Just a couple of weeks prior to its announcement, the search engine major, Google, had subtly hinted so. It declared that it would now redirect Blogger visitors to country-specific domains that would allow it to block posts in countries that have stricter censorship laws in place.

Gradual roll out of content filtering plan

According to media reports, Google will be initially rolling out these changes to India, New Zealand, and Australia, with a plan in place to apply the content filtering measures globally. So, for instance, if a user in the country makes an attempt to access a free blog served from blogspot.com, for example, [blogname].blogspot.com, he or she would now be getting redirected to the ‘country-code top level domain’ (ccTLD) or [blogname].blogspot.com.in. The Google policy won’t affect Blogger blogs, which employ a custom domain.

Say, you are in Australia and checking [blogname].blogspot.com, it is possible to be redirected to [blogname].blogspot.com.au. In other words, A ccTLD, as and when it appears, actually corresponds with the country or current location of the reader. Google elaborates in an explanatory note as why is this happening:

“We routinely launch limited updates, so in the coming months you will see ccTLDs in additional countries. Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Blogger blogs will invariably be subject to censorship laws of the country. However, as it appears, Google is trying to be on the safer side when it comes to offending the authorities, though whether it accepts to censors everything it’s asked to by them or refuses to do so, is a different thing.

But the fact that it is ready to do so means that it is not averse to complying with requests for content blocking through blogspot.in domains. This process will be applicable to country-specific domains, as and when the need arises. Law enforcement agencies from different countries send several content removal requests for various reasons like national security and defamation, details of which are mentioned in the periodic Google’s Transparency Report.

Whether or not Google uses the policy to fulfill the censorship law provisions, Blogger users are likely to be affected in terms of the search rankings.

Two instances in a debate about striking the balance between the free flow of information and privacy on the internet, are apparently pitching users against companies. The first one was a revelation that a network was seemingly sharing phone numbers of its mobile customers with any site/s that they visit. This came to light after Lewis Peckover, an IT systems administrator, put a demonstration showing how a number was revealed after a mobile device accessed a website over 3G.

The company in question, O2 network, was rather quick to react, as it sensed a storm brewing up on Twitter. Yes, it conceded, we did share customers’ numbers with its ‘trusted partners to let services such as age verification’. However, it claimed that the However, it claimed that the intension was never to take such bits information to reach every site, something that happened because of a faulty maintenance, now fixed.

New EU legislations

So why and how would it really matter if your number or other information was provided out to a site – directly or indirectly? The point here is that it might well be a breach of the prevailing data protection legislation provisions in Britain that lay out norms for how this data can or cannot be shared and how the customers are to be informed of this.

And then there are going to be stringent pan-European rules that bring us to a second example. The new data protection directive in EU incorporates ‘the right to be forgotten’ or, the right to inform a social site to take out those indiscreet photographs of the past that might affect your job interview outcome.

More radically, in the backdrop of the web industry, at least, it gives the right to inform a search engine and other websites where a photograph might have landed to expunge it too. The idea behind the new radical directive, slated to replace 27 existing data protection regimes all across Europe, is to put users in charge of their personal information, making them more secured and confident while using online services.

Search and social sites are not happy

This new internet regulation, however, has rekindled debate on Sopa and Pipa, the American anti-piracy laws. While welcoming the strengthened privacy norms, The Open Rights Group (ORG) has appealed to the Commission for ignoring complaints regarding the impact on operations by social sites and search engines.

According to ORG’s Jim Killock, advice from Facebook and Google is not warranted when framing privacy provisions. Both believe most consumers are not averse to share data online, a claim backed by the advertisers, who vouch for its relevance to offer customized services for the benefit of users.

Google is trying to push its search engine as a marketable brand, though it’s hardly unknown to anyone, with no less than two-thirds of the total market share in the US. The thought behind this is to remind users why and how Google and its impact on our lives matter and to represent its powerful online brand in the offline realm. Google’s rival, Microsoft’s Bing, also has been running an ad campaign.

As the search engine giant faces antitrust regulators’ scrutiny, it is eager to narrate ‘heartwarming’ tales about itself to connect with audiences; it’s about human emotion, a bit surprising for a hardcore company, but that’s the way to go. Google believes. Its ad for Chrome, ‘Dear Sophie’ tries to touch the hearts with an emotional appeal. And this despite the fact that data is the king at Google; it’s still not wanting to back up mushy sentimental branding with hard data.

This has been a major transformation for Google, already a household name that still feels the needs to tell an interesting story now. One reason is that it needs new properties like the Google Plus and the Chrome browser to succeed for finding revenue sources beyond search ads. The campaign is part of its mission, launched by its chief executive and co-founder Larry Page to cut down its product offerings and make the existing products more intuitive, attractive and better integrated with one another.

