September 23, 2009

Google Sidewiki Enables Comments for Every Web Site

A new Google Toolbar feature allows web users to read and comment on any and every web site. The feature is called Google Sidewiki and is available for the Firefox and IE versions of the Toolbar.

Unlike blogs, the most recent comments won't appear first. Instead, Google has, of course, developed a ranking algorithm to place what they deem the most relevant comments first.

Right now, very few sites have comments on them. Hopefully, as time goes by, there will be more useful content.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. Remember how Google always releases something big right after a major announcement by a competitor? Well, this is probably their answer to Yahoo's new search update from yesterday.

In the meantime, check out this introductory video, go try SearchWiki for yourself. Then come back and leave us a comment, letting us know what you think.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

July 1, 2009

Google Toolbar for IE Gets Advanced Translation

Google has updated their Toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to make language translation easier. Instead of manually copying and pasting text into Google Translate, the Toolbar now automatically detects if a language is different from the one set as your default.

Google will then serve up a message saying it has detected a language foreign to your own and asking if you would like it translated. Simply click the "Tranlate" button in order to receive the translation.

The new feature is available for all languages of the Toolbar (but again, just for Internet Explorer). The languages include: English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 24, 2009

Google Launches Toolbar Labs; My Location is First Feature

Google has given Toolbar a new experimental playground called Toolbar Labs, which is akin to Google Labs and GMail Labs. Essentially, when a Google product gets "Labs," it means users can select from among features instead of having them automatically included in an update.

With the launch of Toolbar Labs comes the first feature. "My Location" is now available via Toolbar Labs for users to add to their Toolbars.

If you're not familiar, "My Location" uses nearby wifi access points to find your location. Using that information, they can provide local results for a search.

Related Reading: Google Releases Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer Google Updates Firefox Toolbar with Personalized Tab Page If You Want To Know When Google Updates Toolbar PR Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter Google Toolbar Update Features News Tabs

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 25, 2009

Google Releases Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer

It's hard to read and write the news about Google's Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer without thinking of how it must result from their official position siding with the EU against Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows.

One of the major updates for the new IE toolbar is the Quick Search Box. This places the Google logo in the IE taskbar for a widget that enables a quick query with search suggestions. Obviously, Google isn't waiting around for regulations to help them maintain their search market monopoly share.

IE toolbar users will also get the personalized tab page that Firefox toolbar users got a few weeks back. The page loads the most visited pages of the browser user. (Google says they do this without gathering data. Instead, the data resides on the PC.)

Interestingly enough, yesterday's Safari browser update offers similar personalized funcationality.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 2, 2009

Google Updates Firefox Toolbar with Personalized Tab Page

Google has updated its Firefox toolbar with a nifty new feature: a personalized tab page. If you use Firefox and conduct tabbed browsing, you know that when you open a new tab, a blank page comes up.

But with this new update, Google toolbar users will now see a Google branded page with thumbnails of their favorite sites, which can be edited. They can click on a thumbnail to go directly to the site shown.

Privacy worry warts, take ease. All of the information about favorite sites remains locally on the browser. It doesn't get sent to Google.

Related Reading: If You Want To Know When Google Updates Toolbar PR Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter Google Toolbar Update Features News Tabs

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 1, 2009

If You Want To Know When Google Updates Toolbar PR Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter

Call it a late Christmas gift or a New Year's present, but Matt Cutts confirmed the recent Google toolbar PR on Twitter the other night.

His tweet can be seen here. While you are there you might as well start following him for any other short sentenced pearls of wisdom.

Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal gave some more details of the update. Hopefully your site got some lift from it. But as Loren points out the toolbar is not a truly accurate measure of PR.

Posted by Frank Watson at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 11, 2008

Google Toolbar Update Features News Tabs

Google Toolbar 5 for IE was recently released, and it includes an update to its News feature. Now, a drop down box includes tabs for 5 news niches: Top Stories, U.S., World, Entertainment, and Science/Technology.

You can check the headlines without leaving the page you're currently browsing or click a link to read more about a news item you're interested in.

Here's a screenshot:

Related Reading: Election Tools from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL Google Site Search Integrated with Adobe Community Help

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

February 15, 2008

SEW Experts: Google PageRank: Simplified

Google's PageRank may be the single most divisive element in the search optimization game. In today's Outsourced column, "Google PageRank: Simplified," William Flaiz outlines the controversy surrounding Toolbar PageRank and its impact on SEO and link building strategies.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 29, 2007

Matt Cutts Confirms Google-Slap

With all the guessing and theorizing about Google's recent PageRank update, there's now at least confirmation that the update happened, and why.

According to Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal, one of the affected sites, he received confirmation from Matt Cutts that the move was definitely targeting paid link sellers: The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

According to Andy Beard (whose site was also affected), another PageRank update is in progress.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:25 AM | Permalink

December 14, 2006

New features added to Google Toolbar for Firefox

There's a new version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Google Toolbar 3 Beta offers Firefox users all the features of the Toolbar for Internet Explorer plus custom buttons, online bookmarks, Google Docs & Spreadsheets integration and new sharing capabilities.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 2:42 PM | Permalink

October 19, 2006

Searching Via Internet Explorer 7 & The Battle To Be The Default Search Engine

Now that Internet Explorer 7 has been released in final format, I wanted to look at how search is being handled within the browser. There's been lots of discussion and worries about this in the past. Speculation time is over; reality is here. In this article, how the IE7 search box works, how you can change it and how Google and Yahoo's toolbars behave within it to try and maintain their default status, once gained.

The biggest difference with Internet Explorer 7 is the one that's been most discussed, a visible search box built into the "chrome." In the picture below, you can see the search box, complete with the word "Google" in light text to remind me what search engine is my default.

(NOTE: I've used a lot of screenshots, drawing off my Flickr account and picked a day when Flickr has became sluggish after I wrote this. Apologies if the pictures don't show when you view the page. Try reloading or checking back).

Google is my default search engine because it was that way in Internet Explorer 6. It became my default there with my permission, when I installed the Google Toolbar on my laptop (where I did today's testing) ages ago.

I removed the Google Toolbar for the purposes of testing IE7. That didn't cause the IE6 default settings to change, and to Microsoft's credit, they didn't try to override it when I upgraded to IE7.

Microsoft had previously said that if it detected a particular search engine was set to be a default, it would respect that. So, IE7 did -- sort of. Notice however what comes up in the main window of Internet Explorer 7 when I relaunched it:

Here, I'm notified that Google's my default, and I'm asked to confirm this or make another choice. Overall, I think that's fine. Yes, it's Microsoft hoping to change some minds. Maybe "Keep my current default search provider" should be ticked already. But I'd say most people who have Google as their default now will confirm keeping it that way. It's hardly anti-competitive.

Google, in particular, has disagreed. On a new machine, where Google has no presence or partnership, Microsoft Live Search will be the default. Google had suggested that users should be explicitly asked to make a choice from one of several providers. In my past article about this, I wrote about not being sympathetic to that idea, given that Google has had no problem paying to override consumer choice to gain the default position through deals with Firefox or through Dell installations.

Since then, deals have only accelerated. Yahoo partnered with Acer and also with HP. Google cut a deal with Adobe. It's difficult to know how a consumer is going to buy a "virgin" machine where the defaults haven't already been decided or influenced by some business deal.

Given this, let's focus on how consumers can make their choices after the fact. That's pretty easy. From that opening screen that IE gives after installation, tick the "Let me select from a list of other search providers" option and then choose Save Settings at the bottom of the page.

That will brings up this page (other pages might come up for other language/country configurations):

Very fairly, Microsoft isn't positioning themselves at the top of the list or more prominently than others. In fact, I think Microsoft is making a terrible mistake by just saying "Live Search" rather than "Microsoft Live Search." I think relatively few people know the Live brand right now. I can well imagine some people thinking, "Live Search -- what's that?" and skipping the search engine from consideration.

I selected Live Search from the list. That made a pop-up box appear:

Notice the option to make the choice as my default is NOT ticked. This allows you to add several search engines to the search box, which you can then selectively use while still maintaining your default search engine. You can add a bunch of different providers, and I'll come back to this more below.

It's worth noting that the Search Provider page links to information about the OpenSearch system, a way for anyone to easily create search engines that can be added to IE7. Of course, that doesn't mean you get added to the all-important Search Provider page. It just means someone visiting your site might be able to use a button that you promote to them to change their IE7 settings.

That Search Provider page also has an interesting box allowing you to visit any search engine, then do a copy-and-paste action to make your own search box. It's very clever. You simply search for TEST on anything that gives you a search box. Copy-and-paste the resulting URL, and IE7 will automatically create the right way to access that search engine for you. I added Search Engine Watch as a search engine to my IE7 installation easily by doing this.

In the example above, I didn't change my default search provider. Now let's say I want to, perhaps some time after I've initially installed IE7. Google has previous spun the idea of changing settings in IE7 as some complicated task. It even cited research saying only one third of users could figure it out. I have more faith that people can do it, so let's go through the steps.

1. Click the Tools button in IE7's menu, then pick Internet Options  
2. On the General tab of the Internet Options window that appears, there's a Search area. Click on the Settings button here.  
3. That brings up a Change Search Defaults menu: (FYI, I wish the "Find more providers" link was much more visible here. If you didn't pick more providers from when IE was initially installed, you won't have any choices in the main selection area -- and you might miss that link. This is handled in a better way through an alternative method I'll cover below).  
4. Choose the search engine you want, push the Set Default button, then OK. Now you're done.

Well, not necessarily. After I did this, Google was shown as my choice within the search box in the chrome. Evil Google! No, it seems more an IE thing. When I closed and restarted IE7, the default was changed to Live Search.

Let's go back to that search box in the chrome. Obviously, you can use it to search. Enter some words, hit return or click the magnifying glass icon/button, and the browser will pull back results from your default search engine.

The box also allows you to temporarily or permanently change your default search provider. Next to the box, use the down-arrow to get a drop-down menu like this:

From it, any search engine you've added to your providers list is shown. You can see how several providers I've selected are added, including the custom choice I made for Search Engine Watch.

Choose a provider, and then your search will go to that provider for that particular search, similar to how the box in Firefox works. It stays this way until you change it back or until you close IE7 entirely.

Look at the bottom of the menu. The drop-down box lets you get to the IE7 search providers page or bring up the Change Search Defaults box I showed in step 3 above. That makes changing providers a two step process.

Next up, I wanted to see how the search engines competing with Microsoft were reacting to a freshly minted copy of IE7 showing up at their doorsteps. Would I get prompts to change, as we've seen in the past from both Google and Yahoo?

Google and Yahoo surprisingly did nothing. I wonder if this might because the final release of IE7 has made some type of browser agent change that the two have set to identify. We'll see. Meanwhile, Ask gave me this box enticing me to change:

Next up, time to deal with concerns that Google might be too aggressive in protecting itself once installed as the default via the Google Toolbar. I loaded up a fresh copy. In short order, Google asked me if I wanted to make it both my default search provider and notify me if something tries to change that:

To help avoid controversy, Google ought to make these separate options. But from a usability perspective, I can well understand the logic of making then a single choice. If I want Google to be my default, I probably don't want something to try and change that behind my back -- and many have had bad experiences with adware and spyware doing exactly that.

I told it Google fine, then I was surprised that the next screen made me decide whether to have PageRank display enabled or not.

In the past, I recall this as an option you were never prompted to enable. Instead, I recall it as something that search engine optimization folks (about the only ones who care) would enable by diving into the advanced options and switching it on.

I could be wrong in my recollection. If so, my apologies. But even with Google's clear "in your face" warning that enabling PageRank will send data to them, I still wonder if perhaps the screen should be different.

Maybe PageRank display should be disabled by default, rather than making you choose. The screen that appears would then ask explicitly if you wanted to change to enabled. It would explain what it provides to the user (the screen itself tells you nothing, not even a short description such as here). It would then warn, as it does now, that enabling the feature allows Google to see every page you are visiting.

All installed, Google gives me a big notice to let me know I'm ready to go with the toolbar:

I then tried to change search providers using the steps above. That seemed to work, but then I got this small notification in my task bar, along with an audible signal:

My task bar is at the top of the screen (where it belongs, in my opinion!). By default, the task bar is at the bottom of Windows machines by default, so the notification could be less noticeable there. The sound helps, but frankly I don't know why this was blocked at all.

