Organic or Paid Search? Answer: Pay Up
June 16, 2020
There is a weird symbiosis. Unlike the sucker fish clamped on a shark, the predator’s fellow travelers operate in the dark digital ocean. “Organic Vs Paid Search: Explained” correctly points out that traffic costs money. This is not 1994, gentle reader. This is 2020 and the costs of running an ad supported search engine are difficult to control.
The write-up ignores a simple fact: Online advertising companies want anyone who wants clicks and traffic to pay. Like the IRS oriented phrase: Death, taxes, and the online traffic levy.
This means that “organic search” — the 1994 style of Web indexing — is dead like dinosaurs. The future is pay to play.
As output devices become smaller and voice creeps forward as a way to explain where to get a pizza, the free loading sucker fish are going to get scraped off the digital shark. The shark will then eat the sucker fish.
What’s this mean for search engine optimization? More baloney, more hand waving, and another lost cause.
Pay to play, the phrase of the future. There’s no cyber Mother Theresa to intervene.
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2020
Google Search: Clutching at Elephant Parts?
June 3, 2020
The DarkCyber research team finds Google search endlessly fascinating. The group is less interested in the relevance of the results and increasingly interested in the manipulations of data. The line between objective results and weaponized results is a thin one. Figuring out what is occurring, the intent of changes in data presentation, and the actions of stakeholders like SEO (search engine optimization) professionals is similar to the behaviors we documented in our Dark Web research. (We summarized some of our data in “Dark Web Notebook. Information about that monograph is available at this link.) Our radar beeped when one of the team identified a certified SEO expert who identified himself as a “hustler.” This is street jargon for a person with behaviors which may be perceived as illegal or quasi illegal.
Consider this Reddit post from Antihero. The focus of Antihero’s attention was a search for mattress. The result returned about 761 million results. However, the first page of search results — that is the one that 95 percent of those using Google view — is entirely ads. To support the argument, Antihero includes a screen shot of the page which indeed is entirely “pay to play” content. Yep, ads, infomercials in text form, carnival barkers who get that prime real estate by paying off the entertainment company managing the event. To sum up, Google is not good.
Now consider this post from a company which depends on Google for indexing and pointing to its content. “Panda and the Death of SEO PR” explains that Google is doing an outstanding job of filtering certain content from its search results. The idea is that bogus news releases which can be output after registering for free news release services is filtered. Plus the changes in search since 2013 have made it more difficult for outputters to put certain content on Web pages which are then indexed by Google and made available to the world. To sum up, Google is good.
Let’s step back. Google is in the business of selling ads. The ad business is different from those halcyon days when Google was furiously litigating with Yahoo about certain similarities between Google’s fledgling ad service and Yahoo’s ad system and method. Google ended up inking a deal; Yahoo went back into its purple jack in the box; and the pay to play approach to “objective” search become the de facto standard in the US and then elsewhere.
When a Web site is not indexed, the webmaster or 23 year old political science major reinvented while living in mom and dad’s basement needs traffic. What are the choices?
- Create content and hope that tweets, Facebook posts, and links in LinkedIn generate hundreds of thousands of page views. Google’s algorithms and ad sales professionals monitor such traffic anomalies. A spike could mean a customer with money to spend. With more than 35 billion Web pages in the online indexes, generating a spike is possible, but it is difficult to achieve. That path is called “organic search.” The idea is that clicks flow from the video, the content, or the image posted. Organic search operates on the magnet principle. Good content pulls traffic. Yes, that happens.
- Buy ads. This approach does work. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others operate search systems and match ads to user interests. For product traffic, Amazon is emerging as the big dog running in front of the Bezos bulldozer to chase small animals off the trail. Facebook — despite its somewhat unstable political and social position — can deliver person centric ads. Google is the champion of free Web search on the desktop and on mobile devices. If you want traffic, you buy and ad. The ad produces traffic. There is chatter that buying ads has other upsides as well, but those are a subject for a future post.
