2008年11月21日 星期五

Google Phone Is the New Zune

G1




November 20, 2008, 2:34 pm

Google Phone Is the New Zune

If you get your hands on the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, running Google’s Android operating system, you may be struck with a nagging sense of déjà vu.

T-Mobile G1

It has a comfortably solid heft, and a superior case — it feels like it’s covered with a rubbery skin. It gives the impression of being soft to the touch, but is scuff- and ding-resistant and doesn’t show smudgy fingerprints.

It feels rather like … what is it … oh, yes … the original Zune.

Fitting, because the G1 is arguably the Zune of phones.

Like the Zune, it’s from a late-from-the-gate tech behemoth (Google in this case), and it is up against a well-ensconced, well-thought-out Apple product, the iPhone. By comparison, the G1 interface is somewhat clunky and a tad bug-ridden. With but a few Android apps available online (app shopping works best from the handset, although it’s a laborious process), it has little to challenge the Apple App Store.

But the G1 does has some advantages. There’s the aforementioned resilient case for one. A slider screen reveals a backlit qwerty keyboard in addition to the touch screen, for another.

There is one critical difference. The Google engineers are willing – in fact eager – to hear consumer criticism and respond. If you check the Android forum, you’ll see that engineers are responding to consumer requests along the lines of “Good point, thanks, we are working on that.”

So if the G1 isn’t everything you hoped for out of the box, it seems likely to get better. Good enough to take on the iPhone? We’ll see.

Blogger 功能

Blogger 功能

我們製作了 Blogger,方便您與眾人分享心得,無論是時事、生活大小事或是關心的事情都能分享。 我們也開發了許多功能,盡可能讓寫網誌變得簡單有效。

開始使用 | 更多功能 | 進階功能

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讓世界聽見你的聲音,就是這麼簡單

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您的免費網站

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將相片和影片新增到您的文章

您可以輕易新增相片到您的網誌文章內,方法是按一下文章編輯器工具列中的圖片圖示。 相片便會保存在您的免費 Picasa 網頁相簿 帳戶中,您可以在此帳戶中訂購沖印相片,並將相片整理成冊。 新增影片到文章的方式同樣很簡單;只要按一下文章編輯器工具列上的膠捲圖示就可以開始。 使用 Blogger 上載的影片會保存在 Google Video

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新文章通知

您的讀者可以選擇訂閱您網誌的資訊提供,在您發佈新的網誌文章時收到通知。 您也可以在您網誌的資訊提供中自訂要分享的內容,將網誌設定成自動以電子郵件寄送新文章給特定電子郵件地址或郵寄清單。

一個簡單的 ID

您可以使用 Google 帳戶 (也可用來存取 Gmail、iGoogle、Orkut 等 ) 登入 Blogger,因此只要記一組使用者名稱和密碼即可。 您網誌的網址也可作為 OpenID,作為您在網頁上的數位識別資訊。 除了已註冊的 Blogger 成員外,您的網誌還可以接受 OpenID 使用者的意見,更方便您的所有讀者發表意見和參與討論。

世界各地的語言

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進階功能

行動張貼

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群組網誌

透過 Blogger,您可以輕鬆地建立小組網誌,讓多名 Blogger 在一個一網誌中抒發己見。 您可以選取某些小組成員授予其管理權限,其他人則只能發表文章。 也可以選擇不公開網誌,只有特定的人才能觀看。 如此便可以完整控制您的網誌。

第三方應用程式

您可以在與 Blogger 整合的許多第三方應用程式中加以選擇,讓寫網誌變得更加輕鬆。 如果您是開發人員且想要建立自己的完美應用程式,請務必查看 code.blogger.com

更多功能...