There's a big difference between spyware changing your default setting and users themselves trying to change the default using the options within Internet Explorer. Google ought to be able to distinguish the two. Changes made by a user shouldn't be blocked. Moreover, any blocking ought to ask me for confirmation that it's going to happen, not just be done on my behalf.

In other words, consider this. I'd consented for Google to notify me if something was trying to change my default settings, as shown on that earlier screenshot. I did not consent to it doing the blocking on my behalf, which is what it did. It would have been far better if Google had produced some type of pop-up box telling me that something wanted to change my defaults and asking me if I wanted to allow this. Leave the choice with me.

I'll follow-up with Google about this. Meanwhile, what to do if you want to override the decision Google made for you? When that notification happens, you have to click on the little G button in your task bar (if the notification is gone, try changing again to make it come back). Clicking on the G brings up a box like this:

That box is what I think Google should actually show you, rather than processing it behind the scenes unless you manually make it appear. It tells you something wants to change your default, asks if you want to allow that to happen and lets you override what Google wants to do, remain the default, if that's your decision.

If you override, that should disable Google from doing any future monitoring, as it tells you will be the case:

That's what I found to happen. In fact, I see no signs that Google is still monitoring despite being told not to. That's what happened in July, when the GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe program continued to run. Google said this was a bug, which got some dubious laughs in some quarters. Bug or not, I certainly don't see it happening now.

To further test it, I went back to Ask.com and let it make it my default search provider. That worked fine.

Once you've disabled monitoring, what if you want it back? Use the Settings menu of the Google Toolbar, then on the More tab, you'll see two options:

The two different options intrigued me. What was the difference between:

• Set and keep Search settings to Google
  • Notify me on settings change

I enabled only the first. Bad, bad choice. If you do this, you simply cannot change your settings at all unless you go back into the Google Toolbar and override the option. Google will silently keep any settings from being altered. If you enable them both, then you get back to the behavior where at least Google will give you a notification.

Overall, here's what I'd like to see. The Google Toolbar should ask if you want to be notified about changes. If something tries to make a change, it should then ask you for explicit permission whether to override this, at least the first time -- perhaps it gives you an option to let Google handle these changes without notifications behind the scenes after that. But yes -- get in the users face more about what you're going to change initially, so they know what's going on.

Having played with Google, I next loaded up the Yahoo Toolbar. Ugh, not fun. First, Yahoo by default wants to cram Norton Spyware scan down your throat. Yes, right under the big Download Yahoo! Toolbar button in smaller text is an option to get just the toolbar without it. I'd rather see that option get equal play.

After the installation, like Google, Yahoo stands ready to be both my default search engine and help me get back to Yahoo if something changes my default settings:

Like Google, Yahoo makes it clear you've got the toolbar with this big pop-up window:

Decide to personalize the toolbar, as Yahoo suggests? To do that, you've got to have a Yahoo account. That means the toolbar does more than drive searches for Yahoo. Unlike Google, Yahoo's trying to generate user registrations, as well. The toolbar works without registration, of course -- but it no doubt encourages some people to sign up.

I manually changed my default provider from Yahoo to Google, using the steps above. Yahoo didn't block this. But when I closed the browser and relaunched it, I got this:

Fair enough. Unlike Google, Yahoo didn't silently switch itself back. It asked me to make that choice. It was also a one time thing. I told it to allow the change, then closed my browser and reopened it. Yahoo didn't come back and try to get me to switch back to Yahoo again.

Actually, I wouldn't have minded that. I find it very helpful that Firefox or Internet Explorer will keep asking me if I want them as a default unless I explicitly use the offered tick box not to be asked again. That's because it's easy to accidentally hit the wrong button. It's harder to both hit the wrong button and enable a tick box.

All this effort by the toolbars to maintain default status comes off the fear that the IE7 search box is going to somehow gain Microsoft tons of search traffic. I've been pessimistic about this actually happening. I've noted for ages that despite Microsoft long having hooks into IE for its own search, Google and Yahoo have both survived and thrived. My Google Worried About Microsoft's Browser Advantage? What Advantage? article goes into much more depth about this.

It's uncertain to me that the search box in the "chrome" is going to make that much of a difference, but I haven't seen much user behavior data here. I could be completely wrong, and Microsoft's competitors are certainly worried about it. We'll know in short order. IE7 is being rolled out in a mandatory fashion to Windows users beginning November 1 through the Windows update system. If Microsoft's search share rises, the chrome search box may be working.

However, I think many people will still fire up their browser and go back to the search engines they regularly use. Google and Yahoo might not have the enticements to switchover today up, but those will come. And I think those will help them to largely preserve their shares despite the IE7 rollout.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:16 AM | Permalink

September 11, 2006

Google's Toolbar Anti-Phishing Blacklist

Philipp Lenssen reports on a whitelist of URLs found at sb.google.com which appears to be a whitelist of safe URLs to be used for the Google Toolbar. Be digging deeper into the forums area of Google Blogoscoped, you can see that the this whitelist will prevent the "Web Forgery" warning in the Google Toolbar from popping up on those particular sites.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:25 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

Google Toolbar Bug Warns Against Use Of Other Search Engines

Philipp Lenssen reports that a bug in the Google Toolbar warns users when they select other search engines to use. If you enable in the toolbar that you want to keep Google as your main search engine, and you install a toolbar from say MSN, it will pop up warnings at you. The warning reads, "Google has blocked an attempt by another program to change your default search settings."

Benjamin Lewis from Google said there is a bug with the program, "The fact that GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe remains in memory after disabling the feature is a bug – thank you for reporting it. We're working on it right now and should have it fixed shortly. As long as the feature is disabled the .exe doesn't actually do anything, it just remains in memory (not that this makes it less of a problem)." More details at Google System blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:15 AM | Permalink

July 26, 2006

Google Toolbar Look-Alike Installing Malicious Programs

Search Engine Journal reports on a SurfControl release that fake Google Toolbars are being downloaded unknowingly and causing those computers to be contaminated with malicious programs. The programs then use the computers to send out mass-email spam and/or for "internet attacks." So be careful where you download your toolbars.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:18 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

June 22, 2006

Google Updates Toolbar Privacy Policy

It appears to me that Google updated the Google Toolbar Privacy Policy yesterday. I know the dates do not reflect that on the page, but if you take a look at the current version and compare it to the cached version from Jun 16, 2006 you will notice a lot of changes. Below are some of the larger changes to the privacy policy.

+ Removed a bullet that read;

We do not associate any of the information that Toolbar sends with other personal information about you. However, it is possible that a URL or other page information sent to Google may itself contain personal information. For information about how some web sites embed personal information in web requests, click here.

+ Added/Changed Significantly the following bullets;

(1) Toolbar Features that give you access to other Google services such as Blogger and Gmail are subject to the separate Privacy Policies of those products. Features that require use of a Google Account, like Bookmarks, store information with your Account as explained in the main Google Privacy Policy. Other features, like SMS This, that let you transmit data from the Toolbar may log that data transmission, as explained in the FAQ. (2) Third party site custom buttons send information such as search queries to sites that are not operated by Google or covered by Google's Privacy Policy. (3) If you have Google Toolbar Version 4.0 or above, your copy of Google Toolbar includes a unique application number. When you install Google Toolbar, this number and a message indicating whether the installation succeeded are sent back to Google. Also, when Google Toolbar automatically checks to see if a new version is available, the current version number and the unique application number are sent to Google. The unique application number is required for Google Toolbar to work and cannot be disabled. (4) Except for information sent through Toolbar for use with a separate Account-based service such as Gmail, we do not associate any of the information that Toolbar sends with other personal information about you. However, it is possible that a URL or other page information sent to Google may itself contain personal information. For information about how this may happen, click here.

Those are the changes I noticed.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

Google Partners With Adobe For Toolbar Distribution In Shockwave, Other Product To Be Named

Both Adobe (PDF link) and Google have announced a new deal where Adobe will distribute the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer as part of Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player downloads. That was supposed to begin yesterday, and bundling with other Adobe products will happen in the future.

Wait a minute? Weren't Yahoo and Adobe buddy-buddies? Yes -- a special version of the Yahoo Toolbar is built into the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader program, through a deal dating back to October 2004.

In January of this year, Google began distributing Adobe Reader as part of the Google Pack without the Yahoo Toolbar being part of it. Google told me (article for SEW members) then that the Adobe-Yahoo agreement only covered the distribution Adobe did.

So is the Yahoo-Adobe deal completely over? No. Reuters reports that Adobe says that will continue:

Adobe previously included Yahoo Inc.'s toolbar as an option with the Shockwave Player, Adobe spokeswoman Katie Juran said. Adobe still offers the Yahoo toolbar as an option for its Flash Player and Adobe Reader products, she said.

I just uninstalled Acrobat Reader and downloaded a fresh copy. I definitely see the Yahoo Toolbar as part of the latest installation.

As for the Abobe-Google deal, the bundling with Google Pack wasn't based on payment, Google told me at the time. This latest deal is a financial arrangement, though exactly how much money is changing hands is not disclosed.

As for the distribution, I downloaded Shockwave and got no prompt for the Google Toolbar to be added. Of course, I already had it in Internet Explorer, and that seems to be why I didn't get a separate install. The Shockwave FAQ suggests that you should see a separate install process and that this won't happen if you have the Google Toolbar already.

That FAQ also notes that the Yahoo Toolbar, previously bundled with Shockwave, has now been dropped. In addition, it says that that third parties that distribute Shockwave do not have to bundle the Google Toolbar with those distributions.

The Google Blog post also says:

Starting today, Adobe is offering the Google Toolbar to its customers as a free download -- a great way to take Google search with you anywhere on the web.

So far, that seems to be true within Shockwave. But it's also a bit overstated. The Google Toolbar on its own is not offered anywhere on the Adobe products page, nor does a search for "google toolbar" flag any page for those who just want the toolbar on its own

The best, most specific information is part of the Shockwave FAQ that I've mentioned. There is at least a direct link to the Google Toolbar download page. But that's much different that the idea the Google Blog suggests, that people visiting Adobe might be getting a pitch for the Google Toolbar on its own. Not yet, not so far.

Postscript Barry:

I was sent a screen capture of this in action, you can view the screen capture at tcal.net.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:48 AM | Permalink

June 19, 2006

New Search Patent Applications: June 19, 2006 - Autolinking, and Better Advertising through Deletion Predictions

Four patent applications from Google describe fighting spam in emails, providing product review searches, moving large amounts of data, and autolinking. Yahoo matches, and raises with five patent filings. One on watching deletions to choose better ads, another on serving dynamic information through a additional browser interface, and three more on multimedia and RSS.

Microsoft goes TV 2.0 with an electronic program guide, and describes a way of matching advertising content with certain search queries before those searches are made. IBM comes up with a unique way of presenting the results of a search from more than one search engine, and a way of reducing the amount of irrelevant results in a search by analyzing an initial set of results, identifying an appropriate additional query term from those results, and searching the original results again but with the additional query term included in the search.

Go Daddy describes a way of fighting spam in emails. Xerox employs collaborative filtering from previous users' searches to predict search results. Apostolos Gerasoulis, from Ask.com, with a couple of co-inventors, ranks and displays pages (objects) based upon linkage and textual data, and then defines a way to identifiy and assign topics to them.

Google

Email Spam

Emails with links in them could be considered spam if the links point to pages that are in a conceptual category considered spammy. This patent application really doesn't describe the concept categorization part of the process. That's done in a related patent application mentioned within this document, and the related document lists Georges Harik as one inventor. Dr. Harik's name is on a very large percentage of the patent applications involving Gmail-type processes.

Method and system to detect e-mail spam using concept categorization of linked content Invented by Johnny Chen US Patent Application 20060122957 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 3, 2004

Abstract

A system and method for detecting undesired electronic messages (e.g., spam) using concept categorization of hyperlinks is disclosed. A server receives an electronic message and retrieves web pages that correspond to hyperlinks in the message. The server performs concept categorization on the retrieved web pages based on semantic relationships in the received information to determine whether the electronic message meets predefined criteria associated with undesired messages.

Searching and Aggregating Product Reviews

If Google wanted to get into the product or services review business, the next patent filing describes a blue print for the process that might make an effective and innovative system.

