Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the latest Silicon Valley CEO to draw ire after suggesting that folks seeking privacy might not want to look to the Internet to find it.
"I think judgment matters," Schmidt said, appearing on CNBC (see video below). "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines--including Google--do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
In some senses, Schmidt was merely stating the truth about the U.S. law as it currently stands. However his "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" comments, in particular, seem to have raised the hackles of privacy advocates and others.
Among the most interesting reactions was a posting on a Mozilla veteran's personal Web page suggesting that users might want to switch to Bing because of its better privacy policy.
"That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy," Mozilla Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler said on his personal blog, referring to the CNBC comments. "There is no ambiguity, no 'out of context' here. Watch the video."
From there, Dotzler shows how one can easily switch Firefox's search engine from Google to Bing, adding, "Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google."
To be fair, that Patriot Act and other laws apply just as much to Microsoft as it does to Google. Still, I think Dotzler's posting raises some interesting issues. Plus, it's particularly noteworthy that a Mozilla worker is willing to raise the issue given how the lion's share of Mozilla's revenue comes from the Google traffic generated from Mozilla's search bar.
The difference, in my opinion, isn't that Microsoft is somehow subject to different laws than Google, or even that it would behave differently in the face of a government challenge (both companies kowtow in China, for example). Rather, the two companies seem to have a different approach toward privacy issues.
Google's attitude tends to focus on the great benefits that open information can, and often does have. Plus, of course, its stance is an outgrowth of the fact that Google has built its business around gaining revenue by doing the best job of organizing that information.
That shows up in all kinds of ways. Mozilla Developer Relations Director Christopher Blizzard noted in a Twitter posting that sites users visit in Chrome get sent to Google.
"Everyone knows that every site you visit and all address bar searches in Chrome go to Google, right?" Blizzard wrote. (I sent an e-mail to Mozilla seeking its corporate take on things, but did not immediately get a response.)
Microsoft's approach, meanwhile, stems no less from its economic interest, but its zeal is tempered by years of heavy regulation and consumer backlash.
These differences in attitudes, and shifting tides in the center of power in the tech industry, I expect to be major issues in the coming years as regulators and consumers decide where to place their attention.
That said, Schmidt is hardly the first to point out that the idea of privacy on the Internet might be outmoded. "You already have zero privacy. Get over it," former Sun CEO Scott McNealy famously intoned, drawing many of the same criticisms.
Obviously, privacy advocates argue that protections must extend to the Internet. In a blog posting, security expert Bruce Schneier makes a passionate argument, although I think it is interesting that he digs up an essay from 2006 to make his reply.
"Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance," Schneier wrote. "We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need."
So what do you think? Is privacy a basic human need, or a quaint, outdated notion, or is it, paradoxically, both of those things?
The EntityCube listing for Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid.
(Credit: CNET)Think of Microsoft's latest labs effort as the software maker's attempt to give everyone their own Wikipedia entry.
Dubbed EntityCube and now live to try out, the research project pulls together biographical information on anyone found on the Web.
Similar in some ways to other people-search projects that have been around for some time, EntityCube tries to cull the Web to build a dossier on whomever you can think of. Among the interesting features is the social graph that EntityCube builds, as well as its effort to automatically sort out information about different people with the same name. Particularly of note is the "Quanxi map" it can generate, although this feature seems to run particularly slow.
Although Web users can find information on just about anyone using search engines, they typically have to do so manually by going to many different sites. The goal of EntityCube, Microsoft researchers say, is to pull together all of that information.
"Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity," Microsoft said on a page describing the project. "EntityCube is an entity search and summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web entities from billions of crawled Web pages."
Although Microsoft's site makes reference to enitites, not people, the public EntityCube site at this point seems focused mainly on people. The EntityCube site went public late last week.
The project is coming out of Microsoft's research arm, but it would seem to be highly relevant to where the company's Bing efforts are headed. Last week, Microsoft announced an effort called "entity cards," in which Bing tries to put automatically generated summary information at the top of certain search queries, including notable people.
Something like EntityCube could conceivably allow Microsoft to expand that beyond the types of well-known people, such as musicians, for whom it currently offers summaries.
Even in cases where people do have a Wikipedia listing, they may only have a small entry, known as a stub. Such is actually the case with Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid, whose considerably more detailed EntityCube page is show above.
Microsoft gave an early look at EntityCube at this year's TechFest internal science fair back in February.
Microsoft says a change that was being tested was inadvertently moved onto the live Bing.com site, causing a half-hour outage on Thursday.
(Credit: CNET)Microsoft said that a configuration change that was mistakenly moved from testing onto the live Bing.com site was to blame for an outage Thursday that left Microsoft's search engine completely inaccessible for more than half an hour.
