Google in Fight Over Content That Appears in Search Results

Mr. Mosley was the victim of a spectacular 2008 sting by News of the World — Rupert Murdoch’s disgraced, and now defunct, tabloid weekly — which posted photos and video of him participating in a sadomasochistic sex party that the paper described as “a sick Nazi orgy with hookers.”

The Nazi claim, in particular, was a bitter one; the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, a World War II-era British fascist, Mr. Mosley has long bristled at the suggestion of Nazi sympathies. He sued News of the World in a London court for breach of privacy and was awarded £60,000, or about $94,000, in damages.

The High Court ruled that there was “no evidence” that the sex party had been “intended to be an enactment of Nazi behavior or adoption of any of its attitudes.” It also found that there had been “no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording.”

The court ordered News of the World to remove the material in question from the Web, naturally, and there the story might have ended. Except, of course, that the photos and video continue to live on the Internet, via social media and on Web sites maintained by individuals. Mr. Mosley has been fighting ever since to make them disappear.

And that is where Google comes in: Mr. Mosley asked a Paris court during the past week to order the Internet giant to create an algorithm to filter all such photos from its service and search engine, now and forever. His lawyer told the court, the Tribunal de Grande Instance, that if Google France refused to remove the offending images it should face fines.

The French court said it would issue a ruling on Oct. 21. Mr. Mosley has filed a similar case in Hamburg that is to be heard this month.

Google strongly disputes any responsibility.

“We sympathize with Mr. Mosley’s situation,” Google said in a statement, noting that it had always honored his requests to remove obviously incriminating links. “But his proposal to filter the Web would censor legitimate speech, restrict access to information, and stifle innovation.”

The company noted that there was already a solution to the problem: “Going after the actual publishers of the material, and working with Google through our existing and effective removals process.”

Google says that it has already taken down “hundreds of pages” with images that obviously infringe on the court ruling when it is requested to do so, but that there are many cases in which it is not immediately clear whether the content is affected by the ruling, and that in those cases a judge or other competent official should make the decision.

It cites French and E.U. law, which do not require search engines to comb the Web for unlawful content, and it argues that, in any case, many of the hits the photos receive are driven by communications among individuals, so blocking them on search would not end the problem.

A concurrent case, at the European level, would appear to back Google. The European Court of Justice, which is based in Luxembourg, is currently examining a Spanish man’s claim of a “right to be forgotten” on the Web — something Silicon Valley companies oppose.

In a sign that the case might be swinging the technology giants’ way, Niilo Jaaskinen, the Finnish lawyer who serves as advocate general of the court, issued an opinion in June that search engines were not responsible “for personal data appearing on Web pages they process.”

E.U. data protection law “does not entitle a person to restrict or terminate dissemination of personal data that he considers to be harmful or contrary to his interests,” Mr. Jaaskinen wrote. Though the court is not bound by the advocate general’s opinion, it often follows his recommendations. It has yet to decide the matter.

Why would Mr. Mosley seek action against an American company in a French court for actions committed in Britain by a now-defunct English newspaper? It might have to do with France’s strict privacy laws, which make it a criminal offense to record another person — image or sound — in a private space without the person’s consent.

His lawyer, Clara S. Zerbib, said that it was because a Paris court had ruled in 2011 that the recording of the News of the World pictures, without Mr. Mosley’s knowledge in a private place, had been illegal and that a judge might thus find that distributing such pictures on the Internet was also illegal. She noted that Mr. Mosley also worked in France as president of the International Automobile Federation, the Paris-based governing body of Formula One racing, and was concerned about his reputation there.

Mr. Mosley, in a telephone interview, said that Google had been helpful, if not always swift, in answering his requests to remove photos but that he should not have to constantly ask them to do so, since the court ruling had made plain that they were illicit.

“We shouldn’t have to keep asking them every time these photos come up,” Mr. Mosley said. “You have to employ someone to look every day. They shouldn’t put them up in the first place.”

