We got into some of the more technical goods from the paper yesterday, but figured these would also be an worthwhile — or at least more enjoyable — read. Friday and all.

1. “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” – people encountering a crawler for the first time

They note that they received almost daily emails from people either concerned about copyright issues or asking if they liked the site after looking at it. For many people with web pages, this was one of the first crawlers they had seen.

“It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen. Almost daily, we receive an email something like, “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” There are also some people who do not know about the robots exclusion protocol, and think their page should be protected from indexing by a statement like, “This page is copyrighted and should not be indexed.”

More innocent times.

2. A billion web documents predicted by 2000

“It is foreseeable that by the year 2000, a comprehensive index of the Web will contain over a billion documents. . . The goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers.”

Now in 2018, there are reportedly 130 trillion documents on the web — an extraordinary number indeed. And sure enough, their search has scaled to meet it.

3. Google took up 55 GB of storage

“The total of all the data used by the search engine requires a comparable amount of storage, about 55 GB.”

Now, Google is 2 billion lines of code. As noted by one of their engineering managers in 2016, the repository contains 86TB of data.

4. “People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.”

Please note: “tens.”

They write about the need for more precision in search. Remember the days when people regularly clicked past page 1?

5. Percentage of .com domains: from 1.5 to 60, to now 46.5

They note how “commercialized” the web was already becoming, leaving search engine technology “to be largely a black art and to be advertising oriented.”

“The Web has also become increasingly commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of web servers were on .com domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997.”

According to Statistica, the number of .com domains is down to 46.5% as of May 2018.

“With Google,” they wrote, “we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.”

6. “There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits”

After going into some technical detail about optimized compact encoding, they reveal that they’ve their complex compact encoding preparations are categorized simply — endearingly — into fancy and plain.

7. Already defending user experience in anticipating search

From the start, it seems Brin and Page fought for users to not need to excessively specify their queries in order to get desired information. They wrote:

“Some argue that on the web, users should specify more accurately what they want and add more words to their query. We disagree vehemently with this position. If a user issues a query like “Bill Clinton” they should get reasonable results since there is a enormous amount of high quality information available on this topic. Given examples like these, we believe that the standard information retrieval work needs to be extended to deal effectively with the web.”

It’s interesting that this was so clearly in their thinking from the beginning. At last week’s Search Summit, Googler Juan Felipe Rincon said, “The future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know.”

8. There was a typo

In the second paragraph of section 3.2, they write “Couple this flexibility to publish anything with the enormous influence of search engines to route traffic and companies which deliberately manipulating search engines for profit become a serious problem.”

Did you catch it? The verb should be, “companies which are deliberately manipulating search engines become” or “companies which deliberately manipulate search engines become.” Of the utmost gravity, we know.

Just goes to show that even if an incomplete verb phrase won’t keep you from doing some pretty cool stuff in the world. And of course, that even the best of us need editors.

9. Search Engine Watch shout out

We tweeted this yesterday, but felt the need to share again for extra emphasis. Our very own Search Engine Watch was cited in the paper, stating that top search engines claimed to index 100 million web documents as of November 1997. Been a fun 21 years.

10: They chose these photos

Happy Friday, everyone.

Links you build require action on your behalf, while links you earn happen without any work specifically toward acquiring links.

Let’s take the common example of content. You’ve created new content and with that investment you’ve used precious time, resources and personnel.

Your wonderful content — that you’ve invested time and hard work into — is ready for unveiling to the masses. What’s the next step?

Well, with any content there’s the natural promotion channels that should always follow publication:

1. Promote through social media
2. Contact anyone featured or mentioned in the post
3. Leverage relationships
4. Utilize paid promotion (depending on budget and content — could include things such as paid tweets, Facebook ads, etc.)

Those are natural steps any content creation should involve, customized to the content of course. For link earning, there’s no additional steps beyond that. You simply wait for the links to roll in after publication and promotion.

Earned links, on the other hand, are others recognizing your greatness and awarding it appropriately.

Personally, I don’t depend upon others to recognize and reward my hard work. The world we live in is simply too fast-paced, too self-centric. If you want someone to recognize your value, you have to promote that value. Intelligently.

