The Shallowness of Search Engine Optimization: Just Buy Google Ads for Traffic
January 8, 2021
Google is in the business of selling online advertisements and playing the role of a digital real estate broker for a commission, of course, of course. Therefore, any information about how to get Google traffic for free is only mildly interesting. An entire industry of search engine optimization experts explain how to achieve the impossible: Avoid buying Google online ads. The ploy of SEO leads in one direction only; that is, the SEO professional eventually utters the words, “You need to buy Google advertising.” Free only goes so far like the charges for storage to an unsuspecting user of Gmail learns.
So what do I make of “What We Know About Google’s Passage Indexing”? Not much. The write makes clear the tissue thin thought about traffic tricks. How does one respond to Google’s indexing of paragraphs? Do nothing. How does Google’s indexing for meaning impact authors? Not at all. Why did Google make the announcement? Maybe marketing.
In my opinion, the notion of Google Passages feeds the SEO sector and greases the skids for selling more ads. When the free stuff doesn’t deliver clicks, what’s the fix?
Buy Google ads. SEO experts become a sales force for the GOOG.
Simple in my opinion. A purloined letter tactic which has demonstrated remarkable durability.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2021
News Flash: ECommerce Search Is Not Enterprise Search
January 8, 2021
Now here is some crazy stuff—e-commerce search masquerading as enterprise search. Business Wire shares, “Searchspring Named Leader in Enterprise Search Software and E-Merchandising in G2 Grid Reports for Winter 2021.” Now Searchspring may or may not be the best commerce platform, but enterprise search is an entirely different animal. The press release crows:
“The reports’ scores are based on verified reviews by customers and grounded on ease of use, ease of setup, ease of administration, and how well the software meets requirements. G2 is the world’s largest B2B tech marketplace for software and services, helping businesses make smarter buying decisions. Searchspring ranked No. 2 across all providers, earning its Winter 2021 ‘Leader’ position in Enterprise Search Software and E-Merchandising, in addition to being recognized for ‘Best Support’, ‘Easiest Admin’, and ‘Easiest Setup’. Rated by Searchspring customers as 4.9/5 stars, Searchspring was favorably reviewed for offering the ‘Gold Standard for Functionality’, ‘Brilliant Service’, and ‘Incredible Performance. Amazing People. Fantastic Results.’”
So G2’s qualifications for winning make no distinction between e-commerce and enterprise search. We suppose we cannot blame the company for taking the title it was handed and running with it. 2020 has been a big year for online retail, and Searchspring is happy to be recognized for being on top of the surge. Founded in 2007, the firm is located in San Antonio, Texas.
Cynthia Murrell, January 8, 2021
Rah Rah Rah for Enterprise Search
January 8, 2021
The founder and CEO of enterprise search firm Mindbreeze, Daniel Fallmann, has penned quite an advertisement for enterprise search in “Employ Your AI as a Smart Partner: Intelligent Ways to Leverage Knowledge” posted by Forbes. For Fallmann, the advantage of AI is the ability to serve up the right information at the right time in rapidly changing business environments. He advises us that any knowledge management system worth its salt will have these technologies: AI, machine learning, natural language processing, natural language question answering, and semantic content processing. He emphasizes:
“Making the relevance of information personalized for each individual is what makes successful search results for employees. This is achieved by observing user behavior (assuming their consent, of course) and learning from it. Various factors that are analyzed include the role of the activity, the actions that were taken in the past in connection with certain information, specific search behavior and even the emotions that users associate with information — a topic closely related to customer experience or the experience economy.”
Looking ahead, Fallmann sees three significant developments in his field: X analytics, multimedia sources included in search results; weak supervision, a process that allows systems to learn independently and improve with use; and explainable AI (XAI), a way for systems to express their logic in a way humans can understand and manage. We’re told:
“Thanks to these new developments in intelligent systems like those used for enterprise search and knowledge management, workers no longer have to manage newly automated processes. Instead, they can combine their experience with artificial intelligence. This can generate a great opportunity to see ROI with reductions in the time it takes to complete tasks and eliminate repetitive tasks. This can help people play to more distinctively human strengths like social interactions, creativity and tact. And best of all, it can help workers spend their time on more impactful activities like strategy, innovation and problem-solving.”
No doubt, Mr. Fallmann would recommend Mindbreeze’s InSpire platform as the ideal solution. With headquarters in Chicago and in Linz, Austria, that company was founded in 2015 and is connected to a Microsoft reseller.
