Google, Query Relaxation, and Advertisers
March 23, 2017
Most folks don’t know what a query relaxation process does. Think of a noose around your neck. If someone pulls the noose tight, you elicit a very specific result. If I remove the noose, you can frolic on your mobile device. Now substitute strict Boolean queries for a free text search. The Boolean search pulls the result set tight; that is, you get results in which the indexed words match the Boolean query. If a vendor tosses in semantic expansion which drags in concepts, synonyms, and inputs from other users’ queries, the noose is relaxed. You can breathe again.
Search vendors dependent on advertising control the scope of the result set. Yandex, we noted, is relaxing its queries. The reason? Relaxed queries allow an ad matching system more leeway. The idea is that if I search for “Kia Soul 2011 P22545R18” tire, an outfit like Google has to match with ads its system has been told want the keyword “Kia” or “Soul.”
But if the query is relaxed and expansion methods are in play, “Kia” becomes “car”, “vehicle,” “SUV” and “Soul” becomes “auto parts” and maybe “religion.”
Instantly, the ad matching system can go to the advertising pool and start putting more ads into the search results. Some of the ads may be helpful; for example, “auto parts.” Others for a Zen weekend might not be germane to a person looking for a set of radials.
Pretty boring stuff, right? The problem is that as the number of queries sent to old school desktop computers goes down, the opportunity to use ads goes down too. The fix?
Query expansion. Looser queries, more opportunities to display less and less relevant ads. Who is going to notice? Well, that’s a good question.
Now navigate to “AT&T, Other U.S. Advertisers Quit Google, YouTube over Extremist Videos.” The write up points out:
AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and other major U.S. advertisers are pulling hundreds of millions of dollars in business from Google and its video service YouTube despite the Internet giant’s pledge this week to keep offensive and extremist content away from ads. AT&T said that it is halting all ad spending on Google except for search ads. That means AT&T ads will not run on YouTube or two million websites that take part in Google’s ad network.
On the surface, the allegations suggest that Google’s smart software is not smart enough to prevent an ad for a mobile phone company from appearing as a sponsor of a video the advertiser finds offensive. From my point of view, this is an example of what happens when revenue drives query relaxation. With relaxed queries, the advertiser’s message is “close enough” to the results list. Bingo. Google books revenue and the advertiser’s message is displayed.
In the good old days before mobile devices decimated the GoTo.com/Overture.com model, less relaxed queries and ad matching worked reasonably well. Today, relaxed queries are an easy way to generate revenue.
The counter argument is that relaxed queries are what “usage data say searchers want.” Right, that assurance an a dime will buy me what? Not much.
Net net: Buy ads and make sales is a mantra from a time past. Today’s world of search is filled with relaxed queries and less relevant result sets and less relevant, context aware ads.
Google will have to figure something out. Relaxed queries and ad matching is now big news and costing my favorite free online search outfit a lot of money. My suggestion to Google: Relax less. Embrace relevance, precision, and recall.
Users want an answer to their question. Advertisers want to make sales. Google wants money. Dare I say, “Pick two.”
Stephen E Arnold, March 23, 2017
MBAs Under Siege by Smart Software
March 23, 2017
The article titled Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes Over Wall Street With AI Trader on Bloomberg explains how Sentient Technologies Inc. plans to take the human error out of the stock market. Babak Hodjat co-founded the company and spent the past 10 years building an AI system capable of reviewing billions of pieces of data and learning trends and techniques to make money by trading stocks. The article states that the system is based on evolution,
According to patents, Sentient has thousands of machines running simultaneously around the world, algorithmically creating what are essentially trillions of virtual traders that it calls “genes.” These genes are tested by giving them hypothetical sums of money to trade in simulated situations created from historical data. The genes that are unsuccessful die off, while those that make money are spliced together with others to create the next generation… Sentient can squeeze 1,800 simulated trading days into a few minutes.
Hodjat believes that handing the reins over to a machine is wise because it eliminates bias and emotions. But outsiders wonder whether investors will be willing to put their trust entirely in a system. Other hedge funds like Man AHL rely on machine learning too, but nowhere near to the extent of Sentient. As Sentient bring in outside investors later this year the success of the platform will become clearer.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 23, 2017
Country to Country: Canada, Seize the Day in Technology
March 22, 2017
Canada has some excellent universities. Canada has enabled some of IBM’s nifty technology. And there was the BlackBerry moment. But the University of Waterloo soldiers on, unlike Napoleon.
