Will Germany Scrutinize Google Web Search More Closely?
July 14, 2014
Several years ago, I learned a hard-to-believe factoid. In Denmark, 99 percent of referrals to a major financial service firm’s Web site came via Google. Figuring prominently was Google.de. My contact mentioned that the same traffic flow characterized the company’s German affiliate; that is, if an organization wanted Web traffic, Google was then the only game in town.
I no longer follow the flips and flops of Euro-centric Google killers like Quaero. I have little or no interest in assorted German search revolutions whether from the likes of the Weitkämper Clustering Engine or the Intrafind open source play or the Transinsight Enterprise Semantic Intelligence system. Although promising at one time, none of these companies offers an information retrieval that could supplant Google for German language search. Toss in English and the other languages Google supports, and the likelihood of a German Google killer decreases.
I read “Germany Is Looking to Regulate Google and Other Technology Giants.” I found the write up interesting and thought provoking. I spend some time each day contemplating the search and content processing sectors. I don’t pay much attention to the wider world of business and technology.
The article states:
German officials are planning to clip the wings of technology giants such as Google through heavier regulation.
That seems cut and dried. I also noted this statement:
The German government has always been militant in matters of data protection. In 2013, it warned consumers against using Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system due to perceived security risks, suggesting that it provided a back door for the US National Security Agency (NSA). Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that German chancellor Angela Merkel was one of the first high-profile victims of NSA surveillance, with some reports saying that the NSA hacked her mobile phone for over a decade.
My view is that search and content processing may be of particular interest. After all, who wants to sit and listen to a person’s telephone calls. I would convert the speech to text and hit the output with one of the many tools available to attach metadata, generate relationship maps, tug out entities like code words and proper names. Then I would browse the information using an old fashioned tabular report. I am not too keen on the 1959 Cadillac tail fin visualizations that 20 somethings find helpful, but to each his or her own I say.
Scrutiny of Google’s indexing might reveal some interesting things to the team assigned to ponder Google from macro and micro levels. The notion of timed crawls, the depth of crawls, the content parsed and converted to a Guha type semantic store, the Alon Halevy dataspace, and other fascinating methods of generating meta-information might be of interest to the German investigate-the-US-vendors team.
My hunch is that scrutiny of Google is likely to lead to increased concern about Web indexing in general. That means even the somewhat tame Bing crawler and the other Web indexing systems churning away at “public” sites’ content may be of interest.
When it comes to search and retrieval, ignorance and bliss are bedfellows. Once a person understands the utility of the archives, the caches, and the various “representations” of the spidered and parsed source content, bliss may become FUD (a version of IBM’s fear, uncertainty and doubt method). FUD may create some opportunities for German search and retrieval vendors. Will these outfits be able to respond or will the German systems remain in the province of Ivory Tower thinking?
In the short term, life will be good for the law firms representing some of the non German Web indexing companies. I wonder, “Is the Google Germany intercept matter included in the young attorneys’ legal education in Germany?”
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2014
Useful Glossary to Search Short Text
July 13, 2014
The Daily Mail published a list of 60 new abbreviations. If you have access to short message content, the list may be helpful for some queries. You can find the list at http://dailym.ai/1kQpyrm. My faves allow me to say, “DGAF about the vendor’s OOTD. Very classy stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, July 13, 2014
YouTube: What Does Google Need? Money?
July 13, 2014
I read an exclusive to Thomson Reuters. I must admit I was a bit confused about what Google is or is not doing with YouTube.
You can find the “exclusive” (for the time being) at “YouTube Weighs Funding Efforts to Boost Premium Content—Sources.” This is, because it carries the Reuters’ logo, a “real” news story I presume.
The story jumps out of the gate with the suggestion that Google needs money. Digital video is the new living room for couch potatoes. If Google needs money, it the firm’s ad revenue flow insufficient to realize Hollywood-style fancies.
Here’s a passage I marked:
YouTube is by far the world’s most popular location for video streaming, with more than 1 billion unique visitors a month, far surpassing Netflix Inc and Amazon. But it is trying to lure more marketers for premium video advertising, boosting margins as overall prices for Google’s advertising declines.
There you go. But we learn that the special channel investment was a less than stellar success:
YouTube set aside an estimated $100 million in late 2011 to bankroll some 100 channels, though it never confirmed amounts spent or other details. Beneficiaries of that largesse included Madonna and ESPN, as well as lesser-known creators. Reuters was one of the companies that received funds for a channel. But few of those have garnered much mainstream attention
Is it possible that the write up suggests that when Thomson Reuters tried out the dedicated channel thing with YouTube, the test was a belly flop.