He acknowledged that by fighting Google in court, he was inevitably attracting additional attention, but that he had to do it, because “anybody who’s interested in me will Google me, and the first thing they see are these photos.”

Mr. Mosley and his legal team say there do not appear to be any technical barriers to Google’s doing what he is asking. Google, working to address British concerns about child pornography on the Web, said in June that it had the capacity to identify and block images automatically, using “hashing” technology.

“If you have any respect for the rule of law, and it’s been decided by the court that it’s illegal, then you shouldn’t reproduce them,” he said.

But Google is adamant that the automatic filter Mr. Mosley is demanding would be a blunt tool that would indiscriminately eliminate both lawful and unlawful content, including perhaps reporting on Mr. Mosley’s own case.

“We hope that the French court will not order us to build a censorship machine,” the company said.

Comcast and CBS Post Strong Results, Aided by Web

Comcast reported that its earnings rose to $1.7 billion from $1.35 billion, or to 65 cents a share from 50 cents a share, in the period a year earlier. The results surpassed analysts’ already sunny earnings projections of 63 cents a share.

Comcast’s strong quarter was spurred by its broadband Internet business and by a rebound, albeit a tepid one, of the NBC broadcast network. This was the first quarter in which Comcast owned 100 percent of NBCUniversal, the network’s corporate parent; it had previously held a 51 percent stake.

The earnings release was celebrated by Wall Street on Wednesday morning, sending Comcast’s stock up more than 5 percent. It closed at $45.08, almost achieving a record high.

After the closing bell, Comcast was joined by the CBS Corporation, the owner of the CBS broadcast network, which reported its highest quarterly profits ever. Earnings there rose to $472 million, or 76 cents a share, from $427 million, or 65 cents a share, in the period a year earlier.

“Double-digit revenue growth — and the best quarterly profits we’ve ever had — add up to a phenomenal quarter for CBS,” the company’s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, said in a statement. On a Wednesday afternoon conference call, the company’s executive chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, who comes up with new ways to praise Mr. Moonves to investors seemingly every quarter, used the term “supergenius.”

CBS’s performance was attributed in part to content licensing deals with online streaming services like Amazon, which has been running repeats of the network’s newest program “Under the Dome” this summer. The company, which has historically depended more on advertising revenue than its peers have, said it had a 22 percent increase in revenue from content licensing and distribution; Mr. Moonves’s statement mentioned that “our non-advertising revenue sources are having a bigger impact on our results all the time.”

The healthy results from both companies may augur more good news when other networks report in the weeks to come.

At Comcast, revenue for the NBCUniversal division — which includes the NBC network, a wide array of cable channels, a movie studio and other assets — was up 8.9 percent year-over-year, to almost $6 billion. Michael McCormack, a media analyst for Nomura, said in a note to investors that NBCUniversal’s performance exceeded expectations, “with filmed entertainment and broadcast television revenue offsetting weaker-than-expected theme parks revenue.”

NBC’s cable channels, including USA, Syfy and Bravo, posted a 7.7 percent increase in revenue, to $2.41 billion in the quarter. Its somewhat smaller broadcast business, which has been undergoing a reorganization, had a 11.6 percent increase, to $1.73 billion. Mr. McCormack attributed the broadcast unit’s gains to “better ratings and higher retransmission consent fees.”

Comcast executives specifically credited “The Voice,” the singing competition on NBC that has given the network some much-needed momentum.

Distribution, not content, remains the biggest part of Comcast’s business. Revenue for the distribution business, called Comcast Cable, was up 5.8 percent year-over-year, to about $10.5 billion, partly because it added 187,000 broadband subscribers in the second quarter.

Comcast has been losing television subscribers to DirecTV and Verizon FiOS for years, and it lost another 159,000 in the second quarter. But the rate of loss has slowed lately, a point the company emphasized again on Wednesday. The company squeezed a 2.7 percent revenue gain from its TV business, largely through rate increases and from subscribers who chose more expensive packages.

