Tips for Better Search Results
February 2, 2017
Want to be an expert searcher? Gizbot shares some tips, complete with screenshots, in their brief write-up, “Here are 5 Tricks To Get Better Google Search Results.” Writer Sneha Saha begins:
To get any information about anything is easy. Just type the keywords on the Google Search engine and you are done. Rather you might just get information that is far more than what you would actually need. However, getting more information than you require is also a little annoying. Searching for the accurate information among the numerous links that Google provides you with is surely a tough task. We at GizBot have come up with a list of effective methods to try out to search the most accurate information on Google in just a few clicks.
Here are the five tricks: Search for synonyms using a tilde symbol; Use an asterisk in place of any word you cannot remember; Include “or” when confused between two options; Use “intitle” to find keywords within a title or “inurl” to find keywords within a URL; Narrow results by including a date range in your query. See the post for details on any of these search tips.
Cynthia Murrell, February 2, 2017
Google and the Cloud Take on Corporate Database Management
February 1, 2017
The article titled Google Cloud Platform Releases New Database Services, Fighting AWS and Azure for Corporate Customers on GeekWire suggests that Google’s corporate offerings have been weak in the area of database management. Compared to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google is only wading into the somewhat monotonous arena of corporate database needs. The article goes into detail on the offerings,
Cloud SQL, Second Generation, is a service offering instances of the popular MySQL database. It’s most comparable to AWS’s Aurora and SQL Azure, though there are some differences from SQL Azure, so Microsoft allows running a MySQL database on Azure. Google’s Cloud SQL supports MySQL 5.7, point-in-time recovery, automatic storage resizing and one-click failover replicas, the company said. Cloud Bigtable is a NoSQL database, the same one that powers Google’s own search, analytics, maps and Gmail.
The Cloud Bigtable database is made to handle major workloads of 100+ petabytes, and it comes equipped with resources such as Hadoop and Spark. It will be fun to see what happens as Google’s new service offering hits the ground running. How will Amazon and Microsoft react? Will price wars arise? If so, only good can come of it, at least for the corporate consumers.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 1, 2017
Fight Fake News with Science
February 1, 2017
With all the recent chatter around “fake news,” one researcher has decided to approach the problem scientifically. An article at Fortune reveals “What a Map of the Fake-News Ecosystem Says About the Problem.” Writer Mathew Ingram introduces us to data-journalism expert and professor Jonathan Albright, of Elon University, who has mapped the fake-news ecosystem. Facebook and Google are just unwitting distributors of faux facts; Albright wanted to examine the network of sites putting this stuff out there in the first place. See the article for a description of his methodology; Ingram summarizes the results:
More than anything, the impression one gets from looking at Albright’s network map is that there are some extremely powerful ‘nodes’ or hubs, that propel a lot of the traffic involving fake news. And it also shows an entire universe of sites that many people have probably never heard of. Two of the largest hubs Albright found were a site called Conservapedia—a kind of Wikipedia for the right wing—and another called Rense, both of which got huge amounts of incoming traffic. Other prominent destinations were sites like Breitbart News, DailyCaller and YouTube (the latter possibly as an attempt to monetize their traffic).
Albright said he specifically stayed away from trying to determine what or who is behind the rise of fake news. … He just wanted to try and get a handle on the scope of the problem, as well as a sense of how the various fake-news distribution or creation sites are inter-connected. Albright also wanted to do so with publicly-available data and open-source tools so others could build on it.
Albright also pointed out the folly of speculating on sources of fake news; such guesswork only “adds to the existing noise,” he noted. (Let’s hear it for common sense!) Ingram points out that, armed with Albright’s research, Google, Facebook, and other outlets may be better able to combat the problem.
Cynthia Murrell, February 1, 2017
Microsofts Researcher Feature Offers Shortcut to Finding Sources
January 23, 2017
The article titled Microsoft Launches Researcher and Editor in Word, Zoom in PowerPoint on VentureBeat discusses the pros and cons of the new features coming to Office products. Editor is basically a new and improved version of spellcheck that goes beyond typos to report back on wordiness, passive voice, and cliché usage. This is an exciting tool that might put a few proofreaders out of work, but it is hard to see any issues beyond that. The more controversial introduction by Microsoft is Researcher, and the article explains why,
Researcher… will give users a way to find and incorporate additional information from outside sources. This makes it easy to add a quote and even generate proper academic citations for use in papers. Explicit content won’t appear in search results, so you won’t accidentally import it into your work. And you won’t find yourself in some random Wikipedia rabbit hole, because the search for additional information happens in a panel on the right side of your Word document.
