Approval by the European Commission, which came without conditions, had largely been expected to occur this week. The Commission’s announcement comes three weeks before its April 2 deadline, in which it had to determine whether to nix the deal.

With the Commission’s decision in place, Google announced on Tuesday that it has formally closed its merger with DoubleClick.

“We are thrilled that our acquisition of DoubleClick has closed,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a statement. “With DoubleClick, Google now has the leading display ad platform, which will enable us to rapidly bring to market advances in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability, and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers, and agencies.”

According to the Commission’s announcement, the deal was approved based on several factors:

The Commission’s in-depth market investigation found that Google and DoubleClick were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other’s activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors at the moment.

Even if DoubleClick could become an effective competitor in online intermediation services, it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger. The Commission therefore concluded that the elimination of DoubleClick as a potential competitor would not have an adverse impact on competition in the online intermediation advertising services market.

The Commission also analyzed the potential effects of nonhorizontal relationships between Google and DoubleClick, following concerns raised by third parties in the course of the market investigation.

These relationships concern DoubleClick’s market position in ad serving, where Google, by controlling DoubleClick’s tools, could allegedly raise the cost of ad serving for rival intermediaries, and Google’s market position in search advertising and/or online ad intermediation services, where Google could allegedly have required purchasers of search ad space or intermediation to also purchase DoubleClick’s tools.

The Commission found that the merged entity would not have the ability to engage in strategies aimed at marginalizing Google’s competitors, mainly because of the presence of credible ad-serving alternatives, to which customers (publishers/advertisers/ad networks) can switch–in particular, vertically integrated companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.

The market investigation also found that the merged entity would not have the incentive to close off access for competitors in the ad-serving market, mainly because such strategies would be unlikely to be profitable.

Google’s rivals such as Microsoft, as well as privacy groups, were hoping that the Commission, as well as U.S. antitrust regulators, would kill the Google-DoubleClick deal. But the Commission’s passage clears the acquisition’s last large regulatory hurdle.

Last December, the Federal Trade Commission gave the online-advertising megamerger its blessing.

U.S. regulators noted that Google and DoubleClick are not direct competitors and that the markets within online advertising evolve quickly. As a result, the FTC did not find evidence that competitive harm would arise from the merger.

The decision by the FTC had come after the European Commission determined in November that it would take a deeper look into the proposed merger. Some antitrust experts at the time noted that Google could face a difficult time in Europe, given differences in the way federal and European regulators evaluate mergers.

Opponents of the merger weigh in
“U.S. and European policymakers must reform the antitrust process to reflect the realities of the digital-market era, where competition, data collection, and content creation are seamlessly intertwined,” the Center for Digital Democracy, which had presented its opposition to the FTC and the Commission, said in a statement Tuesday. “In today’s digital marketplace, the company that controls the most data about consumers, and has the global reach to connect to them, raises both anticompetitive and privacy concerns. An antiquated and piecemeal antitrust approach fails to protect citizens, consumers, and competition.”

The organization also cited concerns that the merger would aid Microsoft in its goal to acquire Yahoo. That deal is largely being driven by Microsoft’s desire to bolster its online-advertising capabilities.

“Instead of ensuring competition, (the Commission) and the FTC have literally paved the way for the emergence of a global digital duopoly over online advertising,” the Center for Digital Democracy stated.

On the Official Google Blog, Douglas Merrill, a vice president of engineering, spelled out the company’s philosophy, processes, and technology that the company employs for security.

He said that the company is developing its own security software, particularly to address areas such as large-scale computing and automation.

Google’s processes are set up so that sensitive personal information can only be viewed by exception, Merrill said.

“We carefully manage access to confidential information of any sort, and very few Googlers have access to what we consider very sensitive data. This is in no small part because there’s very little reason for us to provide that access–most of our processes are automated, and don’t require much human intervention. Of course, the limited number of people who are granted access to sensitive data must have special approval,” he wrote.

The reduction in listings, ComScore noted, was “offset by paid revenue per click.”

On Monday, at a Bear Stearns media conference in Palm Beach, Fla., Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising and commerce in North America, offered essentially the same view on the matter.

As noted by ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan, Armstrong emphasized that the dip in paid clicks was intentional–part of a strategic plan designed to deliver better, more-precisely targeted ads. Thus, the market anxiety that hit Google’s stock was, well, unjustified.
OK then, but Dignan also cites Armstrong’s acknowledgment that “search is changing overall in general” and tends to reflect macroeconomic conditions–an acknowledgment, Dignan points out, that suggests Google isn’t recession-proof.

Google also told conference attendees that it won’t be developing its own content, that it will increase the number of videos and ads on YouTube, and that the company’s system won’t differentiate between search and display ads over time.

Google’s general theme is to offer advertisers a complete dashboard with multiple forms of advertising. Armstrong also noted that Google will deliver ads on social networks via widgets and social-networking apps.

John Mark is in the former camp and, increasingly, so am I. Google is the Teflon open-source company, contributing selectively and strategically…and winning kudos across the board.

Self-interested Google? Absolutely. But then, how many companies do you know that aren’t self-interested contributors to open source? Walker notes:

I didn’t say they were altruistic, but rather that they knew what they were doing with respect to community development. They invest in communities, many of them related to open source, and this devotion to community helps them tremendously. It helps them when they launch a new set of services because the communities they target will no doubt be the early adopters.

It helps when Google launches a new platform, such as Android, because its communities will be the source of a great number of hackers who will enjoy bending Android to their will.

I wonder, however, if Google gets a free pass on so many issues simply because developers are praying for an alternative to Microsoft’s dominance? Perhaps many, or most, embrace Google, thinking, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Or perhaps Google has done an exceptional job of looking past the criticisms that I and others have thrown at its open-source efforts, and simply barrels forth. When you’re on the top of your game, you can afford to do this.

I’m always bemused to see companies stop to throw stones back at critics, as if it’s going to help their stock price. The only thing that silences critics is performance–something Google has had in spades.

Back to John Mark’s point. Google has been exceptional in some areas of community development. The Summer of Code was a masterstroke of genius. Hiring key open-source developers such as Greg Stein hasn’t hurt, either. Together, its open-source community outreach has been executed well, though not flawlessly.

Perhaps Google has more to teach us than advertising.

Steffen Mueller, an ex-Google product manager from Munich, Germany, has launched his own version of Web search with a dash of the social. Mueller and a few friends from Germany started Topicle, which launched in beta on Monday.

The site lets anyone create or edit their own search engine on any topic–recipes, mortgage news, New York City or even peanut butter. People create a search topic and then choose the Web addresses from which Topicle will search. (Topicle uses Google search APIs to produce its search results.) People can search from one of the preexisting topic search engines, build their own, or rate the domains within an existing topic.

Of course, vertical search engines are nothing new. Sites like Rollyo have been trying to simplify domain-specific search for years; and the major search engines offer similar services for tech-savvy people. Google, for example, runs Google Coop, a service that helps people create a specialized search engine for their Web site. But these services largely haven’t gotten off the ground yet.

Mueller said the human element will ultimately improve search, similar to Wikipedia’s effect on encyclopedia listings.

“Topicle generates more precise and useful search results with sources recommended by humans, as opposed to sources picked solely by a computer algorithm,” said Mueller, who joined Google in early 2004 and worked on various projects including Google Maps and Froogle.

Mueller said Topicle is the first product of his company Zoolium. He did not detail how the company plans to make money. Zoolium is privately funded with $200,000 of Mueller’s money.

Why is that? Why has Google always been a company that has single-handedly taken the tried and true mentality of Web site owners for years and turned it upside down. On top of that, why has the company been able to succeed if conventional wisdom suggests that should never happen?