Method and system for finding and aggregating reviews for a product Invented by Jan Matthias Ruhl and Mayur D. Datar US Patent Application 20060129446 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 14, 2004

Abstract

The embodiments disclosed herein include new, more efficient ways to collect product reviews from the Internet, aggregate reviews for the same product, and provide an aggregated review to end users in a searchable format. One aspect of the invention is a graphical user interface on a computer that includes a plurality of portions of reviews for a product and a search input area for entering search terms to search for reviews of the product that contain the search terms.

Scaling and Distributing Data

Arvind Jain is the head of Research and Development in Google's Bangalore office, and has spoken at a number of conferences on infrastructure projects and issues involving such things as Google's crawl and indexing system, distributed file replication system, and compression techniques for large scale storage systems. He's listed as the inventor for this next Google filing.

System and method for scalable data distribution Invented by Arvind Jain US Patent Application 20060126201 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 10, 2004

Abstract

A system having a resource manager, a plurality of masters, and a plurality of slaves, interconnected by a communications network. To distribute data, a master determined that a destination slave of the plurality slaves requires data. The master then generates a list of slaves from which to transfer the data to the destination slave. The master transmits the list to the resource manager. The resource manager is configured to select a source slave from the list based on available system resources. Once a source is selected by the resource manager, the master receives an instruction from the resource manager to initiate a transfer of the data from the source slave to the destination slave. The master then transmits an instruction to commence the transfer.

Autolinking

Google's Autolink raised a lot of eyebrows, and brought some negative reactions. A Search Engine Watch Blog post from Danny Sullivan, Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out defined many of the issues around the toolbar feature. The following patent application explains how such a system might work from the search engine's perspective.

Providing useful information associated with an item in a document Invented by Gueorgui Djabarov US Patent Application 20060129910 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 14, 2004

Abstract

A method includes recognizing an item within a first document based on a pattern associated with the item but not the exact content of the item. The method further includes identifying a link for the item and providing a second document that includes information associated with the item when the link for the item is selected.

Yahoo

Choosing Better Ads through User Behavior

Some queries involve the use of concepts and units, as described in at least five Yahoo patent filings (see previous patent posts in the Yahoo sections from Yahoo Units and Microsoft Redundancy Filters and More Yahoo Concepts and Google Predictive Searches.)

But sometimes a two term query isn't a concept as much as it is a couple of keywords that someone may use to search for something. If that person performs a second search after deleting one of the words, then the record of that deletion and second search might help Yahoo calculate "deletion probability scores" for words being used in these kind of two term queries.

This can be helpful when there isn't a good keyword based advertising match for that query, but there might be a good match individually for each of the terms that make up the query. The "deletion probability scores" can help determine which of the two terms to show keyword-based advertising for in search results.

System and methods for ranking the relative value of terms in a multi-term search query using deletion prediction Invented by Rosemary Jones and Daniel C. Fain US Patent Application 20060129534 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 14, 2004

Abstract

The likely relevance of each term of a search-engine query of two or more terms is determined by their deletion probability scores. If the deletion probability scores are significantly different, the deletion probability score can be used to return targeted ads related to the more relevant term or terms along with the search results. Deletion probability scores are determined by first gathering historical records of search queries of two or more terms in which a subsequent query was submitted by the same user after one or more of the terms had been deleted. The deletion probability score for a particular term of a search query is calculated as the ratio of the number of times that particular term was itself deleted prior to a subsequent search by the same user divided by the number of times there were subsequent search queries by the same user in which any term or terms including that given term was deleted by the same user prior to the subsequent search. Terms are not limited to individual alphabetic words.

Browser Interface Helpers

This next document describes some ways to provide additional dynamic information to someone via a toolbar styled interface, while they are browsing pages on the web.

Method of controlling an Internet browser interface and a controllable browser interface Invented by Thomas J. Shafron Assigned to Yahoo US Patent Application 20060129937 Published June 15, 2006 Filed February 2, 2006

Abstract

The present invention is directed to a method of dynamically controlling and displaying an Internet browser interface, and to a dynamically controllable Internet browser interface. In accordance with the present invention, a browser interface may be customized using a controlling software program that may be provided by an Internet content provider, an ISP, or that may reside on an Internet user's computer. The controlling software program enables the Internet user, the content provider, or the ISP to customize and control the information and/or functionality of a user's browser and browser interface.

RSS Enhancements

The following three Yahoo filings all list the same inventors, including John Thrall who is the head of media search engineering, for Yahoo Search. They provide different aspects of using RSS with multimedia files.

Syndicating multiple media objects with RSS Invented by Andrew R. Volk, David D. Hall, and John J. Thrall US Patent Application 20060129917 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 1, 2005

Abstract

System and method for syndicating more than one media object in an element using Real Simple Syndication (RSS). In one embodiment, multiple media objects with at least one shared characteristic are syndicated under the same element. For example, a single media object can come in multiple formats and/or compression rates.

Syndicating multimedia information with RSS Invented by Andrew R. Volk, David D. Hall, John J. Thrall US Patent Application 20060129907 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 1, 2005

Abstract

System and method for adding descriptive information to a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) document. The descriptive information describes the content of media objects syndicated through the document. The descriptive information can be used to provided additional information to a subscriber, and can be used in searching for syndicated media content.

RSS rendering via a media player Invented by Andrew R. Volk, David D. Hall, John J. Thrall US Patent Application 20060129916 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 1, 2005

Abstract

System and method for syndicating media objects through a link to a media player using Real Simple Syndication (RSS). A content provider may not want to give direct access to a media object to a subscriber. Instead a content provider can give the subscriber a link to a media player that can access the media object.

Microsoft

Searching electronic program guide data Invented by Pradhan S. Rao, David Hendler Sloo, Daniel Danker, and George K. Nyako Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060130098 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 15, 2004

Abstract

Searching electronic program guide (EPG) data is described. The EPG data may be compartmentalized into channel metadata that describes characteristics of one or more channels and content metadata that describes characteristics of one or more content items. In a implementation, a method includes searching channel metadata and content metadata. A result of the searching is formed for output in conjunction with an electronic program guide (EPG).

System and method for indexing and prefiltering Invented by Brian Burdick, Joshua J. Forman, Kevin P. Kornelson, Murali Vajjiravel, and Rajeev Prasad Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060129555 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 9, 2004

Abstract

A method and system are provided for selecting advertisements for presentation to a user in response to a user search query. The system may include a keyword server for parsing the user search query and an index server for receiving the parsed search query. The index server may include an index of advertising phrases and pre-filtering components for comparing index entries to the parsed user search query in order to discard non-matching index entries and locate matching entries. The pre-filtering components may include either a phrase length pre-filtering component or a word hash pre-filtering component. The system may additionally include a listing server for sorting through the matching entries located by the index server and further filtering the matching entries for retrieval and presentation to the user.

IBM

Ring method, apparatus, and computer program product for managing federated search results in a heterogeneous environment Invented by Wade Shelby Beavers and David Joseph Borrillo Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060129530 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 9, 2004

Abstract

A method, apparatus and computer program product are provided for managing federated search results in a heterogeneous environment. A user enters a search term and the search term is submitted to multiple selected search engines. Search results are gathered from each selected search engine. A search ring is generated including a ring section to represent each of the selected search engines for enabling the user to view search results from one or more of the selected search engines.

Method and system for suggesting search engine keywords Invented by Cary Lee Bates Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060129531 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 9, 2004

Abstract

A search engine receives a search query having one or more keywords. The documents in the result set from that search query are analyzed to identify one or more additional keywords that further segment, or separate, the initial result set. These additional keywords are presented to the user who then selects whether to include or exclude documents matching the additional keywords. In this way, the number of documents in the initial result set is reduced in a relatively quick and effortless manner.

Go Daddy

Email filtering system and method Invented by Brad Owen and Jason Steiner US Patent Application 20060129644 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 14, 2004

Abstract

Systems and methods of the present invention allow filtering out spam and phishing email messages based on the links embedded into the email messages. In a preferred embodiment, an Email Filter extracts links from the email message and obtains desirability values for the links. The Email Filter may route the email message based on desirability values. Such routing includes delivering the email message to a Recipient, delivering the message to a Quarantine Mailbox, or deleting the message.

Xerox

Personalized web search method Invented by Lisa S. Purvis Assigned to Xerox Corporation US Patent Application 20060129533 Published June 15, 2006 Filed December 15, 2004

Abstract

A method for contextualizing search results is disclosed. The method includes performing a traditional web query that returns a set of result pages, using collaborative filtering techniques to generate a set of predicted pages, comparing the set of predicted pages with the set of result pages, and ranking the set of result pages so that result pages that are also included in the set of predicted pages are ranked higher than those that are not. Methods herein also contemplate using the search history of the user or others to refine the results of searches.

Ask.com

Relevancy-based database retrieval and display techniques Invented by Tao Yang, Wei Wang, and Apostolos Gerasoulis US Patent Application 20060129552 Published June 15, 2006 Filed February 2, 2006

Abstract

Techniques to retrieve, rank and display data objects retrieved form a database are described. In particular, methods to assign a global ranking value to a data object based on a combination of that object's link-based (e.g., vector-space cluster analysis) and text-based (e.g., word frequency) ranks are described. Additional techniques to determine a set of concepts, topics or key words associated with each retrieved data objects are described.

My usual reminder about patents: Some of the processes and technology described in patents are created in house, and some are developed with the assistance of contractors and partners. A percentage are never developed in a tangible manner, but may serve as a way to attempt to exclude others from using the technology, or even to possibly mislead competitors into exploring an area that they might not have an interest in (sometimes skepticism is good.)

There are times when a Google or Yahoo acquires a company to gain access to the intellectual property of that company, or the intellectual prowess and expertise of that company's employees. And sometimes patents are just purchased.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 8:42 PM | Permalink

May 12, 2006

Microsoft Fires Back at Google Over IE7 Complaint

News.com reports that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, feels Google is asking for special treatment with the whole controversy on IE7 defaulting the search to MSN Search. Ballmer explains that if you configured IE to use Yahoo search, then when you upgrade to IE7, Yahoo will remain as the default. Only when you get a new computer, will the default search be MSN Search. Also, if you want to change that, the first option in the list is Ask.com, since the search engines are sorted alphabetically. More food for thought off Danny's last comment on this.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:34 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

IE7 Users Are Prompted To Use Google, Yahoo

ClickZ reports that they have noticed when using Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 7, and visiting Google, you are prompted with a DTHML popup box that says, "Make Google your Search Engine in Internet Explorer," as you see here:

Click For Larger Image

Is this Google's way of fighting back against their objections of IE7? Google is upset that Microsoft sets MSN Search as the default engine on IE7. So if you are using IE7 and visit Google, Google will go out of their way to help you switch that default to engine to Google Search.

This is not the first time Google or even Yahoo has promoted their search engine. Philipp Lessen reported this exact thing for IE7 users back September 2005. Also, Yahoo did the same, to IE 7 users in January 2006.

Postscript From Danny: I added the Google image above, plus Yahoo's still doing the same thing, as you'll see below:

Click For Larger Image

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:25 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2006

Google Worried About Microsoft's Browser Advantage? What Advantage?

I was off yesterday (it was a holiday in England), so I merrily missed the fireworks over Google's objections to Microsoft's plans for search in Internet Explorer 7. Nevertheless, a few calls from reporters penetrated my holiday bubble, and I added a brief note with my thoughts below Barry's post about the news. But today, I wanted to more formally revisit the issue. In short, I find Google's concerns pretty overblown, somewhat hypocritical and most important, worry over something that's not likely going to hurt them.

I am nauseatingly exhausted by idea that Microsoft will conjure up some magical method of yanking people into its MSN Windows Live Whatever You Want To Call It search service via the Windows operating system or the Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft has failed for years to be successful in this, which is why it's amazing anyone would still believe it.

In the longer version of this post for Search Engine Watch members, I revisit the tired facts in more depth:

• How search has been integrated into Windows and Internet Explorer since 1996 but failed to help Microsoft.  
• How even when MSN Search was made the default choice by 2001, Google still rose in traffic share.  
• How putting the search box into the "chrome" of the browser doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft will have a major win this time.  
• How search via toolbars still remain the minority of the way searches happen.

Meanwhile, skip past the business aspects. What about the consumer issue of choice? The New York Times writes of Google's preferred solution:

The best way to handle the search box, Google asserts, would be to give users a choice when they first start up Internet Explorer 7. It says that could be done by asking the user to either type in the name of their favorite search engine or choose from a handful of the most popular services, using a simple drop-down menu next to the search box. The Firefox and Opera browsers come with Google set as the default, but Ms. Mayer said Google would support unfettered choice on those as well.

