More Google domain activity - AdSense for TV and web history
I also remember the Google/Viacom partnership -- and with that deal came the announcement that publishers (webmasters) would be able to embed television content on their sites. This could be what the domain is referencing as well.
Gary has some other interesting domain catches in his post here -- one of which caught my eye again. Googlehistory.com/net does remind of the "WayBackMachine" prediction I made before Google Archive Search was released. Although the initial application of Google Archive Search wasn't what I expected, I still believe a service similar to archive.org is in the works.
There are several things that make me think it will happen. The first clue was the announcement Google made about wording changes to cached pages -- a feature that would likely be the backbone of a web archive search tool. In addition to the wording changes, I have also noticed the URL for these pages has changed three times in the last week. Currently the URL looks like this:
- http://www.google.com/search? hl=en& q=cache%3Awww.website.com& btnG=Google+Search& meta=
But as recently has last week, it was using a formats like these (notice the date in the first example):
- http://72.14.203.104/search? sourceid=navclient-ff& ie=UTF-8& rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-9,GGGL:en& q=cache%3Awww.website.com
- http://72.14.203.104/search? q=cache%3Awebsite.com& start=0& ie=utf-8& oe=utf-8& client=firefox-a& rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
The second thing that caught my attention is a brand new entry in their robots.txt file. The addition disallows robots from crawling the directory "/archivesearch/url" which isn't being used by anything yet -- and visiting it gives us a "Bad Request" error message.
In addition to the first two clues, Anna Patterson of Google (who previously worked at Archive.org) holds a patent that could be directly applied to a service exactly as I have described. The ability to search through the history of websites would add a whole new dimension (and way more content) to Google.
Just imagine how much information is stored in the past. I have a feeling that Google's index is about to grow substantially -- how about 200 billion pages?