我們持續開發 Blogger 的新功能;請查看 Blogger Buzz,以瞭解所有的最新功能和變更。如果想要試用某些試驗性功能,請查看 Blogger 測試區。如需關於 Blogger 功能的詳細資訊,請務必造訪 Blogger 說明網站支援論壇。 如果要觀看其他人的張貼內容,請查看精選網誌Blogger Play。希望您喜歡我們製作的內容。


2008年11月20日 星期四

個人定義搜索功能

我們可能在 google的 my account 了解這

個人定義搜索功能 可為大公司甚或 "心靈的共同體所善用




谷歌引入全新個人定義搜索功能

| |
2008年11月21日10:37
週四開始﹐谷歌(Google Inc.)將向用戶提供搜索結果重新排名和編輯等全新個人定製功能。谷歌希望這能使其搜索引擎更好地發揮作用。

被谷歌稱為SearchWiki的這套工具可以讓任何登錄帳戶的谷歌用戶將感興趣的搜索結果挪到前面﹐刪除無用的結果﹐或通過谷歌標準搜索結果頁面上每項結果徬的標記工具添加個人註釋。

負責搜索產品和用戶體驗的谷歌副總裁梅耶(Marissa Mayer)表示﹐這套工具對重復搜索特別有用。

Jessica E. Vascellaro

2008年11月17日 星期一

Privacy Laws Trip Up Google in Parts of Europe

Privacy Laws Trip Up Google in Parts of Europe


Published: November 17, 2008

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the company with open arms. Google’s arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 people, 300 of them engineers, work in Google’s seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

But almost five years into its expansion into Europe — where it has a headquarters in Dublin, large offices in Zurich and London, and smaller centers in countries like Denmark, Russia and Poland — Google is getting caught in a web of privacy laws that threaten its growth and the positive image it has cultivated as a company dedicated to doing good.

In Switzerland, data protection officials are quietly pressing Google to scrap its plans to introduce Street View, a mapping service that provides a vivid, 360-degree, ground-level photographic panorama from any address, which would violate strict Swiss privacy laws that prohibit the unauthorized use of personal images or property.

In Germany, where Street View is also not available, simply taking photographs for the service violates privacy laws.

“The privacy issue will likely become increasingly important for Google as it continues to offer new services in Europe,” said Dirk Lewandowski, a professor of information sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. “For the moment, most consumers are not aware their data is being used by Google in some fashion. But I think as people become aware of this, there could be protests that Google will have to address.”

The conflict does not end with Street View, which so far in Europe depicts only major cities in France, Spain and Italy.

Data protection advisers to the European Commission in Brussels are questioning Google over how long the company retains user logs — the files containing an individual’s queries typed into Google search fields. A panel of regulators wants Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, to purge the records after six months.

Google says it needs the data for nine months to hone its search engine to reflect the constant changes in contextual meaning caused by news and events. Before October, Google retained the records for 18 months in the European Union. Yahoo keeps its records for 13 months and MSN, Microsoft’s search service, for 18 months. So far, European officials are trying to persuade Google and the others to comply, but they have not ruled out asking the commission to intervene.

Nelson Mattos, a vice president responsible for Google’s 12 engineering centers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said he was confident the company would reach a compromise with the authorities. In an interview in Zurich, Mr. Mattos, a Brazilian who was educated in Germany and spent 15 years at I.B.M. before joining Google in 2007, said Street View would be added in Switzerland and Germany “at some point.” But he declined to say when that might be.

“Google is committed to making sure the data of its users is well protected and not misused,” he said. “Europe has a history of innovation. Where it has not always done as good a job in my opinion is in follow-on innovation, in commercializing the innovation. If you restrict too much how a company like Google can innovate, that will restrict the follow-on benefits in Europe.”

To enhance its profile among European decision makers, Google has bolstered its presence in government centers around Europe. The company now has enough employees to fill three floors of an office building in downtown Brussels. In five years, Google has hired about 3,500 people in Europe for its regional headquarters in Dublin, its larger offices in London and Zurich, and at smaller centers in Krakow, Poland; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Aarhus, Denmark.

Many of the company’s most recent innovations, like elements of its new Chrome Web browser, an analytic tool called Trends and a mass transportation trip planner called Transit, have been conceived or improved in Europe.

The engineering center in Zurich helped speed up the functioning of Video ID, an automated video search service that allows video and music copyright owners to sweep YouTube, the largest online Web video-sharing site, to detect illegal uploads. Google bought YouTube in October 2006.

