Today’s Bourne Ultimatum challenge won’t take you too long. It introduces the first use of a Google tool in the game for non French-speaking players. We’ll find you yet, Bourne! Good luck fellow players.

Day 3
Use IM to exchange more messages with Luc Godat and uncover the name of the logistics coordinator.

Hint: If you don’t speak French using translate.google.com will come in handy.

Yesterday Google (disclaimer: I own stock) started a daily puzzle game via searchforbourne.com to ramp up to the launch of the theatrical release of Bourne Ultimatum. Remember the tracking we did for the daily puzzles for the Da Vinci Code? We’ll try to provide the same coverage for this one. Like Da Vinci, there are some prizes for this (50 United States only), but it won’t be based on speed of completion of the puzzles, see the official rules page. It’s also different in that Google has setup a fake dating website complete with Adsense to exchange codes that are being used in the daily mission briefings. Each day you return for a new briefing.

Also like we did with the Da Vinci puzzles, there might be some additional clues offered here, but please do not give away the answers to others. This spoils the challenge and fun and while it might be a bit more frustrating figuring things out on your own, it’s a lot more satisfying when you do. In that spirit, any comments left here with the answers will be removed or edited out at our discretion, but you’re welcome to and encouraged to provide other players additional hints and tips to the answers. Just don’t give the answer away.

How to play
Just login with your Google handle at searchforbourne.com and click on the link in the daily briefing section. Being it is day 2 you can catch up with day 1 and day 2. Each day you do the puzzle you’ll be entered into a drawing for prizes like cash and new car.

Since it started yesterday, here’s a recap of the missions for the first two days.

Day 1
Locate a picture showing Luc Godat’s is located in paris and copy/paste the image URL to it. Hint: It’s not on his main profile page.

Day 2
Send an instant message to Luc Godat’s screenname.

Hint: Use the instant message client under the communication tab inside the agent console. [I kept trying to use GTalk which I’m hoping that isn’t a valid screenname — oops! I got it, though and you will too once you know what to use and what to say]

Some controversy over the Bourne game launch
Phillip at Google Blogoscoped in a post titled “Google’s Undisclosed Movie/ Self Promotion” points that the contest launched with a bit of stealth which may have been misinterpreted — or properly interpreted depending on one’s perspective — as Google providing itself preferential promotional search results that weren’t labeled as being promotional.

Phillip writes:

However, it’s not the first search results “cooperation” for Google – a company claiming they don’t “manipulate search results by hand” – and also not the first Google results self-promotion (the latter, Google retracted after criticism).

Is Phillip just making a newsworthy point or is he being smug? I can’t tell, can you? If it’s the later than sheesh Phillip, ease up on the sphincter, will you?

Personally, I think sometimes people get too anal over what Google does and doesn’t do (myself included sometimes) and this is a shining example. This is for a freaking game. You know, fun, enjoyment, smile, laugh, ha ha. It wasn’t like they were trying to jam Google Toolbar ads into unrelated queries or use those godawful mouseover text ads that blow up and interfere with reading a page. It’s a long way from violating their evil mantra. Are the Google search result pages so sacred that they can’t temporarily try different promotional spots in the search results for related queries in a game other than the bland, almost invisible text ads?

If Google wants to temporarily manipulate related search result pages and show unmarked to make a game more challenging and/or promote a time sensitive game like this, I don’t have a problem with that. Do you? Yes, even if it is promotional for them and yes, even if it knocks down a few of my listings for similar keywords (didn’t in this case, but could in the future). It seems that Google caved after criticism and they now label a few select Bourne results as “Google Promotion.”

What do you think? Is it ok for Google to do this in a promotion or do you want their advertorial stuff always marked? I realize there are FTC concerns with using properly marked advertising, but the line gets gray when talking about a game like this, doesn’t it? I’ve never done any stealth game like this but I think it would be fun to do so someday and would like to think it would be lawful to do so. Your perspective?