A Microsoft representative told CNET on Friday that the problem appears to have come when something being tested was moved onto the live site.
"A configuration change was mistakenly propagated to production from staging," the representative said. "It was supposed to stay in the test environment--it was a mistake."
In a blog posting that went up late on Thursday night, Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella said that a change made during testing had "unfortunate and unintended consequences."
"As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior," Nadella said. "Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com."
And here I thought Microsoft was just trying to be energy efficient by running Bing only 23 hours a day.
Nadella said that Microsoft is exploring what went wrong to make sure it doesn't happen again. The outage came just a day after Microsoft announced a variety of changes to Bing, including added detail for some results and improved mapping tricks.
On the plus side, though, as ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan pointed out, at least people noticed there was an outage. It's all about mindshare, right?In what could be a blow to its image, Microsoft's main Bing search site suffered through an outage on Thursday evening.
Visitors to Bing.com were getting a browser error message rather than a search bar. Service was down for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p.m. PST.
Microsoft acknowledged the issues on its Twitter feed and said it was looking into the matter. It later offered the following explanation, posted to a Bing blog by Satya Nadella, senior vice president of the Online Services division:
The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.
We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.
A Microsoft representative did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.
The outage comes after a big week in which Microsoft announced new search abilities for Bing as well as improved mapping.
Updated at 7:13 p.m. PST to reflect site's return. Updated at 11:13 p.m. PST with Microsoft statement.
SAN FRANCISCO--Although Microsoft would rather everyone ran out and bought a Windows Mobile phone, the software maker is aware of reality. And, since it wants people to use Bing on their phones, it knows it needs to have software that works on other devices.
"Everyone understands the popularity and the pervasiveness of the platform," said Microsoft principal group program manager David Raissipour, following a Bing event Wednesday. "We are actively working on it."
Raissipour confirmed Microsoft is working on a mobile Bing application that will combine a number of features--more than just mapping and search. However, he declined to say what all of those features are or when the software will be ready.
I probed as to whether some of the cool mapping technology Microsoft showed on Wednesday might make it onto phones. Raissipour said such mapping requires a rich platform, but could potentially be done without Silverlight, if necessary. So, what about the iPhone?
"It's certainly possible," Raissipour said. "That's a rich platform."
Microsoft already has native mobile applications for many Windows Mobile phones, BlackBerry devices, and a number of Verizon feature phones. The company is also exploring what it might be able to do on Android, particularly on non-Google branded Android devices. In the meantime, the company has its mobile m.bing.com Web site.
I also had a chance to catch up with overall search engineering chief Satya Nadella to ask some overall Bing questions.
In particular, I wanted to see just how many people are actively choosing to go to Bing.com, as opposed to just searching via MSN or a browser tool bar. With Bing's predecessor, Live Search, very few people actually went to the Live.com page.
"It's still a small percentage," Nadella said, but noted that it has succeeded in getting a fan base, which was a key early goal of the product.
When it comes to the data that Microsoft is including at the top of some search results, in general, Nadella said Microsoft is not paying for the content, nor are companies paying to get their information included.
The benefit to Microsoft is that it displays more useful results while content providers get a link high up in the results page. "It's kind of like SEO [Search Engine Optimization] for structured data," Nadella said. As for those new mapping abilities, I encourage you to check them out for yourself and read . In addition, though, here's a video I did with Microsoft's Blaise Aguera y Arcas, where he walks through the new features.
Although Microsoft and Yahoo have only just inked their final search deal and still need regulatory approval, Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi talked on Tuesday about the economics that the deal will bring.
Speaking at a Credit Suisse technology investor conference in Arizona, Mehdi said that both Microsoft and Yahoo should see a double-digit increase in revenue per search, once the two companies have a single paid search system.
Mehdi
(Credit: Microsoft)Putting their two separate paid search systems together will take longer than just setting up Yahoo to use Bing's algorithmic search.
"That is going to take some time," Mehdi said in the speech, which was Webcast on Microsoft's investor site. Just closing the deal has taken quite awhile. There was the months of talks of an outright acquisition, then the eventual search deal announced in July, and then several more months spent ironing out the final details.
Now Microsoft is waiting on regulatory approval on the deal, but Mehdi said he remains optimistic that it will get the nods it needs in time to close the deal early next calendar year.
The integration is also going to be expensive Mehdi acknowledged, reiterating a past estimate that Microsoft will spend $100 million to $200 million in transition costs during the first year. Mehdi said the company has not said how much it expects to spend in the second year, but said that after that, the deal should be a boon to Microsoft's financial results.
