Link: http://www.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/07/28/google.rival.ap/index.html

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

Google now faces its first rival launch by former employees in the form of Cuil.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable -- only this time it's not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers -- Russell Power and Louis Monier -- searched for better ways to search. Now, it's boasting time. What do you think of the new Cuil search engine?

For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.

A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns -- something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.

Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7488009.stm

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights".

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits everywhere.

Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, has alleged that YouTube is guilty of massive copyright infringement.

The UK's Premier League association is also seeking class action status with Viacom on the issue, alleging YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006, has been used to watch football highlights.

Legal action

When it initiated legal action in March 2007 Viacom said it had identified about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes on the website, which had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Following the launch of its billion-dollar lawsuit, YouTube introduced filtering tools in an effort to prevent content that infringes copyright from appearing on the site.

The US court declined Viacom's request that Google be forced to hand over the source code of YouTube, saying it was a "trade secret" that should not be disclosed.

But it said privacy concerns expressed by Google about handing over the log were "speculative".

Google's senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said in a statement: "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's over-reaching demand for viewing history.

"We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order."

The ruling will see the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users given to Viacom, totalling more than 12 terabytes of data.

Viacom said it wanted the data to "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos."

YouTube and Google had "compelled" it to go to court, Viacom said, "by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and profiting from copyright infringement, when they could be implementing the safe and legal user generated content experience they promise".

It said it would not be asking for any "personally identifiable information" of any user.

"Any information that we or our outside advisors obtain will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against You Tube and Google (and) will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner."

'Erroneous ruling'

Leading privacy expert Simon Davies told BBC News that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened.

He said: "The chickens have come home to roost for Google.

"Their arrogance and refusal to listen to friendly advice has resulted in the privacy of tens of millions being placed under threat."

Mr Davies said privacy campaigners had warned Google for years that IP addresses were personally identifiable information.

Google pledged last year to anonymise IP addresses for search information but it has said nothing about YouTube data.

Mr Davies said: "Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger."

The EFF said: "The Court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.

"We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."

The body said the ruling was also potentially unlawful because the log data did contain personally identifiable data.

The court also ruled that Google disclose to Viacom the details of all videos that have been removed from the site for any reason.

Posted by Stephen Shankland

Google's ever-active search bots, which scour the Web constantly for new pages, have begun a new, more active phase of their indexing jobs.

In a blog post Friday, Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy of Google's crawling and indexing team said the company has begun an experiment in which its indexing software experimentally enters text in Web site forms to see what previously undiscovered pages may appear.

"In the past few months, we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new Web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google," they wrote. "This experiment is part of Google's broader effort to increase its coverage of the Web. In fact, HTML forms have long been thought to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines."

The new Google indexing practice involves only "high quality" Web sites and doesn't run on sites with "robots.txt" files or other standard mechanisms of warding off indexing software.

To decide what words to "type" into the forms, the indexing software samples from among words on the Web page with the form, Google said.

The technology looks related to a company called Transformic that Google acquired, according to a blog post by Anand Rajaraman, who was involved with the technology earlier in his career, while working for Halevy.

http://www.news.com/

Link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2278655,00.asp

03.24.08
by Chloe Albanesius

Google on Monday submitted a white spaces proposal to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it believes provides a "foolproof" way to access unused spectrum for wireless broadband, but denied that the plan means Google will soon become a wireless carrier.

"We do not intend to support opening up the white spaces just so Google can become a wireless carrier or build a wireless network," Rick Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel, said during a conference call with reporters.

Google's only interest in white spaces is that they could provide Americans with "more opportunities to access the 'Net," he said.

When broadcasters shift from analog to digital signals in February 2009, there will be open, unregulated spectrum between the digital channels, or white spaces, that companies like Google and Microsoft want to use for wireless broadband service. Broadcasters, led by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), however, believe that allowing access to this spectrum could disrupt TV signals.

