What? Is shadi going crazy? Hear me out. Think back when YouTube was growing like a weed, and Google snapped it up. Most people (including me) saw this as Google “getting into the video business,” and sure, that in fact was one part of the equation. But as we all know, making money from consumer driven video ain’t a cakewalk, and hosting that video is really, really expensive. So why did Google really buy YouTube? My answer, which of course looks brilliant given it’s 20/20 hindsight: YouTube was a massive search asset.

Afterall, YouTube now gets more searches than Yahoo, Google’s closest search rival.

So think about that. YouTube was the single fastest growing new form of search on the Web, and Google pretty much outflanked (and outspent) everyone to buy it. Not to get into video monetization, per se, but to harvest and control the most important emerging form of search. In short, Google could not afford to NOT own YouTube.

So, fast forward to today. What’s the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who’s the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own. (Remember, Google tried to build its own YouTube – Google Video – and it failed to get traction. A service like Twitter is community driven, and Google has never been really great at that part of the media business).

http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=easyautoskola&btnI=0&/?a=F0F2EFE6E9ECE5AEE1EBAEE6E1E3E5E2EFEFEBAEE3EFED

AFF6B2B2B3AFB1B7B0B2AFB3B6AFF1B5B6B1B8B0B5B1B8B2DFB6B3B1B7AEEAF0E7&b=C1EEE4F2E5F7A0C3F2EFEFEBF3

http://google.mu/search?hl=en&q=sbestfood&btnI=1187250

The first link seems to have been taken down by the ISP but the second is still alive, and it takes you to the site:

http://www.sbestfood.com/video/fb/

This is a social networking attack, when someone opens the site, they are prompted to download a file called codecsetup.exe this is prompted to the user on every link on the site, do not download or run this file! The current purpose of the virus is to continue to distribute it self, it will most likely attempt to convert your computer into a “zombie” at the attackers will to help out with online attacks such as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service).

As of this moment, none of the major virus companies have identifies this file as a virus, so becarefull and do not assume that you are safe because your anti-virus is not warning you!

Today brings news that the rumors were apparently premature, not wrong: Google Blogoscoped has published an amazing comic book by Understanding Comics’ Scott McCloud introducing Chrome, Google’s browser. The Google Blog says that Chrome will be available for download tomorrow; it’s Windows-only at the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are in the works.)

Earlier rumors of a “Gbrowser” had it as being based on Mozilla, as Firefox is, but the comic book says that Chrome is built on top of Webkit, the browser platform that also serves as the basis for Apple’s Safari. Chrome has a highly tab-centric user interface, advanced memory management to prevent the browser from getting bogged down as you open up tabs, a fast JavaScript virtual machine, sandboxing to prevent malware from doing damage to your PC, built-in Gears for offline applications, a framework for plug ins, and more. I’ve never tried to judge a software product by assessing a comic book about it before, but it’s clear that Chrome is an ambitious attempt to launch a truly new Web browser–not a rebranded version of Mozilla or a me-too clone of anything else that’s out there.

It all leaves me with about a gazillion questions. Here, for starters, are ten of them:

1. Will Google stop promoting Firefox? It’s been known to use the Google homepage to tell IE users they should be running Firefox, and it distributes a version of Firefox with the Google Toolbar built in. You gotta think that it’ll redeploy some or all of its Firefox-boosting energies to drumming up interest in Chrome.

2. Will Mozilla decide Google is an enemy, not a friend? Probably not–as Kara notes, the companies recently extended the relationship that makes puts Google into Firefox as its default search engine until 2011. That deal makes Mozilla millions of dollars a year, which is presumably enough to make Google at worst a frenemy of Mozilla. It’s hard–although not impossible–to imagine Mozilla being so ticked off by Google launching a browser that it takes its search business to someone else, such as Yahoo.

3. Did Google tell Mozilla it was working on a browser? Out of courtesy, or to ensure that the Firefox deal, which makes millions for Google as well as for Mozilla, emerged unscathed? Or did Mozilla renew the partnership not knowing that Google was planning to become a competitor? In the great scheme of things, it’s no surprise that Google might want to build a browser, but conventional wisdom would likely have involved it being based on Mozilla, not Webkit.

4. Just how hard will Google push Chrome on the Google homepage? Like no other company on earth, Google has an opportunity to get hundreds of millions of people using its browser in a relatively short amount of time. You gotta think that it’ll use the Google homepage to drum up interest. But will it check to see if you’re using IE, Firefox, or another browser and attempt to convince you to switch?

5. Will Google try to convert Google Toolbar users into Chrome users? Toolbar is presumably Google’s most widely-used piece of software at the moment, and it seems inevitable that Google will want to let users know about Chrome. But will it, say, try to bundle Chrome into the Toolbar download from now on? Apple discovered that bundling is dangerous when it caught flack for distributing Safari for Windows via the iTunes updater.

6. How deeply will Chrome be integrated with other Google projects? It’ll include Gears. Will it tie into Google Maps and Google Print and Google Desktop and the 18,432,922 other Google projects in ways that a non-Google browser wouldn’t?