Head of webspam for 6 years Matt Cutts responds to an Information Week article by Thomas Claburn asking if Google’s spam fight is a sham. Matt tried to respond in the IW comment system, but it swallowed his comment and didn’t publish, so he blogged it instead adding that he wished Mr. Claburn had tried to email somebody on the team with his concerns. As someone who has emailed Matt before, I can tell you that at least he does personally respond to emails over there. Still, I don’t email someone at Google every time I write a critical piece about them either so I don’t think that matters that much.

Coincidentally yesterday I received an email from Blogcritics editor Eric Olsen sent to all the blogcritics requesting any blog posts created appear at blogcritics.org first before appearing on blogger’s sites, and his reasoning:

Ironically, due to an aspect of their algorithms set up to catch splogs and other content stealing sites, because a higher percentage than normal of our stories appear elsewhere first, namely home blogs, we keep getting caught in their net. Although they have assured us that they understand our operation and value us as an integral part
of the Internet, it is clear we are going to have to resolve the issue on our end.

Last time I checked Blogcritics.org was a group blog site doing in excess of 50,000 unique visitors a day with over 1,000 contributors and the fact that they are getting caught in the net of Google tells me that Google’s spam efforts aren’t a “sham.”

Splogs are a huge problem and if the secret anti-spam sauce for Google is going after the pages that post them later, that’s fine with me.

Claburn makes a good point about the domain parking page being mostly spam that Matt pretty much says isn’t his department. I’m unable to point to a single parked domain page that was valuable to me as a surfer, but I can see why webmasters and Google would be interested in them.

Yahoo SmartAds teases with a bold promise from a company that rolled out YPN with ads that were inherently not that smart (Disclaimer: I own Yahoo stock). I watched the SmartAds demo of Joe, the hip “LA guy” who likes poker sites and Vegas. He typed “Vegas Deals” into Yahoo Travel Search and then it showed ads offering flight deals for him.

I tried the same thing as Joe and didn’t block any cookies and what showed for me? Brake for deals at the Fairfield Marriot (see below). Was I doing something wrong? I tried refining my searches with queries like: “seattle to vegas” and “sea to las vegas.” Result?

Maybe you have to be logged in to see the targeted results? I logged into my Yahoo account and added the following new keyword searches:

- vegas specials
- las vegas tourist deals
- vegas travel

What advertisements were showed to me now on page refresh? Advertisements for Greece, Greece! What does Greece have to do with any of the keyword searches above? I refreshed the page 10 times to see different ads. These were the ads that showed:

1. Holiday Inn Express (with the ironic caption: “stay smart everytime”)
2. Staybridge Suites
3. Hotel Indigo
4. Holiday Inn Express (x2)
5. Candlewood Suites (free movies and DVDs)
6. Greece (x2)
7. Fairfield Inn Marriot
8. Holiday Inn Express (x3)
9. Holiday Inn Express (x4)
10. Hotel Indigo

Not one of these hotel ads featured locations in Las Vegas or even Nevada. Not Reno, not even freaking Laughlin. Is this not activated yet? Maybe I should call Brad King at 415-262-7052. Brad, what am I doing wrong? How do we make the Yahoo SmartAds … smart?

This morning I read Google employee Matt Cutts frustrated response to a report from Privacy International that gave Google two big thumbs down. Disclaimer: I own GOOGle stock.

The Privacy International report analyzed the privacy practices of 24 companies including the GYM search engine trio: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. They also looked at two of Google’s properties: YouTube and Orkut. The actual report is in PDF only (grrr) and is in a colorized table with the legend indicating that green is “privacy friendly and privacy enhancing.”

None of the websites profiled received the best rating. The closest to the best rating are denoted in cyan as “generally privacy enhancing but in need of improvement” and include the BBC, eBay, last.fm and Wikipedia. YouTube and Orkut scored the third to worst rating: “serious lapses in privacy practices” and the only site to garner the worst rating, colorized black, is Google.

