Tom Doyle :: TALK

Adobe released a press release today, stating that they are teaming up with search industry leaders, namely Google & Yahoo! to “improve search results of dynamic web content”.

Adobe have given Google & Yahoo! access to the Adobe Flash technology to allow them to improve their ability to index flash files/websites.

So what does this mean for us, the search engine optimisers and web developers? Well at the moment, very little it seems. We’ve all known for quite sometime that Google has been able to follow links and index some content from within a flash flash file. At the moment, all this does is give Google and Yahoo! insider information on how they can get to information, previously unavailable from within the flash file.

Will it make a difference? Will flash websites now have a better change of being indexed? In my opinion, I don’t think this will ever happen. Flash just doesn’t offer the flexibility that plain text based HTML does. You’ve a lot more scope within plain HTML than Flash to optimise your website.

It’s an interesting development, but not one I see making a huge difference for a long time.

So Google and Yahoo! are now partners on search ads huh? My god what next??

I have to say I think it’s a great deal for both parties. Yahoo! can greatly increase the monetisation of their pages, while Google can continue to grow their penetration of the search advertising market.

Here’s Google’s apparent reasoning for the joint venture : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-agreement-to-provide-ad-technology.html

Some of you may have noticed that Google are using a new Favicon for their website. Like me, I’m sure you were wondering why… well here’s why:

“The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.”

So there ye go… now you know!

If you were new to the web, you wouldn’t be forgiven for thinking the homepage of Google is un-inviting, un-interesting and downright boring. Why have such a large company with all their billions never updated their homepage to make it more exciting?

Well to put it simply, it’s been years of testing it’s users. At the Google I/O Conference a couple of weeks ago, Marissa Mayer explained why:

“When Google was a relatively unknown 80-person start-up, the company tested Stanford students on how well they could use Google to find which country won the most gold medals in the 1994 Olympics. The result: students would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…”

When Marissa intervened and asked why they were waiting so long to perform a search, most people said “I’m waiting for the rest of it”. The students were clearly waiting for busier more flashy website and it was never coming.

So what did Google do to counteract this issue? No, they didn’t make it flashier, nor did they add a lot of extra content. No, it was something so simple, most people probably wouldn’t have thought about…

They put a copyright notice at the bottom of the page! Yes, that simple!

It’s not there for legal reasons,” Mayer said. “It’s there as punctuation. That’s it. (It tells the searcher) ‘Nothing else is coming; please start searching now.’”

That’s debatably the most innovative idea to come out of Google to date!

• We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment

I came across a site today that is basically a filesharing application using Google as it’s technology for finding copyrighted files.

www.yamour.com uses some Google hacks (and the Google API) by the looks of things to seek out anything from MP3s to video files. So who should the MPAA hold responsible for this blatant infringement of copyrighted material?

Should it be the owners of Yamour for basically taking all the nice Google features and presenting it in a more user friendly way or should it chase Google to remove the offending material from its index?

For me, it should be neither. Google is my favourite tool on the web, without it, I would be seriously lost! But why should Google be brought to case over people uploading copyrighted files to the internet? In the same way, why is TorrentSpy being punished for doing something that isn’t very far from what Google is doing?

TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay $110m the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) for failing to hand over logs on the activity of users of their website.

The landmark ruling will send shockwaves to the thousands of small torrent search websites and maybe even some of the larger ones that offer a similar service to the one TorrentSpy offered before it shutdown in March of this year.

TorrentSpy in effect, was nothing more than a torrent search engine. It never held or stored any copyrighted material on it’s server. However, it did allow users easily find copyrighted material.

So in effect, TorrentSpy has been sued because it “linked” to copyrighted material, something that Google, Yahoo! and MSN do all the time with their search engine.

A simple search on Google will give you “links” to millions of copyrighted material. Here’s a very simple example of this http://www.google.ie/search?q=intitle%3a%22index+of%22+eminem

Why don’t the MPAA doing anything about this? Is the muscle behind the larger corporates a bridge to far for them to fight in their war against copyright infringement??