Not our words! (Photo: Google)

Google's autocomplete function is both humorous and harmless, but as it turns out, it's getting the company in trouble in Japan. A Tokyo District Court ruled yesterday that the search giant must modify its results so it no longer incorrectly incriminates people for things they didn't do.

An unidentified man in Tokyo served Google with the lawsuit last year after it refused to edit the results when more than 10,000 suggestions appeared linking him to criminal activities and slandering his name. Google was then served with a temporary injunction, but abide by it since its search services operate outside of Japan. This week’s ruling is permanent, but the company can appeal it.

The man said the results contributed to him losing his job and being unable to get another, thus causing him mental and financial anguish. Though his claims that the search results led to his firing couldn't be proven, Google was still ordered to pay 300,000 yen ($3,100) for pain and suffering.

The unidentified Japanese man isn't the first to sue Google for its autocomplete results. In December 2011, Google was forced to pay $65,000 for defamatory search results about a French insurance company; this January an Australian man sued the company because it suggested users search "bankrupt" in conjunction with his name.

Google told CNet that it had no comment and is “studying” the ruling. No word if Jeremy Renner’s camp is thinking of a similar lawsuit.

Do I look bankrupt to you? (Photo: ODT.co.nz)

Google's autocomplete functionality, which suggests search terms as you type based on how often the terms are searched for, is a boon for lazy typers and people who aren't sure how exactly to spell "Massachusetts" (how many s's???). But autocomplete can be a life-ruiner if it proves that people frequently search for your name + an unflattering adjective/event.

Take the case of Australian surgeon Dr. Guy Hingston, whose autocomplete results suggest you search for "bankrupt" when Googling his name. Dr. Hingston is so upset at the inaccurate portrait painted by the GOOG that he filed a suit in a California court, claiming the negative autocomplete results have cost him business as a plastic surgeon.

Of course, Dr. Hingston was involved in a bankruptcy incident when an aviation company he bought went under soon after. The bankruptcy was officially annulled, but that wasn't enough to scrub the evidence of the situation from Google. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Dr. Hingston wants "$75,000 in damages plus court costs for the 'significant harm and economic loss' caused by the matter."

Dr. Hingston isn't the first person to sue based on Google's embarrassing autocomplete issues. The company had to pay a man $200,000 in damages last year for falsely conflating him with a gangland crime in search results.

Wonder if Steve Ballmer will sue for his autocomplete results, because when people search for "Steve Ballmer developers" they're definitely not looking for his dev hiring experience.

(Screencap: Google)

Google France had said earlier that the plan "would be harmful to the internet, internet users and news websites that benefit from substantial traffic" that comes via Google's search engine.

It said it redirected four billion clicks to French media pages each month.

So yes, Google is a little nervous about the possibility they may have to start shelling out Euros just to crawl French news sites. The search giant also sent a letter to the office of French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti which said in part that any law forcing them to pay "would threaten its very existence."

Imagine! They might have to charge an extra $10 for the new Chromebook to make up the shortfall.

Mobile devices: For so much more than Instagramming your dinner. (Photo: flickr.com/sixteenmilesofstring)

We've all done it: An argument breaks out at the bar/dinner table/book club meeting, about a half-remembered line of poetry or factoid about the American Revolution. What was Mick Jagger's childhood nickname? Only Google can tell you for sure. So someone hauls out a smartphone and lickety-split, the matter is settled. Back to brunch! 

Well, the matter isn't settled as far as Google is concerned, reports The New York Times. Rather than being a mere 30-second in-case-of-emergency argument ender, the company wants its search products integrated ever-deeper into your socializing, like that one dude who doesn't know when to stop dropping Trivial Pursuit factoids at the cocktail party.

According to the Times:

Googling the answer to a question has become accepted social behavior, but “it’s still somewhat awkward when you see that at a dinner party,” said Amit Singhal, senior vice president in charge of search at Google. “The key to the future is how can you make such conversations socially even more normal?”

And before you say, "duh, Google Glasses," we're talking about so much more than just being able to pull up an answer quickly, without digging in your tote for your phone:

“It’s not just a question of having screens everywhere or wearing a screen, but also this whole idea of phones and devices becoming more context-aware, so they can offer information that is highly relevant,” said Pattie Maes, founder and director of the M.I.T. Media Lab fluid interfaces group, which studies how to integrate digital information into daily life.

