Googleland: A Strange Variant of English Indeed
August 26, 2021
I used the term “Googzilla” in my monograph the Google Legacy and I refer to everyone’s favorite mom-and-pop online ad service by this coinage in my lectures.
I overlooked the fact that Googzilla and its minion have a language beyond hissing, grunting, and snorting in courts around the world. An insightful person named allegedly Cyrus Shepard coined and trademarked the word “Googlespeak” for his article “Googlespeak TM How Google Limits Thought about Antitrust.” I would love to insert the required TM symbol when I use the word, but I don’t know how to pull this off in the two-bit editor I use to create blog posts in airports. Please, understand that Googlespeak is a trademarked word, and I do not want to trample on anyone’s rights. Will the Google be happy with the word Googlespeak? That I do not know. Who would have thought that Mickey Mouse ears would engender excitement or cause LexisNexis to become agitated by a personal grooming product named in a manner similar to Nexis. I am still afraid to write “Nexus”. Lawyers never sleep because billing…
The article explains that using a specific vocabulary with non-conventional meanings assigned to words has an impact on one’s thoughts. Go to Disneyland and you know what a Magic Kingdom is when you stand in line for a couple of hours and hand over enough money to support an individual living in a tent near the Bureau of Labor Statistics for a week, maybe more.
When in the country of Google, one obviously must speak the citizens’ language. Try out English in Andorra. Let me know how that works out for you. Same in Googleland. I learned:
Orwell observed that when you limit a person’s language, you can successfully limit their thoughts.
As it turns out, in order to turn a blind eye against growing antitrust concerns, Google has codified its own version of Newspeak and made it official company policy.
In documents obtained by The Markup, Google makes it obvious that certain words are taboo in both internal and external communication. The intent of these guidelines couldn’t be more obvious. One document, titled “Five Rules of Thumb for Written Communication,” spells it out clearly. “Words matter. Especially in antitrust law.”
If you live in Googleland, the information in Mr. Shepard’s write up will make no sense to you. For those who reside in other countries, the examples in the essay are likely to add to your understanding of the mom-and-pop outfit.
One problem: After a couple of decades most Googlers and Google users understand Googzilla quite well. Who wants to tangle with the big hypothetical monster. I don’t. I think the GOOG is just peachy keen. Antitrust? Is that a synonym for helping out folks like advertisers, users, Timnit Gebru, and 20 something employees working from home at reduced wage rates? Nope.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2021
A Sporty Xoogler: True or False?
August 26, 2021
I am not sure about the “real” journalists laboring at the New York Post. One thing is certain. Those folks can craft an interesting headline; specifically: “Google Founder Admits He Created Revenge Site Against Estranged Wife.”
Larry the Kiwi recluse? Sergey the glass lover for a while? Or Scott Hassan?
Who?
The write up says:
Scott Hassan, 51, who wrote much of the original code that powers the search giant, is embroiled in a nasty divorce battle that has raged for seven years and involves millions of dollars, claims of treating his children unfairly — and even a shocking online revenge campaign.
The article points out some interesting life details:
“Without Scott, there would be no Google,” Adam Fisher, author of “Valley of Genius,” told The Post. “He was at Stanford and employed to write code for people who were big thinkers. He got to know Sergey and Larry, rewrote their code and convinced them that this was a product. They sold him founders’ stock. That worked out pretty well.”
Sporty. Sporty indeed.
The “real” news outfit’s report asserts:
After being accused by his ex, he has admitted to launching the site AllisonHuynh.com earlier this year, seeding it with links to positive articles written about his ex — but also links to court documents from three embarrassing lawsuits that involve her.
The write up includes images which appear to be “real” or took someone a bit of time to craft.
Now who’s is the testosterone-charged person in this legal matter. I noted this passage:
Within the documents posted are sexual allegations related to Huynh’s wrongful termination suit against her former employer Samuel Ockman and Penguin Computing in 2000. They claim that Huynh threatened to “kill [Ockman] and then herself” if he ever left her and “kept track of when Ockman was out with a new girlfriend,” according to the cross complaint filed by Ockman and his attorney in response to Huynh’s suit.
True? False? I don’t know, but I recognize sporty behavior when presented in the “real” news style of the estimable New York Post.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2021
Google and Personnel Management: Myth or Mess Up?
August 25, 2021
I am not sure if “Google’s Payments Team Is Seeing and Exodus of Executives and Employees” is spot on or wide of the mark. (This chunk of management memorabilia will cost you; the story is paywalled.) Google is an exemplary commercial enterprise: Profitable, profitable, profitable. Did I mention profitable? It follows that its approach to personnel management is top of the class. Summa cum laude territory.
