Google: Changes Coming and Steadily
February 4, 2020
Google’s financial results suggest that the company’s advertising business is facing some headwinds. “Google Lifts Veil on YouTube, Cloud Units” states:
Meanwhile, the company reported disappointing results in its core online advertising operations.
The “meanwhile” is a “nice” way of suggesting that Google’s good news about YouTube and its baby cloud endeavors were supposed to distract from that ominous line:
disappointing results in its core online advertising operations.
And the word “operations.” That is a pregnant choice. The problem perhaps is deeper than softness in companies’ ad spending, more problematic than Amazon’s and Facebook’s expanding advertising initiatives, and more troublesome than the withdrawal of the Silicon Valley sultans, Messrs. Brin and Page.
What is caused the spangled juggernaut to wobble in its “core business”?
DarkCyber’s early morning thoughts include:
- Google’s rush to mobile created an ad inventory gap; that is, more ads for a small space. The fixes have not been satisfying to users or to consumers.
- Trading off relevance for broader results so more ads can be shown in relation to content which is not germane to what the user wanted information about. Even the most jaded consumer of Neverthink content, sort of wants ads relevant to their interests when using Google.
- Overhead is tough to control. Yep, that means productivity from human resources and efficiency in use of capital have to take precedent over moon shots, solving death, and dealing with litigation related to interesting staff issues.
- The Steve Ballmer “one trick pony” assessment of Google is proving accurate. Billions spent and the Google sells ads.
Net net: Worth monitoring the company’s performance and actions whether one has shares, works there, or is just mildly interested in what has defined “search” for billions of people.
Can these people find relevant information online? Nope. That’s probably part of the problem. Can cleverness address the issue? Sure but at what cost. Can Jeff Dean save the overdone cookies? Maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2020
Google Translate: Some Improvements Arrive
January 29, 2020
Google may be struggling with A B testing, but it is improving its translation capabilities.
While Google Translation is more or less accurate, depending on the language, it does have it flaws, especially when it comes to offline translation. SlashGear shares an update on the translation service “Google translate Now Offers Higher Quality Offline Translations.”
Google Translation’s offline services premiered a few years ago, but their quality cannot compare with the online counterpart. The newest update improves the offline translation service by 12% when it comes to grammar and sentence structures. Asians languages have seen improved accuracy with the update.
“Google Translate is best when used with an Internet connection, but there are times the app will prove useful in the absence of WiFi or mobile data. While traveling in a foreign country, for example, someone who doesn’t have mobile data access will find Google Translate’s offline support useful, though the results are often less accurate and polished.”
Google improved its NLP on fifty-nine languages. The old offline translation were understandable, but sounded awkward and like someone learned the language from a textbook. The new update is more grammatically correct and actually makes sense in modern vernacular languages. There’s also new offline transliteration support for ten new languages. Users who translate their own language into one of the new ten languages sees the new original script and the transliteration for accuracy. It helps people who cannot read the language’s writing by putting the sentences in the Latin alphabet.
This is useful for tourists, researchers, polyglots, and students who need to finish their foreign language homework. Now about that mythical A B testing, which is part of the data driven environment for Googlers, right?
Whitney Grace, January 29, 2020
Google: Making Friends Everywhere
January 26, 2020
Would it surprise anyone if Google alters search results to favor itself? Nope! Reuters explains that Europe is once again fed up with Google’s shenanigans, so “Axel Springer Unit, Others Say Google Still Playing Unfairly, Want EU To Act.” Axel Springer owns the shopping comparison Web site Idealo and it has teamed with forty other companies to accuse Google of altering search. The companies want the European Union to enforce a ruling against Google.
The claimants are pressuring European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to enforce an order she made two years ago for Google to stop favoring its own price comparison shopping service. Axel Springer and its forty allies claim Google continues to alter search results, stealing potential customers from them. Google has not complied with Vestager’s order, when the company was also fined $2.65 billion (2.4 billion euros). Google claimed it would allow competitors to bid for advertising space at the top of a search page to even the odds, but Web site traffic has not increased for the claimants.
Google has a monopoly on shopping that Amazon does not have, but what about the smaller companies?