The example used: You and your companions begin discussing monarch butterflies; your Android pulls up a map of migratory patterns, like a total know-it-all.

We're calling it now: In fifty years, there will be no more trivia nights because no one in America will be able to retain any information whatsoever.

Swiftype's sweet offices. (swiftype.com)

Talk to anyone who primarily works on the Internet, and you'll eventually bump into the same grievance, no matter the industry: site search--the mechanism that allows users to search your website for key words--is broken. Actually, broken might be too soft a word: fucked is really more apt. On the whole, site search is fucked.

Last week we were at a bar with a fellow Observer staff writer, when the conversation turned to site search. "I abandoned my Tumblr because their site search doesn't work," he declared. We all nodded our heads in agreement.

But it's not just Tumblr. Have you ever tried to search this very website?

The most effective searchers abandon a site's search box in lieu of a defined Google query, but even Google's site search products aren't particularly reliable. It's a frustrating reality for anyone who publishes online, and it also relegates any content published before a certain time period to the bowels of the Internet. No one is going to unearth a story you wrote six months ago, no matter how relevant to your search query it is.

So when we came upon this post on TechCrunch about Y Combinator-backed startup Swiftype, a project from two ex-Scribd employees, we gleefully Skyped it to the other Betabeat staffers. "If this really works as well as it says it does, we NEED it," we typed.

And it's true: On the surface, Swiftype--which purports to add "great search to your website in minutes"--looks very much like the answer to our Internet-borne prayers. Its founders, Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie, told TechCrunch that Swiftype indexes a more comprehensive crawl than even Google site search does, making "a PageRank that’s specific to individual websites."

But this is where it gets even better: unlike Google, Swiftype allows you to control which pages display at the top of the results when a user searches a specific word. That means that if you're a blog like Betabeat, when someone searches "Apple," for example, the site administrator can choose which articles are the most relevant, and rank them thusly. It's really an editor's dream: complete control of your search results. We're kind of freaking out just thinking about it.

Swiftype just launched its public beta today, so it remains to be seen if it will actually live up to its exciting claims. We tried it out and found it a little bit buggy--when we created a search engine, it didn't index our pages like it does in the video, and when we tried to delete it, it refused to respond to our command.

Obviously the Swiftype team still has a few bugs to work out, but you should probably test it out for free before it exits beta and implements a pricing model.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder & CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can follow him at @garysguide and reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Unless you're living under a rock, you know that Apple last week announced its quarterly earnings and the entire tech industry let out a collective gasp and then promptly went into a swoon. Apple's now overtaken Exxon as the world's most valuable company and has almost $100 billion in cash reserves. Thats higher than the market cap of 474 of the S&P 500 companies. Apple's been very careful when it comes to spending its cash. Expect it to continue the trend of locking in a better deal on components in its supply chain boosting its own profit margins and increasing prices (and scarcity) for competitors. Also expect it to snap up important IP that can provide a generational leap to advance core features of its hardware (camera, screen, battery, memory, CPU). Beyond that ('n all the cool wearable computing rumors), one of the things thats imperative for Apple to do (if its not doing it already) is to finally build its own search engine. Here's why.

Google Is Enemy No. 1
Google and Apple started off as best friends with a common enemy, Microsoft. As things become more competitive, that relationship turned into more of a frenemies sort, you know, like Paris and Nicole. That is until Google launched Android, an iPhone/iOS competitor, and a direct shot across Apple's bow even as Google CEO Eric Schmidt was still on the Apple board. To say that Steve Jobs was furious is an understatement. I believe his exact words were "I am willing to go thermonuclear on them" and "spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong".

Google search, maps and video have been tightly integrated into the iOS experience since the very beginning. And I'm sure this can't be making the folks at Apple happy at all. And don't forget, Apple really, really likes having end-to-end control over what goes into its products. Apple has already quietly snapped up mind-blowing 3D map maker C3 Technologies and mapping company Placebase. So an Apple maps offering is inevitable probably in their next major iOS update, and having their own search engine to go hand-in-hand with that seems logical.

