A source has informed us that Google plans to announce the replacement of its Mini Search Appliance with a new enterprise search solution called Hosted Site Search in the next few days.

We hear it will be a for-pay product that, as the name suggests, will allow businesses to search their websites and other data stores in the cloud. In addition to moving this type of search off-premise (the Mini sits behind the firewall), the Hosted solution will differentiate itself by automatically including organizations’ webpages in the Google index. This feature, however, is said not to affect anyone’s page rank.

Suppliers who help Google manufacture the Mini apparently have been told to reduce their shipment forecasts for the product because it will be shelved soon. The shift in strategy is also understood as a response to Microsoft’s gains in the appliance-based search market.

The Mini is a less powerful version of Google Search Appliance, which can index millions of documents and 220 file types. The Mini, by contrast, can only search up to 300,000 documents and is therefore meant for smaller businesses.

It’s not exactly clear what this decision means for the enterprise search industry, but it won’t be surprising if Google does indeed come out with a cloud-based solution.

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One thing Citi analyst Kevin Mahaney didn’t know about earlier this week in his very optimistic sales estimates for the Kindle: Jenifer Aniston is apparently a fan. At least, that’s what it looks like in the picture above published by US Weekly (that is the first time and also the last time that publication will be mentioned here on TechCrunch, promise).

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Next month GigaOM will hold Structure 08, a conference centered on the changing face of computing infrastructure. The event will discuss the wave of cloud computing technology that has been driving a revolution in web applications and has started to overthrow the notion of conventional servers.

Structure 08 will feature a workshop on Google App Engine, along with keynote presentations from Werner Vogels (Amazon), Greg Papadopoulos (Sun), and James Crowe (Level 3). You can see a full schedule here.

We’re giving away five tickets to the event, so leave a comment telling us why you’re too financially impaired to pay for a ticket and we’ll pick the best responses.

Structure 08 will be held on June 25th at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. TechCrunch readers who register by May 20 can get a 10% discount on registration here.

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One Laptop Per Child will ship a special version of Windows on their low cost laptops for poor children, the two companies announced this afternoon. Previously the laptops, which to date have been tested in a number of countries, ran only Linux. Trials of the Windows version of the machines will begin in June in “key emerging markets.” OLPC is also working with third parties to port its user interface, called Sugar, to Windows, and is hoping to have a machine with dual boot options to allow “users” to choose between operating systems.

There are no financial terms being disclosed, although it wouldn’t be dumb to assume that not only is the software being supplied for free, but Microsoft made a healthy donation to the organization as well. The last thing Microsoft wants is for anyone who’s computer literate to think that a world without Microsoft Windows is possible.

On the upside, though, the pain of having to deal with Windows crashes may make some of these kids excellent technical support people over time. They’d just get lazy with Linux being so stable all the time.

If it isn’t obvious from what I’ve written above, I’m not impressed. OLPC is in danger of becoming a celebrity cause rather than a real attempt to bridge the digital divide. My guess is Linux worked just fine as an operating system for these machines.

Next up: Google Tools and AOL Dial Up service pre-installed on OLPCs?

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More details on Facebook’s banning of Google Friend Connect from the Facebook API earlier today. I spoke with Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer about the banning to get a fuller picture of the conflict.

Here’s an example of how Friend Connect (more details) works in practice. A third party site may want to add social elements to their service. They can integrate with Friend connect and allow users to sign in. Those users choose a social network where they keep their profile (Orkut, Hi5, GTalk and, until today, Facebook) and log in via the social network’s API. They then become “members” of the site, using Google’s terminology. If any of their friends from their social network also become members of that site, those friends are shown on the site and you can interact with them. To see it for yourself, click “log in” at the top of this sample site, IngridMichaelson.

Kelly says the issue comes down to the fact that Google Friend Connect users don’t have control over data pulled from Facebook. In particular, Facebook is concerned that they have no relationship to the end site where the data is presented (in the example above, IngridMichaelson). Instead, Google has inserted itself as a middleman in the process.

Also, Kelly says, once permission is granted to share data, the user has no way to revoke that permission from their Facebook account. Facebook has a privacy control panel that lets users set and change privacy setting over time, including the removal of applications. With Google in the middle, Facebook has no way to stop the flow of data to these third parties.

Google’s Glazer counters that they have a very effective method for unlinking to a site that a user has given permission to, so users will be just fine. In the screen shot below, Google gives an option to “Unlink” the specific social network from the site (on right) or change the data that’s shared from the social network (on left). Kelly is correct that you can’t trigger the unsubscribe from Facebook.com, but Glazer says that’s because Facebook’s API has no way of telling Facebook about the third party site the data has been passed off to.

