Our thoughts on the European Commission review

At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first by providing the best possible answers as quickly as possible - and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. However, given our success and the disruptive nature of our business, it’s entirely understandable that we’ve caused unease among other companies and caught the attention of regulators. Today, the European Commission has announced that they will continue to review complaints about Google's search and search advertising. We respect their process and will continue to work closely with the Commission to answer their questions.

So that everyone understands how we approach search and ads ranking, we thought it would be helpful to state clearly the principles that guide our business:

• Answering users' queries accurately and quickly is our number one goal. Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our traditional “ten blue links”, and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in “weather in London” or “15 grams in ounces” you get the answers directly (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more complex questions just as fast and as clearly. We believe ads are information too, which is why we work so hard to ensure that the advertisements you see are directly relevant to what you are looking for;

• We built Google for users, not websites. It may seem obvious, but people sometimes forget this -- not every website can come out on top, or even appear on the first page of our results, so there will almost always be website owners who are unhappy about their rankings. The most important thing is that we satisfy our users.

• We are always clear when we have been paid for promoting a product or service. Before we launched Google, many search engines took money for inclusion in their results without making that clear to users. We have never done that and we always distinguished advertising content from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and types of content, we promise to continue to be transparent about payments.

• We aim to be as transparent as possible. We provide more information about how our ranking works than any other major search engine, through our webmaster central site, blog, diagnostic tools, support forum, and YouTube channel. We give our advertisers information about the ad auction, tips on how to improve their ad quality scores, and the ability to simulate their bids to give them more transparency. And we’re committed to increasing that transparency going forward. At the same time, we don’t want to help people game our system. We do everything we can to ensure that the integrity of our results isn’t compromised.

Our final principle: the only constant is change. We’ve been working on this stuff for well over a decade, and in that time our search technology has improved by leaps and bounds. Our results are continuing to evolve from a list of websites to something far more dynamic. Today there’s real-time content, automatically translated content, local content (especially important for mobile devices), images, videos, books, and a whole lot more. Users can search by voice -- and in a variety of languages. And we’ve developed new ad formats such as product listing ads and new pricing models such as cost-per-action. We cannot predict where search and online advertising will be headed, but we know for sure that they won’t stay the same. By staying focused on innovation we can continue to make search even better -- for the benefit of users everywhere.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Udi Manber, Vice President, Engineering

Un soutien solide a la culture française

(English follows)

Hier, dans un hôtel particulier somptueusement décoré au coeur de Paris, siège de la Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, j’ai pris part à un évènement qui illustre parfaitement l’engagement de Google pour la promotion et le soutien de la culture française et de ses traditions.

YouTube, la SACD, la SCAM and l’ADAGP - trois sociétés de gestion collectives représentant un large spectre d’auteurs français, créateurs, compositeurs et artistes - ont signé un accord de soutien aux auteurs français. Ce partenariat vise a encourager une diffusion plus large d'émissions et de films français sur la plateforme YouTube en France.

En permettant aux auteurs de bénéficier d'une juste rémunération pour l'exploitation de leurs œuvres, cet accord encourage la création de programmes originaux français et leur diffusion sur Internet.

Pour l’occasion, les signataires ont tenu une conférence de presse sous l'égide du dramaturge Beaumarchais, premier défenseur des droits d’auteurs en France et représenté ce jour-la par un buste majestueux ornant la pièce qui accueillait cet événement. « C’est un accord qui permet de concilier le droit d’auteur tel qu’il a été imaginé par Beaumarchais avec le développement et l’utilisation des nouvelles technologies », déclare le cinéaste Bertrand Tavernier.

Le jour-même, le Ministre de la Culture Frédéric Mitterrand a salué l'accord annoncé entre YouTube, la SACD, la SCAM et l’ADAGP lors de son discours de clôture des Assises du Numérique organisées hier à Paris-Dauphine: « Je ne peux que saluer la démarche entreprise par certains de ces acteurs majeurs, qui intègrent progressivement les principes du droit d’auteur dans leur stratégie, en passant notamment des accords avec les sociétés d’auteurs françaises. Je veux parler bien sûr de l’accord qui vient d’être signé entre YouTube, la SACD, la SCAM et l’ADAGP.»,

Pour Jean-Marc Tassetto, récemment nommé Directeur Général de Google France, les partenariats conclus ces derniers mois avec les artistes, auteurs et éditeurs soulignent l’engagement réel de Google pour la culture française.

Il fait ainsi référence à l’accord stratégique annoncé la semaine dernière avec Hachette pour la numérisation des œuvres en langue française dont les droits sont contrôlés par Hachette Livres mais aussi à celui passé le mois dernier avec la Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique afin de proposer plus de contenus français sur la plateforme YouTube.

Beaumarchais aurait sans doute esquissé un sourire complice hier matin.

