Was It Google or SEO That Undermined the Internet?
April 22, 2020
If you are searching for a Web designer position, the job description will most likely contain the term “familiar with SEO.” SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and it uses keywords in original content to drive traffic to a Web site and make it appear at the top of search results. SEO makes the World Wide Web go round, but Super Highway 98 tells, “How SEO Ruined The Internet.”
Super Highway 98 is a nostalgic Web site that glorifies the early days off the Internet—back in the 1990s when dialup was still needed to surf. The article explains that from 1998-2003, Google was a magical experience. Nowadays, SEO technicians modify hyperlinks and headings to optimize them for search engines. In essence, they are rewriting history, instead of archiving the past:
“ ‘Content pruning’ is an effective SEO tactic on large, established websites. Rather that archiving old content with historical significance, many websites will delete it from their servers and return a 410 status code. Gone. The goal is to optimize “crawl budget,” keeping Google focused on the content that matters now. The result is a web without institutional memory or accountability.”
Today’s Internet hosts “the illusion of choice,” because many Web sites (especially review sites) are owned by the same company and content is specifically scripted for best SEO practices. Content needs to be breaking news and drive up Web traffic. Links are Internet currency. The biggest players usually do not link to other sites to keep users on their own pages.
Not for the foreseeable future. Money is more important than delivering objectionable, comprehensive, user tracking free services.
Whitney Grace, April 22, 2020
Google, Ad Transparency, and Query Relaxation: Should Advertisers Care? Probably
April 20, 2020
You need information about Banjo, a low profile outfit in Utah. Navigate to Google and enter the query Banjo law enforcement. No quotes for this query. Banjo has a Web site, and the phrase law enforcement is reasonably common and specific. (It is what is known as a bound phrase like White House or stock market; that is, the two words go together in US English.)
Here’s what the system displayed to me on April 20, 2020, at 0918 am US Eastern time:
The search results are okay. The ads do not match the query or the user’s intent: Law enforcement is not even close to a $1,000 musical instrument in a retail store.
Notice that the first result is to a Salt Lake Tribune article in March 2020 about Banjo’s allegedly “massive surveillance system.” The second result is from the same newspaper which reports a few days later that the Salt Lake City police won’t share data with Banjo. So far so good. Google is delivering timely, relevant results.
But look at the ads. The query Banjo law enforcement displays to a person wanting information about a policeware company the following for fee, pay to be seen ads in front of a buyer with an interest in Banjo:
These advertisers are betting money that Google can get them relevant clicks when a person search for a banjo. Maybe? But when someone searches for the policeware company Banjo, the advertiser is going to be “surprised.” Do advertisers like surprises?
Here are the advertisers whose for fee ads for people interested in law enforcement software (policeware) had displayed in front of a Google user with a vanishingly low probability of purchasing a stringed instrument whilst researching a specialist software vendor selling almost exclusively to police and screened quangos (quasi non governmental organizations):
- Banjo Ben Clark
- Deering Banjo Company
- Banjo.com (note that our Banjo is Banjo.co)
- Banjo Studio
- Instrument Alley
- Sweetwater
- Guitar Center
These companies paid for ads as a result of query relaxation. Google’s system does not differentiate the Banjo policeware outfit from the music products.
Are there parallels between games in which a person can win money by guessing which cup hides the ball? These games of chance are often confidence operations. In this context confidence means trickery, not trust.
Why? There are url distinctions; that is, Banjo.co versus Banjo.com; there are disambiguation clues in Banjo.co’s Web page; there is the metadata itself with the keyword surveillance a likely index term.
Australia: Facebook and Google Will Not Be Allowed to Kill News
April 20, 2020
“Australia to Force Technology Giants Facebook and Google to Pay for News Content” expresses something News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch has long desired: Money for real news.
The write up reports:
Social media giants Facebook and Google will be forced to pay Australian media companies for sharing their content or face sanctions under a landmark decision by the Morrison government. The move comes as the media industry reels from tumbling advertising revenue, already in decline before the Covid 19 coronavirus outbreak collapsed the market.
Several questions may soon be answered:
- Will Facebook and Google tie up the “pay for news” effort in the courts?
- If the invoices are sent, will Facebook and Google pay them or seek to stall, negotiate, or just ignore blandishments?
- Will the law cause Facebook and Google to set up their own news gathering operations and subsidize them via ad revenue; that is, reinvent traditional news. (Remember: Apple and Google have teamed up to deal with coronavirus. The “pay for news” effort may force a similar shotgun marriage.)
- Will other countries like members of the Five Eyes, get with this “pay for news” program?
Net net: Facebook and Google face a management moment that could become “real news.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2020
Google and Its Mutating Smart Software
April 20, 2020
Google announced quantum supremacy. Earlier the online ad company asserted that it would solve death. Yeah.
Now the company has announced YAB or yet another breakthrough, according to “Google Engineers ‘Mutate’ AI to Make It Evolve Systems Faster Than We Can Code Them”:
For years, engineers at Google have been working on a freakishly smart machine learning system known as the AutoML system (or automatic machine learning system), which is already capable of creating AI that outperforms anything we’ve made. Now, researchers have tweaked it to incorporate concepts of Darwinian evolution and shown it can build AI programs that continue to improve upon themselves faster than they would if humans were doing the coding.
You can read about this mutating wonder in “AutoML-Zero: Evolving Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch.”
DarkCyber assumes that the use of AutoML will allow Google to solve the death thing. However, it may be difficult for the Googler’s method to cope with degrading advertising and increasing infrastructure costs.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2020
Google Cloud: Thinner and Wispier?
April 20, 2020
The Murdoch paywall notwithstanding, DarkCyber was able to read “Google May Let Some Air Out of Its Cloud.” (My dog Tibby subscribes to the dead tree edition. DarkCyber is running an on going experiment to find out if the dead tree and the online units of the WSJ coordinate. So far the answer is “No.” How long has the experiment been running? More than 10 years.
The write up reveals that the Google will spend less on data centers. Why?
Fallout from coronavirus
The real news article points out that if Google slows down its spending, the impact on outfits lower down the food chain will be negative.
Okay, but let’s consider another angle.
Advertising is slowing down. The costs for indexing for the Google search engine are going up. Google has been struggling with cost control even with the hard eyed CFO the company has counting beans.
What’s this mean?
Google will automate more, index less, and hunt for money by providing “We’ll do the ad allocation for you” type services. Imitating Zoom’s interface signals that me-too is more important than applying the Google magic wand to products and services.
Net net: The company’s showing that it has feet of clay-based silicon. After 20 years, these feet should be resistant to perturbations in the humanoid aspect of the firm’s business.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2020
Google: Rolling Over?
April 11, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this headline: “BRIEF-Google France: Will Comply with Latest French FCA Regulatory Verdict.” Most publishers want to be paid for anything, including a link to the original story and for modern taxi meter functions like Web traffic.
Implications:
- This will be interesting for commercial database publishers. These outfits index OPC or other people’s content.
- Publishers in other countries will use their quarantine time to get the monetization show on the road as soon as possible.
- Non profit outfits like the IEEE will maybe stop charging members $10 for a three page summary article of OPC. (Nah, never happen, gentle reader.)
Exciting times ahead. Depending on the money available to sue, any outfit which points to a story could become the lucky recipient of an invoice.
And libraries? Yeah, what about libraries? My goodness what about high school students writing papers based on secondary research? Well, pay up. There is no free lunch for “real” information.
Google once again plays the role of the Great Disruptor. Good work because disruption creates opportunities.
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2020
A Rose by Any Other Name Is Google Meet or Google Chat or Google What?
April 11, 2020
Slashgear published “Google Meet Is Hangouts Meet’s New Name, Everything Else Is the Same.” I don’t use any of the Google “talk” services. I don’t want to talk, chat, receive text messages, or get phone calls. Why? If something is important, a person will send me a letter or maybe a FedEx. Anyone remember those?
But many folks younger than 76 are into chat et al. The write up states:
It is perhaps a running joke by now that Google just can’t settle on a single messaging app or service for long. It has gone through quite a number of them, enough to confuse even the most ardent of Google’s followers. That has happened yet again now that Hangouts Meet, G Suite’s video conferencing product, has officially been rebranded to Google Meet, perhaps with the ironic goal of making things less confusing.
This is no joke. The organizational approach at Google is based on high school science club management methods. This obvious guiding principle is overlooked by many, including the Google Board of Directors, most Googlers, most pundits, and, of course, those seeking Google’s mouse pads, LED pins, T shirts, and other assorted tangible evidence that proximity with the GOOG took place.
The write up states:
The Meet part of the Hangouts brand is being renamed to a more identifiable Google Meet. The logo, however, remains the same and Hangouts Chat remains untouched.
Yeah, okay.
If these services worked, why was it necessary for Google’s HSSCMM team to forbid Zoom on Google laptops?
Perhaps the answer is, “Zoom sort of worked.”
How does this relate to the name confusion, the multiple ways to exchange information, and the incredible confusion of numerous products and services which function like a 1960’s Bell labs TV phone?
Gentle reader, may I submit that Google does one thing well: Relax the precision of search results in order to burn through ad inventory. Google is not making much headway in its non ad businesses. Google is ads.
HSSCMM are now on display. Perhaps everyone can try to join a Hangout, do a chat, or send an email to Google customer service?
One last question, “Are there ads on the Loon balloons?”
