Microsoft’s legal eagle Brad Smith didn’t even bother to pretend the software giant’s filing of a formal antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission wasn’t a wee bit ironic.

Wrote Smith in a blog post late last night:

“There of course will be some who will point out the irony in today’s filing. Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly. This is the first time Microsoft Corporation has ever taken this step.”

But take it the company did, noting: “Microsoft is filing a formal complaint with the European Commission as part of the Commission’s ongoing investigation into whether Google has violated European competition law.”

Google, no surprise, disagreed, via a statement from a spokesman.

“We’re not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants. For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission and we’re happy to explain to anyone how our business works.”

Here is the whole Microsoft post, in which Smith outlines Microsoft reasons for its action:

Adding our Voice to Concerns about Search in Europe

30 Mar 2011 9:00 PM

Posted by Brad Smith

Senior Vice President & General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft is filing a formal complaint with the European Commission as part of the Commission’s ongoing investigation into whether Google has violated European competition law. We thought it important to be transparent and provide some information on what we’re doing and why.

At the outset, we should be among the first to compliment Google for its genuine innovations, of which there have been many over the past decade. As the only viable search competitor to Google in the U.S. and much of Europe, we respect their engineering prowess and competitive drive. Google has done much to advance its laudable mission to “organize the world’s information,” but we’re concerned by a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative.

We’ve therefore decided to join a large and growing number of companies registering their concerns about the European search market. By the European Commission’s own reckoning, Google has about 95 percent of the search market in Europe. This contrasts with the United States, where Microsoft serves about a quarter of Americans’ search needs either directly through Bing or through our partnership with Yahoo!.

At Microsoft we’ve shown that we’re prepared to work hard and invest literally billions of dollars annually to offer Bing, a search service that many now regard as the most innovative available. But, hard work and innovation need a fair and competitive marketplace in which to thrive, and twice the Department of Justice has intervened to thwart Google’s unlawful conduct from impeding fair competition. In 2008 the DOJ moved to file suit against Google for its unlawful attempt to tie up and set search advertising prices at Yahoo!, causing Google to back down. And last year the DOJ formally objected to Google’s efforts to monopolize book content, a position affirmed by a federal district court in New York just last week. Unfortunately, even this has not stopped the spread by Google of new and disconcerting practices in the United States.

As troubling as the situation is in United States, it is worse in Europe. That is why our filing today focuses on a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance in the markets for online search and search advertising to the detriment of European consumers.

How does it do this? Google has built its business on indexing and displaying snippets of other organizations’ Web content. It understands as well as anyone that search engines depend upon the openness of the Web in order to function properly, and it’s quick to complain when others undermine this. Unfortunately, Google has engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.

On PCs it is usually not difficult for people to navigate to any search engine. Google in fact makes this point virtually every time someone raises antitrust concerns about their practices. Their defense ignores the hugely important fact that there are many other important ways that search services compete. Search engines compete to index the Web as fully as possible so they can generate good search results, they compete to gain advertisers (the source of revenue in this business), and they compete to gain distribution of their search boxes through Web sites. Consumers will not benefit from clicking to alternative sites unless all search engines have a fair opportunity to compete in each of these areas.

Our filing details many instances where Google is impeding competition in these areas. A half-dozen examples below help illustrate some of our concerns.

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube–and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.

Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.

Third, Google is seeking to block access to content owned by book publishers. This was underscored in federal court in New York last week, in the decision involving Google’s effort to obtain exclusive and unfettered access to the large volume of so-called “orphan books–books for which no copyright holder can readily be found. Under Google’s plan only its search engine would be able to return search results from these books. As the federal court said in rejecting this plan, “Google’s ability to deny competitors the ability to search orphan books would further entrench Google’s market power in the online search market.” This is an important initial step under U.S. law, but it needs to be reinforced by similar positions in Europe and the rest of the world.

Fourth, Google is even restricting its customers’–namely, advertisers’–access to their own data. Advertisers input large amounts of data into Google’s ad servers in the course of managing their advertising campaigns. This data belongs to the advertisers: it reflects their decisions about their own business. But Google contractually prohibits advertisers from using their data in an interoperable way with other search advertising platforms, such as Microsoft’s adCenter.