Maybe because the old idea of keeping people on the site isn’t necessarily the best way to go. Perhaps users want to use a service that acts as a means to an end instead of a vehicle of infinite knowledge. Maybe users are sick and tired of sticky services and want nothing more than to bounce around the Web in search of the very best content no matter where it is.

Have consumer interests changed or is Google just a search engine and, thus, a place where the inherent task of the service is to move people along? According to one Google representative, the counterculture was bred out of the company’s drive to get people out of the way on search.

And while it’s plain to see Google (and, obviously, other search engines) employing this “push” mentality to search, it may not be so easy to see on its other services. For example, I’m not too sure how that push mentality relates to Gmail at face value. But when you consider the fact that you can set up a Gmail account and use it on any other service, it quickly bears fruit. What about Picasa? Sure, you keep coming back to use the service, but it’s for a reason–you want a better-looking picture and get out of there as quickly as possible.

And it’s this idea of speed and the length of time you can get in and get out that makes this counterculture so interesting. Although certain services attempt to do the same thing as Google, the speed with which you can find or do exactly what you want and be on to the next thing is easily what sets Sergey and Larry’s company apart.

The company does that with its search, does it with Gmail, does it with Reader, does it with Picasa, does it with Docs, and the list goes on. In fact, Google is probably the largest online firm in the world that does as much as it can to get you off its pages. Doesn’t that seem at all counterintuitive?

But perhaps most fascinating is the inherent risk that piggybacks on the counterculture mentality Google is so quick to mention. After all, if just about every Web site on the Net says users should be kept on those pages for fear of losing them to something better, what does it say about Google when it wants users to go out and find something?

In essence, this is a company that has the guts to let you do what you want and hope that you will come back because the service is much better than anything else available.

But if nothing else, this counterculture speaks to something that many in this business simply don’t want to mention–readers and Web surfers simply aren’t trusted and need to be lured into more and more pages so they will stay at the site. Simply put, the average Internet user isn’t trusted and never has been. And yet, when they finally are trusted, good things happen to the company who trusts them.

But if nothing else, Google has shown that trust can go a long way and it shouldn’t be abandoned because the Old Guard subscribed to a faulty belief that users need to be kept on a site for as long as possible. Everything on the Internet is a means to an end and never the end itself. Every single person reads editorial content, searches Google, modifies pictures, and listens to music for a reason. And to think that a particular site is that reason is both misguided and dumb.

Google is on to something with its counterculture and should be followed by more companies than just search engines. The Internet has changed and no site is safe from the perils of stickiness.

In its automated auction system, Google will soon be looking at the length of time it takes to see an advertiser’s landing page once an ad is clicked as a factor in determining ad position and minimum bid for keywords.

People are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, Google explained in its Inside AdWords blog.

I want to emphasize that I agree with the Google statement that people abandon pages that load too slowly.

We’ve all been subjected to captcha programs when signing up for Web services. They typically consist of a box with some characters, either distorted or displayed against some noisy background, and you have to type the letters and numerals in exactly as you see them before the system will accept your sign-in.

MessageLabs created this graphic that shows how a bot fakes out a captcha and uses the newly created e-mail accounts to send out spam.

They are designed to catch, or stop, automated programs called bots that are written to create new accounts for spammers to use. Annoying as the captcha systems are, they have been successful in keeping bots out, until recently.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail captcha mechanisms were broken in July 2007, according to MessageLabs. And now, Gmail has succumbed.

As a result, the proportion of spam sent from Gmail accounts doubled from 1.3 percent in January to 2.6 percent in February, mostly promoting adult-oriented Web sites, MessageLabs says.

A Google representative said she could not confirm or deny that the captcha method used in Gmail had been broken, but did confirm that there had been an increase in spam recently.

The Gmail captcha problem was reported in late February by another security firm, Websense.

Gmail is an attractive target for spammers because a Google account is free and offers access to a wide range of services. Also, Google domains are unlikely to be blacklisted, Websense says.

This screenshot shows network analysis of a bot cracking Gmail’s captcha mechanism, a more sophisticated attack than one used to crack Live Mail’s captcha technique, Websense says.

No disrespect intended to the article’s author, but this article is classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). “Nobody ever lost their job by choosing IBM,” the classic FUD saying goes. “Nobody ever lost their ranking by refusing to implement PageRank sculpting” is the FUD peddled in this article.

PageRank sculpting is a powerful tactic that is worthy of inclusion in any advanced SEO practitioner’s toolkit. I have written and blogged and spoken in favor of the tactic. I stand by the tactic, as do many other top-notch SEOs, and most importantly, so does Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, has publicly condoned the use of PageRank sculpting on repeated occasions. For example, in this SEOMoz interview:

Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?

A) Yes–Webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages

(Matt’s precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives Webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g., a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)

Google has even used the technique on its own properties.

So my question to Ms. Thurow is: “Have you ever conducted any testing of the PageRank sculpting technique?” We at Netconcepts have, and it works.

According to our tests, there are plenty of occasions where it can be a valuable tool, if used wisely. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and the category pages contain three links to every single product page–the product name as a text link, the product image thumbnail as an image link, and the words “View Product” as a text link–you could nofollow the image and “View Product” links and funnel more PageRank through the much more contextually relevant product name-based text links.

If SEO is going to be respected as an experimental science instead of black magic, it needs to be implemented with an experimental approach and all tactics tested for effectiveness (within the bounds of what is acceptable according to the engines). With SEO, you don’t just “set it and forget” using the purported “best practices” as defined by the SEO bloggers and speakers (and sure, feel free to include me in that set).

So if Ms. Thurow wrote this piece without any testing, it’s just unsubstantiated opinion–and I wholeheartedly disagree with it.

And I’m not the only one either. Just take a look at the other prominent SEOs who have countered via blog posts (like “Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sculpting Your Pagerank” and Sphinn comments and desphinns (click on the “Who Desphunn This” tab to see the “desphinns”).

While overall e-mail message volume per user grew 47 percent, the spam volume was up 57 percent in 2007 to record levels, according to data from Google’s Postini cited in the 2008 Annual Google Communications Intelligence Report.

The average “unprotected user” would have received 36,000 spam messages in the year, up from 23,000 in 2006, the report said.

Stopping spam and other malware is the top priority for the government, legal, manufacturing and, for the most part the tech industry, while healthcare, financial and retail companies are more concerned with complying with government regulations, according to online surveys of 575 CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs.

The average volume of spam messages per user jumped significantly in August of 2007. It increased 100 percent within a seven day period, alone, according to Postini’s data centers.

Google released Google Calendar Sync on Wednesday, which allows you to sync up those two calendars.

The tool gives you control over which direction you want the synchronization to go as well as how often you want it to happen.

The software was easy to install, and I was able to see the Outlook items in my Google Calendar but not the other way around for some reason. Oh well. Once I get this figured out it sure will be useful.

There are other Outlook calendar sync tools, but most aren’t free. Jotlet announced two-synchronization with Outlook and its calendar last year. Another interesting one is Calgoo, a Java-based app that syncs online and offline calendars, including Google and Microsoft.

Google Calendar Sync lets you sync your Google Calendar with your Microsoft Outlook calendar.

And that would be approval without conditions, three sources familiar with the matter told the news service.

Google was given the go-ahead by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in December, but has been waiting for European regulators to act.

Core Security published an alert on its Web site on Tuesday stating that it had found eight vulnerabilities related to some open-source image processing libraries in Google’s Android SDK, which the group claims are outdated. Attackers exploiting these vulnerabilities could take complete control of Android handsets, the alert said.