I find video ads are sort of an annoyance. In fact, I can’t figure out how to make them go away. My solution is to not look at the video. I browsed some videos of the SU 27 and did not encounter ads one day. Try this query on YouTube and on Google Video:
“su-27”.
Here’s what I saw today.
Link is http://bit.ly/1ycyteQ.
Variable ads. Errors. Then a few videos of the only fighter aircraft that can do a cobra. Unfamiliar with the move? Ask around for a fighter pilot up on slick moves.
I was baffled. Is Google hunting for investments or is Google just doing Google moon shot thinking? My take on the write up is that Google is flipping rocks, looking for money.
Why?
When the online ad world shifts more aggressively from online search ads to other types of marketing, Google has to find a way to deal with its looming crossover of revenue and costs. Amazon is struggling with the same issue. I find giant, dominant, digital entities interesting. One is never sure of their motives whether it is a “real” journalism outfit or an online ad company.
What’s happened to search? Oh, right, I forgot. The new Google was Google Plus and social search. How did that approach to search (text and video) work out? Why are there two video search systems available? Is Google in sync with the couch potato market and the hot buttons of Hollywood moguls? I don’t know.
Stephen E Arnold, July 13, 2014
Search, Not Just Sentiment Analysis, Needs Customization
July 11, 2014
One of the most widespread misperceptions in enterprise search and content processing is “install and search.” Anyone who has tried to get a desktop search system like X1 or dtSearch to do what the user wants with his or her files and network shares knows that fiddling is part of the desktop search game. Even a basic system like Sow Soft’s Effective File Search requires configuring the targets to query for every search in multi-drive systems. The work arounds are not for the casual user. Just try making a Google Search Appliance walk, talk, and roll over without the ministrations of an expert like Adhere Solutions. Don’t take my word for it. Get your hands dirty with information processing’s moving parts.
Does it not make sense that a search system destined for serving a Fortune 1000 company requires some additional effort? How much more time and money will an enterprise class information retrieval and content processing system require than a desktop system or a plug-and-play appliance?
How much effort is required to these tasks? There is work to get the access controls working as the ever alert security manager expects. Then there is the work needed to get the system to access, normalize, and process content for the basic index. Then there is work for getting the system to recognize, acquire, index, and allow a user to access the old, new, and changed content. Then one has to figure out what to tell management about rich media, content for which additional connectors are required, the method for locating versions of PowerPoints, Excels, and Word files. Then one has to deal with latencies, flawed indexes, and dependencies among the various subsystems that a search and content processing system includes. There are other tasks as well like interfaces, work flow for alerts, yadda yadda. You get the idea of the almost unending stream of dependent, serial “thens.”
When I read “Why Sentiment Analysis Engines need Customization”, I felt sad for licensees fooled by marketers of search and content processing systems. Yep, sad as in sorrow.
Is it not obvious that enterprise search and content processing is primarily about customization?
Many of the so called experts, advisors, and vendors illustrate these common search blind spots:
ITEM: Consulting firms that sell my information under another person’s name assuring that clients are likely to get a wild and wooly view of reality. Example: Check out IDC’s $3,500 version of information based on my team’s work. Here’s the link for those who find that big outfits help themselves to expertise and then identify a person with a fascinating employment and educational history as the AUTHOR.
See http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=idc%20attivio
In this example from http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=idc%20attivio, notice that my work is priced at seven times that of a former IDC professional. Presumably Mr. Schubmehl recognized that my value was greater than that of an IDC sole author and priced my work accordingly. Fascinating because I do not have a signed agreement giving IDC, Mr. Schubmehl, or IDC’s parent company the right to sell my work on Amazon.
This screen shot makes it clear that my work is identified as that of a former IDC professional, a fellow from upstate New York, an MLS on my team, and a Ph.D. on my team.
See http://amzn.to/1ner8mG.
I assume that IDC’s expertise embraces the level of expertise evident in the TechRadar article. Should I trust a company that sells my content without a formal contract? Oh, maybe I should ask this question, “Should you trust a high profile consulting firm that vends another person’s work as its own?” Keep that $3,500 price in mind, please.