For those interested in building links, there are a few additional steps after publishing content:

• Identify audiences who will appreciate your content
• Identify sites where that audience spends time
• Identify pages on those sites where a link would make sense
• Contact the webmasters of those sites, informing them of:
     o The fact that your content exists
     o The value of your content to their audience
    o The suggested page where a link would make sense
    o A request for feedback regarding the content
• Follow up with webmasters as necessary

Bear in mind this is specific to content link building. Building links is only limited to creativity and there are plenty of ways to build links without content.

Will you get links without going to the extra steps? It’s entirely possible, especially if your initial promotion gets solid traction.

But for every link you earn, there are more links that you deserve, but that your promotion won’t reach naturally; links which you could secure with good old-fashioned elbow grease and targeted promotion/outreach.

So which method sounds better to you, earning or building? Why would you invest in content creation if you’re not going to do everything in your power to promote it? What would keep you from finding relevant websites and encouraging them to promote it to their audiences via links?

How did we arrive at the trend of “link earning,” and why does link building sometimes sound like a dirty word?

The answer: Penguin.

Google’s Evolution and Algorithms

Google based its algorithm around links back when it was still known as Backrub and just a project Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on in grad school at Stanford.

Google’s reliance on links is no secret — everyone in search knows it and you can still go read the original abstract on Stanford’s website.

That was the founding of Google — a search engine that recognized a link as a vote of confidence and trust between websites. A link as a signal of authority and relevance.

Over time, Google has evolved, grown and adapted to the web. However, one thing hasn’t changed: links are still a big signal in its algorithm.

There are other signals, too, of course — Google’s quick to mention over 200 — but the fact of the matter is few things move the needle like links.

SEOs notoriously exploited that in the past. Links became shortcuts to quick and easy rankings, leading to manipulation and bad results. Google had to step in, and step in they did, in a big way. Specifically, with Penguin.

Penguin, however, didn’t reduce the effectiveness of links, or reduce links’ role in Google’s algorithm. Instead, Penguin detects low-quality and manipulative links and works to either discount or actively punish those links.

Unfortunately, links are a complicated and confusing subject, especially to those who aren’t savvy in SEO. Everyone understand what a link is, but few understand how Google actually works.

Many business owners and marketers are unsure of the difference between a decent link and a link Penguin will punish.

Why The Term “Earning” Has Merit

Google has successfully (or largely so) ended the ability to spam links for rankings.

Considering it’s been 11 months since the last Penguin refresh, which is necessary to recover if the algorithm is impacting your website, your website has had zero chance of recovery for nearly a year.

A year with significantly reduced search traffic could very well mean the difference between a successful business and a failed business.

Have I mentioned that Google doesn’t let you know if you’ve been impacted by Penguin? The only way to know is to monitor when your search traffic dropped and approximate that with a Penguin update.

So you have Penguin, which will:

• Impact websites it deems to be building low-quality, manipulative links.
     o Google won’t tell you which links these might be, although they’re quick to warn away from “low-quality tactics” which you may or may not be using for SEO.
• Remain in place for uncertain, but large amounts of time.
     o Google’s less than clear about when it will update, or any timeline in general.
• Require hours upon hours of link removal requests, along with a “machete” for disavows.
     o Google wants to send spammers a message and make the penalty hurt.

The fact of the matter is Penguin is a looming, dire threat to any business looking to engage in SEO, particularly if they don’t understand the ins and outs of the industry.

Any link or tactic that bears even a hint of manipulation or low quality has a very dark stain at this point. It’s simply not worth the risk. And that stain has rubbed off on the term link building.

You see, we need a way, a term, to differentiate between link building activities pre-Penguin and post-Penguin.

Hence the term “link earning.”

People want to be so far on the side of safe, so removed from anything that has any chance of trouble, so it is 100% “natural” that they only want links people point at their website without prompting.

The problem with this?

For every link you “earn” there are five more links worth building. And link earning gives the wrong impression.

The Real Issue with the Term Link Earning

The real issue with the term link earning is the mentality it inspires. The if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude.

Any marketer can tell you there’s just no such thing. Just look at the amount of noise online (courtesy of Domo):

There is such an incredible amount of noise. Thinking that you can simply earn your way through it is setting you up for disappointment.

Links are important to SEO and subsequently search engine traffic. No one can dispute that with a straight face.

And I’m not saying that you should work to build links no matter the cost. What I’m saying is that you should look to build links that you deserve. Good links, that make sense.

If you buy into the concept that you can and should stick to “earning links,” you’re hindering your own ability to work effectively. You’re unnecessarily handcuffing yourself in fear of Google.

Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, said himself there’s nothing inherently wrong with link building, in both an interview with Eric Enge and more recently in June at SMX Advanced.

There’s nothing wrong with earning links — but you shouldn’t be afraid to build them, as well. Especially if you’re creating something of value and deserve attention. Put in the extra work to get the most out of your website. We are optimizers, after all.

Google’s Matt Cutts is the superhero of combating webspam. Certainly he doesn’t work alone at the offices of Google; he has what is known as the webspam team. But this isn’t “The Avengers“; Cutts is the star of his own movie.

Of course, there are more people fighting webspam. Duane Forrester is one of those people; he’s the Cutts of Bing.

Forrester’s name recognition is much less widespread than Cutts’. This is simply due to the fact that Google hoards such an inordinately large share of the search market. This also might be due to the fact that Cutts releases an average of two to three videos per week, videos in which he takes the time to answer burning SEO questions. Even though he is a regular at conferences and is hardly averse to doing interviews, Forrester simply doesn’t have Cutts’ visibility.

A lot of what Forrester says can get lost in the shuffle, but every now and again he will make a bold pronouncement that pricks our ears.

What he said on May 9 of this year is as good an example of that as any. Let me draw your attention to myth number seven in particular.

• Links are all I need

While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this hair: sharing, encouraging, incentivizing, buying – it’s all the same. You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path. Links are part of the bigger picture. You want them, but you want them to be natural. If an engine sees you growing tem naturally, you’re rewarded with rankings. If they see you growing them unnaturally, you’re rewarded with penalties.

First off, let me say that I concur that “links are all I need” is a ludicrous myth. I myself am a link builder, and I certainly can’t overemphasize enough the value that link equity provides in attaining visibility in the SERPs, but they are far from the only ranking factor. There are some 200+ other signals to consider.

And yes, there’s undeniably a hefty amount of link spam out there, the kind of stuff that strengthens the principle of “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

‘Surprise Links’

This is about where Forrester and I stop agreeing. The following segment of this myth simply left me confounded.

You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path.

Every now and again, you will get links that surprise you. It’s happened for our company site several times, and it’s a great feeling when it happens.

Here’s the catch-22 of this, however: these “surprise” links are only possible if your site already has some visibility. And without link building, the pursuit of relevant and authoritative links, attracting visibility is difficult.

Here’s something that I’ve learned during my time as a link builder: link building is no longer just SEO; link building is also promotion.

Link Building Is Promotion

This wasn’t always the case. Link building used to be a much more technical trade than what it is today. But the “e” in SEO often stands for evolution, because is it is an ever-changing industry.

SEO and link building have slowly but surely been integrated into the proverbial marketing funnel. Most comprehensive marketing strategies include an SEO component today.

This was most likely inevitable. Marketers are having to adapt to new channels provided by new technology.

Television reigned for several decades, but don’t let the present moniker of “the golden age of television” fool you: that’s more to do with the quality of the programming than the amount of people watching. In fact, a lot of these amazing new shows aren’t being watched traditionally, as Netflix has birthed the cultural phenomenon of binge-watching.

Succinctly said, we live on the Internet now, and even though the death of television advertising is often overstated, marketers are allocating more funds toward Internet marketing. Even though the two have a few differing characteristics, it’s still all about disseminating your brand message and name.

Links are a powerful form of marketing, because a link is an endorsement from another brand. It’s another site in your niche lending you authority and recommending you to the surfing public.

This is untrue of television advertising. The average watcher understands that a 30-second spot on “The Big Bang Theory” has been paid for. Yes a network can and sometimes does execute editorial authority over the brands that are not allowed to advertise on the network, but for the most part they will feature the advertisements of anyone willing to pay the price.

The Importance of Links

Links don’t work that way. Let me rephrase: links shouldn’t work that way.

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made links the most powerful signal because they appreciated the value of a link, that a link was an endorsement from site A to site B. That’s why you want the links. It isn’t only because you want to increase your rankings, but also because a link is a message that you are trustworthy or offer a unique value.

Links are an incredibly powerful branding tool. The more users see that other authority sites are willing to link to you, the more likely those users are going to believe you are such an authority.

But links don’t just come to you, and if your site is relatively new, no one is going to find your site in a search engine if you don’t have any links. You have to do the work to get your name out there.

This is link building.

