I don’t know Amal Jaraisy – in fact, I don’t know anything about her lawsuit against Google Israel other than what was written on several websites – but I do know that she has zero chance of getting her lawsuit certified. According to news reports, Jaraisy, a resident of Nazareth, is suing Google in an Israeli court for enrolling her in Google Buzz without her permission, and revealing information she wanted to keep private. Buzz apparently chooses users for you to follow, a la Facebook, and publicly displays the names of those you are following – based on your private Gmail correspondence, so everyone knows the people you’ve been e-mailing back and forth with – even if you’d rather keep that relationship private.

Jaraisy is seeking to turn the lawsuit into a class action suit, although I couldn’t find a web site to sign up to participate. There are certainly plenty of angry people who would sign up for such a lawsuit, as many of those who got “Buzzed” automatically don’t like that they were automatically enrolled in the program.

However, it is highly doubtful that a lawsuit against Google would go anywhere, since there are so many provisos and “outs” in the terms of service all users agree to when they sign up for a service. Regarding the use of Gmail contacts for a purpose other than email. A quick scan of the Gmail TOS, like all TOSes, basically gives Google the right to add, subtract, or otherwise alter the services it provides or doesn’t. One relevant line in the TOS is in paragraph 4.2, which reads: “Google is constantly innovating in order to provide the best possible experience for its users. You acknowledge and agree that the form and nature of the Services which Google provides may change from time to time without prior notice to you.”

Ms. Jaraisy is an intelligent young woman – here Facebook page says she attended the Technion, Israel’s top science school. One could assume she knows her way around a computer, and a TOS. So why is she bringing the lawsuit? And why is the first Google Buzz lawsuit being brought in an Israeli court? Wouldn’t it make more sense to sue in a California court, where Google is headquartered? After all, the Israeli office does not operate as an independent entity, and Google’s facilities in Israel are dedicate to research and development, not management.

I have some ideas on what the motivation here might be, but I need more information – and as soon as I find what I’m looking for (which I’m pretty sure is out there) I’ll let you know.

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There’s only so much you can put in a newspaper article (like the one I wrote on Google’s ‘courageous’ stance on China’s human rights offenses), I find – I’m often forced to leave out the juiciest nuggets. Like this week, when I wrote about how Google, so courageous when it pursues China for hacking into its accounts, somehow loses its nerves when it comes to net abuses in the Arab countries.

As my article points out, the Arab countries are far more obsessive in their censorship of web usage – and far more vengeful against those who violate the rules. Offenders who post information that displeases the various dictatorships they live in run the risk of jail time (think “Midnight Express” prison, not the Allenwood federal pen) – or worse, like torture. Is China any better? No; it’s just as repressive a society. But at least China strives to improve material living standards for its billions of citizens – unlike most Arab countries, where residents are expected to toil without complaint, making the barons and sheikhs who run their countries richer.

If Google had pinned its decision to “reconsider” doing business in China on Beijing’s oppression against human right activists – a claim that rings very hollow, given the company’s lack of backbone on Arab country’s rights abuses. Google’s complaints would be a lot more believable if they pinned their complaints on China’s industrial espionage or some other business motive. But human rights abuses? That claim only opens Google up to charges of hypocrisy.

Not that you can blame them for not wanting to start up with the Muslim world, given its reactions to images and words that “offend” Islam. No doubt they would say that they don’t want to “offend” the “culture” of the countries gracious enough to host their search engines and services. But the company has no problem taking on the “yellow peril.” Meaning that Google is more afraid of the Arabs than the Chinese – clear proof that the Chinese have a far lighter touch than the Arabs, imho.

And here, it seems to me, is the definitive proof: There is only one image in the world that Google Earth displays in a different format than anywhere else. The entire world as rendered by GE shows hills and dales, lakes and rivers, buildings, houses and cars. From an aerial view, you can look down and see the actual topography of the world – natural and man-made. Except for one spot: The Ka’aba, the center of Muslim worship, in Mecca. According to the Google Sightseeing blog post for this photo, the photo used is a Digitalglobe satellite photo, the only one used on GE. Why?