Let’s look at the specific comments in the report that lead Privacy International to these conclusions about Google:

- privacy policy not updated since 2005. True, Privacy policy last updated October 14, 2005.
- rejected access to U.S Justice department for research purposes. Correct me if wrong but isn’t this a good thing? As Matt Cutts aptly notes, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft all offered up search results where Google was the only one to say no. Yet all of them ranked higher in this report.
- IP addresses are not considered personal information. Considering IP addresses can be shared among a pool of users, I’d tend to agree.
- they do not believe that they collect sensitive information. I don’t believe search results are “sensitive” information either because taken by themselves what do they mean?
- Do sometimes track links clicked So …? MyBlogLog by Yahoo tracks your presence on somebody’s website (if registered and logged in).
- Data collection: Unclear, but has stated 18-24 months as eventual outcome. Log history is retained after this period. What is unclear? Google has said publically that they remove any personal identification after 18-24 months. I think it was a good move for Google to remove the 18-24 months, although I’m puzzled why they didn’t update their privacy policy when this change was made.
- Vague, incomplete and possibly deceptive privacy policy. Most documents written by lawyers fit this definition. Google’s policy doesn’t seem out of the ordinary in this respect. They also offer a more plain language Privacy Highlights page.
- [Privacy Policy] fails to explain detailed data processing elements or information flows. And Coca-Cola or KFC list their secret ingredients?
- Generally poor record of responding to consumer complaints. True, this is a fair concern although I’m not sure how it relates to privacy. Google is slow to respond to individual correspondences. It takes several days, sometimes a week or more to get a response. The flip side of that is once you actually get somebody at Google to respond to an issue the conversation flows better. I see this as a scale problem. They have more people contacting them than people with the ability and time to respond. Solution? Hire more customer service reps. Mitch Ratcliffe points out that Privacy International had problems getting Google to respond to their concerns before publishing the report. Google needs to fix this problem.
- Ambivalent attitude to privacy challenges. Denying the U.S justice department access to records doesn’t sound like an “ambivalent attitude” to me. They strongly felt at the time and wrote about on their official blog that they felt this was overstepping privacy for Google users.
- Privacy mandate is not embedded throughout the company. Maybe I misunderstand the goal of the study here but if they are separating out websites like YouTube and Orkut from Google then why are they making this a negative? Shouldn’t each site stand on its own?
- This might be my favorite of the lot: Techniques and technology rolled out without adequate public consultation (IE. street-view). So Google is supposed to run public beta tests through what? More private, closed beta testing first? Isn’t opening a beta product to the public an opportunity to get “adequate public consultation?” Absurd complaint.
- Google does not allow search history to be removed. You can delete recent search results from view anyway using Google Personalized search. I’m fairly certain this doesn’t delete the results from their database though, so this complaint seems justified.

And finally the justification for the worst grade:

- Track history of ignoring privacy concerns. False.
- Every corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance. Come on, “every” new announcement? I didn’t check the last 10 corporate announcements but I sincerely doubt this is accurate. The whole use of the word “surveillance” conjures images of peeping toms.
- Privacy officer tries to reach out but no indication that this has any affect on product service design or delivery. I didn’t know Google had a Privacy officer, but if they do I’m guessing after reading this report he’s hanging from a ceiling fan somewhere.

Here’s what Matt Cutts said about the report:

I believe this report could corrode earnest efforts to improve privacy at companies around the internet. Why? Because the bottom-line takeaway message that I got from the report is that a company can work hard on privacy issues and still get dragged into the mud. Consider: in the last year or so, other companies gave users’ queries to the government, leaked millions of raw user queries, or even sold user queries and still came off better than Google did.

Don’t look now Matt, but the plot thickens. Privacy International director Simon Davies is claiming in an open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Google is running a smear campaign:

I am writing to express my concern not just at this unfortunate result, but also at communications between Google Inc and members of the media during the period immediately prior to publication of our report. Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that “Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft”. I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings.

One of the people on the 70 person Advisory Board that made up the PI report is an employee of Microsoft. How did Microsoft score? Don’t get excited, it’s orange for “serious lapses in privacy practices.”