Why It’s OK to Pursue Links

An email pitch to a webmaster is no longer just a plea for that webmaster to lend you a little link equity. More importantly, it’s a promotion of your site, a call-to-action that your site is a valuable resource to users/readers of her/his site.

This is why I find Forrester’s proclamation so egregious. Why is it so wrong to notify another webmaster that you have a page or asset on your site that may contribute to the value of that person’s site? Yes, the end goal is to increase your own visibility, but if you’re adding to the user experience that search engines like Bing are so eager to preserve, that seems like a good thing to me.

And as I said before, it’s simply foolish to think links should only come as a surprise. A majority of Web traffic is directed by search engines. These engines depend on links in order to determine rankings for search terms. But if a webmaster for a burgeoning site isn’t allowed to promote her/his site for links, how does that site have any hope for ranking?

Thankfully, Cutts acted as a voice of reason at SMX Advanced earlier this month:

Q8: Is link building just dead? You keep saying a new tactic is dead, or must be nofollowed, is it really you just don’t want people to try to build links at all?

Cutts: No, link building is not dead. And a very small percentage of links on the web are nofollowed. There’s a lot of mileage left in links.

(Danny clarifies that he doesn’t mean links in general, but instead people building links).

Cutts: Duane Forrester had an article on Bing’s Webmaster Blog that said you should never know a link is coming – that’s the wrong path. That’s going a little bit far. Really, do compelling stuff and your links will take care of themselves – if you’re doing great stuff you won’t always know about the links you will get. Add value. “It’s easier to be real, than it is to fake real.”

It’s clear from this interview that the goal should be to create compelling content and do what you can to add to the user experience. Some links will come to you “by surprise” – and you can track those incoming links fairly easily – but it isn’t wrong to approach other webmasters in your niche to alert them of your valuable content. Just don’t abuse that privilege and teeter toward spam.

As marketing evolves and moves more toward the Internet, search engines must be able to accommodate. After all, sites like Google and Bing contributed to the rise of the Internet.

Link building isn’t just for the socially isolated hackers anymore; it’s in the boardroom meetings of major conglomerates. You would think that Bing, a subsidiary of a major conglomerate themselves, would be able to appreciate that.

Vic Gundotra, the driving force behind the Google+ platform, has announced he is leaving Google, which has many people pondering the future of Google+. Gundotra, who has been with Google for eight years, is leaving the company effective immediately.

The new head of Google+ will be David Besbris, currently Google’s VP of engineering, although Google hasn’t yet confirmed any other changes. Besbris has also been with the Google+ team since its beginnings, and worked closely with Gundotra. However Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google+, was passed over for the position, leaving many to question whether Horowitz would remain with Google.

Gundotra has led Google+ since the beginning, leaving many questioning whether Google would continue to invest in their version of a social media platform. Google has been struggling to gain traction on Google+, other than among those people who use it for authorship purposes. However, CEO Larry Page, wrote in a post on his own page that Google will “continue working hard to build great new experiences for the ever increasing number of Google+ fans.”

Google+ was very much a newcomer to the social media market, starting with a limited release in 2011 before rolling out and then further integrating itself with related Google products, such as YouTube. TechCrunch said there will be a massive changeover at Google+, with many of the team’s talent – including those who were part of the Google+ Hangouts team – heading to Android, and with Google+ no longer being pushed for integration within everything Google.

One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of “required” Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates.

One impetus of this was that the YouTube integration with Google+ did not go well, something that the public recognized through the comments blowback, but that was also seen inside the company as a rocky move.

TechCrunch also believes that Google will transition Google+ away from being a product.

What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform – essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

A Google representative has vehemently denied these claims. “Today’s news has no impact on our Google+ strategy – we have an incredibly talented team that will continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts and Photos.”

Gundotra has not announced where he is heading to next, although his own Google+ post simply titled “And Then” seems to hint that he has something on the horizon:

But, now is the time for a new journey. A continuation. An “and then”. I am excited about what’s next. But this isn’t the day to talk about that. This is a day to celebrate the past 8 years. To cry. And smile. And to look forward to the journey yet to come.

The Secret.ly app had an anonymous post last week revealing “Vic Gundotra is interviewing.”

Google has revealed profits for the first quarter of 2014 of $3.45 billion, up from $3.35 billion in the same period last year, but its average cost-per-click income has fallen, causing concern among investors.