“Thomas Hoppner, a lawyer for Idealo said most of the signatories were voicing their frustrations for the first time. ‘The letter demonstrates a united front of genuine comparison shopping services against Google’s attempt to present measures as a “compliance mechanism,’ he said. Earlier this month, Vestager voiced concerns about the lack of significant traffic to Google’s competitors, rowing back on previous comments about the positive impact of the auctions.”
Google says the competition has increased for their ad space auctions, which would explain why these price comparison services are not getting much service. Google will probably do what it can to avoid paying more fines and angering world governments, but all it has to do is grease a few palms to continue its monopolies.
Whitney Grace, January 26, 2020
Google and Data: Doing Stuff Without Data?
January 25, 2020
The Verge has been one of the foot soldiers carrying a pointy stick toward the Google. A few days ago, Google mobilized its desktop search results. The idea was to make search results look the same; that is, virtually impossible to determine where a link came from, who paid for it, and how it was linked to a finger tap or an honest-to-goodness thumb typed word or phrase.
The Verge noted the difference because its experts looked at a page of results on a tiny display device and then on a bigger device and noted the similarity or differences. “Google’s Ads Just Look Like Search Results Now” stated on January 23, 2020:
In what appears to be something of a purposeful dark pattern, the only thing differentiating ads and search results is a small black-and-white “Ad” icon next to the former.
Yikes, a dark pattern. Tricking users. Changing to match mobile.
A day later, The Verge reported that “Google is backtracking on its controversial desktop search results redesign.” The write up stated:
The company says it will experiment with favicon placement.
But the point is not the Verge’s useful coverage of the Google shift. For DarkCyber, the new interface illustrates that the baloney about Google using data to determine its actions, the importance of A B testing, and the overall brilliance of Googlers illustrates that the GOOG does what it wants.
If Google’s “data” cannot inform the company that an interface change will irritate outfits like the Verge, users, and denizens of the Twitter thing — maybe the company’s data dependence is a shibboleth?
If Google cannot interpret A B data in a way to avoid backlash and crawfishing, maybe Google’s data skills are not what the PR machine says?
DarkCyber thought experimenting and analysis came first at the Google. It seems that these steps come after guessing. Ah, the Google.
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2020
A Call for Openness in Search
January 24, 2020
DarkCyber understands that if one cannot “find” something, that something does not exist for most people who look for the “something.” This is not a statement from Grasshopper or a tablet unearthed outside of Athens. Finding is required in order to do work or — as a matter of fact — anything in a digital environment.
“Opening Up Search Is an Ethical Imperative” presents an argument for opening up search. “Opening up” appears to mean that Google’s grip on ad supported search and retrieval is broken. The write up states:
This is a shocking state of affairs given search’s ubiquitous impact on human well-being. And no I don’t think I’m overreaching. Search might mean a doctor diagnosing a patient with tricky symptoms. Bad search results might have life or death consequences. E-Commerce isn’t about buying pointless frivolities. It’s increasingly society’s economic glue. We no longer call on someone in sales to describe our needs verbally. Instead we request via the e-commerce search bar. Add job search, dating search, enterprise search, food delivery, grocery, legal, real estate, and so on, and you get a picture where search is indeed eating the world. What human activity will exist that won’t involve a search bar?
The statement is accurate. In the context of the article, search also means looking for information on a public facing Web site, not just locating a pizza restaurant or checking the weather. Here’s another statement we noted:
As users are reaching more-and-more for search, supporting the community collectively helps ensure positive outcomes for society as a whole. We’ll collectively help doctors find the right diagnosis for a suffering patient; support a purchasing agent find the right parts for an airplane they’re manufacturing; uplift lawyers seeking to hold the powerful accountable by helping them find solid legal precedent for their arguments.
Again, an accurate observation.
The article includes a list of suggestions for companies and others; for example, Do open source correctly and create search talent.
Several observations:
- For most people, including those in organizations, search occurs on mobile devices. Either form factor or the location in which the user runs the search is not conducive to the “library style” of information retrieval and review. The habituation to mobile and on the fly searching is going to be difficult to change. As my eighth grade teacher said, “Habits are like a soft bed: Easy to get into and hard to get out of.” Her grammar may have been questionable, but her comment applies to search today.
- You can learn more about the “open everything” initiative in the DarkCyber video news program which will become available on January 28, 2020. A former CIA professional reveals his commitment to “open everything.” The remarks may spark some fresh thinking.
