Google is to scrap its European search advertising payments system which is worth as much as £50m a year to agencies.

The programme, called Best Practice Funding, will wind up at the end of 2008. It was launched by Google across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2006 giving agencies that used the search engine to book ad campaigns a percentage of money back based on how much they spent on behalf of clients.

The aim of BPF was to drive search advertising across the region by allowing investment in technology, training and research to create better campaigns. BPF sees agencies get from 3% to 8% of their ad spend returned each quarter depending on how much money they place with Google and other qualifying factors.

Each agency qualifying for the programme has had two staff members trained as Google Advertising Professionals - 2,000 have gone through the process to date. "Agencies are now at a level where they don't need a subsidy," said Damian Burns, head of agency relations for Google EMEA. "Everyone should be equal in an auction system, there shouldn't be buying clout, the value for clients is in how well agency campaigns perform." Mr Burns did add that there had been a "mixed" reaction from some agencies at the news.

Some media sources argued that it is another example of Google using its hugely dominant position in the search advertising market. BPF was introduced at the same time as Google scrapped its existing agency discount system. The system, similar to how media agencies get discounts for buying TV ad slots, had been a more generous and straightforward mechanism rewarding agencies with more discount on campaign spend.

There was a backlash from a number of agencies at the time, despite no similar system being offered by Google in other regions. For those agencies that have based their business model on using BPF money as profit in place of the traditional discount for volume buying, then the news today means client contracts will have to be drastically overhauled.

"Many agencies saw BPF as a way of acknowledging bulk buying power without calling it a rebate," said the director at one major media agency. "Google has definitely helped grow the industry but on the other hand their market power means they can do this and no one can boycott them. Some agencies will now be more cynical of Google's attitude to the sector."

One senior agency executive pointed out that Google now has an increasing number of big clients that run their campaigns directly with the search advertising giant and don't benefit from BPF - putting them at a disadvantage. "BPF coincided with the end of the agency discount," said Mark Howe, the country sales director at Google UK.

"It is still wrongly assumed that this was a move designed to challenge the role of agencies. But, the end of the agency discount was completely about upholding the primacy of the auction model." One agency director estimated that BPF could see as much as "tens of millions" of pounds per quarter clawed back by UK agencies.

Google's rival Yahoo! last year modified its agency discount system for search campaigns to offer a maximum of 10% rebate, down from 15%. MSN has maintained its discount rate at 10%, according to one media agency source.

Source: media.guardian.co.uk

Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.”

The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements strictly forbidding them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting. Notwithstanding that NDA, I’ve now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning. Google’s goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Google has a number of heavy hitters engaged in the project. Amar Gandhi, who apparently wasn’t at the meeting and whose title is the rather unassuming “Product Manager, Orkut,” was previously at Microsoft where he unsuccessfully tried to integrate social networking features into Vista. Brad Fitzpatrick, the chief architect of Six Apart until he joined Google in August, is leading the charge to make the Google project as open as possible. Patrick Chanezon, Google Evangelist, is herding the cats.

Lots of people noticed Fitzpatrick’s social graph post (linked in paragraph above), connected the dots to his new job at Google, and speculated that Google’s has been working on something really, really big in this area. This is now confirmed and, unless Google changes the launch date, we’ll be seeing the beginning of it on November 5.

Source: techcrunch.com

Our landing page quality guidelines have always stressed the importance of directing users to easily navigable landing pages that are transparent about the advertiser's business and that contain relevant and original content. In our ongoing effort to provide advertisers greater transparency about our approach to landing page quality, we recently created a new FAQ in the AdWords Help Center outlining the types of business models that users have consistently commented on as providing a poor experience. You can find the new FAQ here -- and below, we've highlighted the most important points:

Types of websites that will be penalized with low landing page quality scores:

* Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information
* Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
* Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor's computer

If we receive user complaints about ads for the types of websites listed above, the advertisers of those websites may not be allowed to continue running AdWords ads for those websites.

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it's important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

* eBook sites that show frequent ads
* 'Get rich quick' sites
* Comparison shopping sites
* Travel aggregators
* Affiliates that don't comply with our affiliate guidelines

Please note that all of the above information, along with further details regarding landing page quality may be found in the AdWords Help Center.

Lastly, you may recall past Inside AdWords blog notices alerting advertisers about upcoming landing page quality updates. Since our systems frequently visit landing pages and update Quality Scores on a regular basis, we will no longer post advance notice of upcoming updates. We will, however, continue to inform you of any significant changes to landing page quality guidelines or the factors which are considered in calculating landing page quality.

Source: adwords.blogspot.com (The official source for information about AdWords)

The search giant is unfazed by competition from "natural language" upstarts, but users—and advertisers—may benefit once they get the hang of the new tool.

How do you beat Google (GOOG) at its own game? Search engine upstart Powerset is betting on the wisdom of the crowds. As the latest step in one of the longer buildups to a product launch in Internet history, Powerset on Sept. 17 is taking the wraps off a new online community site called Powerset Labs. The company hopes the site will marshal thousands of people to help build and improve its search engine before it goes public next year.

