Google Getting into More Trouble Because of Ads
December 26, 2017
It feels like Google is in the news every day lately. Usually, it’s not for anything good. Take, for instance, the recent Register piece about some fishy ad policies, in the article “Google Lies About Click-Fraud Refunds and Tried to Destroy Us –Ad Biz.”
In a complaint filed in a US district court in San Jose, California, on Wednesday, the ad biz claimed Google failed to refund almost $500,000 paid to place ads on websites that drove invalid traffic, in violation of Google rules
Claiming that this is a pattern of behavior, the complaint seeks recognition as a class action for Google’s alleged false promises to refund advertisers for ad impressions placed through Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange deemed to be invalid.
The lawsuit contends that a Google employee had warned the ad biz privately that Google’s Network Partner Managers like AdTrader ‘would mysteriously start getting into trouble with Google once they reached an annual revenue run rate of $4-5 million.’
It should be pointed out that Google has not been convicted of any of these claims, but they are troubling. It is easy to say that it is a busy time to be a member of the search giant’s legal team. Recently, the city of Seattle sent Google a letter stating that it is considered a commercial advertiser, like a radio or television station, and therefore had to turn over any information about political ads sold regarding city elections. We have no doubt Google will weather these storms, but they are concerning.
Patrick Roland, December 26, 2017
Artificial Intelligence: Smarts of a Five Year Old?
December 22, 2017
Who knows if this is true? I find the assertion in “AI Is Still Dumber Than a 5-Year-Old, Say Scientists” interesting. According to Inc. Magazine:
Despite all the hype, there’s been absolutely no progress in the quest to teach computers to have common sense… When it comes to anything that requires common sense, however, AI is almost helpless.
The source for the factoid? Stanford University AI wonks.
Marketing in one thing. Reality is another.
Stephen E Arnold, December 22, 2017
The Future Is Search. Hmmm
December 17, 2017
I read an unusual chunk of content marketing. Navigate to “In the Rush to Big Data, We Forgot about Search.” Who’s the “we”? I think the “we” are customers who are migrating next generation information access systems. Lawyers have relativity. Manufacturers have SAP and Dassault solutions. Folks without much faith in commercial search vendors have Elasticsearch or low-cost systems which deliver a list of results which match a query. The “we”, therefore, seems to refer to the Lucid Imagination outfit now doing business as Lucidworks.
The write up explains that “we need to look at search to be the glue that lets us find the data and analyze it together no matter where it lives.”
That sounds super.
I think there are companies delivering this type of service as they have been for a number of years.
The reason is that vendors who are anchored in search and retrieval like Lucidworks have been bypassed.
In Dark Cyber I write about a stealthy outfit called Blackdot. The company complements the Relativity eDiscovery platform. Sure, there’s a search function, but Relativity does analytics, clustering, and functions which fit the needs of those engaged in eDiscovery. Search is part of the game, which for big cases, involves big data.
Blackdot enhances Relativity. You can learn about some of the functions of this company in the December 26, 2017, Dark Cyber video program.
So what?
The so what is that the services provided by Relativity and Blackspot deliver high value outputs that provide outputs which are immediately useful to analysts, investigators, lawyers, and others who use the integrated systems to solve problems.
A company which wants to deliver this type of service is likely wade into high water and thrash for purchase. The reason is that building a solution from open source tools and home brew scripts is a tough job.
Specialists have been using open source and proprietary code to roll out information access solutions. Relativity is just one example. By the way, Relativity has been plugging away for more than a decade.
A column which makes a case for a customer to let a vendor of open source search build from ground zero a next generation information access solution is going to be a vendor with a smile. However, once the solution fails to meet expectations, those smiles will turn to frowns.
Maybe that’s why Lucidworks has burned through one original founder, several presidents, and $59 million?
Search is a utility. It is not a headliner. Search works when it complements higher value functionality such as those delivered by Relativity and Blackdot or any of the other firms we track for our CyberOSINT research.
Search had its fling, but the glory days faded. When we look at the landscape of enterprise search or Big Data for that matter, we see winners. From our vantage point in Harrod’s Creek, the company leading the much smaller search parade is Elastic. Yep, it’s Lucene, but it has a following.
Guess who one of the followers is. Give up. Lucidworks. The technology is based on Lucene.
Selling consulting services is one thing. Selling search is another.
Today’s forward looking companies want next generation access, and they can get it from dozens of vendors. No starting from scratch. Sign a deal and begin processing data (big or small).
I highlighted this statement from the write up:
So if you move some of your data to SaaS solutions, move some of your data to PaaS solutions, move some of your data to IaaS solutions and across multiple vendors’ cloud platforms while maintaining some of your data behind the firewall—yeah, no one is going to find anything!
Sure. Solve problems. Don’t create them. One can search for solutions using a search engine. Let me know how that works out for your next big decision which you have to make in 10 seconds or less.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2017
Marketing Craziness Will Dominate in 2018
December 15, 2017
It’s official. The new year will herald more marketing craziness than even I expected. The proof, if one can call a survey of people who want to be really rich while keeping Sillycon Valley in high clover, a source of unbiased information appears in “State of Startups.”
