SEO by the Sea

Rand, over at 14th Colony asked about the ruling against Google by the Court of First Instance in Brussels (Belgium), and its translation into English. I found a copy of the ruling at ChillingEffects.org in an image pdf file. I’ve transcribed part of it which details the ruling of the Court in English.

Some interesting points, before the transcription:

Default Judgment?

Continue reading Belgian Copyright Ruling Against Google News

Some recently published patent applications from Go Daddy explore whether additional whois information might help reduce spam and phishing, and improve search engine results. Google noted in a patent application last year that they might be looking at whois information while presenting and ranking pages.

I don’t know how easy it would be to set up the processes described by Go Daddy, or verify the reputation information that they describe, and maintain the records the system would depend upon.

The purpose of whois information

But it might be a moot point to even wonder. A recent decision by the folks at ICANN to limit the use of whois information makes it seem unlikely that that the scenerios envisioned by these documents will happen. ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization held a vote in which they decided upon the sole purpose of whois information:

Continue reading Does Google use whois information?

An interesting patent granted last week on searching books. I would have thought to see something like this from Amazon, or maybe even Google. But it isn’t.

Method and system for full text search of purchasable books that make the full text inaccessible to users

The patent does refer to a New York Times article from July 23, 2003 about Amazon.com’s Look inside the Book process: Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books

Any implications for Google Book Search or Amazon’s Search Inside the Book? I’m not sure. I’m guessing not. But, keep your eyes open just in case.

There’s been a lot of discussion on the web, and in the news over the past few weeks about Google’s operations in China.

The Chinese version of their site, Google.cn filters out content that the Chinese government doesn’t want included in search results. As noted in the Stanford Daily (link no longer available), the Chinese language version of Google.com is unfiltered.

An issue recently arose regarding whether or not Google had a business license to even operate Google.cn, though that problem seems to have now been resolved, with a license granted after Google made a deal with Ganji.com to use their license.

One of the more interesting sets of commentary on Google in China are the posts of economics Professor Gary Becker and Federal District Judge Richard Posner, from The Becker-Posner Blog.

Continue reading Looking at Google in China

I’ve recently started thinking about getting a Mac notebook. I’m just in the beginning research stages, and really don’t know much about how they differ from Windows PCs. I had a Mac cx years ago, but haven’t used one much since.

This does seem to be a good year for the folks at Apple, and I was checking out some laptops at the Apple Store in my local mall last week while doing some last minute Christmas shopping. I liked what I saw.

As I was searching and sorting through the latest patent applications from the US Patent Office this morning, I saw a name I recognized on one of them – Steven P. Jobs. I noticed a few others seemed to share some inventors, and figured that I had better bookmark them to look at later.

I ran across this article, The Devil’s Advocate – Spotlight: Is Your Mac Going To Rat On You?, while checking to see if the topics raised in the patents where timely, and figured that they might be. How much of a privacy concern might these multiple levels of meta data be?

Continue reading Apple Meta Data and RSS Patents