It’s hardly surprising that some kind of vulnerability would be discovered. And, in fact, it’s probably a good thing that groups like Core are discovering problems now. Android, which Google announced in November, is still in beta. Even though several companies showed off prototypes using the Android software at the GSMA Mobile World Congress last month, none of them have built a commercial product yet.

The final version of the software code won’t be available until later this year. So Core and other developers and security experts will hopefully find more glitches or problems. That way, Google and the rest of the developer community can fix these problems before the phones hit the market.

The latest person to move offices from Mountain View, Calif., to Facebook, seven miles away in Palo Alto is Sheryl Sandberg. The Google vice president of global sales and operations will become chief operating officer at the social network company later this month.

Facebook previously hired Benjamin Ling, who was in charge of Google Checkout; Justin Rosenstein, a developer on GDrive and product manager for Google Page Creator; and Gideon Yu, former YouTube chief financial officer who left shortly after Google acquired YouTube in 2006.

Sandberg helped turn online ads into a cash cow for Google and handled sales operations while the company’s employees and revenue grew by leaps and bounds. She and the other ex-Googlers understand the Internet and how to turn ads into cash better than anyone else. Sandberg is more than qualified for the job at Facebook, whose 500-person business is miniscule compared with Google’s 16,000 operation.

Sandberg also will help Facebook avoid another privacy fiasco such as the storm caused by its Beacon ad-tracking technology. My colleague, Caroline McCarthy caught up with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who insisted that Sandberg isn’t a pure replacement for outgoing executive Owen Van Natta.

For Googlers, Facebook offers an opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond and join a start-up with a popular consumer Internet site, focused on innovative technology and run by a daring young Ivy Leaguer.

“Facebook is maturing, and they’re trying to figure out how to be a revenue-generating company…the social networking part was easy; the business part isn’t necessarily,” said Tim Hanlon, an executive vice president at Denuo, a consulting arm of advertising agency Publicis Groupe.

The hiring of Googlers at Facebook “is more an indication that Google is becoming a big company that is probably not providing the entrepreneurial opportunities that people thought they were getting when they originally signed up,” he said. Indeed, my new editor, Dan Farber, calls the move one of Zuckerberg’s smartest so far.

Googlers are likely getting frustrated by the sheer size of the company now, said Satya Patel, a former product manager for ads at Google who now runs the digital media investing efforts at Battery Ventures.

“The people at Google have seen this movie before and know what it takes to solve some of the problems that Facebook is dealing with on a daily basis,” he said. “They see Facebook as an opportunity to be part of a small organization and have that same impact again” that they had in the early days at Google.

Patel sees such migrations of workers in Silicon Valley as a natural evolution. “People are going from the successes of the prior decade to the successes of the coming decade,” he said.

Rosenstein declined to be interviewed, but his words when he left Google for Facebook in June 2007 say a lot:

“Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while–the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization…That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.”

I learned that he was going to be making a big Google Health announcement at a health care trade show on Thursday and a Google spokesman promised me I would get a “one-on-one” interview with him in private afterward if I flew out to Orlando, Fla., from San Francisco for the event.

That Schmidt was sitting down with me proved even billionaires can let bygones be bygones. Our professional relationship got off to a rocky start shortly after I joined CNET News.com in mid-2005. OK, so it was a really rocky start. To refresh your memories: We Googled some personal information about Schmidt and wrote about what we found. He didn’t like it, and News.com was on the receiving end of a very stern corporate silent treatment from Google for nearly two months.

Since then, in fairness, my relationship with the search king has been considerably better. But a sit down with Mr. Schmidt? Of course, I’d fly cross-country, even if there’s a certain absurdity to flying 2,500 miles to interview a guy who works about 40 miles from my office.

I had a list of questions: I was eager to ask Schmidt about recent disappointing ComScore figures for paid search performance and how Google will weather a recession given that lending companies appear to be cutting their ad spending, how Google’s going to monetize YouTube and, of course, how it plans to counter a Microsoft-Yahoo tie-up if that should happen.

My editors agreed to send me to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2008 annual conference. I got a last-minute ticket and stocked up with camera, digital recorder, and the list of questions. I arrived a day early to do a preview of the news and get my footing.

The morning of Schmidt’s keynote I woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I was in my near front-row seat well in advance. After covering the keynote and the news conference afterward, I waited for a Google spokesman to take me to see Schmidt. Walking to a green room in the Orange County Convention Center, the Google spokesman told me I could only ask questions about Google Health.

What?! I asked the spokesman if he was serious, and he said “yes.” This wasn’t what I was expecting. What is Google afraid of?

Schmidt greeted me and agreed to let me take several photos. That was nice. I was told I had 12 minutes and I dove in with several probing questions about Google Health (hey, so you play nice and then try to ask the real questions).

Was it difficult for Google to get health industry players like Aetna, Quest Diagnostics, and Walgreens onboard? “It took a while,” he said, adding that Google lined up health experts to be on an advisory health council and they are integrating their systems to work with Google’s GData. “It was OK. It wasn’t that hard.”

How significant to Google was this project? “We prioritized…(looked at) what do people actually do with search in terms of the volume, and the importance of health came out No. 1…We tend to think of Google Health as an extension of search. You could argue it’s also an application.”

Like with Google News, Schmidt said he hopes that Google Health will lead to more people using Google search and clicking on ads. “Every month we say to ourselves should we add ads to Google News or add more news features to Google News and every month we decide to add more Google news features because…we make so much money from people just using Google search that we don’t need to get the extra money from News…A Google News user is more likely to be a Google searcher and therefore clicks on ads more.”

This led into a question about Google’s reliance on search advertising and how the company would weather a recession. Schmidt cut me off, waved his hand and said, “I’m not going to talk about anything other than Google Health.”

Sheepishly, I said, “So, I don’t suppose I can ask you about Microsoft and Yahoo?” The answer: “No.”

Oh damn. This was bad.

“So what?” you’re probably thinking. “Quit your whining, you worthless, note-scribbling toadie and stop annoying this man!” OK, fair point. But give and take with the press is part of being in a position of responsibility at a highly visible public company. Saying everything but the topic at hand is off limits is, well, lame.

When President Bush holds a press conference about, say, buying books for a bunch of sweet school kids in Alabama, he doesn’t get to say to the gathered mass of reporters: “I’m happy to take questions, but only if we talk about the books we just bought for these sweet school kids. The economy and the war in Iraq are off limits. So fermez la bouche, Seymour Hersh!”

Of course, he’s free to dodge the questions. Some presidents over the years have perfected the art of the dodge. Some, well, they could still use a little work.

Anyway, so back to the interview: Then I said, “um, OK” and looked desperately at my notes and all the questions I had that wouldn’t get answered. OK, I’ll admit it, I was stymied. I not-so-subtly tried to use Google Health as an entree to other questions.

Can you discuss your strategy with regard to social networks and whether that will play a part in Google Health? “It may over time…It makes sense that people who are in health situations are going to want to have a social community.”

And how does this fit in with your mobile strategy? “Everything we do we’re doing for the mobile wireless space as well, so the interface you see will be available in our mobile strategies…We’ll re-whack the pages a little bit…In mobile, we’re having tremendous successes.”

Will Google Health work with other Google properties like Gmail and Google Docs, and what about YouTube? I ask him, grasping for any connection to use.

“In YouTube you could imagine that health videos stored on YouTube would be easily indexable…There are a lot of Google Health videos already on YouTube.” (Earlier, during his keynote, he had this nugget to say about YouTube: “Ten hours of video is being uploaded into YouTube every minute. God knows what the quality of that video is! But it’s coming.”)