ITEM: The TechRadar article is written by a vendor of sentiment analysis software. His employer is Lexalytics / Semantria (once a unit of Infonics). He writes:
High quality NLP engines will let you customize your sentiment analysis settings. “Nasty” is negative by default. If you’re processing slang where “nasty” is considered a positive term, you would access your engine’s sentiment customization function, and assign a positive score to the word. The better NLP engines out there will make this entire process a piece of cake. Without this kind of customization, the machine could very well be useless in your work. When you choose a sentiment analysis engine, make sure it allows for customization. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a machine that interprets everything literally, and you’ll never get accurate results.
When a vendor describes “natural language processing” with the phrase “high quality” I laugh. NLP is a work in progress. But the stunning statement in this quoted passage is:
Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a machine that interprets everything literally, and you’ll never get accurate results.
Amazing, a vendor wrote this sentence. Unless a licensee of a “high quality” NLP system invests in customizing, the system will “never get accurate results.” I quite like that categorical never.
ITEM: Sentiment analysis is a single, usually complex component of a search or content processing system. A person on the LinkedIn enterprise search group asked the few hundred “experts” in the discussion group for examples of successful enterprise search systems. If you are a member in good standing of LinkedIn, you can view the original query at this link. [If the link won’t work, talk to LinkedIn. I have no idea how to make references to my content on the system work consistently over time.] I pointed out that enterprise search success stories are harder to find than reports of failures. Whether the flop is at the scale of the HP/Autonomy acquisition or a more modest termination like Overstock’s dumping of a big name system, the “customizing” issues is often present. Enterprise search and content processing is usually:
- A box of puzzle pieces that requires time, expertise, and money to assemble in a way that attracts and satisfies users and the CFO
- A work in progress to make work so users are happy and in a manner that does not force another search procurement cycle, the firing of the person responsible for the search and content processing system, and the legal fees related to the invoices submitted by the vendor whose system does not work. (Slow or no payment of licensee and consulting fees to a search vendor can be fatal to the search firm’s health.)
- A source of friction among those contending for infrastructure resources. What I am driving at is that a misconfigured search system makes some computing work S-L-O_W. Note: the performance issue must be addressed for appliance-based, cloud, or on premises enterprise search.
- Money. Don’t forget money, please. Remember the CFO’s birthday. Take her to lunch. Be really nice. The cost overruns that plague enterprise search and content processing deployments and operations will need all the goodwill you can generate.
If sentiment analysis requires customizing and money, take out your pencil and estimate how much it will cost to make NLP and sentiment to work. Now do the same calculation for relevancy tuning, index tuning, optimizing indexing and query processing, etc.
The point is that folks who get a basic key word search and retrieval system work pile on the features and functions. Vendors whip up some wrapper code that makes it possible to do a demo of customer support search, eCommerce search, voice search, and predictive search. Once the licensee inks the deal, the fun begins. The reason one major Norwegian search vendor crashed and burned is that licensees balked at paying bills for a next generation system that was not what the PowerPoint slides described. Why has IBM embraced open source search? Is one reason to trim the cost of keeping the basic plumbing working reasonably well? Why are search vendors embracing every buzzword that comes along? I think that search and an enterprise function has become a very difficult thing to sell, make work, and turn into an evergreen revenue stream.
The TechRadar article underscores the danger for licensees of over hyped systems. The consultants often surf on the expertise of others. The vendors dance around the costs and complexities of their systems. The buzzwords obfuscate.
What makes this article by the Lexalytics’ professional almost as painful as IDC’s unauthorized sale of my search content is this statement:
You’ll be stuck with a machine that interprets everything literally, and you’ll never get accurate results.
I agree with this statement.
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2014
IBM: Hitting Numbers by Chasing Medium Sized Fish, Not Whales
July 11, 2014
I scanned my false drop stuffed Yahoo Alert a moment ago (5 04 am Eastern time). I clicked a link with the fetching headline “Enterprise Search Adoption among Midsize Firms.” The core of the story is a reference to an allegedly accurate survey from another publisher. I learned “nearly 40 percent of IT departments reported that they have already invested or plan to invest in enterprise search solutions.” Yikes. That means that 60 percent of midsize firms cannot locate information. Looks like a great opportunity to license an enterprise search system. I wondered who was at the root of this article and had such confidence in a market that probably is expensive to convince to pump big bucks into a Google Search Appliance (starts at $50,000 or so), an Autonomy IDOL hosted service or Amazon Search service with no cap on costs, or sign up for a bargain basement hosted search system until the ministrations of an expensive consultant are required. Most organizations use one of the default, utility search systems already included with other applications; for example, Microsoft’s search feature or a freeeware system like Effective File Search or an open source system like Sphinx Search or Searchdaimon.
