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Google won a significant legal victory when a judge ruled against a Pittsburgh couple who claimed that Street View on Google Maps was a reckless invasion of their privacy. Aaron and Christine Boring alleged in a lawsuit that Google “significantly disregarded (their) privacy interests” when Street View cameras captured images of their house beyond signs marked “private road.”

They sought more than $25,000 in damages and asked that the images of their home be taken off the site and destroyed.

But a federal judge in Pittsburgh found no merit to the claims, finding that Google could legally photograph on private roads.”Today’s satellite-image technology means that…complete privacy does not exist,” Google said in its response to the Borings’ complaint.

A couple in Pittsburgh whose lawsuit claimed that Street View on Google Maps is a reckless invasion of their privacy lost their case.

Aaron and Christine Boring sued the Internet search giant last April, alleging that Google “significantly disregarded (their) privacy interests” when Street View cameras captured images of their house beyond signs marked “private road.” The couple claimed in their five-count lawsuit that finding their home clearly visible on Google’s Street View caused them “mental suffering” and diluted their home value. They sought more than $25,000 in damages and asked that the images of their home be taken off the site and destroyed.

However, the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania wasn’t impressed by the suit and dismissed it (PDF) Tuesday, saying the Borings “failed to state a claim under any count.”

Ironically, the Borings subjected themselves to even more public exposure by filing the lawsuit, which included their home address. In addition, the Allegheny County’s Office of Property Assessments included a photo of the home on its Web site.

The Borings are not alone in their ire toward the Google Maps feature. As reported earlier, residents in California’s Humboldt County complained that the drivers who are hired to collect the images are disregarding private property signs and driving up private roads . In January, a private Minnesota community near St. Paul, unhappy that images of its streets and homes appeared on the site, demanded Google remove the images , which the company did.

However, Google claims to be legally allowed to photograph on private roads, arguing that privacy no longer exists in this age of satellite and aerial imagery.

“Today’s satellite-image technology means that… complete privacy does not exist ,” Google said in its response to the Borings’ complaint

Not long after the feature launched in May 2007 , privacy advocates criticized Google for displaying photographs that included people’s faces and car license plates. And last May, the company announced that it had begun testing face-blurring technology for the service.

source: Cnet

Feb 12, 2009 at 3:55pm ET by Vanessa Fox

The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

Multiple URLs, one page

Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might want tracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort  through 1,000 URLs.

This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

• Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
• Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value  the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish“/>

That’s it!

• You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
• You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

• Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
• Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use  it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

• The  content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
• The canonical URL is the shortest version
• The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)

Can this be abused by spammers? They might try, but Matt Cutts of Google told me that the same safeguards that prevent abuse by other methods (such as redirects) are in place here as well, and that Google  reserves the right to take action on sites that are using the tag to manipulate search engines and violate search engine guidelines.

For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.

If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.

The tag in action

This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. For instance, wikia.com is using the tag for previous revisions of a page. Both http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=4901&oldid=4819 and http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=5401&oldid=4901reference the latest version of the article (http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge) as the canonical.

The search engines stress that it’s still important to build good URL structure and also note that if you aren’t able to implement this tag, they’ll still keep the processes they have now to determine the canonical. For instance, at SMX West on Tuesday, Maile Ohye of Google explained how Google can detect patterns in URLs if they use standard parameters. For instance, with these URLs:

• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=evil
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=good

Maile explained that Google can detect (particularly when looking at patterns across the site) that the sort parameter may order the page differently, but that the URLs with the sort parameter display the same  content as the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike).

While it’s rare for the search engines to join forces, this isn’t the first time they’ve come together on a standard. In November 2006, they came together to support sitemaps.org. And in June 2008 they announced a standard set of robots.txt directives. Matt Cutts of Google and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft told me that they want to help reduce the clutter on the web, and make things easier for searchers as well as site owners.

