Video of the Day: Google Causes Global Warming?

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Consumer Group Calls on Google to Offer Zero Personal Data Retention Policy

Google should offer users of its search engine the ability to leave no personal data on the Internet giant's servers, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Consumer Watchdog say and are asking for a meeting with Google's chairman to discuss the group's privacy concerns.

In a letter to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court and policy advocate John Simpson noted that the search engine Ask.com offers the ability for users' personal data to be removed almost immediately from its servers with its AskEraser service. "We call on you to offer Google's users such a clearly identifiable 'opt out' function on its search engine that is essentially a zero personal data retention policy."

During a question and answer period at a speech in Washington, DC, Schmidt told Simpson that he was "sympathetic" to the group's privacy concerns and told him to arrange a meeting "off line" rather than in front of 200 people, the consumer group says. An online video of that exchange is available.

The letter to Google came after the announcement this week by its rival Yahoo! that it will anonymize personal data it retains after only 90 days. Google currently keeps the data for nine months. European privacy officials have suggested a six-month standard, a limit that Microsoft said it would adopt if all search engine companies adopt the standard.

"This is really about choice," says Simpson. "People should have the right to choose what they do with their personal data and if they provide it all."

To guarantee privacy, Consumer Watchdog says, users need: 1) control over their private data; 2) transparency about how their data is gathered and used; and 3) the right to give informed consent through "opt in" functions, rather than having to sift through pages in order to even locate the "opt out" function, or in its absence, a clearly identifiable and accessible "opt out."

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One-Third of Web Video Seen On YouTube

YouTube accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the United States during the month of January, according to online measurement firm comScore. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007, it adds.

Google-owned websites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3 percent share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points versus the previous month. YouTube accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at the property, comScore says. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 584 million (6 percent), followed by Yahoo! sites with 315 million (3.2 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 199 million (2 percent), it adds.

More than 139 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 206 minutes per person viewing online video in January, comScore says. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (80 million), where they spent an average of 110 minutes watching video. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (53.9 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (36.3 million) and AOL (21.9 million), it adds.

Other notable findings from January 2008 include:

• More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video. 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.4 videos per viewer).
• 49.4 million viewers watched 534 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).
• The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes.
• The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.

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Online Social Networking Frenzy Points to Internet's Future

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Study shows Google Favored Over Other Search Engines by Webmasters

Web site policy makers who use robots.txt files as gatekeepers to specify what is open and what is off limits to Web crawlers have a bias that favors Google over other search engines, say Penn State researchers whose study of more than 7,500 Web sites revealed Google’s advantage.

That finding was surprising, says C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology who led the research team which developed a new search engine—BotSeer—for the study.

“We expected that robots.txt files would treat all search engines equally or maybe disfavor certain obnoxious bots, so we were surprised to discover a strong correlation between the robots favored and the search engines’ market share,” says Giles of Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

Robots.txt files are not an official standard, but by informal agreement, they regulate Web crawlers—also known as “spiders” and “bots”—which mine the Web 24/7 for everything from the latest news to e-mail addresses. Web policy makers use the files found in a Web site’s directory to restrict crawler access to non-public information. Robots.txt files also are used to reduce server load which can result in denial of service and shut down Web sites. But some Web policy makers and administrators are writing robots.txt files which are not uniformly blocking access.

Instead, those robots.txt files give access to Google, Yahoo and MSN while restricting other search engines, the researchers learned.

As an example, some U.S. government sites favor Google’s bot—Googlebot—followed by Yahoo and MSN, according to the researchers.

While the study doesn’t include explanations for why Web policy makers have opted to favor Google, the researchers know the choice was made consciously. Not using a robots.txt file gives all robots equal access to a Web site.

“Robots.txt files are written by Web policy makers and administrators who have to intentionally specify Google as the favored search engine,” Giles says.

That finding is described in a paper, “Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robots.txt,” given at the recent 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence in Silicon Valley. Besides Giles, the authors include Yang Sun and Ziming Zhuang, IST graduate students, and Isaac Councill, an IST post-doctoral scholar.

Not every site has a robots.txt file although the number is growing. Of the 7,500 sites analyzed by the researchers, about four in 10 had a robots.txt file—up from less than 1 in 10 in 1996.
That growth, which the researchers anticipate will continue, was one reason for the study.

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Video: Google's 'Android' Cellphone Platform

WSJ's Amol Sharma reports on Google's new announcement that the company will offer free cell phone software to a variety of carriers.

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Vacation Photos Create 3-D Models of World Landmarks

More than 10 million members of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr snap pictures of their surroundings and then post those photos on the Internet. One group at the University of Washington is doing the reverse--downloading thousands of photos from Flickr and using them to recreate the original scenes.

