An article from CNET makes some interesting observations and is titled Microsoft’s nightmare inches closer to reality. From the article:

The nightmare is inching closer to reality and Microsoft execs are apparently paying attention to the decade-old alert. As part of a management shuffle, Microsoft said Tuesday it would make hosted services a more strategic part of the company and fold its MSN Web portal business into its platform product development group, where Windows is developed.

Another memo, called ‘Google–The Winner Takes All (And Not Just Search),’ is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company’s crown jewel, Windows.

Rumours continue to circulate that Google, whose tight relationship with Linux is no longer a secret, may be ‘cooking’ an operating system. Some recent hirings of user interface experts, notable Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, only support this crazy speculation.

Related items:

• Google OS – What if?
• Towards On-Line Operating Systems
• Google builds an empire to rival Microsoft (ZDNet)

A BusinessWeek article relating to political blogs is rather difficult to ignore.

It appears as though a controversial move by the US government could make it more difficult for blogs to voice political tendencies. If censorship was ever forced, would that permit the existence of political comments, which may be contained within these blogs? We have already come to witness a lawsuit against a Webmaster due to contributory comments that were contained in his site. This should definitely make us all raise a brow.

Amid the explosion of political activity on the Internet, a federal court has instructed the six-member Federal Election Commission to draw up regulations that would extend the nation’s campaign finance and spending limits to the Web.

NTIL some time ago, the official Google Toolbar was only available for Internet Explorer. There were third-party substitutes, however, as I previously discussed in some depth.

One such third-party solution is the GoogleBar, which has an experimental feature exploiting Google Suggest. To those who do not know, Google Suggest involves a typical search box, with a drop-down list filled with suggestions for search term completion, where prevalance/saturation of results implies precedence. For example, if one was to type in “Star W”, a suggestion might be made for the term “Star World” or “Star Wars”.

The GoogleBar Google Suggest feature was buggy and never seemed to work reliably. As the Google Blog suggests this morning, the Google Toolbar now incorporates a new powerful feature. That feature does exactly what the GoogleBar aimed to achieve, namely provide a drop-down of suggestions in the toolbar, yet it does so reliably. More surprisingly, that feature from Google is only available to Firefox users.

The move surprises me as Google appeared to have favoured or catered for Microsoft’s products before complementing that with support for Mac, Linux, or various powerful browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera. I went as far as contacting Google’s Code Manager a couple of weeks ago. He told me that kind support to platforms is yet to be seen, but software which is complete already should not be held back because of insufficient inter-operability.

In my humble opinion and perhaps for the first time, it seems as if Google put Firefox at a higher priority than Internet Explorer. This might mean something. Opera’s strategic move, which made their browser absolutely free, was possibly backed by revenue owing to Google.

ORDPRESS is finally most determinded to put a stop to comment spam. The introduction of rel='nofollow' never seemed to have done the trick. Yet, in then absence of this attribute, which was controversially introduced by Google (much like XML’d Site Maps), who knows what a jungle we would have lived in today.

The new spam prevention mechanism will be capable of serving all sites in principle (via API‘s), not only WordPress-powered sites. Meanwhile, I volunteered to be among the testers, but further details are not intended to be disclosed. I can only say that spam flagging is collaborative, much like Google Mail filtering (mentioned and recommended to the audience in my recent talk on security).

The spam protection plug-in presently has a test-bed on this domain. The following link will get things going, i.e. get spam to surge in:

http://www.schestowitz.com/Spam/

Prepare yourself to the end of comment spam!

Related items:

• Black Hat Search Engine Optimisation
• Spammers Map
• Spammer’s Death

Connect with Google, search with Google, E-mail with Google. Google machine and operating system yet to come?

OOGLE are high up in the headlines again as rumours have become a reality. It is said that “Big G” is yet to offer Wi-Fi and Virtual Private Networking (VPN) to America, starting with the San Francisco bay area.

Google already allow visitors to download necessary software from their site and the FAQ explains a little further. There appears to be somewhat of a ‘hit-and-run game’, whereby Google bring their download sub-site to life, but quickly make it unavailable again, re-directing to their main search page. I suspect this may only appear this way because I access Google from outside the United States. They intend to cover the States in the future as a full-scale ISP according to some rumours, which can finally be confirmed.

I still remember the days when Google boasted being a powerful search engine, later to become a fully-blown information management and centralisation body (e.g. Google Groups, Google Directories). Maps and E-mail have greatly extended its scope, yet now, as Internet services are unveiled, there appear to be no apparent limits.

What will be next to come: Google boxes and Google O/S near you?

OOGLE’S Search Quality Team pushes on with an initiative to remove pages which contain hidden text, JavaScript re-directs and the like. The main intention is to penalise sites that use questionable, if not black-hat, SEO techniques. It is rather encouraging to know that much effort is being put into refinement of search results — an effort considerable enough to justify formation of an entirely independent team.

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link]

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.”

“Googlebombing” is the term used to describe a situation where inappropriate SERP‘s get returned due to intentional (hence unnatural) intervention with the Google algorithms. Anchor text of links (text in the vicinity of a hyperlink) gets heavily used for classification of pages and this observation can lead to overt misuse.

I can recall that in the past, due to large amount of poker-related spam, bloggers decided to link en masse to the Wikipedia page on poker, which in turn made it a prime search engine result for the term “poker”. Therein, poker and gambling were discouraged as well as the practices they use to promote themselves, destroying cyberspace in the process.

More recently, there has been a lot of talk about binding between the term “failure” and the White House, in particular George Bush’s official page. The voices of witnesses have grown loud enough to justify a post in the Google Blog.

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns…

My vague recollection tells me that several years ago, Google humour got involved when searching for the term “weapons of mass destruction”.