Google is ready to start stringing fiber for its gigabit network, according to a blog post from the search giant on Monday. The news comes as a welcome update to its project to lay a gigabit fiber-to-the-home network in both Kansas Cities after the local newspaper reported last month that Google was having trouble with hanging its fiber along utility poles.

However, it looks like those issues may finally be resolved with Google paying the same attachment fees that cable and telecommunications companies pay utilities to use their poles, as opposed to paying additional costs associated with stringing cable higher up on the pole where electricity cables hang. A Google spokeswoman confirmed that the fiber was getting strung, but couldn’t tell me what percentage of the network would be underground as opposed to aerial. She said via email, “We don’t have a percentage estimate but we’re starting on utility poles and down the line, the fiber-to-the-home connections will be terrestrial.” Fiber is far cheaper to deploy aerially than planted in the ground because it avoids the labor costs associated with digging trenches.

Google has said it would start signing up customers by the end of 2011 and that it would begin connecting customers in “early 2012.” If the company has just begun laying its fiber, that may push things back a bit. The project has experienced a few minor delays, but so far seems to be moving ahead. Rather than when, I’m actually far more curious about what Google’s network architecture will be and what it will cost.

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Google’s image search engine tests a new interface for related searches. Instead of only displaying a list of queries, Google also shows small thumbnails. Mouse over a query and you’ll see 3 image results in a preview box.

{ Thanks, Pontus. }

Google Operating System

Microsoft has bought ad space in a number of major newspapers this week in order to slam Google’s recent changes in its privacy polices for many of their products. Read more…

Neowin.net

Google seems determined to push the boundaries of what people expect from the company, for better or worse — just days after launching a new personalized search that has drawn criticism from both competitors and users, the company’s announcement that it is revising its privacy policies has touched off another wave of discontent about the implications for users. So is Google’s new omnibus policy another sign that it has broken its promise and is becoming more evil by the day? Or is the fuss over the new version, which will allow the search giant to share data among its various services, just a tempest in a privacy teapot?

In a blog post on the announcement, Google says that the new privacy policy will be rolled out in March (the new version is online already), but that the company wanted to give users a heads up well in advance because “this stuff matters” (and probably also because both Google and Facebook have had their hands slapped by the Federal Trade Commission and other authorities over privacy). And the company notes that it currently has more than 70 different privacy policies that govern its various services, from YouTube to Gmail to Blogger. Privacy director Alma Whitten says this approach was:

[A]t odds with our efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience.

Google says it just wants to make things easier for you

This makes it sound as though Google is tidying up a messy room, and the company clearly wants users to see it as a benevolent gesture. The post goes on to say that the driving force behind the unification — the ability for Google to combine information you’ve provided to one of its services with information from other services — is designed solely to provide “a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.” And the official announcement ties it directly to the launch of personalized search, which the blog post says is an example of “the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products.”

That may be how Google sees its personalized search, but others see it as a fundamental breach of Google’s core search mission, since competitors like Twitter and Facebook argue that it favors Google’s own social network over others (and have created a browser tool that they say demonstrates this imbalance). The search feature could even provide further ammunition for antitrust regulators, who already have the company in their sights.

The storm of criticism over the new personalized search, which appears to break Google’s original promise to users that it would provide “objective” search results, seems to have made many suspicious of any change that Google makes, and some argue that this has caused people to over-react to the new privacy policy. Kashmir Hill at Forbes, for example, points out that the new policy isn’t even a major change from Google’s earlier policy, which also gave the company the right to share your information between different services. The “Internet freak-out” over the policy change is unwarranted, she says.

But the policy issue seems to have highlighted for many a crucial question: Is Google having all of that info about you — including web searches, Google Analytics data from your website, even location information — a good thing? Mat Honan at Gizmodo says that Google is clearly straying over the line towards being evil, and others argue that the changes mean the company is turning its back on privacy for its own selfish interests. Some privacy advocates say the new policy is “frustrating and a little frightening.”

Does Google want to serve you better, or serve advertisers better?

As The Economist notes in a piece on the privacy changes, one of the driving forces behind the sharing of information between Google services is that this will allow the search giant to more efficiently identify and target users for advertising — in other words, the same goal that Facebook has in offering many of its new features, such as its “frictionless sharing” apps and even the new Timeline personal history feature. This is also at the core of the uneasiness about both services accumulating more and more personal data: it may make things easier, but for whom? Does it just make it easier for Google and Facebook to attract advertisers, or is it actually beneficial for users as well?

