It’s an easy enough method for Google to avoid culpability whenever travelers end up lost due to miscues provided by Maps. However, travelers in Australia have reported that, when driving along the east coast between Sydney and Melbourne, Google Maps is diverting drivers from the Pacific Highway to take an alternative route that leads them through a side-route of backroads.

…For seemingly no reason.

Despite no construction problems or other accessibility issues, Google just doesn’t want you to drive along (what I imagine can only be) a scenic trek along the Pacific coastline. You can manually drag the route over to include Pacific Highway but Google Maps doesn’t really like that; it still tries to divert travelers west on certain parts to avoid Pacific Highway, sometimes even for an arbitrary 30-40 miles before redirecting drivers to resume traveling on Pacific Highway. The erroneous directions have led travelers to believe that large swaths of Pacific Highway are closed for travel (why else would someone have to take through less traveled roads, right?).

The problem was reported to The Sydney Morning Herald who contacted Google Australia about the confusing directions.

A Google Australia spokesman yesterday admitted the Pacific Highway error but could not say how long the glitch had been affecting driving directions. This morning, the bug had still not been fixed.

“Thanks for pointing it out, I will let the team know so they can be aware of the issues, and I’ve flagged it to be corrected,” the Google Australia spokesman said.

“We do have a ‘Report a Problem’ tool that enables users to directly communicate with us about any updates they think need to be made to our maps, and we try to make these changes as quickly as possible.”

That last sentence is a bit of non-advice as The Herald says several travelers have already reported the problem to Google. As of this morning, as you can see from the screen grab above that I took about 20 minutes ago, the problem still appears to be unresolved.

Users can vote on the remaining 336 finalist from 46 countries over the next seven days to determine who will be going to the Sydney Opera House from March 14-20 to perform for a global audience.

The YouTube Blog offers more details. “You can vote once per video, per day, until 23:59 EST on December 17 to help YouTube Symphony Orchestra Artistic Advisor Michael Tilson Thomas boil the 300 shortlisted hopefuls down to the final 96.”

“Your votes are also needed to help choose four solo improvisers. ‘Mothership’ composer Mason Bates will be using your input to choose from 36 soloists, including show-stopping performances on instruments like the guzheng, the musical saw and… the udderbot.”

The Sydney Morning Herald said Butler tried reporting in June what he found to Microsoft, but sent his report to the wrong email address.

“The glitch affects the way browser software attempts to automatically configure proxy settings and means millions of PCs around the world are attempting to download configuration information from the Internet instead of their ISP,” the report said.

Simply by owning the right domain, an attacker could easily watch as thousands of computers stopped by to pick up malicious configuration information. Butler’s experiment in researching the problem could have allowed him to attack over 160,000 PCs in New Zealand.

Butler described Microsoft’s renewed, keen interest in fixing this flaw as “freaky outty.” Worse for Microsoft, the problem exists in Vista, which they have touted as their most secure operating system.

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The Sydney Morning Herald reports Google’s recently appointed Australian boss is refusing to give any details about the amount of money it takes in from Australian marketers and will only hint at the amount of future growth expected.

…the former Fairfax Media group director for magazines and commercial director for newspapers, Karim Temsamani, refused to reveal Google’s search advertising figures for the Australian market and said the non-disclosure policy would continue…

"We think the online market overall has been growing extremely strongly," Mr Temsamani said. "We have seen the numbers that have come out earlier this year and the predictions for next year, which are a little lower than the growth numbers that have been touted for 2007. We believe the market is going to grow as fast next year as it did this year across the total market."

Such comments from Google in Australia are rare and indicate its business is expanding fast enough to cover for the slowdown being experienced by some other big online publishers and portals.

With Google accounting for 80% of all search marketing spend, analysts estimates of AU$399M really are just a shot in the dark. Still, since when has Google ever provided information, when it doesn’t have to?

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That’s been the mantra of Google executives and lawyers for some time. Australian authorities have agreed with this point of view, and given the acquisition their approval.

The Sydney Morning Herald said Australia’s regulators found the two firms aren’t close competitors when it comes to the online ad business. Existing competition in the marketplace would “put some constraints” on the pair when the merger occurs.

While Google and DoubleClick should enjoy that good news, they still have to win approval from regulators in the United States and the European Union. Conventional wisdom now suggests that significant privacy concerns over the deal will not trump tests for competition for regulators in both places.

Aussie Watchdog Growls At Google US

Competitor use of trademarks in Google’s advertising has the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission upset with both Google and Trading Post, a classifieds company owned by a division of the Telstra telecom.

