Archive: July, 2008

Massive breach of privacy

A senior US District Court judge, Louis L. Stanton (South District, NY), has ordered Google to hand over approximately 12-terabytes of data to Viacom as part of the long-standing copyright infringement case between the two companies. The data Viacom is interested in contains the log-in name, IP address and a list of videos requested from each and every YouTube user. Google has also been ordered to hand over a list of every YouTube video that was removed from the system for any reason.

Viacom successfully argued it needed this data to study the popularity of copyrighted material vs. non-copyrighted material on Google’s YouTube video search engine. To offer a base comparison, the Library of Congress is thought to contain between 12 and 20-terabytes of information.

(1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte /1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte /1,048,576 (1,024²) megabytes = 1 terabyte, or, think about a really, really big building, the kind that could hold an Olympic sized swimming pool and about 4,000 spectators. Fill it full, floor to ceiling, with paper. That’s about the size of the data Viacom wants to see. – calculations courtesy of wisegeek.com)

Links are the through-ramps of the World Wide Web. Used to move website visitors from point A to point B, links are the sinew that bind all websites together. Because links are virtual recommendations from one page to another, Google based its original page sorting and ranking algorithm, PageRank, on judging the importance of a web-page by the number and caliber of links directed to that page from other web-pages. Ten years later, links remain one of the most important elements weighed by Google when ranking individual web-pages.

Actually, the word important is sort of an understatement. Links are gold at Google. A well optimized website with strong and highly relevant incoming links is going to rank well at Google. In our practice, this is a truism that is very rarely wrong.

Google appreciates SEOs when they work to make websites better, more accessible and usable. It has supported the sector with information and access and even dedicated the time of several of its long-term engineers, most notably Matt Cutts, to communicating with the SEO industry.