Sure, I can get behind the "give people a choice from the beginning" idea. But if Google wants Microsoft to do that, then Google should make it happen right now in Firefox, which pretty much is Google's surrogate browser. If this is the best way for a browser to behave, then Google should be putting its weight on Firefox to make it happen. And Google should also ensure it does the same with Dell, where it has a partnership that I believe makes it the default search engine on new Dell computers.

It would be much easier to back Google's suggestions for IE7 if it was already doing this with its own partnerships. That's especially so given this latest article comes two months after the Wall Street Journal gave big play to Google's concerns with IE7. Back in February, the Journal wrote:

In December, for these and other reasons, Google refused to sign an agreement with Microsoft relating to the new browser's search capabilities. Microsoft left Google off the list of alternative search services. A month later, Microsoft notified Google it would be included on the list with or without a signed agreement, according to people familiar with the matter. Microsoft says after a review of its legal position, it realized it could include Google without a formal pact.

So Google's been concerned about choice for months. Nevertheless, it has failed to make any changes in Firefox, as I wrote after reviewing the Wall Street Journal article:

It's an odd argument, given that Google has not demanded that Firefox make consumers do similar choices in that browser. A partnership deal makes Google the default in Firefox, except for Asian-language versions where Yahoo cut its own deals.

In the end, I find it almost amazing that Google feels it needs to drop hints to the US Justice Department and the EU that it perhaps needs protection. In the search space, it's Google that remains the major player that many people feel may need to have a counter to. A list of the most popular search engines? Since those are largely US-dominated companies, I suspect the EU would want to change the playing field not to stop Microsoft but to hinder both Google and Microsoft. Is that a box Google really wants to open?

Finally, some second-day stories, that I've reviewed after writing the article above:

• Google supports choice...except on FireFox and Opera from Microsoft's Don Dodge raising the same issue I covered above, that Google has hardly demonstrated a support of choice in the way it demands of Microsoft.  
• Google's Double Standard from Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny, again looking at Google's failure to support choice.  
• Google cries foul, but for what? from Ed Bott provides nice screenshots on how changing providers in IE7 is about the same as changing in Firefox with one exception - MSN Search is NOT an option in Firefox while Google IS an option in IE7. How about Google putting some pressure on Firefox to let Microsoft in the door. It is one of the web's major search engines. It ought to be on that list.  
• Google and choice from Nick Carr has the interesting suggestion that if Google's for choice, shouldn't the Google home page -- which gets far more users than any browser toolbar -- let users make a search choice? The idea gave me a chuckle, but I wouldn't agree. If you go to Google, you wanted Google. I don't buy into the idea you went there because you thought Google was just a synonym for search.  
• Microsoft and Google Set to Wage Arms Race from the New York Times follows on yesterday's article to look at the idea that in the war between Google and Microsoft (and Yahoo, but they don't get a mention), Google's hardly a scrappy underdog. In fact, it has people worried about it perhaps being a monopoly or too powerful. That's something that's been going on since 2002, as my Google: Can The Marcia Brady Of Search Stay Sweet? article from back then covers in more depth.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Google Objects To Microsoft's IE7 Search Default Plans.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:09 AM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Microsoft's IE 7 Serve Unfair Advantage Over Google & Yahoo?

Everyone is pointing to a NY Times article that claims Google is complaining to the Justice Department and the European Commission about Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7. IE7 has set the default browser search engine to MSN Search, Google feels this puts Microsoft at an unfair advantage. Marissa Mayer is quoted as saying; "The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services." She adds, "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose." Microsoft replied to this saying that Google is correct, IE7 sets MSN Search as the default, but changing that setting is incredibly easy and can be done at any time.

The article also says "Microsoft insists it has no intention of deploying its browser as a weapon in the search wars." I have always thought Microsoft would use its browser as an asset in wining the search war. I even claimed that relevancy wouldn't play a part in which search engine gains the most market share in the future. Let me be clear, Danny Sullivan disagrees with me on this point. And this weekend, recent information showed that Danny may be right and I may be wrong. But if Google is that worried about IE7 and Microsoft, than maybe I will be right? Time will tell and I hope Danny follows up on this entry with his own thoughts.

Postscript From Danny: Just briefly, I've written before (and here and here) that despite having a browser tie-in for years, Microsoft has failed to maintain search marketshare. IE7 and Vista, in my view, will hardly be the killer tool in beating Google and Yahoo for Microsoft.

In some related articles, see Google Testing Software Distribution With Dell, Plus Details On IE7 Search Battle, which summarizes a Wall Street Journal article earlier this year on the ongoing fight/issues with search and Internet Explorer. The article itself is here: Pressuring Microsoft, PC Makers Team Up With Its Software Rivals. Also see Google-MSN Fight In Internet Explorer 7; Yahoo Pokes At Google In Firefox.

Postscript 2 From Danny: I've now posted some extended comments here: Google Worried About Microsoft's Browser Advantage? What Advantage?

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Google Objects To Microsoft's IE7 Search Default Plans.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:29 AM | Permalink

April 26, 2006

Google Toolbar Now Supports IE 7

When Google released version 4 of the toolbar it did not support Internet Explorer 7. Nathan Weinberg reports that they now support IE 7 browsers. If you visit http://toolbar.google.com/T4/ you will notice under the download icon, "Now supports IE7." Nice catch.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:33 AM | Permalink

April 24, 2006

Matt Cutts Of Google Comments On Google Toolbar & Rankings

There has always been speculation on the Google Toolbar and if Google uses the data captured from the toolbar for ranking and indexing purposes. Lee Odden asked Matt Cutts of Google for a comment on those theories, in which Matt replied with a typical Google answer - we may. :) Basically, Matt hints that Google does not use the data for ranking purposes, because it can be too easily spoofed. But Matt said he wouldn't say they won't every use it or have never used the data from the toolbar. For the full, unedited response, visit Matt Cutts on Toolbar Data.

Matt believe this all springs from a recent thread at WebmasterWorld, I covered here. Where the thread discusses "traffic" being the new ranking factor in Google's algorithm. One way to determine traffic would be to use the Google Toolbar data. Google has been rumored to use the Google Toolbar data for indexing new pages for a while now. Matt did not comment on that rumor in his statement to Lee Odden.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:19 AM | Permalink

April 6, 2006

Google Releases Google Toolbar 2.0 for Firefox

The Google Labs page recently posted a link to Google Extensions for Firefox, with a new version of the Firefox toolbar available. The 2.0 feature set has added "Enhanced Search Box," "Subscribe to Feed," "Google Safe Browsing," "Send with Gmail," and "Custom Layouts." You can download the toolbar at google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/ and for a full list of the features click here.

Postscript From Danny: Despite saying you can use your preferred newsreader, Google tells me the only readers supported are Google Personalized Homepage, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks, My Yahoo, NewsGator and Pluck.

 

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:02 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2006

Google Toolbar Patent Dispute To Go To Court

News.com reports that the Google Toolbar patent case is to proceed after Google's request for a summary judgment was denied. NetJumper sued Google around two years ago for patent infringement of retrieving information through a browser. From a quick look, you can see NetJumper has software named LinkZilla that enables "any website or software application to place a folder of links in user bookmarks with a single click." If you look at the Google Toolbar feature page, it is extremely similar to the "AutoLink" feature.

It seems like NetJumper recently introduced Bookmarks2, which may be incredibly similar to Google Toolbar version 4's bookmarks feature.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:23 AM | Permalink

February 9, 2006

Buttons, Buttons, Get & Make Your Google Toolbar Buttons

Google Releases Upgraded Toolbar from us earlier covered how the new Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer allows for custom search buttons, which can benefit both site owners and searchers. I wanted to highlight a few new resources since then. If you're a Search Engine Watch member, also see this longer post that goes into more in depth on how to make your own buttons for visitors without needing to be a tech guru.

• Jim Boykin spots some cool Google Toolbar buttons that Aaron Wall has posted. There are a variety to give you link popularity stats, with some complex stuff to remove forum links that might be discounted. I especially like the domain age, competitive analysis, blog analysis and some handy tools.  
• The Google Toolbar Button Gallery has a growing number of buttons in various categories, ready for use. The tools category has some especially shiny stuff, like being able to visit a site anonymously.  
• Want our button? Click here to get it. Our button lets you search everything on the Search Engine Watch Blog and get the last 15 items posted, refreshed every 15 minutes.  
• Niall Kennedy's Google Toolbar search button template is an easy way for those using Movable Type blogs to get their own buttons with blog feed updates embedded in them.  
• Getting Started with the Google Toolbar API is an overview of how you can click and make your own buttons for any site, useful for searchers and webmasters alike. Webmasters will want to dive into the full documentation for further instructions.

Postscript: Aaron's added a number of buttons for various search blogs, including our own. Be sure to check out the logo next to the search button for Google's Matt Cutts's blog.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:05 AM | Permalink

February 8, 2006

Google Testing Software Distribution With Dell, Plus Details On IE7 Search Battle

We covered last month that Google was providing personal home pages for Dell. Dell testing preinstalled Google software package from Reuters now looks at how Google is working with Dell to put Google's desktop search and toolbar on Dell computers. It's said to be a test distribution, at the moment. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal looks at that and more about the search battle shaping up within IE7.

John Battelle points to Pressuring Microsoft, PC Makers Team Up With Its Software Rivals (paid sub. required) from the Wall Street Journal, which sparked the Reuters story about Google and Dell. The WSJ article covers how Google might pay Dell fees approaching $1 billion over three years for distribution.

The story goes deeper into concerns by Yahoo and Google that the new search toolbar in Internet Explorer 7 might hurt them, since MSN would be the default. Sure, it might. Then again, MSN Search has been the default in IE since at least IE3, if I recall. Despite this, non-Microsoft search engines haven't just survived, they've thrived. Yes, IE7 sports an actual search box this time, but I still think we'll see users change this off the default setting in various ways.

There's lots of detail on Google wanting Microsoft to ask consumers to make a conscious choice about search providers, rather than IE7 automatically using their choice in IE6 (which is probably MSN Search, for most people). It's an odd argument, given that Google has not demanded that Firefox make consumers do similar choices in that browser. A partnership deal makes Google the default in Firefox, except for Asian-language versions where Yahoo cut its own deals.

Chris Sherman is planning our own look at some of these issues in the near future. I'd love to see some universal agreement about how ALL browsers should handle choices of search providers, in terms of how defaults are set and can be changed. What I fear is another round of stealth default changes, where each of the players constantly try to switch you around.

Google and Yahoo encourage you to choose them as a default search provider through their software apps. I don't mind, because I can see they are clearly asking me when this happens. Both also try to encourage you to change in other ways, as you can see here and here. Again, I don't mind, because you can understand what's going on. But a few years ago, other players would just make the changes, leaving users puzzled about why all their searches mysteriously started going through some new search engine. We don't need that again.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:39 AM | Permalink

February 3, 2006

Google Has Right to Log the Text of Messages Sent Using their Send to SMS Feature

Nathan over at InsideGoogle mentions a post by Devin Reams who points to a portion of the Google Firefox Send to Phone FAQ: FAQ that says, "we [Google] might also log the text of the message you send, in order to investigate and correct technical problems with the service."

The wording in the privacy section of Google Toolbar 4 documentation reads,

If you send text through SMS using Send To feature of the Google Toolbar, Google logs the number and carrier the message is sent to, and in some cases may record the text sent for debugging purposes.

I don't have time at the moment to check, but I'll try to find out if other services like Vazu, Yahoo's Text-to-SMS service and some of the other web-to-SMS services have similar policies.

Postscript: You can check for yourself. Here's the privacy policy from Vazu and Yahoo (mobile devices).

Posted by Gary Price at 5:22 PM | Permalink

January 30, 2006

Google Toolbar Version 4 Now Available

Google has upgraded its toolbar for Internet Explorer, adding new search features, online bookmarks, custom buttons that can be configured for a number of tasks, and some sharing tools. More on the new toolbar in today's SearchDay article, Google Releases Upgraded Toolbar.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:15 AM | Permalink

October 21, 2005

Ballmer On How They "MSN You" in Holland, Korea & Google Was Curing Cancer

Gary wrote earlier of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently denying any chair throwing at a conference, but Good Morning Silicon Valley highlighted another quote from Ballmer that caught my eye: "People say 'I'm going to MSN you' in Holland and Korea."

