Marketing Pilgrim

There’s now a place in the US, where using Google can land you in jail: a San Diego courtroom.

According to the Union Tribune, a case going before a California jury will be the first to enforce a rule preventing jurors from using Google (or the web in general) to conduct research on the case, or from updating their social networking status.

…jurors will have to sign declarations attesting that they will not use “personal electronic and media devices” to research or communicate about any aspect of the case. That includes computers, cell phones and laptops. Jurors will have to sign the declarations, made under penalty of perjury, both before and after they serve.

Ask not what your current company can do for you, but what you can do for Google!

That’s the battle cry just sent out by Google’s top search engineer Matt Cutts. In a brazen attempt to convince departing Yahoo employees to consider the dark side of the force Google, Cutts has posted the following to his blog.

I was talking to an excellent new Googler that joined from Yahoo this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago. So I’ll keep this post short and sweet: if you’re an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring. If you want to apply for a Software Engineer (SWE) position in Mountain View, use this job page and the application will make it to the right recruiters. Thanks!

Adobe is now moving into another area of the Internet space with its purchase of web analytics company Omniture. Adobe’s suite of products is well known but has been losing its traction over the recent past. In the Internet world, Adobe is probably best known for it’s anti-search product Flash that has been a favorite of web designers and the bane of the SEO’s existence for quite some time.

CNN Money tells us that analysts weren’t too thrilled with this deal

Trip Chowdhry, managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, agreed that the acquisition is a “smart move” on Adobe’s part because it may help offset declining revenues from the company’s Creative Suite of software. However, he believes Adobe overpaid for Omniture because the company is losing market share to rival Google Analytics.

In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.

Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”

What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports:

[Clicker] creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.

Lest we forget, social networks aren’t the only copycats. Search engines certainly do their fair share of feature and markup poaching, as evidenced this week by Google’s latest video search additions: understanding the microformat data from Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa.

Oh, sure, Google says they’re in it to help us find more (and more relevant) videos. As if their mission were cataloguing the world’s information and, like, making it accessible.

Oh wait.

Google’s Webmaster Central blog announces the new capabilities to provide more contextual data about a video as a way for webmasters to get their videos seen in search results. (Previous help in this area came from video sitemaps and mRSS.) The post notes:

Have you ever experienced a time where you had some important data stored in a SaaS (software as a service) application like e-mail or CRM and you wanted your data out of the application? Sounds simple enough, right? After all it is your data? Often times this turns into a process / project that makes little sense to the end user who is indignant that they can’t easily get their own data. The provider, however, has every reason to either make the process difficult or just stall because it gives them time to make a ‘save’.