The Zen of More Tabs from Yandex
September 5, 2016
Serendipitous information discovery has been attempted through many apps, browsers and more. Attempting a solution, Russia’s giant in online search, Yandex, launched a new feature to their browser. A news release from PR Newswire appeared on 4 Traders entitled Yandex Adds AI-based Personal Recommendations to Browser tells us more. Fueling this feature is Yandex’s personalized content recommendation technology called Zen, which selects articles, videos, images and more for its infinite content stream. This is the first time personally targeted content will appear in new tabs for the user. The press release offers a description of the new feature,
The intelligent content discovery feed in Yandex Browser delivers personal recommendations based on the user’s location, browsing history, their viewing history and preferences in Zen, among hundreds of other factors. Zen uses natural language processing and computer vision to understand the verbal and visual content on the pages the user has viewed, liked or disliked, to offer them the content they are likely to like. To start exploring this new internet experience, all one needs to do is download Yandex Browser and give Zen some browsing history to work with. Alternatively, liking or disliking a few websites on Zen’s start up page will help it understand your preferences on the outset.
The world of online search and information discovery is ever-evolving. For a preview of the new Yandex feature, go to their demo. This service works on all platforms in 24 different countries and in 15 different languages. The design of this feature implies people want to actually read all of their recommended content. Whether that’s the case or not, whether Zen is accurate enough for the design to be effective, time will tell.
Megan Feil, September 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/DarkWeb meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
The Wheel of Search: Leidos
September 3, 2016
I know that most experts in search and content processing do not know too much about Teratext, the search system once owned by SAIC, a services firm. Teratext is described in this free profile. I read “Leidos Closes Lockheed Merger.” What I wanted to point out is that Lockheed Martin is “back into” the search business. The company sold its AeroText system, which is similar in some ways to to Leidos TeraText, to Rocket Software. With this deal, one services firm has moved search from its core business to a subsidiary and then sold that entity (Leidos) to a major US government contractor. Now Lockheed Martin is back in the search and content processing business. I find this brokering of search and content systems interesting because the technology is becoming dated and the systems require substantial professional support to install, optimize, operate, maintain, and extend. The wheel of search keeps on turning on axels of decades old technology. There is money in search, particularly some massive, complex systems.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2016
Google vs. Europe Becomes Three-Front War
September 2, 2016
The article titled European Commission Files Third Antitrust Charge Against Google on The Guardian discusses the most recent accusation against Google by the European Commission. This time, they took aim at AdSense advertising. The antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced that Google is preventing the visibility of competitors and favoring its own shopping service as well. The article states,
The EU regulator accuses Alphabet’s Google of abusing its dominance in search to benefit its own advertising business, which has historically been the company’s main revenue stream. The EC also reinforced its existing charge against Google’s shopping service…The EU’s concerns around Google’s adverts relate to the company’s AdSense for Search platform, in which Google acts as an intermediary for websites such as those of online retailers, telecoms operators or newspapers, with searches producing results that include search ads.
Alphabet’s Google has been given 10 weeks to answer the commission’s statement of objections. If the company is found guilty, its fines will consist of up to 10% of its global turnover. While Google works on its response to the charges, another investigation by the EU continues. The latter involves Google’s preferential treatment of its own products such as Google Chrome through its Android system.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Intuitive Interfaces Matter on Dark Web Sites Too
September 1, 2016
Did you know some sites on the Dark Web have a sleek look and intuitive user experience? VeriClouds published this information, including screenshots and more in a piece called Dark Web: Sophisticated eCommerce platform trading in your personal information. Channels for cybercriminals allow users to search for Dark Web commodities such as personal or sensitive information by: category, product type, price, sale type, location and shipping options. Mirroring the processes and policies of traditional retail, some sellers also have refund options. The article states:
Platforms like these are so much more than just rudimentary command line setups or chat rooms. They offer many of the same features as online stores like Amazon or Ebay with vendor ratings, buyer feedback, detailed search options and facilitated transaction and delivery services. Collections of data are presented with detailed descriptions (similar to an ecommerce product pages), and some even provide tutorials on how to best utilize that data to scam victims.