Really? I'm still sort of reeling in disbelief from the entire A9d it mention on the OC earlier this year. I thought perhaps Ballmer was referring to MSN Messenger. I can more readily see people in Holland or Korea saying they "MSN you" and meaning sending an instant message. Heck, I could see anyone anywhere saying that. But the News.com story quoting Ballmer makes it clear this was about web search, as I've bolded:

He pointed to the strength of Microsoft's MSN brand outside of the United States as proof that the company is making strides in the Web search market. "People say 'I'm going to MSN you' in Holland and Korea.

I couldn't resist adding to this other comment he made about Google:

If you read the papers today, other than curing cancer, Google will do everything.

Actually, Google WAS curing cancer at one time. Google Compute, launched back in 2002, let Google Toolbar users donate processor time to Folding@home, a Stanford protein research project with cancer cures as one of its goals.

Interestingly, I guess Google stopped providing this support around 2003. That's the copyright at the bottom of the Google Compute page, which says the toolbar no longer can be used to help the project. Hmm -- opportunity perhaps for Microsoft?

Postscript: Reader Dennis Pallet who lives in Holland writes:

I just read your blog entry about how Dutch people say "I'm going to MSN you" when they talking about MSN web search, but this is absolute nonsense.

I live in The Netherlands myself, and most people have never even heard of MSN Search. The phrase refers to MSN Messenger. Almost everyone here seems to think MSN = MSN Messenger, and don't even know about the MSN brand.

Like I said, the News.com story made the quote out as if it was a reference to web search, but perhaps there was some confusion. It certainly makes a lot more sense to hear it being connected to MSN Messenger.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:28 AM | Permalink

October 13, 2005

The Google Toolbar Spellchecker & Getting Spellchecking In Your Search Box

Yesterday, I wrote about what seemed to be a new feature Google was testing to put spell checking into the search box. Nope, not a new experiment. It actually turns out to be a function of the Google Toolbar. It happens if you type something into any form, including a search box, and push the ABC/Check button. Google Blogoscoped explains more here. It would be cool if it did work in the search box automatically, though -- again, time for Google Suggest to be added to the main Google site, rather than a Google Toolbar feature for Firefox users.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:39 AM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

Sun To Distribute Google Toolbar & Closer Relationship Beween Two; McNealy Says, "Lots of Money Flowing Both Ways if We Do This Right"

The Google and Sun Microsystems press conference is over and word is that Google and Sun have announced a "multiyear" strategic relationship for Google to cross-promote their technologies. Bottom line: another potential jolt to Microsoft software dominanance especially, MS Office. The relationship will begin with the optional inclusion (not yet available) of the Google Toolbar in upcoming downloads of the Java Runtime Environment. Financial terms were not disclosed but Sun CEO, Scott McNealy said, "There is going to be a lot of money flowing both ways if we do this thing right."

Here's a review of some of the press coverage to this point:

For the most part, the blogosphere is underwhelmed by the news, according to News.com

You mean Google makes an annoucement and it wasn't a big deal from the get go? Say it isn't so. (-:

• Watch the Press Conference
• Press Release

Key Facts and Quotes: + As part of the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in downloads of the Java Runtime Environment from Java.com. The new functionality will be available soon.

+ Due to the popularity of Java on the desktop, downloads of Java have more than doubled year over year, reaching 20 million per month.

+ The distribution of Java and the Google Toolbar underscores Google's advocacy of Java technology.

+ The agreement between Sun and Google also kicks off further collaboration between the companies on projects like OpenOffice.org, the open source productivity suite that is the world's leading suite on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and Linux--and the leading alternative suite on Microsoft Windows.

+ "Working with Google will make our technologies available more broadly, increase options for users, lower barriers, and expand participation worldwide." --Scott McNealy, CEO Sun

NOTE: You can already register by email and be notified when the Google Toolbar for the Java Desktop will be available. From the looks of it, the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer (kind of ironic) will be the version distributed by Sun. Sorry Firefox fans (at least for now). Scott

Sun CEO Scott McNealy said the toolbar, "will appear in weeks if not days."

From Reuters: Financial terms were not disclosed. "There is going to be a lot of money flowing both ways if we do this thing right," McNealy said.

From AP: Eventually, the Java component could be offered to users who download the free toolbar that offers quick access to Google search, spell checking and a popup blocker.

From Forbes.com: "We believe that this heavily promoted [Sun and Google] announcement is overblown, and does not represent a real definitive product threat to Microsoft's Office," S&P Equity Research. The Sun and Google partnership is "primarily as an enhanced distribution platform for each company," the research firm said.

From The Register: The problem, however, is that even Google freaks - the types who would be excited if the ad broker started conducting mandatory, aggressive anal probes under the Fistoogle brand - won't find much to cheer here.* They've already got the Google toolbar, and are tooling around like, well, you know. For its part, Sun already serves up more than 20m downloads of Java per month. Will the availability of the Google toolbar - something already available from Google - make people want to download Java more? No, this deal centers more around the obvious - marketing.

* Wow, that's one strong comment. Comment of the year? It's a contender. (-:

From News.com John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice president for software. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that what separates the Toolbar distribution deal from others the company has is the "vastness" of it.

Google also committed to buying more Sun servers, though Schmidt refused to detail how many or what type. That's significant, given the search giant's prestige as an Internet company and its reliance so far on machines it has built itself. Pending agreement of project programmers, Sun will add a Google search bar to OpenOffice.org, an office software suite Sun turned into open-source software in 2000.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:53 PM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

Google Toolbar For Firefox Leaves Beta, Gains Google Suggest

Google reports on its blog that the Google Firefox Toolbar has gained Google Suggest query suggestions. Hey, if it's good enough for the toolbar, it's good enough for the main site. Bring it on! And the toolbar out of beta after only two months! Maybe there's hope Google News will graduate yet from beta. It's four years old this March.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:40 AM | Permalink

September 20, 2005

Issues With Yahoo Messenger Installs

Yahoo IM users get more than they bargained for from News.com earlier this month looks at how the latest version of Yahoo's instant messaging client wants to make itself at home on your desktop beyond just instant messaging. Go with the defaults, and you'll not just get Yahoo Messenger but also the Yahoo Toolbar and new "Yahoo Extras" with "live links" that sound like Google AutoLink but seem to only act that way in the IM client, from what I can see. The install also tries to make Yahoo your default home page and search tool. It's easy to choose not to add any of these additional features, programs and changes, assuming you look for the right checkboxes, but many don't.

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny saw the story and commented that he found the practice "insulting and disrepectful." Google UI designer Kevin Fox chimes in on the comments at Jeremy's blog about dislike the tactics as well and defending Google's bundling of tools with WinZip as being "upfront."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:59 AM | Permalink

July 7, 2005

Firefox Search Goodies Keep on Coming

Google released its top-secret toolbar for Firefox today, and it has all of the features found in the Internet Explorer version—see Gary's post below for details. If you're a toolbar fan, it's definitely something you'll want to investigate.

But don't overlook the dozens of other plugins and extensions designed to make your searching and browsing experience far more complete. In today's SearchDay article, Still More Cool Firefox Tools, I check in with the Mozilla developer community and report on new (free) tools that I'm using on a daily basis.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:57 AM | Permalink

July 6, 2005

Google Toolbar For Firefox Available Tomorrow With Send-To-Phone & Google Suggest

A new Google Toolbar for Firefox for users will be available for download tomorrow morning Pacific time from the Google Toolbar page. It will offer generally the same features as the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Google says. However, Google Labs will also be releasing tomorrow "send-to-phone" and Google Suggest extensions specifically for the toolbar:

• Google Suggest: Will allow you to utilize Google Suggest directly from the toolbar. So, as you enter your query into the toolbar, you'll see suggested search terms.  
• Google Send To Phone: Will allow you to quickly send the text from any web page to a mobile phone as a text message. The service is free but make sure to check with your mobile phone provider to determine the charges (if any) to receive text messages.

The extensions were created by Google engineers during the 20 percent free time, Google says.

FYI, other services also allow you to send web content to your mobile device. Yahoo has offered options to send entries from Yahoo Local and maps from Yahoo Maps to a mobile phone since early 2005. Last week, Yahoo began offering an option to material from Yahoo Shopping via SMS.

Palo Alto-based Vazu also offers a services the allow the user to send contact info, text snippets from any web page, and more to their mobile phone as a text message. Vazu offers both free and fee-based services.

Unlike the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, the Firefox version will have no pop-up blocker. That's because Firefox already has its own built-in blocker.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:00 PM | Permalink

July 5, 2005

Official Google Toolbar For Firefox Comes This Week, But Don't Comment!

Google is to release a version of its Google Toolbar specifically for Firefox later this week. Watch the Google Toolbar site for news of when it is ready, and see below about Google's absurd advice not to comment about the toolbar launch until it happens.

Finally! In February, I'd asked Google why, despite being a close Firefox partner, it still hadn't produced a toolbar for the increasingly popular browser. The response was that the Googlebar tool for Firefox was seen as filling the need. Googlebar For Firefox, Plus The Google & Firefox Deal covers that plus how Googlebar does much of what the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer doesn't.

Can't wait? Go get Googlebar and also SearchStatus, which as I've explained gives you PageRank information and other cool features.

Yahoo Toolbar For Firefox and Closer Look At Yahoo Toolbar For Firefox covers the existing official toolbar for Firefox that Yahoo offers. Also see Firefox Got Yahoo! for more directly from Yahoo.

For some other Firefox and search-related tips, see our recent series on searching and Firefox, the Three Cool Search Gizmos and A Great Search Tool for Firefox article and our Toolbars & Utilities category for Search Engine Watch members.

Firefox users who like toolbars should be sure check out Groowe, an easy way to search against multiple search engines at once and imitate special features their own toolbars provide. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Finally, remember that if anyone in the press asks you about the new Google Toolbar For Firefox, don't comment! At least, don't comment until the news is officially released via a planned Google press release. To help everyone understand this important need, Google posted this publicly:

Hey Googlebar folks, long time no talk. I thought I'd drop you a note to give a heads up on something Google will be releasing next week: a version of our IE Toolbar for Firefox. It will most likely be released on July 7th, but press releases will go out at 9pm on July 6th. Since you were in the Google-toolbar-for-firefox space first, it's conceivable that the press might contact you for comment. If they do it would be great if you could hold of replying until our press releases go out on the 6th.

Yes, if you post news of a secret launch in a public place, it's conceivable the press might hear about it before the launch. But then again, this is becoming a nice way to get triple the publicity for your products, these days.

In the past, we had the "beta" release and then the "final" release as a way to get a double-dose of press gushing. Now we have the triple -- news that accidentally leaks out, then the formal beta release, then the final release (or some product upgrade for those product that never emerge from beta).

A leak like this worked for Google Video last week, so why not do the same for the Google Toolbar For Firefox this week? The real question is, how do you get the quadruple dose of publicity going forward?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:21 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2005

Google Software Gets Bundled

BetaNews is reporting that Google has a deal with WinZip to bundle both of these pieces of software with downloads of the popular utility.

WinZip quietly updated its download executable last week, which now weighs in at close to 4MB with the added Google tools. Users are given the opportunity to opt out of installing the Google software on the first WinZip setup screen; by default the tools are installed.

This is not the first time Google software has been bundled. As the article points out (we also blogged the news last month), you'll also find Google software included with downloads of InterVideo's DVD duplication software and with RealNetworks RealPlayer. Yahoo bundles its toolbar with downloads of Adobe Acrobat and Macromedia Flash.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:10 PM | Permalink

May 30, 2005

Google Toolbar Currently Showing No PageRank Scores Across The Web

Google Toolbar PR Meter Gray Across The Web at our Search Engine Watch Forums covers how for two days now, the Google Toolbar's PageRank meter hasn't been showing ratings for sites all over the web. Such a move would be a nice way to help end PageRank obsession, as I've written in the past. But it's almost certainly a temporary glitch, rather than permanent disabling of of PageRank displays.

It's a holiday weekend in the US, so a delay in fixing this isn't surprising. Barry at Search Engine Roundtable provides a summary of points to add further support that the toolbar meter isn't suddenly going away. Threadwatch has more discussion plus links to other search forums discussing the issue.

