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With Europe’s OK, Google closes DoubleClick acquisition

European antitrust regulators on Tuesday approved Google’s $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick, paving the way for a blockbuster deal in Internet search and publisher-based advertising tools.

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…

Google on data security: You can trust us, really

Google described on Tuesday how it secures the mountains of data that it handles every day, saying that it has highly automated processes and employs the best and brightest in Web security.

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…

Google’s drop in paid clicks: Part of the grand plan

After ComScore reported a recent decline in Google’s paid clicks, the Net ratings service followed up, noting evidence that the drop was due to “Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.”

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…

Google: Model citizen of community development?

John Mark Walker, Hyperic’s community lead, has an interesting take on whether Google deserves to be loved or loathed for its open-source community outreach.

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

…

Former Googler’s social take on search

Ex-Googler start-ups are coming out of the woodworks. And now there’s one more.

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.)…

How Google’s counterculture changes everything

In the world of online services and editorial content, a term known as “stickiness” becomes the rallying cry of Webmasters and marketers alike. In essence, these people are fearful that if they lose visitors on the site, they’ll never get them back. But for some reason, Google doesn’t feel that way. In fact, it’s more than happy to send you out in the wild.

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…

Google to penalize advertisers with slow-loading pages

Companies advertising on Google’s AdWords system better fine-tune their ad landing pages.

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.

Gmail falls prey to spam bots

Spammers have cracked the captcha mechanism Gmail uses to make sure you are a human before you can open an e-mail account, leading to a huge increase in the amount of spam sent from Gmail last month, security firm MessageLabs says.

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…

Don’t buy into the paranoia about PageRank sculpting

The blogosphere and Twitter have been abuzz with talk about this article by Shari Thurow, published Thursday on Search Engine Land. The article warns of supposed dangers against the SEO tactic of “PageRank sculpting.” Readers are coming away feeling reticent to employ the tactic, fearing retribution from the engines in the form of penalties. The article paints PageRank sculpting as poor usability and black hat. I can’t be any more adamant about this: neither is the case.

No disrespect intended to the article’s author, but this article is classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). “Nobody ever lost their job by…

Google says spam is huge corporate headache

Google released a white paper on Thursday about trends in electronic communications systems at corporations and found, to no surprise, that spam is a huge problem and getting worse.

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,…

Sync your Google and Outlook calendars

Online calendars are great but the problem is you tend to have one at work and a separate personal one. Now you can see events in both calendars at once, at least if you are using Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook.

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…

EU could approve Google-DoubleClick merger next week

European regulators are planning to grant approval for Google’s proposed $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick, possibly on March 11, according to a Bloomberg report.

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.

Security threat discovered in Google’s Android software

Researchers have found some holes in Google’s Android SDK that could make the software vulnerable to hack attacks. But because commercial Android devices are still months away from hitting store shelves, there’s no need to panic.

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…

Google offers search within search

Imagine searching inside Wikipedia or Amazon.com, but on the Google search site. Google’s got a test going of a way to search inside different sites from within a Google Web search results page. If you type in “amazon,” “wikipedia” or “new york times” on Google, it brings up the relevant result at the top and immediately underneath is a second search box. If you type a keyword in that secondary search box it will return results from within that site.

The Google-ization of Facebook

Is Facebook the next Google? Maybe and maybe not, but either way there’s a lot that Facebook can learn from Google and from the Googlers it’s hiring.

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…

My stunted interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt

I’ve always wanted to interview Google CEO Eric Schmidt one-on-one, and this week I finally got the chance.

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…

Questions ahead for Google’s Eric Schmidt

It’s fair to say there are plenty of things to chat about with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

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.…

Google goes after Microsoft SharePoint

Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle–security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example–its biggest problem is that it doesn’t connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:

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

…

Schmidt: Google Health targets ‘the most important search’

ORLANDO, Fla.–Search giant Google launched Google Health and announced major industry partners on Thursday, aiming to be the Intuit for personal health care, where people can access all their health information in one spot.

“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…

EFF sues Justice Department over Google privacy hire

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice seeking information about communications between a former top privacy official and Google, which eventually hired the official.

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…

Google and other telecoms to build U.S.-Japan cable

The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.

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…

Opera mobile browsers swap Yahoo for Google

Opera has switched out Yahoo and made Google the default search engine for its Opera Mobile and Opera Mini Web browsers designed for mobile devices.

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…

Get ready to Google-ize your health records

ORLANDO, Fla.–Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt will detail the company’s plans for Google-izing the health care industry at a health care trade show on Thursday morning, starting with a consumer destination site called Google Health.

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…

Google: A bellwether or giant losing its grip?

We interrupt this scheduled lashing of Yahoo to ask a question about the company that’s been putting a whuppin’ on Jerry Yang & Co. over the last few years: Are you OK?

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…

Google urges ISO to give thumbs-down to Microsoft Open XML

The head of Google’s open-source programs on Monday urged international delegates to vote against certifying Office Open XML as an ISO standard, saying the Microsoft-led effort poses a risk to users who want unfettered access to documents.

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…

Google scrambles to avoid EU privacy regulators

Google could soon be forced to delete identifying user information from its search logs, statements by the European Union data regulators suggest. The search engine’s lawyers have long argued that network addresses don’t really count as personal information, and even if they did, the company’s policy of masking the last few digits of an IP address after 18 months is more than sufficient. European regulators don’t appear to be buying Google’s claims.

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…

Google’s Brin fears the Microhoo borg

Speaking at an event for the Google Lunar X Prize on Thursday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin reiterated his company’s position on a Microsoft-Yahoo union, the Associated Press reported.

“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…

Google unleashes even more ads, now in video

Google has launched AdSense for Video, enabling Web sites another way to push ads in our faces.

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…

Google to kick-start medical records program with Cleveland Clinic

Google is set to announce on Thursday that it will be using the Cleveland Clinic hospital in Cleveland, Ohio as the pilot site for its new personal health records initiative.

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…

Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization

A search engine optimization campaign can easily be divided in three fundamental stages:

Choose the right keywords (keyword optimization)
Optimize your pages for your selected keywords (web page optimization), and
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…