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In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel – Europe, Middle East and Africa

Today, we’re announcing the next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers — DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

For the past few years, we’ve been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.

For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher’s ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content.

Imagine you’re a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser may want to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii may want to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.
• A fast-food restaurant wants to run their burger ads before noon and their pizza ads in the afternoon.
• You’ve sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.
• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn’t predict this, so you’re potentially left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network which has ads available.

This is really just scratching the surface. Managing ad space can involve faxes, emailed orders, the manual scheduling of different ad campaigns across multiple sites and difficult decisions about how to allocate ad space most effectively.

Major online publishers use ad serving technology to manage the complex process of how and when the ads they have sold appear on their websites. In recent years, we’ve invested significantly in our ad serving products — DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers for large publishers and Google Ad Manager for growing publishers. Thousands of major online publishers use these products to serve billions of ad impressions every day.

But we see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad serving experience. Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites.

The upgraded DFP includes a wide variety of features that will help publishers to get the most value out of their online content:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks. Dynamic allocation is described in this document [PDF].

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers’ needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. We’ll be upgrading current DART for Publishers publishers to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year as we continue to add features and modules, and we’ll be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks.

To reflect our continued investment in DoubleClick’s products, as well as the central role of DoubleClick’s technology products within Google’s display advertising business, we’re also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos — including typeset changes, incorporating a new “by Google” theme and retiring the “DART” brand.

The upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers is a perfect example of our continuing innovation in this area, and we believe that it will add significant value to online publishers’ content. You can read more about the features of the upgraded DFP on the DoubleClick blog and on the DFP website.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

This week, real-time search took center stage, along with a surging interest in the Winter Games in Vancouver.

Real-time search in Russia and Japan
Since the release of real-time search in December, we’ve seen that finding real-time content — often the only source of online information at the time — can be quite profound. For example, recently when California experienced a few earthquakes, real-time content appeared in search results just seconds after the ground shook. As you can imagine, getting this functionality out to the rest of the world has been a top priority. Because of this, we recently launched real-time search with Russian and Japanese, the first of the languages we plan to support. We want to bring you this functionality globally, so stay tuned as we add more countries.

MySpace in real time
Also in real-time news, starting this week we officially added MySpace content to real-time search. Now you can tap into the pool of news, photos and blog posts that MySpace users have chosen to publish to the world. These updates are all ranked to reflect the most relevant, freshest results, many of which are just seconds old. In all, real-time search includes more than a billion documents and processes hundreds of millions of changes daily. We’re quite excited to offer this enhancement so that real-time search becomes even more useful. You can find the MySpace updates in our real-time mode by clicking on “Show Options” and then “Updates.”

Example search: [myspace]

Better site searches for Images
Based on feedback from users and webmasters, we have improved the [site:] operator for Google Images. In the past, the [site:] operator filtered based on the image URL, not based on the URL of web pages linking to the images. Now, the operator will run your search over web sites that include images, no matter where the images themselves are hosted, which removes a lot of noise from your results and gives you more control over what you’re searching for.

Example searches: [site:digg.com space shuttle], [site:morbidanatomy.blogspot.com], [site:flickr.com/photos/polvero]

Trends in searching for the Winter Games
It’s been a week since the Winter Games in Vancouver began, and it’s clear you have great interest in finding out more about the games. From women’s downhill to curling rules, we’ve seen searches rise as people everywhere watch the quest for gold. Check out Google Trends to see what’s of greatest interest now.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s features. Stay tuned for what’s next!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

We are always interested in hearing what you think, your ideas, your suggestions, and even your complaints. We pay attention to all feedback, and when we can we incorporate it into our short and long term planning. So, what’s the best way to make sure you are heard? That’s the easiest part of all.

Have you tried the Alexa Site Finder recently? If not, we’ve made a few improvements that you might want to check out.

The Alexa Site Finder is different type of search engine, one that is designed to find websites about topics instead of pages related to them. Normally when we search for something online, we go to our favorite search engine (or the search box in our browser), type in a few words, and hit return. What we get is a list of pages related to those words through various algorithms and ranked by some sort of measure of relevance and importance. Often that is exactly what we want, pages that answer a specific question that we want answered.

Sometimes, however, I find I’m more interested in finding an entire website devoted to a topic. I’m more interested in discovery than an answer to a specific question. For example, pages that considered relevant to generic keywords such as “woodworking” or “insurance” are different than websites dedicated them, and using simple keyword searches it can be difficult to find websites about those topics because they’re buried among a sea of pages.