The company won’t divulge how much money it has spent for the global marketing push, albeit it concedes the fact that there had been an apparent shift in strategy. The vice president (global marketing), Lorraine Twohill, has been quoted as saying that as the company gets bigger, it faces more competition, more messages to consumers; more products are there, so it needs to do a bit more for communicating what they actually are and how you can utilize these products, she emphasized.

Lorin Pollack, Google’s event planner reasons that they run an online brand and one cannot actually experience it but for typing keys. So it’s a responsibility to bring the brand to life outside of the realm of computer. The expert adds: “Google is a clean and simple brand. I draw inspiration from the home page, which is just simple.”

Google’s strategy seems to have connected with most viewers since they would prefer viewing a real-life story than have a slew of products being pushed at them.

The international search engine giant has announced to place 60 of its services (excluding Google Books, Google Chrome and Google Wallet owing to different technical and regulatory issues.) under a common privacy policy to let it share data between them once the changes come into effect. Any Google account member – to sign in to services like Gmail, personalized search and YouTube – must abide by the policy. And those, who don’t wish to have their Google-related data shared, can opt to shut their accounts.

There are diverse opinions about the company’s open stance about the changes. Vivian Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice and the EC vice president, at forefront of the Internet privacy & data protection laws, described it a move in the right direction from Google, adding that even before the Commission deciding on the new European law, the company made the first move in the direction of new rules regarding privacy.

But not granting the right of choosing what data is shared between services has drawn criticism. Privacy groups feel it’s imperative that users should have control over the kind of information they wish to have shared between the various services that Google offers. What else does the new Google policy entail, and how it’s going to affect the overall user experience?

Google, as has been reported, is drawing information from Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and search, integrating the data to grasp more about users. Google can collect and is in a position to integrate almost anything in its ecosystem: search preferences, calendar appointments, location data, personal habits, contacts etc based on device information, search queries and Gmail chatter, to name a few.

Under its current policies for some of the Google properties, it can ‘combine the information that you submit under your account with data from other Google services or third parties to offer you with an enhanced experience and to better the quality of its services. The respective privacy policies for both YouTube and search history now also has the same premise. Now Google has made its ability of combining information across its services more explicit.

In an effort to clear up the misconceptions about the new privacy policies, Google’s Policy Manager Betsy Masiello clarifies in a post:

“You still have choice and control. You don’t need to log in to use many of our services, including Search, Maps and YouTube. We’re not collecting more data about you. Our new policy simply makes it clear that we use data to refine and improve your experience on Google — whichever products or services you use.”

Google claims that this is something that the company has been doing for a long while, so what’s all the fuss about, it wants to know.

Facebook, the social networking giant, with over 800 million users, is far ahead of Google that remains a laggard in the domain of social networking. However, it’s trying to bring into play its dominance in search to support its own fervent bid to challenge its chief competitor. As we have already reported, Google has termed the just rolled out new feature as ‘Search Plus Your World’ to produce customized search results. One gets the option of viewing results that are tailored to specific interests and connections, say, a friend’s recommendation for a movie courtesy Google Plus. An official posted by a Google Fellow, Amit Singhal elaborates:

“Google Search is more about finding the best possible results, which sometimes means user’s personal content shared or to find your own things online, the people whom you know and also things that they have shared with you, or even those you might want to know – all this from a search box. This forms the basis of Google’s new search related feature that understands not only online content, but also those who use it, their preferences and relationships in form of personal results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts that only you will be able to see on your results page.”

Twitter has already complained of the new search feature, adding personal content from Google Plus to a user’s search results. On its part, Google claims that it has taken steps towards making the new search feature absolutely private and secure, and also that the company is not averse to including data from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, albeit in such a way that the overall user experience is not affected and that they remain in charge of what they actually see from whom instead of some third party.

Google contends that the search engine does show some material from Flickr, Twitter and other sites when users linked their personal accounts to Google profiles. The aim is to help them locate relevant information from their social connections, irrespective of the site it’s on, Google states, adding it doesn’t presently have access to crawl the content fully on certain sites, so it is not in a position to highlight all that information.

Understandably, critics are wary of the move in terms of consumer privacy. According to them, although data from Google+ contacts of a user does not get displayed publicly, the changes do make the personal information more accessible. Of course, the effect may not be that widespread since Google+ has just about 40 million users. It remains to be seen how the company deals with the charges of favoring its own properties in search results.

