Three powerful technology companies have banded together to oppose Google's proposed settlement with the Authors Guild and the Assn. of American Publishers over the Mountain View, Calif., search giant's book scanning project.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon have signed on to a coalition being assembled by the Internet Archive and Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that works to build a free digital library of Internet content.

Though the coalition has not been formally announced, several participants have already agreed to take part, including the New York Library Assn., the Special Libraries Assn. and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. The group is expected to issue a joint statement next week.

The coalition's members include players who normally would be sitting at opposite sides of the table. Reback, for example, is known for instigating the antitrust efforts against Microsoft. That they have agreed to join forces suggests the magnitude of concern raised by Google's book-scanning efforts, Brantley said.

"By having a set of organizations speaking together, we can demonstrate the seriousness which we all confront by the issues raised by the proposal," Brantley said in an interview. "We are all united in our understanding of the core issues, such as its impact on competitiveness and the threat to reader privacy."

The settlement, reached last October, would allow Google to continue to digitize millions of out-of-print books, with the help of several of the nation's largest libraries. The agreement sets up a way for authors and publishers to get 70% of the sale of those books, with Google keeping 30%. It also lets Google sell ads around book searches that involve out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection.

With a Sept. 4 deadline for comments on the settlement fast approaching, a growing number of parties have voiced their opposition in recent weeks, including William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, which represents hundreds of writers, the National Writers Union and a group of professors from the University of California.

Much of the concern stems from fear that Google would have the power to raise prices to prohibitive levels or that Google would not guarantee the privacy of its readers.

The agreement is also the subject of a Justice Department antitrust inquiry

Before I begin, I should probably tell you who I am and what I do.  I am the owner of Focus Internet Services, which is an internet advertising agency.  We do all forms of "internet-based" advertising from social media management to PPC, but our main business is "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO.  Because the overwhelming majority of internet traffic is now based on "click-throughs" (clicking a link and traveling to a website,) SEO is a game of finding where the traffic is, and positioning a link in that place.  Basically, we are all slaves to Google, like it or not.  Google is the major player in this market, and although there is lots of value in all the other placements we can find, Google still makes the rules.  Now here is the interesting part.....

Google is changing the way it idexes websites, and it is possible that the comfortable "first-page" position that your site currently enjoys might change.  If Google changes the way it indexes pages tomorrow, would you be ready?  The answer is that Google actually changes the way it indexes all the time, and usually these changes only have small effects on your position, unless your site is guilty of a "Google crime" like keyword stuffing, paying for inbound links, or some other "black-hat" technique.  When Google changes dramatically, we all need to be prepared, and have our SEO as tight as possible so as to minimize the damages (or maximize the results.)  Google has recently announced that for the last several months, a large team of their staff have been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search.

"It's the first step in a process that will let us push the
envelope on size, indexing speed,accuracy,comprehensiveness and
other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits under the hood of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences." 

You can check out the developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches for your keywords there to see if your site is effected.

If your SEO tells you that they know what the changes are and know exactly what is in the algorithm that Google uses, then find a new SEO because they are lying to you.  The contents of the algorithm are proprietary and Google does not completely share the information.  They simply give you guidelines to follow in order to make a better optimized website.  The idea is to understand how different structural changes effect your current placement,a s well as what is your competition doing to get rankings themselves.  Make a more sound SEO environment on your site, and track what happens when you change things.  If it is more important to your business than a casual online ad, and your business relies on the placement in order to make money, then it might be best to call a professional seo.

Caffeine: It’s Google On Red Bull, Or Something

Search Engines are like sharks: If they stop moving, they die.

Okay, I’m not even sure if that’s really true about sharks. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not. But still, it is true about search engines, in that they have to keep innovating and updating, if for nothing else to stay ahead of spammers. Google, as the king of search engines, obviously has been doing that constantly throughout the years. Some of the changes are noticeable, but most are subtle tweaks on a rolling basis.

But today, the company has begun testing a new engine for its search product that’s a big enough change that it felt compelled to let the world know about it. Codenamed “Caffeine”, it promises to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

The test, available here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/, really doesn’t look any different at first glance. And Google notes as much, saying that these changes are primarily under the hood. When you hear that, most people will probably assume this means speed in showing results.