Google apparently offered some country to country advice to Canada, assuming the information about the online ad giant is correct. I am referring to “Canada Must Seize the Moment to Lead in Tech Innovation, Google Canada Head Says.” That’s good advice, but I was under the impression that Industry Canada, go go provinces like Quebec, and assorted industry players like Rogers were already taking steps.
Well, I guess I was wrong. Google thinks that Canada can do more. I learned from the write up:
to seize its moment Canada’s tech industry needs to grow exponentially; focus on the regions and sectors with the greatest momentum; and ensure that today’s elementary, middle, and secondary school students are exposed to memorable STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) experiences before entering university.
There you go.
Google apparently suggested that leaders of high profile Canadian technology companies were not perceived as “leaders.” I wonder if that comes as a surprise to the employees of the companies these folks lead.
Google thinks Canada is “punching above its weight.” Yep, the rule of thumb is that to estimate a market in Canada, one takes the US market number and multiples by point two. Canada, therefore, should be winning more boxing matches with US companies. (I am not sure how the logic works out, but it apparently is intended to make the Google perception that Canada is not doing enough in technology easier to swallow.)
My hunch is that the suggestion is one of those “let’s get this over with” talks. When Google executives depart from the “playbook,” oddities like telling a country what to do become news. Google sells online ads, and its core technology comes from clever places and outfits like GoTo.com. Ah, it is easy to forget the history of the GOOG, isn’t it?
I have been tracking the company as country movement. Facebook wants to a giant focus group to become the way of the world. Google tried to get China to rethink its policies. How are these ideas working out?
Hop to it, Canada. Oh, Google won’t forget buying that nifty Montreal AI company with the very influential professor. Nevertheless, Google may not be able to go back in time, but it certainly wants Canada to go forward in a Googley way. IBM is demonstrating its speech recognition wizardry in Montreal. Better late than never for both outfits.
Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2017
Google Volunteers to Make Piracy Harder, and These Free Legal Music Sites Can Help
March 22, 2017
The article titled Google Will Make ‘Pirated’ Content Harder to Find From 1 June on The Inquirer proclaims a new approach to preventing piracy. Numerous entertainment organizations have nagged Google to set stricter rules, and even gone so far as to call Google a gateway to pirated content. The article mentions,
Google has already taken some steps to try and curb ‘piracy’ but has long refused to remove entire sites from search results as they may also offer legal content available for download. These days, the firm is flooded with takedown requests, last year revealing that it gets asked to remove 100,000 links to pirated content every hour.
The anti-piracy code will be adopted by Google and other unnamed search firms in cooperation with the British Intellectual Property Office. In the meantime, the article titled 7 Sites to Get Free Music (Legally!) on MakeUseOf suggests some solid options for people who want to kick the illegal pirating habit. BeSonic, Jamendo, and NoiseTrade are included on the list, and for those classical music lovers, MusOpen might have just the free content you are looking for.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 22, 2017
Big Data: The Crawfish Approach to Meaningful Information
March 21, 2017
Have you ever watched a crawfish (sometimes called a crawdad or a crayfish) get away from trouble. The freshwater crustaceans can go backwards. Members of the members of the Astacidae can be found in parts of the south, so you will have to wander in a Georgia swamp to check out the creature’s behavior.
The point is that crawfish go backwards to protect themselves and achieve their tiny lobster like goals. Big time consultants also crawfish in order to sell more work and provide “enhanced” insight into a thorny business or technical problem other consultants have created.
To see this in action, navigate to “The Conundrum of Big Data.” A super consultant explains that Big Data is not exactly the home run, silver bullet, or magic potion some lesser consultants said Big Data would be. I learned:
Despite two decades of intensive IT investment in data [mining] applications, recent studies show that companies continue to have trouble identifying metrics that can predict and explain performance results and/or improve operations. Data mining, the process of identifying patterns and structures in the data, has clear potential to identify prescriptions for success but its wide implementation fails systematically. Companies tend to deploy ‘unsupervised-learning’ algorithms in pursuit of predictive metrics, but this automated [black box] approach results in linking multiple low-information metrics in theories that turn out to be improbably complex.
Big surprise. For folks who are not trained in the nuts and bolts of data analysis and semi fancy math, Big Data is a giant vacuum cleaner for money. The cash has to pay for “experts,” plumbing, software, and more humans. The outputs are often fuzzy wuzzy probabilities which more “wizards” interpret. Think of a Greek religious authority looking at the ancient equivalent of road kill.
The write up cites the fizzle that was Google Flu Trends. Cough. Cough. But even that sneeze could be fixed with artificial intelligence. Yep, when smart humans make mistakes, send in smart software. That will work.