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2020
Google and Its Warm Relationship with France
April 10, 2020
We noted the trusted (honest) news story “French Regulator: Google Must Pay French News and Publishing Firms for Using Their Content.” The write up notes in a trusted way:
“Google’s practices caused a serious and immediate harm to the press sector, while the economic situation of publishers and news agencies is otherwise fragile, and while the law aimed on the contrary at improving the conditions of remuneration they derive from content produced by journalists,” the watchdog said in a statement.
Anyone indexing information or writing blog posts like this one should immediately stop pointing to content. It may have been a progressive act to burn the library in Alexandria. Monks at Mont St Michel? Wrong doers. No food and thorns under the cowl. And Google. Oh, Google will have its day in a French court. Hint: Bring a checkbook. Mais oui.
Stephen E Arnold, April 10, 2020
A Minor Point about Google Wave
April 9, 2020
I read “Google Wave’s Failure is a Great Lesson for Modern Real-Time Collaboration Tools.” I sure don’t want to get in a digital squabble. Revisionism is a respected skill at this time. The article points out:
The idea to focus on communication came from Jens who noticed a significant shift in the way people interacted online. The consensus between the brothers was that they should build a platform that would reflect those changes in its functionality.
I would suggest checking out Dr. Alon Halevy (who was Alon Levy for a while). He wrote:
I was the CEO of Megagon Labs from November 2015 until December 2018. Prior to Megagon, I headed the Structured Data Group of Google Research in Mountain View, California for a decade (here are a few thoughts about that decade). I joined Google in 2005 with the acquisition of my company, Transformic. Prior to that, I was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, where I founded the UW CSE Database Group in 1998. You can follow me on Twitter for more (un)frequent updates. In the past, I used to blog and maybe I’ll return to it some day.
He added:
My group is responsible for Google Fusion Tables, a service for managing data in the cloud that focuses on ease of use, collaboration and data integration. Fusion Tables enables users to upload spreadsheets, CSV and KML files and share them with collaborators or with the public. You can easily integrate data from multiple sources (and organizations) and use a collection of visualizations to look at your data. In particular, Fusion Tables is deeply integrated with Google Maps, making it easy to visualize large geographic data sets. To facilitate collaboration, users can conduct fine-grained discussions on the data. You can see some examples of how Fusion Tables is being used. You can interact with Fusion Tables through our UI or our API.
The source for these quotes is https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~alon/.
With thousands of Googles, why did I focus on Dr. Halevy. The name change was a signal to which I attended. With a bit of work, one can locate slide decks which explain some of the functionality Dr. Halevy brought to Google.
Did Dr. Halevy inform the younger Googlers?
My research for Google Version 2: The Calculating Predator (Infonortics (now out of business says, “Yes.” Dr. Halevy had a significant impact on Google and influenced the company’s efforts in surveillance, data transformation, and collaborative services.
But as one of my friends says to me when we talk, “Nobody cares.” I would add that many of those waiting about Google are unaware of Transformics. That’s too bad. There was a reason why the Google acquired the firm. What is Dr. Halevy contributing to Facebook. Those early Transformic slide decks and Dr. Halevy’s technical papers may yield some insights. But that’s work. Better to go with revisionism.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2020
Google Stadia: Amazon Jungle Sounds Startling Googzilla Maybe?
April 9, 2020
I used to live in Campinas, Brazil. Not the jungle exactly, but in the 1950s there were some interesting critters roaming around. At night, if you were lucky, we could hear snuffing at door jams. Yep, big cats, and not the Instagram type either.
Amazon announced in the way of the Bezos bulldozer that it would be getting into the online game business. You can read about that move in “Amazon Pushes into Making Video Games, Not Just Streaming Their Play.”
That bulldozer gear shift may have frightened some Googlers. A lot. DarkCyber noted “Google Stadia Now Free to Anyone with a Gmail Address.” The write up stated:
Google’s video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday. To sweeten the deal, Google is also giving new users two months of Stadia Pro — including access to nine games — for free. Existing Stadia Pro subscribers won’t be charged for the next two months of the service, Google said. Previously, access to Stadia required purchasing the $129 Google Stadia Premiere Edition, a bundle that includes a Chromecast Ultra, a wireless Stadia Controller, and three months of Stadia Pro, the service that offered free games and video streams up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with HDR lighting.
If free doesn’t work, what’s next? A Microsoft Bing play like paying people to use a Web search service which is not particularly robust. Perhaps Google will offer coupons or run discounts on weekends like Harbor Freight. Green Stamps were popular with my mother in the late 1940s. Maybe Google could try that as a way to generate some excitement?
How long will the Googlers working on games stick to the project? Google initiatives die when the wizards realize they might miss a bonus or be left out of a really hot project that will ignite their career.
Will online games become another Dodgeball? Wait, I hear the Bezos bulldozer. Even I am frightened of the sound of crushing hopes, dreams, and shopping options. Yikes. How fast can Googzilla run?
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2020
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