While paid clicks increased 26 percent year-over-year (YoY) (and were down 1 percent compared to Q4 2013), Google said that the cost-per-click income fell by 9 percent year-over-year and was unchanged from Q4. This concerned investors, with shares in the firm falling by as much as $20 in pre-market trading.

The worries stem from questions over whether Google can generate the same income from mobile advertising clicks as it does from desktop adverts, at a time when smartphones and tablets are growing in use all the time.

However, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora said in a conference call to discuss the results that he was confident income for mobile advertising would increase as firms understand the benefits of mobile-based selling.

“I believe the medium- to long-term mobile pricing has to be better than desktop pricing. And I think the reason – the way to think about it is that in mobile you have location and you have context of individuals, which you don’t have in the desktop.

“Part of our challenge has been that. We’ve had this huge massive advertiser in the desktop, which over the last decade have become better at advertising, understanding optimization, understanding conversion, understanding transaction. That journey is just beginning for advertisers on the mobile side.”

Google CEO Larry Page was also upbeat on the results, as he focused on the strong revenue growth over the past 12 months. “We completed another great quarter. Google’s revenue was $15.4bn, up 19 percent year on year. We got lots of product improvements done, especially on mobile. I’m also excited with progress on our emerging businesses,” he said.

Google also noted that its proposed sale of Motorola to Lenovo for $3 billion, a significant loss compared with the $12.5bn it paid for it, impacted its overall performance. The firm racked up $198m losses from discontinued operations, with $74m pre-tax losses attributed to Motorola.

Google also revealed it now has a cash balance of almost $60 billion and just shy of 50,000 employees worldwide. With its impending sale of Motorola to Lenovo, though, this could decrease in the coming months.

This article was originally published on V3.

Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 as employee number 16, pushed hard for Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006 when it seemed like a big risk, is the senior most woman at Google, and will now become the Senior Vice President of YouTube.

Kamangar, who also joined Google in 1999 as employee number 9 and replaced Chad Hurley as head of YouTube Oct. 29, 2010, will be staying at the company in an unspecified role having to do with early-stage ventures.

The story was broken by Jessica E. Lessin and Amir Efrati of The Information. They reported, “Google is likely to tap longtime ad products head Susan Wojcicki as the new head of YouTube, according to two people briefed on the discussions, a surprising move that would place one of the company’s earliest employees at the helm of the video unit.”

The leak was confirmed later yesterday in an email from Google CEO Larry Page to Liz Gannes of Re/code. In his emailed statement, Page told Gannes:

“Salar and the whole YouTube team have built something amazing. YouTube is a billion person global community curating videos for every possibility. Anyone uploading their creative content can reach the whole world and even make money. Like Salar, Susan has a healthy disregard for the impossible and is excited about improving YouTube in ways that people will love.”

Re/code also reported that Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined Google in 2003 and became a senior vice president of advertising and commerce last year, will now run the ad business.

So, what else is worth knowing? Kamangar was the first non-engineer at Google, and Wojcicki started in marketing. Ramaswamy is a software engineer. All three of them rose up through the ranks in the ads organization, although Kamangar also worked on products like Gmail and Docs. Wojcicki helped lead seminal projects such as image search and AdSense.

Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She also received her master’s in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993 and a Master’s in Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998. In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park.

Adweek has called Wojcicki “the most important person in advertising” and “the most important Googler you’ve never heard of.” She is married to Google executive Dennis Troper and they have four children. She is also the sister of Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe.

What does this mean to digital marketers?

In early July 2013, Search Engine Watch took a hard look at “How to Make Money on YouTube” and concluded: “The number of advertisers who are using TrueView in-stream ads needs to increase significantly and/or the amount of money they spend on YouTube advertising needs to increase dramatically, or an awful lot of poor YouTube Partners are going to face a hard decision this winter: remain starving artists or look for another day job.”

A couple of weeks later at the Video Summit in San Francisco, a keynote panel discussed the question, “Is YouTube’s Business Model Broken?”

And in December 2013, Geoff Yang, a Partner at Redpoint Ventures, posted “Big Idea 2014: YouTube’s Bay of Pigs Moment” on LinkedIn. Yang wrote:

“From where I sit, this is YouTube’s Bay of Pigs moment. As you may recall, the CIA funded and encouraged rebel troops in Cuba to overthrow the Castro government. But that encouragement was not accompanied by the proper operational and air support to ensure victory. So the rebel upstarts did not prevail over the establishment. Let’s hope that YouTube does not make the same mistake and doom its chance to be pioneers in creating the next generation of content networks and unseat the traditional media establishment.”