So is it any faster? It’s hard to tell. Most results on Google are already so fast, that shaving a nanosecond here or there hardly seems to matter. By Google’s own counter (which show up along the top of every Google result page next to the number of results), the results are mixed. Sometimes Caffeine wins, sometimes regular old Google wins.

But reading Google’s statement, it seems that by “indexing speed” they may mean the speed at which they index pages behind the scenes, putting them in the results. It’s difficult to test that immediately, it seems like something you may start to notice over time as content comes in faster.

One thing I do notice is that across the board, Caffeine seems to have more results in its index than regular Google does. But it’s hard to tell if that really matters since most people never get to the end of the millions of results for items (and for most, in fact, you can’t).

In terms of actual results, they seem to be mostly the same. Doing the same search on each, a few results change positions, and some different ones appear, but it’s largely the same for the words I tested.

Google’s Matt Cutts worked on the project and has a Q&A on his own blog that is interesting. Here’s my favorite part:

Q: Is this Caffeine Update because of Company X or Y is doing Z?
A: Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.

To me that brings to mind two companies immediately: Twitter and Bing. Those are the two services doing the most interesting things around search right now that could potentially challenge Google. But the Google team claims it has been working on this project in secret for the past “several months,” so if you believe that, it stands to reason that this at least probably isn’t a direct response to Bing, which is newer.

And I like that answer. Too many companies focus on directly going after competitors by doing exactly what they’re doing, or attempting to. With Caffeine, it doesn’t appear Google is trying to do that, but instead is just trying to improve what it already does well. Of course, you can have that luxury when you’re the king.

I do wonder though if Google doesn’t do anything to change the appearance of its results, even if those changes are meaningless (adding more pictures, etc), if users won’t perceive that its rivals are out-maneuvering it. Still, better results cannot hurt, especially as some tests suggest that the rivals may be catching up to Google in that regard.

Google is doing this public test now to get feedback from users, presumably before deploying it into wide release on google.com.

Before we look at what are some of the social media channels you should be starting with, I would like to outline 7 categories of Social Media.

1. Blogging: Your competition has a blog and so should you. Blogs can serve many purposes. A couple of key points are host your own blog and consistently add fresh content. Never let your blog go stale.

2. Social Networking: My Space and Facebook are 2 of the largest. Building relationships online are a big part of having a successful Internet business. Social networking allows you to hang out with people that have similar interests to you.

3. Micro Blogging: Twitter.com is a combination of social networking and blogging. Building a large list of followers is a great way to meet people and increase traffic to your blog and websites. Plus it is fun to Tweet!

4. Social Bookmarking: Directories such as Digg and Technorati serve as search engine bait for your blog posts and for new traffic from people who read your blog articles. Bookmarking a blog post is very easy to do and the rewards can pay off for years to come.

5. Discussion Forums: This really was one of the first forms of social media and still is a great way to learn about the niche of your business and to drive traffic to it. Hanging out in discussion forums can be addictive so be careful to use them the right way and not waste time. There is an art to forum marketing and you must learn to do it correctly, but the benefits are many.

6. Email Marketing: There has always been money in having a list. The trick is to build relationships with your list and then sell to it after you have done that. For that reason we include it in social media. Today you can add video, audio, graphics, and other things to make your email more interactive.

7. Video Marketing: When Google bought YouTube everyone was put on notice that video marketing was going to be important. Today internet marketers can drive traffic and build credibility by adding videos to their blog and website.

So How Many Channels for your Brand?  Well, there are a few Social Media Channels I would start on.

1. Blogging:  Putting up a blog and then posting articles is just the start of the process you then need to register your blog on technorati, then list/bookmark/ tweet each post on Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, Delicious and Twitter, this can leverage your presence and then can spread your content to your other channels, sometimes virally as other individuals take up posts  from your blog that they think is worthwhile and pass the link onto their friends and contacts.

Note: See below a screen shot of the effects of the leveraging effects of social media, showing the traffic increase to my blog site after a popular recent post from my blog was passed around the social media space.