From this write up I learned:
Dozens of employees have left Google’s payments team in recent
months.
And what about leaving with know how?
The stream of exits by top talent and recent reorg present another challenge for Google as it tries to get ahead in the digital payment space and launch a bank account integrated into Google Pay.
No problem. No myth, no mess up. Google has steady hands on the controls. What could be better preparation for taking on Amazon:
Under the watch of senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan, Ready has made a bigger ecommerce push in an effort to take on Amazon, which has included partnerships with Shopify, Square and others.
Just so Googley. Management excellence in action.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2021
Does Google Play Protect and Serve—Ads?
August 20, 2021
We hope, gentle reader, that you have not relied on the built-in Google Play Protect to safeguard your Android devices when downloading content from the Play store. MakeUseOf cites a recent report from AV-Test in, “Report: Google Play Protect Sucks at Detecting Malware.” Writer Gavin Phillips summarizes:
“With a maximum of 18 points on offer across the three test sections of Protection, Performance, and Usability, Google Play Protect picked up just 6.0—a full ten points behind the next option, Ikarus. AV-TEST pits each of the antivirus tools against more than 20,000 malicious apps. In the endurance test running from January to June 2021, there were three rounds of testing. Each test involved 3,000 newly discovered malware samples in a real-time test, along with a reference set of malicious apps using malware samples in circulation for around four weeks. Google Play Protect detected 68.8 percent of the real-time malware samples and 76.7 percent of the reference malware samples. In addition, AV-TEST installs around 10,000 harmless apps from the Play Store on each device, aiming to detect any false positives. Again, Google’s Play Protect came bottom of the pile, marking 70 harmless apps as malware.”
A chart listing the test’s results for each security solution can be found in the writeup or the report itself. More than half received the full 18 points while the rest fall between 16 and 17.8 points. Except for Google—its measly 6 points really set it apart as the worst option by far. Since Google “Protect” is the default security option for Android app downloads, this is great news for bad actors. The rest of us would do well to study the top half of that list. iOS users excepted.
Based in Magdeburg, Germany, research institute AV-Test pits the world’s cyber security solutions against its large collection of digital malware samples and makes results available to private users for free. The firm makes its money on consulting for companies and government institutions. AV-Test was founded in 2004 and was just acquired by Ufenau Capital Partners in February of this year.
Cynthia Murrell, August 20, 2021
Google Fiddled Its Magic Algorithm. What?
August 19, 2021
This story is a hoot. Google, as I recall, has a finely tuned algorithm. It is tweaked, tuned, and tailored to deliver on point results. The users benefit from this intense interest the company has in relevance, precision, recall, and high-value results. Now a former Google engineer or Xoogler in my lingo has shattered my beliefs. Night falls.
Navigate to “Top Google Engineer Abandons Company, Reveals Big Tech Rewrote Algos To Target Trump.” (I love the word “algos”. So colloquial. So in.) I spotted this statement:
Google rewrote its algorithms for news searches in order to target #Trump, according to target Trump, according to @Perpetualmaniac #Google whistleblower, and author of the new book, “Google Leaks: An Expose of Bit Tech Censorship.”
The write up states:
As a senior engineer at Google for many years, Zach was aware of their bias, but watched in horror as the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas — when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems — was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history,” the description adds. Vorhies said he left Google in 2019 with 950 pages of internal documents and gave them to the Justice Department.
Wowza. Is this an admission of unauthorized removal of a commercial enterprise’s internal information?
The sources for this interesting allegation of algorithm fiddling are interesting and possibly a little swizzly.
I am shocked.
The Google fiddling with precision, recall, objectivity, and who knows what else? Why? My goodness. What has happened to cause a former employee to offer such shocking assertions.
The algos are falling on my head and nothing seems to fit. Crying’s not for me. Nothing’s worrying me. Because Google.
Stephen E Arnold, August 19, 2021
The Google Wants to Be Sciencey
August 19, 2021
This write up is not about time crystals. This write up is about being sciencey or more sciencey than any other online advertising company is at this time. Freeze that thought, please.
The Next Web exclaims, “Google’s ‘Time Crystals’ Could Be the Greatest Scientific Achievement of our Lifetimes: EurekaEurekaEurekaEureka!” We are told Google researchers and their partners “may” have created time crystals, which were hypothesized nine years ago. We also learn the research has yet to survive a full peer-review process. At the very least, this represents quite a leap for the company’s marketing department, which has been trying to position the company as the quantum leader for years. To say writer Tristan Greene is excited about the (potential) triumph is an understatement. He declares:
“Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Google‘s quantum computing labs may have created the world’s first time crystal inside a quantum computer. … These scientists may have produced an entirely new phase of matter.”