So, it appears that YouTube may have had its “Bay of Pigs Moment” and will now fix its broken business model, helping a million partners who are trying to build a sustainable career on YouTube and beyond. That would make this a very significant announcement.

The deal is also noticeable as it will see Google acquire the services of Tony Fadell, who worked at Apple until 2008, and was known as the “Father of the iPod” for his work on the revolutionary product.

The deal clearly positions Google as being ready for the new era of the ‘connected home’, and in a statement Google CEO Larry Page said the deal would help Google move into new areas that are ripe for innovation.

“Nest’s founders, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, have built a tremendous team that we are excited to welcome into the Google family,” he said. “They’re already delivering amazing products you can buy right now – thermostats that save energy, and smoke and CO alarms that can help keep your family safe. We are excited to bring great experiences to more homes in more countries and fulfill their dreams.”

Nest will remain under Fadell’s leadership once the acquisition is completed, and he touted the deal as an ideal next step for Nest Labs.

“We’re thrilled to join Google. With their support, Nest will be even better placed to build simple, thoughtful devices that make life easier at home, and that have a positive impact on the world,” said Fadell.

Forrester analyst Frank Gillett said the deal proved that the idea of the connected home was taking off and that Google was keen to take control of the entire product ecosystem.

“It shows that Google increasingly believes in hardware and software solutions, such as Nest has built, rather than just building operating systems for other manufacturers to implement in smartphones, Chromebooks, and TVs,” he said. “Google will open up the somewhat closed approach that Nest used to date, to better integrate with interoperable smart home solutions that have entered the market in the last year.”

The deal is subject to the normal regulatory oversights and is expected to be closed in the next few months, according to Google.

This article was originally published on V3.

Google One of Tech Companies Leading Against NSA

Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and AOL on Monday made public a microsite, Reform Government Surveillance, spelling out what they see as acceptable principles against “practices and laws regulating government surveillance of individuals and access to their information.”

Earlier this week, Google CEO Larry Page posted on the website of the industry consortium that has recently sought to convince the U.S. government to rein in surveillance activities.

“The security of users’ data is critical, which is why we’ve invested so much in encryption and fight for transparency around government requests for information,” he wrote. “This is undermined by the apparent wholesale collection of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world.”

The news that was most picked up is at the bottom of that site: a letter from the Big 8 to President Obama and the U.S. Congress, asking them to take the necessary measures to tilt the balance towards individual rights and freedom.

The five principles are:

• Limiting Governments’ Authority to Collect Users’ Information
• Oversight and accountability
• Transparency about government demands
• Respecting the freeflow of information
• Avoiding conflicts among governments

While the principles are laudable and necessary, it’s nevertheless a two-sided reality.

On the one hand, those companies pledge to be “focused on keeping users’ data secure — deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope.”

On the other hand, one of their founding members, Google, is caught red-handed not providing the security they promised to give.

This morning, the Washington Post published the content from an internal document to the NSA specifically pointing at Google cookies as one entry point for information gathering purposes.

The PREF cookie is a Google specific piece of data that individually identifies computers. It usually is used to direct advertisements tailored to the user. However the NSA apparently has been able to leverage this usually benign user tracking tool to identify machines and launch hacking attacks.

Mind Your Own Business

Governments spy on their citizens – and in this case the NSA on its U.S. People – to protect them from potential danger.

Tech firms gather behavioral data from users/consumers to sell ads and products, that are supposed to be better suited to the user/consumer individually. Of all of them, Google has been the pioneer of such data gathering and exploitation.

Facebook stepped seriously into the game with their Open Graph platform, allowing entities to keep track of definitely more minute details of your choices, preferences, habits… but taking it a step further by integrating those within the weave of your friends and relationships (acquaintances, partners, classmates, etc.) own data. Facebook also thereby seamlessly adds the powerful layer of recommendations that will drive higher conversions for brands.

Marketers and brands come on the tip of the iceberg, using such intelligence to take data-driven decisions to better target ads and optimize site conversions, as above.

Now it looks like the NSA is getting the icing on the cake, using each layer previously mentioned, to drill into potential risks and avoid human-led disasters.

