In the latest round of the search-index size contest, Google unveiled an updated index it said is more than three times larger than that of any of its search engine competitors.

"We're celebrating our seventh birthday.... We had a pretty strong year," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with CNET News.com, as he listed the launch of new products including Google Talk, Google Earth, Google Video and Google Desktop Search. "And we've sort of been struggling here with respect to the index. It has always been much larger than the others."

"We're announcing tonight that in terms of unduplicated pages our index is now three times larger than any other search engine," he said, without saying how many pages are in the index.

Google will stop providing on its search page a quantity of pages indexed, which previously was listed as 8 billion, "because people don't necessarily agree on how to count it," Schmidt said.

In addition, the company will encourage users to test out the search engines using a specialized query to see which provides the most results, he said.

"We want end users to derive the number to their satisfaction. They will discover that ours is larger," he said.

In a random test, using the search terms "Joe Schmoe" and "pickles," Google returned 451 results, Yahoo returned 62 results, MSN returned 60 results and Ask Jeeves returned 54 results.

Google took exception when Yahoo last month claimed that at more than 20 billion, its index was larger than Google's.

Search Engine Watch Editor Danny Sullivan has argued that relevancy matters most, and has urged the search engines to come together to develop a uniform way to measure relevancy.

"Who's biggest really doesn't matter, as I and others have written so, so, so, so, so many times before," he wrote in a blog after Yahoo's announcement last month.

Asked to respond to Sullivan's comment that relevance trumps size, Schmidt said: "You get better relevancy and more comprehensive news with a larger index."

"We congratulate Google on removing the index size number from its home page and for recognizing it is a meaningless number," Yahoo said in a statement. "As we've said in the past, what matters is that consumers find what they are looking for, and we invite Google users to compare their results to Yahoo search at http://search.yahoo.com."

According to Google, Google's Blog Search is "Google search technology focused on blogs". It includes search engine results specific to blogs not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large. You can access it at http://www.blogsearch.google.com.

What the Big Deal Is

A lot of people have probably heard about this extra version of search Google has added and are greeting it with a big yawn, particularly since it's still in Beta. So what is the big deal, anyway?

The big deal is that the top search engine in the world, which was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, seems to make a subtle statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches.

Blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.

If search engines are paying attention to blogging that closely, you should be too -- if you want better search engine results. Current fans of blogs will be able to search the freshest results so that they can see what is being discussed right now - information that is often as fresh as the news, and draws upon sources that the media-at-large either doesn't have ready access to, or interest in.

So to those with even the most obscure interests or hobbies, a blog search powered by a top search engine gives ready access to fresh information on any subject that someone can blog about.

And if a blog doesn't yet exist on these narrow themes? You can be the one to start the discussion.

Why It Matters to Your Business

Speaking of the media, this is likely to become one of the many tools that a journalist in the know would use in order to research a story, or to find out more information about a company, directly from the people who use its products or services.

Technorati, is at present, arguably a better tool, but it's just not as well known as the Google brand. If you're a power searcher, you already know what Technorati is. But the key thing to understand is that most consumers - even B2B consumers - aren't as deeply involved in the internet.

But even those folks know what Google is.

There's an even more obvious advantage to this specialized search.

Google Blog search has the unprecedented potential to bring the mainstream surfer into blogging, even more than Yahoo's RSS Headlines pioneered the start of making RSS mainstream about a year ago. Why?

While many of your clients will fall instantly in love with RSS, it's more fair to them to present its possibilities in a format that's easier for them to digest. It's not as hard to explain a blog - and if you can't, you can simply tell them it's a more frequently updated part of your existing site.

When Google's Blog Search is brought more to the front in coming months, if your site gets into position to be visible when more of the internet population becomes blog-happy, then the traffïc potential for your site may prove to be enormous.

The proper use of one RSS feed in one of my content management systems doubled my traffïc, with most of the new users coming from Yahoo, this time last year. Another feed increased my daily traffïc another 75%, and brought me additional return traffïc as well.