So, what will search, on Google Health and in general, look like in five years? “It’s hard to predict what we’ll do in five years…You could imagine eventually we would know how to rank much better health information.”

This guy was good. Total talking points. I’m not sure why he declined to answer these “off topic” questions, other than that he could.

I was told I could ask one last question and I asked him what question have I not asked that I should have? Among reporters, this is generally our last-ditch, I-gotta-get-something-good-or-my-editor-is-going-to-kill-me question.

“I don’t think you have highlighted sufficiently the platform characteristic of this,” Schmidt responded. “Everyone is assuming it is personal health record…I think of it as a platform upon which many services can be built and it is through that platform that the real innovation occurs.”

As a follow up to that I squeezed in a question about Microsoft’s health care platform HealthVault and how does that differ from Google Health? Getting up from his chair, Schmidt said, “That’s it.”

Just like that it was over and I was hustled out the door.

So, my one-on-one with Schmidt wasn’t exactly what I had hoped it would be. But at least I’m getting closer to a free plane trip somewhere in the continental United States on a non-holiday, non-blackout date in the near future.

Microsoft may be closing in on its whopper acquisition of Yahoo. Google’s stock price has slid dramatically since its 52-week high in November. ComScore says bad stuff’s a’ brewing in Google’s U.S. paid-click performance. And the economy, perhaps the only thing that can really slow Google, seems to be headed south.

Schmidt sat down with CNET News.com earlier Thursday for a brief interview at a medical-trade show Health Information Management Systems Society in Orlando, Fla., where Google unveiled its ambitious Google Health initiative. As is his wont as a billionaire executive with many things to do, Schmidt wanted to stick to the script there in the land of Mickey Mouse. For Schmidt, Thursday was all about health care.

In fairness, what Google is trying to do in health care is interesting and sure to stoke yet another round of privacy concerns. But let’s face it: we want to talk about the other stuff, which Schmidt literally waved aside with a wisp of his left hand.

Oh well. We were hoping for a little “on the state of things” rumination in the vein of the older, more thoughtful Bill Gates. Who knows? Maybe he would have flashed some bravado a la Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who once sat in front of about 1,500 people at a company conference, said “OK, shoot,” and answered unrehearsed questions from the audience for more than an hour.

No matter, not every successful executive can be colorful. But this will most likely be the year that Schmidt and his Google gang have a chance to prove that they have the chops to manage a company through the bumpy times as well as the good times. Here’s what they’re facing:

• Microsoft. If Microsoft manages to land Yahoo, it will establish itself as the largest company in a number of Internet categories, including unique monthly visitors, e-mail, and instant messaging. Google will still be the big kahuna of search, with a 56.3 percent share to Microsoft/Yahoo’s 31.5 percent share. But landing Yahoo could give Microsoft a better platform from which to launch Web applications and compete with Google in the Webware future.

This has to be just a little personal to Schmidt. After all, it was Microsoft that made his final years in the chief executive’s office at software maker Novell miserable. Novell, some of you may recall, enjoyed a brief renaissance when Schmidt took the helm. But Microsoft, as it tends to do, caught up with Novell in that once-fascinating category of network operating systems. I say once-fascinating because Microsoft’s utter dominance made it boring until Linux, not Novell’s Netware, proved a worthy rival to Windows on the server.

• Trustbusters. It’s with no shortage of irony that Schmidt, who was among many who complained about Microsoft’s anticompetitive behavior, had to deal with federal and international scrutiny of Google’s planned merger with DoubleClick. Payback’s a you-know-what. Thankfully for Google, the Federal Trade Commission has signed off on the deal, and European regulators are expected to do the same.

But as Google grows more powerful, scrutiny from Washington is going to be routine. What seems like healthy competition to Google’s YouTube today could be tanking competitors looking for a lifeline from their political friends tomorrow. The list of potential bugaboos goes on. When Al Gore was running for president, the rumor making the rounds of Silicon Valley was that Schmidt, an active Gore backer, was going to be his cyberczar. Now he may get that quality time in the capital.

• The economy. In 1965, Gay Talese wrote that a plain-old cold for Frank Sinatra can “send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a president of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.”

As Sinatra in his prime was a bellwether for the music industry and all things swingin,’ Google has become a bellwether for the Internet economy, and Wall Street is starting to worry that even the mighty search king could be impacted by a souring economy. The Federal Reserve chairman said Thursday that he doesn’t expect the ugly “stagflation” of the 1970s, but he acknowledged the coming months could be difficult.

Where does that leave Google? Like Microsoft in desktop software, Cisco Systems in networking equipment, and IBM in, well, everything, Google has grown so big that its health is likely to be indicative of the nation’s health. It will take terrific execution to continue to do great while everyone else suffers.

Schmidt’s first go-around as a chief executive at Novell was ultimately a disappointment. When things got tough, he got going out the exit. He reportedly promises to stay on at Google for 20 years. The challenges in the coming year and how he responds to them will likely prove whether that’s a terribly good idea.

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire’s analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.

…[W]hen comparing licensing models and Web CMS features, we’re not sure what would drive a company to go with SharePoint, when there are a number of viable and more cost effective solutions just waiting in the wings.

Like Google Sites, though not for the Web content management that CMS Wire discusses. For internal collaboration, Google Sites is likely to be a viable option.

However, I still think that Google’s attempt to manage all collaboration through a wiki–which is really all Google Sites is–is a mistake. Wikis are great, but they are just one facet of collaboration. MindTouch, an open-source collaboration company with wikis at its heart, arguably does a better job of making wikis much more than wikis, while Google Sites seems content to run with a relatively vanilla wiki implementation.

Google has yet to prove itself as a viable enterprise competitor. But then again, it doesn’t need to win overnight. Just as Microsoft has always done with its cash-cow businesses, Google can use the immense fruits of its search business to patiently chip away at the enterprise market. Google does exceptionally well at making software easy to use and, well, free.

Those are going to be hard to beat.

One thing I’d like to see: a pledge from Google to keep all of its customers’ content open. The users, not Google, must own the right to easily move data out of Google Sites. I assume Google will do this–it’s getting better and better at such things–but I would like to see it in writing.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Alfresco, an open-source content collaboration company, which theoretically will compete with Google Sites and which does compete with Microsoft SharePoint. I am also an adviser to MindTouch.

“Why would Google be here?” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said during a keynote speech at the Health Information Management Systems Society trade show, which he said was not one the company has normally attended. “What’s the most important search I could do?”

The answer: health. Nearly one out of two Americans has a chronic health condition, he said. Meanwhile, people are already using the Web to get information, including one man, who told Google a search for heart attack symptoms on Google led him to call an ambulance and saved his life, Schmidt said.

“We’re going to partner with leaders in health care to cross-connect…and apply the principles of the Internet” to improve the industry, he said. “The first principle is, it’s the user’s data. The data follows the consumer wherever they go” when they change doctors or insurers.

Currently, there are more than 200 personal health record systems that are closed or tethered to a particular health system, he said.

Google Health aims to untether the 2 billion X-rays taken in the U.S. each year, 62 million CAT scans, and other health data, and put them all online for the patients to access.

Future partners include major hospitals, pharmacies, and insurers, including Walgreen, Aetna, Wal-Mart Stores, the University of California at San Francisco, the American Heart Association, Quest Diagnostics, Long’s Drugs, the American Medical Association, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University.

Google turned to experts in the field in creating Google Health and formed a health advisory council that included Dean Ornish of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, Molly Coye of HealthTech, Paul Tan of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and Sharon Terry of the Genetic Alliance.

