Good news for both attorneys and their clients comes in the form of Google Apps. Google Apps allows both attorneys and their clients to benefit from the efficiency of Google Docs, Google Sites, and an ability to share a calendar through Google as well. This type of communication serves to strengthen the attorney-client relationship to the benefit of both. Additionally, this technology allows attorneys, especially personal injury lawyers like me! to help educate their clients on legal issues with greater ease. Google is committed to constant innovation, and this commitment comes through as the Google Apps suite has provided new, more convenient features such as page-level permissions, inbox prioritizing, and the ability to access information offline. Both legal offices and their clients have found Google Apps to be user friendly as well as easily adapted to a number of uses.
Google appears to understand that future businesses will thrive if they realize that their customers, both in and out of the office, will increasingly turn to social media and other applications like Google App to keep communication and information flowing. Google Apps features, such as Google Docs and Sites, can indeed be used to enhance communication within and without the office. Future businesses, including legal groups, will be turning to concepts such as client portals and direct, electronic communication capabilities more frequently.
Of course, law firms have a particular need for confidentiality when communicating with peers or clients. Google Apps keeps that need foremost in mind with its integral safety features such as a two-step verification process, and SAS70 Type II certification. Attorneys and clients alike can feel safe in the knowledge that their private information is kept secure and protected. Google Apps actually offers more security than that of the average private host.
Despite the recent 44 Google anti trust allegations, Google Apps May be Good News For Attorneys and Firms that are anticipating upcoming trends and technological advances with their clients’ needs in mind, the forward-thinking attorney will consider Google Apps for his own use to improve not only communication within his office, but accessibility and ease to attract, serve, and maintain his clients as well.
I have been following this for quite some time. I have always been more than concerned over how easy it is for a competitor to exhaits your daily bid on Adwords, and it looks like there are other concerns as well. I am keeping an open mind over this. After all, Google rocks. Anyways, an investigation of Google’s business practices is being urged by FairSearch.org, a group of companies that feels Google may be violating antitrust policies. The investigation is being urged of all 50 U.S. state Attorney Generals by the coalition, which includes not only Google’s main rival Microsoft, but also other companies such as Expedia, Kayak, TripAdvisor, and Travelocity. The coalition delivered a letter and white paper consisting of 44 pages of allegations that Google is abusing their dominant search position illegally.
According to FairSearch.org, Google harms not only its competitors, but also consumers, the economy, creativity, and job growth with its alleged illegal antitrust violations. They feel that it is vital that Google’s practices be thoroughly investigated by the attorney generals. These allegations are not necessarily new to Google who already is being probed by not only national but international groups; the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as well as the European Union and Korean Fair Trade Commission have antitrust probes concurrently. Additionally, some attorney generals have already begun investigation into potential antitrust violations by Google.
FairSearch.org’s advisor and former Attorney General of Rhode Island, Patrick Lynch, states “Evidence is mounting that Google’s business practices deserve further investigation from law enforcement and antitrust officials, and that the time to act to protect competition, innovation, and consumers is now.” He furthermore states “State Attorneys General have a critical role to play in investigating Google’s conduct to prevent further harm to competition and consumers, and many of you are already deeply involved.”
Lynch feels that Google employs “deceptive” search results, manipulating the viewer into clicking on links that benefit Google. These links are said to be placed near the top or middle of all searches so that they are most likely to be chosen, yet appear to be organic results even though they are not. Accusations by Lynch include further tricking of users by employing a search-ranking algorithm that purposefully excludes sites or lowers them to a position where they are less likely to be seen and chosen by users.
Lynch further claims that Google is responsible for the theft of content from other websites to display on their own pages without having obtained necessary permission from the originator of the content.
Additionally, FairSearch.org alleges that Google purposefully inflates their own advertising prices by tampering with quality scores. They state that Google is aware of their dominant position as an advertising venue and abuses this position by such inflation of ad rates, knowing that other companies must buy at these rates to get necessary exposure.
FairSearch.org alleges that Google is suppressing competition and thus cheating consumers by buying companies that allow it to monopolize the growing mobile search market. After purchasing these companies, Google is said to employ “exclusivity restrictions…to maintain and expand its dominance”, such as with the Android licensing, according to the letter.
The formation of FairSearch.org originally began in opposition to the acquisition by Google of ITA Software, maker of software for air travel and flight information, for $700 million. In October of last year, FairSearch.org began its battle with this search company giant. Despite protests, the acquisition of ITA Software by Google was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice. However, there were conditions placed on the acquisition, including the requirement that Google develop and license software for use by its online travel site competitors. Furthermore, Google must be responsible for arbitration concerning complaints about fees from said sites.
Twitter has tweets that are irrelevant to the internet. In order for Google to filter those tweets out they have a new tool that is called the real-time search tool. This tool will right away provide blog posts and tweets from the web. While this is going on the tweets that are not relevant become filtered.
This video from Google goes into more detail:
Algorithm is the main way the search engine that Google uses ranks pages, and PageRank is vital with this search engine. A tweet can be marked of importance depending on the followers of the tweet. The rank can increase or decrease by how many followers a tweet has. The Twitter members decide what tweet is liked the most and important when they follow them.
With this new tool that Google with the ‘latest results” it very well could change information on the web that is real-time.
The latest thing that Google has released is called Buzz but it has caused a lot of negative attention from the public. A lot of people have had enough with the social networks and then Google decided to do one with Buzz rather than the much touted Google purchase of DIGG.
The fans of Google Buzz might enjoy one of the latest things that comes with the new version. A new tool with this is called Google Maps api. It allows people to do things such as synchronizing with other friends to see the latest recommendation. With the new navigation tool there is a night mode in it but there is not a European version listed at this time. Other features of the newest 4.1.0 version with Buzz include finding locations, directions, street views, layers and people can search by voice. The navigation is still in the beta version. There is a really great post an Venturebeat that goes into more detail about the Google Maps/Twitter Api.
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