This new tag won’t completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particuarly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions. Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz:

The search engines will be talking about this news at the Ask the Search Engines panel at SMX West. We will be blogging this panel live at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Hello Guys,

Today, I have search something on Google abd found very strang result as give below:

============================================================

1. Vishal Krishna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   This site may harm your computer.
   14 Jan 2009 … Vishal Krishna (born 29 August 1977, popularly known as Vishal), son of noted producer G.K Reddy, is an Indian movie actor who has appeared …
   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishal_Reddy - Similar pages -

2. Vishal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   This site may harm your computer.
   Vishal is a first name often found in the Hindu community. It is also a common adjective found in North Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, …
   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishal - Similar pages -
   More results from en.wikipedia.org »

===============================================================

1. Hotels - Hotel reviews from people like you - Welcome to Hotels.com

   This site may harm your computer.
   Book hotels online with Hotels.com - Browse over 80000 hotel properties, read customer reviews and save with our loyalty program every time you stay.
   www.hotels.com/ - Similar pages -

2. Hotel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   This site may harm your computer.
   A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room …
   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel - Similar pages -

3. Hotels, Rooms, Reservations, Hotel Lodging, Motels - Choice Hotels

   This site may harm your computer.
   Official Site. Choice Hotels provides hotel rooms at great rates. Whether you travel for business, leisure, family vacation, find rooms and suites and book …

   Show stock quote for CHH

   www.choicehotels.com/ - Similar pages -

==================================================================

I have tried many terms but always found “This site may harm your computer.” on each result and when I tried to open any page given below message come:

Suggestions:

• Return to the previous page and pick another result.
• Try another search to find what you’re looking for.

Or you can continue to http://www.hotels.com/ at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Advisory provided by

Can any body else see this ...what is going on with google….

Googlers..what is happing …:(

Google seems to be offering beta testing of a new AdWords budgeting feature called “Timeframe,” which allows users to choose between monthly and daily budgeting.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says the beta testing has been confirmed, and points to a WebmasterWorld thread that includes a response from an official Google representative:

ppcbuyers: I noticed a new feature under Budget Options for “Timeframe”, but only see it available in one client account - anyone else?

AdWordsAdvisor (Google Rep): Sounds as if the one account has been made a part of a limited beta test, ppcbuyers. Not much I can add beyond that.

Google has a page up explaining monthly budgets and the differences between monthly and daily ones.

“With a daily budget, lower traffic days may mean that your ads receive fewer impressions and have some budget leftover. We don’t use this leftover budget, but we do attempt to compensate for the loss in traffic by serving impressions up to 20% over the daily budget on high traffic days. However, some high traffic days require budget flexibility beyond this amount,” says Google.

“With a monthly budget, we’ll adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. For example, if your ads often receive less traffic on non-business days during a month, we’ll apply your unused budget to remaining business days to take traffic fluctuations into account.”

It is unclear how many people actually have access to the Timeframe feature so far. I would imagine that the feature will be quite welcome by advertisers nevertheless.

Showing an example of how developers can do some really cool stuff with the Google Earth API, Google Earth iPhone Engineer David Phillip Oster has created a program that allows people to “surf” any region on the Earth’s surface using the balance board for the Nintendo Wii.

Oster used the Google Earth Browser plug-in and a javascript API, and the board transmits the person’s movements to the application using Bluetooth. See it in action:

“While it’s fun to use Earth Surfer, I really wrote it to inspire others to write their own programs,” explains Oster. “It’s all open source using the Apache License, so you can use the code in your own programs, even commercial ones.”

This certainly provides some hope for bored Wii owners who lament a lack of new entertaining titles to play. If they know how to develop applications or know someone who does, they might be able to get some more entertainment value out of a console that is otherwise collecting dust (I know many people still enjoy the Wii immensely, but I also know some people that are a little disappointed after a year or so).

Oster notes that “Earth Surfer” and it’s source code will be available via the Google Mac Developer Playground starting next week. The program was created for Macworld.

The company may be tightening restrictions on free food, charging lots of money for childcare, and handing out cell phones instead of proper holiday bonuses. But according to new findings from Glassdoor, good old Google remains one of the best places to work.

Glassdoor has collected info on more than 11,000 companies, and Google came in seventh with a rating of 4.1 (5.0 represents a perfect score). CEO Eric Schmidt, meanwhile, received an approval rating of 88 percent. Both of these numbers sound great, and are all the more remarkable since none of Google’s main competitors appear on Glassdoor’s list of the top 50 employers.

