Google's 'Dashboard' allows users some insight into which data the company stores

Google has unveiled its 'Google Dashboard' service, a page where users can get a sense of the data the company stores about them in any of 23 different Google-run services. 

As questions about how the company uses consumer data continue to mount, Google has tried to answer those concerns by allowing users a clearer view into how their data is stored and used by programs like Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs.

"We think of this as a great step towards giving people transparency and control over their data, and we hope this helps shape the way the industry thinks about these issues," Alma Whitten, a Google  engineer who works on Privacy and Security, said in a statement.

The Dashboard is essentially a page listing each service that stores data, along with which types of data it stores. Rather than allowing users to control and edit their data directly from the page, however, Dashboard refers users to other pre-existing settings pages. In that sense, the Dashboard is a consolidation of existing functions, not a new set of tools by which users can control their data.

And though much of the concern about Google's data storage revolves around precisely how and what the company does to analyze and profit from user information, the Dashboard offers little insight into those domains. It does not specify which services keep user data, or for how long. Neither does it alert users that, for instance, their Web search histories and e-mails are constantly scanned for the purposes of selling products to them and others.

But users should expect that most or all of their data could be used for advertising, Google said. "To most folks, I think that there is a general expectation that even when we launch a product that doesn't have a clear business model associated with it, there's a possibility that advertising could be associated in some way," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's business product manager for Trust & Safety.

Google said it would continue to add features to the Dashboard, and that services that were not included in the first iteration -- Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, and Book Search among others -- would be added in later versions.

-- David Sarno

Searching for an improved online shopping experience? Google has a new plan

Google offered this example of how an online store using Google Commerce Search could look, with searchable products sortable by category, color, size or price. Credit: Google.

Just in time for the holidays, Google Inc. took the wraps off a new business, one designed to help big online retailers make their websites easier to search.

With Google Commerce Search -- a service that will cost retailers $50,000 or more for an annual subscription -- the Internet giant will set up a search function on an online retailer's website, which Google says will dramatically improve user experience and drive sales. The product represents a challenge to Google's archrival Microsoft Corp., as well as to Oracle Corp., Endeca Technologies Inc. and other firms that run retailers' websites.

The main selling points are that everything that has made Google a dominant company -- vast computing resources, algorithms that provide right results, and even the ability to fix your typos and find what you're looking for -- will help people navigate clunky retail websites that cause a major stumbling block to sales.

"Search was the most important aspect of an e-commerce experience," said Nitin Mangtani, a lead product manager at Google. People go to a website looking to buy, say, a laptop, and they search the site for the item they want. "If the users are able to find that laptop easily, they are more likely to buy the product," Mangtani said. "If it takes them eight to 10 seconds, and they can't find it easily, they leave the website."

Whereas people have high expectations, websites weren't delivering, so Google saw an opportunity, the company said.

Search engine analyst Greg Sterling said...

More on Google music search

After I wrote about Google's new music search feature last week, several readers pointed out that Google already offered searchers an easy way to stream songs: YouTube. Clips from YouTube have been featured prominently among the search results on Google and Yahoo for some time. If Lala, MySpace Music and Google's other partners in the new search feature are going to see much benefit, they'll have to offer a more compelling experience at the top of the search results than YouTube does nearby.

With that in mind, Google is rolling out the first upgrade to music search today: semi-exclusive content. I say "semi" because the content is actually being made available by Lala and MySpace and can be found by going to those sites directly. Anyway, the booty includes new material and free MP3s available for a limited time only. Among the artists contributing MP3s are Phoenix, Tim McGraw and Mos Def; exclusive tracks will be available from Snoop Dogg, Kings of Leon, Lady Gaga and Linkin Park. It's not clear whether this will be a regular feature or just a gimmick to get people to try out the new search feature. But if artists and labels really want to draw people into the experiences provided by services such as Lala and MySpace Music, they'll need to keep the freebies and/or extra features coming. Otherwise, what's to keep Google users from clicking on the links from YouTube in lieu of the ones at the top of the page?

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Thanks to Google's and Motorola's Droid, Verizon opens up

Verizon Wireless opened up to us.

Verizon Communications Inc. and Motorola Inc. proudly and excitedly showed off their new Droid smart phone in a meeting Wednesday afternoon.

First impression: The device is fast, powerful, fully featured and well-designed -- a combination of adjectives we've never used for a Verizon cellphone.

When was the last time a Verizon phone got this much hype? The BlackBerry Storm? Ouch.