Greene notes that it is difficult to understand exactly what time crystals are, but he tries his best to explain it to us. See the write-up for his attempt, and/or turn to one of these alternate explanations for more details. The quantum-computing enthusiast goes on to explain why he is so excited:
“Literally everyone should care. As I wrote back in 2018, time crystals could be the miracle quantum computing needs. Time crystals have always been theoretical. And by ‘always,’ I mean: since 2012 when they were first hypothesized. If Google‘s actually created time-crystals, it could accelerate the timeline for quantum computing breakthroughs from ‘maybe never’ to ‘maybe within a few decades.’ At the far-fetched, super-optimistic end of things – we could see the creation of a working warp drive in our lifetimes. Imagine taking a trip to Mars or the edge of our solar system, and being back home on Earth in time to catch the evening news. And, even on the conservative end with more realistic expectations, it’s not hard to imagine quantum computing-based chemical and drug discovery leading to universally-effective cancer treatments. This could be the big eureka we’ve all been waiting for. I can’t wait to see what happens in peer-review.”
Yes, we too would like to see the outcome of that process. Will Google be trumpeting the results from the rooftops? Or will it quietly move on as with some previous Google endeavors?
It’s more likely that Google wants to generate some sciencey stuff to muffle the antitrust investigations, the Timnit Gebru matter, and the company’s data collection services which support online advertising.
Freeze that with a time crystal, please.
Cynthia Murrell, August 19, 2021
Google Quote to Note: We Are Just Like Our Customers
August 18, 2021
I read “Google Cloud’s Top Engineers Explain How They Use Customers Sessions to Build Products.” The write up is information obtained from a single Google engineer. The Googler manifests the here-and-now of customer empathy sessions. Yep, empathy. Google cares about the Cloud it seems.
I noted this statement attributed to the empathetic Google expert:
When I joined Google, we needed to get better at meeting people where they are. That was the idea behind these empathy sessions.—Googler Kelsey Hightower
“Meeting people where they are.” Does that mean in a trade show booth. I thought in Washington, DC, Google relied on partners to meet “customers.” Guess I was incorrect in that but that factoid surfaced in a meeting at a security services outfit on August 9, 2021. One of those people noted that he had performed this function for the Google. Obviously, despite the security of the attendees, the first hand account was disinformation maybe?
Here’s another insightful and human centric statement about Google systems:
When you have good technology, you can fall into this trap of assuming it just works.
Okay, great observation. Is the Google in this trap because empathy is one thing and delivering systems that “work”, useful documentation, that bugaboo customer support are not inherently empathetic. These are business services directly at odds with cost cutting, efficiency, and assuming that Googlers are smarter than everyone else in the whole wide world. News flash: That’s not exactly a good premise in my opinion. If that were true, dead fish like Amazon and Microsoft would not be selling more cloud services than Mother Google.
Now here’s the quote to note:
Empathy engineering is a very humbling experience.
Yep, humbling. Maybe a new catchphrase for Googlers? Just be humble. How does that sound?
I think it is more T-shirtable than Don’t be evil. Evil can generate revenue.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2021
Google: Position on Its Ad Moxie
August 12, 2021
I read “US Judicial Panel Moves Texas Lawsuit against Google to New York.” The guts of the story is some legal maneuvering about where allegations about Alphabet Google will be adjudicated. As in real estate, the keys to value is location, location, location. The legal dust up will take place in the Big Apple.
In the article was a quote allegedly made by a Googley-type. My hunch is that this frank, clear, and positive statement vivifies how the mom and pop online ad outfit will position itself. Here’s the quote:
Google welcomed the panel’s decision, saying it would lead to “just and efficient litigation. “We look forward to demonstrating how our advertising business competes fiercely and fairly to the benefit of publishers, advertisers and consumers,” a Google spokeswoman said in an email statement.
I wonder if the Google used this language in its embrace of recently concluded French litigation?
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2021
Google Search: An Intriguing Observation
August 9, 2021
I read “It’s Not SEO: Something Is Fundamentally Broken in Google Search.” I spotted this comment:
Many will remember how remarkably accurate searches were at initial release c. 2017; songs could be found by reciting lyrics, humming melodies, or vaguely describing the thematic or narrative thrust of the song. The picture is very different today. It’s almost impossible to get the system to return even slightly obscure tracks, even if one opens YouTube and reads the title verbatim.