Think the toolbar ought to be disabled? Replaced with something else? You can comment on that or vote for options in this SEW Forum thread, What should Google do about PR in the Toolbar?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:06 AM | Permalink

May 11, 2005

New Google Toolbar 3 With AutoLink Leaves Beta

Google has released an update of its Toolbar for Internet Explorer, addressing many of the concerns with the controversial AutoLink feature that adds additional hyperlinks to web pages that contain package tracking, U.S. addresses, book or automobile information. The changes are both cosmetic and functional.

"Our links look different than links put on the page that are placed by the author," said Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products. The Google-inserted links now have a pale blue background, which distinguishes them from ordinary hyperlinks.

In addition, AutoLinks now include a number of bookstores and automotive sites in addition to the default choices offered in the beta version. You can also set your own preferred default site either through Toolbar preferences or by right-clicking a Google inserted AutoLink. Either way, once you've made a choice your preferred source is persistent until you change it again, according to Mayer.

The sluggish performance of AutoLink has also been addressed. The pull-down menus that show all suggested URLs and the display that appears when you mouse over a link now appear virtually instantly, rather than appearing after a delay with the earlier version.

While the new features address some concerns expressed by users after the initial release of AutoLink, many issues remain. For a thorough discussion of these issues, with some suggestions for changes that Google did not implement, see Danny's Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out blog post.

If you already have the version 3 beta Toolbar installed, you can just wait and the new version will be installed automatically. Google plans to initiate the automatic update process for Toolbar users sometime in the next week or two. However, the auto update process can take up to three weeks after Google begins the process, so if you're impatient, or want to get the new Toolbar right away, download and install it now from toolbar.google.com (the Google Toolbar is for Internet Explorer only; Firefox users clicking this link will be invited to download the free third-party Googlebar, an excellent clone that I highly recommend).

Posted by Chris Sherman at 7:59 PM | Permalink

May 5, 2005

DVD Software Company Announces Bundling Deal with Google

Dow Jones has a brief article about InterVideo, the company that develops and sells WinDVD Creator, DVD Copy, and Media One announcing a bundling deal with Google. According to the story and this news release, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search will be "incorporated" into their products.

Two other bundling deals that quickly comes to mind are + Google's deal with Real Networks + Yahoo and Adobe

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

March 15, 2005

Google AutoLink, Meet Butler, Which Enhances Google Results

Upset about Google AutoLink, the new Google Toolbar feature that adds links to web pages that it feels are appropriate? You might try a new tool created by Mark Pilgrim that inserts links on Google's own pages (NOTE: Updated below with comments from Mark Pilgrim). Via Boing Boing, news of his new Butler Firefox extension that among other things:

• Removes ads from Google pages.
• Inserts links that let you do web searches on competing search engines directly from Google's results.
• Get news results from news sources beyond Google.
• Get similar links to "alternative" sources for image and shopping.
• Removes image copying restrictions from Google Print.

For example, in a search for cars, Butler inserts this at the top of the Google search results:

★ Try your search on Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AlltheWeb, Teoma, MSN, Lycos, Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, Bloglines

And below news results listed, it says:

★ Find more news at Yahoo News, Ask Jeeves, AllTheWeb, MSN, Lycos, Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, Bloglines

To use it, you need to have the Greasemonkey Firefox extension. Once that's installed, you can then go back and install the Butler extension. Once activated, it can be disabled without actually having to uninstall it, should you want to play with the tool from time to time.

The usefulness of the tool is clear. It's very handy for the searcher to have. Given this, it would be hard for Google to object to the tool especially after Google's statement in my Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out article on how they'd react to tools that added links or perhaps stripped ads from their search results:

"I think we'd need to look overall at the utility offered to the users. Can a good argument be made that those users understand what's going on?" said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products at Google. "It would be hard for us to argue against user utility because those are the same metrics we're going to use in evaluating our feature set."

In that article, I wrote my view that when trying to balance desire of users and rights of publishers, tools that added links to pages went too far if they didn't provide a publisher opt-out. And that's main main issue with Butler. While it's giving Google a taste of its own medicine, by rights, it should be letting publishers also opt-out of having links added. And that means Google as a publisher should get that right to opt-out of Butler.

Will an opt-out be added? Would that be added if Google did the same for AutoLink? Pilgrim actually responds that his creation wasn't made as a way of pushing back at AutoLink. He emailed me:

I couldn't care less about the AutoLink hoopla, except that it gave me the idea for Butler. I think anything running on my computer should be under my complete control. I say this as someone who publishes content for money (although it's not my primary income).

Look, I run ZoneAlarm Pro with highest sensitivity and all advanced options enabled (including popup blocking). I run Proxomitron on top of that, and AdBlock and FlashBlock on top of that. These tools don't block ads by accident; they come pre-configured with specific knowledge of specific ad servers. Butler is just another ad blocker.

As for the "try your search on" feature, I am old enough to remember that Google used to offer this feature themselves. Back then it was "try your search on Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, Excite, etc." All the popular search engines of the day. The point is, linking to competitors makes Google more valuable, not less. They seem to have changed their attitude about that as they've added more and more services of their own.

Google as a whole is becoming more and more of a walled garden, which is ironic, given that they started out in the business of sending people away. Now they take every opportunity to keep you within their walls. This might sound like a good idea in a Powerpoint slide deck, but it will kill them in the long run.

None of this answers your question about why I wrote it. Honestly, I wanted to teach myself Javascript and DOM scripting. I'm a geek, not an activist. I spend a lot of time using Google's services, and with the AutoLink faux-crisis still brewing, it seemed like an obvious choice of project.

As for a Google comment on the new tool, I've got a question in to them. In the meantime, some related reading:

• Ok, Ok, I lied [I fired my butler]: From Jonas Luster's blog, this post against Google AutoLink follows the metaphor of AutoLink as a butler, but one that isn't necessarily acting in the interest of his employer. So Luster fires his butler, Google AutoLink.  
• A New Butler For Jonas: While Pilgrim isn't positioning Butler as a slam against Google AutoLink, his colleague Sam Ruby does make that connection that this is an example of an open source push-back against Google's tool, one that anyone can potentially modify and change. From my view, the fact that it is open source doesn't make it any more acceptable to me as a publisher. I still want an opt-out. Be sure to read the comments below the original post for some interesting discussion.  
• Want a line? Here's a line: From Yoz Grahame is referenced in the above Ruby post, and Grahame comments on that. At issue is his attempt to draw a line about when content-modification is acceptable. He argues that Google AutoLink is in the spirit of his definitions of being acceptable because users understand it, it isn't automatic, it can be limited by the user and it's in the spirit of the web.

My own view is that trying to come up with some type of universal guidelines for content modification tools isn't going to be successful. I think there's going to be a variety of lines that we draw over time, and those lines might even change over time. But for me, right now, adding links is a clear and simple line we can start with. If you make a tool that adds links to a page, you should give the publisher an ability to override that feature.

How could opt-out be done? SearchGuild -- which published the first widely-cited AutoLink killer -- is pushing a meta tag. No tool uses this tag right now, but they could. I'll expect to add the tags to Search Engine Watch soon just to show my support. More about the tag here: JavaScript to Kill Google Autolink.

All-in-all, Butler is just the latest example of the "mess" AutoLink created when it was released, as I wrote earlier. It came out, then we got an AutoLink killing script, a supposed way to kill that script, now a tool some will use to fight back at Google plus heaps of bad PR for Google continuing.

Two years ago, the company pulled the related searches feature that its own AdSense publishers hated within 48 hours. We don't need months more of testing AutoLink for Google to realize it needs to make some significant changes to please publishers and not just the usual noises of always considering feedback. Let's get on with an actual solution, starting with an immediate opt-out.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:37 AM | Permalink

March 10, 2005

WSJ's Mossberg Against AutoLink

I've got an update coming on developments with Google AutoLink since I last wrote about it (see Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out). There's a petition, meta tags against it and so on. But in the meantime, via Steve Rubel, news that Wall St. Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg has come out against the system: Google Toolbar Inserts Links in Others' Sites, And That's a Bad Idea. Mossberg was instrumental in getting Microsoft's Smart Tags killed, as my earlier article explains more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:03 AM | Permalink

February 25, 2005

Googlebar For Firefox, Plus The Google & Firefox Deal

Last week, when Google rolled out the latest version of its toolbar, I was dumbfounded that a Firefox version still wasn't offered. What's the deal?

After all, Google is the default search engine within Firefox. Also by default, Firefox starts you off at a page with Google's search box front and center. And Google is the company that seems to keep hiring Firefox developers. How about a little Google love for the up-and-coming browser, such as with an edition of the Google Toolbar for it?

As it turns out, Google says it hasn't felt it needed to create its own tool because of the handy Googlebar tool that's already been developed by others.

"There is the Googlebar, and we've been respectful of the fact they've done a very good rendition," said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products. "It's one reason we feel the Firefox community has already been serviced."

Chris Sherman's written about this extremely good clone of the Google Toolbar before. I've even mentioned in way in the past. Nevertheless, I somehow I had a brain funk when I complained earlier this month about missing Google Toolbar features in an all-in-one package.

Google helped cure that with a new special page that's now up which managed to shake me out of my forgetfulness on Googlebar. Detecting that I was visiting the Google Toolbar page with Firefox, they redirected me earlier this week to a new page that promotes the Googlebar option. Dirson's noticed it too this week, pointing to where the change is being discussed. Google says the change happened late last week.

Googlebar doesn't have the PageRank meter, an essential tool for many search marketers. Don't worry. My Closer Look At Yahoo Toolbar For Firefox explains how to get a PageRank meter via a plug-in and summarizes some other nice Firefox search features that Chris has written about before, at the end.

Meanwhile, what about Firefox being so friendly with Google? How did that happen?

"That is a business relationship that we fostered alongside of Firefox. They really felt we were the best search engine and were interested in providing a good user experience," Mayer said.

Though she didn't reveal specific terms, she said it encompassed a variety of things, such as hosting the Firefox start up page (which will increasingly grow in traffic and bandwidth demands) plus distribution gains for Google by being a favorite in the browser.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:22 PM | Permalink

Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out

AutoLink is new feature in the new third version of Google's popular Google Toolbar that's raised controversy since it was released last week. Why are publishers upset? Can they block the feature that adds links to their web pages? Who rules over content, users or publishers? Why do I think Google should give publishers an opt-out for the feature. That, and other issues, we'll explore in this article. It's a long one, so the links below will let you jump to particular sections, if you prefer.

• How AutoLink Works
• The User Benefit
• The Publisher Benefit & Fears
• We've Been Here Before
• Monopoly & Monetary Fears
• Future Development
• What's Acceptable & What's Not?
• Drawing The Line At Links
• Provide An Opt-Out!
• They're My Users Too
• Turning The Tables
• The Toolbar Area Itself Is Yours
• Alt-Click Away!
• Here's An Opt-Out

How AutoLink Works

Let's start by revisiting how the feature works. It's only available to those using the Google Toolbar 3 beta. Existing Google Toolbar users have not automatically had this feature added, so the number of people currently AutoLink-enabled is small. It will grow, of course, when the toolbar comes out of beta and takes over as the main one offered to the public, something likely to happen in the next few weeks.

Currently, AutoLink only reacts if it spots four types of information on a page:

• Package Tracking Numbers (those currently supported in Search By Number for regular search results)
• US Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs)
• US Addresses
• Publication ISBN numbers

Below, I've inserted two examples in the article so that anyone with the AutoLink-enabled toolbar can see autolinking for themselves easily. The first is the book Web Search Garage by Tara Calishain with its ISBN number shown. The second is Google's address:

Web Search Garage Prentice-Hall, August 2004 ISBN 0131471481, $19.99

Google Headquarters 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

If you have the AutoLink-version of the Google Toolbar installed and come to a page like this one with such "trigger" content on it, you'd hear a little "popping" sound familiar to anyone who uses the Google Toolbar currently, when it blocks a pop-up window from opening.

The AutoLink button in the toolbar also lights up or goes active, changing from "Not Active" to "Active" as shown in the illustration below:

When active, you can push directly on the button or use the little drop-down arrow next to it to get a menu, as shown with the "Drop Down Box" example.

Whether you push directly on the button or use the drop-down option, in both cases, links are also added to the page, making them look like this:

Web Search Garage Prentice-Hall, August 2004 ISBN 0131471481, $19.99

Google Headquarters 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

Click on the ISBN link, and you'll be routed via Google over to a page about the book at Amazon. Click on the address, and you'll be routed to that address shown in Google Maps.