Google already submitted a white spaces plan to the FCC in December 2007 that endorsed a technology known as spectrum sensing, which scans spectrum to detect unused frequencies. Monday's plan goes beyond that to request additional safeguards, but Whitt stressed that Google still believes that spectrum sensing alone would do the trick.

"Spectrum sensing capabilities should be more than adequate," he said. "However, we just decided, in talking amongst ourselves, that we want to move the ball forward. We want everybody satisfied with this process."

What's new in Google's plan

Google's new additions to the plan include support for a combination of geolocation services, designed to protect broadcast TV, and beacons, which protect wireless microphones, Whitt said.

The plan is similar to a proposal introduced last fall by Motorola. Google is "largely agreeing with where Motorola's coming from" with its own proposal, though Google does not get into as much specificity as Motorola did, Whitt said.

In addition, Google is also proposing "safe harbors" for wireless microphones, which would not allow white space devices to transmit on channels 36 to 38. Google said that would provide additional safeguards for medical telemetry devices and radio astronomy devices, which use channel 37.

Beacons and safe harbors, together with spectrum sensing, "should put any reasonable minds at ease whether there's any interference with wireless microphones," Whitt said. "The beacon approach, in particular, seems to be almost foolproof."

Whitt accused broadcasters of clinging to "the comfort of the past [rather than] the promise of the future." Organizations like NAB "use their influence to convince policymakers to protect legacy applications – at any and all costs," according to the FCC filing.

NAB executive vice president Dennis Wharton said Monday night that he is "pleased that Google now seems to realize that spectrum sensing alone won't protect viewers against interference from unlicensed devices."

Wharton was doubtful, however, that adding geolocation and beacon sensing would do the trick. "Portable, mobile personal device operation in the same band as TV broadcasting continues to be a guaranteed recipe for producing interference and should not be allowed under any circumstances," he said in a statement.

"Google hopes to have a sit down [with broadcasters] to talk about the technology, and hopes that we can reach some sort of combination with them, if possible," Whitt said.

Google's filing follows the close last week of the FCC's 700-MHz auction. Google was approved to participate in the auction, but did not place any winning bids.

The FCC's anti-collusion rules regarding the auction are in effect until April 3, so Whitt was limited in what he could say. "I can't say that the proposal is not linked to the 700 [-MHz] situation," he said. Whitt promised that Google will have more to say on the issue once the rules are lifted.

Product plans

Whitt did suggest, however, that white spaces access could help the company's Android open-source mobile platform partnership.

"Android-powered handsets should begin appearing commercially later this year, and would be an excellent match for the TV white space," Whitt said.

Google hopes to have devices that access white spaces by the 2009 holiday season, Whitt said. "Once the DTV transition is over, our hope is when the commission has rules in places, we'll be able to start to have consumer devices," he said.

The FCC in January kicked off a four-to-six week lab test of equipment that will allow ISPs to access white spaces.

A February power issue with a Microsoft-backed device prompted NAB to state that "unlicensed devices are not ready for prime time." Microsoft stressed that the device is just a prototype, and that an identical device also submitted to the FCC for testing had not malfunctioned.

"The device got a bit warm," Paula Boyd, Microsoft's regulatory counsel, said at the time. "Once we powered off the device and allowed it to sit for a little bit, it was working effectively."

Microsoft also ran into difficulties during testing last year when a device submitted to the FCC failed to function properly due to a malfunctioning scanner, according to an August report from the White Spaces Coalition.

Google does not have any plans to submit a prototype device to the FCC, Whitt said.

"Google did do our own demonstration in early December [with FCC engineers]. We may put additional data into the record, but there are no current plans to put our own device into the record," Whitt said.

Google is part of the White Spaces Coalition and the Wireless Innovation Alliance, which also counts companies like Microsoft, HP and Dell as its members.

Whitt said that Google would "welcome the support" of the White Spaces Coalition and Innovation Alliance members. However, Google decided to take its specific plans to the FCC alone, he said.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2278655,00.asp