Google Campaigns Against Web Censorship
April 22, 2011
The worldwide web could possibly undergo some drastic and even somewhat controversy changes in the future. According to the Ars Technica article “Google: Don’t Give Private Trolls Web Censorship Power” the US government is currently working on legislation in support of Web site blocking at the domain level. If this bill comes to pass it would mean that online ad networks as well as credit card companies would be required to cease working with any site that falls on the blocked list. Eventually, “private companies get the right to bring a censorship action in court without waiting for government to act.” The web giant Google has wasted little time speaking out against this potential bill. Appearing at today’s “Legitimate Sites v. Parasites” hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Google’s Kent Walker was clear: a private right of action to bring a COICA claim would give rights holders tremendous leverage over Google.
Walker went so far as to warn of “shakedowns” from private companies wanting to force changes in Google’s behavior. Google has been under noted scrutiny due to controversial search results. Google prefers to take a more neutral role and states that it “doesn’t want to be the “judge, jury, and executioner” for Web sites. Finally, the company simply doesn’t know what sites are “authorized” outlets for music and movies, nor when some use is fair. Legislators want to pass a law that allows them to go after anyone who they feel has inappropriate content on their Web site, from child porn to counterfeit products. Though evidence clearly shows that there are questionable sites online, if search results are allowed to be censored, changed or filtered by the wrong people according to a particular guideline, when it comes to search engine results it will become difficult to determine truth versus fiction.
We don’t want to be sticks in the mud. But: If certain content is excluded because it lacks “value”, is that not a form of censorship? Nah, probably not.
April Holmes, April 22, 2011
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Importance of Being Firstest by Mister Google
April 22, 2011
Short honk: No joke. A number one position in a hit result list is a big deal. No wonder the search engine optimization folks get so excited when clients will push piles of cash across the conference table. How important is the number one spot in a search result list? The answer to the question appears in “Top Google Result Gets 36.4% of Clicks [Study]”. The article has some interesting charts, but you get the idea. If you are out of the top five, you don’t exist. On pages 2 or lower, you have been vaporized and consigned to the depths of oblivion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2011
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Google, Spam, and a Greasy Clean Up
April 22, 2011
According the Tech Crunch article “Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places as a “Content Farm” and Removes From Search Index” Google can no longer hide the problems that have been brewing within. The Google Web spam department recently announced “major revisions to its search algorithms to reduce the amount of content farm and other low quality content appearing in Google search results.”
As Google Webspam continues to assert its independence from other Google departments, Google programs such as Google Places and even major Google Adsense supporters such as Demand Studios have been labeled spam and supposedly banned. As other Google executive members speak out against the new algorithm system The Webspam executive head asserted:
If Google were to determine that Google properties were not providing high quality results, it would not matter whether or not those Google properties were displaying Google ads.” Google has always worked to dominate the search engine world and now ironically it seems that the various Google departments are extremely busy trying to dominate one another.
We think that Google has an interesting challenge. One one hand the company has to pump up traffic. The notion of an online scavenger hunt is one example of a somewhat gratuitous method of getting users to run queries. Traffic, hooks into advertising, which is where the revenue river flows for Google. On the other hand, users want to run queries that return useful, on point results. Links to placeholder pages or other types of content-light Web pages are irritating to some. The recent uptick in Bing.com market share and the continued buzz for Blekko.com suggest that Google’s grip on the North America user may not be unbreakable.
The fact that content is an issue suggests that Google has to focus on some problems I thought it had solved years ago.
April Holmes, April 22, 2011
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Protected: Microsoft SharePoint a Swiss Army Knife? Almost.
April 22, 2011
Google, Traffic, English 101, and an Annoying Panda
April 21, 2011
I read a snippet on my iPad and then the full story in the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal “Sites Retool for Google Effect.” You can find this story on hard copy page B 4 in the version that gets tossed in the wet grass in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. Online, not too sure anymore. This link may work. But, then again, maybe not.
The point of the story is that Google has changed its method of determining relevance. A number of sites mostly unfamiliar to me made the point that Google’s rankings are important to businesses. One example was One Way Furniture, an outfit that operates in Melville, New York. Another was M2commerce LLC, an office supply retailer in Atlanta, Georgia. My take away from the story is that these sites’ owners are going to find a way to deliver content that Google perceives as being relevant.
