An undersea cable that Google helped finance is almost finished, according to a new report.  Indeed, the completion of the Unity fiber optic cable, which will connect the U.S. to Japan, is supposed to be announced next week, and then Google and the company’s Asia-based users should start seeing the benefits soon after.

Tom Krazit wrote this afternoon, "[T]he Pacific undertaking will allow the company to link its data centers in the U.S. and Japan with one of the fastest pipes on the planet, ensuring that Google services will be delivered quickly and cheaply to Asia."

And more specifically, Krazit also stated, "In return for its investment–the amount of which was not disclosed–Google is entitled to 20 percent of the overall capacity for its needs, according to partners involved with the project."

This should help keep Google competitive in most of Asia for quite a while.  All the more so if it pulls out of China, too, since servicing that large market could otherwise claim a lot of resources.

One last important note: the other partners in the Unity Consortium are Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, meaning Google has made friends with some very important international corporations.

As you may know, Google recently acquired social search service Aardvark. I attended a panel on social search at SXSW this week, in which Max Ventilla, the service’s "Head Zookeeper" talked about not only the service, but what social search means for the industry in general.

First off, here are a few Aardvark stats. Ventilla says 85% of questions are answered, and most in under 5 minutes.70% are rated "good" vs. "ok" or "bad". 45% of answers lead to cross-talk among users. Over 50% of users have answered a question. I’ve often wondered about that one myself. When a person uses Aardvark to get a question answered, they are also called upon to answer questions for others. I’ve been curious as to how often new answer-providers are created, considering time has become such a valuable resource these days. The average query length is nineteen words vs. less than three on Google.

According to Ventilla, reasons for social search include:

- Users want personalized responses to questions

- Most content is still locked in people’s heads

- Each individual network is growing exponentially

- Social intimacy makes info actionable

- Questions about how to spend your time and money are subjective

Ventilla says the company has learned that intimacy (more than authority) facilitates trust. In addition, social context is different than social graph, and is frequently sufficient, he says. A few other conclusions they’ve reached are that speakers want to know who they’re addressing, people don’t need artificial incentives to be helpful if there’s no friction involved, and people don’t like receiving random questions, but they don’t actually know what’s in their profiles.

"We wanted to create not a product, but a contact," says Ventilla.

An interesting question was brought up by an audience member – something along the lines of, what if you want to know the best place to buy an engagement ring? How can you make sure the recipient of said ring wouldn’t get that query? Ventilla expressed interest in such a system. In fact, he referred to it as "the holy grail." He also says there are other ways to find this kind of info that are "probably better than Aardvark for the time being."

FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour will leave the agency next month, but that’s almost surely not soon enough for Google.  Today, Harbour criticized Eric Schmidt and the rollout of Buzz, and also asked her colleagues to adopt a tougher stance on some privacy-related offenses.

In fairness to both Google and Harbour, other companies and products, including Facebook, Flickr, and Hotmail, were identified as problematic.  Plus, the commissioner could have been much harsher.  A speech she gave during a privacy roundtable didn’t go at all well for Google, though.

In reference to Schmidt’s infamous "if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" remark, Harbour stated, "Speaking for the last time as a regulator, let me be very clear: I could not disagree more with that assertion.  Privacy is a fundamental right that people do care about."

She later added, "The recent launch of Google Buzz was, quite frankly, irresponsible conduct by a company like Google. . . .  Google consistently tells the public to ‘just trust us,’ and has adopted as a company motto, ‘Do no evil.’  We have high expectations for Google as a corporate citizen.  But for me, based on my observations, I do not believe that consumer privacy played any significant role in the release of Buzz."

Then here’s the last quote we promised: Harbour said, "I would like to see the Commission take the position of intolerance toward companies that push the privacy envelope, then backtrack and modify their offerings after facing consumer and regulator backlash."

Google could be in a fair amount of trouble if the FTC chooses to adopt all these viewpoints as its own.