Yet, one is coming on Nov. 6, and it has a good chance of living up to the hype. A phone with Google's fast-improving Android operating system, a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and digital zoom, a well-implemented touch screen and a slide-out keyboard.

Despite the Verizon check-mark logo branded on the device, the $200 Droid is all Google inside -- and a little Motorola. The handset manufacturer added some features on top of the Android 2.0 open-source system.

"That's really what open source is all about," said Paul Nicholson, Motorola's global marketing director. "You can layer on top of it."

For years, Verizon had this habit of stripping out good features and software from phones it carried in exchange for a clunky proprietary system. Motorola knows what we're talking about.

We won't miss the hideous red menus, the crippled Bluetooth functionality, or the Get It Now download service or Verizon App Store or whatever they're calling it now. This was a company that just months ago head-butted its way onto Verizon's BlackBerry devices with a separate app store to compete with the one that the phones already had.

Verizon spokesman Ken Muche said the company has no plans to make its own app store for Android -- another platform that already has one, called Market. Good idea.

The Droid's App Store does have a Verizon tab, which contains a Visual Voicemail app.

But all of those little Verizon injections added up to potential revenue in the past.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants more computers in schools

Sergey Brin. Credit: Google.

High school dropout Sergey Brin has a few ideas on how the educational system should be improved. Not surprisingly  from a guy who co-founded Google, where he still serves as president of technology and one of the company's three key decision-makers, a lot of those ideas center on computers.

"It's important for students to be put in touch with real-world problems," Brin said. "The curriculum should include computer science. Mathematics should include statistics. The curriculums should really adjust."

He advocated putting all textbooks on computers, to make for easier access, and for putting high school students to work -- writing Wikipedia articles, and teaching technology to senior citizens and middle school students. In teaching, they will learn.

Brin spoke today at a conference on Google's campus, Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age, which the tech company is co-hosting with Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. By and large, speakers passionately spoke of the advantages of equipping schools with the latest in digital technology, and of engaging students on their home turf -- computers.

Google has been relatively quiet in the field of education, but the company is starting to make a splash. For the last three years, it has given schools the premium version of its Google Apps, enabling schools to run their business and provide teachers with e-mail and other tools that it typically charges corporations for. In part, the giveaway helps advance Google's plan of...

Google's bid to save the music industry, one search at a time [UPDATED]

Google's new "music search feature" -- that's the official name, although some folks have been calling it "OneBox" -- is like a relief pitcher arriving in the middle of a game with his team trailing. It can help expose millions of people to legitimate Internet music outlets, which will help those companies compete with free (and, in many cases, unauthorized) sources of music online. Whether consumers will actually spend more on music than they've been doing, however, is a whole 'nother question.

The rap against Google from label executives and online music companies has been that its search results seem indifferent to legality. For example, searching for a legitimate site often yields sponsored results for unlicensed ones; Googling an MP3 will call up dozens of free download sites and probably some unauthorized lyrics outlets, too. The new music search initiative won't scrub the unlicensed sites from the search results, but at least it tries to steer people to sites that compensate copyright holders. The hope, according to Thomas Hesse, president of Sony Music Entertainment's global digital business, is that music fans will have a significantly better experience on a MySpace or a Lala than they would on an illegitimate site.

No doubt they will. Three of the five music services that Google is working with initially -- Lala, Rhapsody and Pandora -- are far easier to use and are much more entertaining than BitTorrent or LimeWire. I'm not a huge fan of the user interfaces at the two others -- MySpace Music and imeem -- but they're far better tools for sampling music and discovering bands than the illegal downloading sites are. And it's certainly true that with the exception of iTunes, which is notably absent from this initiative, legitimate online music services have been woefully undermarketed and underexposed. So the considerable traffic Google is likely to send their way should be a tremendous boon.

Having said that, I think it's still an open question whether the new search function leads the masses to buy more music. It's likely to lead people to listen to more songs -- Google and its streaming partners will enable searchers to play any given song once, in full and for free, right from the search results page. And if they follow up a sample by diving further into MySpace Music or Lala, they'll certainly discover more artists that they like. But if they're accustomed to acquiring music for free online, it's not clear to me why they wouldn't continue to do so after sampling to their heart's content on MySpace or Lala. Alternatively, they may be happy to stick with the free ad-supported streams on MySpace or imeem, or the 10-cent "web songs" on Lala, instead of plunking down 89 cents or more for an MP3. That's fine only if there's enough volume to make up for the lower margins.