A panda attack. Some Web site owners suffer serious wounds. Who are these Web site owners trying to please? Google or their customers? Image source: http://tomdoerr.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/whos-in-the-house-panda-in-da-house/
I don’t want to be too much like my auto mechanic here in Harrod’s Creek, but what about the customer? My thought is that if one posts information, these outfits should ask, “What does our customer need to make an informed decision?” The Wall Street Journal story left me with the impression, which is probably incorrect, that the question should be, “What do I need to create so Google will reward me with a high Google rank?”
For many years I have been avoiding search engine optimization. When I explained how some of Google’s indexing “worked” on lecture tours for my 2004-2005 Google monograph, The Google Legacy, pesky SEO kept popping up. Google has done a reasonable job of explaining how its basic voting mechanism worked. For those of you who were fans of John Kleinberg, you know that Google was influenced to some extent by Clever. There are other touch points in the Backrub/Google PageRank methods disclosed in the now famous PageRank patent. Not familiar with that document? You can find a reasonable summary on Wikipedia or in my The Google Legacy.
If we flash forward from 1996, 1997, and 1998 to the present, quite a bit has happened to relevance ranking in the intervening 13 to 15 years. First, note that we are talking more than a decade. The guts of PageRank remain but the method has been handled the way my mother reacted to a cold day. She used to put on a sweater. Then she put on a light jacket. After adding a scarf, she donned her heavy wool coat. Underneath, it was my mom, but she added layers of “stuff” to keep her warm.
All wrapped up, just slow moving with reduced vision. Layers have and operational downside.
That’s what has happened, in part, to Google. The problem with technology is that if you build a giant facility, it becomes difficult, time consuming, and expensive to tear big chunks of that facility apart and rebuild it. The method of change in MBA class is to draw a couple of boxes, babble a few buzzwords, get a quick touch of Excel fever, and then head to the squash court. The engineering reality is that the MBA diagrams get implemented incrementally. Eventually the desired rebuild is accomplished, but at any point, there is a lot of the original facility still around. If you took an archaeology class for something other than the field trips, you know that humans leave foundations, walls, and even gutters in place. The discarded material is then recycled in the “new” building.
How this apply to Google? Works the same way.
How significant are the changes that Google has made in the last few months? The answer is, “It depends.”
Google has to serve a number of different constituencies. Each constituency has to be kept happy and the “gravity” of each constituency carefully balanced. Algorithms, even Google algorithms, are still software. Software, even smart software that scurries to a look up table to get a red hot value or weight, is chock full of bugs, unknown dependencies, and weird actions that trigger volleyball games or some other mind clearing activity.
Google has to make progress and keep its different information “packages” in balance and hooked up.
The first constituency is the advertiser. I know you think that giant companies care about “you” and “your Web site”, but that is just not true. I don’t care about individuals who have trouble using the comments section of this blog. If a user can’t figure something out, what am I supposed to do? Call WordPress and tell them to fix its comments function because one user does not know how to fill in a Web form? I won’t do that. WordPress won’t do that. I am not confident you, gentle reader, would do that. Google has to fiddle with its relevance method because there are some very BIG reasons to take such a risky and unknown charged step as slapping another layer of functionality on top of the ageing PageRank method. My view is that Google is concerned enough to fool with plumbing because of its awareness that the golden goose of Adwords and Adsense is honking in a manner that signals distress. No advertisers, no Google. Pretty simple equation, but that’s one benefit from living in rural Kentucky. I can only discern the obvious.
Taking Pictures for Maps: Google and Microsoft Go Different Directions
April 21, 2011
We noticed that Microsoft is firing up a service that will take pictures of businesses. If this reminded you of Street View, the Google service, you are not alone. If you want more information on Microsoft’s emulation of this popular and controversial Google service, check out “Microsoft Taking Street Photos in the UK”, which provides the basics plus a link to Microsoft’s explanation of the service.
Source: The BBC.