As for Bing, Mehdi said executives are pleased with the results for its first six months, citing ComScore U.S. search query market share figures that show Microsoft growing from 8.4 percent to 9.9 percent over that period. That said, Mehdi acknowledged that "we have a very long ways to go against a tough competitor."
Several Microsoft executives will be in San Francisco on Wednesday to talk about some new moves in search, including some developments in mobile and mapping. Google, meanwhile, is planning a search event of its own on Monday.
Unlike when you stand over your coworker's desk, Microsoft's Bing search engine actually works better when you hover.
One of the key features of the would-be rival to Google is that when you hover to the right of a result, you can get a preview of what to expect. As part of an update this week, Bing's hover result will now feature more information including a thumbnail preview of the site in question.
Microsoft is using Wolfram Alpha to help power certain results, such as this search for the fat content of french fries.
(Credit: CNET News)One of the ongoing challenges for Bing, besides just getting more people to use the site, is letting them know that the hover feature is there. Microsoft's research has shown it gets high usage from those who know about it, but also finds that lots of people don't know the feature is there. Microsoft has been experimenting with some different visual cues that might make it easier to stumble upon the previews.
The hover feature was developed by the San Francisco-based team that Microsoft acquired as part of last year's acquisition of Powerset. Powerset, which developed a semantic search technology, also powers Bing's index of Wikipedia.
Bing's fall update update also includes the first fruits of a deal with Wolfram Alpha. As part of that arrangement, certain health related searches, such as "how many calories in a hamburger" will now feature information from Alpha. Bing will also rely on Alpha for some math calculations, Microsoft said in a blog posting on Wednesday. Wolfram noted that Microsoft is one of the first customers for a commercial licensing program that was formally announced several weeks ago.
Other changes to Bing include improved local results for topics such as weather and events.
It's all part of a wave of updates Microsoft is making to Bing this week. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is moving its MSN Video site under the Bing umbrella, with a new video page that can be used to watch videos from places like Hulu and elsewhere.
The company also announced some enhancements to Bing Maps, including the ability to use the mouse to alter a suggested route and have one's directions re-calculated.
The improvements come as Microsoft is looking for ways to stand out from Google as it tries to wrest share from its much larger rival. The software maker has seen a modest uptick but faces steep hurdles in trying to make more significant gains.
Experian Hitwise said Wednesday that Bing's share reached 9.57 percent in October. That's up from 8.96 percent in September, but still well behind Google, which had more than 70 percent and Yahoo, with 16 percent of the U.S. search query market.
While adding features is clearly important, trying to stay ahead in the search game can be quite a challenge. Just hours after Microsoft announced a deal last month to index real-time tweets from Twitter, Google announced plans to do the same.
Microsoft has also gotten some unwanted attention for one of its features--the Bing Cashback program--where users can get a portion of their online transactions rebated by starting off on Bing. A blog posting outlined a flaw in the mechanism that could allow people to get cash back without ever spending money via Bing.
That posting was pulled after a
Why would anything between Microsoft and Yahoo go quickly?
After months of awkward teenage romance, the two companies finally announced that they had reached a deal in July.
Microsoft and Yahoo reached a "binding letter agreement" on their search deal in July, but ironing out the full pact is taking the two sides longer than anticipated, they said Wednesday.
(Credit: Microsoft/Yahoo)However, the two sides are apparently still working out the terms of what they agreed to in the "binding letter agreement" reached in July. In a regulatory filing on Wednesday, Yahoo said it and Microsoft need more time to iron out a definitive accord.
"The Letter Agreement specified that the parties would execute definitive agreements by October 27, 2009, but given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized," Yahoo said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
They have time, as regulators are still pouring over the deal.
In a statement, Microsoft said the two companies remain committed to their arrangement.
"Given the complex nature of this transaction, there remain some issues that need some additional clarity and definitive details," a Microsoft representative said in a statement. "So the teams at Yahoo and Microsoft are continuing to work on the remaining details, and we have mutually agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute the agreement."
Microsoft said "both companies are optimistic that we will be able to close this deal by early 2010."
REDMOND, Wash.--In the wake of Microsoft's search deal with Yahoo, online chief Qi Lu outlined why the business is so important to Microsoft and how the company hopes to make headway.
For one thing, he promised the crowd of financial analysts, it can be a huge money maker.
Lu
"When you are at scale it can be a hugely profitable business," Lu said.
The problem is that many of the costs are the same even if you are not operating at scale, which is the place Microsoft has found itself. "Even if you have one user you have to crawl the whole Web."
But the challenge goes further, he said, noting that smaller players, by their nature, have fewer ads to show, meaning those ads are less relevant and the search experience is not only less profitable, but less desirable for users.