This makes it much more costly for Google’s advertisers to run portions of their campaigns with any competitor, and thus less likely that they will do so. That is a significant problem because most advertisers figure that they have to advertise first with Google. If it’s too expensive to port their advertising campaign data to competing advertising platforms, many won’t do it. Competing search engines are left with less relevant ads, and less revenue. And while this restraint isn’t visible to consumers, its effects are nonetheless felt across the Web. Advertising revenue is the economic propellant fueling the billions of dollars needed for ongoing search investments. By reducing competitors’ ability to attract advertising revenue, this restriction strikes at the heart of a competitive market.

Fifth, this undermining of competition is reflected in concerns that go beyond Google’s control over content. One of the ways that search engines attract users is through distribution of search boxes through Web sites. Unfortunately, Google contractually blocks leading Web sites in Europe from distributing competing search boxes. It is obviously difficult for competing search engines to gain users when nearly every search box is powered by Google. Google’s exclusivity terms have even blocked Microsoft from distributing its Windows Live services, such as email and online document storage, through European telecommunications companies because these services are monetized through Bing search boxes.

Finally, we share the concerns expressed by many others that Google discriminates against would-be competitors by making it more costly for them to attain prominent placement for their advertisements. Microsoft has provided the Commission with a considerable body of expert analysis concerning how search engine algorithms work and the competitive significance of promoting or demoting various advertisements.

Over the past year, a growing number of advertisers, publishers, and consumers have expressed to us their concerns about the search market in Europe. They’ve urged us to share our knowledge of the search market with competition officials. As they’ve pointed out, the stakes are high for the European economy. On any given day, more than half of all Europeans use the Internet, and more than 90 percent of them look for information about goods and services on the Web. Indeed, the European Commission’s Digital Agenda made clear that commerce is moving online, where two-thirds of Europeans begin their shopping process. It’s therefore critical that search engines and online advertising move forward in an open, fair and competitive manner.

There of course will be some who will point out the irony in today’s filing. Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly. This is the first time Microsoft Corporation has ever taken this step. More so than most, we recognize the importance of ensuring that competition laws remain balanced and that technology innovation moves forward.

We readily appreciate that Google should continue to have the freedom to innovate. But it shouldn’t be permitted to pursue practices that restrict others from innovating and offering competitive alternatives. That’s what it’s doing now. And that’s what we hope European officials will assess and ultimately decide to stop.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Let’s get this out of the way right now–WakeMate co-founder Arun Gupta said the start-up is finally shipping all pre-orders of the long-awaited sleep tracking gadget.

Gupta said, “Our goal is to fill all pre-orders by Christmas.”

And I can even verify that the unit exists, since I have been using one for a week now.

So why all the skepticism?

Because WakeMate–which began as an idea for a smart alarm clock back in 2006 and graduated out of the Y Combinator incubator in summer of 2009–has had more than a few delays in delivering product.

To be fair, the tiny company might have bit off a fair amount to chew. WakeMate chose a solution to the sleep-tracking problem that required it to build original hardware, a main Web application, as well as apps for Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.

Thus, Gupta describes the first version of its product as “really, a public beta.”

And, WakeMate is indeed a little rough around the edges.

For example, the unit itself–with its semi-exposed electronics and shrink-tube wrapper–looks a little more like something hacked together on top of one of the mini DIY Arduino boards than it does a finished consumer electronics device.

But if you have any experience programming microcontrollers, you might appreciate the sort of sophistication that goes into coordinating this sleepy symphony of data gathering.

(Pardon us for a minute, while I get a little über-geeky and explain how the WakeMate wristband works. If this doesn’t concern you, feel free to fast-forward a few paragraphs to get to Gupta’s predictions for WakeMate’s future.)

When you flick the small switch on the WakeMate wristband, just prior to going to sleep, the device connects via Bluetooth to your iOS, Android or BlackBerry device.

You then open the WakeMate app and enter a 20-minute window during which you’d like to be woken.

The app talks to the wristband and transmits that time information. Then, both app and device enter a sort of low-power state. At this stage, the WakeMate becomes little more than a data logger.

There is a fairly standard, solid-state, three-axis accelerometer on board, much like the one that allows you to “shake to shuffle” your iPhone.

WakeMate then spits out three fields of data–X,Y and Z axis readings–40 times per second, which are stored in its flash memory all night.

That means an eight-hour sleep cycle will produce about 3.5 million unique data points, not including metadata.

