Background: eBay uses PayPal as one of the medium of money transaction. Google started with ‘Google Checkout’. Google wants eBay to move to Checkout from PayPal.

1. eBay live is set to start in Boston.
2. Google announces ‘Let Freedom Ring’ same place same time as eBay live.
3. Google clarifies that the reason for Let Freedom Ring to take place at same place and same time is to ‘expose eBay users to power of checkout’
4. eBay clarifies ‘ we do not want to use checkout as it is unproven’
5. Google insists that ‘let freedom ring’ will continue.
6. eBay in an experimental move removes all ‘AdWords’ from eBay US to check for other possibilities.
7. Google decides to cancel ‘let freedom ring’
8. eBay confirms that ‘experiment’ will continue.
9. Google for the first time in history responded ‘No Comments’
10. …

Reports : Google send traffic to eBay. accounting for 10.6% of its traffic for Tuesday 6/7/07. From daily clickstream, that percentage dropped to 9.86% for Tuesday 6/12/07, representing a near 7% drop from the previous Tuesday. [source]

Is Google firing back? If they are doing it, is it legal for a search engine to do something like this? Is it first time in history of Google that they have lost to someone? (at least for me, it is first time)

While Googling, I saw a link on left side ‘Google Web History’. As ever I was curious and signed up for it, but was wondering. Already Google search history is helping me a lot, but I am always scared that I am being tracked for 75% of my time on internet. What if I start using this service, this will help me a lot. My 100% clicks on internet would be stored in Google’s servers. But what if they sell that data? What if there is theft?

Its simple, many people will say, if you are that scared than why are you using these services? But these services have made my life easier. Search history helps me save 5-10% time; I can sort out things faster. Is there any way I can enjoy the services and feel secured also? Do we have laws to handle issues that are going to appear in future?

Or is it just me who is scared??

Found this (Google – The Ultimate Money Making Machine) article at my netvibes and was wondering is this analysis proper? It’s a great article and clears a lot of doubt. Good comparison between economics of normal web companies and Google. But one doubt remains, why can’t anyone else catch up with Google? Why only Google is able to exploit the unlimited demand market? Is it just the technological edge that Google has or something else?

New! Introducing Gmail Paper
Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it’s here. We’re bringing it back.

Prank 1 : Google Paper
Prank 2 : Google TiSP

digg story

Google released one more feature in Gmail, and according to me, it’s a very important feature and will develop a lot more confidence in Gmail users. Now we can set up to 5 POP3 accounts in gmail and it will fetch mails from those accounts to gmail inbox. So finally my dream of using a ‘universal mail box’ had come true. This feature has not been provided to everyone (as usual) and will be rolled out soon.

Best part about this feature, it’s very simple to configure and good example is provided as always. Just one doubt, is this one of the contributions by thunderbird developers or it’s completely Google’s idea (i.e Google – Mozilla developers)

Yesterday after I submitted my site to Google, I was redirected a page where I could monitor my site position with respect to Google crawler and have to configure options like how often I want my site to be crawled etc. One option that attracted me the most was, Enable enhanced image search? Image searching has always been my interest and always bugs me with questions like how to provide meta-data to images? How to gather the data? How far we have progressed in content based image search?

Only solution that seemed to me was providing as much labeling to images as we can provide, and using that image search would be easier. But the biggest question was if some search engine wants to provide this functionality, the engine will have to check the content of image and we don’t have algorithms for that. Only options remaining now is manual labeling, but with zillions of pictures over internet it would be impossible. But as always Google has a solution here too.

When someone enables ‘enhanced image search’ for his site, the images would be manually labeled. But the catch is, images would be labeled by Google users, who wish to participate in a small game called “Google Image Labeler”. Very simple game, computer will automatically select a random partner for you. After partner selection the 90 second stop watch will start, and one image would be shown to you as well as your partner. You have to label it according to what you think; partner will also label it (unknowing of what you have labeled) and when some label matches, you will move to next image. This way Google gets all the data it wants. I don’t know how successful it would be and how many people will participate in it, but looking at example for SETI@Home, we can say it’s a nice approach by Google.

Only doubt that remains is, why will people provide there time for enhancing image search? Google has made it like a game, and people get points and there name is displayed on a webpage, but is it worth. I was never interested in SETI@Home as was not interested in spending my processing power for some cause which I am not interested in, I always went with Folding@Home ( seems more logical to me as well as something you do for humanity). Thinking in same direction, I wonder how many people would be interested in enhancing image search.