Australians who study computer science now have an added incentive to accomplish impressive things.  Today, it was announced that a certain search company will give away $10,000 once per year in the form of the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.

Like many of Google’s contests, this has the potential to be both a nice gesture and a smart business move.  The first label applies because the PR certainly won’t do Google any harm; the second might fit because the prize will put the company in touch with some very smart people.

Anyway, Google specified what it’s looking for by stating in a blog post, "Entries in the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science should be cutting-edge and represent a tangible advance in their field.  The winning innovation will have the potential to improve the lives of many other Australians."

A couple other important details: people can enter this competition either as individuals or as teams.  The main thing is that they enter by the end of May 7th.

It should be interesting to see what sort of computer science advances occur as a result of the Eureka Prize.  The winner(s) will be announced on August 17th.

It’s common knowledge in the U.S. search industry that Google has a market share of about 65 percent.  Lots of people know (or at least know how to check) the search giant’s market cap, too (it’s currently at $180 billion).  But another measure of Google’s size was presented yesterday, and it turns out that Google is on par with all but the biggest ISPs.

Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist of Arbor Networks, stated on his company’s blog, "If Google were an ISP, it would be the fastest growing and third largest global carrier.  Only two other providers (both of whom carry significant volumes of Google transit) contribute more inter-domain traffic.  But unlike most global carriers (i.e. the ‘tier1s’), Google’s backbone does not deliver traffic on behalf of millions of subscribers nor thousands of regional networks and large enterprises.  Google’s infrastructure supports, well, only Google."

Those are some fairly astonishing observations.  Then here’s another fascinating tidbit: Labovitz continued, "Based on anonymous data from 110 ISPs around the world, we estimate Google contributes somewhere between 6-10% of all Internet traffic globally as of the of summer of 2009."

It’s hard not to see Google’s fiber network experiments in a different light after absorbing this information.  The company might not just thrill the residents of a few towns and make ISPs nervous; Google really does appear capable of changing how the industry works, and may even be able to do so without breaking a figurative sweat.

We’ll be sure to keep an eye on ISPs’ reactions as Google moves ahead with its tests.

Although the "thud" wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago.  According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise).  What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Heather Dougherty explained, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame."

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: "Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week."

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook.  The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue.  A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt doesn’t understand much of the criticism geared toward his company, which Time Magazine columnist Dan Fletcher refers to as "the Web’s least understood and most vilified juggernaut." I attended a panel at SXSW this week in which Fletcher and Rosenblatt discussed Demand’s content strategy that has become the basis of so much controversy (Read here for more background).

Rosenblatt thinks it’s just a case of a new business model getting picked on because it’s not understood yet. He compared it to the early days of other successful companies like Amazon and Netflix.

Is Demand Media’s strategy just misunderstood? Share your thoughts.

Demand Media evidently gets more traffic than the digital properties of ESPN, Time, or Disney. They claim to have more videos on YouTube than anybody. This isn’t spammy content though. It’s content created based on what people are looking for, or what a combination of Demand’s algorithms and staff determine people are looking for based on extensive data analysis.

An audience member referred to a video she came across that was simply not the type of quality Demand Media wants its content to be known for. Rosenblatt acknowledges that there may be some of this out there, simply because the company began with a different model, but they are working to eliminate this, and only implement content that has gone through the company’s exhaustive editorial process.

One huge misconception that Rosenblatt went out of his way to clear up is that of Demand Media’s content being taken as news. He doesn’t see what Demand Media is doing as journalism. Journalism is news, and this isn’t news, he says. It’s stuff that makes you laugh, solves your problems, etc. "Only the journalists call us journalists."

A great deal of the criticism that has been aimed at Demand Media is based around the notion that the company is somehow taking advantage of Google’s algorithms, to get its content placed higher than other sources (isn’t this what SEO/SEM is all about anyway?). Rosenblatt basically made the point that if Google doesn’t think it’s good enough content to be there, than it won’t be there.  To change an algorithm to not give an answer just doesn’t make sense, he says.

