Amr Awadallah Blog

I was shocked after seeing that Google on Friday tried to make an argument that releasing a bunch of query strings from its logs (without any personally identifiable information, PII for short) would:

1. undermine public trust in the privacy of Google’s service

2. expose its trade secrets

3. unnecessarily burden Google

what were they thinking ?

This is why I think their arguments are ridiculous:

1. The government is asking for this data to help fight exposing our children to porn, so definitely a good cause and very legitimate reason.

2. The government is only asking for one week of query-strings, they are not asking for IP addresses, for cookies, for zip codes, etc. Its just a bunch of query-strings. Its impossible to tie just a query string back to the person who issued it, even if you were searching for your name, it could have been somebody else searching for you (I am sure the government can give them the option to sanitize out vanity queries, replace them all with George Bush or something like that)

3. The government is also asking for a random 1M sample of the links that Google crawls, now that has nothing to do with privacy what so ever, that’s all public info on the web.

4. How can the query-strings that the user’s enter into Google and the URLs that are publicly available on the web, represent a trade secret ? That would be a trade secret only if Google was generating these things, but they aren’t, the people are. If Google is worried about refinement queries from its spell-correct or also-try feature (if any), then they can filter those out and only leave the organic queries that the users typed in by them selves.

5. Finally, I was really ROFL when I saw their last claim: “unnecessarily burden Google”. He he 😉 we all know that getting either of those 2 pieces information would take one Google engineer a couple of hours using the Sawzall query language and map-reduce.

The message I am getting is: “We Google think its ok for us to use the user queries to make money, but its wrong to let the government use them to help protect our children”.

I predict that Google will lose this fight.

— amr

I just saw in the San Jose Mercury News issue for last Sunday that Meebo got $3.5M from Sequoia Capital. If this is not the start of Bust 2.0 then I am not sure what is (may be its the end of Bubble 2.0?)

Meebo has a simple Ajax/DHTML based UI that lets you connect to IM networks through a web browser. The UI is cool and everything, but the only reason Meebo had such strong growth was that large corporations and government offices around the world block the standard IM ports for security and productivity reasons. Meebo represented a loophole and got tons of users that way.

For example, my mother is a general manager in the tax authority in Egypt (the equivalent of the IRS here), and she was very upset when the government offices closed all IM ports last year; she now loves Meebo, its her only way to IM while at work.

The question is: how long do you think it will be until these corporations start to block meebo.com? and why would Sequoia fund something like that? Are they “betting” these 3 gals can build lots of other interesting web apps?

Sorry Meebo, but my prediction is that you are going down.

— Amr

PS: My blog is the number one result now in Google if you search for Google Hatred, funny, huh 😉 Seriously though, I do not hate Google, I hate what Google did to Yahoo (though its as much Yahoo’s mistake as it is their’s).

This brief video trys to explain the life cycle of stars at a 2nd grade level. The video was created as a school project for Lina (my daughter), she was in 2nd grad at Hoover School (Palo Alto, CA). We filmed this around April 2005. The sounds effects are from World of Warcraft :). Let me know if you like it.