April 21, 2006
Google’s been busy making a lot of announcements the last few days, so I’m going to summarize them really quickly, with a little commentary.
Google merged their local search with Google Maps to create Google Local in October of 2004. According to their post, they did this to mark the broad searching abilities of the site and emphasize the greater capabilities of the service. However, the new name was never really popular - so they’ve announced that they’re making a return to Google Maps.
This is probably a good decision - as local search has grown in importance throughout the search arena, they’ve been incorporating it into most of their new products. They can’t call everything Google Local, after all!
This isn’t exactly a new offering, so I’m not entirely sure why they’ve recently announced it again, but since I never made mention of it at release, I’ll mention it now. Google Page Creator is a new web site building and hosting service created by Google. You can edit easily on the screen without knowing any HTML at all - it’s even simpler than Blogger. It’s an entire online WYSIWYG web editor.
Of all the parts of this summary, this new release is the most interesting to me. Although I’m happy that Google Maps is back, that is only a change in name. However, the addition of a feature in Google Scholar which will make it easy for researchers to follow recent papers is not only useful - but the technique is intrinsically fascinating.
I’m clearly not the only person to find this to be the case - while writing this, I figured I’d go check out Bill Slawski’s blog to see if he’d mentioned it, and also noted his link to Greg Linden’s interesting viewpoint. The fascinating thing to me is the idea that Google is attempting to algorithmically rank papers on the basis of a researcher’s tendencies - much like they already consider web pages, they’re taking into consideration the significance of the sources, citations of that paper, and date as means to identify relevance.
Google not only managed to get a new calendaring application out the door, but they promptly turned around and provided an API for it. This has great potential to lead to some very useful new web developments, I’m sure.
A few weeks ago, I wrote on the question "Does Accoona Suck". My criticisms were two-fold: first, whether Accoona provided a unique value as a search engine, and second, whether they utilized underhanded marketing techniques to build their reputation.
On the basis of those two points, I was very unimpressed. Recently, Accoona released an interesting new toolbar, as pointed out by Loren Baker. As Loren says, the toolbar, functionally speaking, is fantastic. It’s not perfect; but I was quite impressed with the way it managed to handle numbers.
I tested it with a year incorporated into text, and it successfully expressed that year correctly. It even distinguished between the speaking pattern for a year like 1985 (nineteen-eighty-five) and 2005 (two thousand five). I checked a zip code - also correct. I tried a phone number expressed with dot separators - no problem. It didn’t manage a PO Box number quite right, and had a little trouble with the fraction 1/2 - pronouncing it "one-second". However, fractions which do not deviate from the normal number speaking system were handled more successfully.
On the whole, the voice is pleasant and clear. I would be perfectly willing, if necessary, to listen to a longer text with the tool.
But the marketing strategies that Accoona has demonstrated with this project still leave me frustrated. They have not disclosed everything that I felt necessary in order to install the toolbar - namely, that I would need to install additional software after the toolbar and that I would need to register for a 60 day free trial in order to use the product. It’s a minor issue; but I would have appreciated this information in advance.
For your information, the toolbar costs Euro 21.49 - since that information is also obscured from the Accoona marketing information.
Although they’ve been receiving a lot less coverage in search engine news recently, the issues surrounding search engines and other technology companies’ behavior in China have not gone away. Search Engine Watch looked in on Google and China on April 20th, giving me a gentle reminder that this is an ongoing problem.
I don’t actually altogether agree with Danny Sullivan’s conclusions. In his final paragraph, he states:
We’ve had Google China head Kai-Fu Lee say how important insisting on and following principles should be. In the public speaking training video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt that’s making the rounds, we have him saying how important conflict and tolerance to other opinions are. Yet still caved in on both principles and tolerance when it came to doing business in China.
I’m not clear that Google has truly "caved in on both principles and tolerance". Yes, they have accepted censorship as a cost of doing business in China. Yes, censorship is a vile practice which seems to run counter to Google’s core philosophy. However, I don’t feel that Google has given in to the Chinese government to any greater degree than absolutely necessary.
These are the salient points of my argument:
- Google was already doing business in China, because the main Google site was already accessible in the country.
- Google was already censored in China, by the Chinese government.
- Google has made a public statement that they will protect user privacy:
We will not maintain on Chinese soil any services, like email, that involve personal or confidential data. This means that we will not, for example, host Gmail or Blogger, our email and blogging tools, in China.
- Google has also stated that they will continue to make the unfiltered Chinese language Google.com service available.
All in all, these decisions suggest to me that they are simply trying to cope as best they can with a problematic situation. Google can not operate in China without cooperating with Chinese law - but they can reduce their susceptibility to that law by holding private data out of the reach of the country’s legal access.
I don’t wish to claim that Google is necessarily doing good by making their censored entry into the Chinese market; but they are certainly not doing evil. They are merely maintaining status quo, and hopefully making a profit.
If I was going to be accusing a company of unethical behavior, my fingers would not be pointing at Google. Google has been targeted largely because they have always made a major issue of their ethical practices. It is an interesting practice to make a greater note of the minor slips from those who try the hardest than the major failures of those who hardly try. Try taking a close look at Yahoo, for example, which has recently been accused (for the third time) of helping jail a Chinese dissident. Although there is not yet any solid evidence of this, it would hardly be surprising following the previous cases.
Danny also points to a fascinating piece from the New York Times Magazine called Google in China: The Big Disconnect. This lengthy article discusses cultural differences which technology companies have needed to learn and leverage for the Chinese market, and also how those differences may influence the perception of information freedom. The article is far too rich to summarize here; suffice it to say that you should read it yourself.
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