“Cable had outstanding growth, particularly in high-speed Internet, and NBCUniversal had strong performance across all of its businesses,” Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, said in a statement.

Google Results Show Struggle With Mobile

Despite a range of efforts by Google, the riddle remains unsolved, its financial report Thursday revealed.

Google reported second-quarter results that missed analysts’ expectations for revenue and profit. They showed that its desktop search business continues to slow and ad prices continue to fall as it struggles to make as much money on mobile devices.

The report was particularly incongruous given how Google’s share price climbed 27 percent this year.

It is a vexing problem for every company that has generated revenue through advertising, be it a century-old magazine with a mobile app or a new Web site aggregating the news. Mobile ads do not command the premium that Web advertising does (and Web ads do not make as much as print ads).

Colin W. Gillis, a technology analyst at BGC Partners, wrote a haiku before the earnings announcement: “The results should be/ pretty as a picture to/ justify the stock.”

They were not. Shares, which fell 1 percent ahead of the report on Thursday, fell another 4 percent in after-hours trading.

“One of the reasons why people like Google is you can look forward and see what they’re doing with Glass and laying fiber and driverless cars and Chrome, chasing after new revenue streams,” Mr. Gillis said. “But those are still pretty far away. Google’s core business is all about advertising and clicks, and the core business is absolutely maturing.”

Mobile ads, he added, are inexpensive yet “overpriced because the conversion rates are so low.”

“It’s still too hard to transact on a phone,” Mr. Gillis said.

Google had seemed to have finally found a solution to the riddle, by making the biggest-ever change to its AdWords advertising product. The new program, called enhanced campaigns, which was introduced in February and will be mandatory for all advertisers on Monday, gives advertisers less choice about advertising on mobile devices by automatically including desktop, tablet and cellphone ads for all campaigns. Advertisers can choose not to buy cellphone ads but are required to buy tablet ads.

Google says that this simplifies the process for advertisers and makes it easier to reach customers who use devices indiscriminately. More important than the type of device, the company says, is whether someone is at a desk or on the sofa, in the mood to shop or eat.

But it also means that the price of mobile ads, which has been about half that of desktop ads, will most likely increase. Google’s ads are sold at auction, and one reason mobile prices have been low is that there has been less demand. Enhanced campaigns should change that.

For example, the cost per ad click, known as C.P.C., for clients of the Search Agency, a search ad firm, rose 22 percent in the quarter, largely because of Google’s ad-buying changes. It was the first time that tablet ads cost more than those on desktops, and advertisers increased spending on smartphones 25 percent, the most of any device category.

“There used to be a discount you would get for going after traffic on tablets instead of desktops,” said Keith Wilson, vice president for agency products at the Search Agency. “Now that is disappearing. That is what is going to drive up C.P.C.’s in the mobile space. This has been a catalyst for prioritizing mobile.”

But it was too early for the results of the new ad program to show up in Google’s financial report, company executives said Thursday. The price that advertisers pay when Google users click on their ads decreased 6 percent from last year and 2 percent from the previous quarter, declining for the seventh quarter in a row and at a steeper annual rate than in the previous quarter.

Mobile ad pricing is “one of the many factors at work” affecting click prices, said Nikesh Arora, Google’s chief business officer. Google is in the early stages of enhanced campaigns and it will most likely take a year for the results to become apparent, he said. He added that another important metric at Google, the number of clicks on ads, is up 23 percent over last year, partly because of increased mobile use.

Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said that six million advertisers had already switched to enhanced campaigns. American Apparel, according to Google, doubled its mobile conversion rate with the new ads, and M&Ms, the Mars candy brand, increased it by 41 percent.

In addition to enhanced campaigns, Google is doing other things to improve its mobile offerings and its profits from mobile ads. It has been encouraging Web sites to improve their mobile versions, and last month it said Web sites without easy-to-use mobile versions could fall in search rankings. And it introduced its product listing ads, for shopping, to mobile devices.