At the time the margin between Yahoo and Google was wider than it is today -- so the potential increase from being in Google boggles the mind.

How to Get Listed

According to the Blog Search Help Page:

"If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a förm that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this."

This means that if you're already blogging - and responsibly pinging, you're probably already listed.

If you haven't been blogging, you're in luck. This special brand of Google search is still in Beta, so if you get moving now, you still have enough time to start getting into position. And since the search currently seems to be focused on freshness and relevance, if you keep up the blogging once you start, and you keep your theme narrow, you could still dominate your niche.

Do It Today

The mantra for blogging before was that, proper blogging is a sure fire way to increase traffïc, as well as build stronger ties to your end users or clients, not to mention that it is the simplest of the many implementations of RSS.

Now, with all three major search engines paying more attention to both RSS and Blogging, you can get spidered more frequently, get more of your pages indexed more deeply, and be included in more searches.

You have absolutely no time to waste - if you're not blogging already, you need to get started quickly. Many webmasters are hesitating because they haven't been able to find a blog system that fits well with their site, or find the most popular tools too sophisticated for their needs.

There are literally dozens of frëe resources to help you decide between the standard systems that were originally built for the personal blogger, and the more robust solutions that are aimed at the medium-sized or corporate company - but that's another article.

Whatever you chose, the important thing is to get started blogging today. You'll be missing out on targeted traffïc from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web.

About The Author
Tinu Abayomi-Paul is the co-owner of Leveraged Promotion, which provides many solutions for companies who prefer to out-source their online promotion needs. At Blog.LeveragedPromotion.com you can find out more about how RSS, Blogs and Podcasting can increase your online visibility.

Microsoft asked Keynote Systems not to make a survey of search engine users available to the public.

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Editor's Note: Can MSN meet Steve Ballmer's call for search supremacy? Will MSN's relevance impact your decision to advertise with them? Tell us about it at WebProWorld.

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The numbers didn't look good for the home team in Redmond, the Wall Street Journal reported, and that may have led Microsoft to request the suppression of a search engine study. In the study, MSN Search fell to 5th from 3rd among 2,000 users surveyed in the second quarter of 2005.

Relevance drove the drop, as 27 percent of users found their general search results lacking. 37 percent working with specific geographical locations, ie local search, didn't find the relevance they wanted, WSJ cites the Keynote survey as reporting.

Microsoft says they asked Keynote not to disclose the study, which would have mentioned MSN Search's drop in a press release. A MSN information services group director, Lisa Gurry, claims Microsoft had problems with Keynote's methodology. The results they found didn't match Microsoft's research.

MSN claims that a better assessment of its search performance can be found in its search queries share in the US. WSJ notes comScore's numbers have MSN's percentage at 15.5 percent for July. In comparison, Google had 36.5 percent for the month, and Yahoo had 30.5 percent.

Yahoo figures in the MSN equation, because until February MSN used Yahoo's search to handle its queries. Since the switch to in-house search technology, users have fled for more relevant search engine sites, according to the report.

One of those destinations has been Google, which continues to vex Microsoft with its rollout of products and the much-rumored massive network it is constructing. An internal paper on the Google threat, constructed by MSN execs and seen by the Journal, said "Google threatens Microsoft's position on the Internet, and could potentially lock Microsoft out of its existing distribution channels and reduce the value of Windows."

That document likely led to the recent reorganization of Microsoft's corporate structure, paring seven divisions to three. This morning, Microsoft declared a dividend of 8 cents per share and announced a change to its corporate governance guidelines. Any director on Microsoft's board who has a majority of votes withheld in an uncontested election must resign.

Those directors may be taking another look at the "Google -- The Winner Takes All (And Not Just Search...)" paper, where executives noted the lack of innovative products created by MSN. It could be that an executive or two will be resigning before a director does, if MSN continues to slide, and putting the clamps on negative surveys won't stop that slide from happening.