The idea is that the issue resides within Google’s implementation of search and retrieval. I want to highlight this comment offered in the YCombinator Hacker News thread:
While the old guard in Google’s leadership had a genuine interest in developing a technically superior product, the current leaders are primarily concerned with making money. A well-functioning ranking algorithm is only one small part of the whole. As long as the search engine works well enough for the (money-making) main-stream searches, no one in Google’s leadership perceives a problem.
I have a different view of Google search. Let me offer a handful of observations from my shanty in rural Kentucky.
To begin, the original method for determining precision and recall is like a page of text photocopied with that copy then photocopied. After a couple of hundred photocopies, image of the page has degraded. Photocopy for a couple of decades and the document copy is less than helpful. Degradation in search subsystems is inevitable, and it takes place in search as layers or wrappers have been added around systems and methods.
Second, Google must generate revenue; otherwise, the machine will lose velocity, maybe suffer cash depravation. The recent spectacular financial payoffs are not directed at what I call “precision and recall search.” What’s happening, in my opinion, is that accelerated relaxation of queries makes it easier to “match” an ad. More — not necessarily more relevant — matching provides quicker depletion of the ad inventory, more revenue, more opportunities for Google sales partners to pitch ads, and more users believing Google results are the cat’s pajamas. To “go back” to antiquated ideas like precision and recall, relevance, and old-school Boolean breaks the money flow, adds costs, and a forces distasteful steps for those who want big paydays, bonuses, and the cash to solve death and other childish notions.
Third, this comment from Satellite2 is on the money:
Power users as a proportion of Internet’s total user count probably followed an inverted zipf distribution over time. At the begining 100%, then 99, 90%, 9% and now less than one percent. Assuming power users formulate search in ways that are irreconcilable from those of the average user, and assuming Google adapted their models, metrics to the average user and retrained them at each step,then, we are simply no longer a target market of Google.
I interpret this as implying that Google is no longer interested in delivering on point results. I now run the same query across a number of Web search systems and hunt for results which warrant direct inspection. I use, for example, iseek.com, swisscows.ch, yandex.ru, and a handful of other systems.
Net net: The degradation of Google began around 2005 and 2006. In the last 15 years, Google has become a golden goose for some stakeholders. The company’s search systems — where is that universal search baloney, please? — are going to be increasingly difficult to refine so that a user’s query is answered in a user-useful way.
Messrs. Brin and Page bailed, leaving a consultant-like management team. Was their a link between increased legal scrutiny, friskiness in the Google legal department, antics involving hard drugs and death on a Googler’s yacht, and “effciency oriented” applied technologies which have accelerated the cancer of relevance-free content. Facebook takes bullets for its high school management approach. Google, in my view, may be the pinnacle of the ethos of high school science club activities.
What’s the fix? Maybe a challenger from left field will displace the Google? Maybe a for-fee outfit like Infinity will make it to the big time? Maybe Chinese style censorship will put content squabbles in the basement? Maybe Google will simply become more frustrating to users?
The YouTube search case in the essay in Hacker News is spot on. But Google search — both basic and advanced search — is a service which poses risks to users. Where’s a date sort? A key word search? File type search? A federated search across blogs and news? What happened to file type search? Yada yada yada.
Like the long-dead dinosaurs, Googzilla is now watching the climate change. Snow is beginning to fall because the knowledge environment is changing. Hello, Darwin!
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2021
Another EU Suggestion for the Google
August 4, 2021
I love the Google. I enjoy the delicious usability of Google Maps. The service is brilliant. Waze has data not in the Google Map thing; for example, a restaurant in Louisville called Cocina. Helpful, right? I also like the fascinating interaction of Gmail with the mail client on my phone. Now where did that message go? Oh, right. Auto folders and mystery deletes. What could be more helpful?
But the European Commission is not as flexible as I. I read “EU Warns Google to Improve Hotel and Flight Search Results in Two Months.” Google is working really hard to improve its search system. The core is a couple of decades young and the travel function is as slick as the Gmail system in my opinion.
The write up asserts:
Google has two months to improve the way it presents internet search results for flights and hotels and explain how it ranks these or face possible sanctions, the European Commission and EU consumer authorities have said.
The EC appears to think that Google may or has the potential to mislead people who use the Google to “plan their holidays.” Hmmm. Hello, Covid restrictions.
Google just might be favoring “traders.” Is “traders” a code word for those who purchase ads, are loved by Google sales reps, or individuals with a more Googley approach than others?
I don’t know.
But with France fining the Google the equivalent of eight hours of revenue, the online ad giant is going to view the EC and just maybe the EC should emulate China and its approach to big tech dogs?
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2021
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