After clicking of a few links I was directed to the eminence gris behind this article. Guess who? IBM. The link pointed me to http://www.ibm.com/midmarket/us/en/?lnk=mhso&CE=ISM0124. Yep, IBM wants to recover the billion tossed into Watson (really helpful for a midsize business wanting to win a game show or develop a recipe) or the $3 billion extending Moore’s Law.
I know from industry chatter at the trade shows I attend that there is concern about the future of IBM. This does not come just from those customers who pine for the good old days when IBM engineers delivered expensive but top notch service. Nope. The laments come from IBM professionals. I think I heard words like “lost its way,” “chaotic,” and “floundering.”
Several observations:
ITEM: Selling big buck enterprise search services to midsize firms is expensive, slow, and difficult. If these firms were able to float the boats of other search vendors, the vendors would be in high cotton. The middle market already has search and that’s why 60 percent of the outfits in the allegedly accurate survey are not buying standalone systems. Almost every piece of software includes a finding function. These are either good enough or are not used because users have found workarounds.
ITEM: IBM fees are going to cause even “large” midsize businesses (oxymoronic, right?) to pause. Imagine the cost impact of paying IBM sales people to pitch a product/service that a potential customers does not want, cannot afford, or already has available. Losses mount. Seems obvious to me.
ITEM: The clumsy content marketing ploy of creating a content free article and then pitching IBM as a generic solution is silly. Navigate to the IBM Small and Medium Business Solution page. IBM is offering “customized solutions.”
I don’t think the solution is on point. I don’t think the marketing approach is particularly useful. I don’t think the midsize business will beat a path to the door of a company known to sell expensive services while funding billion dollar pipe dreams.
You can, however, sign up for Forward View, an eMagazine. Yep, helpful.
Call me skeptical.
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2014
Comparing Apples and a Bunch of Grapes a Common Misunderstanding about DuckDuckGo
July 11, 2014
Over at OS News, Thom Holwerda disagrees with a recent, positive review on search engine DuckDuckGo in, “Review: DuckDuckGo Compared to Google, Bing, Yandex.” A user going by “sb56637” at LibreTechTips.com had found that:
“In many respects the tiny DuckDuckGo holds its own against the giant that is Google, and even more so if the user is willing to slightly manipulate the search query to work around DuckDuckGo’s temperamental intelligence layer. So it is heartening to see that DuckDuckGo is a viable alternative to Google by its own merits.”
As our readers may know, usage of DuckDuckGo has grown heartily as people have become more interested in not being tracked. That’s why sb56637 was so happy to call the site a “top-notch search engine.” Holwerda, however, did not have similar success when he tried to substitute the Duck for Google. He writes:
“I tried the ‘new’ DDG as well since it came out, setting it as my default search engine. Sadly, my experience wasn’t as positive – it simply didn’t find the things I was looking for about 80% of the time. Within a few days, I got into the habit of simply adding !g to every search query to go straight to Google anyway since that gave me the results I was looking for.”
Perhaps that is because DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine, while the rest are not. (Metasearch engines mix results from several search engines.) Recall that reviewer sb56637 noted that having to adjust to DuckDuckGo’s “temperamental intelligence layer” is kind of a pain. It seems those willing to do some research and make the adjustments, though, can have both (comparatively better) privacy and good results.
Cynthia Murrell, July 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
AMI: From Albert Search to Market Intelligence
July 10, 2014
Editor’s Note: This is information that did not make Stephen E Arnold’s bylined article in Information Today. That forthcoming Information Today story about French search and content processing companies entering the US market. Spoiler alert: The revenue opportunities and taxes appear to be better in the US than in France. Maybe a French company will be the Next Big Thing in search and content processing. Few French companies have gained significant search and retrieval traction in the US in the last few years. Arguably, the most successful firm is the image recognition outfit called A2iA. It seems that French information retrieval companies and the US market have been lengthy, expensive, and difficult. One French company is trying a different approach, and that’s the core of the Information Today story.)
In 1999, I learned about a Swiss enterprise search system. The working name was, according to my Overflight archive, was AMI Albert.The “AMI” did not mean friend. AMI shorthand for Automatic Message Interpreter.