- The introduction of the word “ethical” into the article raises some interesting questions; namely, “In today’s environment, what does ‘ethical’ mean? This is a surprisingly difficult word to define across contexts.
To sum up:
- There are different search and retrieval systems. Some are ignored like Qwant; others are misunderstood because they are metasearch systems; still others are proprietary systems swathed in buzzwords like artificial intelligence and machine learning; and even more are “sort of” open source like Amazon’s search system which was influenced by defectors from Lucid Imagination, now LucidWorks. Plus there are other variations. Search remains confusing and tangled in the shoe laces of worn out sneakers.
- The dominance of Google means that Google is in charge of presenting information to people using computing devices. The market penetration in some countries is over 95 percent which is the reason that most estimates of search share beat the drum for marginal players like Bing, Qwant, and DuckDuckGo. The thinking is, “A percent or two of share means some money. But the money is not Google scale.”
- Google is not about to change unless the search business is regulated, Google implodes which is possible but not in the next year or two, or billions of people change their “habits.”
Advertisers go where the eyeballs are. Money can alter the meaning of ethics. And that money issue may be the reason Web sites are not indexed comprehensively, US government Web sites are indexed infrequently and superficially, and why Google ignores certain types of content.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2020
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Tweet Insight: Half Right
January 23, 2020
DarkCyber spotted a Tweet about Google search results. You can find the information at this link. The insight is that:
There’s something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?
What if every search result is an ad, an ad driver, or an ad component?
The idea is that the results are shaped to generate revenue, not information.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2020
Google: Cake, Ice Cream, and Presents. Outsiders Not Really Wanted
January 21, 2020
Sundar Pichai is generating some PR buzz. The topic is, on the surface, regulating artificial intelligence. News flash: Barn burned, horses gone, and a new data center has been constructed on the site. Google’s been doing the smart software thing for decades. The evidence is publicly available. Just read Google’s patent applications. There are smart “janitors.” There are intelligent advertising dashboards. There are the hundreds of “signals” processed to make sure that search results are just wonderfully useful. To whom? Well, to Google and maybe advertisers.
The write up “Google Boss Sundar Pichai Calls for AI Regulation” provides an interesting take on Google’s PR play. DarkCyber noted this statement in the Beeb’s article:
Writing in the Financial Times, Sundar Pichai said it was “too important not to” impose regulation but argued for “a sensible approach”. He said that individual areas of AI development, like self-driving cars and health tech, required tailored rules.
None of the examples provided in the first paragraph to this blog post are mentioned.
Why?
Google wants to have its cake, ice cream, and presents. The existing smart software is just fine. The future stuff which Google and others have not been able to convert to an online ad scale cash stream can be regulated. Autonomous weapons? Maybe?
The Beeb states:
Google launched its own independent ethics board in 2019, but shut it down less than two weeks later following controversy about who had been appointed to it.
Yeah, regulation. The Google way.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2020
Google Allegedly Ostracized
January 18, 2020
I worked in the San Francisco area once affectionately known as Plastic Fantastic. My recollection is that most of the people with whom I worked and socialized were flexible. There was the occassional throwback who longed for the rigidity of the Midwestern farm life. But overall, chill was the word. The outfit who paid me to do whatever it was they thought I was my skill was an easy going money machine. Most of the high technology outfits were just starting to get a sense of the power and impact afforded those who were comfortable with online technologies, nifty must have gadgets, and a realization that members of the high school science club could call the shots.
Imagine my surprise when I read the allegedly accurate “San Francisco Pride Members Pass Resolution to Ban Google, YouTube from Future Parades.” The write up states:
Members of the LGBTQ+ organization say they passed an amendment to ban Google, YouTube and Alphabet, as well as the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, from future celebrations after a vote at their monthly membership meeting Wednesday night. In a statement released to SFGATE on Thursday, SF Pride members and former Google engineers Laurence Berland and Tyler Breisacher said they are now urging the board of directors to formally approve the motion at their upcoming meeting on Feb. 5.
Remarkable if true. The Google HR and marketing departments will have to step up their efforts. Recruitment may become more difficult. The PR vibes are doing the Hopf fibration thing. (This is a nice way of saying, “Difficult to understand.”)