When the ACCC first filed against Google’s Irish and Australian operations, the presiding judge demanded the watchdog rewrite its "incomprehensible" and "somewhat repetitious" court documents, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Those have been refocused, with the regulator still claiming Google does not clearly distinguish between paid and organic search results. Google has denied this, and pointed out how it does so with background shading and labeling of ads.

The part of the case concerning use of competitive trademarks could have greater impact. ACCC cited ads placed by Trading Post that display the names of car dealerships, but link back to Trading Post instead.

In the US, Google allows the use of competitive keywords to trigger advertising. One could argue that the company was able to make billionaires of its founders and insiders with the assistance of this practice.

Google’s lawyers have continued to complain about the ACCC’s rewritten claims. They have their work cut out for them. A finding against Google’s practice of competitive keyword use in AdWords could ber a massive hit to its ad revenue stream.

MySpace Turns Away Australian Mobile Users

People are, after all, taking note of the development.  “MySpace has blocked Australians from accessing the new mobile phone version of its site in order to protect its exclusive and probably lucrative partnership deal with Optus,” reported The Sydney Morning Herald, a major national newspaper.  “The move effectively blocks Australians who are not Optus mobile customers from accessing MySpace on their handsets.”

But in terms of an outcry, there’s been virtually nothing.  Most onlookers are simply wondering why MySpace, which isn’t doing so well in the struggle against Facebook, would turn away anyone.  Want a taste of Australia’s attitude towards the social network?  Before the launch of MySpace’s mobile version, a Gizmodo Australia headline stated, “MySpace Mobile is Coming; MySpace Still a Horrible Site.”

As for Australians who don’t feel that way . . .  Unless MySpace is gaining some serious money through its arrangement with Optus, annoying an already shrinking fan base isn’t the smartest course of action.  In this case, “exclusive” could wind up meaning “empty.”

“Censorship!  Conspiracy!  Google’s gone evil!” is the cry that’s been taken up by some.  Others have suggested that Google is just trying to keep 21 world leaders from getting blown up.  And according to Rob Shilkin, a spokesman for Google Australia, they’re all wrong; the poor image quality is the result of a business arrangement gone bad.

“This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with APEC,” Shilkin told The Sydney Morning Herald.  “We’re re-sourcing our imagery for parts of Sydney as a result of a commercial issue with one of our suppliers, so some of the highest-res images have been temporarily replaced.”

And as fun as a conspiracy theory would be, Shilkin’s explanation seems quite possible.  After all, Google did about the best it could with a map of Washington, D.C. when restrictions were put in place there.

Also, we have yet to see how long the “fuzziness” over Google Maps’s representation of Sydney will last – this could all be resolved well before the APEC summit.

Sydney Gets Fuzzy Under Google Maps

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Australia 2007 Summit scheduled for September 2-9 in Sydney will bring in powerful political visitors like US President George W. Bush, protestors and their causes, and potentially the spectre of terrorism. We don’t envy the work Australian security professionals have to do in Sydney in preparation.

It’s been suggested by the Sydney Morning Herald that such preparations have extended to cyberspace, specifically that niche served by Google Maps and its satellite imagery. Views of Sydney from above have taken a turn for the blurrier, with the Herald hinting at national security requests resulting in Google taking down some of their best imagery:

Users of Google Maps Australia could previously zoom in for satellite views as close as 25 metres above the ground in much of Sydney, but now maps of the CBD are blurry even when zoomed out to 300 metres. Where individual people, tree branches and garbage bin lids were once visible, they can now only be seen as vague outlines of objects.

The high-resolution satellite images, which were introduced this year, appear to have been replaced by lower quality versions for the Sydney CBD only, and not for suburbs like Bondi Beach and Point Piper.

The article indicated how updates to imagery of Washington DC did not include much of the downtown area, where lower resolution images remain the norm.

Google has blamed the Sydney image downgrade "as a result of a commercial issue with a supplier." That’s a strange claim, as Google just happens to own Keyhole, a satellite image company that has mapped the world.

“We’ve had an amazing response, with over 1,300 Australian schools registering,” writes Ashley Gorringe of the Doodle 4 Google Team.  And procrastinators haven’t even weighed in yet, as “[r]egistrations close in a little over a week.”

Gorringe goes on to point out the media attention this contest has received; B&T, iTWire, The Sydney Morning Herald, Softpedia, Frontiering Talk, the Art Forum, the Arts Hub, and Googlified have all made note of it, as have two departments of education.

Gorringe also notes an article appearing in the Brisbane Times, and it’s a duplicate of the SMH piece, but that’s still a pretty impressive collection.

Wondering what all the fuss is about?  You can read our old coverage, or, to summarize, Doodle 4 Google is a chance for Australian children to win prizes for themselves and their schools.  They just need to design a “Google doodle” that represents the Australian way of life.  It’s a nice idea, and as it turns out, it’s pretty popular.