"If people aren’t looking for it on search, we’re not there," he added. Demand properties like eHow often appear in search results for queries about how to do things. Well, that’s exactly the kind of content that appears on eHow, and the mantra of the industry has always been "content is king" right? Demand simply wants to wear that crown, and make money doing it.

"We are driven by an economic model," Rosenblatt said. The company is focused on "evergreen, longtail, commercial content." They’re focused on stuff they will make money from.

Rosenblatt says a lot of people think their content is auto-generated. "That’s just wrong," he says. One criticism that Rosenblatt does think is fair, is that some of the company’s content "could feel mechanical." In other words, some may lack creativity. "We need to learn, and we’re trying to," he says. A lack of creativity does not necessarily mean a lack of accuracy, though, and through Demand’s editorial process, there is a lot of fact checking going on. At least that is the impression Rosenblatt gave.

He says they have different models for different categories. With something especially important to the world, like health, he says they make sure professionals are writing the articles. With health, fact checking would also go to doctors.

If you are searching for information on Google about effects of chemotherapy, and you are met with an article written by an expert on the subject, with facts checked by doctors, is there really anything wrong with that? Would you rather get a Wikipedia entry? Remember, we’re not talking "news" here. We’re talking information, and in other cases entertainment.

Demand media does use some Google ads, as iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord pointed out in an article a while back. He wrote:

The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that.

I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches … but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.

The issue of Google’s own practices with regards to this are really a separate issue from Demand Media’s practices. As far as Rosenblatt is concerned, they’re just producing the content that people want, and will find that through either search or discovery. And they’re making a killing doing it.

Tell us what you think about it.

Real estate website Zillow.com told WebProNews today it has launched a free Zillow Android application.

The Zillow Android app uses GPS technology to find and follow users on an aerial map, and displays "Zestimate" values, homes for sale, homes for rent and recently-sold data on the homes around them.

Users can also search for homes, even they are not in the vicinity, by tapping the Android platform’s voice search capabilities. By saying an address, neighborhood, ZIP code or city the app will automatically take the user there on the map.

Key features of the Zillow Android app include:

*Home details and historical data on 95 million homes in the U.S.

*Curbside images of homes using Google StreetView

*Multiple photos, home details, and contact information on homes for sale and rent

*Users can filter their home searches by sale price, rental price, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and listing types

"Since the launch of our highly successful  successful Zillow iPhone App, which has been downloaded nearly one million times since April 2009, home shoppers have been asking us to build an app for the Android," said Spencer Rascoff, Zillow chief operating officer. 

"It’s clear that people want access to all of Zillow’s data and information like Zestimates, listing information, and prior sale price while they are out looking at homes or exploring neighborhoods. We saw this as a great opportunity to be on a platform with enormous potential for real estate and home shopping."
 

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt doesn’t understand much of the criticism geared toward his company, which Time Magazine columnist Dan Fletcher refers to as "the Web’s least understood and most vilified juggernaut." We attended a panel at SXSW this week in which Fletcher and Rosenblatt discussed Demand’s content strategy that has become the basis of so much controversy (Read here for more background).

Rosenblatt thinks it’s just a case of a new business model getting picked on because it’s not understood yet. He compared it to the early days of other successful companies like Amazon and Netflix.

Is Demand Media’s strategy just misunderstood? Share your thoughts.

Demand Media evidently gets more traffic than the digital properties of ESPN, Time, or Disney. They claim to have more videos on YouTube than anybody. This isn’t spammy content though. It’s content created based on what people are looking for, or what a combination of Demand’s algorithms and staff determine people are looking for based on extensive data analysis.

An audience member referred to a video she came across that was simply not the type of quality Demand Media wants its content to be known for. Rosenblatt acknowledges that there may be some of this out there, simply because the company began with a different model, but they are working to eliminate this, and only implement content that has gone through the company’s exhaustive editorial process.