Hmm thoughts
As I looked closer and closer at this report it occured to me that none of the sites really did that well. I know the big story right now is Google doing the worst, but perhaps the bigger story is that nobody did very well. If none of these websites can get an excellent rating for privacy from an independent study that doesn’t speak well for how our privacy is being handled.

Does this worst rating matter from a financial perspective? Google stock hasn’t been significantly impacted yet, although it is down a few bucks to $513 as of publishing this post.

Generally speaking, I’m with Matt on this one, this report seems to have given Google a bad rap undeservedly. I’m not saying Google doesn’t have things they should work on concerning privacy, but their size and dominance in search appears to be working against them. This report proves Google has the biggest bullseye on their backs and rightfully so. They should be showing others the way which they aren’t doing by having a privacy policy that hasn’t been updated in 18 or so months. They need to update that ASAP.

Ironically the Privacy International site has a Google Page Rank of 7. Google’s algorithm considers this a pretty good source.

If you are concerned about privacy I wrote a post with 12 tips for protecting privacy that might be of interest. My personal take on privacy and search engines remains that I don’t care if they use my search results to make their search engine results better. I expect they will do that just like Amazon should use our purchase results to better suggest related products/services we might be interested in and TiVO (when we had it) should use what we’ve watched to record shows it thinks we might like.

Frankly I’m hoping these companies use this information to contribute back to making a better artificial intelligence. Google has been rightly criticized in the past for not giving enough back to open source and it’s good to see them doing things to improve this criticism. With that in mind, if I were ranking them on this legend I would have put them in the yellow “Generally aware of privacy rights but demonstrates some notable lapses.” With the difficulty of getting rid of some preinstalled AOL software I would have put them at the bottom of the pile, not Google.

Yahoo! misery continues.

Sometimes I wonder what mind-altering substance is floating through the air ducts at Yahoo management these days. Or what eerie haze prompted me to buy stock in their company (remember: they haven’t always sucked!)? Some of their leaders don’t seem to be in touch with reality. The newest Dr. bizarro statement comes from Tapan Bhat, the Yahoo! vice president of Front Doors at a conference in Amsterdam saying:

“The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about ‘me.’ It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user.”

Deja vu? Remember CFO Sue Decker kicking off 2006 with this insanely stupid comment: “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

A muzzle company sounds like a good Y! acquisition right about now.

Maybe it’s me that’s out of touch and not Mr. Bhat but search is a lot more important to me than personalization. Too many non-sticky sites assume I actually want some semi-crippled personalized page on their site or that personalized results will have me returning repeatedly salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Sure, I don’t mind having a page that can aggregate favorite content from some sites and I like the ability to fill out my own profile (with external links) at a website but that’s a different activity than using a search engine. The incessant need to add social features to everything these days is becoming idiotic.

Anxiously waiting for the anti-social network movement to begin just to balance the scales again.

Bhat has followers in his belief like Zillow Community Relations Specialist Drew Meyers who writes:

search is becoming less and less relevant by the day as I add trusted sources of information to my feedreader. Everyday, I seem to do fewer and fewer searches.

Not me, Drew. At least not according to the Google trends graphs I’m seeing. It’s 20-30+ searches every day, same as a year ago. I’m not expecting results increasing from personalized results versus traditional SE results any time soon. No more than I trust Zillow estimates to be very accurate do I trust personalized results to be the most relevant.

At least Rex Duff Dixon and I agree: “Even though I don’t think human search is the answer, I don’t believe for a minute that search is over.”

When I look for results from a search engine I primarily want the most relevant results, not the most relevant result my friends or people on the web marked as friends or some trendy social network believes to be the most relevant. If I’m searching through information I created or bookmarked then that is one of the few times I’m interested in receiving personalized results. Help me find something I created days, months or years ago, absolutely that’s useful, but that’s a niche search result, not the most common one.