Discuss this at WebProWorld.

About the Author:
David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Google is working on its most ambitious project to date, the creation of a global data transfer network that could effectively serve as a private Internet. Since the introduction of AdWords three years ago, Google has become the world's largest media company and advertising vehicle. It has grown to rival Microsoft in scope and scale. The process has made it a fully globalized corporation.

Google has an estimated $7billion in the bank and employs many of the brightest brains in IT. It also has a reputation for being one of the best tech firms in the world to work for and has been known to use that reputation to headhunt intellect from its rivals. It is focused on the burgeoning Chinese market and appears to be performing better there than its chief rival Microsoft is. Google has the obvious capital and intellectual resources to do just about anything it wants to.

There are a number of reasons backing speculation that Google is building its own global digital communications network. Google has formally entered the telecom business with the release of a VOIP client known as Google Talk. VOIP is an acronym for Voice Over IP, which is a synonym for Internet telephone. In order to provide this service Google has had to acquire technical and physical resources that, along with other assets held by the company, point to the construction of an alternative Internet.

As Microsoft has so ably demonstrated over the past twenty-five years, there are a number of profitable ventures found in a space monopolized by a single mega-corporation. If that is the path Google is taking, building the infrastructure to capitalize on it would be considered the crucial but difficult first step. Over the past ten months, Google has been purchasing a large quantity of redundant fiber-optic lines, (commonly referred to as dark-fiber), in cities around the world. This fiber was laid during the boom years of the late 1990's but left surplus after the dot-com crash in 2000. Speculation about Google building an alternative Internet has been circulating since early January 2005 when Google started buying and accumulating lots of dark-fiber.

Telecommunications industry news-source Light Reading today reported on some of Google's recent real estate acquisitions. Google is leasing large amounts of floor space in or near major telecom interconnection facilities such as the recent leasing of about 1/10th of the rentable space at 111 8th Ave in New York, one the world's largest telecommunications interconnection hubs. It is also said to be in negotiations for large amounts of space at enormous co-location centers (known as carrier hotels) on the west coast, with the goal of linking Google's North American and Asian networks.

In early 2005, Google began issuing RFP notices to relevant tech firms for the development of a DWDM fiber optics network. The RFP process ended earlier this month and Google is currently reviewing bids from multiple tech vendors. Google is said to be planning to first establish a network in North America and then connect it with similar networks established in Europe and Asia. The construction of such a network could give Google the ability to deliver multiple branded media such as music, video, online telephone and other Internet services to every home in the United States.

DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) is a technology that exponentially increases the carrying capacity of fiber optic cables. According to an article in yesterday's IPMedia Monitor (sub req.), only a handful of the largest telecommunications providers operate commercial DWDM networks. A small number of private DWDM networks exist but few are large enough to need such capacity.

Google's need for bandwidth capacity is increasing rapidly. It currently pays the traditional telecom firms like AT&T who own the long-haul fiber lines a premium for bandwidth. Building its own data transfer network could be seen as a cost savings solution, especially as it could cost as little as $100millïon (in new spending) to construct one. Google already owns fiber throughout North America and around the world. It just needs to connect it all together.

Once connected, what could Google possibly do with a homebrewed state-of-the-art fiber-optics system? It could develop the kind of exclusive branded environment AOL originally dreamed of. It could capitalize on its recent innovations to provide life-service technologies such as Google Talk (VOIP) and interactive information resources such as local search alerts and the delivery of news, video and music files.

According to the IPMedia Monitor article, "... those who have reviewed the RFP say that Google's plans extend far beyond cost-saving motivation, with an architecture that puts a Google-controlled hub deep within all major metro areas."

Google's stated goal is to organize the world's information. A big part of that goal is to turn a profït while doing so. Google turns a very tidy profït each quarter but has long been seen as too reliant on one kind of income, paid search advertising. Google draws between 90 – 95% of its revenues from paid ads. The development of a Google operated data transfer network would give Google any number of ways to expand the number of productive revenue streams from 1 to 1+ more.

