In early March it acquired BeatThatQuote.com for $60.8 million and within 24 hours penalized it for SEO tactics that violated Google webmaster terms and conditions.

Background via TechCrunch:

Power struggles within Google’s executive team, which have been brewing since the announcement of long time CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure, are apparently bubbling up to the surface.

Case in point: In an extraordinary move to illustrate its independence, say sources, the Google webspam team actually classified Google Places as spam and a content farm, and temporarily removed it from search results…

…The fact that many Place pages only contain content scraped from third party sites and little or no original content was a key factor in the automatic change, say sources. This has been a source of constant tension between Google and the sites they scrape.

The TechCrunch story gets colorful, with Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora cruising the Caribbean on Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt’s $40 million yacht named, appropriately enough, “The Adsense.”

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Google Classic: Please Allow 30 Days for your Search Results

“Send your Query to: Google Inc. Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043″

Via dullhunk/Flickr.

Epic Battle Balakov via Creative Commons/Flickr.

Seems like just yesterday that Google and Microsoft began to lock horns over search. Now Apple might join the fray and try to develop and internal engine for mobile search.

Currently, Google is the default search application for the iPhone and now iPad. This wins the company a lot of extra cash. It also gives them discrete insight into what mobile searchers are looking for, all the better to improve their algorithms.

As eWeek reports:

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years. As the search provider for the iPhone, Google sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones. This competitive advantage has not gone unnoticed by Apple. Building its own iPhone-centric search engine would help Apple shield Google from its App Store data, Munster said in a March 30 research note.

Apple’s obviously aware of the competitive advantage they’re giving their onetime frenemy, and increasing adversary, but another five-year window is quite some time to recover from.

Apple did buy mobile ad network Quattro Wireless to give them a running start but has made no mention of what they plan to do with the company.

As Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin said at the time of that reported $275 million purchase:

You can’t keep squeezing more and more service revenue out of consumers. You can only grow so fast that way. There is a belief on both parties’ part that there is an opportunity for big growth in revenue coming from mobile ad and they want to be there to take advantage of it.

Still, even with an ad network in place, creating successful search to pair it with is a difficult nut to crack. Just ask Cuil. Fortunately for Apple they have the market lead over Google in mobile devices.

The question is whether entering the search game will distract them from it.

About Will Google and Apple Do Battle Over Search?

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Pawns via Creative Commons/Flickr.

“It’s overwhelming, fantastic, and like all technological marvels,” says Damon Horowitz, “just a little bit amusing.”

Just a week ago Google bought Horowitz’s social search start-up Aardvark for a reported $50 million. The price is one the company co-founder will neither confirm nor deny. What he will allude to though is that now that they’re under the Google umbrella, Aardvark-style “social search” will attempt to integrate across the company’s ever expanding offerings.

If you’re familiar with Aardvark let your imagination run for a moment and consider how the platform can turbo-boost Google Buzz which was also, and perhaps serendipitously, released last week.

If you’re not familiar with Aardvark — and since it only launched a public beta last October, there’s no reason you should be — a basic primer runs something like this.

Aarvark is a free service that lets those of us puzzled about life’s quandaries ask our social network for answers to our questions. These range from the mundane, “Anyone have a tailor they trust to alter suits near the 1 line in Manhattan?,” to the possibly profound, “How would you figure out how many cats there are in the US that are named Gary?”

More often than not, a response comes within a few minutes.

“We think of Aardvark like a contact who should be available everywhere, through your existing communication channels,” says Horowitz.

Limits of AI

Damon Horowitz explains Artificial Intelligence’s inherent limits and how humans and machines can play nice together — TEDx SoMa 2010.

Questions can be asked through Vark.com, mobile apps, email or instant messenger and the beauty of it all is that responses are contextual. Answers are, after all, coming from people within your social graph. The benefit of social search is the human touch, real responses from real people.

“Aardvark is great when you want to get an answer from a person right away, and you don’t want to try to hunt through a bunch of web pages yourself,” Horowitz explains. “Often we don’t want static information from the web, but a personal answer to our specific question — we want someone to hear our question, understand our context, and share their relevant experience.”

By connecting into existing social circles such as those we have via Facebook and Twitter, Aardvark scans our social graph for those who have similar backgrounds, sensibilities and interests. Send Aardvark a question and the service surveys our first circle of connections and then friends of friends.

Like Twitter, Aardvark should be thought of as a utility rather than a Web application or destination site. Whether it’s Aardvark that succeeds or another company like it, giving people the ability to leverage their social graph to intelligently ask and answer questions across any connected device will increasingly become part of the Internet’s plumbing.

Aardvark’s leveraging of the vast amounts of social, geographic and overall data sloshing through the Web and reconstructing it into a useful utility demonstrates an overall shift in the Internet’s evolution. There’s even a name being promoted to describe the trend. It’s called the Synaptic Web.

In His Own Words

Khris Loux explains the Synaptic Web at the Defrag Conference 2009.

“The Synaptic Web is a set of observations about how the Web is forming,” says Khris Loux, CEO of Echo and proponent of the concept. “As the speed, flexibility and complexity of connections on the Web increase exponentially, the Internet is increasingly beginning to resemble a biological analog; the human brain.”

The metaphor here is that all our information and actions are pings firing across the Internet much like synapses firing in a brain. A single ping doesn’t do much in an of itself but multiply to scale with the billions and billions of social actions people are committing online and you have the beginnings of a pulsating, thinking ecosystem.