On one level, this report shows us how much an intuitive user experience has become the expectation, not an added bonus — anywhere on the web. Related to this heightened expectation for even intangible “things” to have an effective look and feel, we are reminded this is the information age. As information is a commodity, it is no surprise to see the rise in cyber theft of such invisible goods on the Dark Web or otherwise. For example, as the article mentioned, last year’s estimate by the Federal Trade Commission showed 9.9 million victims of identity theft.
Megan Feil, September 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Thunderstone Gets an Upgrade
September 1, 2016
Pokémon Go is the latest mobile gaming craze and all of the players want to have a Pikachu as their main Pokémon. Eventually players will evolve their Pikachu into the more powerful Raichu using candy and stardust, but old school Pokémon gamers know that the true way to evolve a Pikachu is with a Thunderstone. The hardest part of evolving a Pikachu, however, was finding the actual Thunderstone. Compulsive searchers have their own difficulties trying to find their information and other related content in their systems. There is a software search solution coincidentally named Thunderstone and it recently went through an upgrade: “Thunderstone Releases Version 16.”
Thunderstone’s newest release includes updates that improve search quality across the board: intranets, aggregators, and public facing Web sites. There also are more authorization options for better security, including a central authentication service and negotiate Kerberos option. Perhaps the biggest upgrade is the following:
Simplified crawl configuration
- Sitemaps allowing easier crawling of sites where URLs are not easily determined from a crawl.
- XML/XSL site support by applying stylesheets to sites that deliver content via XML and XSL instead of HTML; the searchable text is better identified.
- Proxy Auto-config (PAC) file support which makes it easier to index and crawl enterprises composed of different networks with varying proxy rules: the same config files used by browsers may now be used at crawl time.
The Ajax crawlable URL scheme from Google is supported, allowing Ajax based dynamic sites that support it to be crawled and indexed more effectively.”
Thunderstone now packs a more powerful punch for search quality and returning results. Now if only finding Cubone could be improved as well.
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
People Are Using Voice Search and They Are Looking for Local Services
August 31, 2016
The article titled 3 Voice Search Stats to Know for Your Local Marketing on ReachLocal describes some of the trends involving voice search. The most important number they provide is 40%- the percentage of voice searches with local intent. Other search inquiries relate to the weather and movie times, and huge amounts are devoted to asking for directions. So what does this mean for local marketing? The article offers some pointers:
“Create natural language-based content on your website that uses keywords and phrases people use when conducting a voice search. One tip is to include common questions about your business with specific answers, since search queries starting with question words increased 61% year over year in 2014. Optimize your business information on multiple search engines and directories including Google and Bing, and on sites like Yelp and superpages that can populate in organic search results.”
The article also mentions that 42% of adults and 55% of teenagers use voice search every day. Additionally, 20% of Google searches are voice. Bing has an even higher amount with 25% voice-based searches. The article does not have any stats related to incidents of users falling in love with their virtual assistants like Siri, but, marketing managers just might start to at a higher rate if they can really assist in local marketing and community outreach.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 31, 2016
Google Enables Users to Delete Search History, Piece by Piece
August 31, 2016
The article on CIO titled Google Quietly Brings Forgetting to the U.S. draws attention to Google have enabled Americans to view and edit their search history. Simply visit My Activity and login to witness the mind-boggling amount of data Google has collected in your search career. To delete, all you have to do is complete two clicks. But the article points out that to delete a lot of searches, you will need an afternoon dedicated to cleaning up your history. And afterward you might find that your searches are less customized, as are your ads and autofills. But the article emphasizes a more communal concern,
There’s something else to consider here, though, and this has societal implications. Google’s forget policy has some key right-to-know overlaps with its takedown policy. The takedown policy allows people to request that stories about or images of them be removed from the database. The forget policy allows the user to decide on his own to delete something…I like being able to edit my history, but I am painfully aware that allowing the worst among us to do the same can have undesired consequences.
