Sunday, August 1, 2010

Google answers your questions on privacy and how businesses can use Search while dropping hints about its new product

Does Google plan to bring Google Street View to the UAE? Do you think there will be problems with the privacy for this?

Just in case your readers don’t know Street View, what it does is give a 360 degree view of the street you want. So if you want to look at Oxford Street in London, you’d like to know how the street is laid out and what shops are there, and it’s not just because that’s interesting. Say, for example, you had a business meeting there and you’d never been there before, you could organise where to meet.

If you look at Street View in any of the cities we have it, you’ll never be able to see a face, you’ll never be able to see a licence plate number on a car.

You’ll see there is the shape of a body over there, but is it you or me? Nobody will be able to tell. If your car is there, we’ll be able to see that there’s a silver car, but what’s the plate number and what exactly does it look like? You can’t tell. We’ve solved the privacy issue by having a very strong technology that doesn’t allow these things to be clear.

We’ve launched in France, Spain, the US and others and people love it and use it a lot.

As for Dubai, HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister and Vice President of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai has asked me this question and I’ll tell you the same thing!
To be able to have Street View, you have to have clear Google Maps available and we don’t have this yet because as you know, every two weeks there’s a new street in Dubai and street-naming is not complete so if someone wants to tell you where they live they say, “You know the Eppco station? Take two rights after that and you will come to a Y-turn and go left and you’ll have found my place”!

So until all that is finished, we won’t have clear Google Maps. After that is done, with government approval, we will send a car with a camera to take the photos and then the technology will make it look like a surround view.

How can my firm increase its ranking on Google? Can I pay to get it linked to certain search words?

There’s the natural search and the sponsored or paid search.

The natural search is the main search and you can influence this by having a better web site - we have something called Webmaster Tools which give you some tips on optimising your web site and structuring it so that when our ‘spiders’ come and look on the internet, they can understand it and rank it higher.

On the other hand, there’s the sponsored links. They might be page 15 in the natural search but they appear in the right of the screen. This is called the Adwords product and you can find out more on google.com or google.ae.

Why is it difficult to look at YouTube and make sure no inappropriate videos are available?

Every single minute there is 20 hours of video constantly being uploaded, so monitoring this information is not something that is physically possible and we don’t believe in doing it.

So what we do is have community guidelines and the service agreement. The community guidelines allow you as a user, when you see a video that you feel is inappropriate or not correct, to flag it. At Google we take this very seriously and we look at the content. If this content is against our community guidelines and our rules, the video will be removed.

But we don’t enforce this by ourselves, we use the community. You have so many people seeing and flagging this video and saying that this is a really disturbing video, and we see that it’s against our rules and we remove it. And I encourage our users to do this.

However a flag doesn’t mean we automatically remove it. If 20,000 people view a video and five people flag it, I don’t really care about that because in the end 20,000 people think this is a nice video and only five people don’t like it.

I have been reading about the fight between the media in the US and Google, with the media saying Google giving information from their web sites is costly to them. With much experience in getting people to use your web site, do you have ideas about what the media can do to help their web sites?

I disagree with the word fight, we love the media! To tell you how much we love the media, last year we paid $6 billion to media platforms through our Adsense product.

Adsense is where, if you go to a media  web site, there will be sponsored links on the right hand side of the page. So if there is an article about cars, we will show car-related ads on the right hand side of the page. If the reader is reading this and it makes him want to buy an Audi and he clicks on a link to Audi, the media firm makes money and Google makes money. We did the sales with Audi, we did all the work with them, but you have the platform and the content and somebody from your readers clicked, so whatever Audi gets will be shared between you and Google.

Last year, this business was worth $6 billion and we think that it also empowers media companies to focus more on their content while we concentrate on getting you advertising. We do this not only with big companies, but with bloggers and smaller media as well. So we don’t feel that we’re fighting with the media, we are helping them. And the other thing is that we are a search company, when there is information we search it and bring it to offer to users. I don’t have a portal where I’m taking information off others’ sites and putting it, I’m not taking content from you, I’m driving traffic to you and this traffic can turn into money if you have the Adsense product on your web site.

I enjoy Google Earth very much and I think it is useful also, but I only understand a little of how it works. Why are the images so old? And why are some so clear and some are not so clear when you zoom in?

You as a user, you can go and buy satellite photography, it’s a business. There are people with satellites and they take photos and sell them to individuals or companies, this data is available.

What Google Earth does is take all these images and put them in software. Before Google Earth, the only way to look at these images was to download each one individually. The Google Earth software allows you to move around fast and then when you stop and zoom in, that’s the image it downloads. So we buy these images and put them in our technology to organise them.

Some images are clearer than others because of different satellites taking the images, sometimes governments don’t allow satellites to take photos at one metre above the ground, they tell the satellite provider they can only take photos from two metres or 30 metres. Governments can decide which areas of a country photos can be taken of and at what distance.

Google is committed to bringing you the best image available in the market for a certain spot, but if the best image is not-so-good, we can’t do anything because we are buying these images.

We are also committed to update in maximum 18 months. This is because some satellites take 18 months to get around the world, or because some of the satellites passed over an area when it was cloudy or obscured and the image doesn’t come out well.

We do our best to get the best photos for Google Earth, without you paying a penny, because this is a free service.

What new consumer products is Google planning at the moment and when will they be ready?

We don’t usually talk about our planning a lot, but there is something very interesting that will blow your mind, which is called Google Wave and if you want to find out about Google Wave go to wave.google.com.

I promise you after you see the video on Google Wave, you will not believe that you’re looking on a browser, you’ll think that you’re looking at a movie. This is the future, it will be available and launched by the end of this year, and it will change the future of each of us using the internet. Go and see and you will be amazed!

Google was represented by Husni Khuffash, country business manager in the UAE.

Ask the expert

There’s always been one topic of conversation that everyone in Dubai seems to be talking about - real estate. Whether it was during the boom or the bust, everyone has an opinion, and they should, because it really does affect everyone.

All economies are intimately linked to their property sectors, it can be a huge driver of growth and it can just as easily drag other industries down.

Although falling prices and rents are great for now, in the long run, a property industry in trouble will make trouble for everyone.

Damac Properties, one of the big names in Dubai real estate, is taking the spotlight for this fortnight’s Ask the Expert and its CEO Peter Riddoch is ready to answer your questions on Dubai’s property sector.

Established in 2002, Damac has projects all over town and it’s the largest private real estate developer in the Middle East. Some of Damac’s projects include The Waves Tower and Marina Terrace in Dubai Marina, The Crescent at IMPZ and Palm Springs on Palm Jebel Ali.

Riddoch has been with the company since a year after it launched, and previously with Majid Al Futtaim Group as group vice president of property and with Faisal Bin Qassim Al-Thani and Sons (FBQHC) as general manager.

Damac has faced its own challenges in the crisis, including layoffs and disputes with investors, and has said that it will focus its attention this year on completing projects that have already been started, which contain around 11,500 units across the GCC.

Many will want to know what it takes to be a developer in these troubling times, what future Damac sees for itself and when it thinks it will be able to start new projects again.

Many more will want to know how low the rents can go, what level would keep the economy going without putting tenants out of pocket and if sales are going to pick up again.

If you are one of the many, get your question in now.