Cynthia Murrell, January 8, 2021
Stork Search for Static Sites
January 8, 2021
Just a short honk to let our dear readers in on this search resource: If you host a website with static content, Stork may be for you. At the platform’s landing page, Creator James Little tells us how it works:
“Stork is two things that work in tandem to put a beautiful, fast, and accurate search interface on your static site. First, it’s a program that indexes your content and writes that index to disk. Second, it’s a JavaScript library that downloads that index, hooks into a search input, and displays optimal search results immediately to your user, as they type. Stork is built with Rust, and the JavaScript library uses Web Assembly behind the scenes. It’s built with content creators in mind, in that it requires little-to-no code to get started and can be extended deeply. It’s perfect for JAMstack sites and personal blogs, but can be used wherever you need a search interface.”
The page offers a setup guide which, interestingly, uses the task of embedding The Federalist Papers as an example. Complete with snippets of code, the description walks users through setup, customization, and index building, so see the page for those details. One can see the project’s GitHub here.
Cynthia Murrell, January 8, 2021
Cyber Security: An Oxymoron Maybe?
January 8, 2021
AI neural networks are only as smart as they are programmed and the technology is still in its infancy. In other words, AI neural networks are biased and make mistakes. This is not a problem now, especially when many AI neural networks are in the experimental stage; however, as the technology advances says we need to discuss future problems now in, “The Inevitable Symbiosis Of Cybersecuriity And AI.”
AI neural networks, like other technology, is hackable. The problem Hacker Noon brings up is that companies that rely on AI to power their products and services, such as Tesla’s self-driving algorithm, are ready to launch them to the public. Are these companies aware of vulnerabilities in their algorithms and actively resolving them or are they ignoring them?
AI engineers are happy to discuss how AI is revolutionizing cybersecurity, but there is little about how the cybersecurity is or could improve AI. Cybersecurity companies are not applying their algorithms to find vulnerabilities. Complacency is the enemy of AI safety:
“Moreover, there are still few use cases where it is paramount to guarantee the AI algorithms have no life-threatening vulnerabilities. But as AI takes over more and more tasks such as driving, flying, designing drugs to treat illnesses and so on, AI engineers will need to also learn the craft of, and be, cybersecurity experts.
I want to emphasize that the responsibility of engineering safer AI algorithms cannot be delegated to an external cybersecurity firm. Only the engineers and researchers designing the algorithms have the intimate knowledge necessary to deeply understand what and why vulnerabilities exists and how to effectively and safely fix them.”
Cyber security: An oxymoron?
Whitney Grace, January 8, 2021
Google: A Rose by Any Other Name Could Be Fully Autonomous
January 7, 2021
I spotted an interesting article called “Waymo Shelves Self Diving Term for Its Technology to Shore Up Safety.” The write up explains:
Waymo will call its technology “fully autonomous” to create, what it believes, is an important distinction. The company’s argument rests entirely on how the public perceives “self-driving” as a term.
As Google tries to solve the “problem” or respond to the “opportunity” for vehicles in which humans can play with their mobile devices instead of driving is bigly. I want to point out that Google and the others pitching this nirvana for motorists and advertisers have not solved some of the tricky issues. Crashing a car due to road markers? Mistaking a small dog as a puddle? These are not “problems”; they are outliers. Black sheep get hit by smart software too.
The fix is not the lingo. The fix is to begin to change the roadways to make the “opportunity” less fraught. How’s Google doing solving death and handling its labor “opportunity”? Yeah. Quantum supremacy too.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2021
The Mainframe Wants to Be Young Again
January 7, 2021
I know that the idea of a mainframe being young is not widespread. I am not certain that a TikTok video has been created to demonstrate the spring in the septuagenarian’s step. I learned about the mainframe’s most recent aspirations in “Big Mainframe Computing.” I noted this statement:
BMC is now aiming to help build what it (and everybody else in the industry) is calling the autonomous digital enterprise but putting the artificial intelligence (AI) in mAInframe. The company now refers to the joint BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) and Compuware portfolios… and this is the world of Ops plus AI = AIOps.
I quite like the realization that the letters “ai” appear in the word “mainframe.” From my perspective, innovations are chugging along. Companies like Apple, AMD, and nVidia are crafting solutions likely to create additional computing alternatives for “smart software.”
Would you pay to attend a ballet performed by the people in pharmaceutical advertisements on cable nightly news programs?