One huge misconception that Rosenblatt went out of his way to clear up is that of Demand Media’s content being taken as news. He doesn’t see what Demand Media is doing as journalism. Journalism is news, and this isn’t news, he says. It’s stuff that makes you laugh, solves your problems, etc. "Only the journalists call us journalists."

A great deal of the criticism that has been aimed at Demand Media is based around the notion that the company is somehow taking advantage of Google’s algorithms, to get its content placed higher than other sources (isn’t this what SEO/SEM is all about anyway?). Rosenblatt basically made the point that if Google doesn’t think it’s good enough content to be there, than it won’t be there.  To change an algorithm to not give an answer just doesn’t make sense, he says.

"If people aren’t looking for it on search, we’re not there," he added. Demand properties like eHow often appear in search results for queries about how to do things. Well, that’s exactly the kind of content that appears on eHow, and the mantra of the industry has always been "content is king" right? Demand simply wants to wear that crown, and make money doing it.

"We are driven by an economic model," Rosenblatt said. The company is focused on "evergreen, longtail, commercial content." They’re focused on stuff they will make money from.

Rosenblatt says a lot of people think their content is auto-generated. "That’s just wrong," he says. One criticism that Rosenblatt does think is fair, is that some of the company’s content "could feel mechanical." In other words, some may lack creativity. "We need to learn, and we’re trying to," he says. A lack of creativity does not necessarily mean a lack of accuracy, though, and through Demand’s editorial process, there is a lot of fact checking going on. At least that is the impression Rosenblatt gave.

He says they have different models for different categories. With something especially important to the world, like health, he says they make sure professionals are writing the articles. With health, fact checking would also go to doctors.

If you are searching for information on Google about effects of chemotherapy, and you are met with an article written by an expert on the subject, with facts checked by doctors, is there really anything wrong with that? Would you rather get a Wikipedia entry? Remember, we’re not talking "news" here. We’re talking information, and in other cases entertainment.

Demand media does use some Google ads, as iEntry CEO and WebProNews publsiher Rich Ord pointed out in an article a while back. He wrote:

The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that.

I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches … but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.

The issue of Google’s own practices with regards to this are really a separate issue from Demand Media’s practices. As far as Rosenblatt is concerned, they’re just producing the content that people want, and will find that through either search or discovery. And they’re making a killing doing it.

Tell us what you think about it.

FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour will leave the agency next month, but that’s almost surely not soon enough for Google.  Today, Harbour criticized Eric Schmidt and the rollout of Buzz, and also asked her colleagues to adopt a tougher stance on some privacy-related offenses.

In fairness to both Google and Harbour, other companies and products, including Facebook, Flickr, and Hotmail, were identified as problematic.  Plus, the commissioner could have been much harsher.  A speech she gave during a privacy roundtable didn’t go at all well for Google, though.

In reference to Schmidt’s infamous "if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" remark, Harbour stated, "Speaking for the last time as a regulator, let me be very clear: I could not disagree more with that assertion.  Privacy is a fundamental right that people do care about."

She later added, "The recent launch of Google Buzz was, quite frankly, irresponsible conduct by a company like Google. . . .  Google consistently tells the public to ‘just trust us,’ and has adopted as a company motto, ‘Do no evil.’  We have high expectations for Google as a corporate citizen.  But for me, based on my observations, I do not believe that consumer privacy played any significant role in the release of Buzz."

Then here’s the last quote we promised: Harbour said, "I would like to see the Commission take the position of intolerance toward companies that push the privacy envelope, then backtrack and modify their offerings after facing consumer and regulator backlash."

Google could be in a fair amount of trouble if the FTC chooses to adopt all these viewpoints as its own.

Australians who study computer science now have an added incentive to accomplish impressive things.  Today, it was announced that a certain search company will give away $10,000 once per year in the form of the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.

Like many of Google’s contests, this has the potential to be both a nice gesture and a smart business move.  The first label applies because the PR certainly won’t do Google any harm; the second might fit because the prize will put the company in touch with some very smart people.