• The Internet search giant’s new feature, known as Search plus Your World, blends information like photos, comments, news etc posted on Google+ into all relevant search results of a user. Now, keying in the first few letters of your colleague’s or friend’s name will result in in autocomplete highlighting a personalized profile prediction.
• Choosing a predicted profile will take you to a page for your colleague/ friend that includes data from the respective Google+ profile as well as relevant results related to them, thanks to Google Instant. Once you opt for that profile, , you will see a button so as to add them to your own circles, if you are a signed-in Google+ user, right on your results page. However, not everyone would want the results to be dotted with such postings and/ or personal information. In other words, one will get results customized to one’s interests and social connections.
• The idea is apparently to make users themselves the focal point of the whole search experience. This concept of a personal search engine to deliver customized results may outwardly seem a user friendly one, but it’s also apparently an effort to overpower Facebook. The impact for now may be limited since Google+ has about just 40 million users.
• Google has stated it wishes to incorporate information from the social networking giant, albeit not allowed an access to all of it available on the site. The question to be asked is: if Google is indeed doing the best thing for its users or the best thing for itself.
• When a user visits Google or Google+, photos from Picasa, its photo-sharing service, information from Google+ and gradually all other Google services will be considered  to deliver personalized results. This could make some users uncomfortable from point of view privacy, but
• Google maintains that it has switched to technology, which encrypts its search results. It’s also introducing a new toggle on the results page where one can see what one’s search results will look like sans personal content, and with one single click, it’s possible to get an unpersonalized view of results. It provides interface elements as well as control settings like those in Google+. For instance, personal results are marked as ‘Public’, ‘Limited’ or ‘Only you’.
• Users can turn off the feature through a setting available in their personal preferences or can do so on a search-by-search basis simply by clicking an icon of the globe on the search results page and not that of a person. Privacy groups are already opposing the new search feature for privacy & antitrust concerns. Google shows not all social posts, but only the Google Plus accounts. Twitter is aggrieved because the change would make any timely information from it tougher to locate on Google, the site claims.

Adding a personal touch to search

The idea, as the search engine giant puts it, is to serve up pages, which bring your personal world to the fore through search, taking a salvo at Facebook for in their battle for eyeballs and ad revenues. Google is keen to neutralize its social rival’s growing influence by adding a personal touch to its engine in order to bring back users by combining the search engine function with Google+, its nascent social network.

Market analysts describe this as a significant step in the realm of search – namely, Search plus Your World – via a personal anecdote when you use Google. This move is aimed at delivering results that take into account not only immediate content requirements but also a user’s mindset and their relationships.

Blending public and the private worlds

For this, it’s extending the scope of search beyond public So webpages to the posts and photos photos shared privately come into play. As you key in a person’s name, Google will automatically recommend people you may be interested in. It’s also guiding users to profiles as well as Google+ pages that relate to the topic.

Until now there was no connection between one’s Web search results and one’s personal information. Not all users would want or even understand why personal information is part of search results. The company says it will explain the rationale to users at the top of pages as why it’s making certain information more visible. This may invite resistance similar to that faced by Facebook after rolling out Timeline.

Google is not asking users if they want this new feature, and just turning it on. In case you don’t want it, you’ve to turn off the same. Twitter has already raised a murmur of protest about the Google feature. Its official reaction was as follows:

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the Internet. We are concerned that as a result of these changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone.”

A move to promote Google+?

The new feature apparently tends to promote Google+ over its social rivals – by design or by default, which could lead to regulatory scrutiny even as the search engine giant is already facing antitrust investigations in Europe and the U.S.  Incidentally, Google is not the first engine to do so. Microsoft’s Bing in an alliance with Facebook, has already been tapping some part of information shared on the latter. But Google’s move has attracted greater attention owing to its total dominance in search.

• To make its service faster, it will begin to load some webpages in the background before one is done with keying in the URL in the omnibox. If it auto-completes to a website likely to be visited by the user, Chrome will start pre-rendering the page. This is aimed at reducing the time lag to receive a fully-loaded page.
• Chrome claims to have improved its Safe Browsing technology to help surfers guard against certain malware attacks. Previously, it focused more on shielding them from websites that were suspected of exploiting the computer with no user interaction needed. The engineers have noticed a rise in malicious sites trying to lure people into downloading and running a file, masking it as a free anti-virus product at times, which ultimately might harm the machines.
• To prevent such malicious downloads, Chrome now incorporates expanded functionality for analyzing executable files like ‘.msi’ and ‘.exe’ files, which you download. You will get a precautionary message if its found to be malicious in nature.

Meanwhile, Google Chrome has released a new campaign aimed at Indian users; it’s being run both online and offline. The ad revolves around a humble artist from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, who leverages the Web to resurrect the ancient tradition of Tanjore paintings, not only finding buyers for his works but also becoming a successful entrepreneur rather than just being an artist. The artist narrates his Web-driven wonderful success tale in the film, which uses the art to weave it.

