Digital Copyright Canada

Posted by Jacob Glick, Canada Policy Counsel

It’s not every day that you get to ask your country’s leader questions about issues you care about. But that’s exactly what Canadians did this afternoon when Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat down with YouTube.
Roughly 170,000 votes were cast through Google Moderator for nearly 1,800 questions -- giving voice to thousands of Canadians. And don’t think that these were softball questions. Canadians asked their Prime Minister questions on a wide variety of important topics: from the deficit to Canada’s role in Afgahistan, from child care to protecting pensions. We tried to select questions that represented the most popular topics and would solicit conversation. (We also minimized duplicate questions so we could cover a range of issues.) Neither the Prime Minister nor his office knew in advance which questions he’d be asked.
You can see the Prime Minister respond to your questions in this video:


Prime Minister Harper is the second world leader to answer your questions in a YouTube Interview. It’s your appetite for political discussion on YouTube that creates these opportunities to access public leaders in this format, and we look forward to conducting more YouTube Interviews soon.

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist

It is widely recognized that the news industry is facing financial difficulties, but there is little agreement about the source of those difficulties or what can be done about them. The debate about the role of the web has been particularly heated: is it the source of the problem or the source of the solution? The Federal Trade Commission is exploring questions like this through a series of workshops on the future of the news industry. At the first round in December, Josh Cohen from the Google News team spoke about how we're working with news publishers to help them attract bigger audiences and generate more revenue. The next round of the workshop kicks off in Washington D.C. this morning, and I will be speaking about the economics of news -- offline and online. I first gave this talk at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in January and wanted to give you a summary of my remarks here.

The news industry's financial problems started well before the web came along. Circulation has been falling since 1985 and circulation per household has been falling since 1947! Ad revenue for newspapers was roughly constant in real terms up until 2005, and ad revenue per reader actually increased up until that time. Since then, the drop in advertising rates due to the recession, coupled with a significant drop in circulation, has exacerbated newspapers' financial difficulties.

In the last five years many more people have been reading the news online: About 40% of internet users say they looked at online news “yesterday.” Higher income households report even larger numbers, making online news readers a potentially attractive audience for advertisers.

However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% only about 8.2% of newspapers' ad revenue comes from their Internet editions, according to the most recent Newspaper Association of America data.

There's a reason for the relatively short time readers spend on online news: a disproportionate amount of online news reading occurs during working hours. The good news is that newspapers can now reach readers at work, which was difficult prior to the internet. The bad news is that readers don’t have a lot of time to devote to news when they are supposed to be working. Online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity. One of the big challenges facing the news industry is increasing involvement with the news during leisure hours, when readers have more time to look at both news content and ads.

What about search engines? Many readers go directly to their favorite news site, but a good fraction use search engines to access news specific news topics. According to comScore, clicks from search engines account for 35-40% of traffic to major U.S. news sites. Since most newspaper ads are priced on a per-impression basis, this means that 35-40% of major U.S. newspaper online revenue is coming from search engine referrals. That is a big fraction of online advertising revenue but, as we saw above, online ad revenue is only about 5% 8% of the total.

Furthermore, the real money in search engine advertising is in the highly commercial verticals like Shopping, Health, and Travel. Unfortunately, most of the search clicks that go to newspapers are in categories like Sports, News & Current Events, and Local, which don’t attract the biggest spending advertisers.

This isn't so surprising: the fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news. They’ve made money from the special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on. These sections attract contextually targeted advertising, which is much more effective than non-targeted advertising. After all, someone reading the Automotive section is likely to be more interested in cars than the average consumer, so advertisers will pay a premium to reach those consumers.

Traditionally, the ad revenue from these special sections has been used to cross-subsidize the core news production. Nowadays internet users go directly to websites like Edmunds, Orbitz, Epicurious, and Amazon to look for products and services in specialized areas. Not surprisingly, advertisers follow those eyeballs, which makes the traditional cross-subsidization model that newspapers have used far more difficult.

Some have argued that the solution to the financial problems of newspapers is to charge for access. Many people place a high value on news, and there is clearly a significant social value to having a well informed citizenry. The problem is that there is a lot of competition among news providers, and this competition tends to push prices down. News sources that have highly differentiated content may be able to make pay-for-access work, but this will likely to be difficult for more generic news sources.