In my opinion, the highlight of the write up was this passage:
When it comes to data, size isn’t everything because big data on their own cannot just solve the problem of ‘insight’ (i.e. inferring what is going on). The true enablers are the data-scientists and statisticians who have been obsessed for more than two centuries to understand the world through data and what traps lie in wait during this exercise. In the world of analytics (AaaS), it is agility (using science, investigative skills, appropriate technology), trust (to solve the client’s real business problems and build collateral), and ‘know-how’ (to extract intelligence hidden in the data) that are the prime ‘assets’ for competing, not the size of the data. Big data are certainly here but big insights have yet to arrive.
Yes. More consulting is needed to make those payoffs arrive. But first, hire more advisers. What could possibly go wrong? Cough. Sneeze. One goes forwards with Big Data by going backwards for more analysis.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2017
Dark Web Expert Was There From the Beginning
March 21, 2017
Journalist William Langewiesche at Vanity Fair presents the storied career of a hacker-turned-security expert, whom he pseudonymously calls Opsec, in the extensive article, “Welcome to the Dark Net, a Wilderness Where Invisible World Wars are Fought and Hackers Roam Free.” The engaging piece chronicles the rise of the Dark Web alongside Opsec’s cyber adventures, which began when he was but a child in the late ’80s. It also clearly explains how some things work on and around the Dark Web, and defines some jargon. I would recommend this article as a clear and entertaining introduction to the subject, so readers may want to check out the whole thing.
Meanwhile, I found this tidbit about a recent botnet attack interesting. For background, Opsec now works for a large, online entertainment company. Langewiesche describes an intrusion the security expert recently found into that company’s systems:
The Chinese [hacking team] first went into a subcontractor, a global offshore payment processor that handled credit-card transactions, and then, having gained possession of that network, quietly entered the Company through a legitimate back door that had been installed on the Company’s network to administer consumer accounts. The initial breach was a work of art. The Chinese wrote a piece of customized software purely for that job. It was a one-of-a-kind ‘callback dropper,’ a Trojan horse that could be loaded with any of many malware modules, but otherwise stood empty, and regularly checked in with its masters to ask for instructions. Once inside the network, the Chinese were able to move laterally because the Company, for the sake of operational efficiency, had not compartmentalized its network. …
First, using ‘bounce points’ within the network to further obscure their presence, [the hackers] went after the central domain controller, where they acquired their own administrative account, effectively compromising 100 million user names and passwords and gaining the ability to push software packages throughout the network. Second, and more important, the Chinese headed into the network’s ‘build’ system, a part of the network where software changes are compiled and then uploaded to a content-distribution network for the downloading of updates to customers. In that position they acquired the ability to bundle their own software packages and insert them into the regular flow, potentially reaching 70 million personal computers or more. But, for the moment, they did none of that. Instead they installed three empty callback Trojans on three separate network computers and left them standing there to await future instructions. Opsec and his team concluded that the purpose was to lay the groundwork for the rapid construction of a giant botnet.
Opsec suspects the same payment processor vulnerability was exploited at other companies, as well, as part of a plan to launch this giant botnet as part of a global cyber-war. Considering he only caught the attack due to one small error made by the hackers, the discovery is unnerving. Opsec has his ideas on how to fight such a series of attacks, but he is holding off at the behest of his employer. Officially, at least. See the article for more information.
Cynthia Murrell, March 21, 2017
Is This Our Beloved Google? Ads and Consumer Scams?
March 20, 2017
I admit it. I want to believe everything I read on the Internet. I take this approach to be more in tune with today’s talking heads on US cable TV and the millennials who seem to cross my path like deer unfamiliar with four lane highways.
I read what must be an early April Fool’s joke. The write up’s headline struck me as orthogonal to my perception of the company I know, love, and trust: “Google to Revamp Ad Policies after U.K., Big Brands Boycott.”
The main idea is that someone believes that Google has been indexing terror-related content and placing ads next to those result pages and videos. I learned:
The U.S. company said in a blog post Friday it would give clients more control over where their ads appear on both YouTube, the video-sharing service it owns, and the Google Display Network, which posts advertising to third-party websites. The announcement came after the U.K. government and the Guardian newspaper pulled ads from the video site, stepping up pressure on YouTube to police content on its platform.
Interesting. I thought Google / DeepMind had the hate speech, fake news, and offensive content issue killed, cooked, and eaten.