A presentation in October at the International Conference on Computer Vision showed how photos from online sites such as Flickr can be used to create a virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City.

"The big breakthrough here is being able to compute very accurate 3D models from people's vacation photos," says co-author Steve Seitz, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. "The long-term vision is to be able to reconstruct the detailed geometry of all the structures on the surface of the Earth. Many people are working toward that goal, but by using online collections this work brings in a whole new source of imagery and level of detail."

Online photo-sharing Web sites such as Flickr and Google are popular because they offer a free, easy way to share photos. Flickr now holds more than 1 billion photos; a search for "Notre Dame Paris" finds more than 80,000 files. The study authors, experts in computer vision, believe this is the world's most diverse, and largely untapped, source of digital imagery.

But the freely available photos do present a challenge: these are holiday snapshots and personal photos, not laboratory-quality research images. While some may be postcard-perfect representations of a setting, others may be dark, blurry or have people covering up most of the scene.

To make the 3D digital model, the researchers first download photos of a landmark. For instance, they might download the roughly 60,000 pictures on Flickr that are tagged with the words "Statue of Liberty." The computer finds photos that it will be able to use in the reconstruction and discards pictures that are of low quality or have obstructions. Photo Tourism, a tool developed at the UW, then calculates where each person was standing when he or she took the photo. By comparing two photos of the same object that were taken from slightly different perspectives, the software applies principles of computer vision to figure out the distance to each point.

"The general principle is very similar to how our eyes work," says lead author Michael Goesele, a former postdoctoral researcher at the UW who is now a professor at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. "You get multiple views from different points of a scene, and then you find the same point in different views and infer from that the depth of the object."

In tests, a computer took less than two hours to make a 3D reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, using 151 photos taken by 50 different photographers. A reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral used 206 images taken by 92 people. All the calculations and image sorting were performed automatically.

"We don't quite get the accuracy of a laser scanner, but we're in the ballpark," Seitz says. The recreations of Notre Dame show individual figures carved into the stone facade. A model of The Duomo in Pisa, Italy, a building about 160 feet tall, is accurate to within a few inches. The resolution of the 3D model mostly depends on the resolution of the original photos.
Creating 3D reconstructions of individual buildings is a first step in a long-term effort to recreate an entire city using online photographs.

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Watchdog Group Uncovers 300 Apparently Pirated Films Viewed More Than 22 Million Times

The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) sent a report to members of Congress
detailing their research effort to examine the extent of apparent copyright
violations on Google Video.

Earlier this summer, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) researched the extent of copyrighted material being hosted on Google Video and released a "Top 50" list of apparently copyrighted movies. In the latest "spot check" of the site conducted from September 10 to September 18, NLPC says it discovered 300 additional instances of apparently copyrighted
films, including more than 60 movies released this year.

Several popular summer releases including Shrek the Third, Oceans Thirteen, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Knocked Up were easily found on the video sharing site, the oranization says. Receiving more than 22 million views in the past year, the 300 apparently pirated films as
well as many other copyrighted works continue to make their way to Google Video despite Google's cited claim that it respects the rights of copyright holders and is continuing to take the lead in providing state-of-the-art tools for all copyright holders to identify and remove their intellectual property from the site, the watchdog group says.

"While Google faces numerous legal challenges related to the posting of copyrighted content on its video sharing websites, there is also a growing chorus who believe that evidence of Google's seemingly indifferent attitude towards Internet video piracy has resulted in a legitimization or
'mainstreaming' of video piracy which will have broad and damaging implications for all intellectual property owners," the letter, signed by NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm, accompanying the report reads. "We share those concerns."

"Since [we originally identified evidence of copyright infringement], the number of apparently copyrighted movies being hosted by Google Video appears to have grown substantially," the letter adds. "During the past two weeks, NLPC again conducted random spot checks of Google Video in an attempt to identify clearly copyrighted works that continue to be hosted on
the site. What we found raises serious questions about Google's oft-stated commitment to prevent apparently copyrighted content from being hosted on its video sharing site."

Boehm's letter also questions Google's repeated announcements that it intends to install video filtering technology on its video sharing services. "Google has been promising video filtering technology to screen for copyrighted content since at least the fall of 2006," says Boehm. "On
July 27 of this year, Google again announced that it would launch a filtering system by September of this year to prevent pirated material from being uploaded to its YouTube video sharing site. As of this Monday however, it appeared that Google still had not implemented the promised technology either for its YouTube or Google Video sites."

Estimates credit Internet piracy theft for nearly $2.3 billion in lost revenue to the U.S. film industry. "As you continue to debate intellectual property issues in the months ahead, we urge you to pay close attention to the 'mainstreaming' of video piracy by Internet leaders such as Google, and urge you to continue taking strong and enforceable measures to protect the
intellectual property of American businesses," the letter concludes.

