YouTube Manipulation: The Corrosive Effect of Search Engine Optimization
April 20, 2021
Do you want to get a glimpse of how “relevant” content ends up in your search results? Navigate to “Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods.” Here’s a quote to note:
Mr. Robertson recently boasted in a text that in one day a video
targeting Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist he once worked with, had
been viewed over 250,000 times.
The article explains how a person who comes across as an evil individual generated traffic. The information provides a road map to undermine relevance and make a mockery of Google’s vaunted black box for determining relevance.
Let’s call this manipulation of a flawed method for determining relevance what it is:
SEO or search engine optimization.
Take a look at a search results list from your most recent query? What’s relevant? What’s accurate? What’s manipulating you via injections of digital bias?
Years ago professional publishers produced indexes and abstracts of content human measured against specific editorial criteria. Those “standards” and “methods” are long gone.
What’s taken the place of knowledge work? Thumbtypers in the SEO game.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2021
Has Google Smart Software Become the Sad Clown for AI?
April 20, 2021
“Is Google’s AI Research about to Implode?” raises an interesting question. The answer depends on whom one asks. For the high profile ethical AI Googlers who are now Xooglers (former Google employees), the answer is probably along the lines of “About. Okay, boomer, it has imploded.” Ask a Googler who still has a job at the GOOG and received a bonus for his or her work in smart software and the answer is probably more like, “Dude, we are AI.” With matters Googley, I am not sure where the truth exists.
The write up states:
in making certain “corrections” to large datasets, for example removing references to sex, the voices of LGBTQ people will be given less prominence. The lack of transparency and accountability in the data makes these models useless for anything other than generating amusing Guardian articles (my words, not the authors). But they have substantial negative consequences: in producing reams of factually incorrect texts and requiring computing resources that can have a major environmental impact.
Ah, ha, the roots of bias.
Google has not made enough progress is making its models neutral. Thus, human fiddling is required. And where there are humans fiddling, there are discordant notes.
The write up concludes with this statement:
What concerns me is that when Google’s own researchers start to produce novel ideas then the company perceives these as a threat. So much of a threat that they fire their most innovative researcher and shut down the groups that are doing truly novel work.
Right now, I think the Google wants to squelch talk about algorithmic “issues.” Smart software appears to be related maximizing efficiency. The idea is that efficiency yields lower costs. Lower costs provide more cash to incentivize employees to find ways to improve, for example, ad auction efficiency. Ethics are not an emergent phenomenon of this type of system. The result is algorithmic road kill, a major PR problem, a glimpse of the inner Google, and writers who are skeptical about the world’s largest online ad vendor’s use of “smart” technology.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2021
Google and the Annoying Australian Government
April 16, 2021
I noted “Australian Judge Rules Google Misled Android Users on Data.” The write up reports:
Google broke Australian law by misleading users about personal location data collected through Android mobile devices…
In the big world of the Google does this decision matter?
Chair of the Australian Competition Commission finds the decision important for Australia. The news story states:
This is an important victory for consumers, especially anyone concerned about their privacy online, as the court’s decision sends a strong message to Google and others that big businesses must not mislead their customers. We are extremely pleased with the outcome in this world-first case.
Like Facebook, Google finds that Australia is having difficulties accepting the systems and methods of the digital nation states. One risk to the GOOG may be that other mere countries emulate the ways of the Aussies. Imagine the chaos if the EC downs three or four Foster’s and screams, “Let’s put Googzilla on the barbie.”
Even Google’s legions of attorneys might balk at a trip to Brussels or Strasbourg as the Australian emulation attracts attention.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2021
The Google Is Busy: Use the Maps to Buy from Advertisers Already
April 15, 2021
Talk about ungrateful. Australia is annoying a US tech giant with unwarranted criticisms. Just because a highway has a petrol station every 500 or 600 miles, what difference does it make if the data on a free map are incorrect. That electric vehicle should have solar panels. Carbon fuel machines need to have auxiliary gas tank.