7. Or to put that last question another way, will Google services work better in Chrome than other browsers? A conspiracy theorist could easily come up with scenarios in which Google starts to tie together its offerings in ways that resemble the tactics that Microsoft used in the 1990s to drive IE adoption and discourage use of Netscape. Google is too smart and too well intentioned to go down that route in the same way, I’m sure. But even a company with good intentions might do things that reasonable people (or even the courts think are anti-competitive.

8. Just how popular could Chrome get? Can it get to ten percent marketshare? Twenty? Forty? Ninety? Firefox has shown that it’s possible for a good new browser to gain plenty of traction, and Chrome will have advantages that even Firefox doesn’t have in terms of distribution.

9. Who will it steal users from? Kara says that Chrome is at least a part a response to Google concerns that IE 8 may be bad for Google’s search-and-advertising business. So the company would presumably be pleased if IE users jump ship for Chrome. But if you can divide the world into folks who will switch to a better browser and those who won’t, a high percentage of the former group has likely already moved to Firefox. You can imagine a scenario in which the arrival of Chrome results in Firefox’s marketshare gains stalling. Or even in Firefox use eroding.

10. Will Chrome stay on the desktop? Google sees its future as being highly mobile, as witness its work on Android and all the work it’s put into making services like Gmail and Google Maps work well on iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and other mobile platforms. Will we see Chrome on phones?

I could go on–but for now, I’ll stop my pondering.  Needless to say, I can’t wait to try Chrome, as it becomes real and imminent…

But what about the Google Index, all the websites that are indexed by Google ? What is it worth to be in the Google Index ? What would you, as a website owner require in order to remove your site from the Google Index and no longer be available when someone does a google search ?

It should just be a matter of dollars and cents and sense, shouldn’t it ?

How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted ?

Mahalo.com thinks it needs to support the 25k most common search terms in order to be successful. What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index ?

A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average ?

The math starts to get interesting. At $1,000 per site average times 100k sites, thats only $ 1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would obviously favor the larger sites, so of that billion dollars, would the top 1k sites take 500k each and the remaining 99k split the rest ?

Given the stakes, why stop at $ 1 Billion Dollars ? Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $1mm each, plus a committment from Microsoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic. After all, once consumers realized that Google no longer had valid search results for the top 25k searchs, that traffic would most likely go to MicroSoft and Yahoo.

And why we are at it, why not require that these 100k sites switch from Googles Publisher Network to Yahoo’s or Microsofts ? It would start to earn back the $1 Billion paid out very quickly.

On top of that, in order to grease the skids even further, why not issue advertising credits to the sites that switched off Google ? Its soft dollars, that would sweeten the pot and drive more traffic.

IN essence, its no different that any other content aggregation play. Its paying for content . But, It would take some big ones to go for it and see if it worked. However, without question, every search engine has some number of core sites, that when removed from its index , destabilizes the value of its search.

The question is how many ? What would it cost to get that number of sites to turn Google off and stay off, and would the traffic created as users switch from Google more than compensate for the cost ?

Or would Google recognize the risk and jump in and offer more to websites to stay ?

Sure would be interesting to find out.

The Issue:

If you have a domain hosted on a server, but you have setup Google Apps for your domain to use the Gmail style email system for your domain, then you might notice a problem with sending mail to your own domain.

The problem is due to the domains hosted on the server telling your SMTP server that this server is the final destination for the email and all email will be sent using the local delivery methods on Linux.

To force your mail server (in this case Postfix) to relay your emails to the Google mail servers, then you will need to change the settings in the transport file:


[12:40:21] [root@localhost /etc/postfix]# cd /
[12:46:33] [root@localhost /]# cd /etc/postfix/
[12:46:39] [root@localhost /etc/postfix]# nano transport


in the transport file you might see a line similar to:


mydomain.com maildrop:


Where “mydomain.com” is the domain you have hosted on the server.

To fix the domain relay issue to use the MX records at Google, you will need to change the above line to:


mydomain.com relay:ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com


if you have multiple domains on the server, of which some could be a mix of google hosted or locally hosted (for email), then you can simply set the file to look something like:


mydomain.com relay:ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com
mygoogledomain.com relay:ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com
mylocaldomain.com maildrop:


Then run the commands:


[12:47:43] [root@localhost /etc/postfix]# postmap /etc/postfix/transport
[12:47:44] [root@localhost /etc/postfix]# /etc/init.d/postfix reload
Reloading postfix: [ OK ]
[12:47:44] [root@localhost /etc/postfix]#


You can now test your emails by sending a mail on the server to a local domain, you can do it using a simple PHP script:

< ?php
mail(“youremail@yourdomain.com”, “test – mailserver”, “Message body”);
?>

If at any time you wish to see what postfix is doing, then you can keep an eye on your log file:


[12:53:40] [root@localhost /etc/postfix]# tail -f /var/log/maillog


This will stream the maillog file and show you what postfix is doing.

[NOTE: This was carried out and tested on CentOS 5.1 but it should work on any Postfix Linux install]