This is where the Alexa Site Finder comes in. I can type “insurance” into the Find sites about box, press Go, and I have a list of websites about insurance. The Site Finder also returns the Alexa Traffic Rank for the site, along with possibly a description and popular search keywords that drive traffic to the site. The Alexa Traffic Rank is a measure of popularity, and the lower the rank, the more people visit and use the site (Google is rank 1). I like this extra information because I can usually use it to quickly decide if the site is one I’m interested in or not.

The Site Finder also allows me to filter my results by Country, Language, Category, Alexa Traffic Rank, and Adult Content. For example, I can filter my search results to include sites with no adult content and with predominantly US users. Or I can can restrict my searches to sites with ranks less than 100,000 to identify only popular sites, or with ranks greater than 100,000 to find those on the long tail.

So the next time you are in the mood to discover new sites on the web, try the Alexa Site Finder. I think you will find that it’s a valuable tool, allowing you to move past endless lists of pages and focus in on sites dedicated to the content you are interested in. If you have any thoughts on how we might improve the Alexa Site Finder, please leave them in the comments below. You can also reach us through twitter, either @AlexaInternet or me personally @wcoburn. I’d love to hear what you think.

When we search for something on the internet, either through a search engine like Google or a site’s dedicated search, we’re showing our intent. Our exact intent isn’t always obvious, a search for “Italian coffee maker” could indicate we want to purchase an stove top espresso maker, or that we’re looking for instructions on how to brew Italian style coffee, or even trying to find an Italian coffee shop. Most modern search engines, however, do a fairly good job of guessing what we might be interested in and showing us results we’re interested in. It is this intent that makes search engines so important.

If you own a website, you of course want your site to be considered among the most relevant for searches that apply to your site. But what are the best searches to optimize for? It’s easy to generate a short list of terms that seem important, but are people really searching for those terms? Your site analytics will tell you which terms are sending traffic your way via various search engines, but which terms are you missing? Also, wouldn’t it be great to know which terms are sending traffic to your competitors, and how important they are?

This is where Alexa Search Analytics comes in.

There are three pieces of data we present: Search Traffic, Top Keywords from Search Traffic, and Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic.

Search Traffic is an estimate of the percentage of visits to the site that come from search engines. The goal of most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) initiatives is to increase the percentage of quality traffic to a site coming from search engines, and Search Traffic indicates how well this is working. In the example to the right, the numbers are steady at slightly under 1 in 3 visits coming from search engines. What does this graph say about your competitors? Are the numbers climbing, indicating that they recently launched a successful SEO initiative? How do their SEO efforts compare to yours?

Next are the Top Keywords from Search Traffic. These are the keywords and keyword phrases driving traffic the most traffic to the site. In the example, the top 10 keyword phrases account for less than 3.5% of the total search engine traffic, meaning that this site is optimized for a wide range of phrases. This is good, because the more phases search engines consider you relevant to, the more potential traffic you can drive to your site. What does your site analytics say about your keywords? What do we say about your competitors? Do they have a wider variety of terms leading to their site? If so, you might start thinking about ways to improve your SEO.

Lastly are the Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic. These are the important terms, because they’re there keyword terms and phrases that are driving significant amounts of traffic to the site you are analyzing. The relative importance of the phrases to the site is indicated by the green bar. In the example to the right, which has been truncated for space, we again see a wide variety of terms. These are often different from the Top Keywords, because again this list takes into account how popular the term itself is. You can, however, and should ask similar questions. What does this list say about your competitor’s SEO? Is it dominated by a few words, or is there a broad range? How do you compare? Can you identify phrases that offer you the best opportunities?

Thoughts? Then please leave a comment below! Note, however, that all comments are moderated, and comments containing URLs will be deleted. You can also reach us through twitter, either @AlexaInternet or me personally @wcoburn. And, as always, you can leave us a message in the Alexa Forums. I am very interested to hear what you have to say about this.

Since we reintroduced website reviews on Alexa, we have received a number of requests from webmasters for help getting their site reviewed. Well, one of the easiest ways to get visitors to review your site is to politely ask them to. If a visitor loves your site and wants to help promote it, it should be easy. But we wanted to make it even easier, so you can now download one of our new Alexa Reviews Widget and place it on your site.

If you are familiar with the Alexa Site Widgets, the Review Widget is similar. All you need to do is go to the For Site Owners area on Alexa.com, where you will see the full selection of widgets we have to offer, and select Get Reviews Widgets. We offer two styles of Reviews Widget, each in three sizes. Choose the one you want, enter in the domain of your website, and we’ll generate a short snippet of HTML code that is ready to cut and paste into place. It’s simple and easy, so what are you waiting for? Install an Alexa Reviews Widget on your site today.