All Things Digital

Google’s new Chrome browser hasn’t been available for a week yet and already, privacy advocates are sounding alarms. Over the weekend, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security warned against using the browser, which it fears collects and centralizes a bit too much user data with Google (GOOG). “It was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor,” the Berliner Zeitung reported. “With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the Internet.”

If your mission is to beat Google in the search market, it’s probably wise to give your upstart search engine a name that people know how to pronounce. It’s also wise to make sure that the name appears in the first page of search results. Cuil, the upstart search engine that debuted today with aspirations of unseating Google, has apparently done neither.

Cuil, sophomorically pronounced “cool,” isn’t exactly the sort of name from which global brands are made (Google arguably wasn’t either but at least people knew how to pronounce it). And if its search engine boasts greater comprehension and relevance than Google’s (GOOG) as Cuil claims, why doesn’t it display the company itself in a search for “Cuil” instead of “Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha,” “French Cuisine,” and “Lochaber”? (My first search for “cuil” returned nothing at all.) This, from a search outfit with a Web index three times the assumed size of Google’s and an executive team of Google veterans?

“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”

And you have to be useful. Effective, too. Right now, Cuil seems to be lacking in both areas. “This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft (MSFT), much less Google, that’s another story.”

To be fair, Cuil does have one thing going for it: a privacy policy that seems to be quite a bit more favorable to users than Google’s.

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.”

Jerry Yang and Co. say Microsoft (MSFT) was never committed to a whole-company acquisition of Yahoo (YHOO). But if that’s the case, why is it that Microsoft seems entirely committed to a whole-company acquisition of another search company–Powerset?

This afternoon, Microsoft said it will acquire the search start-up for a sum believed to be more than $100 million.

Coming as it does in the aftermath of Microsoft’s failed effort to buy Yahoo, the acquisition is an interesting one. Powerset is no Yahoo. That said, it’s in some ways better.

Powerset specializes in so-called “natural language” search, which is meant to understand the intent and meaning behind the words in search queries–so that, for example, a search engine could understand the difference between a search for “yahoo” the exclamation, and “Yahoo” the search company Microsoft didn’t buy. Powerset searches the Web–well, at this point, just Wikipedia–semantically. And that’s a handy skill to have when your competing with Google (GOOG), which isn’t yet able to search the Web in that way.

Said Harvard Business School professor Andrei Hagiu, “Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset makes perfect sense and is probably the best shot at a disruptive technology that might allow it to leapfrog Google.”

Flash content on the Web may be slow-loading and occasionally nonintuitive, but at least now it’s searchable.

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

The days of measuring Internet usage with panels and surveys are finally coming to an end. Good thing too, because those media-measurement techniques–which were developed to gauge radio audience size 70 years ago–were getting, you know, a bit old.

Google (GOOG) today unveiled a new tool that promises to measure Internet usage more precisely. Called AdPlanner, it combines search engine and audience measurement data to create a richer, more intelligent picture of Internet usage, one that may prove far more useful to advertisers looking to identify the best places to buy ads that will reach their target audiences. Slap it together with the recently announced Google Trends for Web Sites and what use is there for traditional advertising-research suppliers?

Great news for media buyers and advertisers who’ve long relied on comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen/Netratings and their shallow, inconsistent metrics. Ugly news for comScore and Nielsen/Netratings, which now seem destined to be disintermediated by Google in much the same way the company disintermediated the rest of the online advertising industry. Sadly, they’ve no one to blame for this but themselves. It’s not like they haven’t been hearing complaints about discrepancies in audience measurement for nearly a decade now (some, presumably, from Google itself).

“We in the marketing-media ecosystem have spent too many years trying to clean up the residue of flawed media-research methodologies,” Randall Rothenberg, president & CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau wrote in a scathing letter to comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings back in 2007. “We simply cannot let the Internet, the most accountable medium ever invented, fall into the same bad customs that have hindered older media and angered advertisers for decades–customs such as inadequate samples, accepted out of begrudging convenience; or phantom metrics, like ‘pass-along readers,’ that add shadowy bulk to audiences that cannot be measured directly; or metering technologies and processes that are easy to game.”

Coming as it does after news of Microsoft’s plan to bribe consumers to use its search engine, reports of Google’s (GOOG) continued dominance in search aren’t all that surprising. Google’s share of the U.S. search market in April grew to 61.6%, up from 59.8% in March, comScore announced today. And it grew at the expense of rivals Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), AOL (TWX) and Ask.com (IACI). Yahoo’s share dropped 0.9 percentage points to 20.4%, Microsoft dropped 0.3 to 9.1%, AOL dropped 0.2 to 4.6% and Ask dropped 0.4 to 4.3%.

A pretty dismal showing for the other four “major” search engines, which apparently bleed and sweat search market share. As noted here last week, the IT industry used to say that IBM (IBM) wasn’t the competition; it was the environment in which you compete. Today the adage seems equally applicable to Google, which dominates the search market just as IBM once dominated the computer industry.

Dear Friends; Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this, You will repent later. … When you forward this email to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks time period.

For every person that you forward this email to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00. For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.”

–Excerpt from the Microsoft giveaway hoax

My God … Bill Gates really is sharing his fortune. But not with folks who help out with that infamous Microsoft email “beta test.” He’s sharing it with consumers who use Microsoft’s Live Search engine to find and purchase products online.

Today, Microsoft (MSFT) will announce “Live Search Cashback,” a sort of search-engine loyalty program that rewards users with rebates on certain purchases of products found through Microsoft’s live.com Web search. “We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping,” Microsoft enthuses on the Cashback site. “We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’”

Cringe.

Like Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo (YHOO), this new service is yet another effort to bolster its laggard search service, which has long been a very distant third in the search market. Question is, will it work? Gartner (IT) analyst Van Baker says maybe. “Assuming that the rebate amounts are enough to be appealing to people, which it sounds like they are, that definitely could attract a fair number of consumers,” Baker told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. “But what they may do is just go to that site when they’re thinking about buying something, and use Google the rest of the time.”

Ask.com (IACI), the little search engine that can’t, but someday hopes to, is committed to becoming a viable competitor in a market overwhelmingly dominated by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

It has not, as CEO Jim Safka vehemently points out in an interview with Forbes today, ceded the search battle to anyone. “It’s horses–t,” he told Forbes.com. “It’s categorically not true. We’re more committed to our algorithm and engineers than ever. While Yahoo and Microsoft are paralyzed by trying to figure out what’s happening to their companies, we’re trying to figure out what’s next in search. You’re going to see more innovation coming out of Ask then ever before.”

The first evidence of that “innovation”? Ask’s acquisition of that paragon of innovation Lexico Publishing Group LLC, the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. With Lexico’s properties in its pocket, Ask expects to expand its audience to more than 145 million unique monthly users–an increase that the company claims would make it the ninth-largest Web property globally. Whether the company means among all users or just married women primarily living in the South and the Midwest remains to be seen …