Sun Valley – Google’s Larry Page: Stop stressing about search data privacy
Hey you Mr. Privacy Nut,
Google co-founder Larry Page has a message for you: Stop worrying about how data about your Web searching habits might be abused. Your search data is there to serve a greater good.
“It’s always easy to be fearful of a hypothetical bad thing that could happen in the future, and yet the data of these kinds of (search) logs and so on are actually very, very useful,” Page told reporters at a briefing in Sun Valley on Thursday.
He cited the company’s recent work using search data to figure out which regions in the US were experiencing flu outbreaks. Google was able to detect the flu more accurately than the government, Page said, and probably could save it tens of millions of dollars in the process.
Page said the company is also exploring whether search data could detect pandemics.
“I think the answer is probably yes, we will be able to do some things like that. That could possibly save a third of the world population,” he said.
“So you could sort of worry about well, there’s some possibility something bad will happen with search logs – I’m not sure what – nothing has really happened yet of significance. Or we’re moving very fast. There’s lots of new uses for the data. Once it’s deleted it’s gone. You can’t ever get it back.”
Rupert Murdoch, the smartest man in newspapers?
I wrote an analysis on Monday about the possibility that News Corp might take its news search results away from Google and list them on Microsoft’s Bing search engine instead. My conclusion: This one isn’t such a hot idea. Then I read John Gapper’s Financial Times item about how it *could* be a hot idea.
To recap, here’s how it would work.
- Microsoft would pay News Corp for the privilege of being the only search engine to carry results from papers including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Times of London.
- Microsoft thinks it can get more people to use its search engine, drawing them away from Google.
- News Corp could punish Google, in essence, for making tons of money from the ads it serves alongside news search results. Why, the thinking goes, should Google make a bunch of money off the news that we produce and our newsrooms go starving and our ad sales tank?
- Other newspaper publishers, if they see Murdoch making it work, might think the same thing and abandon Google en masse.
I and many others wrote that it would be a gamble at best. What if people don’t care that much about news? If the 70 percent of the search market that uses Google discovers the news is absent, will they switch search engines? Scientists of misanthropy like me say it’s unlikely. If they don’t find it, they won’t seek it.
Gapper at the FT has another way of looking at it:
In effect, (Murdoch) would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing. That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible. …
Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming. … If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?
I hope News Ltd do this. It will clean up a lot of the so called “news” provided via Google and hurt their hits/ad revenue in the process. It’s naive to think his competitors won’t take advantage of this. Doesn’t Murdoch realise that he has devalued his own product over the years and now most of his tabloid news comes from the people and the internet – so he is the one getting content “free”. People don’t care where they get general celebrity news these days. If they want good analysis of stories they’ll go direct to specialised sites and more often than not these days they are independant web sites set up by journalists sick of the big media players. The paradigm has changed and Murdoch doesn’t still doesn’t get it. Let him cut of his own nose…
from The Great Debate UK:
The end of .com, the beginning of .yourbrand
-Joe White is chief operating officer at Gandi, an Internet domain name registration firm. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Despite the importance of domain names for companies and the extraordinary amount of money many have paid for them, the vast majority of businesses are unprepared for imminent changes to the Internet.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that oversees the structure of the internet, is liberalising the market for domain name extensions – the .com or .net part of a web address – from the beginning of 2010. This means that anyone, in theory, can apply to operate an extension. So alongside .com, .net, and .org, we will see .whateveryoulike.
Historically, companies have considered their domain to be a critical part of their brand identity. Some domains have been sold for millions of dollars – sex.com was reportedly sold for $14 million – and multinational companies often register up to 20,000 different variations of their brand to try and stop opportunists exploiting it. However, despite this historic investment and interest, the vast majority (two thirds) of businesses are unprepared for imminent changes, according to some research we did a little while ago in conjunction with the Future Laboratory.
This is interesting given that there are real opportunities for companies. It will mean companies can readdress the way they communicate with customers, partners, or investors. We’ve already seen a shift in consumer behaviour where the high-street and virtual world have blended. The growth in blogging and social networking means people have also shifted their identity online. The liberalisation of top level domain names will help to blend the activities of both businesses and consumers with the potential to create a personalised brand experience.
Toyota, for example, could create the .toyota domain and register europe.toyota and usa.toyota, and set up sites for individual brands (highlander.toyota) and use targeted domains for different markets such as customers and suppliers (suppliers.toyota, dealers.toyota, buying.toyota). Or, Nike could create a personalised brand experience using yourname.nike, with training programmes, suggested products, networking pages which could link with sponsored athletes and so on. In addition, some companies could do one-off marketing campaigns or initiatives to support individual product launches. For example, Tastyhamburgersandhealthysalads.mcdonalds or Doveforrealwomen.unilever.
Indicators suggest that consumers will embrace this change. As part of the same research, we interviewed 1,000 consumers and one in five (19 per cent) said an extension such as .nike or .microsoft would be memorable. Considering only 24 per cent think .com is memorable, this shows the future potential for branded top-level domains.
Well I think it would go a long way to resolving the issues of us running out of domain names anytime soon as well as protecting users from phishing websites. One thing that will need to be done is to price these new domain extensions so that people can register these instead of just large corporations.
76% of people can’t remember .com? That’s sad.