Flash forward to 2014. Note that a Google query for “AMI” may return hits for AMI International a defense oriented company as well as hits to American Megatrends, Advanced Metering Infrastructure, ambient intelligence, the Association Montessori International, and dozens of other organizations sharing the acronym. In an age of Google, finding a specific company can be a challenge and may inhibit some potential customers ability to locate a specific vendor. (This is a problem shared by Thunderstone, for example. The game company makes it tough to locate information about the search appliance vendor.)
Basic search interface as of 2011.
Every time I update my files, I struggle to get specific information. Invariably I get an email from an AMI Software sales person telling me, “Yes, we are growing. We are very much a dynamic force in market intelligence.”
The UK Web site for the firm is www.amisw.co.uk. The French language Web site for the company is http://www.amisw.com/fr/. And the English language version of the French Web site is at http://www.amisw.com/fr/. The company’s blog is at http://www.amisw.com/fr/blog/, but the content is stale. The most recent update as of July 7, 2014, is from December 2013. The company seems to have shifted its dissemination of news to LinkedIn, where more than 30 AMI employees have a LinkedIn presence. The blog is in French. The LinkedIn postings are in English. Most of the AMI videos are in French as well.
Advanced Search Interface as of 2011.
The Managing Director, according to www.amisw.com/fr, is Alain Beauvieux. The person in charge of products is Eric Fourboul. The UK sales manager is Mike Alderton.
Mr. Beauvieux is a former IBMer and worked at LexiQuest, which originally formerly Erli, S.A. LexiQuest (Clementine) was acquired by SPSS. SPSS was, in turn, acquired by IBM, joining other long-in-the-tooth technologies marketed today by IBM. Eric
Fourboul is a former Dassault professional, and he has some Microsoft DNA in his background.
Google and What You Cannot Find
July 7, 2014
I don’t have much information about the “right to be forgotten” process at the GOOG. I have been watching the streams my Overflight system tracks. I did find one Web page that I found interesting. Navigate to Forgotten Results.
You can explore the links and the source for each entry. I clicked on a few and found the information suggestive, not definitive. I did a couple of quick checks and the content for which I looked was available via other indexes or from other Google domains when I used a Web proxy.
For most users, information not in the Google index does not exist. The approach is, I think, “Hey, Google indexes all the world’s information, right?”
Sort of.
You can ponder the value of being able to delete certain information from online indexes used to satisfy a Web query. My hunch is that some outfits who continue to grouse about Google (maybe, Foundem), certain types of content (information not deemed to be high priority), and other digital information can be deleted. Most folks won’t know the difference.
Keep in mind that among the people who are online searchers, almost everyone is an expert in their own mind. There are professionals like Marydee Ojala, Barbara Quint, Anne Mintz, and Ruth Pagell who are significantly more “expert” than the over confident MBAs, mobile phone search wizards, search engine optimization gurus, and the majority of short cut focused college students chasing a library or information science degree.
What’s important to me is that it is now possible to be confident that locating information on mind becomes much harder. Multiple queries and different search systems must be used. Will Bing maps show you the location of a certain facility in Scotland? Why are some government servers not in the USA.gov service? Why is Yahoo’s presentation of the “news” focused squarely on the inconsequential and stale?
The question about Google is a pretty good one. In our tests, identical queries across different search systems generate anywhere from 60 to 75 percent overlap. Flip this around and you will have to work really hard to find the other 25 to 40 percent.
Research is hard work. The right to be forgotten just ups the ante for specialists in open source online research. I suppose that’s one reason my intel conference briefings on alternatives to Google.com search continues to pack ’em in.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2014
MillionShort: A Path around Search Engine Optimization
July 5, 2014
In my lectures for members of the intelligence community, I talk about how to move “Beyond Google.” I rely on several online search services that are not embraced by the unwashed millions who perceive Google as the Alpha and the Omega of search and retrieval. Google is not objective. The more quickly online users accept the pervasiveness of subjectivity in search results, the more likely a mobile user will be able to locate the Cuba Libre Restaurant in Washington, DC, near the Google offices and pin down the whereabouts of a person like eBay’s chief technical officer. The MillionShort.com system allows me to jump over the irrelevant baloney generated by heavily SEO’ed sites. Man, I hate SEO. Does Matt Cutts’ leave of absence suggest that he too cannot cope with the rigors of eroding objective, relevant results to a Google query?
