Google Inc., expanding its efforts at providing software that helps users create and post their own materials on the Internet, has acquired a California startup that develops online collaboration tools known as wikis.

The announcement came Tuesday through separate postings at Google’s and JotSpot Inc.’s Web journals. Terms were not disclosed.

JotSpot Chief Executive Joe Kraus said JotSpot would be able to tap into the Internet search leader’s large user base and robust data centers capable of handling any growth.

“Our vision has always been to take wikis out of the land of the nerds and bring it to the largest possible audience,” Kraus said in an interview. “There’s no larger audience that you can reach than one you can reach through Google.”

Wiki tools, popularized by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, let users create, modify and even delete information on items that others in a group have produced.

In July, JotSpot released a new version that aims to make shared pages similar to spreadsheets, photo albums and other software people already use. In the past, Wiki tools have generally mimicked basic Web pages or word-processing documents - photographs, for instance, might appear as a list of attachments, with no thumbnails previewing the image before downloading.
Shared vision

Kraus said Google shared his company’s vision for helping groups collaborate online. As the two companies talked over the past nine months, he said, “we were completing each other’s sentences.”

The deal isn’t Kraus’ first encounter with Google. Long before Google became a household name, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered forgoing their own search engine and licensing their technology instead. According to John Battelle’s book “The Search,” Page unsuccessfully tried to get $1.6 million from Excite, an early search engine Kraus had co-founded.

Google’s acquisition of JotSpot, which closed Monday, comes as the search company prepares to purchase the online video-sharing site YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock.

Earlier in the year, Google said it bought Upstartle, the maker of the online word-processing program Writely. Google has since packaged Writely with an online spreadsheet it developed in-house. The free tools could help groups simultaneously work on documents over the Web and provide alternatives to Microsoft Corp.’s dominant business-software applications, which largely run on computer desktops rather than the Internet.

Kraus said Google’s acquisition of JotSpot “validates the notion that people want to do more online than just read. The Web is moving from a monologue to a dialogue.”

As JotSpot makes the transition to Google’s systems, new registrations have been suspended. Existing users can continue using the service, and JotSpot will stop billing for paid accounts.

Kraus declined to discuss future product plans under Google. In the past, Google turned the Picasa Inc.’s $29 photo organizer into a free download, but it sold a premium version of Google Earth, a mapping product that incorporated technology acquired from Keyhole Corp.

JotSpot currently has 30,000 paid users at about 2,000 companies using a service hosted on premise or at JotSpot. About 10 times as many people use the free, JotSpot-hosted service, which restricts the number of pages and the size of the collaborating group.
Universal ID

Kraus said Google has yet to determine whether existing users would eventually have to sign up for free user IDs through Google, as Writely users ultimately had to do.

The universal identity could heighten privacy concerns, making it easier for governments to obtain one’s search history, e-mail messages, word-processing documents and now wiki data with just one subpoena. Kraus said users could delete accounts before migrating to Google.

JotSpot’s 27 employees will move about six miles from Palo Alto, Calif., to Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

Shares of Google fell 18 cents to close at $476.39 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Source - CNN

By Eric Auchard

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - A federal judge on Friday questioned whether Google Inc. defamed a small company by cutting it from its Web search ranking system or whether Google is free to choose which sites it features.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California heard arguments in a lawsuit by KinderStart.com LLC that seeks to challenge the fairness of how Google calculates the relative popularity of Web sites.

KinderStart, a Norwalk, Connecticut-based Web parenting site that features links to information about raising children, alleges violations of antitrust, free speech, unfair competition and defamation and libel laws in its suit.

Fogel said in opening comments that he was concerned attorneys for plaintiff KinderStart had not met the legal standard for defamation at the core of its complaint.

“I guess I am still not convinced … that a provably false statement has been alleged,” Fogel said during a court session on whether the suit should advance to the evidence discovery stage or be dismissed outright.

The judge asked whether Google has a free speech right to prioritize some sites over others in how it constructs computer formulas in its search system. “Assuming Google is saying that KinderStart’s Web site isn’t worth seeing. Why can’t they say that? That’s my question,” Fogel said.

KinderStart argues the site’s sudden demotion in March 2005 to a “zero” ranking in Google’s search system has severely harmed its business. It seeks class action status on behalf of what is says are many other sites that have suffered the same fate as Google regularly fine-tunes its rankings.

“The fact that they (Google) have used a computer shouldn’t affect whether it is defamatory,” KinderStart counsel Gregory Yu said after the hearing.
“Using a computer to do that is a smoke screen,” he said.

Fogel said he would take until at least the end of the year to render a formal ruling on whether the case should proceed or be dismissed, either with right of appeal or for all time.

“Judge Fogel’s comments make it clear that he has read the papers very carefully,” Hilary Ware, Google’s senior litigation counsel, said. “We look forward to his ruling.”

Apart from the basic way it counts the number of inbound links to any particular Web page, Google zealously defends the secrecy of the complex mathematical algorithms it uses to determine a site’s ranking. Earlier this year, Google went to court to protect those trade secrets in a successful bid to limit a U.S. Justice Department request for search data.

Google maintains that such secrecy is necessary to prevent the manipulation of its search system to gain attention.

“This is a case that challenges Google’s very right to operate,” Google outside legal counsel David Kramer told the court. “It is not a case about KinderStart’s free speech.”

Source-Reuters