European Court of Justice rules in Google's favour

Google aims to provide as much information as possible to users so that they can make informed decisions. For this reason, we have been awaiting a series of decisions by the European Court of Justice that explore the extent to which trade mark rights can be used to restrict information available to users. The first of those decisions was delivered today.

The question before the court was whether advertisers should be allowed to choose keywords freely when reaching out to users on the Internet. In other words, if advertisers are allowed to show advertisements when another company's brand name is entered as a search query.

Trade marks are part of our daily life and culture, helping us to identify the products and services that we may be looking for. They are key for companies to market and advertise their products and services. But trade mark rights are not absolute.

We believe that user interest is best served by maximizing the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts. For instance, if a user is searching for information about a particular car, he or she will want more than just that car’s website. They might be looking for different dealers that sell that car, second hand cars, reviews about the car or looking for information about other cars in the same category.

And, contrary to what some are intimating, this case is not about us arguing for a right to advertise counterfeit goods. We have strict policies that forbid the advertising of counterfeit goods; it's a bad user experience. We work collaboratively with brand owners to better identify and deal with counterfeiters.

Some companies want to limit choice for users by extending trade mark law to encompass the use of keywords in online advertising. Ultimately they want to be able to exercise greater control over the infomation available to users by preventing other companies from advertising when a user enters their trade mark as a search query. In other words, controlling and restricting the amount of information that users may see in response to their searches.

Today, the Court confirmed that Google has not infringed trade mark law by allowing advertisers to bid for keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trade marks. It also confirmed that European law that protects internet hosting services applies to Google’s AdWords advertising system. This is important because it is a fundamental principle behind the free flow of information over the internet.

Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful. We will study the decision as we move forward in order to make sure that we continue to deliver advertising that is perceived as both valuable and relevant by our users.

Posted by Dr. Harjinder S. Obhi, Senior Litigation Counsel, EMEA

Embracing disruption

How should the European Union approach innovation policy over the next five years? That was the fascinating question that I came to Brussels this month to discuss at the Lisbon Council. It’s not an easy question, but it is one that Europe as a whole needs to address, as innovation is vital for competitiveness.

We all talk about innovation, but what is it really? At a high level, it can probably be broken down into three broad categories. Firstly, there's the incremental innovations which improves an existing product or process. In the 70's & 80's it meant moving the tools closer to the workers, and that saved time and improved efficiency. All of which is useful. A more recent example is something like our own Gmail team, which operates Labs to showcase additional features to the core email product, such as Mail Goggles. This allows you to check check that you're really sure you want to send an email you might later regret.

The second order of innovation is similar to the first, but where the incremental innovation has a distinct side effect. Consider our Adsense programme. We’ve developed an system to match advertisements to the content of Publishers' websites. This makes it possible for people not only to tell their story in their local language but also get paid! Instead of a few big publishers being the only ones to benefit, the side effect enables anyone with an Internet connection can participate and has made the Internet an incredible platform for free speech.

Finally, there's the holy grail, and what most people think of as real innovation. Consider our data centre infrastructure. In the past data centres were built with expensive, ultra-reliable hardware. In contrast, most of our data centres run on cheap hardware; in fact, cheaper than the average game console. We’ve designed software that can recover when these machines fail, making the consumer experience just as reliable. We published a paper a while ago on costs compared to guaranteed reliable hardware, and claimed that our approach generated a 10x price per price increase on cost per Mb vs traditional approaches, a game changing number.

So what does this mean for policy makers? I shared the platform with Anthony D. Williams who presented his paper on Wikinomics and the Era of Openness. Much of the subsequent discussion of his emphasis on collabaratory innovation focused upon the consequences for intellectual property regulation.

Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn gave the keynote speech. She outlined an agenda that rightly embraced a broad definition of innovation. In addition to innovation by lab workers in 'white coats', she recognised that real innovation is possible outside of the R&D laboratory in all sort of industries.