In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment. There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.

New tablet computers like the Kindle, iPad, and Android devices may encourage people to read online news at home in the comfort of their easy chairs. At Google, we certainly don't think we have all the solutions, but we are definitely keen on working with the news industry to help it attract bigger audiences and generate more ad revenue. Experiments like Fast Flip, Living Stories and Starred Stories may help pull together the at-work and at-home access to the news. Online news access on handheld device like cell phones and tablets is likely to be quite different from traditional newspapers reading, with much more multimedia content, interactivity and reader involvement. The transition to a fully online news will be difficult, but there's a good chance that we will emerge with a significantly more compelling user experience.

Update 1 (3/10/10): Listen to audio of Hal's presentation.

Update 2 (3/16/10): We have revised this post and the embedded slide deck to correct an inaccurate figure. The percentage of U.S. newspaper revenue generated by online is 8.2%, not 5%.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, CEO

Power. Clean water. The Interstate highway system. It’s easy to forget that the advantages of modern American life result from basic infrastructure investments made by earlier generations.

Tomorrow the FCC will release a national broadband strategy. The plan will set goals for expanding broadband to unserved and under-served areas, promote greater speeds, and drive consumer demand. It will harness this communications technology to urgent national priorities, such as jobs, education, health, energy, and security. In short, the plan will lay the groundwork for investing in America’s future.

Yes, the Internet was invented in the United States. Yes, we once led the world in broadband development. But now, networks in many countries, from Western Europe to East Asia, are faster and more advanced than our own. Long after we recover from this recession, this broadband gap will be a dead weight on American businesses and workers, unless we act now.

As with the space race in the 1960s, America needs a national effort by our scientists, engineers, companies, educational institutions and government agencies. Just like that great national adventure, we need near-term and long-term goals.

Broadband is an essential input to expanding business, education, and healthcare opportunities everywhere. As soon as possible, we need to bring Internet access to every community, from rural America to the inner cities.

But we also need even more ambitious objectives -- or “stretch goals” -- that test the limits of our ingenuity. When President John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to space exploration, the immediate goal was to send an astronaut in orbit around the earth. But JFK called for “putting a man on the moon” because he knew that dream would inspire Americans to literally reach for the stars.

The private sector has a big job to do, and needs to carry much of the investment. For our part, we plan to build and test an ultra-high-speed broadband network in at least one U.S. community. We are excited by the amount of support our proposed testbed has received from local communities and individuals.

But smart, tailored public policies are critical too. Let’s install broadband fiber as part of every federally-funded infrastructure project, from highways to mass transit. And let’s deploy broadband fiber to every library, school, community health center, and public housing facility in the U.S.

I support a national broadband strategy because ubiquitous broadband connectivity can catapult America into the next level of economic competitiveness, worker productivity, and educational opportunity. But as in the past, we will make this breakthrough by choice, not chance.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

Internet users deserve to be well-informed about the performance of their broadband connections, and good data is the foundation of sound policy. So I'm excited to see that the FCC has launched a "beta" consumer broadband test on broadband.gov today. The site provides access to two third-party measurement tools, and is "the FCC's first attempt at providing consumers real-time information about the quality of their broadband connection."

One of the tests is provided through Measurement Lab (M-Lab), the open server platform that a group of researchers and other organizations created with our help last year. The FCC allows users to run Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) -- an open source tool developed by Internet2 -- and see their estimated download and upload speeds. They can also see the estimated latency and jitter of the connection test between the user's computer and an M-Lab server.

Since M-Lab launched, a number of partners have joined to add new tools, improve the platform, and make the data more accessible. One of M-Lab's core goals is to help advance network research, and we're thrilled to have the FCC contribute to this effort as well. All M-Lab test results are made open and publicly available so that researchers can build on and learn from the data without restriction. By pointing users to this tool, the FCC is contributing to this open pool of broadband data. (Note that as part of these tests, the FCC asks users to submit their addresses; to be clear, M-Lab is not collecting any of this information.)

The FCC has also said that the forthcoming National Broadband Plan will recommend different measures to improve broadband transparency. As we stated in previous comments, we think it's important to consider the complementary ways it can use multiple measurement and data collection methodologies, and we look forward to seeing what else the Plan recommends.

