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Why are Republicans in Congress targeting Google? Two reasons

An odd thing happened in Washington this week. A dozen Republicans demanded a public hearing into Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick because, they claim, "the privacy implications of such a merger are enormous."

This demand came in a letter from those politicians (PDF), including Rep. Dennis Hastert, to their Democratic counterparts, who now have the power to decide whether to haul Google in for questioning.

What's odd is that these are the same Republicans who have spent their political careers extolling the virtues of mergers when telecommunications giants are vying to acquire one … Read more

iPod lookalike can time an egg

If you think you're seeing iPods wherever you turn, there's good reason. Not only do people carry them everywhere, but their design is being copied increasingly for household appliances.

In the bedroom, for instance, we just saw the "Dr. Light" alarm clock with its iPod-wannabe appearance. And now we've gotten word of a Williams-Sonoma kitchen timer, of all things, that sports the ubiquitous click-wheel look as well.

Gadget Labs notes that the "Triple Timer" will be particularly comfortable for the iPod veteran to use, as long as it's not confused with the … Read more

OneClick your way to a shapelier blog

We don't often give a lot of attention to WordPress (for Windows or Mac), Movable Type and other self-publishing blogging systems. They often require a bit more determination than merely creating a Blogger or Livejournal username, password, and some pithy-kitschy title to show the world how witty you truly are.

WordPress has two very strong aspects: The installation really does take about 5 minutes, and it's highly customizable with plug-ins that absolve the user of having to be a CSS expert. OneClick is a two-part plug-in for WordPress and Firefox that simplifies the plug-in experience even further.

… Read more

German official says 'nein' to Google-DoubleClick deal

The data protection commissioner of the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has come out against Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick.

Such a merger would "lead to a massive violation of data privacy rights" for consumers in the European Union if the databases of the two companies were combined, says Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for Germany's northernmost state.

In a letter to the European Commissioner for Competition, Weichert writes that search engines in general already violate consumer rights to "informational self-determination" by retaining data for so long, among other things.

A … Read more

Only2Clicks does eye-friendly start pages

Only2Clicks is one of the few Web services I've seen lately whose name tells exactly what it does. The concept is pretty straightforward--set up your favorite Web sites, and the service will load them up in a grid, with photo thumbnails for each. You can add and remove any number of sites, and the thumbnails will be refreshed each time you reload the page. You can also re-organize the links with simple drag and drop. The idea is to set Only2Clicks as your start page, so you'll be able to quickly eyeball each site before figuring out where … Read more

Asterpix does hypervideo tagging and annotation

Up until this afternoon I had never heard of the expression "hypervideo," although I was quite familiar with the concept having used it in video services like Viddler, and enhanced podcasts in Windows Media Player. The idea is simple--take hyperlinks and textual information, and add it to various times or positions on a video. The result is that your viewers can have added contextual information about whatever they're watching, at the moment it happens.

The hard part is the execution, and making things user-friendly. A service called Asterpix has taken a stab at it with a hypervideo … Read more

Google deems cost-per-action as the 'Holy Grail'

SAN JOSE, Calif.--On the morning of day three here at Search Engine Strategies ("SES") San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search product and user experience, gave her keynote presentation. She said a lot of interesting things, but of particular note to me was that she deemed cost-per-action (CPA) "the Holy Grail."

According to Marissa, Google is making moves towards cost-per-action as a more ideal auction-based pricing model, but she also pointed out that it's a long way away.

Cost-per-action may be a new term for some readers, so I'll review … Read more

Microsoft's anti-Google lobbyists, revealed

If it wasn't official before, we have it in writing now: Microsoft is directing at least a small fraction of its massive (by tech industry standards) lobbying shop toward Google's proposed purchase of DoubleClick.

According to a recent public disclosure filing with the U.S. Senate, Redmond has retained veteran lobbyists Thomas Boggs and Kathleen Ireland (no, not that Kathy Ireland), along with Antitrust Modernization Commission vice chairman and former Clinton White House attorney Jonathan Yarowsky. All of them work for the prominent law firm Patton Boggs.

Their charge, according to the paperwork? "Competitive issues surrounding Google-DoubleClick … Read more

Study: Botnets boosting click fraud rates on ads

The overall industry average click fraud rate--which represents the number of clicks on online pay-per-click ads that are not legitimate--has jumped, according to a new report from search engine marketing firm Click Forensics.

The overall click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for the second quarter, up from 14.1 percent from a year ago and 14.8 percent from the previous quarter, Click Forensics said. The rate for pay-per-click ads appearing on search engine content networks, such as Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 25.6 percent, up from 21.9 percent for the previous quarter.

The … Read more