Then again, Google has always prided itself on its ability to organize the world's information and provide it frëe of charge to its users. The cost of Google's services is borne by the advertisers. Google might simply be exponentially increasing its online real estate inventory by enticing hundreds of millïons of new registered users to take a look at whatever it is they are creating. Assuming it is the coolest thing on the block when released and is faster and cheaper than its competitors (as most of Google's new products tend to be), many of those new users will choose to stick around to use the services offered by a Google branded network.

Google appears to be preparing to become the world's greatest data delivery vehicle. Perhaps this phase of Internet history will be summarized with the neo-business aphorism, "If you can't beat them and you can't join them, you can just make your own reality and make lots of monëy over there." Google has $7big in the bank, much of it being investor monëy. From all accounts, it is preparing to light up and connect millïons of miles of dark fiber, starting in North America possibly as early as the first quarter of 2006. Today we wire America. Tomorrow we wire the world. On Saturday, we'll do brunch.

About The Author
Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunïty to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at: jimhedger@stepforth.com.

Whether you like it or not, Google is the place to be ranked well. Yahoo! and MSN can offer their share of traffic, but nothing serves up traffic like a top ranking in Google. Unfortunately, no search engine is quicker to hand out a penalty either.

As the clear leader in the search engine market, it is hard to blame Google for being quick to hand out a penalty on a website. There are hundreds of 'black-hat' SEO techniques and tricks that all aim to 'crack' Google and give a website owner a top ranking without them doing as much work to achieve that ranking. If one person discovers a hole in Google, it takes very little time for an entire drove of website owners to start changing their sites to take advantage of this hole.
Whether you like it or not, Google is the place to be ranked well. Yahoo! and MSN can offer their share of traffïc, but nothing serves up traffïc like a top ranking in Google. Unfortunately, no search engine is quicker to hand out a penalty either.

As the clear leader in the search engine market, it is hard to blame Google for being quick to hand out a penalty on a website. There are hundreds of 'black-hat' SEO techniques and tricks that all aim to 'crack' Google and give a website owner a top ranking without them doing as much work to achieve that ranking. If one person discovers a hole in Google, it takes very little time for an entire drove of website owners to start changing their sites to take advantage of this hole.

But is Google too quick to hand out a penalty? They have claimed in the past that it would be unlikely that a legitïmate site would receive a penalty. However, with all the confusion on the Internet about what good SEO really is, is it possible that a legitïmate site owner accidentally employs a technique that is shared by spammers? The site owner may have no intention of defrauding Google, but they may receive the penalty all the same.

Google Plans to Alert Site Owners of Potential Problems

There is some great news for website owners who fear they may have been penalized by Google. Matt Cutts, the owner of this quickly growing blog and employee of Google, confirmed on his website that Google is piloting a new program which will proactively alert website owners of potential problems on their website.

This is definitely exciting for website owners who do not know if they have been penalized, but it should not be taken for something that it is not. Keep in mind the following points:

1. This is a pilot program. It is not a full fledged program that guarantees everyone will be contacted who has been negatively effected. Chances are, you will not be contacted at all.

2. It is an automated program. Google will not have any one person sending out these emails, but a bot that will have to 'discover' your email address. If it can't find one, it will try to guess an email address. If you are good at protecting yourself from sp@m, you may not get a message from Google even if they want to contact you.

There may be a day in the not-so-far future where Google is able to contact legitïmate website owners who made an honest (or maybe not so honest) mistake. That day is not hëre yet, so the responsibility is still that of the individual website owner to make sure they have a legitïmate website in the eyes of Google.

The Many Ways to Get Penalized by Google

There are many ways to get accidentally penalized by Google. Preventing your site from being penalized takes a lot of attention to detail. Even if you have hired on a professional SEO firm, you should be mindful of the problems that can arise from a simple mistake. Below are several things to look out for on your site.

