Google stands by book search deal

Google has defended its online book deal amid reports it is being reviewed by the US justice department.

An investigation is expected to examine whether or not the book search agreement with authors and publishers violates anti-trust laws.

Google reached a settlement in October to create a $125m (£85m) fund to pay authors to have their work digitised.

The deal still needs court approval and this week the deadline was extended to September for others to oppose it.

Now that the justice department has become involved, Google has taken to the blogosphere with a post explaining the benefits of putting millions and millions of books online.

“As the discussion continues, it’s important to understand what readers stand to gain,” wrote Adam Smith, the director of product management for Google Book Search.

In his post, Mr Smith outlined a number of scenarios where readers could benefit. These include being able to access out-of-print, or so-called “orphaned” books where the authors cannot be found, as well as being able to get hold of more books in foreign languages.

For authors, Google also stressed the positives.

“The settlement won’t just expand access to out-of-print books, either,” said Mr Smith.

“Because authors and publishers will have the ability to let users preview and purchase their in-print books through Google Book Search, readers will have even more options for accessing in-print books than they have today.”

‘Monopolistic situation’

The Google settlement was reached following earlier legal action by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.

That suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from libraries for use in its Book Search service was a violation of copyrights.

Google’s service will allow users to download PDF files of classic books

Both organisations refused to comment on the story.

The Department of Justice also declined to give a statement. Its involvement does not necessarily mean it will attempt to scuttle the deal, which critics have said would unfairly give Google an exclusive licence to profit from millions of books.

Some librarians have said they fear that with no competition Google would be free to raise prices to access the collection.

The Consumer Watchdog told the BBC it was one of a number of groups involved in calling on the Department of Justice to act.

“We felt the deal set up an unfair monopolistic situation for Google,” explained Consumer Watchdog advocate John Simpson.

“We do need to have the world’s books digitised but I think there are very big concerns if one internet giant is able to dominate the digital market. We want a level playing field here,” Mr Simpson said.

The deal currently only applies in the US, but Google’s Adam Smith said: “We believe that this will constitute an unprecedented test bed for the development of similar services around the world.”

Web tool ‘as important as Google’

A web tool that “could be as important as Google”, according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

The “computational knowledge engine”, as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.

“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Simple text

However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.

“Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say ‘I don’t need all those extra words’.”

Instead they tended to use “concepts” similar to how most people use search engines today.

But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was “disappointed” by Dr Wolfram’s “dismissal of English syntax as ‘fluff”’.

For example, he said, suppose someone asks ”When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?”

“Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama,” he said.

The tool computes many of the answers “on the fly” by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts – such as the height of Mount Everest – or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country’s GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

“Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results,” said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.

Dr Wolfram said the “trillions of pieces of data” were chosen and managed by a team of “experts” at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.

Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.

Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove ‘linguistic fluff’

“Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain,” he wrote earlier this year. “It computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”

Learning language

The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.

This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.

For example, a relatively simple search, such as “who was the president of Brazil in 1923?”, will return the answer “Artur da Silva Bernardes”.

This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.

Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people’s questions.

“We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case,” he said.

In addition, he said, the system had got “pretty good at removing linguistic fluff”, the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.

“I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing.”

Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be “the world’s first web-based question answering system”. It has been on the web since December 1993.

Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.

Dr Katz said, it answers “millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world” on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.

It is also able to compute answers form several sources in a similar way to Alpha.

Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.

For example, Powerset, uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.

The company is attempting to build a similar search engine “that reads and understands every sentence on the Web”.

In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.

Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.

“In a sense we are at the beginning,” he said.

Couple Chrome Videos

In an effort to spread the word about its Chrome browser, Google commissioned 11 short videos about the browser. My two favorites are below.

I think the first one could actually be used as a TV commercial. It wins for best use of color. And the tune is catchy—makes me want to buy a Chrome browser. Wait, I forgot. It’s free.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqfwNbB0QqQ]

The second one is just funny. Men in tights always are. See how they blend into the background? Just like the browser does.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp64ogUy_Os]

MSN Picks WetPaint To Add A Fresh Coat To Its Entertainment Pages

MSN had a bit of a problem. It had the popular entertainment area of its service, where movies, musical acts, and other things in pop culture have pages filled with content for fans. But the problem was that paying people to populate these sites with content was expensive. And since it’s the fans that want to see it, why not let them help out to build the site? That’s why MSN is now partnering with WetPaint, the simple website building platform, to power new entertainment sites.

Two dozen such sites are set to be launched over the next few months. These sites will specifically be powered by WetPaint Injected, its service which allows any site owner to place user generated content onto their sites. That’s exactly what MSN plans to do, as it will still house the sites, but will simply populate pages based on the content that fans create.

Though none are yet live, you can get a taste for how this might work with the WetPaint-powered page Showtime has for its show, The Tudors. It features a large community updating the site regularly, giving other fans pictures, video clips and commentary.

And what’s really nice about these WetPaint Injected-powered site is that they play nicely with search engines, WetPaint CEO Ben Elowitz tells me. With a lot of other widget add-ons that usually power fan pages hosted elsewhere, the search engine crawlers have trouble parsing the site, but WetPaint is SEO-friendly, and that has led to large increases in traffic from searchable terms that fans include on pages.

