Internet Marketing

From Silicon Alley Insider:

If Google and Yahoo go forward with their search partnership, they’ll have to sign a consent decree. Which will mean, that Google might have US government inspectors digging around in its books, business practices and contracts. The measly Yahoo partnership certainly don’t seem to be worth the government snooping around.

Jessica Vascellaro of the WSJ says Google’s close to walking from the deal. This means Yahoo’s board members might want to get back on the phone with Microsoft about selling the search business to them. The likelihood that Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. will walk away from their planned search partnership has risen, say people close to the contract negotiations.

The two Internet search portals have so far failed to reach an agreement on their partnership with the US Justice Department, which has been building a lawsuit to block the deal. Following a meeting Thursday with the Justice Department, the companies could announce a decision to back away from the partnership — or a last-minute resolution, if one is reached — by the middle of next week, according to these sources.

The option to just scrap the deal has been on the table before, but Google in particular has begun considering it more seriously recently as talks with the Justice Department haven’t progressed. One sticking point has been the Justice Department’s discussion of having the companies sign a consent decree enforcing the terms of the search partnership. By doing so, the parties would be subjecting their compliance with the agreement to ongoing oversight by a judge.

Kara Swisher intelligently guesses what the reason Google gave the WSJ some of this story is to ramp up pressure on the Justice Department to cave. Google doesn’t need this deal, but Yahoo does (and if it doesn’t get it, it’s leverage to draw Microsoft into an alternative deal is very small.)

If that’s the strategy, though, it’s unlikely to work. Who, exactly, is going to complain to the Justice Department about blocking the Google-Yahoo deal? Yahoo shareholders? Not a particularly powerful constituency nowadays.

Related Article: rent a car bulgariaNo Search Deal for Google, Yahoo?
-Brian R.

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While defining web 2.0 as mainly a marketing term Eric Schmidt of Google answers what he feels will me the next evolution of the internet, otherwise know as Web 3.0.

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In a move perhaps indicative of their plans for their recent purchase of facial recognition company Neven Vision, Google now allows users of their image search to search for faces of specific individuals. This is different than simply looking for an individual in the sense that Google now seems to be able to identify the difference between a photo of a face vs. a photo of an individual.

Compare these two image search results - for our favorite jailbird “Paris Hilton”.

Normal Image Search

Face Image Search

If you look at the syntax in the code you will see this operator at the end of the query. “imagetype=face”. It currently appears that Google is still using the content of the page itself to determine the content of the image however in the future the technology acquired from Neven Visions would allow it to determine the content of the image from the image itself.

Let’s hope Big Brother truly does no evil.

PS - if you want to try out these searches for yourself simply copy the text below and replace the part i have put in bold with your own desired person.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=paris hilton&btnG=Search%2BImages&gbv=2&imgtype=face

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