Marketing Pilgrim

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According to TechCrunch, you may soon be able to "flip" through your favorite news stories on Google. Flipper is not yet public, but by the look of the screenshots below it appears that Google News is going for that same experience you get when you pick up your favorite daily newspaper.

How’s a modern search engine supposed to grow market share if it can’t rely on serving up internet pornography? </sarcasm>

Well, Google’s going to have to take on China’s leading search engine Baidu, without the help of those that use the search engine to locate naked flesh. According to AP, China’s main watchdog, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, is unhappy that Google is not adequately conforming to its pornography ban.

The watchdog said that despite official warnings, Google was still failing to “filter pornographic contents from its search engine results according to China’s relevant laws and regulations.” It said tests found that the search engine provided links to a large number of lewd and vulgar pictures, videos and articles, though it gave no specific examples.

How about a nice ‘feel good’ story to take you into the weekend? The news in the Internet marketing industry has been focused on negative numbers, downturns and dire forecasts for quite a while now. Personally, I get a little worn out by it. It’s good to be reminded, however, of just how potentially life altering (a little hyperbole never hurt anyone) the use of social media can be. Staples, one of the best known brands for those with school age children, is using its name via Facebook to do some good for kids who may not have the means to even have decent school supplies.

Google has taken a serious step in Deutschland regarding how much data they keep for their Street View service. This offering has been the target of privacy groups and angry villagers for quite some time now but Google looks like it is giving back some power to the people. Of course, having the German government involved likely ‘influenced’ their decision.

Mashable brings Google’s new policy into focus;

You might be wondering what’s new here; after all, Google (Google) has been blurring Street View imagery containing potentially sensitive data like faces and license plates, on request, for quite a while now.

However, in Germany, there will be a crucial difference, because over there Google has agreed to completely erase such data internally. AP writes:

Although Google Books may still face government scrutiny over its author settlement, the service is forging ahead with new features—lots of new features. (Think they’re gearing up for something?)

Google is still hard at work organizing the world’s information and making it accessible—they’ve improved everything from their in-book search tool to the book overview pages, from table-of-contents navigation to thumbnail page views. And probably biggest of all, they’ve added a new embed feature:

(You know you need more F. Scott in your life.)

To better navigate within these books, Google is offering everything from plain text versions of the text (well, OCRed versions) to thumbnail views of all pages. They’ve also added a pull-down menu with the book’s table of contents for faster navigation. And they’ve made the page-by-page navigation faster and easier to use with page turning buttons and better animation. Finally, they’ve improved their in-book search to show larger context snippets.