For example, I’m noticing that as the number of posts to this blog keep growing (4,300 and counting) the built-in search is becoming less useful. It’s been one of those things that has me pondering buying the Google Mini and experimenting. Search relevancy is important to me and if I’m going to buy a search product for this site, why not go with #1 (Google). I’m not interested in some heavily personalized search product, I’m looking for which engine will offer both myself and others the most relevant results. The ability to personalize results within the relevant results would be an interesting feature but first I want the most relevant result set.

There are some areas like shopping where personalization makes more sense. If I buy the Twilight Zone DVDs then I’m probably more likely to enjoy the Outer Limits. Personalization makes more sense there, but when I’m searching for a speciifc topic how does the search engine know my intention? Maybe it’s research for an article or blog post. Maybe it’s more information on a company, product or service. Maybe it’s a definition of a word (yes, I use the search engine for that occasionally). The point is I’d like to see the most relevant result across a wide variety of people and perspectives — people who agree and disagree or in the case of a product or service, the place that makes the product or provides the service.

Just because Yahoo can’t seem to figure out how to better compete against Google they shouldn’t try telling us the future of search won’t be about search. That’s a cop out. The future of search will be about the same thing it’s about today: providing the most relevant results. The format and presentation probably will change but the core component is when we use a search engine we are looking for something specific and want to find the most relevant result quickly and hassle-free. The job of the search engine is to be the quickest, cleanest and best at providing those results again and again and sorry Yahoo, you aren’t up to par.

This might be a good time for another “Are You kidding” post that Yahoo! isn’t quitting search. Yahoo’s biggest problem isn’t the search engine past, present or future, it remains Yahoo themselves. They have some really smart people working there, but it’s time to muzzle these managers now.

On yesterday’s Hmmcast I lamented that the new Ask3D isn’t truly 3D, it’s shameless marketing speak. This morning I learned about, downloaded and checked out SpaceTime which promises 3D search results from Google and Yahoo, image search from Google and Flickr and 3D eBay auction search. While it does present results from those sites in a 3D space, it isn’t useful. Some, of many, downsides to this effort:

- Windows only
- slow unless you have a really fast computer (I have 128MB graphics card and 2GB of RAM on this system and it’s still pokey)
- text of results of pages coming at you in 3D aren’t very legible, forcing you to double-click on the pages to load and move back to 2D. A truly 3D browser should keep as much in three dimensions as possible
- no bookmarking capability, as Duncan notes
- limited interaction. You can plod forward and back through results in groups of 10 but you can’t move around the objects or actually do anything with the search results. It’s like looking at badly rendered screenshots.

Something that has more potential if they ever get it done is web on a prim inside Second Life. Or better yet, a competing world that works better than Second Life.

Would be much more real world useful bringing 3D into an existing virtual world rather than trying to take 2D and dress it up in a 3D user interface. Last month at VTOR I wrote about how the Ubrowser project is coming along. UBrowser uses OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla® rendering engine and allows more interaction than SpaceTime within 3D space. You can even type into forms, conduct searches on pages all while rotating the pages on a cube.

Gotta love the first frequently asked question on the Ubrowser FAQ page:

This is all a bit pointless isn’t it? No one wants to browse in 3D… Well, yeah but, no but, yeah but… It’s really just an illustration of how to embed the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine.

Despite being more proof of concept than application, Ubrowser outduels SpaceTime on every level. Don’t bother with this Space, this Time.

Hmmcast #126 mp4

Video: Just Ask3D

I was excited by the name of the new Ask.com search engine. I’ve owned stock in Ask.com since before they were bought by Barry Diller and banished the butler. Must say the changes made since the acquisition have left me feeling more and more remorseful for buying the stock. Particularly the part where I was left holding EXPEdia stock in the spinoff. There has yet to be one travel sites I’ve liked, what about you?

But this morning I was hopeful when I saw the news that the all new Ask3D had arrived with grand promises that they were a “truly new way to search.”

And then it was downhill from there. Again. The 3D in the title is merely a marketing gimmick:

No, you don’t need red and blue glasses to see it. 3D stands for the three dimensions of searching - query expression, investigating results, and digging deeply into content. You used to have to visit three different pages or websites to see and search through each dimension.