Duplicate Pages

This is a common problem, and a problem that can be difficult to avoid, especially if you have a large website. Duplicate pages are pages that have essentially the same content; it is an old trick employed by search engine spammers. Search engine spammers would use the same page over and over again, but change keywords at the bottom of the page to create some variance and to focus in on different niches.

Accidentally recreating this sp@m technique can be very easy to do. Below are a few ways in which you could have duplicate pages without even knowing about it:

• If you use different landing pages in your advertising campaigns to measure ad effectiveness, you are essentially building duplicate pages. If Google discovers these different landing pages, they may think that you are using duplicate content.
  
  
• Sites that offer the ability to print pages often create two pages that have essentially the same content.

• Using mod_rewrite to create search engine friendly URL's can create duplicate pages. When you use mod_rewrite the server will serve up the same page regardless of whether you use the search engine friendly url or the regular url.

These are just a few examples of how duplicate pages can creep into your website. You should look for more ways that duplicate pages could have creeped into your website.

If you find that you do have duplicate pages within your website, you should use the robots.txt file to exclude the duplicate pages. We published an article last week about the robots.txt file which should be helpful: How to Prevent Duplicate Content with Robots.txt and Meta Tags

Redirecting Users

Another favorite technique of search engine spammers is to use redirects to create doorway pages (otherwise known as cloaking). The idea hëre is to present one page to a search engine spider that is optimized for the search engine and present an entirely different page to the user. Search engine spammers use all different types of redirects, from complicated javascrïpt redirects to simple http-refresh commands.

There are many valid reasons to redirect users on your website to a different page. Whether you are changing the name of your website or changing the structure, your website pages may not always be in the same place and you nevër want to löse a visitor to an ugly 404 page (even Google does not like 404 pages).

Google does recognize that you may need to throw in a redirection from time to time. If you need to do so, you should use a 301 redirect. There are several ways to employ a 301 permanent redirect. Below are two examples:

Example 1 - Using mod_rewrite

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Save this in a file called .htaccess and upload it to your server.

Example 2 - Using an Apache Redirect

Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com/

Save this in a file called .htaccess and upload it to your server.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the oldest search engine spamming technique known. All this entails is using your targeted keywords over and over and over again on your website. Keyword stuffing can happen throughout the content of your website, in hidden text, in the alt property of your images, in the meta tags of your website, in HTML comments, or a variety of other ways. To see an example of keyword stuffing, take a look at this thread over in our SEO Tips and Tricks portion of our forums.

The example above is an exaggerated example of keyword stuffing, but it happens a lot with website owners. The desire to rank high in the search engines often leads a person to put their keywords in their site much more often than they would do so normally. As a general rule, if the text on your page appears unnatural to you, it will appear unnatural to the search engines.

Be Vigilant and Be Natural

So far Google has done a decent job of keeping sp@m out of their index. It still finds its way into their results, especially for less competitive keywords, but when Google does find sp@m they tend to develop new methods to detect that sp@m and remove it from their index. Unfortunately they will inevitably affect website owners who really do not know that they are doing something wrong.

Google has taken a very positive step in starting their pilot program aimed at notifying website owners who may be innocently doing something wrong, but the responsibility ultimately will always reside with the website owner. If you are having troubles ranking well for your targeted keywords, take the time today to review your website. Ask yourself if you have duplicate pages, if you have any hidden text or are possibly stuffing keywords on your page. Do you have any redirects which could be misinterpreted? Take the time to re-read Google's webmaster info and familiarize yourself with it.

Getting to the top of Google is hard work, but it is well worth it when you reach the top.

About The Author
Does Google Penalize Innocent Websites was written by Mark Daoust, the owner of
Site-Reference.com.

If you wish to reprint this artice on your website, you may do so as long as all the links are active, this resource box is in place, and none of the links or the article is altered in any way. This applies to posting this article in forums or any other website. We do chëck those who reprint our articles for compliance on a regular basis.

