We always knew Google was ambitious. Now comes a hint of the real Googly Dream:

“Google is aiming to become the primary interface for all enterprise applications.”

“Information access is a big problem in the enterprise … We don’t see ourselves as a Web-search company. We don’t see ourselves as a consumer company. We see ourselves as an information company.”

Read the interview.

[via Nicholas Carr]

The Seattle Times is reporting that Microsoft is going head to head with Google in today’s launch of its adCenter online advertising system in the U.S.

The official announcement is coming this morning when Chief Executive Steve Ballmer addresses the company’s Strategic Account Summit, a wide-ranging two-day event. … AdCenter will give advertisers sophisticated information about consumers, including their location, age, gender and sometimes, their level of wealth. That’s more than what Google and Yahoo! offer, said Joe Doran, senior director for monetization in Microsoft’s MSN ad-planning group. The service will also allow advertisers to choose specific times of the day or week in which their ads would be displayed.

Microsoft earlier launched adCenter in Singapore and France, and for the past nine months it has run a pilot program in the U.S. with 6,000 customers. The company will begin a similar pilot in the UK next month.

Yes, it’s true, Google makes the old the new new.

If you can’t get your head around that you need to read Chris Anderson, the long tailed man.

We’re used to the newspaper model of content: new is what matters and yesterday’s news is fish-wrap. But Google and the other search engines are time-agnostic. And the result of that is a dramatic shift in demand towards older material. What matters to modern search engines is relevance, measured mostly by the number of other sites that link to a page. A little-noticed implication of this is that older content tends to score higher because it’s had longer to accumulate incoming links. In other words, search inverts the usual priority of content: older is often better.

This “frees us from the tyranny of the new.” And, “Archives rule!”

Blogs are especially relevant here because they file older posts by date and provide internal search facilities. So that most transient of content — the blog post — gains importance with time in ways that other, more apparently weighty material doesn’t.

Chris makes some very good points here, although he’s qualified it later with an update suggesting that Google’s algorithm reduces the relevance of older content gradually over time. But not, it seems, by enough to counteract the effect, which is more like a book publisher’s backlist than newspaper content.