The onboard clock–for the computer, not for human time-telling–waits until your pre-selected 20-minute window and then figures out, based on frequency and severity of wrist movement, when you are closest to being awake on your own.

When that moment comes, it wakes the Bluetooth connection, connects to the phone, sounds the alarm and starts uploading the data it collected all night directly to the phone and immediately sends the information to WakeMate’s servers.

And, not to worry, if the WakeMate dies mid-sleep, the phone knows to sound the alarm anyway.

It is quite a concert that needs to be played flawlessly for connectivity and battery life to remain intact.

Impressive data tricks aside, the world in which WakeMate was conceived looked a little different from the one into which it has been born, and that means a different set of competitive realities.

When WakeMate left Y Combinator, the world of iOS device-connected movement sensors was limited to the Nike Fit, which links running performance via a shoe-attached device.

It was also a world without Fitbit, another popular activity and health tracker.

And, unlike now, there were no sleep apps claiming to do what WakeMate does.

But now, even with all the new rivals, Gupta believes WakeMate still has the edge.

He explained: “In the early days of sleep-tracking studies, doctors decided to monitor non-dominant wrist movement as part of the data collected to determine sleep state. That continues today, so there is a ton of research that has been collected over the years on correlating wrist movement with sleep cycle.”

He added that WakeMate has built an algorithm that fits the data collected by its wristband to these medically relevant sleep-cycle models and spits out graphs mapping your sleep states, your waking moments and even times when you were in deepest sleep.

“All the competing tools out there aren’t at all based on any kind of accepted research–no one is studying pillow movement or waistband movement or anything,” Gupta said. “But we know how you are sleeping when you move your wrist.”

The major questions facing WakeMate as a company revolve around what one might expect from a start-up with such a complex beta product.

Gupta said it will focus on innovating and revising its wristband, as well as doing more interesting things with the data it will collect.

“On the macro level, we’re really doing the biggest sleep study that has ever been done,” he said. “We’ll be able to tell you how people are sleeping in San Francisco versus New York, based on seasons and all kinds of things.”

Gupta added that while he doesn’t know what the next step is, WakeMate is prototyping ideas where it could correlate sleep data with other metrics about health, occupation and stress to provide a more complete tool set.

But as more companies work on the problem of digitizing the analog data of human life, the harder questions to answer are really in front of the consumer.

Gupta said he doesn’t know what a world would look like if a health insurance company could access your sleep data, or when information about your apparent insomnia is grabbed by some hacker.

What WakeMate hopes for, he said, is a world where more people have access to the kind of medical data collection that has previously only been collectable by trained technicians in controlled settings.

But more data is better, as far as WakeMate is concerned–it is hoping that its vision puts its products at the center of an all-day biometric data collection future.

For a bunch of reasons, Web video tends to work better when it has already been recorded. But here’s one way to make live Web video more palatable: Make it easier to find.

Clicker, the would-be TV Guide for Web video, is now indexing live video streams, too. Legal streams, that is–if you’re trying to find pirated streams of the Mets or a World Cup game, Clicker won’t help you.

But if you want to know if C-Span is up and running or when the next installment of Leo Laporte’s show is going up or when ESPN 3′s next soccer game goes live, the service should help. Exactly how much, though, will be up to the people who make the live streams and supply the metadata Clicker uses to help sort and categorize the shows.

For instance, it’s nice to know when Kevin Pollak’s chat show (surprisingly watchable) is airing. It’s even nicer to know who Pollak’s guest is going to be. But Clicker can’t provide that information until Pollak’s show does.

Editor’s Note: All Things Digital’s Katherine Boehret reviewed Clicker back in November. Check out her review here.

Who: David Maher Roberts

What: CEO

Why: David came to The Filter from the publishing world. The Filter used to be a music-selection engine (pre-Apple Genius). Today, after a major overhaul, David says it’s trying to be a recommendation engine that brings “the world of entertainment, filtered for me.” Now The Filter offers that service to businesses that want a recommendation engine on top of their own content services. NBC is the company’s latest major client.

Where: thefilter.com (Web site); @davidpmr (Twitter); Bath, United Kingdom (analog place)

Who Else: Apple’s (AAPL) Genius is trying to supply the service on top of its own content engine in iTunes. Pandora is in the mix too.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Man of the World: I don’t know where my accent is from. I’m half French and half English and was raised in international schools in Brussels. I’m a true European.