Now back to the Reddit post. Those who buy ads for content related to mattresses and pay the most appear on the results page in Antihero’s online article.
And what about the eRelease “Google is wonderful” post? It is valid, particularly for Google partners and organizations which have an opportunity to participate in the Google ecosystem.
Net net: When organic traffic doesn’t work, one can work with a Google partner who can provide content distribution and a glide path for ad sales. When one grabs part of an elephant, even when one has one’s eyes open and one is wearing rubber boots and a rubber apron, it is difficult to see what you near.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2020
Google and Page Experience
June 2, 2020
Just a short item, a question in reality: What’s a “page experience”? I understand a Web page. This is the digital equivalent of a note card or a sheet of paper. I understand experience; for example, a tumble down a flight of steps is an experience.
But “page experience”? Fuzzy, weird word pairing like those old school America Online word pairs.
“Google Will Factor Page Experience into Search Rankings” explains that the phrase means:
page experience will measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. To determine page experience, Google will consider Core Web Vitals, metrics that measure user experience, as well as existing signals, like mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing and HTTPS-security.
Interesting. The “secret” Google ranking algorithm gets another batch of signals to use to determine relevance. Does “relevance” mean which and how many ads can be matched to information retrieved from one of Google’s universal search indexes?
The article reports:
Google says it will still prioritize the best information…
For decades methods like precision and recall, Boolean logic, and controlled vocabularies provided mechanisms for matching indexed information to a user query.
Most people have zero idea how Google determines what information to display. Does it matter? To most people online information is accurate. Jibber jabber like “page experience” is a phrase with a hefty payload of content free suggestivity.
Advertising revenue is the point of the exercise, isn’t it? Perhaps there is a correlation between Amazon’s and Facebook’s growing online advertising businesses and Google verbiage?
Using Google in a quest to find relevant information is an experience in itself.
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2020
Search Engine Optimization Craziness Continues
May 28, 2020
One of the DarkCyber team spotted a write up. She kept it under wraps because with restaurants reopening, the loyal researcher did not want our lunch spoiled. SEO makes my dander do whatever dander does. Because I pay for lunch for those working for me, the team knows that happy subjects like the wonderfulness of enterprise search innovations are sunnier topics.
She goofed. I snagged a photocopy of “The Four V’s of Semantic Search.” My initial reaction was, “Are these SEO experts channeling IBM’s four V’s of Big Data”? I came to my senses. SEO experts simply borrow acronyms, refit them, and reveal great insights.
SEO or search engine optimization is a runway for selling Google Advertising. When the “organic” content fails to deliver the lusted after clicks, those seeking click validation have one path forward: Pay Google for traffic.
Don’t agree. Well, get in line with those who fail to understand their role in the ad selling pipeline.
What’s the write up explain is the key to “semantic search”?
There are four points, just almost the very same as IBM’s shattering insight after Charlie Chaplin ads and before the most recent round of layoffs at Big Blue.
First, crank out lots of content. Nah, it doesn’t have to advance knowledge. Second, put out the content as fast as possible. Bing, Google, and Yandex algorithms are greedy. Feed them, you click starved Web site owner. Third, mix up your content. We now have three V’s: Volume, velocity, and variety. Are there facts to back up these bold and confident statements? You are kidding, right?
The fourth V is the one that made me take a few deep breaths, chop some wood, and crush two aluminum Perrier in the thin, flimsy cans.
Veracity is the trigger word. Here’s what the write up says:
The fourth V is about how accurate the information is that you share, which speaks about your expertise in the given subject and to your honesty. Google cares about whether the information you share is true or not and real or not, because this is what Google’s audience cares about. That’s why you won’t usually get search results that point to the fake news sites. [Note a DarkCyber editor added the possessive apostrophe in this passage. You know “veractity” which is related to accuracy sort of.]
What’s this have to do with semantic search?
Nothing, zip, zilch, nada.
It should be the four V’s plus a B for baloney. That’s SEO because when you don’t get traffic, buy it.