The film incidentally is part of a worldwide campaign with a core theme that “the web is what you make of it”. These series of campaigns talk of real life stories of ordinary people with extraordinary success achieved primarily because of the power and reach of the Internet medium. It tells how the course of their lives changed dramatically after taking their skills to a wider audience on the Web.  The country marketing head of Google India, Nikhil Rungta, has been quoted as saying, “The campaign is in keeping the same global thought, and speaks specifically of how a business, which was stagnating, returned to its old glory.”

The campaign has been conceptualized at the global search company’s US headquarters with the help of creative agency BBH, marketed all across the world, customized to accommodate real life stories of the local achievers. The first in this particular series, conceived on a global scale, was ‘Dear Sophie’. In this campaign a father was shown sending multimedia messages to his cute baby daughter. The first ad of the India-centric campaign was about a poor woman from a small town passionate about cooking, and the way she took inspiration to launch a cookery blog, which made her famous. This tale too was apparently devised on a real life narration.

Most competitors claim it is overpowering them in Web search to gain a strong foothold in the worldwide online travel business worth $110 billion. What is that has antagonized them?Google started placing its service of flight-search right atop generic search results since last month to ensure its own results are prominently displayed above links to Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz Worldwide and other key middlemen.

• Random Google searches now deliver a Google-powered chart of the lowest airfares between the prime cities like NY and LA.
• Its flight tool also links exclusively to sites of the top airlines. Links to top travel sites, are pushed further down; they rely on it for 10% to 20% of their overall traffic.

Booking sites recent Google links

It had already faced the Justice Department’s antitrust scrutiny over its proposal to take control of ITA Software, the flight-data firm, which powers its new tool and of its some competitors, like Orbitz & Kayak Interactive. They had vehemently opposed the monopolistic transaction.

Eventually, Google made certain concessions before getting a final approval, but only after agreeing to make relevant travel data readily available to competitors. While the company was not required by the DOJ to directly link to these travel websites, it did emphasize that tools to drive more traffic to airline as well as online travel agency websites would be built.

Is Google travel hurting competitors unfairly?

Competitors complain Google is violating the spirit of commitment made by it. The latter accepts it has partially failed to keep assurances of linking to the travel sites, but adds it had little choice. ITA founder (now a Google vice president), Jeremy Wertheimer, publicly stated:  “The airlines informed us that they wouldn’t give us (travel data) if we gave booking links to travel agencies,” adding Google still wants to incorporate travel sites, and will ‘keep knocking on that door’ to find out if things actually change.

Of course, there’s not any sign as yet of end consumers being affected by Google’s new features. Similar queries on it and the top travel sites invariably yield the same fare. Meanwhile, Google’s flight search has come as a boon though to airlines, having struggled for long to wean traffic away from travel agency sites that levy a charge on airlines for each booking.  Incidentally, Microsoft’s Bing, with less than a quarter of Google’s user base, also puts its flight-search tool atop relevant results.

For the six month period covering first half of the year 2011, for which details have just been released by the search engine major, a significant rise was recorded in the compliance rate from just about forty percent previously. According to the latest transparency report, there were over 750 items sought to be removed apart from 92 requests for content removal, a number much higher in comparison to the previous reporting period from different government agencies, bodies and courts.

They ask for removal of content for various reasons. Those often stated for removal range from copyright, privacy issues, security reasons and allegations of defamation. In addition, claims that content pages are illegal or unlawful, qualifying as hate speech and pornography were also there, prompting to delete the same.

The search giant is mostly protected owing to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides it with a safe-harbor provision (for ISPs) from being held liable in any way for copyright infringement. But it must take something down in order to comply with the act, especially after receiving a take-down notice for content that has been copyrighted. And this does place Google in position of being jury, judge and executioner of the legal provisions as it ought to make a determination of any alleged violation of copyright infringement.

Laws governing these issues differ from one country to another, and the requests mirror the legal context of a specific jurisdiction. Google releases this data to initiate discussions about the appropriate authority and scope of government requests, citing transparency as its core value around the information flow.

Following are the highlights as far as Government requests are concerned as publicized by Google:

• China: Google received three requests to remove a total of 121 items from its services and removed ads that violated its AdWords policies in response to the two requests.
• India: It got requests from the various state and local to remove YouTube videos, which showed protests against certain social leaders or contained offensive language about religious leaders. Google refused most requests, just locally restricting videos that seemed to violate local laws. In addition, it had a request to delete 236 communities and profiles from the Orkut service for being critical of a local politician. Google refused to comply.
• United Kingdom: The number of requests for content removal went up by 71% in comparison to the previous reporting time period.
• United States: It got a request to remove YouTube videos showing police brutality, though it did not remove the same. Separately, there were requests from many local law enforcement agencies for removal of allegedly defamatory videos. It didn’t comply with most of these requests. The number of requests went up significantly in comparison to the previous reporting period.