Anyway, Google specified what it’s looking for by stating in a blog post, "Entries in the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science should be cutting-edge and represent a tangible advance in their field.  The winning innovation will have the potential to improve the lives of many other Australians."

A couple other important details: people can enter this competition either as individuals or as teams.  The main thing is that they enter by the end of May 7th.

It should be interesting to see what sort of computer science advances occur as a result of the Eureka Prize.  The winner(s) will be announced on August 17th.

It’s common knowledge in the U.S. search industry that Google has a market share of about 65 percent.  Lots of people know (or at least know how to check) the search giant’s market cap, too (it’s currently at $180 billion).  But another measure of Google’s size was presented yesterday, and it turns out that Google is on par with all but the biggest ISPs.

Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist of Arbor Networks, stated on his company’s blog, "If Google were an ISP, it would be the fastest growing and third largest global carrier.  Only two other providers (both of whom carry significant volumes of Google transit) contribute more inter-domain traffic.  But unlike most global carriers (i.e. the ‘tier1s’), Google’s backbone does not deliver traffic on behalf of millions of subscribers nor thousands of regional networks and large enterprises.  Google’s infrastructure supports, well, only Google."

Those are some fairly astonishing observations.  Then here’s another fascinating tidbit: Labovitz continued, "Based on anonymous data from 110 ISPs around the world, we estimate Google contributes somewhere between 6-10% of all Internet traffic globally as of the of summer of 2009."

It’s hard not to see Google’s fiber network experiments in a different light after absorbing this information.  The company might not just thrill the residents of a few towns and make ISPs nervous; Google really does appear capable of changing how the industry works, and may even be able to do so without breaking a figurative sweat.

We’ll be sure to keep an eye on ISPs’ reactions as Google moves ahead with its tests.

In a move that investors and marketers alike should applaud, Google’s figured out another way to make money off the site it bought for $1.65 billion three and a half years ago.  Today, Google explained that it’s come up with a tool to help small organizations advertise on YouTube.

Emily Williams, a member of the Inside AdWords team, explained on the corporate blog, "[W]e’re announcing another new feature in Display Ad Builder that lets advertisers use simple templates to create InVideo overlays and companion ads on YouTube."  (FYI: "An InVideo ad is an animated flash overlay that appears at the bottom part of a video that a user is watching.")

Williams later continued, "Now, any advertiser can use Display Ad Builder to turn their image ads into overlays and run a campaign on YouTube in minutes.  Depending on the type of campaign an advertiser wants to run, overlays can be bought on a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) basis, and can be matched to YouTube videos based on numerous criteria (like demographics or content categories), or even on a video by video level."

This could prove to be a very popular option, considering that takeover ads on the YouTube homepage are said to be sold far in advance for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And the move also earns points for being low risk, since it probably didn’t take much in the way of resources to execute and doesn’t cut any privacy corners.

Now we just get to guess how much Google will actually make from the new feature.  One slightly relevant note: earlier this month, a Citigroup analyst estimated that YouTube will pull in about $1 billion in gross revenue this year.

Investors and online advertising experts may want to consider for a moment what, exactly, has contributed to Google’s stupendous financial success (current market cap: $180 billion).  Now consider this: Google thinks mobile ad rates might surpass what’s come to be deemed the industry standard.

According to Reuters, Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google, announced during a webcast, "We hope and believe that there’s even a chance that we could exceed desktop in the future."

Of course, this isn’t the first time someone representing the search giant has spoken highly of the mobile market; CEO Eric Schmidt and CFO Patrick Pichette, among others, have emphasized its importance before.  Earlier this month, a VP of advertising even claimed that desktops will be irrelevant in three years’ time.

Still, Gundotra’s comment may signify just how much Google is betting on the success of Android and mobile advertising, and how seriously it will take threats posed by Apple, Microsoft, and other companies.

Here’s one last interesting tidbit: with regards to China, Pichette said during the same webcast that the country’s "another great market in which Android should flourish."