“Google Has Stopped Street View Photography in Germany” reported that even though a German court ruled that Google may continue its street- level photography, the company has stopped with little explanation. The article asserted:
It’s easy to assume that the service’s difficult birth has factored into the decision. German officials raised objections almost as soon as Google announced plans to launch Street View there. After lengthy negotiations, Google eventually agreed to let German residents opt-out of having their buildings appear online, and nearly 250,000 German households and businesses took Google up on that offer. I’m not a programmer, but I can’t help wonder if the presence of so many blurred buildings — and the potential challenge of updating Street View while maintaining their privacy — is a factor in Google’s decision.
Google may also suspect, as we do, that Germany will begin behaving more like China and less like a puppy rolling over. Microsoft, though an old dog, may be learning some new tricks.
Cynthia Murrell April 21, 2011
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EbookBrowse: Search Engine for Docs and Data
April 21, 2011
EbookBrowse is a free engine that specifically searches for PDF, DOC, XLS, and other data files. Here’s how they describe their site:
Our crawlers harvested a huge database PDF&DOC files through different open Internet resources such as blogs, forums, BBS and others. This database is regularly checked for file validity so now you can search within more than three million of live PDF&DOC files. Today we have 30000 000 document files in our search database and approximately 50 000 files are added daily.
I threw a few searches at the engine, with subjects involving business, hobbies, and politics. It works as advertised, though as with any search engine, the more specific you are (to a point) the better your results.
It helps that you can select the types of files you’re looking for, and no selection returns everything rather than nothing. The results are presented in a window from which you can both download the file and share your findings via email and social networks (click the + sign for many more of these than you see in the usual list.)
Oh, and it’s nice and clean. No advertising! I recommend you check it out.
Cynthia Murrell April 21, 2011
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Yahoo and Its BOSS
April 21, 2011
There are some genuinely interesting search and content processing systems built with Yahoo BOSS. The acronym means Build Your Own Search Service. To see what clever engineers can do with BOSS, navigate to the Cluuz.com service. Run a query for a well known person. Here’s a snippet of Yahoo out via Cluuz for Jason Calacanis, the high profile Internet entrepreneur.
Source: www.cluuz.com
We were delighted to spot “Yahoo BOSS V2 Officially Released.” Despite a lack of attention to traditional search products, Yahoo! has put effort into developing this commodity.
BOSS makes it relatively easy for an organization to build custom search platforms, whether they want access to Web pages, images, and/ or other search divisions. You have to pay if you hit the big time and cross Yahoo’s usage threshold, then there is a cost based on number of queries and the features the new service taps.
BOSS also makes it possible to build a business on the technology. According to the article:
The most appealing element in Yahoo’s BOSS V2, though, is the search page advertisements provided by Yahoo – that allow you, as the search provider, to make some money. While this form of monetization may not be profitable for all developers, it will at least subsidize the price of BOSS itself.
After the tie up with Microsoft, we did not know if BOSS would survive the changes in Yahoo search and in staffing. For now, the BOSS still lives.
Cynthia Murrell April 21, 2011
Thought Equity and Sony Metadata
April 21, 2011
The Yahoo Finance article “Thought Equity Motion Powers Enterprise-Wide Metadata Management for Sony Pictures Entertainment” brings to light the collaboration between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Thought Equity Motion. According to the article”
The video platform and footage licensing company will help Sony Pictures get more out of their large entertainment library by utilizing the T3 Metadata Editor to help them better manage content and more importantly offer consumers better and more powerful options. Sony Pictures Entertainment states “The massive amount of visual data we work with in movies and TV shows must be textually searchable and mapped to a huge amount of other information — such as clearances, rights and restrictions, and music cue sheets. The more easily we can store and access that information, the smarter we can be in using it.”
By using the T3 Metadata tool Sony can do more localized searches such as by actor, dialogue and even location allowing them to do so much more with the information they have available. Yet another company has discovered the power of information.
We find it interesting that metadata is suddenly the “new kid on the block” for Sony. We have found real findability challenges on its Web site. The Sony eBook reader is also equipped with a search system that gave us a headache. We hope Sony does metadata thoroughly. Forget the new products Sony can produce, think of the hapless user trying to locate an item.
April Holmes, April 21, 2011
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Protected: Is Genesis a New SharePoint Opportunity?
April 21, 2011
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