“Google Maps Under Fire for Incorrect Information, Outdated Imagery” is grousing and to the really busy Google. The write up asserts:
The errors on Google Maps go as far as claiming that the town of Eromanga is some 85 kilometers from its actual location, so drivers who may use the navigation to drive to this city could end up in a completely different place.
Like the Googzilla has time to figure out where a dirt road goes in Eromanga? Ho ho ho. Buy an ad. The Google may add Eromanga to its customer database. Well, maybe.
The write up continues:
Furthermore, according to local reports, the local Street View imagery is more than a decade old…
I have concluded that the article in auto Evolution has been assembled by individuals who are not Googley. The fix is directly from a Crocodile Dundee film; to wit:
As a result, the authorities recommend people stick with the traditional way of navigation and use the street signs to find a specific location. “If you see a signpost saying a town is ‘this way’ and Google Maps is telling you something different, don’t trust Google Maps,” Quilpie Shire Council Mayor Stuart Mackenzie said.
Australia. Consistently annoying. Eromanga, really? Just buy some ads. The Google cares about ads even if these messages are for enterprises in where was it? Oh, right, Eromanga.
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2021
Google Stop Words: Close Enough for the Mom and Pop Online Ad Vendor
April 15, 2021
I remember from a statistics lecture given by a fellow named Dr. Peplow maybe that fuzzy is one of the main characteristics of statistics. The idea is that a percentage is not a real entity; for example, the average number of lions in a litter is three, give or take a couple of the magnets for hunters and poachers. Depending upon the data set, the “real” number maybe 3.2 cubs in a litter. Who has ever seen a fractional lion? Certainly not me.
Why am I thinking fuzzy? Google is into data. The company collects, counts, and transform “real” data into actions. Whip in some smart software, and the company has processes which transform an advertiser’s need to reach eyeballs with some statistically validated interest in whatever the Mad Ave folks are trying to sell.
“Google Has a Secret Blocklist that Hides YouTube Hate Videos from Advertisers—But It’s Full of Holes” suggests that some of the Google procedures are fuzzy. The uncharitable might suggest that Google wants to get close enough to collect ad money. Horse shoe aficionados use the phrase “close enough for horse shoes” to indicate a toss which gets a point or blocks an opponent’s effort. That seems to be one possible message from the Mark Up article.
I noted this passage in the essay:
If you want to find YouTube videos related to “KKK” to advertise on, Google Ads will block you. But the company failed to block dozens of other hate and White nationalist terms and slogans, an investigation by The Markup has found. Using a list of 86 hate-related terms we compiled with the help of experts, we discovered that Google uses a blocklist to try to stop advertisers from building YouTube ad campaigns around hate terms. But less than a third of the terms on our list were blocked when we conducted our investigation.
What seems to be happening is that Google’s methods for taking a term and then “broadening” it so that related terms are identified is not working. The idea is that related terms with a higher “score” are more directly linked to the original term. Words and phrases with lower “scores” are not closely related. The article uses the example of the term KKK.
I learned:
Google Ads suggested millions upon millions of YouTube videos to advertisers purchasing ads related to the terms “White power,” the fascist slogan “blood and soil,” and the far-right call to violence “racial holy war.” The company even suggested videos for campaigns with terms that it clearly finds problematic, such as “great replacement.” YouTube slaps Wikipedia boxes on videos about the “the great replacement,” noting that it’s “a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory.” Some of the hundreds of millions of videos that the company suggested for ad placements related to these hate terms contained overt racism and bigotry, including multiple videos featuring re-posted content from the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah, whose official channel was suspended by YouTube in 2019 for hate speech.
It seems to me that Google is filtering specific words and phrases on a stop word list. Then the company is not identifying related terms, particularly words which are synonyms for the word on the stop list.
Is it possible that Google is controlling how it does fuzzification. In order to get clicks and advertising, Google blocks specifics and omits the term expansion and synonym identification settings to eliminate the words and phrases identified by the Mark Up’s investigative team?
These references to synonym expansion and reference to query expansion are likely to be unfamiliar to some people. Nevertheless, fuzzy is in the hands of those who set statistical thresholds.