Google reported second-quarter revenue of $14.11 billion, up 19 percent from $11.8 billion a year ago. Net revenue, which excludes payments to ad partners, was $11.1 billion, up from $9.2 billion. Net income rose to $3.23 billion, or $9.54 a share, from $2.79 billion, or $8.42 a share. Excluding the cost of stock options, Google’s second-quarter profit was $9.56 a share.

Analysts had expected net revenue of $11.33 billion and earnings, excluding the cost of stock options, of $10.78 a share.

Adding to the disappointing results was a $342 million operating loss at Motorola Mobility, which is expected to introduce a new phone, the Moto X, this summer.

As shareholders and analysts wait for Google to find the next product to reignite revenue growth as the core search business slows, Mr. Page acknowledged the challenges of building new products that reach people on the same scale as search.

“It’s pretty easy to come up with ideas,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to make them real and get them to billions of people. And that’s to me what’s so exciting.”

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Tool Kit: Swindles and Spam, Lurking in Your Search Results

Though the major search engines discourage such deception, that hasn’t stopped companies from engaging in such practices — and fooling users in the process.

Even someone with decades of search expertise, like Duane Forrester, a senior product manager at Bing, can fall victim to a Web scam.

“I was looking to buy a new lens for a digital camera, and I found a store that had one for $200 less than everyone else,” Mr. Forrester said. “Turns out the store was a fly-by-night shop out of the U.K. that sold broken products. I called the company and got my refund, but I still fell into the pothole.”

Millions of “dirty” sites litter the Web. The Web security firm Blue Coat Systems concluded in its 2012 security report that search engines topped the list of spam entry points, before e-mail and other sources. At a minimum, off-topic spam results are a nuisance. More perniciously, spammers can infect computers with malware and phish for sensitive personal data like credit card information. Here are some ways to avoid search spam.

LEARN TO SPOT SPAM Mastering the art of smarter searching won’t always shield you from getting spammed. That is why, as a first step, you should look before you click.

Don’t assume that the top results are the most useful or even the safest. Look at the letters that follow the period at the end of a Web address. Top-level domains like .com and .info, as well as top-level country code domains like .fr (for France) are prime targets for spammers.

One reason is that spammers know that spelling mistakes happen. It’s common to forget the “o” in a dot-com search, for instance. So if you want a site that ends in .com, but mistakenly type in .cm (the country code for Cameroon), you might get spam instead of the page you wanted.

Many sites will also take advantage of Web address shorteners like Bitly to direct you to an unsavory source. So be cautious about clicking those truncated URLs as well.

Both Google and Bing tip searchers off to potentially unsafe sites, wherever possible. If a search engine warns you that a site is potentially unsafe, browse at your own risk. And as Mr. Forrester’s tale shows, a site that is offering discounts that appear too good to be true may indeed be offering deals too good to be true.

In addition, before making any purchase on a lesser-known site, take a look around. Do you see a listed address? If so, map it. Look for the e-mail address. If your only contact option is a Gmail or Yahoo account, something may be awry.

A site’s language, too, may be a giveaway, especially when you are conducting a local search.

Flagrant grammar and spelling errors may signal that the owner is based elsewhere. And if you spot the term “free” scrawled across a Web site, proceed with caution.

SOME SITES ARE RISKIER It is important to know what separates a potential spam site from a harmless one. The difference may be counterintuitive. For example, pornography domains may be safer to browse than some mainstream content. According to Cisco’s 2013 annual security report, “online advertisements are 182 times more likely to deliver malicious content than pornographic sites.”

Matt Cutts, who heads the Web spam team at Google, said this was because pornography sites were well monitored. “People who run porn sites are tech-savvy, and they pay a lot of attention to visitors, so they notice unusual things quickly,” he said.

Though a search result may be safe, it may not be useful. A prime example is Yahoo Answers. The community-driven site consistently ranks high across the major engines on question-related queries. But the quality of its answers varies greatly and the site is often more useful for a chuckle than legitimate insight. Learn to spot and selectively skip these sites.