Siri
Call it premature or prescient but many are touting Siri as the future of search. We are still in the first version of Siri but it is not difficult to extrapolate how in future versions, as it gets better, it can hook into data from different apps and bring us back exactly what we were searching for without ever going to a search engine. But for now, when Siri doesn't have an answer (which is more often than not) it defaults to Google for search results. Again something that I'm sure Apple is not happy about. Siri also seems to be accumulating and crunching vast amounts of data and this has a direct effect on improving its results. So integrating their own search engine at the back end instead of Google's would be the smart thing for Apple to do.

Google Is Vulnerable
It's no secret that Google search results quality has been deteriorating for a few years now and despite the Panda update they seem to be fighting a losing battle against SEO spam. But they have still been passably good or at least on par with the competition to prevent any mass exodus. But with the recent update of integrating Google+ into their main search results while ignoring data from social competitors Twitter and Facebook and the increasingly prominent placement of Google properties such as Places at the expense of direct competitors like Yelp means that Google has finally gone bat shit crazy and sacrificed their hard earned reputation in search quality for a desperate attempt at jumpstarting Google+ as a reply to Facebook's rising web dominance. Add to that the fact that the Feds are supposedly taking a closer look at it for potential anti-trust violations and the brouhaha over its recent privacy policy changes and you can see how, more so than ever before in its short 15 year history, Google is today vulnerable and ripe for disruption.

Anything That Weakens Android ...
The biggest chunk of Apple's revenues and profits (and the fattest margins), by far, come from iOS products, especially the iPhone, which accounts for over 50% of its revenues. The biggest competitor that the folks at Apple spend sleepless nights over is probably Google's Android. The biggest chunk of Google's revenues (an astounding 97%) comes from search and ads. Google's revenues from Android are minimal. Google has never really had a credible threat to its core bread 'n butter business of search. But if Apple were to throw its weight (and cash) behind launching a search engine, it could have the folks at Google dropping Android 'n Google+ like hot potatoes (or at least putting them on the back burner) and scurrying back and doubling down to protect the moat around their search castle.

Spreading Innovation Across Its Ecosystem
Apple (unlike Google 'n others) doesn't like to spread the peanut butter too thin across too many initiatives. It has historically always focused on keeping its product line simple and streamlined. And in a similar vein, it has always focused on innovating around a few key features with the dual purpose of creating something that is a) disruptive and b) can be rolled out across its ecosystem of products. Examples of this are iOS, touch computing, Airplay, the App store, retina display, thunderbolt and even innovation in design and aesthetics. And I think Siri with a full fledged search engine behind it would be something that Apple would love to eventually integrate across all its products.

Search (And Ads) Are A Big Market
The total online ad spend is expected to reach almost $50 billion by 2015. When you are a company doing the revenues that Apple does, entering any new market means justifying how the potential upside will swing the needle for the company's overall revenues and profits. And we all know Apple is razor focused on generating revenues (and profits) because it knows thats what gives it the buffer to innovate. And television and search seem the two most likely big markets adjacent to Apple's current offerings that it could turn to next. iAds may not have taken off but it showed that Apple was interested and I'm positive it wants to take another swing at it. ^[1]

Mobile First
According to a recent Comscore report, Google has around 65 percent market share in web search. But a big chunk of that is desktop and laptop search. Mobile is a whole different ball game and one that is very much up for grabs. iOS and Android may be fighting it out in terms of share of installations but when it comes to actual usage and traffic, its no contest. iOS has the lion's share of around 58.5 percent of all mobile traffic (including a whopping 97.2% of all tablet traffic) while Android only accounts for 31.9 percent. Add to that the fact that mobile as a percent of overall web traffic is rising very rapidly (now almost 7%) and that mobile (iOS) is central to Apple's products, dominance and revenues, and it makes sense for Apple to take a shot at mobile search.

The Twitter Firehose
When Apple launched Ping (its feeble attempt at a social network), it initially turned to Facebook. But the two couldn't quite work things out. Fast forward a couple of years, and Apple now has Twitter deeply integrated into iOS. If Apple were to launch its own search engine, integrating the Twitter firehose into its results could give it an instant advantage over Google (who couldn't come to terms with Twitter on a deal).

