onetimeuse001

Any health issues are seen as a cost of doing business, after all they are a million ways to get sick and die in the third world.

Not simple at all. A trip outside the first world will tell you that raising pigs is not as easy as you make it. Not every family has land and resources avail to raise pigs as you said it.

Go to a freaking store and buy a bunch of t-shirts, you can get them for as little as $5 each, if money is an issue. Copying Jobs or the Google founders doesn't make you one of them, just makes you an ....

Xerox patents have a limited time, they (maybe) can be licensed or exchanged with other patents licenses. Or, gasp....a resourceful company can invest billions to come with a new way to skin the cat.

>> And when it gets into the realm of shapes, then you have an incredibly broken system.

The biggest lie told by Samsung's shills to hide the details. If that was the case Apple would have sued everyone making phones with round corners. Samsung has a habit of waiting to see what sells and then clone them to get all the benefits without the risks.

Doing this to Apple can get you in a few newspapers, and that's not good for China Inc :)

The only Apple product I have is iTunes and spent probably $50 with them. Any more insults?

If Braun was still marketing those products they might have complained. Apple said that they're making less money because people are buying Samsung phones that use Apple's patented idea /look and feel. True or not that's another story.

Regarding design protection: Ford can't copy Jaguar or Ferrari, can it?

The fact is that they exist, iPhone was REVOLUTIONARY when announced and soon after others started cloning it. Go and look at Samsung and Android pre-iPhone and let's talk. Just because something is copied a lot doesn't mean that Apple should roll over. Nokia, for example, came up with a great phone that doesn't seem to clone the iPhone.

By the way, E=Mc2 is pretty obvious to me too--now.

Too bad Bill Gates isn't looking for a lawyer or advocate now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

That's almost certainly on purpose to get better ad click ratio. Google manually inspects all major keywords, you can bet "credit cards," "mortgage" and "insurance" are tweaked and tweaked to Google's specification. Showing "bofa.com" when searching for mortgage isn't that useful to the average user, so people click on ads.

The problem for Google is that soon enough people will notice what Panda and Penguin did.

No doubt, especially since you work for Google. When ads are similar looking to content why even bother to do a much better job to find content when ads can fill that void? Better content equals less clicks on ads.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "

(I know you don't believe what you wrote but you had to say it anyway. Google's attitude changed in 2004 when you added ads on top, so attitude shifts to justify whatever you do. See Google's attitude on the original Pagerank paper)

Ads are as helpful as content? First there's a major conflict of interest since you control both ads and content. One update and content shifts, making ads by default better or worst. A tiny shifts not noticed by 99% of people can increase your profits by a wide margin. A tiny shift here and a Panda shift there and your revenue reaches $50 Billion a year, or a huge cut of the total e-comm trade.

If I search for Adidas 2012 VX Shoe (made it up) and I see 3-4 ads on top, why are they more helpful? Because they have it, because they have most reviews, cheapest price or what? In every case I have tried advertising it's the ad price difference, especially among top merchants. Of course that ad price is added to the consumer one way or another so nice try, portraying this as a helpful thing. Equally as important, the sites that lost traffic due to more ads are forced to go out of business or advertise /increase bids. A vicious cycle, induced by Google, to benefit Google.

>> And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads.

There is no money in many searches, that's known, nothing altruistic about it. You show ads where you have ads and where it is profitable, in key markets.

>> Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.

The difference between Geico, Progressive, All State et al is just the ad price and CTR, in sum how much money you make from them. The best site for the user would be a comparison site or maybe a CNN Fortune article that compared them.

The real questions: Should Google be trusted to rank organic search in an unbiased manner when they have a huge incentive to manipulate them, quarter by quarter? The only sure thing, unless Google is lying to SEC, is that Google's profits are increasing by an extraordinary amount after all these changes were made.

Is it good for the economy and for the web to have one company that controls both ranking and ads? Google control as much as 95% in some EU countries and roughly 70% in USA. You are talking about monopoly territory.