As Eric Schmidt said, Google will eventually run into every conceivable online problem. It’s had its troubles with China, now India is causing the Googlers grief.

ISPs in India are blocking Google’s popular Blogspot domain because of the vast horde of spam blogs hosted there.

A correspondent in India whose blog http://arunachalagrace.blogspot.com has had problems, has sent us this:

The current story is that as a result of the recent problems in Bombay, the Government instructed 11 sites to be taken down — one of which was linked to Blogspot — so they took down the whole of Blogspot instead of that one site linked to it. The Government then started on some more destructive creativity — but have run up against huge howls of protest. You cannot imagine the uproar here as a result of the censorship.

It’s a new time and the Government has responded in the China way — ban everything! But nowadays there’s a middle class and a large number of educated people — the old shock and awe methods don’t work anymore. But it takes time for that to sink in.

No doubt the matter will be speedily resolved especially as India is the largest call centre and outsourcing hub in the World - and 90% of those lucrative contracts are from the Western World. If India wishes to maintain a professional credibility they will have to choose. It is difficult for a naturally authoritative political structure to relax their grip but no doubt the commerical aspect will tilt the balance.

In the meantime I’ve already found ways of accessing Blogspot — its a new time — you have to be able to get into automatic zig-zag mode!

Google’s reaction must be weary acceptance that the spam takeover at Blogspot has damaged its reputation worldwide.

Twelve patent applications have been published by Google on July 11. They include seven covering geographical information and local search, which shows the way the company is moving.

SearchEngineWatch list them as follows:

(1) How good a match ads may be to the content on pages they are served upon through a program like Adsense.
(2) A process for improving the targeting of ads.
(3) Real time transporation data for travelers.
(4) An exploration of ad layouts.
(5) An automated advertising approval process.
(6) Reasons for location-based businesses to use local area advertising, including an improved pay-per-call process.
(7) How the most authoritative local search results are identified.
(8) The use of visual gap segmentation to separate information on different parts of pages, with implications beyond local search.
9) Ties business locations with regional areas.
10) A method for reducing ambiguity in geographic location.
(11) Deciding whether regular or local results might be shown when at least one query term might be geographical in nature.
(12) Assigning confidence scores between business identity and location information on a page.

Person-specific advertising on IP-TV still appears to be Google’s long-term goal.

The US-based Merriam-Webster Dictionary has added “Google” to the new update of its Collegiate Dictionary. The dictionary classifies it as a Verb as well as a noun, along with other English-language dictionaries.

So what’s new? Haven’t we been googling things for ages? Merriam-Webster defines google as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web”.

According to TechTree: “Google says that Merriam-Webster is in fact defining the term for people, using Google specifically rather than other Internet search engines. The search giant is aware of the potential damage such everyday use might bring upon its trademark name.”

The company fears that the word “google” might end-up being so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with the word “search”. If this happens, Google could lose protection for this trademark, which could result in other people using the word “google” to refer to their own products, thus diminishing brand Google.

On the bright side, Google now joins the ranks of well-known brand names like “Xerox,” used by many to refer to the act of making a photocopy on any machine, and “Walkman,” a Sony-branded name that is oft used to describe portable audio players that don’t actually bear that name.

We’re taking a few days off here at Google Future. We’ll be back on Monday 10 July.

Have a great week.