Advocacy Group Asks DOJ To Probe Google Search Results

Consumer Watchdog today called on the Justice Department to guarantee that its ongoing antitrust probe of Google's business practices include an investigation into if the company is manipulating its search results to favor its own products.

The nonprofit advocacy group said it sent a letter to Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Division, after news that the European Commission had received three complaints against Google alleging the company manipulated search engine results in an anticompetitive way.

Also this week U.K. based price comparison site Foundem filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission with examples of how Google products were allegedly favored in its search results.

"We know and appreciate that your department is conducting an ongoing antitrust investigation of various business practices by Google, some of that related to the proposed Google Books settlement," wrote John M. Simpson, consumer advocate.

"Today I write to call upon you to ensure that included in that probe is consideration of how Google may use its search algorithms to manipulate Internet search results to favor its own products."

With around 70 percent of the search market in the U.S., Consumer Watchdog says Google is effectively the Internet's gatekeeper for most consumers. The group says whether a website is ever visited can depend entirely on where it lands in Google search results.

"As part of your continued antitrust investigation we call on you to shine a light on Google's black box, and require it to explain what's behind search results," Simpson wrote.

"If, as it appears, Google is tweaking results to further its narrow agenda, this anticompetitive behavior must be stopped."
 

Google Analytics, Chromium Receive Language Upgrades

The folks in charge of science fiction movies that are currently in development may, for the sake of accuracy, want to feature Google's name on any universal translators.  The company's continued to move forward in its work with languages by tweaking Google Analytics and a build of Chromium.

Let's first talk about what might be viewed as a finished product.  Late last week, Google Analytics became available in six more languages (Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovak, and Vietnamese), and this should, of course, allow many more people to become users (and maybe first-time advertisers).

The ramifications of the other development are a little harder to pin down.  Lee Mathews reported this morning, "You can now enable auto-translation of pages in Chromium.  Just add the --auto-translate switch to your Chromium shortcut and head over to a foreign language web page to test it out.  A Google Translate bar will appear, and you can then click the button to convert all text on the page."

It's hard to say for sure if Chrome will get this feature, and almost impossible to make a guess about the timeframe of any implementation.

Still, Google's continuing to show a definite interest in letting all sorts of people use its products for the sake of learning about all sorts of things.

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> Google Announces Unicode Progress

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Google Gets a New Real-Time Infrastructure for Display Ads

Google just announced that it is acquiring Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising." The company considers itself a pioneer in dynamic ad serving and optimization solutions. Google appears to agree.

Teracent provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements. The infrastructure Teracent brings to the table allows for real-time assembly of dynamic ads. It's designed to determine the optimal selection of each ad element and return it based on the objectives of the campaign.

"As you know, we've been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone," Google says. "We believe that Teracent's technology fits neatly into these efforts."

Google says the one on the right was created with Teracent's technology.

"Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," the company adds. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

"The infrastructure, opportunities and technical depth that Google will provide for Teracent customers means a future of product innovation for Teracent's dynamic ad optimization platform," Teracent says in their own announcement.

Google says the technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns, while enabling publishers to make more money from their ad space.

Teracent's technology will be available to all Google advertisers running display ads, including DoubleClick clients. The deal is expected to close this quarter, subject to various, but unnamed closing conditions.

Integration details will be announced after the deal is officially closed. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Have You Read This?

> Does Size Matter in Display Advertising?

> Google Launches New Display Ad Measurement Tool

> Google Launches New Templates for Display Ads

TypePad Gets Real-Time Blog Updates

Today Six Apart, the makers of TypePad, released a new TypePad PubSubHubub hub, which automatically promotes blog updates in real time. It's a free feature for bloggers who use TypePad, and it automatically updates Google Reader, FriendFeed, SuperFeedr, and LiveDoor.

It's not even a plug-in, but simply an automatic feature, which requires no changes from bloggers. Although, those using Advance Templates in TypePad will have to add a line of code to their atom.xml, which can be found here.

Pubsubhubbub is described as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." This is a protocol that Google itself has adopted for shared items in Google Reader, which allows it to contribute to real-time search. Google recently provided the following presentation:

"The PubSubHubbub protocol is decentralized and free," explains Six Apart's Nima Badiey. "No single company controls it and anybody can run a hub, ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs."

"The new TypePad PubSubHubbub hub builds on the exciting work that Brad Fitzpatrick (a Six Apart alum) and Brett Slatkin’s team at Google have done with the implementation of PubSubHubbub," Badiey says.

A lot of blogs are hosted by TypePad, so this could prove to be another big stride for the real-time web, which we hear more and more about every day. That's why real-time search is not limited to tweets and Facebook updates. Content in general is rapidly pushed out from many different media channels all over the web. Freshness can play a big role in some kinds of queries.

Speaking of "real-time," a way to get close to real-time search using Google has been discovered by way of tweaking a URL using a time-related search option. More on this here.

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