Category: industry news

I spent a little time thinking about the whole AOL research fiasco where they released search records which although the user names were removed could be used to identify people from their search logs.

I however am hoping this fiasco does bring tighter regulation of the search engines. In Germany any flattery of the Nazi party is banned. On Google.de you could however search for “why hitler was great” and see tonnes of neo-nazi results. Search engines are portals to this content.

Television, radio and even newspapers are regulated to control access to this sort of information. Perhaps search engines should too.

A number of the searches I saw on the AOL logs convinced me regulation is and should be coming. Questions about murdering your wife and people searching for perverted pictures of children closely followed by looking for local schools suggest that search engines have a responsibility to understand better what they are making available and to who.

Great job from microsoft today in providing a simply awesome bit of desktop kit. I love being able to work on the web without going through numerous layers of authentication and the usual vagueries of a browser. With the new windows live writer I can post to this blog from my desktop! Great job microsoft keep on creating good work like this.

A final point is that the live homepage and widgets are great, the live search is looking actually very competitive in terms of user experience and quality listings. I think Microsoft are seriously starting to get their act together. The next 5 yrs is gonna be fun.

Something that has continually surprised me since starting a job is how often companies repeat the mistakes countries and armies of the old world have been making for centuries.

The economist has an interesting article likening Google to Napoleon at the start of the 19th Century when he was advancing and succeeding on all fronts.

Google is technologically superior to their competitors, Google has made massive progress in a short blitzkrieg against the old empires of Yahoo and MSN with Search, eBay with Checkout/Base and even smaller companies like YouTube with Video.

Has Google overlooked and failed to kill off a key competitor and are they reaching into a new market that could become a Russia? Only time will tell but with search, ecommerce and advertising I think google has at least three fronts. You cannot have a war on multiple fronts and win.