Fuzzy is not real, but the search results are. Ad money is a powerful force in some situations. The article seems to have uncovered a couple of enlightening examples. String matching coupled with synonym expansion seem to be out of step. Some fuzzification may be helpful in the hate speech methods.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2021
Federating Domains: Advancing a Tiny Google Agenda?
April 14, 2021
Years ago I documented some of Google’s aspirations in my monograph Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. The research was funded by commercial enterprises, but I was given the green light to publish some of the data my team and I gathered. One of the findings was that Google’s founders had an image of Google as the Internet. The idea was that a user would come to Google, and Google would serve “answers” without having to send the user to the source Web site. No one paid much attention to my diagram of how this would work (included in my first Google monograph) the Google Legacy and then in word form in Google Version 2.
A harmonic response occurred when I read “W3C Technical Architecture Group Slaps Down Google’s Proposal to Treat Multiple Domains as Same Origin.” The write up explains the Googley approach. I noted this statement in the source article:
The proposal suggests that where multiple domains owned by the same entity – such as google.com, google.co.uk, and youtube.com – they could be grouped into sets which “allow related domain names to declare themselves as the same first-party.” The idea allows for sites to declare their own sets by means of a manifest in a known location. It also states that “the browser vendor could maintain a list of domains which meet its UA [User Agent] policy, and ship it in the browser.”
Why?
I have no great intuition for the 2021 Google. It seems to me that this notion of using a “”virtual domain” for multiple domains is a useful functionality. User tracking, advertising applications, and making the Google infrastructure the central authority for named virtual hosts, and other operations is a good one. By that I mean “good” for Google.
The notion of efficiency is central to Google business model. Due to the scale of the company, consolidating, federating, and controlling deliver both business and technical payoffs. Speeding up Web site response or reducing the time required for DNS operations translates to money savings for the Google. When coupled with tasks such as streamlined monitoring, there are probably additional benefits.
Will the rejection of the Google idea cause the idea to go away? In my view, this type of virtualization which is semi-possible within WordPress (a Google fave at the moment) is in operation in some Googley test set ups. Cross domain tracking is more efficient when the federated targets pipe data into the monitoring subsystem.
Rejection is irrelevant in my experience. Google does what Google does with or without permission or the blessings of committees. Azure and IBM are poking around the same functionality. Amazon AWS may be ahead by two years, an estimate offered by a senior AWS manager a couple of years ago.
Each of these outfits have one thing in mind: Control, revenue, and data collection.
Will anyone care? Sure, the Google competitors, but to users and advertisers my hunch is that the play is irrelevant until it is not.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
virtual parking
domain mapping (Cloud Run)
named virtual hosts
Fables of Googzilla: The Theoretical Information Tsar and the Search Duck
April 14, 2021
The mom and pop online ad vendor (hereinafter “The Google”) will appear in a thrilling new video series tentatively titled “Tales of Googzilla.”
Public sources (aka open source intelligence or OSINT) reveals two magnetic programs.
The first is summarized in “YouTube Pulls Florida Governor’s Video, Says His Panel Spread Covid-19 Misinformation.” The plot involves an emerging star named Gov Ron. In the midst of Covid, spring break dust ups, and NASCAR races — the Alphabet Google YouTube mom and pop online ad vendor hit the delete button. The write up reports:
Video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a panel of scientists apparently trading in Covid-19 misinformation has been pulled from YouTube.
To add some back alley darkness, the report noted:
It had been embedded in a Tampa-area TV station’s news story and it’s removal was flagged by the American Institute for Economic Research, a “free market” think tank based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Ah, ha. Misinformation “embedded.”
What will Gov Ron do? Will Googzilla continue to squash certain info bugs? What if Googzilla, like a drunken elephant, get frisky amidst the shanties erected by other alleged miscreants? How does one corral an elephant under the influence?
The second is reported in “DuckDuckGo Promises to Block Google’s Latest Ad-Tracking Tech — If Google Allows It.” The semi mighty metasearch engine Duck is honking in an intimidating manner at Googzilla. Can the Duck thing cause the mom and pop giant to discard its new approach to ensuring the privacy of Google services’ users?