I learned:
In 2015 and 2016, engineering leaders were far and away the hardest executive hires to make. But this year, the tables turned, and sales leaders became the most coveted and difficult hires (with 26% saying sales was the hardest vs. 24% saying engineering). This looks like the start of a sea change as more enterprise companies enter the fray, compete for talent, and see firsthand how costly a bad VP of Sales hire can be.
The “report” outlines other issues of importance. For me, the shift from gee whiz technology to selling products and services is the signal for the revenue horse race to begin.
Marketing by jargon, demo fluff, and mindless automated communications are likely to be in contention. But the smart money is on the consummate sales person who can close deals and generate revenue. Horse owners want a payoff because digital currency seems to be a new game for those with a desire to bet on a big winner.
They are off and running.
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2017
Pinterest Searches Now Powered by Dollars
December 15, 2017
Oh, Pinterest why did it take you so long? Search Engine Watch shares the long awaited and non-surprising news that: “Pinterest Moves Into Paid Search: What You Need To Know.” If you have a craft, design, decoration, wedding, book, dog, clothing, etc. business, then Pinterest Ads Manager is now open for business and ready to host your ads. Pinterest hopes that its new ad platform will deliver a competitive advertising experience similar to Google AdWords.
This announcement comes at the end of a lengthy campaign to get the product right, with early partners including eBay, Target, and bid management platform Kenshoo. The newly released self-serve paid search platform provides the same experience these early partners have enjoyed, without the need to go through Pinterest or a third party to get started. The Ads Manager allows brands to create and optimize their promoted Pins and will also track and report on campaign performance.
Pinterest has long desired to monetize its search and the image-driven social platform is perfect to suggest products and services to consumers. Monetizing search has its own unique challenges, but they are practically the same ones Facebook had when they launched their own ad platform. Pinterest used its statistics to lure potential advertisers:
97% of Pinterest searches are non-branded
There are now over 200 million Pinterest users (up from 150
million in 2016)
More than 2 billion searches take place on Pinterest each month
75% of all Pins saved by users come from businesses.
Pinterest heavily borrowed search ideas from other social networks, such as the keyword targeting. However, Pinterest wants to be seen as a separate and highlight its unique features as different Google’s AdWords. It is another market to target users and get attention to products. It is brand new and exactly the same!
Whitney Grace, December 15, 2017
Craigslist Is Shooting Itself in the Foot by Shunning Search
December 6, 2017
Craigslist is legendary as a way to find things, sell things, get jobs and meet people. But, it’s aim is to do so locally. Recently, some search engines started allowing users to search all of Criagslist, but it won’t last and that’s a shame. We learned this from a Search Engines List article, “How to Search All of Craigslist.”
According to the story, there are several new search tools on the market:
All these sites work roughly the same way. They provide a simple front end with either a series of selections to choose from or a search engine box. You can use them to search Craigslist, and sometimes other classified advert websites, without having to drill down into your city or area.
Use these services while you can, though. Unfortunately, Craigslist is cracking down on scrapers and websites that crawl its website. It has already blocked a number of the more popular Craigslist crawlers and will likely block more as time goes on. In the meantime, all those websites in the links I provided are currently working fine (as of January 2017).
This is a real shame. With a national and international reach that this technology serves, Craigslist should be embracing it, not shutting it down. Something like this could turn Craigslist into the next eBay.
Patrick Roland, December 6, 2017
Thomson Reuters Pays for Sales Calls?
December 3, 2017
Navigate to this Thomson Reuters’ Web page. The eDiscovery unit of the professional publishing company is paying $50 for a sales meeting. I learned about this because Thomson Reuters is using Google advertising to snag potential customers who run queries for “ediscovery.”
You won’t get cash money, but you get an Amazon gift card. There are some caveats, of course. You have to fill out a form and attend a meeting. I assume that Thomson Reuters wants to pay real live attorneys to listen to whatever the TR Legal Solutions professional has to say. Such a deal. I wonder if eDiscovery leads are that difficult to surface. My hunch is that when a top law firm sells out or closes up shop, the pool of eDiscovery prospects is roiled. Remarkable. If the link doesn’t resolve, a senior manager may have been as stunned as I was. Paying cash to lawyers to listen to a sales presentation. Yikes.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2017
IBM Can Train Smart Software ‘Extremely Fast’ an IBM Wizard Asserts
November 30, 2017
Short honk: If you love IBM, you will want to read “AI, Cognitive Realities and Quantum Futures – IBM’s Head of Cognitive Solutions Explains.” The article contains extracts of an IBM wizard’s comments at a Salesforce event. Here’s the passage I noted:
What we find is we always start with POCs, proof of concept. They can be small or large. They’re very quick now, because we can train Watson our new data extremely fast.