The notion that Google would buckle under to mere advertisers strikes me as ludicrous. For years, Google has pointed out that confused individuals at Foundem, the government of France, and other information sites misunderstand Google’s squeaky clean approach to figuring out what’s important.
The other item which suggests that the Google in my mind is not the Google in the real world is “Facebook, Twitter, and Google Must Remove Scams or Risk Legal Action, Says EU.”
What’s up? Smart software understands content in context. Algorithms developed by the wizards at Google and other outfits chug along without the silly errors humans make. Google and other companies have to become net nannies. (Hey, that software worked great, didn’t it?)
I learned:
The EU also ordered these social networks to remove fraudulent posts that can mislead consumers.
If these write ups are indeed accurate, I will take down my “Do no evil” poster. Is there a “We do evil” version available? I will check those advertisements on Google.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2017
Android Introduces in Apps Search
March 20, 2017
Android has announced a new search feature, this one specifically for documents and messages within your apps. With this feature, if you want to revisit that great idea you jotted down last Tuesday, you will (eventually) be able to search for it within Evernote using whatever keywords you can recall from your brilliant plan. The brief write-up at Ubergizmo, “Google Introduces ‘In Apps’ Search Feature to Android,” explains the new feature:
According to Google, ‘We use apps to call friends, send messages or listen to music. But sometimes, it’s hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. Today, we’re introducing a new way for you to search for information in your apps on your Android phone. With this new search mode, called In Apps, you can quickly find content from installed apps.
Basically by searching under the ‘In Apps’ tab in the search bar on your Android phone, instead of trying to search the web, it will search within your apps itself. This will be ideal if you’re trying to bring up a particular message, or if you have saved a document and you’re unsure if you saved it in Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, in your email, and so on.
So far, In Apps only works with Gmail, Spotify, and YouTube. However, Google plans to incorporate the feature into more apps, including Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Evernote, Glide, Todoist, and Google Keep. I expect we will eventually see the feature integrated into nearly every Android app.
Cynthia Murrell, March 20, 2017
Yahoot: Paying for Success
March 17, 2017
The Xoogler Marissa Mayer may get $23 million before Uncle Sam takes a bite. According to the “real” journalistic outfit Variety, I learned:
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, following the closing of the Verizon acquisition of the internet company’s operating businesses, will get a golden parachute package worth around $23 million if she’s fired or leaves for good cause within a year, Yahoo disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday.
My source was “Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Would Get $23M Severance Package after Verizon Deal Closes If She’s Fired or Leaves for Good Cause.” The payoff, if it occurs, provides $3 million in cash and the balance in equity.
Assuming no hitch in the git along, the new top Yahooligan will be Thomas McInerney, who has been a senior manager at IAC.
Yahoo. It’s a hoot. Paying for success.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2017
Bitcoin Alternative Monero Accepted by AlphaBay
March 17, 2017
As institutions like banks and law enforcement come to grips with the flow of Bitcoin, another cyber currency is suddenly gaining ground. Bloomberg Technology reveals, “New Digital Currency Spikes as Drug Dealers Get More Secrecy.” The coin in question, Monero, has been around for a couple of years, but was recently given a boost by the marketplace AlphaBay, one of the most popular destinations for buyers of illicit drugs on the Dark Web. In the two weeks after the site announced it would soon accept Monero, the total worth of that currency in circulation jumped to over $100 million (from about $25 million the previous month). Writer Yuji Nakamura explains why a shift may be underway:
Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency in the world with a total value of $9.1 billion, also allows users to move funds discreetly and uses a network of miners to verify the authenticity of each trade. But its privacy has come under threat as governments and private investigators increase their ability to track transactions across the bitcoin network and trace funds to bank accounts ultimately used to convert digital assets to and from traditional currencies like U.S. dollars.
Monero similarly uses a network of miners to verify its trades, but mixes multiple transactions together to make it harder to trace the genesis of the funds. It also adopts ‘dual-key stealth’ addresses, which make it difficult for third-parties to pinpoint who received the funds.
For any two outputs, from the same or different transactions, you cannot prove they were sent to the same person,’ Riccardo Spagni, a lead developer of Monero, wrote by e-mail. Jumbling trades together makes it ‘impossible to tell which transaction, of a set of transactions, a particular input comes from. It appears to come from all of them.
Though Monero has yet to withstand the trials of AlphaBay-level volumes for long, its security features received praise from investor and prominent digital-currency-advocate Roger Ver. As of this writing, Monero is ranked fifth among digital currencies in overall market value. Click here for a list of digital currencies ranked, in real time, by market cap.
Cynthia Murrell, March 17, 2017
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