Started Life: I went into journalism as a photographer. When I was 24, I started a couple of magazines, which didn’t go well, but I got picked up by a U.K.-based publisher (Future Publishing) and moved up their ranks.

Biggest Influence: Chris Anderson, founder of Future Media (David’s former employer) and now of TED.

Real Passion: I was trained as a jazz drummer from the age of 10 and always played in bands and things.

On His Playlist: All based around French Electro Pop. Right now, I’ve fallen in love with Owl City. It represents exactly the sort of music I grew up with in France. It just makes me smile. My staple diet is much more British. Stuff like the Twang. My favorite band of all time is Belle and Sebastian.

Bio in 140 Characters

Lives in Bath, U.K., but began life a citizen of Europe. David commutes globally so his family doesn’t have to.

The Five Questions

Break this down for me. What does The Filter do now, and why is Peter Gabriel involved?

Yeah, so Peter Gabriel was one of our founders and is an investor now. He and our CTO, Martin Hopkins, had the idea about 10 years ago that we would need some kind of tool to help us navigate the world of content when we had too much choice. Our model has changed since then, but we still do basically the same thing. Today, we are basically in the SaaS, software-as-a-service, business. Our technology gets laid on top of other businesses’ content to deliver more relevant recommendations.

A good example is Nokia (NOK). They use us to combine information about your content preferences and your geolocation to give you recommendations about events nearby.

Let’s say I’m listening to music online. How much information about me does my music service need to give you in order for this to work?

Well, what we offer to most of our customers is an anonymous service. We do a lot of personalized services too, though. We can do a good job not knowing anything about the person and just about the session they are in right now. We take input like the piece of music, how many times you’ve listened, whether or not you’ve shared it or saved it to a play list, and then recommend statistically similar content. At its core, our product is a Bayesian inference engine, so it assigns mathematical probabilities to whether or not you will like something and then computes the best fit. We blend the metadata connections with the behavioral connections, and then we filter the output.

I’m a little hazy on how you connect consumers to their data and then make recommendations. You said you do use individual-level data sometimes. Do you guys use data collected from one company to inform the algorithm that recommends content at another?

Well, there are two things we are being careful about, as you’d imagine. Generally, we use data from within an organization to inform the decisions made there. We do anonymize and aggregate all of the data and use that for all of our customers. The individual-level data we try to keep anonymous.

What does a paper publishing guy have to offer a digital recommendation engine?

I came in originally as a consultant to help them with their “come to market” strategy. I was running all of Future Publishing’s Web operations for Europe and stumbled upon Eden Ventures, who are the VCs behind The Filter. I came in, and there was already a CEO. I didn’t realize they were trying to replace him, but we worked on what they should be doing and at the end of it they offered me the job. I would say that I come in from the content and publishing world, and I know how media companies make the kinds of decisions like using a service like The Filter.

What is the eventuality you guys hope for here? Is success in ubiquity or in being bought up?

I think my goal with The Filter is to grow it to be so large that it is the glue that connects people to their content. Once that happens, I think we’d hope for a large business to be so connected to our technology that they want to own it.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100416/almost-famous-david-maher-roberts-of-the-filter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100415/some-twits-chirp-from-twitter-conference-ev-biz-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20100415/some-twits-chirp-from-twitter-conference-ev-biz-and-more/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:13:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26740

Here’s a video BoomTown did yesterday at the Twitter Chirp conference, where a lot of noise was made about a lot of things.

Like: Twitter has a Google (GOOG) Android app; Twitter has a link shortener; Twitter does more searches than you think; Twitter has 105.8 million registered users and is adding 300,000 a day; Twitter users write 55 million posts a day; Twitter is being archived at the Library of Congress.

Also more blah-blah-blah on geolocation, metadata called Annotations and, of course, @anywhere, which is essentially Facebook Connect for Twitter.

And–oh, yes–making money. That.

Apparently, according to the execs in attendance, I will have to stop making fun of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s name, calling him things like: No-Biz-Here Stone, Ain’t-Nobody’s-Biz-Ness-If-We-Don’t-Have-a-Business-Plan Stone and Biz Stone-Cold-Profits.