A Google employee who is also an emergency room doctor demonstrated Google Health, which was previewed at Google’s booth at the HIMSS show.

The system stores all the health records of a patient and enables users to import records from different health provider systems, as well as search for doctors and get information on conditions from Google Scholar, discussion groups, and other sources.

Google Health lets consumers get information about medical conditions, including illustrations to help identify symptoms, as this screenshot from CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote shows. 

Third-party developers have created gadgets that can be embedded in iGoogle home pages for things like alerts to remind patients to take their medicine, and other developers have created interfaces for displaying a weekly view of all the medicines a patient takes.

During a question-and-answer session, a physician told Schmidt that he has “a pang about ‘Big Brother Google’ knowing so much about me.” Schmidt assured him that the system would be safe and secure, and that no information could be shared with anyone without permission from the user.

During a news conference after the keynote speech, Schmidt said that if the government tries to subpoena Google for the consumer records, the company would have to comply, but he hinted in answering a follow-up question that patients could circumvent that by deleting their records.

“We are subject to U.S. law. In the case where we are forced by court to turn over information, we would do it,” he said. “If the information were not there, it would be (hard) to subpoena it,” he added.

Asked if insurance companies would have access to the data, Schmidt said that barring a law, the only way Google would share with insurers is “if someone were to force us with a gun to do it.”

“We have taken a pretty aggressive position with regard to protecting (consumer) privacy in the U.S., but we are subject to U.S. law,” he said.

Earlier, an attendee asked whether Google has a “monetization path” for Google Health.

“Not in the short term,” Schmidt said, adding that the hope is that people using the site will also use other Google sites and ultimately click on ads there. Google News similarly drives people to search on Google.

At the time Jane Horvath was named as the Justice Department’s chief privacy and civil-liberties officer in February 2006, Google was challenging a subpoena by the department for Web searches. A federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data allowing Google to share information about random URLs but said users’ search queries were off-limits.

Horvath, quoted in an article afterward, was critical of the initial subpoena, saying she had privacy concerns with it, the EFF says.

In the fall of 2007, Horvath was named as Google’s senior privacy counsel. The EFF asked the Justice Department for information about communications between Horvath and Google by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but the Justice Department has not responded, according to the EFF.

“Google has an unprecedented ability to collect and retain very personal information about millions of Americans, and the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies have developed a huge appetite for that information,” EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel wrote in a statement Tuesday about the foundation’s lawsuit against the government agency (PDF). “We want to know what discussions DOJ’s top privacy lawyer had with Google before leaving her government position to join the company.”

Sobel explained that the nonprofit would probably have filed the lawsuit even if Google had never hired Horvath.

“There is no suggestion on our part that there was anything inappropriate by her being hired by Google or that there was a quid pro quo,” he said in an interview. “The obvious question is what contact had the DOJ’s chief privacy officer had with a large data collecting company like Google on data retention?”

A Justice Department spokesman said the agency had no comment. Google spokesman Steve Langdon said “Google did not work with Jane Horvath on this issue when she was at DOJ.”

The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. “Google’s partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications,” Yahoo News reported.

Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason faster in Beijing than in Shanghai, but everywhere I’ve gone in China there’s been some lag. (Speeds in Tokyo were very fast when I was there in late 2004 and 2005.)

The previously announced cable, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, is scheduled to be partially operational before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8. It will be the first direct connection between the United States and China.

In January 2007, Yahoo and Opera announced that Yahoo would be the default search engine on Opera Mobile and Mini. Now, though, the mobile versions are getting what the desktop version of Opera has had for seven years–a built-in Google default.

Opera and Google “are extending this collaboration to give our users immediate access to the quality and convenience of Google’s search results,” Opera Chief Executive Jon von Tetzchner said in a statement Wednesday.

Yahoo said the change was on its own initiative, though it didn’t offer details on what exactly it didn’t find desirable about having its OneSearch mobile search service be selected by default.

“Yahoo has elected not to continue its mobile search partnership with Opera at this time,” the company said in a statement. Yahoo has 29 carrier partnerships, and its “ability to partner with leading mobile operators and handset manufacturers enables us to lead and further the global mobile ecosystem.”

Google search will be presented on the Opera browsers’ start pages–except in Russia and other former Soviet republics, Opera said.

Opera Mini can be downloaded for free on mobile phones, and Opera Mini users collectively browse 1.7 billion Web pages per month, the Oslo, Norway-based company said.

Schmidt is scheduled to give the morning keynote speech at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2008 annual conference here and will outline Google’s vision on tackling the next Internet frontier of medical data. The move, rumored for a few years, makes sense, given how much people use the Web to get health information and how much they spend on medicines and health care.

Google Health is being previewed at the company booth and gives a glimpse of what consumers participating in a trial in Cleveland will experience–a clean and simple interface where people can get to their health information in one place, share it with others, and search for information and care providers. Google Health will be available for anyone with a Google account to use later this year, said Missy Krasner, product marketing manager for Health Team Google.

This will be extremely convenient. Who hasn’t struggled at the doctor’s office to remember when that smallpox vaccine immunization was received or been overwhelmed by the task of trying to find a specialist doctor who takes your insurance plan and is located near your home or office?

Consumers using the site will be able to create a customized profile of their health, and share that with doctors and family members, as well as eventually important medical records from hospitals, doctors’ offices, and pharmacies. The site is integrated with Google Maps and Gmail to enable people to search for health care providers, see their locations on a map, and save the contact information in Gmail.

Like it does with home page gadgets, Google will allow third parties to create gadgets that work within the platform. For instance, one gadget could alert people through Google Calendar when they need to take medication, Krasner said.

Google representatives weren’t allowing anyone to take photos of the screen, but I snuck this one on my iPhone. On the table next to the chairs were the requisite colored lava lamps, infusing the sterile medical trade show environment with some cool, Silicon Valley Google aesthestic.

The screen shown at the Google booth featured three main columns of information. On one side were links to notices, drug interactions, and medical contacts, among others. In the middle were links to allow you to add more stuff to the profile, import medical records, discover more health tools, and find a doctor. On the right side is the profile summary, where you can link to conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, and test results.

The Google booth was tiny in comparison to others around it, but it was extremely crowded with representatives from other companies wanting to partner with Google and with consumers eager to know what Google has in mind for their medical information.

“I spend more time on Google than anywhere else on the Web,” said one woman, who stepped up for a demo and was handed a Google mug and a cookie because the Google oven mitts handed out in prior days were gone. (Google also gave out aprons at a party for partners the night before to go along with its “Google Home” theme for the event, to signify that Google Health is a “safe and central place on the Web for medical information,” Krasner said.)

Privacy and security are paramount
Given Google’s strong brand in search and its reputation for innovation, there’s no doubt that consumers will be riveted. However, Google will have to convince people that it can adequately protect their personal information, particularly sensitive information like medical conditions that could be misused by employers, insurers, and others, if exposed.

“There’s going to be a time when law enforcement wants to see the records of someone,” said Michael Zimmer, who is the Microsoft resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. “We know law enforcement has already asked for search records.”

Google Health will be serving as a proxy for the consumer and therefore is not subject to government regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as hospitals and doctor clinics are. This worries the World Privacy Forum, which issued a report (PDF) last week on the privacy consequences of personal health records. Such records can be more easily subpoenaed by a third party than health records covered under HIPAA, and data could leak into a marketing system or otherwise sold, the report said.

Krasner said Google Health users will actually have more control of their data because their express consent is required for any data sharing. Users can also hide portions of their profile, if they share it with others, and can delete data.

