Sergey plans his space invasion

Losing Viacom Lawsuit might cost 250$ Billion for Google.

Couple of weeks back we reported on the lawsuit by Viacom on Youtube and Google for allowing its copyrighted videos to be posted on Youtube.

Google responded strongly in their counter filing in Court. Google’s filing says “By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression,” . We strongly supported Google’s claim.

Doing further research on Viacom’s claim we were able to find some hard core facts. What currently looks like a small lawsuit might burst into a major Nuke explosion if Google ever looses the lawsuit. Viacom claims Youtube has more than 150,000 copyright videos and it claims a Billion dollar for it. So what happens if Google wins this lawsuit i am sure other companies won’t sit quite.
Companies like CBS, NBC will jump in and will claim their own damages like this Google has to faces lots of companies around the world. I am sure just a lost lawsuit in Youtube will cost Google 50 Billion dollars if other companies claim their share.

Google is a search engine which was developed using other web site’s information in their search results. They do have a cache of copyrighted pages crawled on the web so if Youtube is wrong then Google search is wrong too and with all the billions of sites out there Google will go Bankrupt. I estimate Google will need to pay 200 Billion Dollars. Google news also faced a recent major lawsuit from Belgium newspaper group. They want more than 75 million dollars since their news appeared in Google news.

Its Seems Everyone needs a piece of the Google PIE.

Look the following setup of images i tried to portray the 2 lawsuits.

This image shows Google Kingdom and does it look like Sergey brin on the King’s chair 😉

This is Google country guys fishing in Viacom territory. Is Google responsible for this?

Google country guys selling fishes that are taken from Viacom territory river.

This image criticises the Belgium Newspaper group. Goats from the Belgium Newspaper group territory are grazing in Google’s territory.

Google’s Market share / wealth

Viacom and Belgium Newspaper claim

Vijay

How Google handles Scrapers – Nice information from Google team

Its been a long battle between Google, webmasters and content thieves who scrap information from a website and display it on their website to get traffic. Many Webmasters had been complaining for a long time about this problem. As far as i know Google is already doing a good job with content thieves and scraper sites. Now they have opened up with their inner workings on how they tackle this problem.

We tackle 2 types of dupe content problems one within a site and other with external sites. Dupe content within a site can easily be fixed. I am sure we have full control over it. We can find all potential areas which might create 2 pages of same content and prevent one version from crawling or remove any links to those pages which might be duplicates.

External sites are always a problem since we don’t have any control over it. Google says they are now effectively tracking down potential duplicates and give maximum credit to the Original source and filter out rest of the duplicates.

If you find a site which is ranking above you using your content Google says

1. Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
2. You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
3. Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.

For more information read this official Blog posting

2000 visitors a day from Stumbleupon

I don’t know how many sites have similar experience but this is the first time for our site. Stumbleupon.com a famous site similar to Digg.com is becoming increasingly popular these days.

Weekend traffic is usually slow for our site but this weekend was too good. On Saturday we got around 2000 visitors just from stumbleupon.com to our sandbox checker tool http://www.searchenginegenie.com/sandbox-checker.htm . This is a new record for us from a single site to a single page. Usually our traffic averages around 4500 Unique visitors per day. Stumbleupon.com traffic is almost 1/2 of our average traffic in a single day. We love stumble upon now. We have an extensive list of FREE AD free seo tools http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm hope you too enjoy it.

Mcdar.net site suspended and the infamous datacenter watch tool gone

Mcdar.net was the first site to give Google datacenter comparision of results. We do have a similar tool like the way they had http://www.searchenginegenie.com/data/index.htm . For some reason mcdar.net tool is no longer available their site shows a suspension notice i am not sure what’s the reason whether its temporary or they are gone for ever.

Though they just left it unmaintained i am sure the site owner still runs the site active lets wait and see whether they will be back our not. Till that time use our tool and our tool is totally Ad free.

New SEO tool to be released by us coming week.

Already we have one of the best list of Free SEO tools in market. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm . Now we are working on a new tool which will give predict the pagerank of a website based on their current pagerank plus user input values. Currently we don’t have any real pagerank prediction tools in Internet. All the tools now either check various datacenters and display’s the Pagerank or give some random values. But our tool will use partially use the Original Pagerank formula. Our programmers are doing their best to get user values and current pagerank to predict new pagerank.

Original pagerank formula:

:$PR(A)=\; 1\; –\; d\; +\; d\; \backslash left(\; \backslash frac\{PR(B)\}\{L(B)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(C)\}\{L(C)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(D)\}\{L(D)\}+\backslash ,\backslash cdots\; \backslash right)$

or (”N” = the number of documents in collection)

:$PR(A)=\; \{1\; –\; d\; \backslash over\; N\}\; +\; d\; \backslash left(\; \backslash frac\{PR(B)\}\{L(B)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(C)\}\{L(C)\}+\; \backslash frac\{PR(D)\}\{L(D)\}+\backslash ,\backslash cdots\; \backslash right)\; .$

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

ICANN Sends out warning to registrars with Lot of spam

Recently ICANN sent out warning to Domain registrars who handle lot of spam domains. Worst spam offenders are found out by a survey and they are sent out notices to stop spam in their registration or face ban.