The DuckDuck write up asserts that the Duck:
announced that the latest version of its Chrome extension would prevent websites from tracking users via their FLoC identification. Of course, the company notes that the extension update will have to be approved by Google before it becomes available to its users.
This seems like a fair fight. Issue a news release, honk angrily, and then point out that unless Googzilla grunts, “Okay,” the “new” user privacy methods will be implemented. Quack, quack, quack.
What’s the point of these two programs?
Advertising. Power. Control. Power. Did I already mention power? And PR/marketing. Yes.
Googzilla is the creation of the mom and pop finding system which has a large appetite for revenue.
Programs will air exclusively on streaming services supported by a company which lives in fear of Qwant, a fact revealed by Googzilla’s former keeper, Eric Schmidt.
Roar. Stomp. Quack. Quack. Delayed programs in the series may be released on Amazon Twitch. Programs air at random and in response to real life, just like YouTube influencer videos containing wholesome family entertainment like Valentine’s Day Inspired Try On Haul Fashion Nova Lingerie, Sleepwear & Dresses. Hey, four million views of Disney-grade excellence at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
A Test to Determine Googliness
April 12, 2021
I read “After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again.” I immediately thought of the statement, “You’ll Never Work in This Town Again.” Did the icon Harvey Weinstein say this? I can’t recall.
Okay, no loving a job. The real news “opinion” piece explains a harrowing, first-person account of harassment. Did I harass Mr. Weinstein with my use of the word “icon”? Yikes.
To learn about the mom-and-pop online ad agency’s approach to personnel management, read the real news “opinion” article.
Here’s what I gleaned from the write up:
1. Be a compliant engineer who stays within the bright white lines of behavior at the Google. What if the interactions are virtual? No matter. Bright white lines, real or imagined, are the markers.
2. Don’t pick a mentor who wants to keep his / her job, bonus, stock options, and invitations to select company events. (Once some events required a ski weekend. Whoooie! Fun.) Mentors who value something other than “relationships” may provide a re-introduction to the Maslow – Google hierarchy of needs.
3. Keep quiet and avoid the human resources people management wizard. After a sales call at SHRM or something like that, I knew that modern HR was a casualty of MBA think; for example, employees are at fault. Unproductive employees are self identified. Modern organizations don’t want flawed and profit-sucking humanoids. Maybe I have the human resource function wrong, but I too can have an opinion.
4. Life at the Googleplex does not dispense “Also Participated” badges like a really trendy private middle school.
These observations lend themselves to items on my “Checklist for Being Googley”; to wit:
- Be smart enough to be compliant and “cooperative”
- Work alone when possible delivering “good enough” outputs
- Operate without official or unofficial visits to personnel professionals
- Welcome inter-personal interactions warmly, enthusiastically, and without documenting such encounters
- Do “what it takes” to join a hot team, get a promotion, and enter the private domains of the truly elite
- Eschew interviews, book deals, and opportunities to contribute to a “real news” channel.
If you can tick off each of these items, you are ready to do a run through the Google Labs Aptitude Test. Rumored to have been retired, copies of these tests of Google grade knowledge are still available. Just search Google.com. Oh, strike that. This link returns the questions, not the attractive green of the original hard copy with the really hard questions like:
What’s broken with Unix? How would you Fix it?
Beyond Search had a copy but boxer Max ate it years ago. Yes, he passed the exam.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2021
The Alphabet Google YouTube Thing Explains Good Old Outcome Centered Design
April 8, 2021
If you have tried to locate information on a Google Map, you know what good design is, right? What about trying to navigate the YouTube upload interface to add or delete a “channel”? Perfection, okay. What if you have discovered an AMP error email and tried to figure out how a static Web site generated by an AMP approved “partner” can be producing a single flawed Web page? Intuitive and helpful, don’t you think?
Truth is: Google Maps are almost impossible to use regardless of device. The YouTube interface is just weird and better for a 10-year-old video game player than a person over 30, and the AMP messages? Just stupid.
