Marketing Pilgrim

Verne Kopytoff has a recap of yesterday’s press day at Google. I missed the first part of the web cast, but it appears Sergey Brin really doesn’t like Microsoft.

He voiced concerns that Microsoft may use illegal tactics to give its own search engine preferential treatment in an upcoming release of its Windows Vista operating system for computers. He then recalled Microsoft’s past legal battle with the now-defunct Netscape Communications Corp. over Internet browsers in which Microsoft was found by a federal court to have abused its power.

“We certainly see a history with that particular company, Microsoft, behaving anti-competitively, being a convicted monopoly,” Brin said. He then talked about Google taking preemptive action against any future abuse by Microsoft, including lobbying the Justice Department.

Lots of bloggers at Google Press Day. One working exceptionaly hard to post all the comments, is Google’s own Matt Cutts.

It’s the most comprehensive coverage of all the blogs.

Nice work Matt!

So Google Health was a slight-of-hand, what we really got today was Google Co-op (beta, of course). From Google’s press release…

Google Co-op beta is a community where users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone. Organizations, businesses, or individuals can label web pages relevant to their areas of expertise or create specialized links to which users can subscribe.

Once a user has subscribed to a provider’s content, all of that provider’s labels and subscribed links are added to the user’s search results for relevant queries. These contributions serve as meta information that helps Google’s search algorithms connect users to the most relevant information for their specific query. Users interested in contributing can get started at www.google.com/coop.

SEW has details of a new beta version of Google Desktop just announced. The new version includes Google Gadgets, which includes a host of cool new widgets.

Listening to the Google Press Day stream, it appears the company is going to launch has launched Google Trends – basically opening up Google Zeitgeist to marketers.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

For when you want to be there, but can’t.

ClickZ reports the Ziff Davis Game Group is today launching Gazerk, a vertical search engine for the gaming vertical, powered by Kosmix.