The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

For some reason, my request for a face-to-face interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was unsuccessful. Apparently, I needed to ask in 1996 to get an appointment any time soon. Nonetheless, the Google people were keen to answer my questions about the business. On the less positive side, I had to do the whole thing by email and the answers need to be attributed to a ‘Google spokesperson’. As I’ve said before, I think email interviews are less than satisfactory. Being a big company, they have to be pretty circumspect and so some of the answers are a bit bland, to say the least. Nonetheless, thought I’d share a portion of what they provided. Thank you, Oliver at Google UK, for co-ordinating this.

How do you define Web 2.0, if indeed you consider it worthy of a definition?

Here at Google we have no single definition of web 2.0. For us, the development of our services rests on keeping creative and innovative, maintaining our focus on improving user experience, and our goal to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Two commonly used indicators of Web 2.0 are “the web as platform” and “the wisdom of crowds”. How is Google currently implementing these? A third element that tends to be cited is “the web as a social experience”. Are you active in this space?

Our overall view is “Don’t bet against the Internet”. What’s exciting today is that technologies like AJAX are making it possible for browser-based applications to have the rich functionality that used to only be possible with desktop-based applications.

A big objection to web applications is trust. How might this be overcome?

Google is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We recognise that our continued success is based on earning - and keeping - our users’ trust. Unlike a credit card company or mobile phone operator, our users can switch to a competing search provider with the click of a mouse. All our work at Google is guided by clear privacy principles.

At Google:

- We build privacy protections into our products from the ground up;

- None of our products use any personal data unless fully disclosed in a privacy policy;

- We always ask people actively to opt-in to services that use sensitive data;

- We write our privacy policies in simple clear language so that users can easily understand them - they are not the usual legal jargon; and

- We allow people to use most of our services anonymously, and we even tell them how they can disable our cookies that they have been sent.

In addition, Google will take legal action to protect its users’ privacy. In 2005 the US Government asked us to provide two months worth of users’ search queries and billions of web addresses (URLs) as part of its effort to defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 federal law that seeks to ban Internet sites from displaying content deemed ”harmful to minors”. The US Supreme Court ruled that the law couldn’t be enforced unless the Government could prove that less intrusive measures (such as Internet filtering) had proven inadequate.

Google challenged these demands. As Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel, has explained:

While privacy was not the most significant legal issue in this case (because the Government wasn’t asking for personally identifiable information), privacy was perhaps the most significant to our users. As we noted in our briefing to the court, we believe that if the Government was permitted to require Google to hand over search queries that could have undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private. (Google Blog, 17th March 2006).

A US judge largely ruled in our favor - forcing the Government to exclude all search queries from its demand and to limit the number of URLs to just 50,000. We believe that this was a real victory for privacy, and for our users.

How does AJAX help Google deliver a better service/experience?

With AJAX, web sites can be more dynamic and interactive, and the user interface can be more responsive. For example, AJAX technologies are behind the draggable maps on Google Maps. Likewise, AJAX technologies are behind Google Suggest, letting us display query suggestions from Google’s legions of servers in real time as the user types. These types of interactive features are enabled by AJAX, and they have let Google develop novel and innovative interfaces that improve our ability to deliver information to our users.

So-called “mashups” using the Google Maps API (in particular) are causing a lot of excitement. Why do you think this is the case? Any favourites there? Is this the future? (i.e. will the trend towards open APIs become dominant? why?)

Mapping has traditionally been a very expensive and complex technology. With the Google Maps API, web developers can incorporate maps into their web pages for free and with very little programming experience. Because the API is so accessible, web developers whose web sites had geographic data quickly adopted Google Maps to make their web sites more interactive, attractive, and useful for their users. We are really excited to see such wide adoption from such a wide range of web sites. There is such a variety of sites that use the Google Maps API, everyone on the team has their own favourite. We even do our own mash-ups sometimes, such as our integration of the stages of the Tour de France 2006 into Google Earth, which you can read about here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/tour-de-france-goes-3d-with-google.html

Google’s business model is generally to provide free services and monetize those services with targeted advertising. Open APIs like the Google Maps API are very compatible with this business model, and we hope to open up more of our computing infrastructure to developers in the future.

One driver (IMHO) of Web 2.0 is a demand for authentic, word-of-mouth relationships and referrals. Is web searching going out of fashion any time soon?

While it is difficult to speculate about future trends, we feel that providing relevant answers to search queries is something that users want and value, and we continue to devote the majority of our time to developing and improving upon our search services.

It’s important to remember that today only around 10 to 15% of the world’s information is available online. The more information that comes online, the more important search will become.

I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.

The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.

What makes for interestingness on flickr? It’s an aggregation of the number of notes, comments, favouritedness (sorry) and links to a submitted image.

The photo itself has been annotated a number of times by users. They point to the slight inequality between the eyes, the shape of the lips and the relationship between the woman, the photographer and the second woman in the picture. The comments are nearly all in Spanish, but my tourist-level translation skills suggest that she’s thought of as very beautiful by a lot of people.

But ‘interesting’? What does that word mean? (adjective 1. arousing curiosity or attention: arousing curiosity, attracting or holding attention, or provoking thought 2. not boring: enjoyable because of being varied, challenging, stimulating, or exciting). Thank you, Encarta.

Yes, she’s interesting. But the definition gives no idea of how to rank interesting things. In fact, it appears to be an entirely subjective quality, judging from that definition. That’s true in normal life too, of course. I tell people that I am interested in Web 2.0, and they tell me to grow-up and get a life. Does the fact that the vast majority of comments are in Spanish not suggest that there is a very strong cultural weighting to the idea of ‘interesting’?

I raise this because my new pal, Tim O’Reilly, has recently written on the subject:

Google made a breakthrough in web search with its original idea of links as citations (i.e. PageRank), and they are still the undisputed leader in general web search, but they haven’t done as well in searching rich media. I think they have some things to learn from Flickr. More specifically, web search innovators all need to think through what makes results “interesting” for a given domain. I like what flickr has done in calling out “interestingness” as a quality worth searching for, and leaving it as a playground for exploration.

I kind of agree. Interestingness is a quality worth searching for. I don’t want the most popular links on the subject I search for, say “mashups”, like Google gives me. I want the most interesting and informative one or two. Oh… hang on… that’s exactly how interestingness on flickr is calculated.

We don’t have agreement on the philosophical meaning of beauty, but we do have computer algorithms that will calculate it according to most people’s criteria. Again, we have a populist interpretation of very personal values. So by that scale…

Picasso is more interesting than Mondrian. That picture of dogs playing poker is more interesting than either. Still interested?

So, lovely to see farecast, even in a limited beta. Please, UK hackers - find a way to make it easier to buy train tickets! (5% would suit me fine, guys).

Pete Cashmore’s post about this here