Really, the only businesses that WebProNews even sort of covers to make that cut were Bain & Company (at number two), Netflix (number three), and Apple (in eighteenth place).

It’s at the other end of the list that a more familiar name appears. Glassdoor’s users judged eBay to be about the 47th worst company on the site, giving it a rating of 2.7. eBay’s CEO, John Donahue, got an approval rating of just 20 percent.

Wags of the finger and pats on the back should be doled out accordingly. A hat tip goes to Erick Schonfeld, too.

It’s likely to be a little while before Christmas traffic statistics start rolling in, but even without those numbers, it’s safe to state that Google Product Search is becoming more popular. A measurement of growth extending through November has the service putting its rivals to shame.

Pete Barlas reports, “Google Product Search had 11.8 million unique visitors in November. That’s up a whopping 786% from the year-ago period — the biggest one-year increase by far of any online comparison shopping service, says market tracker comScore.”

This gain says a lot about what Google can accomplish when it focuses a little energy on something. Google Product Search isn’t even one of the search giant’s most heavily promoted services, either, which points to all sorts of bright possibilities for things like Gmail and Chrome.

Still, Google Product Search has a ways to go until it can claim true victory. Yahoo Shopping remains the category leader, attracting 27.6 million visitors in November - or about 2.5 times what Google’s offering got.

Look for more interesting developments on this front after the December numbers are released. And keep an eye on Google Product Search’s “beta” tag, too.

What is Considered a Bounce?

Some questions about how bounce rate relates to SEO came up over at Webforumz.com, where our own Mike McDonald was kind enough to step in and try to get some answers about. Mike asked some questions to a couple of Googlers, and the following responses are the result of that. This should shed a little light on how Google takes bounce rate into account.

First Mike got a response from Google Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik:

If you’re talking about bounce rates in the context of Google Analytics, I’m afraid you probably know as much as I do. I love the product, but don’t know the ins-and-outs of it very thoroughly.

If you’re talking about bounce rates in the context of Google web search and webmaster-y issues, then we really don’t have specific guidance on bounces per se; rather, the key for webmasters is to make users happy so they find your site useful, bookmark your site, return to your site, recommend your site, link to your site, etc. Pretty much everything we write algorithmically re: web search is designed to maximize user happiness, so anything webmasters do to increase that is likely to improve their site’s presence in Google.

Mike also sent a few questions to Matt Cutts, who forwarded them to Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, which produced a nice little Q&A:

Mike McDonald: What is the duration for a single page visit until it is no longer considered a bounce when a visitor leaves?

Avinash Kaushik: Bounce is a Visit level metric.

The definition is simple, if there is a Visit (a session technically speaking) with just one page view in it then it is considered a bounce. IE Someone came to your site, saw just one page, did not other action, left your website.

If you want to get a graduate level explanation about bounce rates and a business / marketing perspective on it here it is:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/…unce-rate.html

MM: What if a visitor lands on a page, and then visits another page within 5 seconds and then closes the browser. Is that considered a bounce?

AK: No bounce.

Remember time has no bearing on bounce computations. Just page views. In this case there are two page views in a session. No bounce.

The WAA standard definition of bounce rate, and that of Google Analytics, only considers the page view. Time has no bearing on the equation.

MM: When external links are opened in a new window (i.e. target_blank, rel=”external”, onclick=… etc) is it considered a bounce? Is there any difference between using HTML and Javascript to open a new window?

AK: Depends.

If in your external link popping strategy you are also sending a “hit” back to GA, as in this strategy….

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527

Then the behavior you describe won’t be considered as bounce because you have just sent a “hit” (a page view really) back to GA.

If in your external link popping strategy you are not sending a hit back to GA then if the person comes to your site, clicks on a link to leave the site, then that is a bounce.

Note that with Event Tracking (advanced AJAX, Flash, Flex, Video etc) released by the GA team Analytics can handle a lot more complex scenarios intelligently. Say if I come to your site. Watch the video you did with me at SES and leave. Most tools would consider that bounce. But if you are using GA and have event tracking for your videos (or 100% flash site) then that won’t be considered bounce. In fact GA will accurately compute how long I stayed on your site, how much of the video I watched etc etc.