Not everyone is critical of being targeted, however: Christopher Dawson at ZDNet, for example, says he is enthusiastically in favor of Google’s information sharing, because he says he wants the company to get better at identifying important or relevant information for him — including ads. But for others, Google’s moves reinforce just how much the giant company knows about them, from their browsing history to their email conversations. For those who want to “compartmentalize” their lives, with some services reserved for personal use and others for business or public use, the pooling of information is a very real threat.

Google makes a point of noting that you can export your data from most of its services, thanks to an effort it calls the Data Liberation Front, so users who don’t like their information being shared can take their business elsewhere. But there is no “opt out” that allows users to not take part in this data sharing — and that could be an issue for Google as regulators like the European Union put more and more focus on what some have called the “right to be forgotten” and the need to give users more control over what happens to their personal information.

The bottom line is that whether you see Google’s new privacy policy as evil or not depends on what you think the company’s purpose is: Is it to help users find information that is relevant to them? If so, then pooling information is probably good. But if Google’s potential distortion of that purpose with its personalized search and favoritism towards Google+ results has you suspicious about its motives, then it might look a little evil. In the end, you have to answer the question: “Does Google have my best interests at heart?”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Josh Halletti and Christian Ditatompel

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The Mountain View based search giant is moving to unify its service policy soon, which is great news for simplification of the services they offer. However, it may not be as good as it sounds. Read more…

Neowin.net

Google’s much hyped plan to bring a 1 Gbps Internet service to the citizens of Kansas City has been delayed by months, reportedly due to a dispute over how the fiber wires are hung on utility poles. Read more…

Neowin.net

Google created an online petition to show members of Congress that the American public opposes SOPA and PIPA – and collected 4.5 million virtual signatures in one day. Read more…

Neowin.net

Google censored its homepage logo in the US to protest against two bills that could damage the Internet and destroy its core values. “Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA,” explains Google.

Google’s homepage also includes a link that asks users to “tell Congress: please don’t censor the Internet.” The censored logo is only available in the US, but the link is also displayed outside US.

While the new bills may seem to be well-intended, they’re easy to abuse and they’ll not stop piracy. “These bills would grant new powers to law enforcement to filter the Internet and block access to tools to get around those filters. We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA also eliminate due process. They provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution,” mentions a Google blog post.

Google’s suggestion is to cut the funding for pirate sites. For example, ad services would be required to stop providing ads for sites created to infringe copyright and payment services would no longer be allowed to intermediate transactions between US residents and the company that owns the pirate site. I’m not sure that’s a great idea because this law could also be abused.

Wikipedia and WordPress were a lot braver: they decided to make it more difficult to access their content. “For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.” That’s the message you’ll see today when you visit a page from the English Wikipedia (unless you press Escape before the page loads, you disable JavaScript, you visit Google’s cached pages or use a plugin like Readability). Probably Google didn’t want to divert all its search traffic to Bing and other search engines, but many top search results are Wikipedia pages, so Wikipedia’s blackout will affect Google users.

Google Operating System

Google’s attempt to simplify the navigation bar wasn’t very successful. The menu released six weeks ago is no longer available and it has been replaced with the old black navigation bar.

I tried to see if it was just a temporary bug, but almost all the browsers I tested displayed the black navigation bar. The only browser that still displayed the menu was Chrome, but that was no longer case after clearing the cookies.

Google indirectly confirmed this change two days ago, when the screenshots from a Google blog post included the old bar.

Sometimes, when you try to simplify things, you end up making them more complicated. Navigation elements should be obvious and hiding them in a menu doesn’t make them easy to find. The huge menu took more space than the navigation bar and made the homepage less attractive. Hopefully, Google will fix the navigation interface and release a better version.

Google Operating System

Diane Greene has joined the board of directors of Google, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced today. Greene was the CEO of VMware but was replaced by current CEO Paul Maritz a few years ago. Greene, who was the co-founder of VMWare is quite plugged in to the Silicon Valley ecosystem. She is super smart and is probably one of the better board appointments. Good move by Google. From Google’s blog post:

An experienced entrepreneur, technological innovator, and corporate executive with more than three decades of experience, Greene will also serve on Google’s Audit Committee. Her appointment is effective January 12, 2012.

“Diane is a special person who combines a sharp business acumen with a brilliant technical mind,” said Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. “We know she will be a great contributor and we are grateful to have her insight.”

“Google is an asset to society because of its relentless focus on improving users’ lives through pioneering technology, and it is also a standout growing business,” said Greene. “It is incredibly exciting to have the opportunity to support this as a board member.”

Greene, 56, has been a member of the board of directors of Intuit Inc. since August 2006. Greene co-founded VMware, Inc. in 1998 and took the company public in 2007. She served as Chief Executive Officer and President of VMware from 1998 to 2008, as a member of the board of directors of VMware from 2007 to 2008, and as an Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation from 2005 to 2008.

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