Similarly, instructional sites like eHow may place a higher premium on quantity over quality content, so you might not find exactly what you are searching for there.

Be wary of Web pages that oversell you on their supposed legitimacy. One Better Business Bureau logo is fine. A series of logos promoting a site’s professionalism or expertise is a red flag.

Almost anyone with rudimentary Photoshop skills can create and attach fake logos on to a site. You can crosscheck any awards by going to the source.

It is also a good idea to check whether a Web site is certified. The Department of Homeland Security offers more information on this.

SOME SEARCHES ATTRACT SPAM Some searches are more enticing to spammers than others. Credit report queries are a top target. Remember, there are only three major national credit agencies. If you are using an outside party to check credit reports, do so carefully.

Be extra cautious when conducting travel and insurance searches. Some sites create travel tips for the express purpose of drawing you into their hotel or other travel-related business. It is best to seek out travel information from a more trusted site.

Search results for lyrics, videos and screen savers also pose an increased risk. For example, pages with downloadable content, like those offering ring tones, provide an enticing built-in audience for spammers because the user is actively looking to install software.

When you search also matters. Spammers tend to come out in force on Cyber Monday and other big shopping periods.

Nor is spam limited to text. A site with many broken image links may be designed that way intentionally. It is easier to sell an outdated model if customers don’t see the product. Use a reverse image search service like TinEye to find out if an image has been pulled from another site.

BEEF UP YOUR BROWSER As the search leader, Google is targeted more than any other engine. Chrome users can install a spam extension that lets users identify potential spam sites and block them from their search results by clicking on a “spam” text link next to each result.

You can also change your Google ad settings and opt out of the company’s advertising cookies.

SEEK OUT CUSTOM ENGINES Another way to avoid getting spam — and to get more relevant results — is to go directly to a specialized search engine, where the results are already filtered for your query.

You could go to Google Books for book searches and know you will more likely get book results for “The Great Gatsby,” say, and not offers for “Gatsby” T-shirts. There are also engines like Science.gov and Scirus — both useful for science-related queries. Another valuable specialized engine is iSEEK Education. Lastly, you can use the image service Picsearch to filter photo searches.

Groupon Narrows Its Loss After String of Disappointing Results

The company also reported that its net loss in the first quarter narrowed from a year earlier.

Shares of Groupon jumped 10.6 percent, or 59 cents, to $6.18 in after-hours trading.

Groupon said its first-quarter revenue rose 7.5 percent, to $601.4 million, from $559.3 million a year earlier. Groupon was expected to generate revenue of $590 million, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

The company posted a net loss of $4 million, or 1 cent a share, in the latest quarter, compared with a net loss of $11.7 million, or 2 cents a share, a year earlier.

Consolidated segment operating income, a closely watched measure of Groupon’s profitability, came in at $51.2 million in the latest period. Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, was expecting this figure to be about $26 million.

Groupon’s North American revenue jumped 42 percent, while international revenue fell 18 percent.

“Revenues were slightly better than expected, with North America growth a lot better, while international is definitely still slower,” said Aaron Kessler, an analyst at Raymond James.

The company, one of the most celebrated Internet market debutantes of 2011, fired Andrew Mason, its co-founder and chief executive, in February after a string of disappointing results wiped out three-quarters of its market value. Groupon, which has lost several other key executives, is seeking a new permanent chief executive.

Ted Leonsis, the company’s interim co-chief executive, said on Wednesday that Groupon’s board had formed a special committee that had begun a search for a new chief.

Groupon’s current leadership team is “gelling very very nicely,” giving the search committee more time to find “the ideal long-term C.E.O.,” Mr. Leonsis said in a conference call with analysts and investors.

Groupon shares hit a record low late last year, but have rallied strongly since then, partly because Tiger Global, a top technology-focused hedge fund firm, took a stake of about 10 percent in the company.

