Down and out … Bill pictured on Google’s Street View mapping tool.

Losing his best friend in a freak boating accident was bad enough.

- Picture pulled
- Renewed privacy concerns
- Street View monitored

But Google’s Street View has made a bad situation worse for Bill, from Victoria.

Bill – not his real name – had been drowning his sorrows over the weekend after the Friday funeral of his friend and felt worse for wear when a taxi dropped him off at his mother’s home early on Monday February 4.

Feeling ill, he lay on the grass, and fell asleep.

The next thing he knew was being woken up by police in the morning.

He wasn’t aware that Google’s camera-equipped car had driven by earlier and snapped his picture.

Last week when Google launched its Street View tool for Google Maps, that picture was on display for anyone with an internet connection to see. It has since been taken down after it was flagged by users.

“I’m not too happy about it – I mean, I shouldn’t have been there in the state that I was in but I wasn’t really thinking there would be someone driving past with a video camera on the roof filming me either,” Bill, who spends around 10 months of the year fishing off Darwin, said via satellite phone.

The issue highlights some of the concerns voiced by privacy activists, who say that while Street View is a great tool for armchair explorers, people are not given the choice of whether they or their houses appear on the site.

A form inside the “Street View Help” page allows people to report images they see as inappropriate or invasive, but the Australian Privacy Foundation said the form is not visible enough and Google was too slow to remove images reported by users.

Street View has already exposed a cheating spouse, uncovered a lying neighbour and snapped a man sleeping on the job.

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week, “street view” was entered into Google’s search engine more times than “olympics”, according to Google’s Insight tool.

Despite Google’s commitment to blur faces and number plates, people can still be identified by location and their appearance.

The weekend before Bill was snapped by the Street View cameras, his best mate was killed when his 5.4 metre fibreglass runabout smashed into a compass pylon in waters at Lakes Entrance, Victoria, around 1am.

It was Australia Day weekend and Bill, a 36-year-old skipper who leads a crew of five fishermen in the Northern Territory, had just returned home to Lakes Entrance for a much-needed break.

For five months prior to the accident, the pair had been planning a motorbike trip around Tasmania.

With that plan in tatters, after the funeral Bill and some friends decided to drown their sorrows all weekend and “come Monday morning, I got out of the taxi and rolled over on the grass and went to sleep on the footpath”.

“What do you do when you lose a mate like that, you know?,” he said.

“I know what he would have done if I left – he would’ve partied too, that’s what I would’ve wanted him to do so that’s what we did.”

Bill said he understood that he could not expect complete privacy in a public street but did not expect his embarrassing moment to be broadcast over the internet.

He was fearful that those living in his area would log on to Street View to check out their neighbourhood and stumble across the image of him passed out on the footpath.

His mother, asked for her reaction upon hearing of the Street View images, said: “I was absolutely horrified – I was horrified that anybody had even heard about it.”

A letter writer in last weekend’s Herald, Janice Creenaune, was similarly mortified after logging on to Street View.

Both her parents were pictured outside their house but her dad had passed away a month ago.

“While recognising that Google-time is never real-time, the image renews the raw loss,” she wrote.

But another letter writer, Elizabeth Maher, had a more positive experience: “While others may have legitimate complaints about Google publishing pictures of their house, I was delighted to views ours, with me pictured hard at work in the garden, complete with broom and bucket, thereby dispelling any uncertainty as to who is the gardener in the family.”

The Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, has said her office continued to monitor Street View and would be meeting Google representatives shortly to discuss recent privacy concerns.

Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin said Google could not comment on specific images but noted the positive side of Street View, such as the fact that it has already been integrated on property sites like Domain.com.au as a way for home buyers and renters to research suburbs and addresses.

He said the company had taken significant steps to protect the privacy of individuals, including face blurring and tools for people to flag sensitive imagery for removal.

But in Bill’s case, having the imagery taken down promptly would have been difficult without third-party assistance as he does not have internet access on his boat and his mother does not have a computer.

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As we mark the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Games, I can’t help but remember eight years ago, when I competed on the U.S. cycling team. Even though I didn’t walk away with any medals then, training and competing involved a herculean effort – but that pales in comparison to what we’re unveiling today.

I’m happy to present the 2008 Summer Games on Google, a site that features a number of our products to help you stay updated on Summer Games happenings. And it’s available in 66 countries and 31 languages, from Australia to Uruguay, and from Arabic to Vietnamese.
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Have you ever thought of creating one or several sites in different languages? Let’s say you want to start a travel site about backpacking in Europe, and you want to offer your content to English, German, and Spanish speakers. You’ll want to keep in mind factors like site structure, geographic as well as language targeting, and content organization.

Site structure
The first thing you’ll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let’s say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you’d want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it’s more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:

1. Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
2. Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.

Matt Cutts wrote a substantial post on subdirectories and subdomains, which may help you decide which option to go with.

Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany).

If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don’t want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don’t want to use the geographic target tool.

Content organization
The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.

If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to google.de and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.

If you have more questions on this topic, you can join our Webmaster Help Group to get more advice.

Posted by Charlene Perez and Juliane Stiller, Search Quality Team

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