Introduced a year ago, Video ID is being used by 300 companies, including Lionsgate Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment and the Italian broadcaster RAI. In 90 percent of cases, says Patrick Walker, director of partnerships at YouTube in London, companies choose not to block the illegal footage; instead they run advertisements next to the homegrown uploads, splitting the revenue with YouTube.

“It has basically allowed all types of rights holders for the first time to protect their content on the Web,” Mr. Walker said, “and in most cases, has opened up a whole new way for companies to make money off of their inventories.”

2008年11月16日 星期日

Google looks to users' needs

Google looks to users' needs

Simon Canning | November 17, 2008

THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.

Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.

Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.

"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.

"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."

He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.

He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.

But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.

"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.

At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."

The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.

"It's an interesting question," Smith says.

"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.

"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organisation that has always done that and been very successful at it.

"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."

Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.

Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.

Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.

Google looks to users' needs

Google looks to users' needs

Simon Canning | November 17, 2008

THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.

Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.

Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.

"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.

"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."

He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.

He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.

But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.

"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.

At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."

The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.

"It's an interesting question," Smith says.

"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.

"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organisation that has always done that and been very successful at it.

"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."

Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.

Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.

Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.

2008年11月11日 星期二

Google Will Add Videoconferencing to Gmail Service

Google Will Add Videoconferencing to Gmail Service (Update2)

By Brian Womack

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., the most popular Internet search engine, is adding videoconferencing features to its Gmail e-mail service to lure users from Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Users can chat for free using Gmail by installing a small add-on program to their browser, Google said today in a statement. Those without a Webcam can use an audio chat option.

Google is trying to capitalize on the growing popularity of videoconferencing, which consumers use to chat with friends and companies rely on to reduce travel costs and connect employees in multiple locations. Microsoft already offers videoconferencing through its Windows Live instant-messaging software. Google's product is different because it works through the Web browser, said Keith Coleman, product manager for Gmail.

``This is one of those things that is very subtle and very simple, but I think can change the way you communicate and the way you work,'' Coleman said in an interview. ``It's very easy to have these very fast, fluid conversations.''

The videoconferencing feature is also available to users of Google Apps, the company's set of online applications, which includes word-processing and spreadsheet software. Companies from Hewlett-Packard Co. to Cisco Systems Inc. also offer corporate videoconferencing products.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, fell $7.32 to $311.46 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have lost 55 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net.

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

谷歌推出流感趨勢跟蹤服務
谷歌週二推出了一項免費的網絡服務﹐
這項服務能早於現有的任何手段顯示出全美各地流感病例是否在增加


Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread


Published: November 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctor.

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Related

Times Topics: Google Inc.

Health Guide: The Flu »

Backstory With The Times's Miguel Helft

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.

Some public health experts say the data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths.

For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keep daily tabs on disease trends in their own communities.

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

A paper on the methodology behind Flu Trends is expected to be published in a future issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers have long said that the material people publish on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they get in trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo itself has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site.

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune advertising campaigns. And internally it has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends.

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but concerns about privacy had generally stopped the company from sharing it with outside academics.

Google Flu Trends gets around privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced back to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Mr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.

Other people have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report about what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic, so its usefulness is limited.

HealthMap, a project affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, scours the Web for news articles, blog posts and electronic newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease.

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

2008年11月8日 星期六

Google at 10: Searching Its Own Soul By MIGUEL HELFT

Saturday Interview

Google at 10: Searching Its Own Soul


Published: November 7, 2008

AS Google recently turned 10 years old, some analysts and investors began to say the company was suffering from early signs of maturity. Google’s growth rate, while still brisk, has slowed significantly and is expected to slow more because of the economic slowdown. Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive, said that Google was better positioned than other advertising companies to survive a recession.

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Kimberly White/Reuters

Eric E. Schmidt

Mr. Schmidt, 53, spoke earlier this week from the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters about his plans for managing Google in a downturn, the unraveling of an advertising partnership with Yahoo and his recent public endorsement of Barack Obama. Mr. Schmidt is also a member of Senator Obama’s transition economic advisory board.

Q. Google is working hard to rein in expenses. Is that because Google has matured or because of the economic crisis? And how bad do you think the economy will get?