Elowitz notes that it’s nice to see MSN taking a lead in making its sites more socially friendly, when other large portals are strugling with that. And as a number of big names in entertainment and brands start to move to use fan pages on Facebook, he also notes that WetPaint-powered fan pages perform well when compared to Facebook fan pages. Generally, the WetPaint variety see 100 times the usage from fans when it comes to contributions and comments, he says.

Elowitz wouldn’t go into the specifics of the arangement with MSN, but notes that usually its outside business deals involve revenue sharing and/or some sort of fee for their service.

It seems to be a smart play by MSN. Why pay someone to do work that fans will do for free? Not only that, but fans tell other fans about the contributions their making, and it’s like built-in buzz for the community you’re targeting. And when you serve everyone who comes to these sites ads, you have a nice little, basically free, revenue stream right there.

WetPaint also has a smaller side project it’s working on in light of the recent shut down of Geocities. GARP, or Geocities Asset Recovery Plan, will allow stranded Geocities users to transfer their sites over to Wetpain using their migration kit. WetPaint is even offering to buy domains for the first thousand sites that migrate.

AOL Posts 23 Percent Decline In Revenues During 1st Quarter

Time Warner announced first quarter earnings today, giving us a peak at how AOL is doing. It’ seen better days. Revenues were down 23 percent to $867 million. Of that advertising revenues made up about half ($443 million), but were down a gut-wrenching 20 percent. Yahoo, in comparison, saw a 12 percent decline in advertising revenues during the quarter, and Google saw 6 percent growth in total revenues on an annual basis. Even Microsoft did better on the online advertising front, suffering a smaller 16 percent drop in the quarter.

Also revealed in the 10Q filing with the SEC is Time Warner’s intention to separate the old dial-up access business and spin off the rest of AOL:

Although the Company’s Board of Directors has not made any decision, the Company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner’s stockholders, in one or a series of transactions. Based on the results of the Company’s review, future market conditions or the availability of more favorable strategic opportunities that may arise before a transaction is completed, the Company may decide to pursue an alternative other than a spin-off with respect to either or both of AOL’s businesses.

New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong gets a pass this quarter because he was just hired away from Google in March. But he has to stop the bleeding before a spin-off or sale is possible. Meanwhile, on the product front, AOL is pushing forward with tweaks to its homepage that more fully integrate blogs, Twitter, and social networks. And AOL is positioning AIM and Socialthing as a single sign-on alternative to Facebook connect and Google Friend Connect

Microsoft PubCenter May Be Too Good To Be True

Last week, Microsoft officially opened up PubCenter to the masses, allowing anyone to sign up for the ad program. We’ve written about how Microsoft’s PubCenter, a self-serve third-party ad publishers platform through AdCenter, was doing well with private beta testers over the past year, with PubCenter paying significantly more than competitors Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher (one particular site owner says he is receiving from four times more in revenue from Microsoft than Google AdSense). We are now hearing and reading on PubCenter forums that since the program opened up to the public last week, revenue has plummeted and many publishers are switching back to AdSense due to the sudden drop in payouts.

One publisher, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that Microsoft has cut his payout by 80 to 90 percent and that many of the publishers on PubCenter are leaving to go back to AdSense. According to our source, this new revshare went into place on either the 18th or the 19th of April. Here’s a direct quote from the publisher: “Realistically, Microsoft’s payout has been too high from the beginning, but this drop puts it well below the scope of being remotely competitive and instead files it under ‘worthless.’”

On the private forums, many publishers are outraged by the sudden drop in revenue. We’ve lifted some of the comments from several different publishers who are using PubCenter:

“My earnings have gone down by about 50 % over the last few days. I typically do about 8500 a month with PubCenter-I was doing around 7500 with AdSense prior, so I welcomed a new player. Unfortunately, unless this trend changes it will be back to AdSense for me. The most annoying part is knowing that nothing on my site or traffic has changed but instead that someone decided to adjust the revshare numbers.”

“I’m not seeing any drop with the other [ad] networks recently…it’s just the way it was last month…but here it’s a very steep drop in the last 3 days or so . . . . I am not sure if some updates have been rolled out. This is definitely something to be concerned about since the numbers we are seeing over the past days bring serious concerns.”

“April 20th is the lowest eCPM I have seen since starting this program, much lower than my other programs.”

“I haven’t seen eCPM this low since I started. The past 3 days have been extremely concerning. As far as my impressions go, I have been usually at the high end of my average. My average CTR has improved…not sure why eCPM has declined so sharply.”

Google is in the driver’s seat when it comes to serving ads on third-party publisher sites. The company has more advertisers chasing all those impressions, which tends to drive bidding way up. So even though Google only shares a small amount with publishers, they can outpay competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. That means Microsoft may have to actually take a loss revenue sharing just to get in the game. Their total revenue per click may actually be lower than what Google pays out in a revenue share, meaning to win publishers Microsoft may have to share more than 100% of revenue. That gets expensive fast.

Workday Raises $75 Million For Human Resources Software

Workday, a financial and human resources SaaS provider, has secured $75 million in Series E funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) (which contributed $45 million) with existing investors Greylock Partners and Workday CEO and co-founder Dave Duffield also participating. Duffield founded PeopleSoft, which he sold to Oracle in January 2005 for $10.3 billion. The company has raised a total of $150 million in funding.

Workday, which currently has over 80 customers, plans to use the funds to extend its product portfolio and support the company’s expansion. Workday’s software, Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management, helps companies manage human resources and finances in a single system.