google has lost an appeal of a trademark infringement case in France and will have to pay $100,300 in damages.

The court in Versailles, west of Paris, found that Google Inc. was guilty of "trademark counterfeiting" and ordered it to pay the damages originally awarded to French travel companies Luteciel and Viaticum, as well as costs.

More in the article: Google Loses French Trademark Appeal.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:32 PM | Permalink

February 9, 2005

Is Hatemongering A Problem On Orkut?

Free speech versus providing an outlet for people to spread hate is an issue that Google will need to deal with on its Orkut social-networking service. The New York Times article: Hate Messages on Google Site Draw Concern, offers an overview.

The hatemongering is fast becoming an embarrassment for Google, the world's most popular search engine, particularly because the company has adopted "don't be evil" as its motto. The potential for tarnishing Google's gold-plated brand name also underscores the risks the company faces as it expands into new Internet businesses in which it has less experience. For Google, the trouble on Orkut - which is still in beta, or test, form - could easily escalate. A prosecutor in Brazil, where the service is especially popular, has already initiated an investigation into some of the more virulent Orkut sites.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:35 AM | Permalink

January 13, 2005

SEC Will Not Pursue Case Against Google

We've learned from an SEC 8-K filing that the Securities and Exchange Commission will not pursue a case against Google regarding the pre-IPO publication of a Playboy interview with Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The filing also points out that Google has also settled with the SEC "relating to its stock option practices." Google will not be fined. These three documents offer details. + Cease and Decist Order from the SEC + Google's Offer of Settlement + Consent Order for Violations Of Section 25110 Of The California Corp. Code

Posted by Gary Price at 12:55 PM | Permalink

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