Now, given that the San Francisco microblogging service is introducing a number of advertising-related efforts in a quest to make some bank, I will have to change the name to Hey-Zuckerberg-We-Have-a-Biz-Too Stone.

Or, given some of the tensions with third-party developers over Twitter moving into their space in core development areas: Pardon-Us-While-We-Stomp-on-Your-Biz Stone.

In fact, that issue was the main focus of a panel I moderated yesterday afternoon at Twitter’s Chirp, titled “Investing in the Ecosystem.”

My dudes-only panelists included Polaris Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Venrock’s David Pakman, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton.

Mostly, they took my guff about the state of the Twitterverse, in what turned out to be a lively discussion.

While yesterday was all talk, from COO Dick Costolo (who mistakenly thinks he is as funny as I am), Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, Stone and others, Chirp today is 24-hour hackathon.

Here’s a video I did of interviews with a wide range of Twitter staff, investors and advisers–and blogger Robert Scoble, of course, who is as inevitable at an event like this as air:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100415/some-twits-chirp-from-twitter-conference-ev-biz-and-more/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090723/is-the-ap-adding-drm-to-the-news-not-yet/ http://allthingsd.com/20090723/is-the-ap-adding-drm-to-the-news-not-yet/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:03:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9650 Here’s the next step in the Associated Press’s attempt to adapt to the reality of the Web: It’s going to try to keep tabs on its stories, photos and videos via a “news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use.”

At first blush, the AP’s description of the program, found in this press release and this FAQ, sounds a lot like an attempt to implement digital rights management–a lock-and-key system–for the news. But at least in this iteration, that’s not the case. The AP is really talking about adding a layer of metadata to its copy, so it can see who’s using it, and where.

“Any time you talk about a tracking system, the thrust of [the commentary] is about enforcing copyright,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s VP of strategic planning, told me this afternoon. “But what we hope is the outcome out of this is the ability to enable more licensed uses of  content. We want to keep the content open, we don’t want to keep it behind firewalls.”

If you want to see a benign description of the technology the AP intends to use, head to this site, developed by its U.K.-based partner Media Standards Trust. If you don’t have time for that, just imagine Wal-Mart (WMT) adding RFID chips to track its pallets as they move around the country.

Jim Kennedy tells me that the AP will have tests for the new system up and running by mid-November, and hopes to have it in place for all the copy it produces by the end of the year. And in 2010, it will make it available to the cooperative’s members, i.e., other news organizations.

You’ll hear griping about this from some corners, but all of it sounds fine to me–I don’t care how the AP tracks its product. But note that this tracking system only works when its used by someone who already has a business relationship with the AP.

Which means it doesn’t solve the two problems the AP started complaining about this spring: The  fact that bloggers and other nogoodniks are using AP copy without paying for it and the fact that Google (GOOG) isn’t paying the AP enough for the copy it does use.

On those fronts, the AP’s contract with Google expires at the end of this year, and my understanding is that renewal negotiations are moving slowly, at best. And the AP will continue to use Attributor’s tracking service to find unauthorized uses of its stuff on the Web.

And if the AP ever does try to shove its copy behind a firewall, then a tracking system would come in handy. But we’re not there yet.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090723/is-the-ap-adding-drm-to-the-news-not-yet/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090512/google-the-search-for-relevancy/ http://allthingsd.com/20090512/google-the-search-for-relevancy/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 21:31:16 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=17526

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090512/google-the-search-for-relevancy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090512/live-google-searchology/ http://allthingsd.com/20090512/live-google-searchology/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 17:13:04 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=17457 The architects of Google search are holding court at company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., this morning offering what promises to be a sort of state of the union on the subject of search. Overseeing the event, dubbed “Google Searchology”: Udi Manber, VP of Search Engineering, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience.

Gabriel Stricker, Google’s Director of Search Communications kicks things off by noting that the company will be sharing a number of new developments that cater to the growing demands of its users. With that, Udi Manber takes the stage to offer a big-picture overview of search.

Manber says what Google does is the new “rocket science.” Search has to be fast, relevant, and fresh, he explains. But even that’s not enough. The real goal is to solve users’ problems. If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If the content is there but in a language the user doesn’t speak, that’s our problem. If the Web is too slow, it’s our problem. Manber offers a few examples of how Google works to address these challenges: real-time data, translation, etc. With these services nailed down, he says, Google can move on to the more important task of working on “understanding.”