Stephen E Arnold, May 28, 2020
Search Engine Optimization: Designed to Sell Google Advertising
May 26, 2020
Many years ago, I gave a talk at one of Search Engine Land’s conferences. I am not sure how I ended up on the program. At that time I was focused on enterprise search and some work for the US government. I showed up, gave a talk about enterprise search, and sat in on several round tables. The idea was, as I recall, that speakers sat at a table and people could sit down and talk about search. I was like a murder hornet at a five year old’s birthday party. Not only did I have any context for questions like “How do I get my department’s content to rank highly in our local search engine?” And “What ideas do you have for making content relevant?” That was the last time I accepted an invitation to give a talk at a search engine optimization conference. If you want to manipulate corporate content, just do it directly. What’s with the indexing thing?
The topics were designed to give a marketer who knew essentially zero about search of any kind information to game a relevance ranking system. The intent of the conference organizer (who eventually became a search evangelist or apologist for Google) and the attendees had zero, zilch, nada, to do with getting on point answers to a query.
I typically confine my annoyance at search engine optimization to comments I offer in my blog Beyond Search/Dark Cyber. If a scam artist sends me asking me to include a link to another blog, I respond and point out I will reproduce those emails about cyber crime. That usually causes the bot or whoever is sending me emails to go away.
I want to take this opportunity to state what was obvious to me when the SEO (the acronym for the relevance-killing discipline of search engine optimization) industry began taking bait dangled by Google.
Here’s how this multi-year, large-scale digital pipeline works. The diagram below shows a marketer or Web site owner eager to get the site into a search engine. Being indexed, of course, is not enough. The Web site must appear on the first page of a Web search system’s results pages. The person seeking traffic has two choices and only two choices: Get traffic with the content (text, audio, or video) providing the magnetism or pay to play. Buy ads. Get traffic. Period.
Put content on the page with index terms (now called tags) and make sure the Web page conforms to Google’s rules. Despite Google’s protestations, the company accounts for an astounding 95 percent of the search queries in the US and Western Europe. Google has competition in China which holds down Google’s share of market in the Middle Kingdom. For all practical purposes, embracing Google’s web master guidelines, conforming to AMP, and making modifications decreed by Google is helpful in getting indexed. The first path appears to be easy. When it fails, the search engine optimization experts are ready to assist.
The second path to traffic is to buy Google Advertising. Google has a desire to become the premier place for large-scale media campaigns. Google will sell ads to small outfits, but the money comes from having Fortune 1000 companies and their ilk buy Google advertising. The problem is that Google Advertising costs money. The interface is designed to be like a game, a gambling game at that. The results from Google ads can be difficult to connect to a specific sale. Nevertheless, ads are option two.
How does the pipeline work? What is the feedback mechanism that enriches some SEO experts? Why are the two options symbiotic? I want to provide brief answers to each of these questions.
How does the pipeline work? (Perhaps the word “grooming” might be appropriate here?)
This is an easy question. Not buying ads means that most Web sites will get almost zero traffic. Web search is a pay-to-play operation. Google has its own list of bluebirds, canaries, and sparrow. (A bluebird is a Web site that Google must index no matter what. An example is whitehouse.gov, stanford.edu, and cnn.com. A sparrow is an uninteresting Web site which may get indexed on an irregular or relaxed cycle. The canary? That’s a Web site which may not be indexed comprehensively or if indexed, updated on a delayed basis.) With more than 35 billion Web sites wanting to be indexed by Google and the lesser online systems, the no-ads option seems attractive. Therefore, Google encourages SEO experts to pitch their services.