A. The issue we face with the economic crisis is we don’t know as managers how long the crisis goes. So what is a prudent answer? A prudent answer is to watch hiring. We are hiring but at a slower rate. Last week, we made some number of tens of offers. I suspect that will continue.

The other thing we have done is fairly detailed expense reviews to make sure we are not wasting money.

Q. Given the uncertainty, do you plan for a worst-case situation or something else?

A. It is a judgment call. Google is in a good position over the long term. We have a product that is more measurable, more targetable, and we are the innovator in the space. At some point, people need to sell products, and at some point they realize that the best advertising is measurable advertising, and they conclude that we do that.

Q. Google is known for investing liberally in projects that don’t produce immediate returns. Does the new measure of austerity, such as it is, change that?

A. It is interesting you use the word austerity. It doesn’t feel very austere. I think it is better to use the word focus. We are clearly going to be more careful with potential large expense streams, which are of uncertain return. But we are also going to continue to invest certainly in small teams to do wacky things.

Q. Are there examples of projects you have undertaken in the past — things like Chrome, Google’s Internet browser, or Android, its mobile operating system — that you wouldn’t do today?

A. The question is, with today’s market, would we still have done the things you named? Absolutely. Going forward, maybe we would do fewer ultimately. The problem here is that if you tighten up too much, you eliminate future innovation and then you set yourself up for a really bad outcome five or 10 years from now.

Q. Google is known for its lavish employee perks. Can you rein in expenses without affecting the culture?

A. The people who manage these areas are very, very sensitive to what is really important versus what is an experiment or a waste of money or what have you. But we have no intention of getting rid of the really important aspects of our culture.

Q. Isn’t it less fun to run a company that has to watch its spending more carefully?

A. I think it is actually more fun. The reason is that it is very easy to be a successful executive in high-growth times. It is much more challenging, but in my view much more rewarding to be a leader in times where you have to make really hard choices.

Q. Earlier this week, Google walked away from an advertising partnership with Yahoo, after the Justice Department said it was planning to block it on antitrust grounds. Yahoo said it would have defended the deal in court and that it was disappointed you chose not to. Was Google less committed to this deal than Yahoo?

A. We were unsuccessful in convincing the Justice Department of something which we strongly feel, which is that providing better value to advertisers would have occurred by virtue of this deal. We concluded after a lot of soul-searching that it was not in our best interest to go through a lengthy and costly trial which we believe we ultimately would have won.

Q. This is the first time that regulators have gotten in the way of a Google deal. Are you concerned that, as many antitrust experts believe, this will happen more frequently now? And if so, was it a mistake for Google to propose the deal in the first place?

A. We have no regrets about attempting to do the right thing from our perspective. With change comes risks. This is a risk that we understood. Now you ask a hypothetical question, which is, Given that that event has occurred, is there another scenario? We don’t see one right now, but you never know.

Q. Will Google think differently about deals after this incident?

A. Probably not. I think that this was a unique situation.

Q. You publicly endorsed Barack Obama for president saying, among other things, that you liked his economic plan. Are there other ideas or proposals that you think could help America’s and Silicon Valley’s economy?

A. The strongest position I have taken from an economic point, with Senator Obama, now President-elect Obama, has been to try to solve all of our problems at once. And the easiest way to do that, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and over time attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. The Google calculations, which we announced about a month ago, indicate that over a 22-year period, you can save a trillion dollars by investing in these technologies, including plug-in hybrids, and thereby reduce our reliance on oil.

Q. Were you concerned that your personal endorsement of Barack Obama would be seen as an endorsement by Google, especially since the company could benefit from some of Barack Obama’s policies on issues like net neutrality or clean energy?

A. I was, and we debated it internally at great length. I ultimately concluded that since there were so many C.E.O.’s who had been endorsing the Republican candidate, it would be O.K. for a C.E.O. to endorse a Democratic candidate.

Q. Barack Obama has said he intends to name a chief technology officer. Have you had any discussions with his team about being a candidate for that position or another role in his administration?

A. I am extremely happy serving the shareholders of Google as the C.E.O., so I have no interest in serving as a government employee.


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