Researcher pulls information from the Bing Knowledge Graph to provide writers with relevant connections to their topics. The question is, will users rely on Researcher to fact-check for them, or will they make sure that the suggested source material is appropriate and substantiated? In spite of the lessons of the Republic National Convention, plagiarism can get you into big trouble (in a college classroom, anyway.) It is easy to see student users failing to properly cite or quote the suggested information, unless Researcher also offers help in those activities as well. Is this a good thing, or is it another way to make our children dumber by enabling shortcuts?
Chelsea Kerwin, January 23, 2017
Are You Really Beefing up Your Search Skills?
January 18, 2017
Everyone’s New Year’s resolution is usually to lose weight. When January swings around again, that resolution went out the door with the spring-cleaning. Exercise can be a challenge, but you can always exercise your search skills by reading Medium’s article, “Google Search Tricks To Become A Search Power User.” Or at least the article promises to improve your search skills.
Let’s face it, searching on the Web might seem simple, but it requires a little more brainpower than dumping keywords into a search box. Google makes searching easier and is even the Swiss army knife of answering basic questions. The Medium article does go a step further by drawing old school search tips, such as the asterisk, quotes, parentheses, and others. These explanations, however, need to be read more than once to understand how the tools work:
My favorite of all, single word followed by a ‘*’ will do wonders. But yeah this will not narrow your results; still it keeps a wider range of search results. You’ll need to fine tune to find exactly what you want. This way is useful in case when you don’t remember more than a word or two but you still you want to search fully of it.
Having used some of these tips myself, they actually make searching more complicated than taking a little extra time to read the search results. I am surprised that they did not include the traditional Boolean operators that usually work, more or less. Sometimes search tips cause more trouble than they are worth.
Whitney Grace, January 18, 2016
Big Data Is a Big Mess
January 18, 2017
Big Data and Cloud Computing were supposed to make things easier for the C-Suites to take billion dollar decisions. But it seems things have started to fall apart.
In an article published by Forbes titled The Data Warehouse Has Failed, Will Cloud Computing Die Next?, the author says:
A company that sells software tools designed to put intelligence controls into data warehousing environments says that traditional data warehousing approaches are flaky. Is this just a platform to spin WhereScape wares, or does Whitehead have a point?
WhereScape, a key player in Data Warehousing is admitting that the buzzwords in the IT industry are fizzing out. The Big Data is being generated, in abundance, but companies still are unsure what to do with the enormous amount of data that their companies produce.
Large corporations who already have invested heavily in Big Data are yet to find any RoIs. As the author points out:
Data led organizations have no idea how good their data is. CEOs have no idea where the data they get actually comes from, who is responsible for it etc. yet they make multi million pound decisions based on it. Big data is making the situation worse not better.
Looks like after 3D-Printing, another buzzword in the tech world, Big Data and Cloud Computing is going to be just a fizzled out buzzword.
Vishal Ingole, January 18, 2017
Chinese Censorship Agency Declares All News Online Must Be Verified
January 12, 2017
The heavy hand of Chinese censorship has just gotten heavier. The South China Morning Post reports, “All News Stories Must Be Verified, China’s Internet Censor Decrees as it Tightens Grip on Online Media.” The censorship agency now warns websites not to publish news without “proper verification.” Of course, to hear the government tell it, they just wants to cut down on fake news and false information. Reporter Choi Chi-yuk writes:
The instruction, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, came only a few days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the organisation, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the top gatekeeper of Chinese internet affairs. Xu is regarded as one of President Xi Jinping’s key supporters.
The cyberspace watchdog said online media could not report any news taken from social media websites without approval. ‘All websites should bear the key responsibility to further streamline the course of reporting and publishing of news, and set up a sound internal monitoring mechanism among all mobile news portals [and the social media chat websites] Weibo or WeChat,’ Xinhua reported the directive as saying. ‘It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts,’ it said.
We’re told the central agency has directed regional offices to aggressively monitor content and “severely” punish those who post what they consider false news. They also insist that sources be named within posts. Apparently, several popular news portals have been rebuked under the policy, including Sina.com, Ifeng.com, Caijing.com.cn, Qq.com and 163.com.