At least Google's pushing people in the right direction, or at least some of the right directions. The search sovereign needs to learn how to work more subscription-music services into the mix, too, for the sake of eMusic, Napster and Microsoft's Zune Pass. And you have to wonder how innovative new services will find a way to get a piece of the traffic that Google's search initiative will generate for its short list of partners. R.J. Pittman, who led Google's efforts to develop the new search function, said the company would consider adding partners to the list, but they'll have to be "online, Web-based, easily accessible and offer some interesting approaches to music discovery." Lots of companies fit that bill, so it will be interesting to see how Google decides who's in and who's out.

Updated at 4:43 p.m.: Now that I've played with it a bit, I see that Google still has some work to do on the new feature. The intelligence it applies to search results -- for example, guessing the right band or song name despite errors in the search -- haven't been integrated into music searches. So if, for example, if you search for "Martha Muffins," Google will guess that you were looking for Martha and the Muffins, and return a bunch of links to the band and its work. But it won't trigger a chance to stream songs from the band via MySpace or Lala. Similarly, if you go looking for "the angels want to wear my red shoes," you won't get the chance to stream the song on the search page. But you will get lots of links to the song on other sites. Searching for the song by its correct title -- "Red Shoes" -- won't help, 'cause the new feature doesn't recognize that as a search for a song. It's similarly befuddled by searches for songs covered by multiple artists, such as "Moon River."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Google launches music search with Lala, Pandora, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace

Google this afternoon began rolling out its widely rumored music feature, which lets users search for and listen to entire songs for free.

The search engine banded together with several music service sites that are responsible for streaming the songs on Google's search results pages. Searching for Coldplay, for example, will yield the band's album cover art, alongside four popular songs that users can play once for free. Once a song has been played by a user, they will only be able to hear a 30-second sample of tune. (The feature is being gradually rolled out over the next 24 hours, so some folks may not see the feature until tomorrow.)

Google itself isn't paying record companies for the rights to play millions of songs on its search page; its partners are. Those include Lala, Pandora, imeem, MySpace Music and Rhapsody, a subscription service from Real Networks. All have licensing agreements with record labels to stream or sample millions of songs online.

The Mountain View, Calif., search company said it's not interested in competing with digital music retailers such as Amazon and Apple's iTunes.

"We're not in the music business per se," said R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product for the music search project. "We don't license the music nor sell the music directly on Google. We are merely a music search feature."

But in steering millions of Internet users to these sites, Google is indirectly boosting their ability to compete with iTunes, which was responsible for 69% of U.S. digital music sales in the first six months of this year, and 35% of all music sales, including physical albums, according to market research firm NPD Group Inc. Amazon, the second-largest player, accounted for 9% of digital music sales and 10% of overall music sales.

Google says it's only interested in helping people find and discover music. Whether it can help revitalize the music industry is another question that Times editorial writer Jon Healey addresses here.

Millions of people already use Google to ...

Los Angeles adopts Google e-mail system for 30,000 city employees

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., making it the largest city in the nation to make the move and handing the Web search giant a major victory in its quest to become a software provider to the world's cities and businesses.

After more than two hours of debate, council members voted 12-0 to approve the $7.25-million contract that would move all 30,000 city employees to Google's so-called cloud over the coming year.

"The City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the art e-mail system," said Councilman Tony Cardenas, who made the motion to approve the Google system.

Before the vote, several council members had voiced objections to the contract, including whether the city would see any real cost savings, as Google had contended, and when the new system would be ready to store data from law enforcement, where security standards are more rigorous.

Because Los Angeles will be among the earliest adopters of the Google system, council members expressed concern that the city might be signing on before Google's cloud system was fully proven.

"It's unclear if this is cutting edge, or the edge of a cliff and we're about to step off," said Councilman Paul Koretz.

The contract was approved pending an amendment that would require Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system was breached and city data exposed or stolen. No such clause existed in the contract.

The vote today ended a nearly year-long process during which Google competed furiously with other software vendors, including rival Microsoft Corp., to secure the city's valuable stamp of approval. Parties on all sides believe that if smaller cities see Los Angeles successfully transition to Google's cloud system, they may be more likely to follow suit.

It is that type of cascade effect that Microsoft lobbied hard to prevent, sending executives and paid advocates to Los Angeles to make the case against Google.

The city plans to complete implementation of the Google system by June and will begin with a pilot period during which a limited number of employees will test the system. City law enforcement agencies including the Los Angeles Police Department will migrate to the new system once they are satisfied with the security and functioning of the system.

Update:  Several readers have asked about the $7.25 million cost of the contract.  That price covers five years of e-mail for the city.