For my part, I offered the following ideas for innovation policy:

• Put the consumer first: We have a core product philosophy within Google that goes like this: “Follow the user and all else will follow”. It turns out not to be a new idea, as Henry Ford learnt when he famously said: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have asked me to build a faster horse”. The key is understanding user behavior and building and iterating products by ‘following the data’ on aggregated usage. (The Economist recently provided a excellent introduction to the power of data.)
• Remove barriers to innovation: Speed matters. Consider Playfish, the company behind the super popular Facebook App Animal farm. They started 2 years ago in UK, and built their entire service on Amazon’s ‘infrastructure as a service’ platform (that enables business to rent data centre capacity rather than build it themselves). They recently sold to Electronic Arts for $275m. We sometimes talk of a new ‘innovation without permission’ culture, and facilitating that would be a good goal to set for legislators.
• Diversity in the hiring process matters, as without multiple perspectives innovation will die because everyone sees the problem the same way. Europe’s universities must educate a broad cross-section of students in maths, science and computer science. In particular more women need to be encouraged to take careers in technology.
• Risk taking is as important for large companies as for start-ups: We encourage employees to take risks, and we tailor our compensation model to encourage risk taking. Otherwise people quickly learn that to get ahead they shouldn’t try anything new, especially if there is a risk of failure. The result: innovation dies.

We need a broad culture that truly embraces innovation. This may sound obvious, but innovation brings disruption that quickly mutes the enthusiasm. Embracing disruption is perhaps the new Commissioner's real political challenge.

Posted by Rian Liebenberg, Engineering Director

Securing online freedom

More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations.

On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube.

Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website Change for Equality, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime.

Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see.

At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President David Drummond said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.”

David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the Global Network Initiative. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”

Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

​A digital renaissance: partnering with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ​

The Renaissance, Europe's period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we're interested in a (small “r”) renaissance of a different kind — a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we’ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world's books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they're so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture.

Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We're not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world's books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius — like Shakespeare and Cervantes — are part of our human cultural history.

Posted by Gino Mattiuzzo, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Italy

Statistics for a changing Europe: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs

Eurostat has one of the toughest jobs on the planet. It's tasked with organising, cross-referencing and making available the millions of different official data sets that are generated by a union of 495m people in 27 countries - everything from birth and mortality rates, hotel rooms per country and books read per capita to government finance trends and consumer confidence indices.

So I'm excited that we've been able to include some of Eurostat's rich datasets in our new experiment, the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs. This Google Labs project is all about making public sector information (PSI) easier to use, understand and communicate using dynamic data visualisations. It's also about giving a taste of how open access to well-organised public data (such as Eurostat's broad range of statistics) can result in new applications and insights that can be of direct benefit to citizens, businesses and policy makers.

We're starting out our experiment with three Eurostat datasets: the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in Europe, Unemployment in Europe, and Minimum Wages in Europe. We've also integrated five other international datasets, from organisations such as the World Bank and the OECD. Our aim is to make it easy to understand and compare the data, so the Data Explorer has dynamic visualisations that allow you to view the data the way that you want to view it - whether that's as a line graph, a bar graph, on a map or as bubble chart.

You can see how the statistics change over time using the time slider function under each chart. Changing topics is easy, as is readjusting the dataset you're looking at - it's just a couple of clicks. You can highlight different entries to illustrate a specific point you want to make, and you can change the scale on each chart. Once you have your visualization exactly as you want it, you can easily share it with friends or colleagues or even embed it on your own website or blog:

This map shows monthly unemployment in Europe with the latest data from Eurostat. The bubble sizes show the total number of unemployed, and the colours represent the unemployment rate (unemployed persons as a percentage of the labour force). Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time, or click "explore data" to dig deeper. These maps - and the other charts you can generate - are based on the Trendalyzer technology Google acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we've previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.