Cynthia Murrell, January 12, 2017
Google Looks to Curb Hate Speech with Jigsaw
January 6, 2017
No matter how advanced technology becomes, certain questions continue to vex us. For example, where is the line between silencing expression and prohibiting abuse? Wired examines Google’s efforts to walk that line in its article, “Google’s Digital Justice League: How Its Jigsaw Projects are Hunting Down Online Trolls.” Reporter Merjin Hos begins by sketching the growing problem of online harassment and the real-world turmoil it creates, arguing that rampant trolling serves as a sort of censorship — silencing many voices through fear. Jigsaw, a project from Google, aims to automatically filter out online hate speech and harassment. As Jared Cohen, Jigsaw founder and president, put it, “I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight, to do everything we can to level the playing field.”
The extensive article also delves into Cohen’s history, the genesis of Jigsaw, how the team is teaching its AI to identify harassment, and problems they have encountered thus far. It is an informative read for anyone interested in the topic.
Hos describes how the Jigsaw team has gone about instructing their algorithm:
The group partnered with The New York Times (NYT), which gave Jigsaw’s engineers 17 million comments from NYT stories, along with data about which of those comments were flagged as inappropriate by moderators.
Jigsaw also worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to parse 130,000 snippets of discussion around Wikipedia pages. It showed those text strings to panels of ten people recruited randomly from the CrowdFlower crowdsourcing service and asked whether they found each snippet to represent a ‘personal attack’ or ‘harassment’. Jigsaw then fed the massive corpus of online conversation and human evaluations into Google’s open source machine learning software, TensorFlow. …
By some measures Jigsaw has now trained Conversation AI to spot toxic language with impressive accuracy. Feed a string of text into its Wikipedia harassment-detection engine and it can, with what Google describes as more than 92 per cent certainty and a ten per cent false-positive rate, come up with a judgment that matches a human test panel as to whether that line represents an attack.
There is still much to be done, but soon Wikipedia and the New York Times will be implementing Jigsaw, at least on a limited basis. At first, the AI’s judgments will be checked by humans. This is important, partially because the software still returns some false positives—an inadvertent but highly problematic overstep. Though a perfect solution may be impossible, it is encouraging to know Jigsaw’s leader understands how tough it will be to balance protection with freedom of expression. “We don’t claim to have all the answers,” Cohen emphasizes.
Cynthia Murrell, January 6, 2017
In Pursuit of Better News Online
December 20, 2016
Since the death of what we used to call “newspapers,” Facebook and Twitter have been gradually encroaching on the news business. In fact, Facebook recently faced criticism for the ways it has managed its Trending news stories. Now, the two social media firms seem to be taking responsibility for their roles, having joined an alliance of organizations committed to more competent news delivery. The write-up, “Facebook, Twitter Join Coalition to Improve Online News” at Yahoo News informs us about the initiative:
First Draft News, which is backed by Google [specifically Google News Lab], announced Tuesday that some 20 news organizations will be part of its partner network to share information on best practices for journalism in the online age. Jenni Sargent, managing director of First Draft, said the partner network will help advance the organization’s goal of improving news online and on social networks.
Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organizations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source,’ she said in a blog post. ‘We are not going to solve these problems overnight, but we’re certainly not going to solve them as individual organizations.
Sargent said the coalition will develop training programs and ‘a collaborative verification platform,’ as well as a voluntary code of practice for online news.
We’re told First Draft has been pursuing several projects since it was launched last year, like working with YouTube to verify user-generated videos. The article shares their list of participants; it includes news organizations from the New York Times to BuzzFeed, as well as other interested parties, like Amnesty International and the International Fact-Checking Network. Will this coalition succeed in restoring the public’s trust in our news sources? We can hope.
Cynthia Murrell, December 20, 2016
Use Google on Itself to Search Your Personal Gmail Account
December 16, 2016
The article titled 9 Secret Google Search Tricks on Field Guide includes a shortcut to checking on your current and recent deliveries, your flight plans, and your hotels. Google provides this information by pulling keywords from your Gmail account inbox. Perhaps the best one for convenience is searching “my bills” and being reminded of upcoming payments. Of course, this won’t work for bills that you receive via snail mail. The article explains,
Google is your portal to everything out there on the World Wide Web…but also your portal to more and more of your personal stuff, from the location of your phone to the location of your Amazon delivery. If you’re signed into the Google search page, and you use other Google services, here are nine search tricks worth knowing. It probably goes without saying but just in case: only you can see these results.
Yes, search is getting easier. Trust Mother Google. She will hold all your information in her hand and you just need to ask for it. Other tricks include searching “I’ve lost my phone.” Google might not be Find My Iphone, but it can tell you the last place you had your phone, given that you phone was linked to your Google account. Hotels, Events, Photos, Google will have your back.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 16, 2016
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