Though copyright law predates the Internet, case law has been established regarding the indexing of copyrighted material, and it has come out in favor of the indexer. Publishers who have issues with Google's Print for Libraries project may end up with little more than hurt feelings.

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Editor's note: Google is receiving legal support for Google Print. Will this affect the way they index these collections? Discuss at WebProWorld.

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Late in 2004, Google made a surprise announcement about an incredibly ambitious project to digitize and index millions of published works, with the aid of Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library. The project was/is expected to cost upwards of $200 million over at least 10 years.

The entire text of books considered to be public domain and out of copyright will be scanned and made available online. For copyrighted material, the books will be scanned, and snippets will be made available structured around search terms with links to where the book can be checked out or purchased.

The publishing community, who had already signed up for Google Print for Publishers where snippets of copyrighted material were indexed for preview purposes, felt somewhat betrayed by Google as the Library project appeared to be sneaked in along side the Publisher program.

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Two major publishers, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), sent letters to Google asking them to stop the project as digitizing entire works of literature was a fundamental violation of copyright and would, in their opinion, hurt publishers and writers financially.

"…News of Google Print for Libraries came as a complete surprise. It had not been mentioned by Google representatives during any of the discussions they were having with our members, and Google's subsequent explanations of Google Print for Libraries have only increased that confusion and transformed it into mounting alarm and concern at a plan that appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale," read a letter written by Peter Givler on behalf of AAUP.

Technically that's correct, Google has not received explicit permission or paid to reproduce the material. Instead, the search engine has gone through the 5 selected libraries which have given permission to digitize all or some of their collections. Though Google paused the project in August to negotiate with publishers, scanning is slated to continue this autumn with publishers having the option to de-list themselves from the project.

Google, as well as critics of the publisher groups, has argued that the Library project will only help to increase exposure and book sales. Publishers say that is yet to be seen, that no one has the right to copy entire texts without permission, that the implications of allowing Google to do so would pave the way for others to do the same, that they're not convinced the system is secure, and that privacy issues (involving cookies and the Patriot Act) remain unresolved.

But all of these objections from publishers may yield little in court because of case law and Fair Use guidelines.

As this copyright analysis from Jonathan Band goes to great lengths to explain, ArribaSoft v. Kelly is one precedent ruling Google's legal team could use in its favor. In this case, image search engine ArribaSoft was cleared of accusations brought about in a lawsuit by a photographer who claimed indexing his copyrighted images was a violation of copyright law. The ruling that ArribaSoft was protected under four separate provisions of Fair Use was upheld in two separate courts.

Here are some of the key rulings in that case:

Read The Full Article


Discuss this at WebProWorld.

About the Author:
Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Providing wireless Internet looks like one potential for all the fiber Google has bought, but maybe they want to be more than that.

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Editor's note: Google VoIP, Google Pay-Per-Call, Google Phones? Maybe? Phone in your opinion on WebProWorld.

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It's Friday, always a day when writers everywhere dig deep into the mire of probability, speculation, and silliness, in order to find material and feed the ever-hungry audience on the web. For those in the tech world, the Google Game has become a weekly rite. Playing the game is easy - just follow what Google does and project what they intend to do.

Today's version plays upon other theories regarding Google and its acquisition of lots of unused 'dark fiber'. Om Malik and others have theorized about the potential for Google delivering ads, videos, maps, and other web content.

What if it's all about voice? Perhaps the vision of a wireless broadband network operated out of Mountain View is about VoIP instead of any of those services.

The announcement by Intrado of its V9-1-1 Mobility Service looks like another piece of the puzzle needed to ensure compliance with FCC 911 requirements. This component lets wireless VoIP providers have customer access to the emergency network. Failings in this area by Vonage and others have led to lawsuits and FCC involvement in resolving the problem.

