Google Says Bing is Cribbing Its Search Results

I’m attending Farsight today in San Francisco. It’s an interesting conference on search, sponsored by Microsoft’s Bing but featuring participants from Google, Blekko, Wolfram Alpha, and other companies involved in the never-ending quest to make it easy to find stuff on the Web.

Oddly enough, the big news at the event doesn’t involve big news at the event–it concerns Google’s charge that Bing relays information about IE users’ Google searches back to Microsoft, which uses it to influence the results on Bing. Google confirmed the practice by running a sting operation involving “synthetic” search results for unusual searches, and says that Bing is “cheating.” Bing doesn’t deny anything, but says it’s not copying and that what it’s doing has only a minor effect on its results.

Search guru Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, who understands the implications of all this way better than I do, has an exhaustive story and promises more stuff to come. He comes to the conclusion that what Bing is doing is legal, and covered by IE’s terms of service, but that “Bing should develop its own search voice without using Google’s as a tuning fork.” Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. And I have a hunch that Microsoft will come out of this concluding that it needs to stop doing this, for PR reasons if nothing else…

 

OnLive’s Subscription Service Exits Beta; Now Comes the Hard Part

The free ride is over for OnLive PlayPack, the streaming game service’s all-you-can-play package.

PlayPack now costs $10 per month, with the first month free, and currently includes 38 games. OnLive had been giving subscription access away since December to owners of its $99 Microconsole, a small set-top box and controller for playing through televisions. Presumably, the service will now be available to PC gamers as well. If you cancel the service, OnLive will hang onto your data for a year.

OnLive’s claim to fame is its ability to instantly stream video games to low-end computers as compressed audio and video, using servers that handle all the heavy lifting remotely. (My experience was functional, but flawed.) But the subscription plan could be the most disruptive part of the package if it can gain more games on a regular basis.

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Clarity on Apple’s E-Reader Rule Runaround. Depressing Clarity!

John Paczkowski of All Things Digital got Apple to comment on the unexpected rejection of Sony’s Reader e-reading app for the iPhone. Spokesperson Trudy Miller told him:

We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines. We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

What Miller is saying is that it’s okay for developers of e-reading apps to provide access on the iPhone to e-books bought in the browser or elsewhere–but that they must also make it possible for users to buy those books using iOS’s in-app purchasing feature, which would let folks buy books in the app itself (and would give Apple a 30 percent cut of the profits).

As Paczkowski points out, this is a big change for e-book merchants, and one that might drive them crazy; they’ll now be forced to cut Apple in on book sales. But it’s conceivable, at least, that if they play ball and implement this feature, it’ll be a modest plus for consumers: They’ll be able to buy books without leaving their favorite iPhone e-reading apps.

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Anybots’ QB Remote-Presence Robot Starts Shipping

Last August, I wrote about Anybots’ QB, a $15,000 remote-presence robot that lets distant workers attend meetings, hang out with coworkers, and generally behave as if they were in the office. (It’s essentially a fancy remote-controllable Webcam on wheels.) At the time, QB was in beta testing and was supposed to be available for purchase by the fall. Anybots’ schedule slipped: the bot is only now starting to ship. But it’s gained some features which I could have used when I gave a QB a whirl, including seamless Wi-Fi roaming, two-way video streaming using the display in its “forehead,” and high-resolution zooming.

QB’s major competitor seems to be vGo, a somewhat simpler $5,000 robot which did start shipping last fall. (I met a vGo last month when it cohosted the Last Gadget Standing event at CES with Robin Raskin, Jon Heim, Gary Dell’Abate,  and myself.)

In either form, I’m a believer in the basic concept–and I think the day will come when QB, vGo, and/or their competitors and descendents will inhabit plenty of workplaces and nobody will even blink. I sure wish they had existed back when I worked in PC World’s Boston office and wasted countless hours trying to track down my San Francisco coworkers via telephone, and “attending” meetings by speakerphone which didn’t make much sense because I could (kind off) hear what was going on but couldn’t see. I could have been a lot more proactive and productive if I’d been able to tool around the office in robotic form…

Mozy’s New Pricing is a Small Price Hike, or a Big Price Hike, or a Price Cut, Depending on How You Look at It

Online backup kingpin Mozy built its business in part on an appealing, cheap-sounding offer: You could back up as much data to the cloud as you wanted for $4.99 a month. On Monday, it announced plans to move to new pricing plans that involve both higher prices and fixed storage limits. But depending on how you use the service, the revised options could cost you a little more or a lot more–or might save you money.

Now there are two MozyHome plans: You can pay $5.99 a month for up to 50GB of backup space for one PC, or $9.99 a month for up to 125GB of space for three PCs. (In both cases, there are discounts if you sign up for a year or two years at a time.) You can add additional computers and/or extra 20GB blocks of storage for $2 a month apiece. For new customers, the pricing takes effect immediately; existing ones get keep the old prices until March 1st, and those who bought service in chunks of a year or more won’t see an increase until their current block of time runs out.

For most Mozy customers, the new pricing works out to a price hike of a buck a month, or twenty percent. For a minority of users who backed up immense amounts of data, it’ll be an increase so huge as to make the service unaffordable, which may be the idea. (Storing a terabyte of data–which some people did–will now cost almost $100 a month.) For anyone who wants to use Mozy with three PCs and can make do with a total of 125GB of space, however, the new pricing is a third cheaper than the old “unlimited” plan, since it would have required three separate $4.99 plans.

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