Alternatively, use the drop-down box, select an option shown, and an entirely new window will open to display the AutoLink content. In contrast, with the links on the page, new windows aren't opened. Instead, the original window is replaced with the new content.

Don't like the links? Via the drop down box, you can use the Remove option to get rid of them or put them back using the Add option, if they have been removed.

By the way, earlier this week I found that using the drop-down box did NOT add links to the page. In fact, because I was using the drop-down box rather than pushing on the button, I at first didn't think links were actually added to the page at all. I talked with one other person who had the same thing happen to her. But in writing this article, that behavior changed for me.

Google says it's made no alteration to the toolbar behavior since it launched. Nothing has been changed on their end, the company says, and I should have always been seeing links added to a page whether I pushed directly on the button or chose the drop-down option. Given this -- and how corroded my IE installation has become over the past year or so (one reason I now use Firefox), I'll chalk it up to an oddity on my end.

The User Benefit

Google says feedback from users so far is that they like the feature. That's easy to see why. If you come across a page about a book without a link, as I showed above, it's very nice that you can get to another page with more information about it or the ability to buy it. Amazon fills that role nicely. I've often come across books mentioned on pages, then had to do the copy-and-paste routine over at Amazon in the way AutoLink helps make unnecessary.

Similarly, if you see an address such as on a corporate web site and would like to get a map, this is a handy way not to have to cut-and-paste into a mapping program.

The Publisher Benefit & Fears

Fair to say, feedback so far from publishers isn't so rosy. Yes, some think the feature is nice, such as prominent blogger Anil Dash has said. But from my review, he's in the minority. We've had other prominent bloggers such as Steve Rubel, Dan Gillmor and Dave Winer crying foul.

Closer to home for me, many search marketers who are also publishers clearly dislike the tool. At our Search Engine Watch Forums, the AutoLink & Google As Anti-Webmaster thread isn't finding many people in favor of it. The same is true for the New Google Toolbar Feature Rekindles the Old SmartTag Debate thread at WebmasterWorld.

Publishers do get a benefit from the tool. If they've failed to add useful links, those visiting their sites perhaps may come away happier that they were still able to leverage the information on the pages to get further information.

The publisher fear is far larger. Many publishers consciously decide what links they want to add. Having some tool come along and modify their content is simply unacceptable to them. That's especially so given how easy it would be for any tool to grow capabilities, such as making words into ad links that generate no revenue for them -- something that's happened in the past.

We've Been Here Before

There is a ton of hue and cry about how Google is trying to repeat a plan Microsoft abandoned after large outcry in 2001 called Smart Tags, which would have allowed words on pages to be turned into links. Which links and to where? That would have been determined by Microsoft.

By the way, a key developer of Smart Tags from Microsoft does now work for Google. However, rumors that he was involved with Google AutoLink aren't true. Google says he's involved in a completely different product.

Microsoft backed off from Smart Tags, but TopText from eZula went ahead later that year. It inserted yellow hyperlinks into pages -- paid links that earned eZula money but not the publisher. My Forget Smart Tags; TopText Is Doing What You Feared article from back then looks in depth at the system and the concern that arose over it. I'd strongly encourage reading it, because there are plenty of direct comparisons between what happened then and what's happening now.

eZula's still out there and apparently offering the same type of placement, but my impression is that the system didn't gain greater popularity due to search marketers who especially rallied around the late Jim Wilson's Scumware site to fight the program.

Why did search marketers care so much? They were footing the bill. Ads they placed with people like LookSmart got inserted into pages that they never actively chose. Many disliked this and made threads to their ad providers like LookSmart to stop partnering or lose them as customers.

Predating both the Smart Tags idea and TopText was Amazon's zBubbles and Flyswat, both from 1999. They came and went without any major outcry. Flyswat in particular inserted links on pages just as TopText did, Smart Tags would have and AutoLink now does.

I see now that some places like Symantec now class Flyswat as spyware, which sort of amazes me given that I thought the product long ago had died. I can't even reach the Flyswat site, but I suspect old installation copies are still floating around via download sites such as PC World (which offers it here, then offers an anti-spyware tool to get rid of it here). But at the time it was out there, Flyswat drew praise in many quarters as a great browser "helper."

Monopoly & Monetary Fears

Why was Flyswat largely acceptable, when only two years later, Smart Tags and TopText drew ire and today, Google AutoLink faces criticism?

With TopText, the answer is easy. Publishers didn't like the fact the system let competitors manage to insert themselves into their own content. Others who had purchased precisely targeted search ads weren't happy to discover that these ads were then in turn distributed to TopText for less precise contextual targeting.

With Smart Tags, it was the monopoly factor. Microsoft had such a dominant share of the browser market that letting it control how words would be linked was simply too frightening to many -- and this despite opt-outs the company decided just before the end that it would offer.

Enter Google. It, too, occupies a dominant role. We don't know exactly how many toolbar installations it has, but the company acknowledges millions of users. To be fair, Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products, told me that queries generated through the Google Toolbar are "by no means a majority of all Internet Explorer users" who access Google.

"With AutoLink versus Smart Tags, the toolbar is different is that its only installed by users [as opposed to automatically being part of the browser] and is by no means a majority," she explained further.

Even Microsoft blogvangelist Robert Scoble agrees here, arguing that Google can do things Microsoft can't because Microsoft still has a browser on 9 out of 10 desktops out there. Nevertheless, he was against Smart Tags and doesn't seem to favor the current Google implementation of AutoLink.

Monopoly or not, the toolbar clearly has many users. In addition, people like Winer fear that if Google is able to offer this type of feature, nothing prevents Microsoft and others from doing the same.

So with Google, there's a bit of the monopoly factor. I think there's also the TopText-like fear that AutoLinks could cost publishers money. If you have a page about a book, you might not want Google sending someone to Amazon to purchase it, especially without your own affiliate code.

As an aside, it's worth mentioning that there are other reasons why you might find advertising links inserted into editorial copy. Vibrant Media's been doing this for some time through its IntelliTXT service. However, the issue of publisher rights as with Google AutoLinks is not in question with this type of service. That's because the publisher themselves has chosen to add the links.

Instead, the issues are more about the practice from an editorial integrity standpoint, and yesterday's Ads Embedded in Online News Raise Questions article from the New York Times is just one of many articles to look at this.

Back to Google AutoLink, a remaining major concern for publishers is simply that they might not want Google sending anyone anywhere out of their sites via links that they didn't provide in the first place. There's a potential traffic loss people worry about, though Google doesn't see this as a serious problem.

"Are we really taking traffic away from them? Think about what they've [users] have done. They've been looking at the page. They've decided there's a piece of information on the page. They had to get the idea that they wanted to get more information some way. They clicked a toolbar button, and then they clicked a link. That's a pretty determined series of user actions. It seems to me that that user is going elsewhere anyway," Mayer said.

Future Development

What about the idea that Google might put ads links on pages? That's not something it does now, nor does the company have any plans to in the immediate future, it said.

As for those Amazon links, Google said it gains nothing from them. Amazon was selected because it was seen as the best choice for book information.

"Obviously Amazon is a partner of ours, but there was no monetary exchanges as part of this development. We picked out what we thought was the best user experience for things we linked to," Mayer said.

Don't like that choice? When the tool emerges from beta in the near future, it is definitely planned for people to choose some of the content providers they want to tap into. If you want links to Barnes & Noble for ISBNs rather than Amazon, you'll almost certainly be able to do that or pick from others.

How about the tool expanding the range of what's auto-linked. That could happen. Google's not saying what may or may not change, because the tool is still in beta -- a traditional style beta that should only last a few months at most.

It's possible, Google said, that if users push the button, it might decide that the toolbar should always automatically show links rather than make this a page-by-page choice users initiate. Or not, depending on feedback.

New features could also be added or removed. The company is interested in link enabling anything that someone might have to cut-and-paste to get existing information from Google. For instance, enter a stock symbol into Google right now, and it links to you stock data. Potentially, stock symbols could be turned into AutoLinks.

Couldn't any word be made into a link? Sure, but that would be too much, Google says.

"That goes a little too far. We aren't interested in turning an entire page into hyperlinks. That's not particularly helpful to the user," Mayer said.

What's Acceptable & What's Not?

AutoLink also raises anew the philosophical debate of who ultimately controls content. "It's my content, hands off!," is a common theme that resonates with many publishers. What gives Google the right to start tampering with your page?

Google's response is that the users give them the right. The users want this tool. The users want to control how they view that content.

"It's important to recognize that the toolbar is installed by people who want Google-enhanced functionality," Mayer said. "I would argue that the user is adding the link to the page. Google just provides the tool."

That's a pretty forceful argument. We don't hear many objections to the fact that users can control font sizes as they like, for example. Google's open source program manager Chris DiBona goes through a litany of more things like this in his personal blog post on the issue, Oh, please.

It's easy to add more. I've heard plenty of praise for various Firefox browser plug-ins that can do special things to pages when they spot certain types of links or the ability to restyle entire pages with Firefox. Why is Firefox so praised for enabling users but Google suddenly seen as evil for doing the same?

Indeed, this isn't the first time Google has interacted with publisher content via its toolbar before. The ability to highlight or jump to words on a page are widely praised. But more dramatic was the addition of a pop-up blocker in June 2003. That not only prevented some web sites from doing what they wanted to do, but it also arguably cost some publishers money through the blocking.

Wide-spread criticism? Hardly. I've seen a few grumblings from time-to-time that Google might be blocking commerce and publisher intent this way, but the praise over the pop-up blocking feature has been enormous -- and mimicked by other search toolbars. My guess is that publishers didn't fight back more against this because it was clear how hated pop-ups where by consumers.

Drawing The Line At Links

So where is that line when a tool gives a user too much control -- or better, when a user is given control that a publisher ought to be able to counter? I agree with many others that adding links crosses it. I don't care if the user thinks adding links to my pages will make things better for them. As a publisher, I want to be able to override a tool that tries this.

Legally, we don't know where publishers really stand on this, as the recent Google toolbar move raises online ire from News.com examines. But forget legal.

Instead, adding links is a line that I think any respectable software publisher shouldn't cross. Last year, Google introduced a set of software principles that are all about protecting the user experience. An addition to those principles should be made to protect the publisher experience, as well.

Provide An Opt-Out!

In this case, I think Google should provide an easy opt-out that publishers can implement to block AutoLink. Some others want AutoLink to be opt-in -- that Google shouldn't be able to do anything like this unless publishers explicitly say they should.

I think that's too far. Users do have rights. They have installed this software. Opt-out gives any publisher seriously concerned with the tool the ability to control it on their site. Many won't be concerned, so requiring an opt-in is overkill that does hurt the user experience.

It's also somewhat hypocritical to demand Google do an opt-in for this tool when virtually no one demands an opt-in about being crawled. Why that isn't demanded is pretty clear. People want in Google because of the traffic it will bring them. But being crawled is another form of messing with content.

For its part, Google doesn't want to do an opt-out. The fear is that it will hurt the user experience.

"If you had opt-in or opt-out, that's overall a lot less useful," Mayer said. "If the links sometimes won't show because there's a publisher opting-out, that's bad for the user experience."

Explaining further, she said:

"It's an interesting balance to strike, but we're going to weigh more heavily on the user side," Mayer said. "We think we struck the initial balance in a reasonable way. The publisher's page is seen as intended in the browser. It's a user-elected action that changes things. Beyond that, we aren't driving all traffic to Google."

Google also feels there's a form of an opt-out in that it won't overwrite any existing links. Worried that an ISBN code might get turned into a link by Google? Make it a link yourself, and it will be untouched.

Indeed, when Gary Price first wrote about the AutoLink feature in Search Engine Watch last week, he used an example of going to Barnes & Noble to show how unlinked ISBN codes there got auto-linked through the Google Toolbar to connect people to Amazon.

That made Barnes & Noble into a poster child for many publishers about why AutoLink was bad. Look at how it put links to a competitor on the Barnes & Noble site!

It took the company about a week, but an opt-out is effectively in place with Barnes & Noble. As I wrote yesterday, all ISBN numbers on the site now have links to Barnes & Noble's own content.

It was probably an easy move for them to make, having a database-driven site. But for others, it could involve a lot of hard-coding. In addition, if Google adds new content types for AutoLink, then publishers have to go back and make more changes. Adding your own links to block Google AutoLinks is simply not an effective form of opting-out for many to use.

They're My Users Too

My response to the "protect the user experience" argument is pretty blunt. Too bad if it is harmed in this case, from Google's perspective.

They may be Google's users, but they are also my users as a publisher as well. If my visitors are upset that my site prevents them from using Google AutoLink, they can tell and lobby me directly. I don't need Google deciding for me what my users want on my web site.

Google would gain on the public relations front from offering an opt-out. Even better, I'd encourage them to lobby for a single standard type of opt-out that other publishers could support such as through a robots.txt file extension that works for everyone. That would be real leadership in the industry and in line with the software principles statement it started last year.

Turning The Tables

How about turning the tables? How would Google feel about programs that modified its search results. It's not even theoretical. We have tools that will strip out ads from Google because the user may not want ads. We have software that will add links to Google's own results (for more, see our forum thread).

"I think we'd need to look overall at the utility offered to the users. Can a good argument be made that those users understand what's going on?" Mayer said. "It would be hard for us to argue against user utility because those are the same metrics we're going to use in evaluating our feature set."

It's a change from when Google was asked about this in 2001, on what it thought of TopText adding links to its results. At that time, it wasn't an issue of it being OK if it helped the user. Instead, the Google wasn't concerned because there didn't appear to be much take up of TopText.

Still, things change -- and it's helpful to have a current view on where Google stands, especially if a competitor like Yahoo or Microsoft decides to add a feature to its toolbar that allows users to hit links inserted on Google pages to generate results from their search engines.

The Toolbar Area Itself Is Yours

I'd sweeten the pot a bit to encourage Google to give an opt-out. Personally, I only want it to prevent adding links to my pages. Want to display links via the toolbar? That's fine -- it's your toolbar, do what you want with it.

Wouldn't that mean Google might down the line start showing ads or content related to my pages in the toolbar. Yes, it might. But we've had tools do this sort of thing already (a new toolbar program from Searchfeed and EffectiveBrand just came out this week), plus free useful tools do need to be supported somehow.

I wouldn't necessarily like it, but if it's not interfering with my actual page -- popping things over my content, adding links but instead staying within the toolbar area, I'd live with it.

That's especially so as long as the user clearly knew what was happening in the toolbar. All the same arguments Google makes about the user having the right to do what they want, I heard the same from TopText way back when. But Google says its history of user disclosure on what the toolbar does is better, and I largely agree.

"You can just look at Google's track record as with the PageRank feature. We tell people it's not the 'usual yada yada' and we are very up front," Mayer said. "We make sure our users are really informed that something going to happen, because we want to have the trust of our users."

In other words, no one gets tricked into downloading the Google Toolbar. And the links aren't automatically enabled. You do have to make the choice to turn them on.

Nevertheless, I still don't want links added to my pages. But if someone wants to consciously choose to click on a button that makes new windows pop-open, it's hard to object.

Similarly, we have a long history of other tools being tolerated for showing related content, such as Alexa. Heck, for ages both Internet Explorer and Netscape had built-in "related links" functionality powered by Alexa that few ever objected to.

Alt-Click Away!

Another option for Google is to provide Alt-Click functionality in the way that the GuruNet helper application (now Answers.com, also once called Atomica) has long allowed. In this case, people can select a word, hold the ALT key and click with their mouse, which in turn brings up a page with more information about what's described.

This doesn't add anything to a web page, easing concerns about content manipulation. Indeed, Wall St. Journal writer Walt Mossberg, who rallied against Smart Tags in 2001, nevertheless loved GuruNet for letting him Alt-Click on words in his same complaint against Smart Tags and has continued to praise the GuruNet's Alt-Click feature in 2003 and 2005.

In short, Alt-Click is an easy way to provide the user who wants to make a conscious choice to act upon ISBN numbers, addresses or other content that lacks links with AutoLink-like functionality -- just without having to use the actual links that are objectionable to some publishers.

Google did consider this option, but links were seen as more intuitive:

"We talked about whether we should make this work like that or something else. But we think that if you're going to create a link, the ability to get to get to another page, the web already has paradigm for that. Right now, the link really does make sense," Mayer said.

Adding further, she said:

"The links that we add do look different. We work hard to help the user understand that this was a link added by the Google Toolbar, that it wasn't a native link. We do this through a mouse rollover that is visible when you mouse over the link."

From my end, the mouse rollover isn't enough, little Google color "bubbles" or "balls" added to the hand icon, along with link pop-up text that says "Google Toolbar AutoLink." That's because before you hover, these links look identical to native links -- and some people are just going to click rather than hover for very long.

A different color or a double-underline or something would help. But while I certainly agree that links are far more intuitive, whether they look radically different from native links or not, they simply clash too much with publisher rights, in my view, and at this moment.

Here's An Opt-Out

You don't have to wait for Google to provide an opt-out, especially in that it might never do so. Threadwatch describes a JavaScript blocking solution cooked up by Search Guild. Download the solution (instructions are provided), insert it into your web pages. The same Threadwatch thread is also tracking any new solutions that come up -- some new server-side ones have just been posted.

Meanwhile, an anti-anti-AutoLink option appears to also be out there for users who want to override publishers trying to prevent AutoLink. I say appears because it seems like a clunky workaround that I can't really understand -- and looking at the comments posted, some others don't get it as well.

I mention it mainly because it highlights how quickly things have become absurd. You have third-parties working to prevent AutoLink and potentially others working to prevent preventing AutoLink. It's a mess.

The user experience is hardly being protected by Google refusing to provide an opt-out. It would be much better for Google to provide an opt-out in a way that makes publishers happy but also lets Google report clearly to its own users if the publisher has blocked AutoLink from the site they are visiting.

After all, it's arguably bad for the user experience if they can't get cached copies of pages. Nevertheless, Google has long allowed web site owners the ability to opt-out of having pages cached, primarily it seems to avoid conflicts over copyright. Despite this opt-out, the cached pages feature has survived for years. AutoLink can survive opt-out black spots, as well.

Finally, just weeks ago, Google acknowledged that publishers should have MORE ability to control their links through the introduction of the nofollow link attribute. It's disconcerting to say the least to then have the same company assume a right to add links to publisher pages without permission.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:43 AM | Permalink

February 24, 2005

Microsoft Smart Tag Engineer Not Involved With AutoLink

One other bit of the AutoLink story that I'm working on now. Rumors that the person involved with Microsoft's Smart Tag program has done the same for Google are incorrect. Jeff Reynar does now works for Google, but the company says he was never involved with the AutoLink feature.

"He was hired into our New York office, and the toolbar team is in Mountain View," Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products, told me yesterday. Rayner's been involved in Google's local search efforts, she added. "He certainly hasn't been involved in the toolbar."

Sound odd to have Google commenting so freely about the activities of a particular employee, when they often don't? The reason is that Rayner's been surprised by the number of people who assumed he somehow championed the AutoLink feature at Google and wanted to get the correct story out, so he asked Google to spread the word to those who followed-up about any connection.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:55 PM | Permalink

Barnes & Noble Overrides Google Toolbar AutoLink

I'm working on a story about the Google AutoLink feature and controversy is has raised with some publishers that should be out tomorrow. But I wanted to note an interesting change now that I spotted at Barnes & Noble, the poster child for concerns over the tool.

Yesterday, I could go over to Barnes & Noble, find a page with an ISBN number and use the AutoLink tool in the Google Toolbar to turn the numbers into links that lead to Amazon. Today, all those ISBN numbers are already links.

What happened? My guess is that Barnes & Noble got wise to the fact that AutoLink won't impact any ISBN numbers that are already links -- so they made every ISBN a link leading back to within their own site.

Powell's Books hasn't figured that out yet. If you are using the Google Toolbar with the new feature, visit this page, and see how clicking on the button will show you how the ISBN can be turned into an Amazon link.

For more on the AutoLink feature, see our forum discussion AutoLink & Google As Anti-Webmaster and this past blog post, A New Version (Beta) of the Google Toolbar is Now Available. And more from me tomorrow, of course.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:09 PM | Permalink

February 16, 2005

A New Version (Beta) of the Google Toolbar is Now Available, Still No Firefox

Google has just released a new beta version of the their toolbar.

Google Toolbar 3.0 (beta) can now be downloaded via a link at: http://toolbar.google.com or via this link. If you already have the Google Toolbar installed, you'll still need to download this beta version. In other words, Toolbar 3.0 will not automatically install on your browser.

Firefox? Nope When I first learned that a new Google toolbar was coming, I figured after last week's release of the Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox, I would learn that the a new Google Toolbar would soon be available for Firefox. Well, I was wrong. Google Toolbar 3.0 (beta) is still ONLY available for Internet Explorer running Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP. Google didn't provide any info about when (if ever) versions for Firefox and the Mac will be available.

What does Version 3.0 offer? OK, now that I've answered the question many of you might have been asking, let's take a look at the three new features that Google Toolbar 3.0 offers:

+ Spelling Correction A new button on the toolbar allows you to use Google's spell check technology on any web form. For example, you can now spell check your work if you use many web-based e-mail service like Gmail. (-: When you're ready to spell check, click the "check" button on the toolbar. If an incorrect spelling is detected, the word will be highlighted in red. Click the link and corrected spellings are suggested. It's also possible at this point to edit the word (a box will surround the term) or add the term to your personal spell check dictionary. If you select a corrected spelling, the term turns green and you're on to the next word. Click again to turn off the spell check. This feature should get the Google "as an operating system" people talking.

+ AutoLink This might not only be useful (or not) to you but the commercial possibilities are massive. With "AutoLink" enabled, the toolbar will be "enhanced" with additional links if Google thinks additional information might be helpful. For example, say your browsing a web page with numerous addresses on it. AutoLink will turn each of those addresses into direct links to the Google Maps database. Google currently offers AutoLinks for the following info (if it's recognized on the web page your looking at or found in other material your viewing in your browser): ++ Addresses (U.S. Only)

++ Package Tracking Numbers

++ ISBN's It's interesting to note that Google must have some type of arrangement with Amazon.com on this one. I searched for a book directly from the Barnes & Noble database. As soon as I visited a page for a book with an ISBN, the link button on the browser that was labeled "AutoLink" changed to read "Show Book Info." When I clicked on the button I went directly to the ISBN link on the B&N page. However, if I selected the arrow next to the button, the ISBN appeared with a hotlink to the book's page in the Amazon database. In this case, we're going to have to wait and see if Google will allow a user to choose their favorite book merchant or even query a libraries local catalog?

++ VIN's (Vehicle Identification Numbers) These four lookups have been part of Google's "Search by Number" feature which was released last January. Look for more AutoLink options in the future.

The AutoLink feature reminds me of (providing related links/info based on content found on a page NOT in its implementation) Microsoft's Smart Tags (with Word Documents), Vibrant Media's IntelliTXT, Gurunet/Answer.com's One-Click Answers, Blinkx, Intellext, and what Flyswat offered more than five years ago. Yahoo's new YQ! service also allows web page authors to embed tags into their web pages to find related info.

Speculation? Sure, I'm game. It will be interesting to see how this goes over. If it does, will AutoLink be a new revenue stream for Google? Will they begin offering paid partnerships to certain database publishers and/or advertisers to have their content directly accessible as an "AutoLink"? What criteria will they use to determine useful AutoLinks? I'm also wondering if Google will take the AutoLink technology and make it part of the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini products. In other words, will customers be able to create their own AutoLinks across an enterprise? Bottom Line? Plenty to think about with this feature.

+ Word Translator The third new feature included in the Google Toolbar 3.0 beta release is what the company is calling "Word Translator." With this feature activated, each word on all web pages and other material viewable in your IE browser can be hovered over and translated one word at a time. Translation is available for eight languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, or Korean) utilizing the same technology available on Google's Language Tools page.

Beta Notes How long will Google Toolbar 3.0 be a beta release? Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, told me that she was planning for a two month beta release. She also said that these new features have been available internally (to Googlers) for the past few months. Finally, if you're wondering what's the current percentage of searches originating from the Google Toolbar, so was I. I asked a Google spokesperson for some help with the answer but unfortunately they wouldn't share the info.

UPDATE: Marissa told Johh B. that the toolbar user base was "in the millions."

Posted by Gary Price at 12:44 PM | Permalink

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