Eurostat has been making its datasets freely available on the internet for some time now, and fully understands the potential benefits of giving European citizens and organisations open access to its data - especially given the EU's emphasis on benchmarking to promote economic reform. And although access to PSI is not always easy or uniform across Europe, there is now a clear movement emerging to make publicly funded information as widely available as possible via the internet. We're seeing more and more often that European institutions, national governments and regional public sector organisations are now not just talking about how to improve availability of public data, they're also taking action to enable innovative services and benefit citizens.

We hope our experiment helps demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you: by launching in Labs, we're explicitly asking for your feedback, which we'd love to see in our discussion forum. If you're a data provider interested to become a part of the Public Data Explorer, please do get in touch.

Posted by Ola Rosling, Product Manager, Public Data Team

Google, transparency and our not-so-secret formula

Recently the European Commission opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints. Part of the complaint alleges that Google operates without sufficient transparency into how and why web sites rank in our search results. The notion that Google isn't transparent is tough for me to swallow. Google has set the standard in how we communicate with web site publishers. Let me tell you about some of the ways we explain to sites how we rank them and why.

One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google's scoring has always been PageRank. That "secret ingredient" is hardly a secret. Here it is. That early paper not only gave the formula for PageRank, but mentioned many of the other signals in Google's ranking, including anchor text, the location of words within documents, the relative proximity of query words in a document, the size and type of fonts used, the raw HTML of each page, and capitalization of words. Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the "secret formulas" for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses. Some of these papers have spurred not only open-source projects but entire companies in their own right.

Academic papers are one thing, but Google also aims to engage and educate in many other ways. In 1999, Sergey Brin participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference for webmasters. In 2001, Google became one of the first search engines to engage online at a publisher forum called WebmasterWorld. One representative (GoogleGuy) has posted over 2800 times, while another (AdWordsAdvisor) has posted almost 5000 times.

Google's efforts at transparency and communication have evolved with the web. We started blogging in May 2004 and have written thousands of posts on our official blog. Google now has over 70 official blogs, including an official webmaster blog specifically to help site owners understand how Google works and help them rank appropriately in our search results. Google publishes more blog posts than almost any other large company. We also provide extensive public documentation on our web site with advice for publishers, in dozens of different languages.

As the head of Google's webspam team (which tries to stop attempts to violate our clearly documented, public webmaster guidelines), people often ask me questions about how Google works. That's why I started my own personal blog in 2005 and have written hundreds of posts about Google. The topics range from common web site mistakes to advice for new bloggers. I've had the pleasure of speaking to web site owners or doing public web site reviews at over 30 different search conferences. In fact, I'll be answering questions at another search conference this week - along with a dozen or so Google colleagues.

We've tried all sorts of experiments to help site owners understand how Google's search ranking works. We've done multiple live webmaster chats online with hundreds of simultaneous participants. We've experimented with tweeting. We've participated in podcasts. And here's one of my favorite ways we've helped to break out of the black box and give advice to publishers: in the past year, we've taken questions from the public and posted hundreds of video answers on a webmaster video channel. Those videos have been watched over 1.5 million times (!). We also engage online across the blogosphere to answer questions about Google's practices.

The list goes on and on. Google has reached out to other search engines on methods to make life easier for website owners. The resulting standards include specifying preferred web site url formats as well as Sitemaps, an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about the pages on their site. Google provides a webmaster forum where both Google employees and helpful outside "superusers" hang out and answer questions about specific sites. We've run in-person website clinics to provide specific one-on-one feedback and advice in locations from San Francisco to India to Russia to virtual site clinics in Spanish. We've even confirmed ranking signals that Google doesn't use in our algorithms, such as the keywords meta tag, which saves site owners from doing needless work and helps avoid frivolous lawsuits.