Par Christophe Muller, directeur des partenariats YouTube Europe du Sud, de l’Est, Moyen-Orient et Afrique

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Supporting French culture

Yesterday, in a lavishly decorated former palace in central Paris, the home of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, I took part in an event that offered a perfect picture of just how serious Google is about supporting French culture and traditions in the internet age.

YouTube and SACD, SCAM and ADAGP - three associations representing French screenwriters, composers and other creative artists - signed an agreement to put more TV shows and movies online in France. The deal improves YouTube’s access to French content - and allows French creators to profit.

Appropriately, the signatories gave a press conference sitting below a gilded mirror and in front of a bust of the 18th-century Ancien Regime dramatist Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais - someone who also fought hard in the courts to protect his copyright. Well known French movie director Betrand Tavernier described the agreement as “allowing us to reconcile copyright as Beaumarchais defined it with the development and use of new technologies.”

It was great to hear support too from French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, who saluted the accord in a speech. “I can only welcome the approach taken by some of these major players, who are gradually incorporating the principles of copyright law into their agreements with French authors' societies. I refer of course to the agreement signed between YouTube and the SACD, SCAM and ADAGP. "

For Jean-Marc Tassetto, Google’s recently appointed managing director for France, the event represented another important step forward in the partnerships we are signing with artists, authors and publishers in France. Last week, we announced a breakthrough deal with France’s largest publisher Hachette and last month we signed a deal with SACEM, a French musicians association to bring more French music videos to YouTube.

Without a doubt, Beaumarchais would be smiling.

Posted by Christophe Muller, Director of Partnerships for YouTube in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa

Partnering to put out-of-print French works back in circulation

It’s astonishing, but true: approximately 75% of the world’s books are in-copyright, but out-of-print. That can make things pretty difficult for people who want to find those books and read and enjoy them. Not to mention for the authors and publishers who created them and want to sell them and see them accessed and valued.

Yesterday morning in Paris, Google and Hachette Livre, one of France’s largest publishers, signed a Memorandum of Understanding that both companies believe will breathe new life into Hachette’s catalogue of dormant and commercially unavailable books. Within six months, we aim to sign a more detailed agreement which we believe will benefit French authors, publishers, booksellers, researchers, academics and the reading public - and will increase public access to cultural works.

Under the terms of the MoU, Hachette will determine which of its out-of-print works it wants scanned; these books will then be scanned by Google and made searchable via Google Books. Hachette will decide which books are to be made available for purchase via Google Editions. Hachette and Google will also be able to make these books available for other services.

Finally, French booksellers will be able to sell Hachette’s out-of-print works electronically and Hachette intends to make digital copies of scanned works available to public institutions such as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France - thus contributing to the growing corpus of French culture available online.

This might just be a first step, but it’s an important one to us, and to Hachette. We’re keen to work with the creative industries to find new business models and new solutions for increasing the value of public access to cultural works. We hope to sign similar MOUs with other publishers throughout France.

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnerships Development Manager, France

Friday 19/11/2010, updated para 3 to better reflect the MoU

Learned lunches: the Oxford Internet Institute Lectures

Game theory in advertising content and pricing; the Panopticon implications of the Internet as our digital memory; and bringing 30 year old guidelines on privacy into the Internet age - these topics and more are addressed by leading academics in the new series of Oxford Internet Institute lectures, hosted by Google Brussels.

Established in 2001 as an academic centre for the study of the societal implications of the Internet, the Institute’s research faculty devotes its time to the study of the economical, social, political and ethical questions shaping the Internet today.

The first lecture of the autumn series was given by Dr Greg Taylor, an economist whose research focuses on the microeconomics of search and other online marketplaces, and the social science implications of commercial interactions. Greg presented his study of the relationship between the information content of online advertisements and the fee structure used to price them, looking at pay per-click, pay per-impression and pay per-scale.

On November 9th, we will welcome Christopher Kuner, Head of the International Privacy and Information Management Practice at law firm Hunton & Williams. Christopher will discuss the Regulation of Transborder Data Flows in the framework of the OECD privacy guidelines and will debate whether the policies that form the basis of today’s privacy and data protection laws are in line with the realities of the Internet age. You can sign up for his lecture here.

On December 8th, Graeme B. Dinwoodie, Professor of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law and Professorial Fellow of St. Peter’s College Oxford, will discuss keyword advertising and trademark law. You can sign up for his lecture here.

The 2011 calender will kick off on February 8th with a lecture from Christopher Millard, Professor of Privacy and Information Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, and researcher at the QMUL Cloud Legal Project. Christopher will discuss the shift of computing intelligence to the Internet cloud and the key legal and regulatory challenges of controlling and processing data in the cloud. The registration form for his lecture is here.

If you would like to be added to the mailing list for the Oxford Internet Institute lecture series, please contact Tim Davies: tim.davies [at] oii.ox.ac.uk

Posted by: Angela Steen, Policy Analyst, Google Brussels