It took me awhile to figure out, since there doesn’t seem to be a ban on photographing or taking video of the place (you can watch Muslims praying there five times a day on many satellite TV stations in the Arab world). But then I saw the following on this web site, discussing the direction Muslims must bow when they pray: “As one is not permitted to take a GPS reading from on top or inside the Kaaba, an estimate must be made from various positions around the Kaaba.” That photo may have been taken by a Digitalglobe satellite, but it looks suspiciously like a pencil drawing (as you can see from the photo below; note the contrast with the buildings to the south) – something Google decided to put in out of “respect” to Islam, which probably would have frowned on (or, more likely, “strenuously” protested) inclusion of an aerial photo of the Kaaba in GE. Can’t say I blame Google for wanting to avoid trouble. But at least they could drop the pretense of standing up for “morality” when it comes to China.

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Do you know how Google PageRank works? Lots of people out there believe they do – many of them have made turned that understanding into a career, working in SEO to get their clients on the all-important first results page. You can have talmudical-level discussion with some of these people; no question that they know their stuff. Some have even gone on the lecture circuit or written books on how PageRank works.

But can they explain how it works in three minutes or less? Probably not – no, make that definitely not, if the websites of many of these experts are any indication. “What kind of question is that,” I hear an insulted SEO expert saying; “Nobody could explain such a complicated technology in three minutes or less!”

Oh yes they can – and they (or rather he) did just that last week, during the finals of the Israel Famelab contest, a part of the British Famelab, established five years ago in Britain, and expanded to several other countries, including Israel, two years ago. Famelab is a contest designed for graduate students and researchers to “help discover the new faces of science.” According to the rules, the candidate must take an interesting (and complicated) scientific topic, and explain it to a panel of judges in just three minutes (!) in their native language. The winners get a laptop and a free trip to England, where they are honored at the Chelthenham Science Festival.

The PageRank presentation was made by Ohad Barzilai, a candidate for a doctoral degree in computer science at Tel Aviv University. Here’s a rough translation of the highlights of how he explained PageRank (original Hebrew here)

“With PageRank, Google lets the internet make its own popularity standings. The standings are determined by links and connections between sites. The sites with the most links get the highest rankings.”

Okay, even the judges knew that part! But Barzilai goes into the gory details; Google’s bots, crawling around the net, mine the data for links and connections, and builds a database over 20 billion lines long (!), with all the link data between sites correlated. But once that’s done, Google then has to determine the quality of those links:

“Here’s an example: You are an employer interviewing two potential employees. One brings with him ten letters of recommendation, and the other brings only one. But that one was written by Bill Gates. Who would you hire, based on that information? Clearly the letter with Gates’ nod is more valuable. When someone giving a recommendation has an important reputation of his own, we give those recommendations more value. But what if you discovered that Gates’ had written 10,000 such letters? Would you still value his recommendation as you did before? Most likely not; as a person gives out more and more recommendations, those recommendations are worth less.

“That is exactly how PageRank works. Google has discovered an amazing thing: If they apply a mathematical equation called a diagonal lemma to the big list of link results, they are able to get a picture of the importance of the links and the sites themselves. The astounding thing is that Google has discovered, using linear algebra, to mathematically quantify the intuitive standings of popularity and relevance. It’s all done automatically without human intervention. This is what Google does, and they do it better than anyone else in the world does today.

Not bad for three minutes! PageRank a very complicated subject, as you can see from here, a college level course that spends a semester discussing it! Making sense out of PageRank in just three minutes is truly an accomplishment. By the way, Barzilai only came in second place for this – the winner discussed memory and face recognition! Some people fear that Israel’s educational system isn’t doing the job when it comes to training students for science and hi-tech. Looks like they just might be wrong!