MM: If opening external links in a new window is considered a bounce, does it change anything if the user then comes back to the site which has remained opened and then starts browsing around?

AK: See above for first part of your answer. It depends on how you have encoded the external links (with ga tracking or not).

For the second part….

A session in Google Analytics (and pretty much every other web analytics tool out there) is “29 mins of inactivity”. So I come to your site. See just one page. Go away to say google or whatever. Come back in 15 mins (or under 29 mins). Do another click. That’s still the same session. No bounce.

Hope this helps.

There is definitely some useful information there. To read the rest of the conversation, or to contribute to it, you can find the thread at Webforumz here.

This is strictly rumor, but Valleywag is reporting the gossip that one of Google’s more “famous” employees may be on the way out. That would be Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer. Owen Thomas at VW writes:

Top Googlers, overheard at a holiday party, chattered about Mayer’s departure as a matter of if, not when. And in some ways, it’s surprising she’s stayed as long as she has.

First of all, she’s wealthy. That “19th employee” bit is code, within Silicon Valley, for “rich”; the earlier an employee joins a startup which succeeds, the more money they make. With Google, which is still worth $96 billion after its stock tumble, that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco’s Four Seasons, another home in outrageously pricey Palo Alto, and a large (if questionably tasteful) art collection, including original glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. A couture hound, she once paid $60,000 for a lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and she owns part of I Dream of Cake, a “cake gallery” in North Beach, as a way of indulging her pastry fetish…So she’s already made her money.

Frank Watson at SearchEngineWatch.com notes that the idea of her leaving seems contradictory to her words in an interview with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, discussing the future of search.

Mayer also discussed the future of search on an Official Google Blog post a few months back, and as we head into the New Year, it seems like a good time to revisit that anyway.

So whether the rumor is true or not, thanks Valleywag for reminding us of Mayer’s talk of the future. It makes for a good year-end piece.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Search engine Yahoo! Inc will cut to three months the time it stores personal data gathered from Web surfing, making its retention policy the shortest among peers, the company said on Wednesday.

The company will “anonymize” the computer addresses of its users within three months in most cases, from a prior standard of 13 months. It is reserving the right to keep data for up to six months if fraud or system security are involved.

Internet search companies have come under pressure from European and other data protection officials to do more to protect the privacy of users.

Earlier this year, industry leader Google Inc halved the amount of time it stores personal data to nine months. Microsoft Corp has said it will cut the time to six months if its rivals did the same.

“Google first went to 18 months and started this competition,” said Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group.

Yahoo’s pledge is “significant because they are getting rid of some data after 90 days and they actually have an implementation plan to get this done,” he added.

The company is also expanding the scope of the data it is making anonymous, to include page and advertisement clicks and views, from just search log data alone.

The European Union has recommended that companies keep data no more than six months and urged the sector to adopt an industry-wide standard.

“This was our attempt to put a stake in the ground” on the issue, Yahoo vice president of policy and privacy chief Anne Toth said.

Internet search engines get their revenue by matching advertisements to searches, so advertisers can peg their ads to what is on the searcher’s mind.

RIVALS WEIGH IN

Microsoft said it welcomed the move, but made a distinction between the timeframe and the method of making data anonymous.

Yahoo will delete the final segment of the Internet Protocol (IP) address, which it said makes it no longer unique or identifiable.

Microsoft is deleting all of the Internet address, which it said will break any potential link to a particular set of search queries, according to Brendon Lynch, director of privacy strategy at the software giant.

“The best anonymization is to get rid of all the identifying information,” Schwartz said. “We are still not there on an industry standard.”

Google reiterated in a statement its current policy of nine months and said it is “continually evaluating” its policies with respect to privacy.

Ask.com, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp., recently offered customers the ability to “opt out” of having their information stored for more than a few hours.

Yahoo’s Toth said the company is not considering such a policy.

Once the companies make commitments on data retention, they are enforceable under federal and state laws in the United States, Schwartz added.

Source: Yahoo