“I don’t think consumers really understand this stuff,” said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. “The convenience of having a health profile online would be valuable, but the issues of privacy and security really trump others, until there is legislation in place to protect consumers.”

Google and others “want to become a new generation of digital Park Ave. doctors. They claim they are protecting medical and health privacy, but the real goal is to harvest consumer health data so they can target individuals with precision advertising for specific prescription drug brands and over-the-counter remedies,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Behavioral targeting and other interactive marketing require a range of specific privacy safeguards, when it comes to health marketing.”

Krasner told CNET Networks’ ZDNet that Google won’t sell the data and won’t put ads on the site, but rather hopes to drive traffic to partner sites where there will be ads. In addition, Web searches will not be used to provide services or information to users of Google Health, Google representatives said.

One hospital administrator who hasn’t seen Google Health yet is optimistic about the plan. “Generally speaking, personal health records are a good thing. I’m all in favor of individual responsibility, and having information close to you and in your control,” said Craig Vercruysse, chief information officer at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. “It is smart on Google’s part to tie that into their overall search strategy.”

Microsoft as friend or foe?
Google also faces competition from others, such as Microsoft’s HealthVault, Healthline, WebMD and Revolution Health, founded by AOL founder Steve Case.

One of the most popular features of Revolution Health’s Web site is the free personal health record, and people feel comfortable using it, Case said in his keynote at the HIMSS conference Wednesday. Consumers also like the Care Pages section, where friends and family can get updates on how a patient is progressing.

“We believe care pages can be the initial link between hospitals and consumers,” Case added.

Earlier in the week, Microsoft announced that it was planning to spend $3 million to drum up developer support for its HealthVault electronic-records platform. Google Health could work with HealthVault, Microsoft representatives said.

“We are committed to being open,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s health solutions group. “We’re just the custodian for the data. If you want to move the data from HealthVault to Google, you can.”

Microsoft is creating a back-end ecosystem for developers, while Google is jumping in with a front-end site for consumers.

Google’s strength in search technologies gives it a leg up over the others, said Alfred Spector, vice president of research and special initiatives at Google, as well as an engineering executive for Google Health. “Other core advantages are the infrastructure for storage, high availability, and scalability.”

Other challenges remain for Google. The slow-moving health care industry is focused on long-term planning, while Google grew up in the rapid-pace environment of the Internet.

If it wants to extend its reach beyond the consumer portal, Google will need to find ways to work with more entrenched industry giants, such as Intel and General Electric, which are already working to bring the medical field into the Digital Age.

Google shares dropped 4.57 percent Tuesday largely on new ComScore numbers that show flat year-over-year growth in U.S. paid-click performance in January. It’s an abrupt turn from the 25 percent year-over-year growth Google produced in the fourth quarter and the consistent growth Google has shown since, well, since there’s been a Google. Regardless of what you think of ComScore’s oft-controversial methods, this isn’t good. As Henry Blodget aptly put it in Silicon Alley Insider, “Even if ComScore is only half right, this is a disaster.”

Google declined to comment on the report.

Today’s nearly 5 percent drop brings the search king’s share price down from its 52-week high of $747.24 in November all the way to $464.19 at the end of trading Tuesday.That’s just one more tidbit of bad news from Google’s 52-week low, $437 per share, back in March 2007.

Google, it would seem, can’t defy gravity or a bad economy more than any other company. For some, the ComScore numbers offer a fine opportunity to gloat. Others, and bless the optimists, aren’t terribly worried just yet. But for most companies relying on advertising for their revenues (and who doesn’t these days?), Google’s bad news provides plenty of reason to fret.

Sure, it could be that Google’s dominance of the ad market is waning. That would certainly be the glass-is-half-full scenario. But the more likely scenario is that Google is a bellwether for the rest of the online ad market, that everyone will struggle as the economy heads south, and that we’re on the cusp of plenty more bad news.

Delegates from international standards bodies are meeting in Geneva this week to resolve technical comments submitted after Office Open XML (OOXML) failed to pass as a standard last September. The results of the five-day ballot resolution meeting are critical for Microsoft’s two-year bid to get International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, certification.

Google’s open-source programs manager, Zaheda Bhorat, posted a blog on Monday urging those delegates to vote against Open XML because Google believes that it is an “insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office.”

Bhorat said Open XML should be subsumed into the existing standard–OpenDocument Format, or ODF–which is backed by Microsoft rivals, including Google.
“As ISO member bodies around the world work on possible revisions of their vote previously submitted, the deadline of March 30th approaches fast. I invite you to pay close attention, and heed the call of many for unification of OOXML into ODF. A document standards decision may not matter to you today, but as someone who relies on constant access to editable documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it may matter immensely in the near future,” he wrote.

In a document more thoroughly laying out its position on Open XML, Google says the core problem with the specification is that it’s redundant with ODF. The company also says it’s too specific to Microsoft Office and that it’s of insufficient quality.

“Submitting such a proposal makes a mockery of the standards process,” according to the Google assessment.

Update: in response to a reader’s comment, here is added text that reiterates Microsoft’s position.

Microsoft executives have contended over the past two years that Open XML is not entirely controlled by the company, pointing out that Apple, Novell, and large customers are on the committee at Ecma International, the standards body submitting Open XML to the ISO for standards consideration.

Rather than have one document standard, Microsoft’s view is that there should be multiple document standards with different purposes.

According to an Associated Press report, European data privacy regulators confirmed this past Thursday that Internet search engines based outside Europe must also comply with EU rules dictating how person’s Internet address or search history is stored.

The EU’s rules insist that Net surfers must consent to their data being collected and that the search engines give a person the right to object or verify their information. As long as Google has an office or data center within EU territory, the stricter European rules apply.

With intense pressure coming from European regulators, Google seems to be scrambling to defend itself. However, instead of adapting its privacy policies to match the changing political climate, the search giant has opted for an alternative approach: denial. In a major public relations push this week, multiple Google employees have publicly stated that network IP addresses are not private identifying information.

An engineer speaks
On Friday, Dr. Alma Whitten, an engineer in Google’s security team added her two cents to the debate, in a lengthy post on Google’s Public Policy Blog. According to Whitten:
“If you’re an ISP…and you know the name and address of the person who holds that account, then that IP address is more like personal data, even though multiple people could still be using it. On the other hand, the IP addresses recorded by every Web site on the planet without additional information should not be considered personal data, because these Web sites usually cannot identify the human beings behind these number strings.”

Whitten’s statement has been thoroughly debunked by the tech media, members of the blogosphere and even The New York Times. I won’t rehash the things that have been covered elsewhere, but I will make the following four points:

• If the millions of IP addresses in Google’s logs are not identifying information, why is the company fighting so hard to keep them? Instead of following Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com’s lead in deleting the entire IP address after 18 months, Google instead smudges out the last octet (up to 3 digits) of an IP address after that same period.
• The IP address may not be identifying when Google possesses it, but when subpoenaed by law enforcement, it can easily lead to a subscriber name and address when coupled with ISP log data.
• An IP address is enough probable cause for law enforcement to get a search warrant for someone’s home. One court confirmed this, stating that “though it was possible that the transmissions originated outside of the residence to which the IP address was assigned, it remained likely that the source of the transmissions was inside that residence.”
• The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) seems to think that an IP address is identifying information. Using just an IP and an allegation of copyright infringement, the RIAA has been able to force Internet service providers and universities into giving up the names and addresses of the alleged pirates.
  Of course, this entire IP address debate only applies to people who do not have a

Google account. Anyone who uses Google’s free email service and does a search while they are logged into their email account will find their searches logged, and associated with their name. The company is even nice enough to opt users in to this handy feature by default, providing one-click access to every search issued by a logged in user.