For now, you can head over to broadband.gov to try out this first step.

Posted by Tamar Fruchtman, Senior Corporate Counsel

Last month, Stanford University announced an expanded partnership that takes advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to people across the United States.

Recently, University of Virginia joined our other partners in expanding its partnership with Google. If the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from U.Va's library, along with works from Stanford, the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Texas, who also expanded their original partnerships with Google.
We're excited that University of Virginia has joined in our ongoing efforts to bring more books to more students, teachers, researchers, and book lovers around the country. You can read more at the University of Virginia website.

Posted by Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

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 Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

This morning the House Committee on Foreign Affairs will address Internet censorship, trade, and network security. These are all issues of great importance to Google as we continue to create and improve products and services that increase access to information.

Google Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong will testify before the committee and share our recommendations for private and public sector engagement on promoting Internet freedom around the world. Her full testimony is available here.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube Head of News and Politics

(cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog)
If you're reading this, then you're probably on the Internet -- via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.
After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with United States President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we'll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night March 14 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we've broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links next to each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.

• Access and Affordability
• Mobile and Wireless
• Security and Privacy
• Digital Economy
• Internet in Schools
• Open Internet / Network Neutrality
• Others (learn more at Broadband.gov)

Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will help bring the Internet to everyone. We're looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.

Posted by Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team

(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We're also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.

Popular public data topics on Google
We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we've analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we've learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics.

You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here's the top 20 to get you started:

1. School comparisons
2. Unemployment
3. Population
4. Sales tax
5. Salaries
6. Exchange rates
7. Crime statistics
8. Health statistics (health conditions)
9. Disaster statistics
10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
11. Last names
12. Poverty
13. Oil price
14. Minimum wage
15. Consumer price index, inflation
16. Mortality
17. Cost of living
18. Election results
19. First names
20. Accidents, traffic violations

You'll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information.

To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it's important for me to note that the data only covers one week's worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider.

The Public Data Explorer
As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it's easy to access, understand and communicate. That's why today we're also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We've embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example:



This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click "explore data" to dig deeper.

Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we've previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.

With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we've added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We're excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers.

We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you're a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.

Posted by Hiroto Tokusei, Product Manager
(cross-posted from the Official You Tube Blog)

Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. To address a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a time-consuming and complicated process.

Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube. One of the first steps we took was the development of a caption feature in 2008. In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages -- all in just a couple of clicks.
Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even be a "request processing" button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video, so here are some things to keep in mind:

• While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned. President Obama's speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
• Auto-captions should be available to everyone who's interested in using them. We're also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you're having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

For content owners, the power of auto-captioning is significant. With just a few quick clicks your videos can be accessed by a whole new global audience. And captions can make is easier for users to discover content on YouTube.
Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater collaboration and understanding.

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

This morning, senators will take up an issue of critical importance to Google and Internet users all around the world: how best to fight censorship and advance global online free expression. More than 40 countries now censor online content in one way or another, forcing Google to confront challenges every day on an issue that is very important to us and our users.

At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, led by Senator Dick Durbin, our Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong will outline the challenges Google faces and make recommendations for government action. She will also address the role that the Global Network Initiative, which Google helped found, is playing in giving a voice to those that are silenced.

The hearing will be live cast at 10 am ET and Nicole's testimony is available here.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

(Cross-posted from the Google European Public Policy Blog)

Yesterday's news that the European Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints from three companies has generated a lot of questions about how Google's ranking works. Here, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow responsible for ranking, who has worked in search for almost 20 years, explains the principles behind our algorithm.

Pop quiz. Get ready. You're only going to have a few milliseconds to answer this question, so look sharp. Here goes: "know the way to San Jose?" Now display the answer on a screen that’s about 14 inches wide and 12 inches tall. Find the answer from among billions and billions of documents. Wait a second - is this for directions or are we talking about the song? Too late. Just find the answer and display it. Now on to the next question. Because you'll have to answer hundreds of millions each day to do well at this test. And in case you find yourself getting too good at it, don’t worry: at least 20% of those questions you get every day you’ll have never seen before. Sound hard? Welcome to the wild world of search at Google. More specifically, welcome to the world of ranking.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to seek out relevant and useful results for a user's query. There's a ton that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours. Our algorithms use hundreds of different signals to pick the top results for any given query. Signals are indicators of relevance, and they include items as simple as the words on a webpage or more complex calculations such as the authoritativeness of other sites linking to any given page. Those signals and our algorithms are in constant flux, and are constantly being improved. On average, we make one or two changes to them every day. Lately, I’ve been reading about whether regulators should look into dictating how search engines like Google conduct their ranking. While the debate unfolds about government-regulated search, let me provide some general thinking behind our approach to ranking. Future ranking experts (inside or outside government) might find it helpful. Our philosophy has three main elements:

1. Algorithmically-generated results.
2. No query left behind.
3. Keep it simple.

After nearly two decades, I’ve lost count of how many times I've been asked why Google chooses to generate its search results algorithmically. Here's how we see it: the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are utilizing all this human contribution through our algorithms to order and rank our results. We think that's a much better solution than a hand-arranged one. Other search engines approach this differently -- selecting some results one at a time, manually curating what you see on the page. We believe that approach which relies heavily on an individual's tastes and preferences just doesn't produce the quality and relevant ranking that our algorithms do. And given the hundreds of millions of queries we have to handle every day, it wouldn't be feasible to handle each by hand anyway.

This brings me to the next point: leaving no query behind. Usually once I've explained to people the thinking behind algorithmically-generated results, some will ask me, "But what if you do a search, and the results you see are just plain lousy? Why wouldn't you just go in there by hand and change them?" The part of this question that's valid is in terms of lousy results. It happens. It happens all the time. Every day we get the right answers for people, and every day we get stumped. And we love getting stumped. Because more often than not, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages around the world in over 100 countries. I should add, however, that we do have clear written policies for websites that are included in our results, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (such as legal requirements, child porn, spam, viruses/malware, etc.). But those cases are quite different from the notion of rearranging the page you see one result at a time.

Finally, simplicity. This seems pretty obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. Our commitment to simplicity has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows.

Ultimately, search is nowhere near a solved problem. Although I've been at this for almost two decades now, I'd still guess that search isn't quite out of its infancy yet. The science is probably just about at the point where we're crawling. Soon we'll walk. I hope that in my lifetime, I'll see search enter its adolescence.

In the meantime, we're working hard at our ongoing pop quizzes. Here's one last one: "search engine." In 0.14 seconds from among a few hundred million pages, our initial results are: AltaVista, Dogpile Web Search, Bing and Ask.com. I guess I'd better get back to work.

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics

(cross-posted from the CitizenTube blog)

Chris Wallace at Fox News Sunday came to our DC office last week to do a piece for his Sunday show. Every week, FNS does a feature called "Power Player of the Week" - this week, Chris chose YouTube. We had a great conversation with him about politics on the site and how our interview with President Obama came together earlier this month.

Wallace himself is no stranger to YouTube. Before the interview, we chatted about Chris' first big YouTube moment - which was his interview with President Clinton in which Clinton became irked when Wallace pressed him on what more he could have done to go after Osama Bin Laden.

Fox now has a YouTube channel at youtube.com/foxnews.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa

(cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that's where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Julia Holtz, Senior Competition Counsel

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

As Google has grown, we've not surprisingly faced more questions about our role in the advertising ecosystem and our overall approach to competition. This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company. However, we've always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way -- through technological innovation and great products, rather than by locking in our users or advertisers, or creating artificial barriers to entry.

The European Commission has notified us that it has received complaints from three companies: a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing. While we will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints, we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law.

Given that these complaints will generate interest in the media, we wanted to provide some background to them. First, search. Foundem - a member of an organisation called ICOMP which is funded partly by Microsoft - argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. ejustice.fr's complaint seems to echo these concerns.

We understand how important rankings can be to websites, especially commercial ones, because a higher ranking typically drives higher volumes of traffic. We are also the first to admit that our search is not perfect, but it's a very hard computer science problem to crack. Imagine having to rank the 272 million possible results for a popular query like the iPod on a 14 by 12 screen computer screen in just a few milliseconds. It's a challenge we face millions of times each day.

Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites -- indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google's results. For more information on this issue check out our guidelines for webmasters and advertisers, and for an independent analysis of Foundem's ranking issues please read this report by Econsultancy.

