Google News Russians attempt to topple Google in Vietnam

Vietnam's booming Internet scene is littered with failed startups that tried to take on Google and other entrenched U.S web companies. That's not deterring a newly launched Russian-Vietnamese outfit which believes it can unseat the American search engine in this fast-growing Asian market and also contend with a jittery, authoritarian government seeking to clamp down on freedom of expression online.
Like Google rivals elsewhere, Coc Coc, or "Knock Knock" in English, believes the ubiquitous search engine doesn't get the nuances of the local language. It says its algorithms make for a better, quicker search in Vietnamese, while its local knowledge means the information served will be more relevant - and hence more valuable.

Coc Coc also flags another possible vulnerability: Google has no office or staff in Vietnam. The company, whose code of conduct includes the phrase "Don't be evil", is concerned about the liability it faces over content hosted on its servers and having to cooperate with censorship requests by Vietnam's authoritarian, one-party government.

Unlike other past hopefuls, Coc Coc is not short of cash

The company has so far spent $10 million, hired 300 staff - including 30 foreigners, mostly Russians - and spread itself out over four floors of a downtown office block in the Vietnamese capital. According to Coc Coc's founders, its investors have $100 million over the next five years to try and get a chunk of the 97 percent of Vietnamese web surfers who currently use Google to switch. They declined to name the investors.

"When I came here, I had some understanding why Vietnam was a good market to beat Google," said Mikhail Kostin, the company's chief search expert and like others in Coc Coc, a veteran at Russia's largest Internet company, Mail.Ru. "But after living here for one year, I understand the language and market much more deeply. I'm sure it's right

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Latest Google AdSense news Yahoo announces online ad alliance with Google

Yahoo! on Wednesday announced an advertising alliance with Google, the company that dethroned the pioneering Internet firm in the world of Internet search.
Google will use its online ad targeting skills at some Yahoo! properties, stepping in to put relevant marketing messages in available spaces, according to Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo!.

Yahoo! gave the example of someone online shopping for boots being shown an ad for something completely unrelated because no advertisements for footwear were available in inventory.

"If you see an ad for boots, that's instantly going to pique your attention more than an ad for, say, a car battery," Yahoo! said.

That's better for users. This is why contextual advertising is such a powerful tool."

The large stocks of ads at Google AdSense and Admob increase opportunities to present Yahoo! website users with marketing messages they will click on, generating revenue.

By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we'll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful," Yahoo! said.

"For our users, there won't be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear."

The move comes amid turn-around efforts by Yahoo! chief executive Marissa Mayer, who was a high-level Google executive before taking the Yahoo! helm in July.

Yahoo! has been trying to reinvent itself since the once-flowering Internet search service found itself withering in Google's shadow.

"We work with a number of top publishers to help them monetize their content through AdSense for Content and AdMob," a Google spokesman said in response to an AFP inquiry. "We're thrilled to now include Yahoo!.

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Google goes on the offensive against online news aggregators

Google's imprint on daily life is hard to ignore in Europe, where it reportedly has 93 percent of the Internet search market, more than in the United States. Yet when it comes to its lobbying of lawmakers, Google prefers a low profile.

That all changed this week when Google fired a rare public broadside against a proposal that would force it and other online aggregators of news content to pay German newspaper and magazine publishers to display snippets of news in Web searches.

The proposed ancillary copyright law, which is to have its first reading Friday in the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, has ignited a storm of hyperbole pitting Google and local Web advocates against powerful publishers including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bild and Die Welt.

Google took off the gloves Tuesday when it opened a campaign urging German users to e-mail members of the Bundestag with their concerns. Google said the proposal would shrink the free flow of information on the Internet in Germany, perhaps even forcing it to display blank links to German references.

The issue is also being debated in other European capitals. In October, President François Hollande of France asked the Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to have a representative meet with a government mediator to resolve the issue. The company complied. The implicit threat was that if no solution were found, France might pursue a legislative option.

Christoph Keese, the senior vice president of Axel Springer, publisher of Bild and Die Welt, two of the largest-circulation newspapers in Germany, said lawmakers in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal and Spain were considering similar measures. Google said that conversely, new laws passed in Canada, and proposals that could soon be adopted in Britain and the Netherlands, would further loosen copyright restrictions and free up new kinds of Internet sharing.

The German proposal "would make it much more difficult to find the information that you seek in the Internet," Google warned in its campaign, which it titled "Defend Your Internet."

The unusually public salvos from Google caught many German lawmakers by surprise. Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue at a working dinner Tuesday with a group of lawmakers from her party, the Christian Democratic Union, including Peter Beyer, a member of the Bundestag from Ratingen, a town near Düsseldorf.