One British tech news site sarcasticly compared Whitten’s argument to the Chewbacca defense from TV’s South Park. A tip for those in charge of strategy at the Googleplex: when your policy positions are being compared to OJ Simpson defense lawyer Johnny Cochran, you have a problem.

Adios Alberto
For the last few years, Peter Fleischer, the company’s Paris-based Global Privacy Counsel has been the public face for Google’s privacy policies–most frequently offering his views on the company’s official Public Policy Blog. Fleischer is a forceful advocate of his employer, who has in the past engaged in public shouting matches with critics of the company. It was Fleischer who first introduced the company’s log “anonymization” policy, as well as the decision to reduce the length of cookies from 30 years to 2 – a move ridiculed as only useful to the dead or those confined to a maximum security prison.

In one notable case, Fleischer passed the buck to the EU, and said that the only reason that Google kept its log data for so long was because it was forced to by EU regulations. In response to these claims, Fleischer was sharply criticized by the online press, with one journalist calling his statements “misleading” and “dishonest.” Wired’s Ryan Singel wrote at the time of Fleischer:

It’s simply dishonest to continually imply otherwise in order to hide the real political and monetary reasons that Google chooses to hang onto this data.

I think it’s quite reasonable to state that at this point, Peter Fleischer has little to no credibility with the privacy community or members of the technology press. When that is taken into consideration, it is not so surprising that Google chose to rebrand its privacy policy, and have a PhD wielding engineer lend her name by repeating the company’s Politburo issued talking points.

Fleischer’s statements, like those of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his final weeks at the job, are simply no longer trusted. Which, of course, makes Google’s recent hire of a Gonzales appointed Department of Justice privacy czar all the more interesting.

A request for comment sent to Whitten was forwarded to a member of Google’s public relations staff, who had yet to respond to my questions by press time.

“The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies. And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that’s unnerving,” Brin said.

It’s the same argument Google used when the Microsoft bid for Yahoo was first unleashed.

In the letter from February 3 titled, “Yahoo and the future of the Internet,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said that Microsoft’s bid “raises troubling questions,” pointing to the company’s monopolistic past.

“This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation,” Drummond said in the letter.

Google’s strategy is to plant the seeds of doubt, like Hillary Clinton claiming on a daily basis that her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, isn’t experienced enough to hold the nation’s highest office. If you keep repeating it, people might believe it. But both Google and Clinton will have a hard time making their charges stick.

In Google’s case, having Microsoft with a dominant position in browsers and traditional operating systems and gaining share via Yahoo in search, ads, and unique users who consume its services is unnerving–even for a company that has had a meteoric rise and more than 60 percent of the super-efficient and profitable search ad business.

I’m not complaining…well, actually I am. The ads don’t offer much, except more distraction to already ad-filled Web sites.

Viewing the ads on My Damn Channel, for instance, you can’t always tell an ad from actual entertainment content. I know the lines between advertising and entertainment are blurring. But this seems like overkill. There are banner ads on the sides, top, and bottom of the page. There are text ads on the sides and the same text ads are now rotating as overlays on top of the video I’m watching, covering up a swath at the bottom of the screen and interfering with the action.

The ads are a distraction, not an enhancement, to an otherwise great program. My Damn Channel’s “Horrible People” is a funny online sitcom and well worth checking out. But this can’t be the best way to monetize it–with ads I can already see elsewhere on the page.

And where’s the context? The ads are for film producers, a commercial director, Burbank sound stages, and women’s shoes. Nothing there that would appeal to a general comedy-watching Internet user like myself.

The best thing about the ads are the little “X” in the corner that you can click to make them go away.

Google AdSense for Video puts text ads on top of videos, but it looks like ever more ad clutter on some sites.

Between 1,500 and 10,000 patients at the Cleveland, Ohio, facility will participate in the project’s test run, volunteering to have their medical records transferred to their Google accounts. The hospital already keeps electronic records for over 100,000 patients in an internal system called MyChart, but when those personal health records, or PHRs, are shared with Google, patients will be able to use them outside of the Cleveland Clinic. Included in the data will be prescription information, medical histories, and details about conditions and allergies.

“Patients are more proactively managing their own healthcare information,” Dr. C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer, said in a statement. “At Cleveland Clinic, we strive to participate in and help to advance the national dialogue around a more efficient and effective national healthcare system.”

“We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search projects and user experience, said in the same statement. “We chose Cleveland Clinic as one of the first partners to pilot our new health offering because as a provider, they already empower their patients by giving them online tools that help them manage their medical records online and coordinate care with their doctors.” Additionally, Cleveland Clinic president and CEO Delos M. Cosgrove is a member of Google’s Health Advisory Council.

Google isn’t the only tech titan looking to change the healthcare industry. AOL founder Steve Case has launched a new company, Revolution Health; InterActiveCorp has invested in several health-related start-ups; and Microsoft has been working on a medical record service.

But all these “health 2.0″ initiatives will inevitably raise privacy concerns, and critics of such projects have already begun to make themselves heard. The World Privacy Forum, which has highlighted concerns about medical identity theft in the past, has already issued a report voicing concerns about third-party PHR systems that aren’t covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which has been in effect since 1996 and requires individuals to be notified when a party other than a patient’s doctor wants to access confidential medical data.

Not only is security an issue, the nonprofit has said, so is the likelilhood that marketers and other corporate entities will be able to exploit otherwise confidential data. The World Privacy Forum has not taken a specific stance on Google’s new project or on others like Microsoft’s.

Google is of particular concern to some privacy advocates because the company already has so much data about its users.

“While PHRs may have some laudable goals,” the report by privacy consultant Robert Gellman read, “they are also a tempting target for companies or others that want to evade whatever privacy protections remain in the health care system in order to make a profit.”

1. Choose the right keywords (keyword optimization)
2. Optimize your pages for your selected keywords (web page optimization), and
3. Get quality inbound links to your pages (off-site factors).

In the next few pages, we will teach you how to follow a systematic approach to complete these three steps, using free tools available on the net.

PART I: Keyword Optimization
The first step in a search engine optimization campaign is to choose your keywords or keyphrases for each of your web pages. Keywords are the terms that search engine users type in the search box to conduct a query. The right keywords are those that:

1. clearly describe the purpose and content of your site, and,
2. allow your site to show up as close to the first results page as possible.

A good position doesn’t depend only on your choice of keywords. It also depends on how well do you position those keywords in your web page, and how many quality external pages link to you. However, choosing the wrong keywords can throw off your entire search engine optimization strategy, so you need to invest a few hours and make sure you do it right.

Let’s start with your homepage. Look at it carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site. Try to form two or three word phrases, since competition for one-word keyphrases is fierce, and it is virtually impossible to get a top position for them. That is why, from now on, we will talk about keyphrases, not keywords. Once you have developed your list of potential keyphrases you are ready for the next step: to analyze the demand and supply for those keyphrases, and choose the best ones (those with good demand and not enough supply).

We will first check the demand for your selected keyphrases. For this, we will go to Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Overture is a popular pay-per-click search engine. You will then type each of the keyphrases you selected, and see how many people search for those terms. This tool will show you only those searches conducted in Overture (and only in one month time). However, the relative popularity of each search term will be very similar in other search engines as well. In addition to telling you if your selected keyphrases are popular, this tool will show you other keyphrases that you may not have thought about, which may even be more relevant to your site.