Of course, by “the worse among us” he means terrorists. But for many people, the right to privacy is more important than the hypothetical ways that terrorists will potentially suffer within a more totalitarian, Big Brother state. Indeed, Google’s claim that the search history information is entirely private is already suspect. If Google personnel or Google partners can see this data, doesn’t that mean it is no longer private?
Chelsea Kerwin, August 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Equivalent of a Brexit
August 31, 2016
Britain’s historical vote to leave the European Union has set a historical precedent. What is the precedent however? Is it the choice to leave an organization? The choice to maintain their independence? Or is it a basic example of the right to choose? The Brexit will be used as a metaphor for any major upheaval for the next century, so how can it be used in technology context? BA Insight gives us the answer with “Would Your Users Vote ‘Yes’ For Sharexit?”
SharePoint is Microsoft Office’s collaborative content management program. It can be used to organize projects, build Web sites, store files, and allow team members to communicate. Office workers also spurn it across the globe over due to its inefficiencies. To avoid a Sharexit in your organization, the article offers several ways to improve a user’s SharePoint experience. One of the easiest ways to keep SharePoint is to build an individual user interface that handles little tasks to make a user’s life easier. Personalizing the individual SharePoint user experience is another method, so the end user does not feel like another cog in the system but rather that SharePoint was designed for them. Two other suggestions are plain, simple advice: take user feedback and actually use it and make SharePoint the go information center for the organization by putting everything on it.
Perhaps the best advice is making information easy to find on SharePoint:
Documents are over here, discussions over there, people are that way, and then I don’t know who the experts really are. You can make your Intranet a whole lot smarter, or dare we say “intelligent”, if you take advantage of this information in an integrated fashion, exposing your users to connected, but different, information. You can connect documents to the person who wrote them, then to that person’s expertise and connected colleagues, enabling search for your hidden experts. The ones that can really be helpful often reduce chances for misinformation, repetition of work, or errors. To do this, expertise location capabilities can combine contributed expertise with stated expertise, allowing for easy searching and expert identification.
Developers love SharePoint because it is easy to manage and to roll out information or software to every user. End users hate it because it creates more problems than resolving anything. If developers take the time to listen to what the end users need from their SharePoint experience than can avoid an Sharexit.
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
HonkinNews for August 30, 2016, Now Available
August 30, 2016
If you want to learn how Beyond Search sends secure messages, view Honking News, August 30, 2016. Stories include IBM in Scotland and a possible new recipe for haggis with tamarind, Microsoft and its inability to change China, the US Army’s math challenge, and frisky algorithms. The program for August 30, 2016, is located in this YouTube cubby. We have added a video player to the Beyond Search blog too. Bet your bots — er, bet your boots — on that.
Kenny Toth, August 30, 2016
Computers Will Talk Pretty One Day Soon with NLP
August 25, 2016
The article titled National Language Processing: Turning Words Into Data on B2C takes an in-depth look at NLP and why it is such a difficult area to perfect. Anyone who has conversed with an automated customer service system knows that NLP technology is far from ideal. Why is this? The article suggests that while computers are great at learning the basic rules of language, things get far more complex when you throw in context-dependent or ambiguous language, not to mention human error. The article explains,
“This has changed with the advent of machine learning…In the case of NLP, using a real-world data set lets the computer and machine learning expert create algorithms that better capture how language is actually used in the real world, rather than on how the rules of syntax and grammar say it should be used. This allows computers to devise more sophisticated—and more accurate—models than would be possible solely using a static set of instructions from human developers.”
Throw in Big Data and we have a treasure trove of unstructured data to glean value from in the form of text messages, emails, and social media. The article lists several exciting applications such as automatic translation, automatic summarization, Natural Language Generation, and sentiment analysis.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 25, 2016
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