"She asked us how many e-mails we'd received and we told her," he said Wednesday during an interview, adding that he had received fewer than 10 from Google supporters. "Most of use had only received a few, three or four. She and the rest of the C.D.U. are still behind this law. I have no doubts that it will pass."

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Google pulls the plug on AdSense for Feedburner, other services

Google trimmed news "badges" and more as part of year-long house cleaning aimed at sweeping out unpopular, outdated or unneeded features at its online properties.
"It is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact," Google senior engineering director Yossi Matias said in a blog post.

"So today, we're winding down a bunch more features bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our 'spring' clean last fall."

Features being eliminated included AdSense for Feeds, which let website publishers earn revenue by placing ads in RSS feeds, and Classic Plus, which allowed users to upload images to use as backgrounds at Google.com.

Google will consolidate online storage of data in Picasa and Drive, giving users five gigabytes of memory space for free overall for both services and options to pay for more capacity, according to Matias.

On October 15, the company will stop displaying "Badges" awarded for story-reading achievements at its online news pages and no longer show recommended sections

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Google AdSense European Antitrust Woes Are Far From Over

Google has struggled for years to settle an antitrust investigation in the European Union, to avoid a huge fine and the stigma that would come with breaking the law.
Now it appears there may be no end in sight to the Internet search giant's antitrust problems in Europe even if it does finalize a tentative accord reached in that case, according to a letter from Joaquin Almunia, the competition commissioner and the most powerful antitrust enforcer in the 28-country bloc.

Almunia has not given up on reaching a final settlement with Google in the case, in which the U.S. company is accused of abusing its dominance in the online search and adverting business. But the letter, made available by a person who did not want to be identified because the document had not been made public, indicates that Almunia is trying to marshal support for an unpopular provisional deal by emphasizing to critics that new investigations await Google.

In the letter, written June 11 to his commission colleagues, Almunia said that the European Commission was prepared to investigate "many allegations, the various practices that they cover, and the new types of markets that are affected." He mentioned social networks, streaming, cellphone operating systems and mobile apps as areas that could face scrutiny.

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Google Says Its AdSense Advertising Platform Now Speaks Hindi

Google Says Its AdSense Advertising Platform Now Speaks Hindi
Google earlier this week announced that its mobile and Web advertising network, AdSense, now supports Hindi, which it describes as one of the most widely spoken languages in India, and one that that has over 500 million speakers across the world.
The search giant, which makes a significant proportion of its revenue from ad sales, in a blog post said the move will help the AdSense platform support the "wealth of quality Hindi content" that is currently available online.

Emanuele Brandi, Product Sales Lead on behalf of the AdSense Internationalization Team, says in the blog post, "We're excited to launch AdSense Hindi language support [on Sunday] to help fuel even more quality content creation on the web, and to help advertisers connect with a rapidly growing online audience."

Brandi tells Hindi language-based site webmasters that they will now be able to earn money by displaying Google AdSense advertisements in Hindi

Google details steps webmasters have to take to begin displaying Hindi Google AdSense ads, including making sure the website is compliant with the AdSense program policies, and signing up for an AdSense account by enrolling the Hindi website. Once the account is approved, webmasters simply have to add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to users

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Google Android, AdSense Probes Are Advancing: EU Antitrust Chief Margrethe Vestager

Google Android, AdSense Probes Are Advancing: EU Antitrust Chief Margrethe Vestager

Google allegedly using Android OS and AdSense to thwart rivals
European Commission opened its investigation into Android in 2015
A complaint was lodged by the lobbying group FairSearch
Investigations into how Google may be using its Android smartphone operating system and its AdSense advertising service to thwart rivals are advancing, Europe's antitrust chief said on Wednesday, amid concern about the lengthy proceedings.

The European Commission opened its investigation into Android in 2015, following a complaint two years earlier from the lobbying group FairSearch.

A 2016 document seen by Reuters said the EU competition enforcer planned to levy a large fine against the company and would order it to stop giving revenue-sharing payments to smartphone makers to pre-install only Google Search.
It is also expected to tell the company, a unit of Alphabet, to stop requiring Google's Chrome browser and other apps to be installed alongside Google's Play store. In the AdSense case, Google was accused of blocking rivals in online search advertising in 2016.

The Commission has yet to rule on either case, triggering worries among rivals and consumer groups.

We are advancing on our two cases involving Google, both the Android case and the AdSense case," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told EU lawmakers.

"Five years in the Google case seems an eternity," lawmaker Ramon Tremosa said. Echoing some of Google's rivals, he has urged Vestager to break up the company. Such a move is unlikely because of the high legal threshold.

The former Danish economy minister, who has the power to sanction companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover, handed down a record EUR 2.4 billion ($2.97 billion) fine to Google last year for squeezing out rivals of its shopping service.

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