The Data Food Chain and the Mobile Catalyst

Tech firms build the technology to allow the gathering, then they sell the data. Marketers and brands buy the data from tech firms to place their ads and products.

The NSA keeps an eye on everyone, at every level and potentially at all times. How?

The rise of mobile is a huge enabler: you carry your own spy with you all the time. Your location can easily be tracked; there even are tutorials on YouTube or apps on iTunes for the general public. While location tracking seems innocuous, it actually allows the gathering of contextual data, down to the level of what surrounds you, where, at what time and what you are therefore likely to pay attention to if served with information).

Who Has the Most to Lose?

Tech firms have billions to lose in direct business from their own consumers (companies, brands and individuals) who would like better protection against unwanted spying. Who likes to have a stranger peek into their pockets? They have billions to lose in secondary trading; if the customers go, they have no more data to sell to the next level of the food chain: marketers and brands.

Marketers and brands have billions to lose, too, if their consumers distrust them. Already, the trend is clear: during the Black Friday shoppingpalooza, a report by BiTE interactive revealed that shoppers were turned off by a mobile experience that offered personalized suggestions based on their past purchases.

Is There a Way Out of This Data Debauchery?

Unlikely so. The rise of wearable devices will deepen the level of contextualization almost to a molecular level, as tech maven and Rackspace‘s statup liaison officer, Robert Scoble explains in his book: “The Age of Context, Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy”.

The only solution for the whole ecosystem to be able to not only survive but also thrive will be to allow privacy control at the individual user’s level.

However, such controls have to be easy to access (read: user interface and user experience), easy to understand, and easy to change. Facebook is clearly not doing a great job with that at the moment, causing fury every time they update their privacy policy. Can the others do any better?

What do you think?

Information from The Inquirer was used in this report.

This article was originally published on ClickZ.

Eight of the world’s largest technology companies have signed a joint letter to the US president and congress, demanding reform on the methods used by government agencies to gather user data.

The open letter, published on the Reform Government Surveillance website, has been signed by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL and Twitter. The letter states that “the balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual – rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.”

Reflecting previous rhetoric from all the companies, including joint letters and petitions, the demands made of the US government also match up with the USA Freedom Act, a bill currently being put to the House of Representatives.

The letter also asks for governments to put in place “sensible limitations” on how they make requests for user information. “Governments should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of internet communications,” it adds.

It calls for greater transparency over how data requests are recorded, with the firms once again asking to be able to publish the number and extent of user data requests they receive. Currently, requests made under the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) cannot be published by law.

The website also contains statements from various technology executives. Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith said: “People won’t use technology they don’t trust. Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.”

Google chief executive Larry Page, meanwhile, said his firm had made significant investment in securing its users’ data, which was now being “undermined by the apparent wholesale collection of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world. It’s time for reform and we urge the US government to lead the way.”

Revelations stemming from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden caused a crisis of confidence in the tech industry, when it was revealed that the the government had tapped supposedly secure data via firms including Google and Yahoo.

Google has since begun encrypting all of the data stored in its cloud services, while Twitter has begun to use “forward secrecy” measures in order to better protect user data.

This article was originally published on V3.

Google’s Matt Cutts revealed the Easter egg via Twitter:

Here’s what Google’s search results looked like in 1998:

Also note at the bottom where Google invited users to try their query on other big search engines of the day – AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, and Lycos, among others. Clicking on those links takes you to an archived version of those classic search engines.

Aside from all the great search engines options we had in 1998, this was a great year of music with hits like “Backstreet’s Back” by Backstreet Boys, or “I Want You Back” by NSYNC. There were also great tech events like Compuserve becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL and the founding of PayPal.

While you can’t do a search in the old school Google, it is amazing to see how far the search engine has advanced from the 10 blue links to more dynamic search engine, providing universal search items like images, video, and news.

Google also introduced their first special logo, or Google Doodle, in 1998 for Burning Man, an event that co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin both attended that year.

Google has had plenty of Easter eggs to entertain the nerds (me included) throughout the years. Some of these were things like asking the search engine questions like [the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything], to which replies “42” or [define anagram] to which the search engine responds with “did you mean nerd fame again.” Other things you could do would ask Google [do a barrel roll] to which it would reply not with an answer, but with your screen spinning round and round.

While this maybe a time waster for many, it still show that a huge corporation, like Google, can still have a sense of humor and make time for a bit of fun