Regarding Ciao!, they were a long-time AdSense partner of Google's, with whom we always had a good relationship. However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao! in 2008 (renaming it Ciao! from Bing) we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels.

Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case. We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments.

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

Earlier this week, I noted some of the improvements we've made to Buzz based on some really helpful user feedback. We've made a few other efforts to make Buzz settings easier to manage, including adding Buzz to the Google Dashboard.

The Google Dashboard is a tool that summarizes data for each Google product you use and provides direct links to your personal settings. For Buzz, the Dashboard is another place to see how many people you're following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts as well as links to change your Buzz settings.

The Dashboard is just another way for users to find out more about products like Buzz -- and how to exercise choice and control over their information and their use of our products.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

Last Tuesday we introduced Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations and share updates, links and more. In the days since we launched, we've heard a lot of feedback about how Buzz works.

We've heard your concerns loud and clear, and we've already taken steps to address them. On Thursday we made some improvements to Buzz so that privacy controls are more visible and useful. And yesterday afternoon we announced further changes that we'll be rolling out over the next few days — including modifying the start-up process so that you review our suggestions for people to follow (rather than automatically following them from the get-go), and adding a Buzz tab to the Gmail settings page so that privacy controls are more easily accessible.

At Google, we like to respond to user feedback, then iterate based on that feedback. So thanks for speaking up. We've been working quickly over the holiday weekend to incorporate the new changes into Buzz, and we'll be continuing to improve your user experience.

Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel

Given how important broadband capability is to economic growth and job creation, it's no surprise that it's become a major topic of discussion in Washington.

The FCC is currently finalizing its National Broadband Plan to present to Congress next month. Recently we suggested that as part of its Plan, the Commission should build ultra high-speed broadband networks as testbeds in several communities across the country, to help learn how to bring faster and better broadband access to more people. We thought it was important to back up our policy recommendation with concrete action, so now we've decided to build an experimental network of our own.

Today we announced plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks, delivering Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what's available today to most Americans, over 1 gigabit per second fiber connections. As a first step, we're asking interested local governments to complete a request for information, which will help us determine where to build. Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make broadband Internet access better, faster, and more widely available.

We're excited to see how consumers, small businesses, anchor institutions, and local governments will take advantage of ultra high-speed access to the Net. In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online VoIP and video and countless other applications, we think that ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to many new innovations – including streaming high-definition video content, remote data storage, distance learning, real-time multimedia collaboration, and others that we simply can't imagine yet.

This project will build on our ongoing efforts to expand and improve Internet access for consumers – from our free municipal Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, CA, to our advocacy in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, to our work to open the TV "white spaces" to unlicensed uses.

In building our broadband testbed, we plan to incorporate the policies we've been advocating for in areas like network neutrality and privacy protection. Even on a small scale, building an experimental network will also raise other important legal and policy issues, from local environmental law to rights-of-way, so we'll be working closely with communities, public officials, and other stakeholders to make sure we get this right.

By several measures, no matter who you ask, the U.S. in far too many places still lags behind many countries in Europe and Asia in terms of broadband speed, availability, and uptake. While it's unlikely that our experiment will be the silver bullet that delivers ultra high-speed Internet access to the rest of America, our engineers hope to learn some important things from this project. We can't wait to see what developers and consumers alike can accomplish with access to 1 gigabit broadband speeds.

Posted by Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager

(cross-posted from the Official You-Tube Blog)

Diversity of content is one of the great things about YouTube. But we know that some of you want a more controlled experience. That's why we're announcing Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube. An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence such as a political protest or war coverage. While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site.
It's easy to opt in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your choice on that browser with your YouTube password. To learn more, check out the video below.
And remember, ALL content must still comply with our Community Guidelines. Safety Mode isn't fool proof, but it provides a greater degree of control over your YouTube experience. Safety Mode is rolling out to all users through out the day, watch for the new link at the bottom of any YouTube page.

Posted by Mistique Cano, Manager, Public Policy Communications

Given that most of us of are still digging out from this weekend's record snowfall, we're postponing today's D.C. Talk, Democracy Online: Can the Internet Bring Change? We hope to reschedule soon. In the meantime, keep warm!