Google To Pay Mozilla $0.5 Billion To Retain "Default Search Engine" Place.

With the release of firefox 3 just around the corner Google are heating up their talks with Mozilla and are about to make an offer ensuring mozilla keep Google as the default search engine across the board, On all of their software.
Google, Yahoo and MS have all put in bids trying to secure the place of "default search engine" on Mozillas firefox browser, But Google are believed to have put in an exceptionally large bid of 500 million dollars that would would also make Google the default search engine on all mozilla software which has an internet search function.

Users will still be able to change which search engine is used when they perform a search from firefox, but with an estimated 25% of all internet users now regularly using firefox and users on average performing 30 internet searches a day the status of "default search engine" will result in increased traffic and increased revenue from advertising to whoever get's this place.

Plans are also being formulated to strike a deal that would insert Google adsense ads on to any page which currently contains no adsense ads. the ad-revenue from these adverts would more than likely be split 50/50 between Google and mozilla (i'm sure plugins will be available to block this function).

Google To Buy Stage6

The mill is churning and the word is that Google are set to make a $750 million offer to buy the DivX online video site stage6.

The announcement that stage6 was closing was news to everyone, Especially Google, Who after hearing the announcement formulated an emergency meeting and flew-in board members from all over the planet. As I type the board are banging their heads together trying to put the final touches in their buy-out deal which is expected to exceed $750 million.

The purchase of stage6 by Google will mean two things. Firstly the site will continue to provide high quality, High definition video available for download. But it also means that the copyright terms will be enforced a lot more... So don't expect to be able to download spider-man 3 from stage6 once Google buys it.

edit: News is yahoo is also interested in making a bid for stage6.

Google To Launch Wikipedia Killer With AdShare

Earlier this week, Google started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that they are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Their goal, According to this blog post, is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But they wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

With knol google aim to create a huge online repository of user generated information which will be available for other search engines to crawl and index and which will also share a substantial revenue share from adverts with article authors.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Google To Update PageRank 1/1/08

Happy new year! Google are planning to update toolbar pagerank on January the first 2008 to fix the mess they made of the last update.

Google have been inundated with emails since they reduced the PR of any website suspected of selling text links for link juice drastically, many all the way to zero.

While many sites will have their PR restored to what it was before the last update, Not all will be restored. What Google have done is refine their algorithm for detecting what sites are buying and selling links for pagerank, So if you actually were selling text links for pagerank it's likely your PR will remain what it is now.

Google Magazine?

A patent obtained by Google in 2006 indicates that Google may soon be venturing in to the world of printed media.

What Google are planning to do, By the looks of the patent, Is produce a system where by the user will be able to create a magazine based on their input via small kiosks, Similar to the way photo kiosks work now.

The system will aggregate information and articles from various sources based on user input and produce a real world printed publication or digital hard-copy containing targeted adverts. Similar to how RSS aggregation works now, But on paper.

Google previous attempts at printed media haven't worked out too well so we may actually see Google licence the patent out to companies with the intention of providing the adverts for the publication.

it will be interesting to know more about where google plan to get the data from. Scraping content from websites will infringe on intellectual property right. We may even see the introduction of a new meta tag that grants google permission to use a sites content.

Google Hacked?

I was just sent this screen shot by an anonymous reader of another one of my blogs. it's an image supposedly showing a defaced google.co.uk page with the name tex-tenthousand.

At first i though "meh, he just saved the page and then edited it". But if you look at the pagerank bar it shows the correct pagerank for google.co.uk which it wouldn't do if he was viewing an html file locally.

Google Set To Unveil "Android" Phone Software

Google is ready to unveil a suite of software for mobile phones based on open-source technology, backed by some of the largest wireless industry companies in the world.

The company is expected to hold a press conference on Monday to unveil the project, which is expected to incorporate software from the Linux world into a mobile platform code-named Android that's designed to run on phones, according to sources familiar with Google's plans. A software development kit for what's being called "a complete mobile-phone software stack" is believed to be in the works and will be released relatively soon thereafter, the sources said. It's not exactly clear what kind of software will come as part of that stack, but it's said to include everything you need to run a phone.

Japanese wireless carriers KDDI and NTT DoCoMo are said to be heavily involved in what will be called the Open Handset Alliance, according to other sources. The rest of the more than 30 other companies involved reads like a who's-who list of the mobile-computing industry, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, HTC, Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Sprint, and Texas Instruments.

Don't expect to see a Google phone, or Gphone, on store shelves anytime soon. And in such a large project with so many different players, plans and some details could still change over the weekend. It's unclear when the final version will be released. Google has repeatedly declined to talk about the Gphone or confirm the Monday event.