Recently in Google Category

The Chinese Google (seems so lame to say it this way), BAIDU, has decided to do video ads. I think its a bad idea. Reason is simple. Ads in there own right are quite annoying to the end user if they start taking over the content. Google ads don't fall in this category because 1) they are the most unassuming ads you will ever see on the internet 2) they are just plain text. It is very easy for the users to ignore them, if they want to. Also, the level of customization Google ads words, coz is plain HTML, provides the content publisher to really mesh the ads and content together in a unobtrusive way. This all is just not possible in video, hell, not even in those annoying flash and gif ads. Suddenly you start worrying about the color formatting of your page and the non-matching color used by your advertiser. Video is even worse, they can run any content without your control. Also, genuinely people, video ads are a pain for the end user. Some site have this videos ads which start playing as soon as the page is loaded. So the alarmed user has to start looking for this video player to turn it off. And if the site is running a video ad on most of the pages, on every page click a user does he/she has to stop the video from playing. That is annoying. Video ads just doesn't make sense. Lots of people have done it before and failed. I don't understand why would baidu is doing it. Is it because, well its becoming a big bully in china. Mind you, it has a very coveted position, Number One search engine in china. As per the Shanghai Daily, Baidu is planning to run this ads on sites of Baidu union members. Baidu union members are :

There are around 150,000 sites which have already formed a partnership with Baidu through cooperation on search-related ads. These sites, called Baidu Union members, are mostly small ones with stable traffic and rich content ranging from vertical industry portals to entertainment sites, but it is difficult for them to attract advertisers on their own due to their size.

Neways, I think this search engine war is starting to enter the "desperate territories". On the other side of the globe, Google has started to put ads in some of the youtube videos. I don't like but I can see why. Youtube videos are just not running on www.youtube.com anymore. They are everywhere. Phone, Home media center, other electronic stuff (like i dont know..). And for all these place there is no way to put in ads around the content (or at least Google hasn't figured it out yet). So next logical step is put the ads in the content itself (duh !). Which for the online user (i.e. youtube.com users) wouldn't make sense but for people watching youtube videos on there home tv, well its just commercial break. Same old, same old. We are all now immune to commercial breaks. Same would happen to ads embedded in youtube videos. Come to think of it, I am sure all video site will follow in on this one. But, there are a few things to watch out for: 1) How Google decides which videos get the ads 2) what if the content uploader doesn't want the ads 3) what if someone actually wants the ads in the video. Keep watching.

It was a great shock and deeply saddening news to hear about the massacre at the Virginia Tech Campus. My heart felt condolences to all the family and friends of the victims. I know how it feels to lose a family member, if only words would make it all better. One of the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings was Minal Panchal. Like many of U.S. residing indians, she too had an account on Orkut, a popular social networking website. As the news of the shooting spread and people learned that Minal Panchal was one of the victims, people started scrapping there condolences on her profile page. The turnout was mind boggling. I personally saw the phenomenon. The count scarps on her profile was on a continues increase, it reached 25000 in just 2-3 days. And was going on. I too wrote my condolences. I was surprised to see in matter of seconds (~30 seconds), my scrap entry was pushed back to 4th page of her scrap book. I tried to reload the page, every time i did a refresh, i could see 4-5 new entries. It was quite touching to see such a support and how people all around felt so bad about the whole thing. Now just two days, I discovered her profile is now deleted. This is probably because of some spamming algorithm running on orkut. This post of mine is to raise a concern against this. As much as I understand the need for such a algorithm, I would want to bring to notice of people orkut that this is not a case of spamming and her profile should be reactivated. By not doing so, orkut is denying people from showing there support for this sad event. It is not about just this one person, I feel this profile was providing a place for people to pour there feeling out and show there support for all affected by this mad massacre. I am very sure there is no technical reason as to why they should not be able to reactivate her profile. Worst would be if orkut is concerned with the increased traffic load on the website. I really hope thats not the case. Orkut is owned by Google. I would expect more from google than this.

I am fighting between the words "baffled" and "amazed" to describe what I saw today on Google Trends. "Baffled" has a bit of speculation and "amazed" is all happy. God, it doesn't matter. It was cool !!(for the lack of words). Google Trends is a pretty neat service that plots various search request Google receives. Basically telling you how many search request it received over a defined period. I was trying out some of our favourite searches in there raw from (no extra qualifiers). The service also tries to map news stories related to the search request and how it affected the search behaviour. One other bit of information around the graph : where did the search came i.e. Location. One can view cities, countries and even language. Neat han. Now the interesting part. I search for java, xml, j2ee, linux, eclipse and also some odds like ubuntu linux, ruby on rails, phython, php. Well, the graph wasn't shockwave here. If you look at the cities, almost always there were 2-3 Indian cities in the list of 10.WOW. There were times there were 5 in the top 10. Most notably Banglore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi. It was a great feeling in a way but am still baffled (there, i picked the word). Well, we know India in booming in the high tech industry, but what surprises me considering the popularity of google, having a majority share in search request is a big big thing. That to me, means a hell lot of people back home are searching for tech stuff. The baffling part :

• Internet is not that widely used. Its changing but we have a long way to go.
• Not everyone is doing computers. This is relative to a huge large population base. Thus the search request are maily concentrated to only a very small fraction of the people. This would mean lots of clicks per geek.
• This one is a bit sad then baffling. All the cool searches don't have Indian cities listed at all. Atom, Ruby, ubuntu,django. An appeal : Atom Pub is goooooooood, RSS is not.
• It seems only the big brands (in terms of amount of money spent on advertising) have hit a chord with india i.e. .Net and related technologies and Java and gang. Python and PHP not hitting the nail right, which is sad again.
• Is the tech industry that hot in India? I knew it was warm but this definitely is hot.

Answers anyone ? Disclaimer: I do understand the usual caveats of statistical analysis, there are lot other factors involved, dataset is not really connected to the topic in question. And ofcourse, I did not try every available tech search possible but tried enough to get the picture right.