Microsoft’s Photosynth is a Synaptic Web example, says Loux. By taking the discrete photos taken by the crowd, combining them with geographic data and mixing them through — and analyzing them with — very smart code, whole new images and ways to explore spaces are created.

“Photosynth,” Loux explains, “is clear proof that patterns exist and meaning can be discerned without the need for active coordination between users.”

What he’s talking about is a meta-web, a place that isn’t so much sites and HTML pages but instead human connections augmented by the machine.

Horowitz has worked on these problems for a while now. His background is in Artificial Intelligence and philosophy. What he concluded though is that trying to get the machine to think and act like a human is a bit of a fool’s errand. Instead, we should be harnessing the machine to increase connections between people and leverage human intelligence.

“Machines do well at processing large quantities of information — they are great at fast indexing, numerical analysis, pattern recognition and such,” says Horowitz. “Humans deal well with context — they are naturally adept at understanding other humans, at sharing subjective experiences, thinking through ideas, and helping each other out.

When the Web was born some twenty years ago, it was a publishing mechanism. If you learned some HTML you could put up a page and broadcast your thoughts. Everyone became a publisher.

When the Web was reborn as Web 2.0, everyone became a commentator. The read/write Web has been a participatory experience. You write, I comment. You post, we share.

Facebook built an empire on this read/write model and while it and Twitter are now part of social media vernacular, Aardvark — despite its aquisition by Google — is still under the radar.

This is a shame. Where else can you get answers to life’s questions in under five minutes, a claim Aardvark legitimately makes.

“I know this ‘we sit on top of all your other social information online’ approach isn’t yet a fully established paradigm,” Horowitz says, “but I think everything is moving that way.”

The change is tectonic and while tectonic change comes imperceptibly at first, Internet time moves quite fast. Five years ago seems ancient in the Web world, just as five years from now 2010 will appear quite quaint.

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Managing reputation can be tricky. Take a colleague of mine. As far as I know — and I know him pretty well — he’s a capable, intelligent and amiable fellow. Oh, and law abiding too. Yes, law abiding.

Why do I say that? Because if you search on the Google for him your second result will be for a convict with his exact same name. It’s come up when dealing with clients and potential employers. This usually happens after an awkward pause and goes something like this: “So, um, I hate to bring this up, um, but, ah… ah… you ever spend time in jail?”

No he hasn’t. And when explained there’s usually a laugh followed perhaps by another awkward silence.

Search “Colombia” and Ms. Colombia greets you.

I bring all this up because of a conversation this morning with my cousin. He wants to visit Colombia. He mentioned that when he did a search on the country, one of the first image results is of beautiful women. Sure enough, here it is.

This got me thinking. Usually when doing image searches for countries the first results are maps and flags. But what does the first results with people in it say about national character? How does it brand the country.

Brand Colombia: sultry.

Let’s try Iran. It’s in the news. The world’s talking about it non-stop. Negotiations go on in the UN Security Council to figure out how to halt the nation’s nuclear ambitions.

Here are the first humans we get via an “Iran” Google image search.

Iran’s digital reputation? Less Good.

Obviously not so good.

My cousin and I went back and forth on this for a while. We’d select a country and just like that, brand image in a search result.

Definite loser of the bunch after Iran is Mugabe’s Zimbabwe below.

Not only are there no maps and flags, the first result is just a disgusting abuse showing the horror of torture. The second image? A baton wielding cop chasing a civilian.

It’s interesting to watch how countries are starting to focus on digital diplomacy.

For better or for worse, many are coming to understand that much rests on actual digital reputation. That is, what topics trend in Twitter, what search results are seen on YouTube and Google.

Mugabe’s World of Nightmare

Better, what search results are buried and mostly forgotten.

National Public Radio recently had a story about Israel’s “pre-emptive PR” strategies for dealing in the Middle East.

Part of the country’s strategy to improve its image in the diplomatic world is to engage the social media world. This was most famously pursued during and after Gaza but diplomacy and reputation is a 24 hour a day, year-round affair.

The Israelis are keenly aware of this.

From All Things Considered:

Noam Lemelshtrich, dean of communications at IDC Herzliya, the university that hosted the conference, says Israel should be using new media — such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — to get its message across to a wider audience.

“I think we are handling this very, very poorly,” Lemelshtrich says. “It’s not being handled by professionals, it’s being handled by politicians. But fortunately, the Internet and social networks allow the people of Israel, who are much better than their government, to tell their stories to friendly crowds across the world in the United States and in Europe. So I am optimistic, because the new social medium allows us to bypass the government.”

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister he famously sought to rebrand dour England. The attempt was made to make Britain “cool”.

Today, the social Web takes that out of government hands and places it in our search results.

Update

Due to a personal reasons, I’d be remiss not to post the first anthropomorphic image when searching “Russia”. Not quite sure how to interpret this but here goes.

Related posts:

1. Video Search
2. LIFE Photo Archive Now Available on Google Image Search
3. Can Search Queries Track the Flu

During a court appearance to determine whether he has title to excavate the area for what’s purported to be a sunken 19th century boat, Nathan Smith testified he used Google and satellite images to check the spot, then metal detectors to investigate further.

The case is a first step in a process to get to dig. Fighting him is an estate that claims the location is not at sea, but actually on its own land.