"(I)f you want to offer Internet telephone service, you need to make sure your subscribers have access to the dedicated wireline 9-1-1 network," Intrado cites William Stofega, Research Manager with IDC's Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) Services Program, in a statement. "For any wireless carrier considering making the move into VoIP, solutions like Intrado's are worth investigating."
That last statement should cause major wireless carriers like Cingular, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile to reach for the antacids. Why? Well, Google just doubled its cash pile, and Intrado has been the focus of takeover rumors ever since Roy Disney started complaining about the company's business and compensation plans in July.

There's some sentiment among dissident Intrado investors that the company is undervalued. By extending their 911 call routing software to wireless VoIP uses, ensuring emergency calls can be routed correctly, Intrado has made itself a much more attractive target.

Google could pickup Intrado, set up a holding company or outsource customer service and sales of wireless handsets, and partner with a firm like LG to develop a Google branded device. Those handsets could have access to Google applications embedded, and deliver ads to users of those applications.

Its foray into print ads that include call-back numbers shows Google may be ready to delve more deeply into the pay-per-call advertising model. The geocoding used with Google Maps would allow them to target ad sales all the way down to a single street.

Google Talk is free. A Google Phone could be nominally priced, with VoIP supported by advertising. Since Google would own the network, by virtue of all that dark fiber it's purchased, its costs to carry calls would be much less. Maybe it's time to take another look at Google Mobile services; they appear to be ready to take advantage of this proposal.

Discuss this at WebProWorld.

About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The migration from print to online for news and business information has pushed down the money made from print ads.

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Editor's Note: Can you visualize a future where your ads appear in videos online? We want to hear about it on WebProWorld.

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In the distant past of 1995, InfoWorld was my primary source of technology information. I found that by following the magazine, and never missing a Bob Metcalfe or Stewart Alsop column, my tech education was progressing nicely. I even discovered that I was better informed than my superiors, and that helped me move up the IT food chain.

An InformationWeek article reminds me of how far the Internet has gained in importance for tech information. That article notes how revenue for the news and trade markets grew 8.7 percent in 2004, but will likely be half that in 2005.

That doesn't come as much of a mystery to those following the online advertising industry. Jupiter Research noted last month that revenue from search engine ads will double within five years to nearly $19 billion.

Yahoo had more than $1 billion in online ad revenue in the first quarter of 2005; that rose to $1.25 billion for the second quarter. Google's second quarter ad revenues were slightly higher at $1.36 billion. All that money comes at the expense of other media outlets, as the print world has seen.

Part of that change has happened as users switched from waiting for the weekly trade journal to arrive to going online for answers. Search engines like Google and Yahoo turn up multiple sources for pretty much every tech issue that exists.

Sites (besides the two mentioned) supported by advertising revenue, and blogs created by individual users, have picked up that traffic. According to research firm Outsell's Market View report, individuals are spending 15 percent less on printed news and trade journals than they did in 2001.

The article discusses how the news and trade industries have seen print ad revenue drop, and that lower cost online ads aren't covering those losses. As online ads gain in importance, a rise in their rates will eventually offset that print ad revenue loss.

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InformationWeek doesn't touch on one aspect of individuals and their purchasing habits, as they might relate to publications like themselves and InfoWorld. That aspect would be outsourcing. As tech companies have aggressively placed jobs in low-cost countries, American employees have found themselves changing fields. Why would someone keep buying tech magazines when embarking on a new career?

With fewer prospects for tech employment in the US, fewer students choose to enter the computer science fields in college. That leads to fewer tech trade readers, print or online, which now impacts print advertising to a much greater degree.

Broadband penetration in the US market has given more households the means to access high-bandwidth video content. News organizations like CBS and CNN have been racing with others to meet that demand, and monetize it via advertising. They can meet the higher expectations of an audience that no longer finds print as compelling a medium. Print media will have to adjust its revenue expectations to match the change in demand.

Discuss this at WebProWorld.

About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.