I know I would not because I am 77 and know that what was possible in the 1960s is a bit of a challenge.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2021
Facebook Focuses on an AI-Driven Future
January 7, 2021
Thousands of Facebook employees were treated to project announcements and product demos at the company’s end-of-the-year meeting. BuzzFeed News got its hands on an audio recording of the proceedings and shares a few highlights in, “Facebook Is Developing a Tool to Summarize Articles so You Don’t Have to Read Them.” As have many of us, Facebook has had a challenging year. However, company executives painted a positive picture at the meeting. We are not surprised to see the company pinning many hopes on AI. Writer Ryan Mac reports:
“Despite the turmoil, the company’s leaders said the social networking company has moved forward, adding some 20,000 new workers this year. With more people around the world at home, the company has experienced record usage, said Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer. … Among the advancements touted by Schroepfer were the company’s commitments to artificial intelligence, which has often been seen internally as a panacea to the social network’s ills. He noted that Facebook’s data centers were receiving ‘new systems’ that would make them 10 to 30 times faster and allow Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) to essentially train itself. ‘And it is actually the key tool we are using right now today in production to fight hate speech, misinformation, and honestly the hardest possible content problems we face,’ Schroepfer said, noting a company talking point that Facebook now detects 95% of all hate speech on the platform. In recent weeks, departing Facebook employees have pushed back on the idea that AI could cure the company’s content moderation problems. While Facebook employs thousands of third-party human moderators, it’s made it clear that AI is how it plans to patrol its platform in the future, an idea that concerns workers.”
The employees are right to be concerned. Experience shows AI is still a long way from consistently discerning nuance in human language. Facebook will save money by creating algorithms over hiring people to moderate the platform, but that will do little to stem the tide of false information or hateful speech. Another new tool that leverages AI looks like another way to spread false, or at least incomplete, information—”TL;DR” (the popular abbreviation for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”) will summarize news articles into bulleted lists. No word on whether this is connected to Semantic Scholar’s tool by the same name designed for use with academic texts.
Other curious announcements include the development of a universal translator (a la Star Trek) and “Horizon,” a VR social network where users’ avatars can hang out together (inspired by pandemic isolation, perhaps?) Then there is the brain-reading device. Last year Facebook bought neural-interface startup CRTL-labs and has since made progress on a device that can translate thoughts into physical actions. Potential applications, says Schroepfer, include typing, manipulating virtual objects, or driving a character in a video game. Will they put that together with the Horizon project? Hmmm.
Cynthia Murrell, January 7, 2021
Hasta La Vistas, ROSS Intelligence
January 7, 2021
Artificial intelligence is useful for all fields, especially for legal professionals. Legal-based AI is specifically designed to process legal research, including litigation. ROSS Intelligence developed a legal research product using AI, but lawsuit from Thomson Reuters forced the company to shutdown. LawSites shares more details in: “Legal Research Company ROSS To Shut Down Under Pressure OF Thomson Reuters’ Lawsuit.”
In May 2020, Thomson Reuters sued ROSS because they alleged ROSS stole Westlaw data. ROSS “stole” the Westlaw data to design their own competing product.
“Within a day of the lawsuit, ROSS responded with a vigorous denial of the allegations. Cofounders Andrew Arruda, CEO, and Jimoh Ovbiagele, CTO, asserted that TR’s lawsuit was nothing more than an anticompetitive tactic by TR to squelch an up-and-coming competitor. ‘By filing this lawsuit despite its lack of merit, Westlaw is interfering with our chances of securing more funding or merging with other companies, which we need to do in order to innovate and compete with Westlaw,’ they said at the time. ;This is not the first time Westlaw has used litigation as a weapon.’”
The lawsuit prevented ROSS from starting another round of funding. They were forced to send their clients to other legal research platforms and fire their staff. ROSS will continue to battle Thomson Reuters in court using insurance money.
Will Westlaw use litigation as a business method in the future? Do lawyers send invoices?
Whitney Grace, January 7, 2021
Palantir Titan Positioning
January 7, 2021
I spotted the jargon now used by Palantir for its Titan platform. No, the jargon is not platform. Here’s what the policeware powerhouse states at the Titan Web page:
Titan’s platform upgrade makes Gotham more performant, open, and proactive, so that the world’s institutions can continue turning data into intelligence.
I once heard a Fast Search & Transfer whiz kid use the word “performant.” In 2006, I asked, “What does performant mean?” The answer was, “It means fast.” I asked, “Like the name of your company or fast as in speed?” The reply, “Fast.” That’s the type of answer that may have contributed to some of Fast Search’s challenges.
I also like the Palantirish word “proactive,” which seems forward leaning.
The search and business intelligence vendors have been using the phrase “turning data into intelligence” for years.
To sum up, Palantir is becoming performant in marketing its platform which converts all sorts of information into “intelligence.” Now what is “intelligence”? Answer fast or performantly, please.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2021
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