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2020
The New Doing Gooder Google
January 17, 2020
Google’s cheerleading unit likes to remind us, amid the constant criticisms, that the company makes some positive contributions to society. For example, it seems their AI has gotten good at detecting cancer. We learn from AndoridCentral that “Google’s AI Is Better at Detecting Cancer than Doctors, Says Study.” About the same research, Ausdroid reports, “Google Publish their Impressive Breast Cancer Screening Using AI Results.” The capabilities are courtesy of technology developed by Google acquisition DeepMind. The study was performed by Google Health in conjunction with Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, Northwestern University, and Royal Surrey County Hospital. Researchers used deep-learning tools to create AI detection models and applied them to almost 30,000 patients for whom results were already known. Muhammad Jarir Kanji of AndroidCentral writes:
“The system was trained using a large dataset of mammograms from women in the two countries. Even more telling than its better accuracy than doctors was the fact that it did so with far less information than the radiologists it was competing with, who also had access to the patients’ medical history and previous mammograms in their deliberations. … While the paper noted that ‘AI may be uniquely poised to help with’ the challenge of detecting breast cancer, Darzi said the system was not yet at a stage where it could replace a human reader.”
Emphasis on “yet.” Meanwhile, Ausdroid’s Scott Plowman emphasizes:
“The data sets were also NOT used to train the AI system and thus we totally unknown to the system.
Comparing the positive results from the AI to those patients who ended up having biopsy-confirmed breast cancer the AI demonstrated a ‘statistically significant’ improvement in ‘absolute specificity’ of 1.2% (UK – double read), and 5.7% (USA – single read) and an improvement in absolute sensitivity of 2.7% (UK) and 9.4% (USA). For reference, sensitivity is the ability to correctly identify lesions and specificity is how accurate it is at identifying those without lesions. This means that it has a reduction in both false positives and false negatives.”
If Google’s PR team spins more stories like this one, they just might be able to burnish the company’s reputation.
Cynthia Murrell, January 08, 2020
An Interesting Hypothesis about Google Indexing
January 15, 2020
We noted “Google’s Crawl-Less Index.” The main idea is that something has changed in how Google indexes. We circled in yellow this statement from the article:
[Google’ can do this now because they have a popular web browser, so they can retire their old method of discovering links and let the users do their crawling.
The statement needs context.
The speculation is that Google indexes a Web page only when a user visits a page. Google notes the behavior and indexes the page.
What’s happening, DarkCyber concludes, is that Google no longer brute force crawls the public Web. Indexing takes place when a signal (a human navigating to a page) is received. Then the page is indexed.
Is this user-behavior centric indexing a reality?
DarkCyber has noted these characteristics of Google’s indexing in the last year:
- Certain sites are in the Google indexes but are either not updated or updated selectively; for example, the Railway Pension Retiriement Board, MARAD, and similar sites
- Large sites like the Auto Channel no longer have backfiles indexed and findable unless the user resorts to Google’s advanced search syntax. Then the results display less speedily than more current content probably due to the Google caches not having infrequently accessed content in a cache close to that user
- Current content for many specialist sites is not available when it is published. This is a characteristic of commercial sites with unusual domains like dot co and for some blogs.
What’s going on? DarkCyber believes that Google is trying to reduce the increasing and very difficult to control costs associated with indexing new content, indexing updated content (the deltas), and indexing the complicated content which Web sites generate in chasing the dream of becoming number one for a Google query.
Search efficiency, as we have documented in our write ups, books, and columns about Google, boils down to:
- Maximizing advertising value. That’s one reason why query expansion is used. Results match more ads and, thus, the advertiser’s ads get broader exposure.
- Getting away from the old school approach of indexing the billions of Web pages. 90 percent of these Web pages get zero traffic; therefore, index only what’s actually wanted by users. Today’s Google is not focused on library science, relevance, precision, and recall.
- Cutting costs. Cost control at the Google is very, very difficult. The crazy moonshots, the free form approach to management, the need for legions of lawyers and contract workers, the fines, the technical debt of a 20 year old company, the salaries, and the extras—each of these has to be controlled. The job is difficult.
Net net: Even wonder why finding specific information is getting more difficult via Google? Money.
PS: Finding timely, accurate information and obtaining historical content are more difficult, in DarkCyber’s experience, than at any time since we sold our ThePoint service to Lycos in the mid 1990s.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2020
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