The frustrating thing is that even if all 20,000 employees at Google worked full-time on answering questions from website publishers, we still couldn't talk to every site owner. Why not? Because the web has over 192 million domain names registered. That's why we introduced Google Webmaster Tools, a one-stop location to provide scalable, self-service information and to let webmasters provide us with data. Describing the powerful tools we provide to site owners for free would take an entire other blog post, but a number of the offerings include:

• Site owners can get recommendations about issues like duplicate meta descriptions or missing title tags.
• Site owners who we believe have violated our webmaster guidelines and where Google has taken corresponding action regarding their site in our index can submit a request for reconsideration.
• Site owners who have been hacked can get details about malware on their site. After they remove the hacked content, they can fetch pages from their site as Googlebot to make sure the malicious content is really gone.
• Site owners can find out about errors that Google encountered while crawling their site.

A Google employee recently blogged about using these free, public tools to diagnose an issue with his webhost where he had exceeded his bandwidth quota. Millions of webmasters have taken similar advantage of Google's free tools for site owners to get helpful information about their site.

At Google, we try to be as open as we can, even to the point of helping users export their data out of Google's products. At the same time, we don't think it's unreasonable for any business to have some trade secrets, not least because we don’t want to help spammers and crackers game our system. If people who are trying to game search rankings knew every single detail about how we rank sites, it would be easier for them to 'spam' our results with pages that are not relevant and are frustrating to users -- including porn and malware sites.

Ultimately, criticizing Google for its "secret formula" is an easy claim to make, but it just isn't true. Google has worked day after day for years to be open, to educate publishers about how we rank sites, and to answer questions from both publishers and our users. So if that's how people choose to define "secret," then ours must be the worst kept secret in the world of search.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Search Quality Team

Inaugural Authors@Google EU Lunchtime Talk: Net Neutrality by Chris Marsden

The Authors@Google programme brings authors to Google to give informal talks - open to all comers - based around their recently published books. Participants are treated to readings of everything from serious literature to sharp political analysis, pioneering science fiction and moving personal memoirs, and whenever possible, we share these remarkable discussions with the world via our YouTube channel.

We'll be holding our first Authors@Google EU talk over lunch on Thursday 18 March, and we hope you'll be able to come along (register here). Kicking off the series, Chris Marsden, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex, will present the key arguments from his new book: Net Neutrality: Towards a Co-Regulatory Solution (2010, Bloomsbury Academic. Visit their site for a Creative Commons download.)

Dr Herbert Ungerer, Former Deputy Director General of the European Commission's DG Competition, describes Marsden's book as "fascinating to read, thoroughly researched and testing the paths to the future of the Internet."

During his Authors@Google talk, Marsden will argue for a 'middle way' on net neutrality, a term that is used to cover a wide spectrum of questions about the future of the internet, and that is the focus of regulatory scrutiny and legislation in Canada, the US and Europe.

Marsden will ask whether we should allow 'Lex Monopolium' to become entrenched at the expense of an open Internet, or whether innovation and investment can be encouraged by relatively light tough co-regulatory principles, backed up by a knowledgeable regulator with powers to intervene whenever economic or social concerns dictate. At the end of the talk, there will of course be plenty of opportunity for questions!

When: Thursday March 18, 12:15 - 13:30 hours CET (sandwich lunch provided).

Where: Google, Chaussée D'Etterbeek 180 / Steenweg op Etterbeek 180, 2nd floor, 1040 Brussels

Registration: please register here

Chris Marsden biography:

Christopher T. Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Law, having joined the University of Essex in 2007. He was senior analyst at RAND Europe (2005-07), research manager at Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (2004-05), Regulatory Director at MCI WorldCom UK Ltd (2001-02), and General Counsel of Shortmedia (2000-01). He has LLB 1989 and LLM 1994 from the London of School of Economics.

He is Media Board Member at the Society for Computers and Law; Editorial Board Member of the journal 'Info' since 2003; and was Founding co-editor of the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy.

He has also been a Research Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, an Industrial Policy Fellow at Cambridge University's Computer Lab, and a visiting fellow at law and business schools in the UK, US, Japan and Australia. He blogs at chrismarsden.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter: ChrisTMarsden

Posted by Alain Van Gaever, Telecom Policy Manager