Under Mr. Leonsis, and his counterpart, Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon is trying to turn around its struggling European business, while continuing to expand in the United States. Analysts expect a slimmed-down company under the new leadership.

North American Sales Lift Ford’s Results

Two other big automakers, Daimler and PSA Peugeot Citroën, said that they expected weak sales in Europe to drag down their profits throughout this year.

Ford, the nation’s second-largest automaker after General Motors, said its overall revenue grew 10 percent in the quarter to $35.8 billion, and its market share continued to increase in the United States.

And despite unsettled economic conditions in international markets, the company reiterated forecasts that its full-year profit would at least match its performance in 2012.

“Our strong first-quarter results provide further proof that our One Ford plan continues to deliver,” said Alan R. Mulally, Ford’s chief executive.

Ford said that strong sales in its core North American market propelled the company to its 15th consecutive profitable quarter.

The company’s sales in the United States rose 11 percent in the first three months of this year, compared with a 6 percent increase for the overall industry.

In North America, Ford posted a pretax profit of $2.4 billion, a 14-percent improvement over the same period a year ago. The company said it was the best quarterly performance since it began reporting the region as a separate business unit in 2000.

The company has steadily rebuilt its product lineup in recent years, bringing out new versions of mainstay vehicles like the Explorer sport utility vehicle and expanding production of smaller, more fuel-efficient cars like the Focus.

But Ford, like most other major automakers, continued to struggle overseas in the first quarter.

The company reported a pretax loss of $462 million in Europe — about triple the $149 million it lost in the region in the first quarter of 2012.

Ford has said it expects to lose up to $2 billion this year in Europe, where weak economic conditions have driven new-vehicle sales to their lowest level in decades. The company is closing a major assembly plant in Belgium and accelerating other cost cutting in the region.

Other automakers indicated that troubles in the European economy might depress sales there for some time.

Daimler, the German maker of Mercedes-Benz luxury cars, said Wednesday that it was backing off its profit forecast for this year because of conditions in Europe.

The French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën reported that its first-quarter sales dropped 10 percent because of weak demand in Europe. The company said it hoped to start talks with labor unions on wages and working hours in an effort to cut costs and improve competitiveness.

Ford’s chief financial officer, Robert Shanks, said in an interview Wednesday that despite the sustained slide in European sales, there were some “bright spots” in the Continent’s economy.

“We are starting to see some signs that the overall economy may be starting to stabilize,” Mr. Shanks said.

Auto sales in the most troubled markets in Europe — in particular Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Spain — appear to have hit bottom. “Some of these markets have flat-lined, which is a good thing,” he said. “Before, they were just dropping.”

While Europe continues to drag down Ford’s results, the company is pressing ahead with plans to introduce several new vehicles in the region.

Ford is also coping with a setback in South America, where it reported a pretax loss of $218 million, after earning a profit of $54 million in the first quarter of last year. The company said currency issues in Venezuela and Argentina depressed its results, but that it still expected to break even in the region for the entire year.

Results in Asia, where Ford is investing heavily in new factories and products, improved slightly. The company said it earned a pretax profit of $6 million in the region compared with a $95 million loss a year ago.

One analyst said that Ford’s overall performance showed that its turnaround was sustainable despite steep losses in Europe.

“As a global company, Ford is buffeted by winds affecting each of the world’s major markets,” said Jack Nerad, an analyst with the auto research site Kelley Blue Book. “Most recently the North American market has been on the mend and Ford has been buoyed by this trend.”

Unlike its domestic rivals General Motors and Chrysler, Ford was able to survive the recession without a government bailout and a bankruptcy filing.

In recent years the company has increased the number of models built on global vehicle platforms, which saves money on development costs. Ford is also streamlining production plans to reduce inventories.

Mr. Shanks said that Ford expected the United States car market to continue its recovery this year, with industrywide sales of 15 million to 16 million vehicles. He added that sales of full-size pickups appeared to be gaining momentum because of improved housing starts and other construction activity.