Announcement here

“ICANN has sent enforcement notices and notices of concern to certain registrars, including those reported this week as being the registrars for the majority of websites advertised in spam emails.
Earlier this week, an investigation by KnujOn, widely reported online, publicly identified 10 registrars as being the companies used to register the majority of domain names that have since appeared in spam email messages.
More than half of those registrars named had already been contacted by ICANN prior to publication of KnujOn’s report, and the remainder have since been notified following an analysis of other sources of data, including ICANN’s internal database.
With tens of millions of domain names in existence, and tens of thousands changing hands each day, ICANN relies upon the wider Internet community to report and review what it believes to be inaccurate registration data for individual domains. To this end, a dedicated online system called the Whois Data Problem Report System (“WDPRS”) was developed in 2002 to receive and track such complaints.
“ICANN sends, on average, over 75 enforcement notices per month following complaints from the community. We also conduct compliance audits to determine whether accredited registrars and registries are adhering to their contractual obligations,” explained Stacy Burnette, Director of Compliance at ICANN.** “Infringing domain names are locked and websites removed every week through this system.”
Although the majority of registrars offer excellent services and contribute to the highly competitive market for domains, ICANN’s compliance department has developed an escalation process to protect registrants and give registrars an opportunity to cure cited violations before ICANN commences the breach process.
However, while registrars are responsible for investigating claims of Whois inaccuracy, it is not fair to assume a registrar that sponsors spam-generating domain names is affiliated with the spam activity. A distinction must be made between registrars and an end user who chooses to use a particular domain name for illegitimate purposes.
“But if those registrars, including those publicly cited, do not investigate and correct alleged inaccuracies reported to ICANN, our escalation procedure can ultimately result in ICANN terminating their accreditation and preventing them from registering domain names,” Ms Burnette said. “

Digg effect – Effect of ranking on digg homepage

Digg killed my friends server. Few day’s back one of my friend’s article featured of Digg homepage. Within few minutes his server can’t withstand the massive traffic and was down for 5 hours. Is Digg homepage ranking worth anyone else had that experience?

Please share it here

Chris.

MSN search Yahoo and Google Join Hands atleast for one good cause

MSN webmaster live search blog recently reported how search engines have joined hands on using robots exclusion protocol to not only block them but also allow how users will guide the crawlers. I am sure this is not new but there are some tags described here which are definitely found by Google but not commonly used by other search engine crawlers.

One tag that immediately comes to my mind if the NOODP tag. If this tag is used in meta tag it will tell the Search engine not to show title and description of a Dmoz listing. We at search engine genie use this tag and this was first introduced before around 30 months by Google. Good to know that MSN and Yahoo too understands this tag.

NOODP META Tag

Then we have the crawl Delay settings in robots.txt first introduced by Yahoo. When we set a crawl delay we tell the crawler to fetch the pages from the server at the specified interval of time.
According to MSN Live search blog Microsoft now uses crawl delay and you can set the crawl delay and expect Yahoo and MSN to follow it. Google still doesn’t want to use crawl delay. Its understandable on Google’s point of view since a crawl delay is something very disturbing for a site.

For detailed reading follow the link above to MSN Live search official blog

Is Microsoft indirectly going for a Proxy fight?

BLB&G LLB group is taking on Yahoo on behalf of some share holders for not accepting Microsoft bid. this page has some very useful information that’s just revealed.

On February 21, 2008, BLB&G, on behalf of Plaintiffs, filed a Class Action Complaint against Yahoo and its board of directors (the “Board”), alleging that they have acted to thwart a non-coercive takeover bid by Microsoft, which would provide a 62% premium over Yahoo’s pre-offer share price, and have instead approved improper defensive measures and pursued third party deals that would be destructive to shareholder value. Yahoo’s “Just Say No to Microsoft” approach is a result of resentment by the Board, and not any good faith focus on maximizing shareholder value. Microsoft attempted to initiate merger discussions in late 2006 and early 2007, but was rebuffed, supposedly so Yahoo’s management could implement existing strategic plans. None of those initiatives improved Yahoo’s performance. On February 1, 2008, over a year after its initial approach, Microsoft returned, offering to acquire Yahoo for $31 per share, representing a 62% premium above the $19.18 closing price of its stock on January 31, 2008.

Looks like the proxy fight is about to move forward more aggressively. Lets wait and see