If this is true, IBM may have an advantage over many other smart software vendors. Why? Gathering input data, formatting that data into a form the system’s content processing module can handle, and crunching the data to generate the needed indexes takes time and costs a great deal of money. If one needs to get inputs from subject matter experts, the cost of putting engineers in a room with the SMEs can be high.
It would be interesting to know the metrics behind the IBM “extremely fast” comment. My hunch is that head-to-head tests with comparable systems will reveal that none of the systems have made a significant breakthrough in these backend and training processes.
Talk is easy and fast; training smart software not so much.
Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2017
KFC: Colonel Faraday Sanders Is Not Online
November 26, 2017
I am proud to live in Kentucky. We have the University of Louisville occupying investigators’ time and energy. We have the exciting West End, which generates quite a bit of news each week. We have the Kentucky Fried Chicken (yum, yum, yum) Faraday cage milestone.
Here in Harrod’s Creek, the gang of geriatric squirrel hunters usually talks about Senator Mitch McConnell’s struggles or the Rand Paul fight with his neighbor. This morning, one of the tobacco chewing professionals drew my attention to “KFC Offering $10K ‘Internet Escape Pod’ Ahead of Cyber Monday.”
I am okay with the notion of Faraday cages, bags, and rooms. I have a Faraday bag myself. I stick my mobile phone in the bag and enjoy annoyance free drives to and from Lexington. (I use the UK library, gentle reader. The U of L makes me nervous when I think of the late, lamented president, the most wonderful basketball coach in the world, and an athletic director whose income makes some investment bankers envious.)
The write up informed me:
KFC’s Escape Pod is just one of several items the chicken chain made available on its new KFC Ltd. online shopping platform, which launched in July. Another collection of merchandise will reportedly be made available in early December, when it will become even more apparent that the executives at KFC have lost all interest in selling us chicken anymore.
What’s this $10,000 item look like? Here you go:
Kentucky deserves its reputation as an innovation center.
Nothing like a Faraday tent to make your chicken eating free of mobile phone calls. It also prevents an owner from uploading a picture of this odd ball product to Facebook.
Well, maybe not. KFC is making Kentucky great again!
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2017
Traveling Content: What? No Border Control?
November 25, 2017
I read “Understanding the Content Journey.” Frankly I was left with a cold fish on my keyboard. I shoved the dead thing aside after I learned:
The next major disruption for marketers will be in the form of embedded machine learning capabilities that augment and automate the content journey — making content more intelligent.
Okay, marketers, how are you going to make content smarter, more intelligent. Indexing, manual tags, plugging into the IBM Watson smart thing, or following the precepts of search engine optimization.
Intelligent content comes from intelligent people. Machines can and do write about sports scores, financial reports, and other information which lends itself to relatively error free parsing.
None of these issues struck me as germane to the “content journey.” What I learned was that intelligent content has several facets; for instance:
- Content ideation and search. What is content ideation? Search is a buzzword which is less clear than words like “mother” and “semantics.” (At least for “mother”, everyone has one. For semantics, I am not sure marketers have the answer.
- Content creation. I think this means writing. Most writing is just okay. Most college students once received average grades. Today, everyone gets a blue ribbon. Unfortunately writing remains difficult for many. I assume that content creation is different and, therefore, easier. One needs “content ideation” and Bing or Google.
- Content management. Frankly I have zero idea what content management means. The organizations with which I am familiar often have one or maybe multiple content management systems. In my experience, these are expensive beasties, and they, like enterprise search, generate considerable user hostility. The idea is to slap a slice and dice system on top of whatever marketers “write” and reuse that content for many purposes. Each purpose requires less and less of the “writing” function I believe.
- Content personalization. Ah, ha. Now I think I understand. A person needs an answer. A customer facing online support system will answer the person’s questions with no humans involved. That’s a close cousin to Facebook and Google keeping track of what a user does and then using that behavior to deliver “more like that.” Yes, that’s true “content ideation.” Reduce costs and reinforce what the user believes is accurate.
- Content delivery. That’s easy for me to understand. One uses social media or search engines to get the fruits of “content ideation” to a user. The only hitch is that free mechanisms are not reliable. The solution, from my perspective, is to buy ads. Facebook, Google, and other online ad mechanisms match the words from the “content ideation” with what the systems perceive is the user’s information need. Yep, that works well for research, fact checking, and analyzing a particular issue.
- Content performance. Now we come to metrics, which means either clicks or sales. At this point we are quite far from “content ideation” because the main point of this write up is that one only writes what produces clicks or sales. Tough luck, Nietzsche.
Net net: I am not sure if this write up would have received a passing grade from my first English 101 professor, a wacky crank named Dr. Pearce. For me, “content ideation” is more than making up a listicle of buzzwords.
But what about the journey? Well, that trope was abandoned because silliness rarely gets from Point A to Point B.
Pretty remarkable analysis even in our era of fake news, made up facts, specious analysis, and lax border controls.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2017
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