Now here’s the kicker. Web sites which do not buy ads struggle to get clicks. SEO experts make suggestions and may make changes in their customers’ Web pages. But nothing delivers traffic unless an anomaly or a particular item of information catches attention which delivers large numbers of clicks. Google dutifully indexes that which attracts clicks, thus creating more demand. More demand means that indexing those “magnetic” pages makes ad sales “obvious”. Traffic allows Google to chop through its ad inventory. Relaxed queries for words related to “magnetic” sites is an obvious technical play to sell more ads. Thus, SEO experts lucky enough to have a customer pulled into the maelstrom of a “magnetic” page is happy. If Google wants a change, that Web site operator will make the change. If an SEO expert is involved, the Google change is packaged with assurance that “traffic will arrive in an organic way.” Organic in the lingo of the SEO expert means “you don’t have to pay to get traffic.”
So what? Groomed or indoctrinated SEO experts set the stage to help Google get their requirements and methods adopted without telling a Web site operator “You must do this.” Second, the SEO experts make money pushing the fluff about organic traffic. Third, Web site operators who benefit from the effect of “magnetic” sites on their Web site become noisy advocates of SEO.
There is a but.
At any time, Google’s algorithms can decrement a Web site living by organic traffic. Google can also manually intervene and slow the flow of traffic to a Web site. The mechanism ranges from blacklists to adding a url or entity to a list of sites with “negative” quality scores. I have explained the notion of “quality” as defined by Google in my The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 monographs, originally published by Infonortics but out of print due to the skill print publishers have in committing hair Kari.
What happens when a Web site loses traffic? Some sue like Foundem; others go out of business. Many simply accept the loss of traffic as fate and either buy Google Advertising or run back into the La-La land of SEO assurances that traffic will again flow organically after we wave our magic wand.
Other companies bite the bullet and buy Google advertising. Examples range from companies who pull advertising because their ads appear adjacent objectionable content. These companies go back because Google is a de facto gatekeeper for high-volume online traffic. Other companies decide that they need to pay SEO experts AND buy Google Advertising.
This is a sweet operation because:
Google has evangelists who tell those with Web pages what specific changes are needed to make a Web page conform to a Google-defined standard. Conformance to Google standards reduces computational load. There are tens of thousands of Google’s “SEO helpers” creating what Google wants and needs.
When the SEO experts fail to deliver clicks, you know what happens? Google Advertising to the only life saver on the digital beach.
SEO is a game played for free or organic traffic. Google controls the information highway. Stay in your lane and do what we want. Make a tiny error. Well, Google Advertising, a friendly Google inside sales professional or certified SEO expert can get you out of the mud.
SEO experts are sure to object to my characterization of their efforts as Google pre-sales. But some SEO experts make money and one SEO expert became an honest-to-goodness Googler.
From my point of view, SEO is a complement to Google Advertising. Want traffic? Buy Google’s ads. The Google knows, and it gets the pay-to-play money, its gets the support and love of the SEO “experts”, and Google gets a third party pounding Web sites into the Google cookie cutter.
What happens if an outfit doesn’t play Foosball by Google’s rules? Just ask Foundem or the TradeComet executives.
If you are not on Google, you may not exist. That’s what makes the pipeline work and plugs in the Google money machine: Pay to play. It is a business model guaranteed to cement increasingly irrelevant results to users’ minds. And what happens when Google shapers results? You decide based on the information you “find” in Google, usually above the fold and more than 90 percent of the time without clicking to Page 2.
If you want more search engine optimization information, point your browser to this page of titles and hot links on Xenky.com. (Some of these articles identify SEO experts who are avowed hustlers. Is SEO a playground for digital Larry Flynts?)
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2020
Semantic SEO: Solution or Runway for Google Ads, Formerly AdWords?
May 14, 2020
I participated in a conversation with Robert David Steele, a former CIA professional, and a former Google software engineer named Zack Vorhies. One of the topics touched upon was Google’s relaxing of its relevance thresholds. A video of extracts from the conversation contains some interesting information; for example, the location of a repository of Google company documents Mr. Vorhies publicly released.
My contribution to the discussion focused on how valuable “relaxed” relevance is. The approach allows Google to display more ads per query. The “relaxed” query means that an ad inventory can be worked through more quickly than it would be IF old fashioned Boolean search were the norm for users. Advertisers’ eyes cross when an explanation of Boolean and “relaxing” a semantic method have to be explained.
DarkCyber’s research team prefers Boolean. None of the researchers need training wheels, Mother Google (which seems to emulate Elsa Krebs of James Bond fame) and WFH Googlers bonding with their mobile phones like a fuzzier, semantic Tommy Bahama methods.
The team spotted “The Newbie’s Information to Semantic Search: Examples and Instruments.” Our interpretation of “newbies” is that the collective noun refers to desperate marketers who have to find a way to boost traffic to a Web site BEFORE going to his or her millennial leader and saying, “Um, err, you know, I think we have to start buying Google Ads.”
Yes, there is a link between the SEO rah rah and the Google online advertising system. The idea is simple. When SEO fails, the owner of the Web page has to buy Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). In a future post, someone on the team will write about this interesting business process. Just not in this post, thank you.
The article triggering this essay includes what looks like simplified semi-technical diagrams. Plus, there are screenshots featuring Yo Yo Ma. And SEOish jargon; for example:
Coding
Elements
Knowledge as in “knowledge of any Web page.” DarkCyber finds categorical affirmatives a crime against logicians living and semantically dead.
Mapping as in “semantic mapping”
Markup
Semantic
Plus, the write up some to be an advertorial weaponized content object for a product called Optimizer. DarkCyber concluded that the system is a word look up tool, sort of a dumbed down thesaurus for hustlers, unemployed business administration junior college drop outs, and earnest art history majors working in the honorable discipline of SEO.
What’s the semantic analysis convey to a reader unfamiliar with the concepts of “semantic,” “mark up,” and “knowledge.”? The answer, in the view of the DarkCyber team, is less and less useful search results. Mr. Vorhies makes this point in the video cited above. In fact, he wants to go back to the “old Google.” Why? Today’s Google outputs frustratingly off point results.
The article’s main points, based on the DarkCyber interpretation of the article, are:
First, statements like this: “…don’t actually recognize how troublesome it’s to elucidate what’s being communicated with out the assistance of all “beyond-words” indicators.” Yeah, what? DarkCyber thinks the tortured words imply that smart software and data can light up the dark spaces of a user’s query. Stated another way: Search results should answer the user’s question with on point results. Yes, that sounds good. A tiny percentage of people using Google want to conduct an internal reference interview to identify what’s needed, select the online indexes to search, formulate the terms required for a query, and then run the query on multiple systems. Very few users of online search systems wants to scan results, analyzed the most useful content, dedupe and verify data, and then capture facts with appropriate bibliographic information. Many times, this type of process is little for than input for a more refined query. Who has time for a systematic, thorough informationizing process. Why? Saying the word “pizza” to a mobile phone is the way to go. If it works for pizza, the simple query will work for Inconel 235 chemical properties, right? This easy approach is called semantic. In reality it is a canned search with results shaped by advertisers who want clicks.
Second, a person desperately seeking traffic to a Web site must index content on a Web page. Today, “index” is a not-so-useful term. Today one “tags” a page with user assigned terms. Controlled vocabularies play almost no role in modern Web search systems. Just make up a term, then to a TikTok video and become a millionaire. Easy, right? To make tags more useful, one must use synonyms. If a page is about pizza, then a semantic tag is one that might offer the tag “vegetarian.” At least one of the DarkCyber team is old enough to remember being taught how to use a thesaurus and a dictionary. Today, one needs smart software to help the art major navigate the many words available in the English language.
Third, to make the best use of related words, the desperate marketer must embrace “semantic mapping.” The idea is to “visualize relationships between ideas and entities.” (The term “entity” is not defined, which the DarkCyber team is perfectly okay for newbies who need help with indexing.) The idea of a semantic map is a Google generated search page — actually a report of allegedly related data — created by Google’s smart software. In grade school decades ago, students were taken to the library, taught about the “catalog”. Then students would gather information from “sources.” The discovered information was then winnowed and assembled into an essay or a report. If something looked or seemed funny, there was a reference librarian or a teacher to inform the student about the method for verifying facts. Now? Just trust Google. To make the idea vivid, the article provides another Google output. Instead of Yo Yo Ma, the topic is “pizza.” There you go.
The write up reminds the reader to use the third party application Text Optimizer for best results. And the bad news is that “semantic codes” must be attached to these semantically related index terms. One example is the command for deleted text. Indeed, helpful. Another tag is to indicate a direct quotation. No link to a source is suggested. Another useful method for the practicing hustler.
Let’s step back.
The article is all too typical of search engine optimization expertise. The intent is wrapped in the wool of jargon. The main point is to sell a third party software which provides training wheels to the thrashing SEO hungry individual. Plus, the content is not designed to help the user who needs specific information.
The focus of SEO is to add fluff to content. When the SEO words don’t do the job, what does the SEO marketer do?
Buy Google Ads. This is “pay to play”, and it is the one thing that Google relies upon for revenue.
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2020
Virtue Signaling: A Covid Short Circuit
May 6, 2020
One of the DarkCyber team sent me a link to “COVID-19 & SEO: Why SEO Is More Important Now Than Ever.” The impact of the article was, “Befuddlement.” The phrase “more important than ever” assumes that search engine optimization was important in the first place.
I have long held the belief that online advertising vendors used search engine as mechanism to drive ad sales. Based on the research for Google Version 2: The Calculating Predator, it was clear that manipulating content could cause the “clever” Google PageRank method to boost pages with minimal intellectual value. Therefore, if you can’t stop weaponized, shaped, or malformed information, what is the benefit of search engine optimization?
The shift coincided with some of my work for the world’s largest source of Web indexed content. By encouraging SEO via an “ambassador” to SEO conferences, online advertising could be positioned as an essential service.
A new Web site is posted. The content is indexed and boosted in the search results. Then over time, the ranking of that “new” site begins to slip down the results page. Nothing the SEO expert does has an impact on the lost results. The customer becomes frustrated and may try another SEO expert. But the site is now essentially not findable.
What’s the solution?
The fix is to purchase online advertising and then traffic returns. Is this magic?
No, it illustrates an aspect of misinformation that gets little purchase in today’s world.
The article “COVID-19 & SEO: Why SEO Is More Important Now Than Ever” illustrates the effort optimization experts expend trying to get a free boost on ad supported “free to use” Web indexes. The word “covid” is lashed to SEO. The argument, noted above, is that SEO is important.
I circled this passage in the write up:
While ecommerce businesses are seeing unmatched results from SEO at the moment — Adobe reports an almost 200% increase in toilet paper purchases alone — companies outside the ecommerce sector are still benefiting from their investment in SEO.
This is interesting logic. Adobe is a word which is used to locate information about Photoshop and other applications. The bound phrase “toilet paper” is a word used frequently on Amazon. (Amazon attracts more product searches now than Google.) But the statement ignores the fact that similar interest in toilet paper occurred in Russia. Perhaps something about the product is causing the searches? Is that something a factor other than SEO?
The search engine optimization sector uses whatever words are needed to generate a boost. Then when the customer finds the SEO less effective, the customer is softened up to buy online ads.
The free Web search systems are under increasing pressure to generate financial returns. This means that the claims of SEO will pay off for those who sell online ads. When the SEO ministrations fail to work, what’s a company to do?
Answer: Buy online ads. Those are going to work.
Why’s this important? Three reasons:
- The symbiosis between SEO and online advertising is not widely discussed.
- Content, even if it is wonky, is needed to give the illusion that an online indexing system is timely and comprehensive. They are neither timely nor comprehensive, but those are separate topics.
- Companies are becoming more and more desperate to make sales. That means that high value information is going to get lost in the barrages of dross.
Are there examples of this activity? Yes, there is the high profile issue between what’s displayed, what’s available, and what’s shown. Navigate to “How Google Search Results Shape, and Sometimes Distort, Public Opinion – and Why You Should Care.”
And there are other examples as well. Take a look at LinkedIn and run a query for “search engine optimization.” You will find a number of experts. At least one of these experts uses an alias. Why? Who is this? We’ll try to answer these questions. Watch for our new feature about SEO deception.
Remember this assertion:
No matter your industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented your business with a slew of challenges and difficult decisions, especially when it comes to how you’ll market your company. Compared to other marketing options, SEO offers far more stability and security. It’s a great option for businesses focusing on long-term growth during tenuous times.
One question: “Are the statements accurate?” or are they the shibboleths of the hustler.
Looking for our search engine optimization hustling coverage, click this link.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2020
Looking for more SEO fancy dancing, read this DarkCyber story at https://wp.me/pf6p2-gdY
Google Ad Revenue: What Happens When the One Trick Pony Gets Seedy Toe?
May 1, 2020
Seedy toe?
What’s that? If you live in Kentucky, home of the abandoned Derby you know. If not, your child’s pony is going to be in discomfort. And the costs? You don’t want to know what large animal vets in horse country charge, do you?
“CEO Sundar Pichai Spells Out Alphabet’s Positives, but COVID-19 Damage to Ad Revenues Is Only Going to Get Worse” presents a key point articulated by the chief Googler Sundar Pichai:
In March, we experienced a significant and sudden slowdown in ad revenues. The timing of the slowdown correlated to the locations and sectors impacted by the virus and related shutdown orders…Overall, recovery in ad spend will depend on a return to economic activity.
The article also quotes the Google chief financial officer as observing: The second quarter will be “a difficult one.” Google’s CFO did not elaborate on Google cost control measures. Yep, cost control. Important DarkCyber believes.
But back to seedy toe and a lame pony.
The bulk of Google revenues come from online advertising. Amazon is doing a good job of capturing product search and that means that Amazon product ad revenue is likely to track those clicks. That’s bad news for Google as the bad news from the virus disruption affects large swaths of the global economy. Facebook’s ad revenues may have taken a hit in the most recent quarter, but that outstanding, other-directed manager Mark Zuckerberg hungers for more ad revenue as well.
Google may be able to kick sand in the face of dead tree outfits, but the datasphere is a different sort of construct.
Limping ponies will not be invited to parade at birthday parties. Lame ponies can be expensive to make well again.
Here in Kentucky there are only so many places at the Old Friends Farm. Then what? A one way ticket to Fiji? Ponies are a treat of sorts in Oceania. Bula!
Google needs to avoid seedy toe. Amazon and Facebook are not ponies. These outfits are tigers with a hunger for easy prey; for example, a lame pony.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2020
Google: The Laser That Threatened James Bond Creeps Closer to the Private Parts of the GOOG
April 23, 2020
Update: I omitted the link to the actual Googler blog post. Too excited thinking about “integrity.” My bad.
Goldfinger was an interesting film. In 1965, lasers were advanced. Some thought they were death rays. The Hollywood people, sunning around the pool with Technicolor drinks, thought the laser was the ideal way to burn James Bond’s private parts. Goldfinger was the bad actor. Now Google’s integrity weapon may be threatening Alphabet’s private parts. Odd job indeed.
The laser posed a risk to the fictional James Bond’s private parts. The Google integrity verification is a similar risk with one difference: Googlers are steering the destructive beam of actual data toward Alphabet’s secret places.
Flash forward to 2020, “Google to Require All Advertisers to Pass Identity Verification Process.” The word “all” is probably not warranted, but it sounds good. Talking heads enjoy glittering generalities and categorical affirmatives.
Nevertheless, the news story, if accurate, reveals some interesting quasi-factoids. Here’s one example:
Google began requiring political advertisers wanting to run election ads on its platform to verify their identity back in 2018. Now, that program is being extended to all advertisers, the company wrote in a blog post this morning from John Canfield, its director of product management for ads integrity. The change will allow consumers to see who’s running an ad and which country they’re located in when they click “Why this ad?” on a placement.
Advertisers have to “prove” something other than having a mechanism to put funds into a Google advertising account. Second, Google has a job description which includes these words: “Management” and “integrity.” Plus, the information will not help Google. Nope, the winners in knowing who allegedly buys ads is “consumers.”
Google’s integrity person allegedly said:
“This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see from Google and help them make more informed decisions when using our advertising Controls,” John Canfield, Google’s director of product management for ads integrity, said in the post. “It will also help support the health of the digital advertising ecosystem by detecting bad actors and limiting their attempts to misrepresent themselves.”
How does one become verified by Google’s integrity people?
Organizations are required to submit personal legal information (like a W9 or IRS document showing the organization’s name, address and employer identification number). An individual from the organization also needs to provide legal identification on the organization’s behalf. Individuals have to show government-issued photo ID like a passport or ID card. Google said it previously had collected basic information about the advertiser but didn’t require documentation to verify.
How effective are Google’s efforts to filter, screen, and verify? We know that human traffickers and others in this line of business have infiltrated videos on YouTube. We know that one can run a query for “Photoshop crakz”:
Apparently Google’s system cannot block listings for stolen commercial software. In fact, the listing for this illegal offering was updated three days ago. DarkCyber knows that some legitimate sites’ content has not been updated for longer periods of time. Notice how Google’s smart autocorrect changed “crakz” into “cracked.” Helpful smart software. Why does Google display the result? Why doesn’t Adobe email Google’s search wizards to have these links with illegal intent filtered? One reason may be that Adobe has emailed Google customer support and is, like many others with questions for the Google, waiting for a response from an informed Googler?
Google, Ad Transparency, and Query Relaxation: Should Advertisers Care? Probably
April 20, 2020
You need information about Banjo, a low profile outfit in Utah. Navigate to Google and enter the query Banjo law enforcement. No quotes for this query. Banjo has a Web site, and the phrase law enforcement is reasonably common and specific. (It is what is known as a bound phrase like White House or stock market; that is, the two words go together in US English.)
Here’s what the system displayed to me on April 20, 2020, at 0918 am US Eastern time:
The search results are okay. The ads do not match the query or the user’s intent: Law enforcement is not even close to a $1,000 musical instrument in a retail store.
Notice that the first result is to a Salt Lake Tribune article in March 2020 about Banjo’s allegedly “massive surveillance system.” The second result is from the same newspaper which reports a few days later that the Salt Lake City police won’t share data with Banjo. So far so good. Google is delivering timely, relevant results.
But look at the ads. The query Banjo law enforcement displays to a person wanting information about a policeware company the following for fee, pay to be seen ads in front of a buyer with an interest in Banjo:
These advertisers are betting money that Google can get them relevant clicks when a person search for a banjo. Maybe? But when someone searches for the policeware company Banjo, the advertiser is going to be “surprised.” Do advertisers like surprises?
Here are the advertisers whose for fee ads for people interested in law enforcement software (policeware) had displayed in front of a Google user with a vanishingly low probability of purchasing a stringed instrument whilst researching a specialist software vendor selling almost exclusively to police and screened quangos (quasi non governmental organizations):
- Banjo Ben Clark
- Deering Banjo Company
- Banjo.com (note that our Banjo is Banjo.co)
- Banjo Studio
- Instrument Alley
- Sweetwater
- Guitar Center
These companies paid for ads as a result of query relaxation. Google’s system does not differentiate the Banjo policeware outfit from the music products.
Are there parallels between games in which a person can win money by guessing which cup hides the ball? These games of chance are often confidence operations. In this context confidence means trickery, not trust.
Why? There are url distinctions; that is, Banjo.co versus Banjo.com; there are disambiguation clues in Banjo.co’s Web page; there is the metadata itself with the keyword surveillance a likely index term.
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