Google: Power and privacy

A country club on the fringes of London has been the meeting place for all sorts of powerful and interesting people from all over the world for the last two days.

They included political figures like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, business leaders from Sir Richard Branson to Jean-Bernard Levy of Vivendi, media bosses like the BBC's Mark Thompson and Carolyn McCall of Guardian Media Group - and even royalty in the form of Prince Charles and the crown princes of both Spain and Norway.

Who could attract such a crowd? Google, of course. Its annual Zeitgeist event is becoming a rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos for movers and shakers who want to know where the most powerful business on the web is heading.

On the final afternoon, even a few journalists were allowed in for what seemed like a routine demo of products that many of us had already seen - like Google Squared, the "structured data search" which might blow Wolfram Alpha out of the water when it launches, or Gmail Video Chat, which is already out there for anyone to try.

Then, without warning and just as the journalists were in danger of nodding off, two billionaires slipped quietly into the room, and we all perked up. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, and Larry Page, the firm's co-founder, had come to answer our questions..

No, Larry Page revealed, he hadn't tested Wolfram Alpha yet, though his co-founder Sergey Brin had tried the computational knowledge engine - and, of course, any competition was welcome.

Google Video Chat was better quality than Skype and yes, "quite significant" numbers of people were using it - this was Eric Schmidt's response to my sceptical query about the product. Others wanted to know whether Twitter, now increasingly seen as a "breaking news" service by its users, was forcing Google to focus on real-time search.

Larry Page said that speed and relevance were Google's watchwords - the company even gave out stopwatches to its employees to stress that message - but he didn't seem too worried about Twitter.

One subject on just about everyone's mind, however, was privacy. A German journalist appeared particularly concerned that her house could be seen on Street View - to such an extent that Eric Schmidt seemed eager to deal personally with getting it removed.

Street View is just one issue which is helping to crystallise the concerns of both consumers and regulators about the threat which the search giant might pose to privacy. But Larry Page, in particular, seemed determined to prove that he wouldn't let the business be shackled by such concerns.

To the journalists, and later to the whole Zeitgiest crowd during an onstage chat with Eric Schmidt, he enthused about a couple of Google geo-location products: Latitude and an Android application called Tracks, which tell your firends where exactly you are.

And, when asked about EU pressure to reduce the length of time that Google holds on to data, he had a clear riposte. That sort of policy, he explained, could make the data less valuable not just for his company, but for anyone wanting to predict events like a flu pandemic by examining patterns in searches over a long period: "I don't feel the public as a whole and the regulators have engaged in enough of a debate to know what the issues are."

Faced with the prospect of more regulation, guess what? Google thinks that that's a really bad idea. "Historically, when markets get regulated, the rate of innovation slows dramatically," Eric Schmidt told us."We don't think that's a good outcome - we think a better outcome is for us to use good judgement. We take what we see as the consumer interest as our guiding principle."

Google's billionaire bosses are amiable fellows, willing to engage with journalists on just about any issue. But as their company reaches into every corner of our online lives, they are bound to face more questions about how they wield their power. Telling the regulators that Google knows best what's good for consumers may not wash.

There's money to be made from blogging - uh, right?

Late last month Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's notoriously inept campaign pollster, published an article in the Wall Street Journal asserting, "There are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters."

Penn's lunacy, buttressed by the claim that almost half a million Americans used blogging as their primary source of income, prompted howls of derision from bloggers.

"Fantastically bogus and clueless," Mickey Kaus wrote on the Slate website.

But as the ranks of print journalists dwindle, and the army of Lilliputian opinioneers swells, wouldn't it be nice to know if there is money to be made blogging?

I have been monitoring the career of ace Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern, a cast member of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strip, whose transition to Internet journalism has been rocky at best. Are there gold nuggets buried in the digital dross?

There is a small aristocracy of early-adopting bloggers who have become successful online publishers, such as Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos or Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. If you can get a media giant such as New York Times Digital or the Atlantic magazine to pay you to blog, good on you. There are well-read academic bloggers such as Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who blogs for free. He writes textbooks, he has a nice day job -- it's all good, as the kids say.

Then there is everyone else. Millions of them.

The website Technorati pegged bloggers' median annual costs at $80 and the median average revenue at $200. Bloggers with advertising spent a mean of $1,800 on their sites and harvested bigger bucks, about $6,000 a year. Enough to feed a family of four. Mice.

How do you make money? By driving traffic to your website.

Web tool 'as important as Google'

A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.

"Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

"Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.

Dr Wolfram said the "trillions of pieces of data" were chosen and managed by a team of "experts" at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.

Nova Spivak, founder of the web tool Twine, has described Alpha as having the potential to be as important to the web as Google.

Developers say Wolfram Alpha can simplify language to remove 'linguistic fluff'

"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote earlier this year. "It computes answers - it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."

Learning language

The new tool uses a technique known as natural language processing to return answers.

This allows users to ask questions of the tool using normal, spoken language rather than specific search terms.

For example, a relatively simple search, such as "who was the president of Brazil in 1923?", will return the answer "Artur da Silva Bernardes".

This technique has long been the holy grail of computer scientists who aim to allow people to interact with computers in an instinctive way.

Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved many of the problems of interpreting people's questions.

"We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case," he said.

In addition, he said, the system had got "pretty good at removing linguistic fluff", the kinds of words that are not necessary for the system to find and compute the relevant data.

Searching for 'Blair Bush' could give a different result...

Simple text

However, he said, most users tend to stop using structured sentences fairly quickly.

"Pretty soon they get lazy, and they say 'I don't need all those extra words'."

Instead they tended to use "concepts" similar to how most people use search engines today.

But Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a natural language expert, said he was "disappointed" by Dr Wolfram's "dismissal of English syntax as 'fluff'''.

For example, he said, suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?"

"Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama," he said.

...than searching for 'Bush Blair'

"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."

Dr Katz is the head of the Start project, a natural language processing tool that claims to be "the world's first web-based question answering system". It has been on the web since December 1993.

Like Alpha, the system searches a series of organised databases to return relevant answers to search queries. However, it only uses public databases and runs on a much smaller scale than Alpha.

Dr Katz said it answers "millions of questions from hundreds of thousands of users from around the world" on topics as diverse as places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.

It is also able to compute answers from several sources in a similar way to Alpha.

Web companies have also harnessed natural language processing.

For example, Powerset uses technology developed at the Palo Alto Research Center, the former research laboratories of Xerox.

The company is attempting to build a similar search engine "that reads and understands every sentence on the Web".

In May 2008, the company released a tool that allowed people to search parts of Wikipedia. Two months later, it was acquired by Microsoft.

Dr Wolfram said he has been working on Alpha for several years. However, he imagines that it will continue to evolve.

"In a sense we are at the beginning," he said.