Glazer says that they have been in “constant contact” with Facebook over the Friend Connect product, and are still trying to work with Facebook to get access to the API again. But Facebook has their own competing product to Friend Connect, called Facebook Connect. The longer the ban, made under the banner of protecting user privacy, remains in place, the stronger Facebook’s position will be competitively. My guess is they’re in no hurry to get through this conflict any time soon.

The fact is that Google is taking perfectly adequate steps to protect user privacy with their Friend Connect product, and it is a useful product for users. After talking with both sides, it seems to me that Facebook is relying on a very convenient catch-22 to stay out of Google’s network. They are the ones in control of their own API functionality, and they could add features that fix this problem. Until they do, there’s nothing Google can do to remedy the “problem,” and the walls around the Facebook garden get ever higher.

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Last month we ran a brief post introducing Spellr.us, a service that monitors websites for spelling errors. Little was known about the site at the time - all we had to go by was a teaser splash page. The site has finally entered a private beta, and it shows a lot of potential. For those looking to try it out for themselves, you can grab one of 150 invites here.

Spellr.us monitors webpages by running site-wide spell checks at regular intervals. Results are presented as snapshots of pages, with errors highlighted in bright boxes (a mouse-over displays suggested corrections). Members can also choose to have errors sent to them in RSS feeds - a feature that will be especially handy for large sites that make frequent posts. Besides the visual snapshots, Spellr.us can list misspelled words according to their frequency across the site. This means that words like TechCrunch or Flickr, which are commonly used but aren’t in the dictionary (yet), can be quickly found and added to a custom dictionary.

I ran TechCrunch.com through a trial run, and the results were promising. Error flagging worked very well, with different colors to distinguish between possible errors and obvious typos. And the site’s main dashboard, which links to each error, made navigating across hundreds of pages surprisingly painless.

Unfortunately the site is still very much a beta, so we won’t be implementing the service any time soon. Custom dictionaries don’t work yet, and the system doesn’t offer any way to omit user comments from the search (we wound up with over 20,000 flagged errors because of this, though we made a few mistakes ourselves…). Spellr.us says that all of these features will be introduced by the general release. Grammar checking is also on the horizon, though a concrete date hasn’t been established.

Other players in this space include web tool supplier NetMechanic and TextTrust, which uses a combination of human and automated spellcheckers.

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Yeah that’s right. I have a puppet parody now, too. This is pretty tame stuff compared to the hit job Loren did on Shel israel. Before you hit play, note that there is some offensive language in the video, referring to our recent dispute with Wired.

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Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.

The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.

In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).

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Israeli startup PopTok has done a brave thing. It’s created a plugin that combines emoticons and movie quotes (which, used in excess, are two of the most annoying things known to man). The plugin is currently Windows only, offering support for AIM and MSN Live Messenger with more protocols on the way.

The JVP Studio-funded startup wants to replace emoticons as we know them with short snippets of Hollywood movies, television, and music videos. After downloading the PopTok client, users can choose from hundreds of clips which have been culled from such quotable classics as “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” and “Austin Powers”. The site has formed partnerships with a number of studios, so all of this is done legally.

Unfortunately, PopTok is going to run into a number of problems. Only users that have installed the PopTok plugin can see clips immediately - everyone else just gets a link to a page that shows the movie. It’s unlikely that many people will take the time to open their browsers for a three second payoff, so the program is going to have a hard time gaining traction.

PopTok is fun at first, but I’m afraid it has the potential to be one of the more annoying plugins on the web (if any of my friends start to use it often, I’ll probably block them). That said, I’m probably not the program’s target audience. Instead, PopTok seems geared towards the tween and teen markets, which are far more likely to embrace this sort of thing. If the program can get a sizable user base in the youth market then it stands a chance at saying, “Show me the money!”, otherwise I’m afraid it’ll be “Hasta la vista, baby.”

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Update: More details here.

Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn’t involve openness or portability of data, it seems.

Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google’s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API:

Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.

It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.

In the last paragraph of the blog post, Facebook says they want to work with everyone: “We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.” If that’s the case, this sure is an interesting start to a healthy working relationship with Google. Next up on the block list: MySpace and their Data Availability malware product, no doubt.

Thanks for the tip, Jesse.

Update: Facebook PR is pointing out Sections 2B(4), 2B(5) and 2A9(vi) of the Developer Terms of Service:

4) You may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook User for such Facebook Properties) to access or share the Facebook Properties without our prior written consent.

5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.

You will not use Facebook Platform or any of your Facebook Platform Applications, and your Facebook Platform Application will not be designed…(vi) to request, collect, solicit or otherwise obtain access to usernames, passwords or other authentication credentials from any Facebook Users, or to proxy authentication credentials for any Facebook Users for the purposes of automating logins to the Facebook Site.

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