The Yahoo deal will help Microsoft in the scale arena. Combined, the two companies would have more than triple the search share that Microsoft has on its own. That said, the combined entity still has less than half of Google's share.
"With larger scales there are several important advantages," Lu said. "There is an almost immediate lift in the quality of user experience."
For example, suggested searches are based on a fairly simple algorithm, but one that gets much better the more queries a search provider sees.
But, even beyond the scale issues, Lu acknowledged that Microsoft also faces a brand challenge. He said that studies show that given a choice between Google's brand with another provider's results and Google's results with another provider's brand--users will choose the Google name, which has become synonymous with search.
"People will prefer the Google brand because of the strength it has," said Lu, who joined Microsoft from Yahoo at the end of last year.
Answering those challenges won't happen overnight, he said.
"We want to be brutally honest about where we are," he said. "It's going to take time."
Microsoft relaunched its search engine as Bing in June and has seen a slight bump in market share, though it remains to be seen whether it can hold onto and build on that initial interest.
"Overall the early feedback from the market has been encouraging," Lu said. "It's a good step, but it's the first step in a long, long journey."
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Microsoft's search deal with Yahoo is the culmination of months of well documented negotiations, but in many ways, it is just the beginning of the long road ahead.
In the coming months, Microsoft and Yahoo will not only have to win regulatory approval for the deal, but also figure out how to bring together disparate approaches to the search market.
Microsoft has spent much of its energy in the last couple years refining its core technology, improving in vertical categories, and rebranding its Web search under the Bing moniker. Yahoo, meanwhile has put a lot of energy into tools that allow others to build on its technology, including the BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey efforts.
Mehdi
As part of the deal announced on Wednesday, Microsoft will now be responsible for trying to merge those efforts. In an interview, Microsoft Senior Vice president Yusuf Mehdi said Microsoft hasn't looked at the specific lines of code in that area, but is open to trying to take Yahoo's best ideas and integrate them into Bing.
"We like the approach that Yahoo has done," he said, referring to SearchMonkey and BOSS.
Both Mehdi and Yahoo Executive VP Schneider acknowledged that there are integration challenges, but Schneider said there is a clear delineation of who is responsible for what.
"At the same time we are integrating, we are really divide-and-conquering," Schneider said in the joint interview with Mehdi. "The reality is in the way we structured (the deal), it allows each of us to innovate in the areas that will jointly bring advantage."
The fact that the companies have already spent time thinking about these issues reflects the different nature of the discussions this time around.
Whereas last year's negotiations were done with Yahoo's board and a keen eye on Wall Street, the deal announced on Wednesday is much more focused on how to build a search business for the long term.
CEO Steve Ballmer noted on the conference call earlier Wednesday that the two sides have a 100-page playbook as opposed to a two-page term sheet and also noted that the negotiations were handled by management as opposed to representatives of the company's boards.
Schneider
In addition to being run by the top management from Microsoft's online group, including Mehdi, Senior Vice President Satya Nadella, and online unit President Qi Lu (a former Yahoo executive), Mehdi and Schneider said the negotiating teams routinely called on the companies' engineering and sales ranks to make sure the deal they were structuring made operational sense.
It wasn't just the typical few business development executives in a room hashing out financial details, the pair said. "We really have got a great vibe with Yahoo's operating team," Mehdi said.
The two companies will be able to do some work on their joint plans while the deal is pending, but there are limits as to how much collaboration can take place.
"We will do all of the pre-work that we are allowed to do in terms of preparing," Mehdi said. "We feel like we can make a lot of progress."
Ultimately, though, the two companies said they expect just integrating Bing's results into Yahoo in the U.S. will take several months, while moving from Yahoo's Panama ad-serving technology to Microsoft's AdCenter could take a year. It could be two years from the deal close before the two companies can fully implement the deal across the globe.
Microsoft's Mehdi didn't close the door on an eventual expansion of the deal into some of the areas the two companies had at one point considered, such as joint work on display advertising.
"Today is a start on a fantastic partnership which we are very excited about," Mehdi said. "By starting this partnership it allows us to over time build greater and deeper relationships. Right now the focus is on getting to a credible No. 2 player in search and paid search."
One of the open questions is what will happen to each company's business and workforce during the time that the deal is pending. Schneider said the companies have a communications plan for employees as well as the sorts of retention bonuses planned to keep key employees in place.
"We believe this is a winning plan," she said. "People want to be part of a winning vision."
Ultimately, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said some of Yahoo search employees will move to other parts of the company, some will be offered jobs at Microsoft, while others will eventually lose their jobs.
For his part, Mehdi said the company will continue to beef up its search staff while the deal is pending. "We are continuing to hire and invest in search."