Manber invites Pat Riley, senior search quality engineer, to the stage to talk a bit about Google’s “did you mean” link. Lots of people use the link, Riley says, and Google has been working to improve it. Called “spellmillion,” the project provides not only related results for a misspelled query but for alternate ones as well (think labor as in “work” and labor as in “pregnancy”). But it requires Google to process multiple searches for a single query and demands a lot of processing power.

Riley notes that the project has been somewhat contentious because it also potentially questions user intent. He offers the example of “Macy Ray.” Some users might be searching for “Macy Gray,” the singer, others for a person actually named “Macy Ray.” How do you address those two potential queries on a single search results page?

Riley is followed by Engineering Director Scott Huffman, whose subject is mobile search. Huffman starts things off with a few truisms. Mobile search is often local. It should be easy to use. Effortless. And it should provide all that Google has to offer. Huffman notes that this is quite a task since Google must optimize its search for different mobile experiences and different user interfaces: Google’s own Android, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, etc. Some of these platforms require gestures–touch, swipe–others use a keypad. All must provide access to the Web and the mobile Web–sites that have been optimized for mobile devices. On the screen behind him, Huffman displays an example of Google search that displays desktop Web results and mobile Web results, the latter denoted by a red square.

Mobile search must also be easy. Huffman demos a shared desktop-mobile search for a flight number. Since he’s logged into his Google account, his search for “ba 284? SF-London on the desktop is immediately shared with the Google app on his mobile device. An unreleased feature, but it’s on its way. A quick look at local listings automatically delivered to devices on the basis on GPS/cell tower location, and then Huffman brings Mayer on stage.

Mayer talks a bit about universal search before moving on to Google’s “bento box” of search results. She talks about Google’s focus on the importance of presentation and its efforts to make search results more usable for the user. An example of this SearchWiki, a tool that allows users to annotate their searches, to “keep their train of thought,” says Mayer. We need to help our users find more and do more with it, she says, noting that the company is still working to address some longstanding user problems:

• Finding recent information
• Expressing that you want just one type of result
• Assessing which results are best
• Knowing what you’re looking for
• Expressing your searches in keywords

Mayer introduces Google Search Options, a feature that appends a search option panel to results, allowing users to “slice and dice” the results as they choose. A demo of the feature, in a search for “Hubble Telescope,” allows for search calibration by time, pages that include images, etc. Another search for “solar oven” is filtered down to specific genres–videos, discussion forums, reviews. Click on those links and that new search context is immediately displayed on the page.

Interestingly, the reviews feature uses something called “sentiment analysis” to extract sentiments from a review and present them in displayed snippets.

Search Options also includes a timeline feature that allows users to visualize results over time. And there’s something called “Wonder Wheel,” which presents a visual representation of a query surrounded by potential refinements (hence “Wonder Wheel”). Click on a refinement and results update automatically. Search Options should be going live now, says Mayer.

A bit of geometry monomania here today at Google Searchology. First the Wonder Wheel and now “Google Squared,” a sort of spreadsheet visualization of search being cooked up in Google Labs. Unstructured data pulled directly from search and organized according to the whim of the user. A search for “small dogs” pulls up a lists of–wonder of wonders–small dogs organized by size, weight, breed, etc. Click on an individual cell and you can change its source. Pretty slick. Still a work in progress, though. It should be available later this month, Mayer says during the Q&A.

Another new feature: Rich Snippets. A search for “drooling dog BBQ” returns your standard Google results along with a list of metadata–average user reviews, for example. A search for a GPS system includes an additional pointer to a recent CNET review of the unit in question. Rich Snippets is open API, incidentally.

Last up, an Android star map app that uses GPS to create a star map “local to your place on earth” and to your position. Move the phone and the map adjusts to your view–essentially the app transforms the device into map overlay for the sky. And how does this tie into search? Search for “Gemini” and a sort of pointer appears onscreen directing you to its location in the sky. And with that, Mayer wraps things up.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090512/live-google-searchology/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081118/a-search-engine-with-a-real-eye-for-videos/ http://allthingsd.com/20081118/a-search-engine-with-a-real-eye-for-videos/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:52:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081118/a-search-engine-with-a-real-eye-for-videos/ Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it’s no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip’s “contextual metadata” — tags, video title and description — and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like “Obama” so as to get more traction.

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

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