-- David Sarno [follow]

Google starts testing Social Search. 'Creepy,' naysayers mutter. [Updated]

Just about any social-networking-focused product that Google rolls out brings a group of naysayers pointing fingers and calling it creepy.

Right on cue, those folks are welcoming Google's new real-time search feature with less than open arms: "Google Social Search is creepy.... Just perfect for child preditors [sic] to use," wrote Greg House on Twitter.

OK, let's turn it down a notch.

Google Social Search is available for testing in Google Labs, a section of experimental search features. Social Search stems from a deal Google recently struck with Twitter.

[Updated at 6:28 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Google had announced a deal with Facebook.]

Microsoft announced a similar deal and promptly rolled out BingTweets along with news of a partnership with Facebook. No one has yet disclosed financial terms.

Google’s Social Search works much like its standard search, but instead of sifting through the Web at large, it culls links from friends’ pages on the user’s social networks. 

In order to know who your friends are, Google asks you to fill out a profile that includes links to your pages on networks like Twitter and FriendFeed -- which is now owned by Facebook. A deal with Facebook could be on the horizon -- at which time, Facebook's notoriously change-averse users would no doubt bemoan the feature.

Are today's reactions any worse than the ones to Google Web History, which shows you a list of past searches? Or to Google Latitude, which shows you where on a map you and your friends are? Or to Gmail's targeted ads, which, for example, promote concert tickets if you receive an e-mail about U2? Or to Google Voice, which logs your phone usage, voice mails and text messages?

Maybe not, but what happens if Google rolls out Facebook search?

-- Mark Milian

Twitter: @markmilian

The Internet: a place to pay for music?

The Internet has been a decidedly mixed blessing for the music industry, encouraging people to listen to more songs and discover more bands but also to buy fewer recordings. One reason is that there's been a disconnect between where people go online to find and hear music, and where they can pay for it.

Two pieces of news today suggested that the industry may soon turn more of that burgeoning consumption into revenue, although neither one is a sure thing. TechCrunch, among others, reported that Google -- the site that millions of music lovers use to find bands and songs online -- is poised to launch a music service. The venture, which is set to be unveiled next week, reportedly will combine Google's search capabilities with streaming and purchasing functions from Lala.com and MySpace's iLike. Meanwhile, Facebook -- the planet's most popular social network -- has chosen Lala to power a new music-gifting service. Starting Thursday, users will be able to send their pals MP3s or Lala "websongs" (streamable songs from an online locker) in addition to the usual array of virtual gifts.

By putting the ability to hear and buy music where the masses spend time online, Google and Facebook could help convert more of the Internet's free music consumption into revenue. In both cases, users won't have to pull out their wallets to generate royalties for labels and artists -- Google would presumably share revenue from the ads it sells around its music service, and Facebook would automatically ding its users' credit cards for the music gifts they send. According to Lala CEO Bill Nguyen, Facebook users already spend $50 million or more annually on such gifts as virtual plants and pictures of birthday cakes, which sell for about $1 apiece. So it's reasonable to assume that they'll spend 10 cents to a $1 sending people songs. (Note to the Beatles: Now's the time to license "Birthday" and "Yesterday" to Lala.) Nguyen is so bullish on Facebook's music gifts that he said it could bring in "an order of magnitude" more revenue for the company. He added, "This may be the most significant thing since the ringtone." (He declined to comment on the Google reports.)

That's hyperbolic, but Facebook certainly is taking a lot of the friction out of buying music for a pal. Not only does it tell users about their friends' birthdays and other significant events, it also makes it easy to search through Lala's catalog of 8 million songs for just the right sentiment. And the 10-cent charge for streamable tracks is practically painless, especially when it's added to the user's tab automatically, Google's advantage, meanwhile, is that it's extremely well positioned to serve music fans and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Google pursues a pure advertiser-supported model, à la MySpace Music and the much-hyped Spotify, or if it is more focused on driving sales through social-based discovery and low prices, à la Lala. As NPD analyst Russ Crupnick pointed out recently, free advertiser-supported services are cannibalizing digital music sales. That's true in part because advertisers won't pay much for banner or display ads on a music service that people use as background music. So if Google goes the unlimited-free-music route, it's an open question whether it would be able to generate enough revenue from advertisers to make its service a net plus for copyright holders.

My guess is that it won't. At a panel discussion today about new music formats at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica, iLike CEO Ali Partovi spoke highly of Lala's model of one free listen. But he also said it was important to go beyond mere 30-second samples, which has been one of iLike's limitations. Said Partovi, "If you let them listen to the full song, they're more likely to buy."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.