The Apple Brand And Its Halo Effect
The Apple brand has never been stronger, more trusted, more beloved and with a universal appeal on a global scale as it is today (despite what all the fandroids will have u know ;)). And it is very much associated with innovation. There is a reason why the tech world waits with bated breath to see what Apple will announce next. It has earned that reputation. Which means that unlike Microsoft trying to push Bing by throwing around big marketing dollars, if Apple were to launch a new search engine it won't have to do much of a hard sell. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to take it for a spin. After that it will have to stand on its own merit, and if its a clunker like Ping, it will tell. ^[2]

And Finally ... The Gang Of Four
Last year, at the AllThingsD conference, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt made an interesting observation about the ominous sounding 'Gang of Four' that are dominant in the tech ecosystem today - Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook - and how each of them is rapidly encroaching into each others businesses. There was a time when you equated Google with search, Facebook with social and Amazon with e-commerce. Not any more. With Google snapping up phone manufacturer Motorola, Facebook contemplating its own mobile phone (and a rumored search engine) once it clears the IPO fence and Amazon aggressively rolling out wannabe iPad competitor Kindle Fire, it would be foolish for Apple to take the risk of having any aspect of its business model too highly dependent on any of them.

Its like Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson are all in the ring at the same time. The gloves are off and the battle for tech supremacy is on. This is no time to pull the punches. This is time for war.

[1] Apple doesn't enter a new market just because they can or because it has potential upside for revenues & profits. They have shown remarkable discipline of only entering markets where they can a) disrupt the status quo with a quantum leap of innovation b) leverage and strengthen its existing ecosystem of products. Search + Siri might be just that ticket.

[2] The failure of Ping (and lukewarm reception of iCloud precursor MobileMe) drives home the fact that not everything Apple touches turns into gold, especially when its a little bit outside their comfort zone. Hence an acquisition of a company such as DuckDuckGo, Blekko or even Twitter might make a lot of sense. Heck if Apple bought Twitter AND Square (not an impossible scenario), that might mean Jack Dorsey going to Apple and being groomed as a potential Steve Jobs heir apparent. Now THAT would be interesting.

So I sez to the guy, what about my turkey meatballs?

The markets reacted to Google's acquisition of venerable guide brand Zagat, pushing Open Table's stock price down eight percent. The move is based on the assumption that Google is trying to get closer to the action in terms of reviews, reservations and someday payments.

JP Morgans analyst Doug Anmuth thinks Google will integrate Zagat across a wide variety of products, especially Maps and the newly formed daily deals unit, Google offers. On the pure search side, Mr. Anmuth predicts this will allow Google to claim higher quality search leads and thus charge higher rates fir advertising.

Google has been on a shopping spree Since Larry Page took the reigns as CEO and shows no signs of slowing down. According to recent reports the search giant is willing to pay far more for Hulu than the other bidders involved to overcome any reservations the TV networks might have about selling to an online advertising powerhouse.

In recent moths Betabeat has covered the departure of several high profile staffers from Zagat to startup land, including its chief revenue officer and head of mobile. No doubt the atmosphere at WeWork Labs is exciting, although something tells us the staff cafe doesn't quite match up to the Googleplex. As for Tim and Nina Zagat, who started the company 30 years ago as a guide to New York eateries, this is a massive and well deserved win.

Now this trove of knowledge will be integrated with upstart search engine Blekko, which is taking on giants like Google and Bing by offering users heavily curated results.

Blekko's idea is to help users can cut down on spammy search results by adding "slash tags" to help sort the web. Users can sort by political fields like "liberal/conservative" or by verticals like "tech/sports."

Stack Overflow's army of power editors will now curate the results on programming-related slash tags like "Java" and "Linux." It's a welcome chance for many to earn reputation in a community that's become notoriously hard for newcomers to enter.

"I'd be willing to help in the tags that I'm most active in," wrote user Tim Post. "I really like what Blekko is doing, and I love finding information that I need without having to sift through a mountain of crud."

Google is actually adopting a similar model, asking users to help it identify spammy sites it can block. But the Stack Overflow community is far more engaged and accurate than the masses on which Google is relying.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper