News Report from India Alleges Thomson Reuters Tap Dances with Trust
May 26, 2020
Who knows if Tecake in India is reporting “real news.” The report is interesting and thought provoking like its title: “Thomson Reuters Faces Pressure Over ICE Contracts.”
DarkCyber finds Thomson Reuters use of “trust” as a keyword interesting. My father once told me, “Anyone who tell you he or she is honest, may not be.”
The write up alleges:
A group of Thomson Reuters shareholders says the company’s technology databases are being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “track and arrest immigrants on a massive scale,” potentially causing reputational damage to the company.
The article then adds:
Jacinta Gonzalez of Mijente said in an interview with The Verge that the role of data brokers like CLEAR in the surveillance of immigrants has been unsettling.
“While Thomson Reuters has built a brand as a trusted news source, few people realize that the news operation is largely financed by the company’s role as a data broker for agencies like ICE,” Gonzalez said. She added that there are “enormous risks” associated with working with ICE, not the least of which are human rights concerns around the agency’s detention of immigrants and the separation of families trying to enter the US at its border with Mexico.
Thomson Reuters may find itself in an unusual position: Making news instead of reporting it.
Worth watching how a trusted outfit responds to shareholder and activist grousing. Money is the objective, isn’t it? Perhaps questioning trust is not in the notebook?
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 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
And You Thought Brexit Was Screwed Up?
May 26, 2020
Nope, DarkCyber does not know if the information in “Open Letter on Confidential Dealings in Facebook Case” is “real news.” What’s interesting in the write up is this table:
The key point is that three years have passed and not much has happened. The main point is that Brexit may be a speedier bureaucratic process than enforcing the GDPR.
I do love the “accept cookies now” messages. That is one way to measure progress.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2020
DarkCyber for May 26, 2020 Now Available
May 26, 2020
DarkCyber for May 26, 2020, is an online video program focusing on cyber crime, intelligence, and lesser known Internet services. This week’s stories include NSO Group in the PR spotlight, Covid 19 phishing, Germany limits intel services scope of action, a source for bad actor hackers, ETSI.org as a job hunter’s game preserve, and four new drones for surveillance and kinetic action. (Kinetic means explosive munitions.)
The program is a production of Stephen E Arnold and the DarkCyber research team.
In addition to our news programs, we have begun adding special videos. You can view the most recent interview segments with a CIA professional is DarkCyber Exclusive: Litigation Likely for Short Selling.
More special video features are in the works. Remember. DarkCyber contains no demeaning “begging for dollars” pleas, no content marketing, and no subscription fees. As a result, DarkCyber videos and blog posts deliver information that may be difficult to locate and analysis that can cause consternation.
This week’s program is at https://vimeo.com/422426350.
Kenny Toth, May 26, 2020
Quantum Schmantum
May 25, 2020
What happens when the miasmatic hyperbole about artificial intelligence begins to wane? Another revolutionary, game changing, paradigm shifting technology will arise. Maybe the heiress to AI hoo-hah is waiting in the wings, ready to rush on stage?
One candidate is quantum computing. A couple of years ago, a conference organizer told me, “I’m all in on quantum computing. It’s the next technology revolution.”
My reaction was, “Yeah, okay.”
I noted Intel’s announcement of its horse collar or horse baloney breakthrough. I noted Google’s quantum supremacy PR push. I noted innovations like the value of photons in controlling a quantum interaction.
Got it. Careers are being made. Grants are being obtained. And venture firms are using other people’s money to make the quantum revolution arrive sooner rather than later. “Later” in hyperbole land is rarely defined.
I was interested in a paper by Gil Kalai, whose nominal professional relationship is with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The title? “The Argument against Quantum Computers, the Quantum Laws of Nature, and Google’s Supremacy Claim.”
The write up explains some caveats with the technology packing with anticipation to grab the spotlight from artificial intelligence. The paper is quite interesting. Sure, it includes equations, which are conversation killers at a newly reopened beach front bar on the Jersey Shore. There’s also postulates and reasonably easy-to-follow arguments. So read the paper already.
Here’s the conclusion:
I expect that the most important application will eventually be the understanding of the impossibility of quantum error-correction and quantum computation. Overall, the debate over quantum computing is a fascinating one, and I can see a clear silver lining: major advances in human ability to simulate quantum physics and quantum chemistry are expected to emerge if quantum computational supremacy can be demonstrated and quantum computers can be built, but also if quantum computational supremacy cannot be demonstrated and quantum computers cannot be built. Some of the insights and methods characteristic of the area of quantum computation might be useful for classical computation of realistic quantum systems – which is, apparently, what nature does.
This is a good news, bad news conclusion. The research is a journey. The destination may be surprising. So hype on.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
Microsoft: Rationalizing Is a Synonym for Good Enough Search
May 25, 2020
On May 16, 2020, Microsoft — the JEDI champions and the target of amusement for Google’s Action Blocks — updated its “Rationalizing Semantic and Keyword Search on Microsoft Academic” page. One notable change is references to everyone’s favorite pandemic and bandwagon for virtue signaling: Covid 19.
What’s Microsoft saying about its Microsoft Academic Search?
The write up points out that the four year old method for delivering “results that best matched semantically coherent interpretations of user queries, informed by the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)” is fixed up. I assume this means the fixing up which Longhorn required before it became semi ready for prime time.
Microsoft points out (mostly in a mist of misinformation) that the competitors just do keyword matches. I won’t repeat what I have written in my three Google monographs, the New Landscape of Search, and numerous columns and blog posts.
Well, Microsoft does allow some stupid, old fashioned, and hopelessly archaic keyword searching. The new search will avoid returning pages with null results or zero hits. FYI, gentle reader, learning there are “no hits” is high value information for many queries. Just ask someone running scientific, technical, engineering, and medical queries. Those quite specific searches with no hits are informationized payloads.
Keyword matching is now “rudimentary.” And what’s better? Okay, Boolean lovers who know how to formulate specific queries created after a reference interview by the light of an oil lamp in a damp cave in Eastern Europe:
To put it simply, we’ve changed our semantic search implementation from a strict form where all terms must be understood to a looser form where as many terms as possible are understood.
What’s this mean? Irrelevant, or at best tangential information. But without the explicit mechanisms of a faceted based search system. (Endeca, Endeca, why did you beat up on those who wanted to perform “guided navigation?” Are you wizards to blame?)
The write up presents some before and after queries. Guess what? You get more results, more to scan and review, and more time burned because the search system is being helpful.
Ah, no, thank you.
There is zero search system of which I know capable of “knowing” how to relax a query to provide the specific information for which I am looking. I prefer to formulate a query, scan, reformulate the query, scan, and hone my attention to the content object which in my judgment a useful nugget of information can be found.
Microsoft presents data and “distance” as evidence their new and improved system works. Better than sliced bread? For Microsoft search experts, the answer is a chorus of “yes indeeds.”
The result is another modern system which makes a person less skilled in retrieving “academic” information get a “good enough” answer.
Remember. This Microsoft outfit is going to be in the warfighting game. How does “good enough” information retrieval intentionally displaying content not directly related to the query meet the needs of an analyst in one of the more academic units of the Pentagon?
Oh, I bet this new system is not intended for that PhD. That individual uses a next generation information retrieval which provides specific tools to locate on point information.
Microsoft wants to be the search champion. Too bad it is emulating the king of irrelevant results and doing it without the payoff of massive advertising revenue.
Need academic information? Gentle reader, try iSeek, Qwant or Swisscows or your library’s online commercial databases. Include Microsoft’s offering, but supplement, analyze, and aggregate. You know like do research, not accept what the JEDI crowd offers up.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
Microsoft: Good Enough Is Not the Standard We Need
May 25, 2020
Imagine the topic options swirling around this weekend: A mass marketish iPhone jailbreak procedure, Amazon allegedly selling to blacklisted companies, Joe Rogan either pulling off the podcast coup of the year or falling into the black hole of irrelevance.
What catches DarkCyber’s eye?
Microsoft Acknowledges Internet Error in Windows 10 Cumulative Update KB4535996
Three points related to the allegedly accurate statement.
First, the problem affects some WFHers. Those are people who need the Internet to do work and get paid. Bad.
Second, the problem originated in February 2020, and it is only now (May 24, 2020) being “acknowledged.”
Third, Microsoft fouled up its magical online upgrade process.
So what?
Microsoft is gung-ho on the cloud, its “building” for the future, its reinvention of apps, and its partner flogging.
Maybe the company should consider that good enough is not good enough.
Even Amazon — a firm with some issues — steps up and says, “Hey, our vaunted speedy delivery is going to work like a horse drawn cart now.”
Microsoft appears to have embraced its good enough, and it is not.
I am tired of going to my office which has Linux, Mac, and Windows machines. There I see the Windows machine waiting for me to enter a secret code or press a button to update. Yesterday one of these machines reported that it couldn’t reach my Microsoft account?
These guys are going to do warfighting?
Good enough is not. Not for Google, not for Facebook, not for Amazon, and not for Microsoft.
Good enough. Does that mean excellence today?
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
Facebook: A Super Example of a Leader with Integrity, Forthrightness, and Ethics
May 25, 2020
This is amazing. After years of Congress criticizing Facebook for its disappointing policies on false information, one representative is pointing to the social media platform as an example to others. CNBC reports, “Schiff to Google and Twitter: Please Be More Like Facebook When It Comes to Coronavirus Misinformation.” After the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, tolerating Russian-made falsehoods during the 2016 presidential election, and consistently refusing to curb untrue political ads, what did Facebook do to earn this praise now? Reporter Joshua Roberts writes:
“Facebook said earlier this month that it would notify users if they had engaged with a post that had been removed for including misinformation about Covid-19 in violation of its policies. The social media company will also direct users to myths debunked by the World Health Organization. That marked a major step for Facebook, which has wrung its hands over other forms of misinformation, most notably in political ads. But even while it has refused to fact-check or remove most political ads that contain false information, Facebook said it would remove any that contain misinformation about the coronavirus. Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee that investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 election, asked the chief executives of Google, YouTube and Twitter to consider a similar policy to Facebook’s in letters sent Wednesday. ‘While taking down harmful misinformation is a crucial step, mitigating the harms from false content that is removed requires also ensuring that those users who accessed it while it was available have as high a likelihood of possible of viewing the facts as well,’ Schiff wrote to the CEOs.”
Good point. While both Google’s YouTube and Twitter have also been removing misinformation on Covid-19, they have not agreed to notify anyone who viewed the falsehoods before they were taken down. Yes, a leader among leaders.
Cynthia Murrell, May 25, 2020
Crazy Enterprise Search Market Report for May 25, 2020
May 25, 2020
Another crazy enterprise market report is now available. This one skips when the report was written, falling back on the vague word “recent.” In fact, my hunch is that this is one dicey report marketed under different aliases in order to gin up sales.
What’s in this gem from Market Study Report. The write up about the report promises:
The recent document on the Enterprise Search market involves breakdown of this industry as well as division of this vertical. As per the report, the Enterprise Search market is subjected to grow and gain returns over the predicted time period with an outstanding growth rate y-o-y over the predicted period.
Yep, outstanding. Obviously the global economic downturn has not had an impact on the half century young enterprise search software sector.
Enterprise search solutions are hot items. Forget hand sanitizer and surgical masks, enterprise search solutions are the barn burners. Are their lines of eager customers queuing outside of Algolia, Coveo, Elastic, IBM Omnifind’s office, Lucidworks, and Microsoft’s search facility in Beijing? Sure, sure, long lines. No social distancing either. Jostling and crowding is what happens when a sizzler is on offer.
The report presents information “with regards to the geographical landscape.” Yep, but how many languages do enterprise search systems support?
What’s interesting is the list of companies analyzed in the report? Here you go:
Attivio Inc
Concept Searching Limited
Coveo Corp
Dassault Systemes
Expert System Inc
Hyland
IBM Corp
Lucid Work (Would it be helpful if the report authors spelled the name of the company correctly, wouldn’t it?)
Marklogic Inc
Micro Focus
Oracle
SAP AG
Microsoft
X1 Technologies
There are some notable omissions, but I won’t provide these names. Obviously I am not hip to where enterprise search is at at this moment.
In the three editions of the Enterprise Search Report I wrote, it never crossed my mind to include this a manufacturing cost structure analysis. Poor stupid me.
What seems clear is that whoever is marketing this report recycles the content under different names, hoping for a sale.
The data in the report, one hopes, is more polished than the promotional material.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
Search: Contentious and Increasingly Horrible
May 25, 2020
I dropped enterprise search, commercial search, and vertical search to the bottom of my “Favorite Topics” list years ago.
Why?
The individuals popping up and off at conferences were disconnected from the realities of looking for information under stressful circumstances.
Hey, big rocks, how did you move from that quarry kilometers away and get yourselves smoothed down? Just like modern online search systems, you won’t get an answer. Finding information relevant to a query is as difficult as getting megalithic stones to become Chatty Kathies.
The thumb typing crowd, some are now in their mid forties, ASSUME that search has to think for the stupid user.
The techniques range from smart software which skews results in what are to an experienced researcher stupid ways. For those search experts concerned with making their information or their name appear number one on a results list, good search was anything that produced a top spot in a result list even if that result was stupid, irrelevant, or shameless ego jockeying. Then there are the chipper, super confident experts who emerged from an educational system which awarded those who showed up and sort of behaved a blue ribbon. Yep, everything that group does is just wonderful. Yeah, right.
You can see the consequences of two forces colliding when you read Science Magazine’s “They Redesigned PubMed, a Beloved Website. It Hasn’t Gone Over Well.”
You can work through the examples in the source article. The pain points range from appearance to search functionality.
Why did this happen?
The change is a result of people who do not have the experience of performing search under stressful conditions. No, I don’t mean locating the Cuba Libre restaurant in Washington, DC, on a Google Map. I mean looking up technical information to complete a lab test, perform a diagnosis, locate a procedure, or some similar action. There is a pandemic going on, isn’t there?
The complaints indicate that the “new” PubMed is not perceived as a home run.
Go read the original.
I want to offer several observations:
- Those who do research with intent need predictability; that is, when a Boolean query is entered, the results should reflect that logic. Modern systems think Boolean is stupid. There you go, a value judgment from those with “Also Participated” ribbons in high school.
- Interfaces should allow the user to select an approach. There are some users who like a blinking dot or a question mark. Enter the commands and get a text output. Others like the Endeca style training wheels, although I doubt if any of the modern “helper” interfaces know what Endeca offered. Other may want some other type of interface like a PhD approach; that is, push here, dummy. The point is: Why not allow the user to select the interface?
- Change is introduced for dark purposes. Catalina has many points of friction so that Apple can extend its span of control. Annoying? Sure is. Why doesn’t Apple tell the truth about these friction points? What? Tell the truth, are you crazy. Apple, like Facebook and Google, are doing what they can to protect their hegemony, and the user is the victim. Tough. The same logic applies to PubMed. Dollars to donuts there is a “reason” for the change, and it may be due to whimsy, money, or the need to demonstrate the team is actually doing something instead of just having meetings with contractors.
Net net: Search, as I wrote for Barbara Quint in the now departed magazine Searcher, search is dead. Each day the hope for a better, more appropriate way to locate online information becomes lost in the mists of time. Getting relevant information from PubMed or any modern systems is like trying to get the stone of Ollantaytambo to explain how the rocks moved eons ago.
Finding information today is more difficult than at any other time in my professional career. That’s a big problem.
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2020
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