Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they revealed.
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Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO
Fastcase is a new legal research tool that is bringing cool lateral thinking to the traditional problem of serving up legal search results. The results are some highly impressive innovations both in the algorithms that sort and rank the results, as well as in how the results are presented.
Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, gave me an interview to describe their process.
1) You found that legal research has a three way tension between cases with the most citations, cases from the highest courts, and recency of the decision. How does your algorithm solve that problem? (more…)
I got the question recently from a friend at a big corporation, in the context of buying reviews. Of course, Google does not make the law (yet), but there are laws restricting misleading marketing. (more…)
One is at Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-mythbusters-content/12810/
The other is at Blogue Marketing Interactif: http://www.bloguemarketinginteractif.com/flogue-collette-judy/ (in French)
While reading Canada’s Trade-marks Act (IDK why it’s not spelled Trademarks, but anyways…), I found the following (more…)
The scams described in the video below have a lot in common with the Google cash, Google Money and other similar scams prominently found all around the internet. (more…)
Are domain names the internet’s real estate? Can keyword research be considered intellectual property? I put these and other questions to Eric Goldman and Mark J Rosenberg, both of whom are speaking on SES San Jose’s legal panel. (Clarification: This is an interview, not coverage of an SES session.)
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At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google – which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search – makes the rules.
This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”… (more…)
Legal fictions can be used by greyhat SEOs to overcome Google’s nearsighted paradigms on buying websites and buying links. While Google is trying to pass off its guidelines as law – and is succeeding in convincing some people of that fact* – the facts are otherwise, and my two-post series on the topic will show that the law can actually enable people to skirt Google’s techniques and expose its faults. (more…)
Net Neutrality has added another formidable opponent to its already large list, with the US Justice department issuing a filing with the Federal Communications Commission against Net Neutrality. This could potentially be big news for bloggers, Search Engine Optimization consultants and all those in the internet marketing industry.
Net Neutrality is the principle that all web sites be accessible to surfers for the same cost. The telecommunications industry is lobbying the US government to enact legislation allowing it to charge more for people to surf certain websites, or even certain forms of content.
There are two main reasons why Net Neutrality matters, and why this filing is bad news for the internet marketing industry. (more…)