On second thought, maybe we should be careful about how we use the word ‘google.’ Big G’s trademark lawyers have gotten awfully trigger-happy over the last couple weeks. First, they sent cease & desist letters to publications that dared to use ‘to google’ as a stand-in for ‘to conduct a web search using Google.’ Now, says Barry Schwartz, an AdWords rep is threatening a webmaster for installing Google’s “add to Google reader” RSS button on his site. Uh, hellooo? Right Hand, meet Left Hand. Please tell each other what you’re up to.

Shoddy reason to sue Google #878676 Maybe there’s cause for Google’s lawyers to be a bit on the jumpy side, given all the ‘you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-us’ lawsuits they tend to attract. Case in point, from Techdirt: a Poynter Online story says that a Dutch dating site for farmers (Farmdate, in case you were wondering “which one?”) doesn’t like that sponsored links for “sex” sites pop up when their own site is shown in the organic listings. Not sure what they’re objecting to; the idea that dating has something to do with sex? Or maybe that the juxtaposition of “farms” and “sex” could produce unfortunate and unprofitable associations?

Coupon-spiracy Clip n’ save has come to Google Maps. They’re now offering coupon capability – and thus low-tech conversion tracking – free to any merchant with a local listing. Says Danny Sullivan, just log in here with your Google account to sign up, follow the directions, and you’ll soon see a “coupons” link added to your Google maps listing. Google’s already got a deal going with coupon king Valpak, which mails out weekly blue envelopes stuffed with coupons of the old-fashioned paper variety. Google Maps coupons, of course, must be converted to paper before use, which adds a step to the traditional coupon process.

Ah, good. New acquisitions. One of the cooler trends in online photo organization is image recognition, exemplified by beta service Riya; they’ve made facial and object recognition their bread and butter, promising a future when sites like theirs do most of the dirty work of slogging through a photo collection and usefully tagging the pictures. Google apparently sees the potential there, too, and they’ve purchased a company to help bring them up to speed – and, no, it’s not Riya. Instead, Neven Vision is now a part of the Google family, and they’ll get to work juicing up Big G’s Picasa photo service with some image recognition science.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.