For example, if your first keyphrase was “Italian Restaurant”, the Search Term Suggestion Tool will also display other popular search terms, like: “Gourmet Italian Restaurant”, “Northern Italian Restaurant”, “Italian Restaurant Pizzeria”, “Italian Restaurant Miami”, etc. You may also try other keyphrases, for example: “Italian Cuisine”, and come up with more specific keyphrases, like: “Fine Italian Cuisine”, “Italian Cuisine Miami”, “Northern Italian Cuisine”, “Italian Cuisine Fine Dining”, “Gourmet Italian Cuisine”, etc.

What you have done is to validate and enlarge your pool of popular, in-demand, potential keyphrases for your web page. The next step is to check the supply, or, in other words, to see how much competition there is for your selected keywords. Naturally, you want to focus on keyphrases where competition is less fierce. For example, choosing “Italian Restaurant” alone will certainly hurt you. There are so many of them that your chances of showing up in an advantageous position within the search results are pretty slim.

Having said that, get your list of keyphrases, go to Google ( http://www.google.com ) and type-in each of them in the search box. Enter your keyphrases within quotation marks (to filter-out less relevant results), and see how many results each individual query produces, making a note of those with a relatively small number of results (less competition). You will stick with the keyphrase that:

1. Best describes the topic and content of your page
2. Is a popular search term according to Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool.
3. Generates a relatively small number of results after performing the Google search.

If “Gourmet Italian Restaurant” is the keyphrase that best meets these three criteria, it will become your primary keyphrase. To get even better results, you can choose a second keyphrase to make your page more relevant to an even more specific niche. For example, if your restaurant is in Miami, you can consider “Miami” a second keyphrase. Once you have chosen the keyphrases for you homepage, do the same for the other pages on your site.

After this, you will take your selected keyphrases and optimize your pages heavily for them. This involves placing them in strategic locations in the title, headings and body of each page, as we will see in Part II: Web Page Optimization.

PART II: Web Page Optimization
Once you have chosen your keyphrases, the next stage is to optimize your page for those keyphrases. You do that by positioning your keywords in strategic locations within your page. What follows is a checklist of tips and steps you must follow to optimize your page:

• Keyphrases in the web page title:
  • Create a descriptive title for your page: Your web page title is very important because it is what the search engines display as link text as the result of a search. The title must include your main keyphrases, while at the same time it must describe your business very well and should entice readers to click on it.
  • Unless your business is big and well known (like Microsoft or Coca Cola) don’t start your page title with the name of your company. Start your title with the words search engine users will most likely use (your keyphrases)
  • Put your main keyphrase at the beginning of your page title (keyphrase prominence) and keep your keyphrase together (keyword proximity).
  • Put your second keyphrase somewhere else in the title.
  • Make the title short (8 words or less).
• Keyphrases in your Keyword Meta Tag: Search engines rarely use the Keyword Meta Tag any more (Google completely ignores it). However, place a list of your main and secondary keywords in the Keyword Meta Tag of your page, just in case search engines decide to use them again in the future.
• Keyphrases in your Description Meta Tag: The Description Meta Tag is still important, since some search engines use them to elaborate on the results link. Remember to:
  • Include your keyphrases (main and secondary) in your Description Meta Tag.
  • Make your description ‘descriptive’, concise and professional. Avoid using hype.
  • Make it short (25 words or less).
  • Don’t make your description sound just like a collection of keywords.
  • Keep your keyphrases together.
• Keywords in the body of your page: It is important to use your keywords heavily on your page, since this will help the search engine determine the topic of your page. Follow these tips as much as possible, since they will help search engines determine your page’s relevance to your chosen keyphrases:
  • Use your keyphrases several times, and place them as close to the top of the page as possible.
  • Place your keyphrases between Header Tags (H1, H2 or H3) in the first two paragraphs of your page.
  • Place your keyphrases in bold type phase at least once.
  • Repeat your keyphrases often to increase your keyphrase density. Repeating your keyphrases between 5 to 10 times for every 100 words in your page is considered effective.
  • Since you have to repeat your keyphrases often, you must be especially careful not to make your text sound awkward. Your visitors should be able to read your page fluently and effortlessly. Remember that ultimately it is your readers who will decide if your page is worth the time they spend on it. A pleasant experience will make them more likely to come back.

• Other Web Page Design Considerations:
  • You must make your page easy to navigate by the search engines. Search engines heavily favor text over graphics, and HTML over other editing formats.
  • Use text heavily, especially in your navigation bar. Avoid placing text in graphic format since the search engines won’t be able to read it.
  • Avoid frames. Search engines have trouble following them, and they may index only the framed content page and not the navigation frame.
  • Avoid Flash and JavaScript: search engines don’t follow either one. If you use flash, make an HTML version of your site available to your readers and the search engines. If you use a JavaScript navigation menu, include an alternate text menu at the bottom of the page, so it can be followed by the search engines.
  • Create a Site Map that includes all the pages in your site, and place a Site Map link close to the top of the homepage. When the search engine follows the site map link, it will find and index all the pages in your site!
  • If you use a left navigation bar, the search engine will read it before the body of your page. Make sure you include your most important keywords there, too.
  • Make sure that all your internal pages link to your homepage.
  • Don’t try to describe all your products or services in one page. It will confuse the search engine and dilute your page’s relevance to your selected keyphrase. Instead, create different very focused pages, each with its own content and keyphrases, and optimize them too.

This is pretty much all you have to do to make sure that your page is optimized for your chosen keywords. The next and final step to increase your site’s ranking is to get as many links to your site as possible, from quality sites that have a topic related to yours. This is what we will see in

Part III: Off Page Factors
Once you have selected your keyphrases and optimized your pages for them, the last step is to make sure that you get linked from the best directories, and from lots of quality sites with a topic related to your site’s. The best search engines, and in particular Google (who alone can deliver 80% of the search engine traffic to your site) “crawl” the web looking for links to your site. They interpret a link to your page as a vote, and the more links (votes) you have coming from quality sites the higher your page rank will be, and the higher the possibility that your page will achieve a good position in the search results pages. It’s that simple. Following these four steps is the best way to get the quality links you need:

1. Get listed in DMOZ: The Open Directory Project ( http://www.dmoz.org ) is the world’s largest directory. It is maintained by voluntary editors who review your site prior to inclusion. Being listed in this directory is important because it is used by Google and America Online to build their directories. Getting listed is free, but it may take a few weeks or even months to get listed, which can be a bit frustrating. However, there is a strong believe among search engine optimization experts that an Open Directory Project listing can significantly increase your page rank in Google, so you must take the time to submit your site and do it right (list your site in the right category and strictly follow their submission guidelines). For how to get listed in the Open Directory Project go to: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html .
2. Get listed in Yahoo!: Submissions to Yahoo! are no longer free for commercial sites (your site can be reviewed in about a week for a fee of $299 although inclusion in the directory is not guaranteed. However, if you do get accepted, the $299 fee will be due every year if you want your site to continue to be listed). A link from Yahoo’s directory is still one of the best links you can get, and it is worth the money you spend getting listed. For tips on getting listed in Yahoo! go to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/suggest.html .
3. Submit articles: There are many sites where you can publish articles in your field of expertise. This is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and to drive quality traffic to your site. The key is to include your resource box at the end of your article. A resource box is a small paragraph with a brief description of you and your business, where you include a link to your site. This way, every time somebody picks up your article and publishes it in their website or newsletter, your link will be there for readers and search engines to see and follow. For tips of getting traffic by writing articles you can visit: Where can I submit an article for publication .
4. Exchange links with reputable sites: You must try to find quality sites that are compatible to your site’s topic (not direct competitors), and ask the webmaster for a link exchange. This will give you highly targeted traffic and will improve your score with the search engines. For tips on a good link exchange campaign, visit: How do I get links to my web page.