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Branding Matters -- Even When Searching

Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off, according to a Penn State study.

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

The queries included “camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music.”

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

“Given that there was no difference in the results, all of the search engines should have had the exact same score,” says Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. “Some emotional branding is having an effect here.” Jansen and co-author, Mimi Zhang, an IST graduate student, detailed the study in a paper, “The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results,” at the recent Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, Calif.
The researchers were motivated to understand why Web users gravitate toward a handful of search engines when there are about 4,000 search engines that have similar technologies and similar interfaces. The performance -- defined as the ratio of relevant documents to the total number returned at some point in the results listing -- of those search engines also is practically the same.

To determine each engine's “performance,” participants rated the returned results on a three-
point scale: very relevant, somewhat relevant, and not relevant. After averaging the scores, the researcher determined an average -- about 36 percent of all results were judged relevant to the query.

The researchers then looked at each engine’s “score” to determine whether it fell above or below the average.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

Given that many of the participants said they used Google to search, Jansen says he was surprised that Yahoo! came out on top. Its total scores were 15 percent above the average for the four queries while Google’s total scores were just 0.7 percent above the average. Future research will consider whether participants “carried over” satisfaction with other products when ranking search engines, Jansen says.

AI2RS, the search engine created in-house with no brand-name recognition, fared the worst. The researchers calculated its average precision rating as 10 percent below the average although AI2RS had the highest score when the query was “laser removal.”

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The Top of Search Engines

When you type a search term into the Internet, how many pages are you willing to look at it? Are you willing to advance from page to page to page in hopes of finding something?

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Today, Google and other major search engines heavily rely on incoming links from quality websites and the words attached to those links (anchor text) as the number one deciding factor in who ranks above whom. The very heart of Google’s ranking process is their PageRank system that measures your overall link popularity, as well as the websites who are providing the links.

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Google Joins Telescope Project

Google has joined a group of 19 universities and national labs that are building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

Scheduled to begin operations in 2013, the 8.4-meter LSST will be able to survey the entire visible southern sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids as small as 100 meters, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. LSST is a public-private partnership.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is a publicly traded U.S. company, specializing in Internet search and online advertising, according to Wikipedia. The company had 9,378 full-time employees as of Sept. 30, 2006, and is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10100 (the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros), Wikipedia notes. The verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet," it adds.

LSST and Google share many of the same goals: organizing massive quantities of data and making it useful. Over 30,000 gigabytes (30TB) of images will be generated every night during the decade-long LSST sky survey. The massive amount of data from LSST must be managed efficiently and analyzed in real time.

Key areas in the Google-LSST collaboration will be: organizing the massive ingestion of information, processing and analyzing the continuous data streams in a 24/7 fault tolerant manner, enabling the new discoveries coming out of the LSST to be made available to the public and researchers in real time, and working with and managing large parallel data systems. In addition to aiding professional scientists and amateur astronomers, properly organized the LSST data will generate a new and dynamic view of the night sky for the public. LSST data will be valuable to curious minds of all ages, and will provide a powerful teaching tool.
In applying for membership, William Coughran, Google VP of Engineering, says, “Google’s mission is to take the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The data from LSST will be an important part of the world’s information, and by being involved in the project we hope to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful.”

"The LSST will be the world's most powerful survey telescope, with vast data management challenges. LSST engineers and scientists have been collaborating with Google on a number of these exciting opportunities. Even though the Universe is very old, exciting things happen every second. The LSST will be able to find these events hundreds of times better than today's other big telescopes. Google will help us organize and present the seemingly overwhelming volumes of data collected by the LSST,” says Donald Sweeney, LSST project manager.
“Partnering with Google will significantly enhance our ability to convert LSST data to knowledge,” says University of California at Davis professor and LSST Director J. Anthony Tyson. “LSST will change the way we observe the universe by mapping the visible sky deeply, rapidly, and continuously. It will open entirely new windows on our universe, yielding discoveries in a variety of areas of astronomy and fundamental physics. Innovations in data management will play a central role.”

In 2003, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Research Corporation, The University of Arizona, and the University of Washington formed the LSST Corporation, a non-profit 501(c)3 Arizona corporation, with headquarters in Tucson, Ariz. Membership has expanded to include Brookhaven National Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Google Inc., Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Johns Hopkins University, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology - Stanford University, Las Cumbres Observatory Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Princeton University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University of California at Davis, University of California at Irvine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Pennsylvania.

The LSST research and development effort is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Additional funding comes from private donations, in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSST institutional members.


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