I was hoping for something like a cross between a virtual world and Google quality results. Alas nothing remotely close. Boo, hiss! Bring back the butler, at least he wasn’t such a tease.

It finally happened yesterday at our local Best Buy.

I’ve been tracking the prices of TB external drives for awhile wondering when we’d see them under $500 and available to walk in and buy. I predicted in 2004 that by the end of 2005 we’d see sub $500 TB drives in stores and was off by a year. For awhile the biggest drives you saw were 500 GB, then there was a relatively brief period of 750 GB drives but now 1 TB drives are readily available. Yesterday, I saw a couple different 1TB external drives and one of them was priced at $329 USD.

Or so I thought.

When I went to the Best Buy website today the price was $399, so it might have been my eyes. Still, $399, $329, it’s getting to be in the price range where more and more people will have 1TB+ drives. That means much more space to record, keep and index. Google’s focus on search and our reliance on being able to find will become even more important.

The last external drive I bought and attached to our network was 250GB. I partitioned that to share with iTunes (the Mac) and Zune (Windows) our MP3 library. The CDs we listen to regularly are stored on that drive so we can access from any machine on the network including the Xbox. We also use that as a network backup drive and I’ve copied over every AVI and MPG file for the Hmmcasts since the beginning of the year.

How much space is left on the 250 GB drive as of this writing? 101 GB.

Before too long we’re going to be thinking about another external drive to add to the network. No more sub 1TB hard drive purchases seem likely for our desktop machines unless the deals on sub 1 TB drives are incredible. I wonder if by the end of the year we’ll see 1 TB external drives going for under $200? It’s not that far away considering they’re already here for under $400.

I wouldn’t be shocked if within my lifetime exabyte storage is widely available for under $100. That means I’m expecting to see the smaller petabyte drives for under $100 in the next 10-20 years. Before you think I’m bonkers, petabyte drives aren’t really that far away if we’re already seeing TB drives already.

1024 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB)
1024 GB = 1 terabyte (TB)
1024 TB = 1 petabyte (PB)
1024 PB = 1 exabyte (EB)
1024 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB)

It’s more doubtful I’ll live to see sub $100 zettabyte drives in local retailers, but I’m sure my children or future grandchilden will. Maybe one or more of them will be writing here at MakeYouGoHmm.com about walking around with a 1 ZB device recording their entire lives. Every exchange, every moment, every memory. Will Google or a Google competitor be there to index it all for eternity? Perhaps.

Nice 3D view of Safeco Field, Microsoft.

Today Microsoft released a 3D versions of New York City and other locations while Google released a new street side map view.

Beyond tourists, virtual travelers and developer creations (count on those in the coming days), this won’t be as useful until detailed maps are available in every major city. Would also like to see this not be so US-centric. What about other places in the world? Seems like Microsoft has more cities than Google pimped out but who knows how long that will remain. Whomever gets the most street-level 3D maps of the entire world and makes them available for mashups in other applications first is going to be at least the short term victor.

Google has extensive street side views in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York. Want to walk the Las Vegas strip tonight without getting tired feet or spending a penny, try this:

Google’s implementation is better than what Microsoft’s street side views back in February 2006 and the A9 street view from Amazon. None of this has done much to increase Microsoft’s search penetration over Google, so take the eye candy part of my title literally.

Microsoft’s version also requires downloading an add-on in Firefox (see below) whereas Google’s does not (correction: Google Maps does require newer version of Adobe Flash player).

In the Google street view demo video their street side guy or whatever he’s called has some resemblance to the Channel 9 guy, check it out:

Odd that they wouldn’t use a Google guy type character with different colors. Strange coincidence?

Phillip from Google Blogoscoped points out Google is also releasing something called mapplets, via the mapplets developer documentation:

“Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-webpage that you can put into a normal webpage, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.”

You can try out some mapplets in the mapplets directory.

Microsoft and Google have had a showdown at the map corral before. Virtual Earth vs. Google Maps was the first time.