Powerset is one of several dozen startups presenting themselves at TechCrunch40, a showcase being held in San Francisco on Sept. 17 and 18 by bloggers Michael Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, and Jason Calacanis, founder of the human-powered search startup Mahalo.com. But given the mounting anticipation since its plans became public last year, Powerset is likely to be one of the most closely watched.
Aiming for Advertisers

Ultimately, the 70-person San Francisco company aims to one-up Google by producing search results that are even more on the mark—and potentially, more valuable to advertisers. Google's search engine matches words within search queries with text in Web pages. It also tallies links between Web pages to highlight the ones that get linked to the most from other Web pages.

In contrast, Powerset's system will analyze the actual meaning of words and phrases that it indexes on the Web. It then will analyze the linguistic meaning of the query and find the best matches between the two—theoretically, at least, producing more meaningful results. "Our system reads every single sentence in every single document and extracts meaning from them," says Powerset Chief Executive Barney Pell. The method is based on what's known as natural-language processing, which Powerset developed partly in-house and partly through a licensing agreement with PARC, Xerox's (XRX) famous Palo Alto Research Center.

Using Powerset's method, a searcher could ask, "What companies did PeopleSoft acquire in 2002?" and potentially get more on-point search results than from typing in mere keywords such as "PeopleSoft acquisitions 2002." Using Google, that query also brings up mentions of Oracle's 2004 acquisition of PeopleSoft. Another advantage of the Powerset approach is it gets to the meaning of words, so queries for one word will fetch results that contain words which are synonyms. Google's keyword searching generally won't do that.


Skeptics and Followers
Powerset, funded by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Foundation Capital, has a lot of skeptics. In a screed last October, search expert Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the online news site Search Engine Land, noted that no claims of the superiority of natural-language search have ever held up. And he disputed the idea that most people would rather ask questions than simply type in a few words, noting Google didn't train people to query that way but simply responded to the way users were already conducting searches. "Linguistics will not solve most search problems," adds Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice-president of search technology at Ask.com, the search engine unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI).

Powerset's not alone. New York-based startup Hakia also plans to field a search engine employing similar techniques. Still others are taking a different approach to tapping people's brains to improve search. Through his for-profit company Wikia, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has kicked off Search Wikia, a project that aims to apply the same human collaboration to search that built Wikipedia into a powerful online encyclopedia

Source: businessweek.com

Google has denied suggestions that the terms and conditions for its Google Docs & Spreadsheets service mean that it owns any user's content published in the application.

Google Docs is part of the Google Apps platform, which offers a Web-based calendar, e-mail and document management system, and allows users to publish and share documents. Google recently announced a partnership with global consulting firm Capgemini to promote its services to the corporate sector, which has remained an elusive market for the service.

The controversy centers on Google's use of the word "public" in its terms and conditions for Google Docs.

One clause states, "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services."

In response to the concerns raised, Google Australia issued a statement, which reads, "We don't claim ownership or control over content in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, whether you're using it as an individual or through Google Apps.

"Read in their entirety, our terms of service ensure that, for documents you expressly choose to share with others, we have the proper license to display those documents to the selected users and format documents properly for different displays. To be clear, Google will not use your documents beyond the scope that you and you alone control. Australians' work documents and (soccer-oriented spreadsheets) are not going to end up shared with anyone unless the user expressly wants them to be!"

Concern about the subject initially was raised in a blog posted on August 28 by ZDNet's Joshua Greenbaum, who said: "I know that user agreements are typically ignored by most users, but anyone in the corporate world who ignores this risks seeing their IP in a Google marketing campaign, or worse." ZDNet is owned by News.com publisher CNET Networks.

A Google Australia representative responded that "CNET wrongly claimed if content was published using Google Docs, that Google had the right to publish that for marketing purposes. We have no right to share or publish that, unless you're intending to publish that yourself."

Public or private?
Matt Asay, general manager of open-source content management vendor Alfresco and a member of the CNET Blog Network, also questioned Google's use of the word "public," suggesting that its interpretation would ultimately be determined during litigation.

"Is it private, if I share (content) with my company?" Asay asked in a blog posted on August 30. "Maybe. Is it private, if I share it with my family? Maybe. It's an open question, and guess who decides? Google (or, ultimately, a court), not you. Why? Because the system doesn't provide a way to define what is private and what is public."

Asay suggested that rather than amending its terms and conditions, Google should offer users a "make this public" option in the interface to ensure that the intended meaning of public and private is communicated.

David Vaile, executive director at the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia, said Google should give a clear and explicit definition of what is "public," and also offer an interface that lets users control the attribute on a page-by-page basis and reminds them of this status.
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Highlighting potential for the term "public" to be contested, Vaile said it can be construed in different ways, depending on the legal context. For example, in a defamation case, for it to be deemed "public," only one other person needs to hear of it or become aware of it. "It doesn't necessarily need to be in a public place, but it is beyond you and the subject you were referring to."

However, Vaile said Google should be credited for its attempt to set out the terms and conditions in plain English. "A lot (of terms-and-conditions statements) are by lawyers, for lawyers, aimed at litigation rather than communication. You have to give people credit for dealing with a difficult problem--to be clear yet specific enough to cover all the possibilities," Vaile said. On the other hand, Vaile said Google offers two sets of terms and conditions--a universal set and another for its Google Docs service.

"There seems to be some disconnect between Google's universal terms and that for Google Docs," he noted. "As a question of contractual interpretation, there's some serious legal confusion whether Google's terms of service are meant to be read together or whether the Google Docs terms are meant to read separately...By having two identically named documents, you've created legal confusion, and it breaks best software practice by having multiple documents."

Source: news.com