I read “Waymo’s 7 Principles of Outcome-Centered Design Are What Your Product Needs” and thought I stumbled upon a listicle crafted by Stephen Colbert and Jo Koy in the O’Hare Airport’s Jazz Bar.
Waymo (so named because one get way more with Alphabet Google YouTube — hereinafter, AGYT)technology — is managed by co-CEOs. It is semi famous for hiring uber engineer Anthony Levandowski. Plus the company has been beavering away to make driving down 101 semi fun since 2009. The good news is that Waymo seems to be making more headway than the Google team trying to solve death. The Wikipedia entry for Waymo documents 12 collisions, but the exact number of smart errors by the Alphabet Google YouTube software is not known even to some Googlers. Need to know, you know.
What are the rules for outcome centered design; that is, ads but no crashes I presume. The write up presents seven. Here are three and you can let your Chrome browser steer you to the full list. Don’t run into the Tesla Web site either, please.
Principle 2. Create focus by clarifying you8r purpose.
Okay, focus. Let’s see. When riding in a vehicle with no human in charge, the idea is to avoid a crash. What about filtering YouTube for okay content? Well, that only works some of the time. The Waymo crashes appear to underscore the fuzz in the statistical routines.
And Principle 4. Clue in to your customer’s context.
Yep, in a vehicle which knows one browsing history and has access to nifty profiles with probabilities allows the vehicle to just get going. Forget what the humanoid may want. Alphabet Google YouTube is ahead of the humanoid. Sometimes. The AFYT approach is to trim down what the humanoid wants to three options. Close enough for horse shoes. Waymo, like Alphabet Google YouTube, knows best. Just like a digital mistress. The humanoid, however, is going to a previously unvisited location. Another humanoid told the rider face to face about an emergency. The AGYT system cannot figure out context. Not to worry. Those AGYT interfaces will make everything really easy. One can talk to the Waymo equipped smart vehicle. Just speak clearly, slowly, and in a language which Waymo parses in an acceptable manner. Bororo won’t work.
Finally, Principle 7: Edit edit edit.
I think this means revisions. Those are a great idea. Alphabet Google YouTube does an outstanding job with dots, hamburger menus, and breezy writing in low contrast colors. Oh, content? If you don’t get it, you are not Googley. Speak up and you may be the Timnit treatment or the Congressional obfuscation rhetoric. I also like ignoring the antics of senior managers.
Yep, outcome centered. Great stuff. Were Messrs. Colbert and Koy imbibing something other than Sprite at the airport when possibly conjuring this list of really good tips? What’s the outcome? How about ads displayed to passengers in Waymo infused vehicles? Context centered, relevant, and a feature one cannot turn off.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2021
Google and the Institutionalization of Me Too, Me Too
April 8, 2021
Never one to let a trend pass it by un-mimicked, Google has created a new YouTube feature. Ars Technica reports, “YouTube’s TikTok Clone, ‘YouTube Shorts,’ Is Live in the US.” The feature actually launched in India last September and has done well there—possibly because TikTok has been banned in that country since June. The feature but has now made its way to our shores. Writer Ron Amadeo tells us:
“The YouTube Shorts section shows up on the mobile apps section of the YouTube home screen and for now has a ‘beta’ label. It works exactly like TikTok, launching a full-screen vertical video interface, and users can swipe vertically between videos. As you’d expect, you can like, dislike, comment on, and share a short. You can also tap on a user name from the Shorts interface to see all the shorts from that user. The YouTube twist is that shorts are also regular YouTube videos and show up on traditional channel pages and in subscription feeds, where they are indistinguishable from normal videos. They have the normal YouTube interface instead of the swipey TikTok interface. This appears to be the only way to view these videos on desktop. A big part of TikTok is the video editor, which allows users to make videos with tons of effects, music, filters, and variable playback speeds that contribute to the signature TikTok video style. The YouTube Shorts editor seems nearly featureless in comparison, offering only speed options and some music.”
Absent those signature features, it seems unlikely Short will successfully rival TikTok. Perhaps it will last about as long as Stadia, Orkut, or Web Accelerator. At least no one can say Google shies away from trying things that may not work out.
Cynthia Murrell, April 8, 2021
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