I noticed a few days ago that the MillionShort.com search system was returning no results, a blank screen, or a message saying that the service was down. I was worried. MillionShort uses a combination of Bing application programming interface calls, some proprietary scripts, and its own index to chop out the Web sites that I love to hate. The name “million short” means that I can NOT out the offensive entertainment sites that pump Justin Bieber information to me. The wildly distorted search engine optimized sites that display useless, off point content, and sites that I really want not to see ever again. Do you too feel this way about www.about.com or www.wikipedia.com or Google.com?
Here’s what MillionShort.com let’s me do. I can run a query and narrow the results with a single click to sites that are not in the Top 1000 most popular Web sites. Try the service and run a query. Instead of showing me the drivel that passes for news from Yahoo.com or CNN.com, I can pinpoint gems like YouTube videos that provide specific information about certain illicit activities, identify blogs that contain information about moderators (if you don’t know what this is, then you won’t appreciate the value of the links), and similar topics that often cannot be found using Blekko, Exalead search, Google, or Yandex in .com and .ru flavors.
MillionShort.com is operated by an entrepreneur whom I am chasing for more details about the system. If I uncover something useful via MillionShort or one of the other “off the radar” services I profile in my intel lectures, I may share some information nuggets in this blog. In the meantime, check out the service. If you get a “not available” message, check back every hour or so. The service comes back up, which is a very good thing for intrepid researchers. For those who want their pizza from the microwave, MillionShort.com may not fit your info life style. Your loss, I fear.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2014
Information Manipulation: Accountability Pipe Dream
July 5, 2014
I read an article with what I think is the original title: “What does the Facebook Experiment Teach us? Growing Anxiety About Data Manipulation.” I noted that the title presented on Techmeme was “We Need to Hold All Companies Accountable, Not Just Facebook, for How They Manipulate People.” In my view, this mismatch of titles is a great illustration of information manipulation. I doubt that the writer of the improved headline is aware of the irony.
The ubiquity of information manipulation is far broader than Facebook twirling the dials of its often breathless users. Navigate to Google and run this query:
cloud word processing
Note anything interesting in the results list displayed for me on my desktop computer:
The number one ad is for Google. In the first page of results, Google’s cloud word processing system is listed three more times. I did not spot Microsoft Office in the cloud except in item eight: Is Google Docs Making Microsoft Word Redundant.
For most Google search users, the results are objective. No distortion evident.
Here’s what Yandex displays for the same query:
No Google word processing and no Microsoft word processing whether in the cloud or elsewhere.
When it comes to searching for information, the notion that a Web indexing outfit is displaying objective results is silly. The Web indexing companies are in the forefront of distorting information and manipulating users.
Flash back to the first year of the Bush administration when Richard Cheney was vice president. I was in a meeting where the request was considered to make sure that the vice president’s office Web site would appear in FirstGov.gov hits in a prominent position. This, gentle reader, is a request that calls for hit boosting. The idea is to write a script or configure the indexing plumbing to make darned sure a specific url or series of documents appears when and where they are required. No problem, of course. We created a stored query for the Fast Search & Transfer search system and delivered what the vice president wanted.
This type of results manipulation is more common than most people accept. Fiddling Web search, like shaping the flow of content on a particular semantic vector, is trivial. Search engine optimization is a fools’ game compared with the tried and true methods of weighting or just buying real estate on a search results page, a Web site from a “real” company.
The notion that disinformation, reformation, and misinformation will be identifiable, rectified, and used to hold companies accountable is not just impossible. The notion itself reveals how little awareness of the actual methods of digital content injection work.
How much of the content on Facebook, Twitter, and other widely used social networks is generated by intelligence professionals, public relations “professionals,” and folks who want to be perceived as intellectual luminaries? Whatever your answer, what data do you have to back up your number? At a recent intelligence conference in Dubai, one specialist estimated that half of the traffic on social networks is shaped or generated by law enforcement and intelligence entities. Do you believe that? Probably not. So good for you.
Amusing, but as someone once told me, “Ignorance is bliss.” So, hello, happy idealists. The job is identifying, interpreting, and filtering. Tough, time consuming work. Most of the experts prefer to follow the path of least resistance and express shock that Facebook would toy with its users. Be outraged. Call for action. Invent an algorithm to detect information manipulation. Let me know how that works out when you look for a restaurant and it is not findable from your mobile device.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2014
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