| From: Ron | 3/6/2024 11:35:25 AM | | | | | | Google Is Finally Trying to Kill AI Clickbait On Tuesday, Google announced changes to combat AI spam in search. An SEO expert says these new rules could “change everything.”
Google is taking action against algorithmically generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy, designed in part to keep AI clickbait out of its search results.
“It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at the marketing agency Amsive. “It could change everything.”
In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in search results by 40 percent. It will focus on reducing what the company calls “scaled content abuse,” which is when bad actors flood the internet with massive amounts of articles and blog posts designed to game search engines.
“A good example of it, which has been around for a little while, is the abuse around obituary spam,” says Google’s vice president of search, Pandu Nayak. Obituary spam is an especially grim type of digital piracy, where people attempt to make money by scraping and republishing death notices, sometimes on social platforms like YouTube. Recently, obituary spammers have started using artificial intelligence tools to increase their output, making the issue even worse. Google’s new policy, if enacted effectively, should make it harder for this type of spam to crop up in online searches.
This notably more aggressive approach to combating search spam takes specific aim at “domain squatting,” a practice in which scavengers purchase websites with name recognition to profit off their reputations, often replacing original journalism with AI-generated articles designed to manipulate search engine rankings. This type of behavior predates the AI boom, but with the rise of text-generation tools like ChatGPT, it’s become increasingly easy to churn out endless articles to game Google rankings.
The spike in domain squatting is just one of the issues that have tarnished Google Search’s reputation in recent years. “People can spin up these sites really easily,” says SEO expert Gareth Boyd, who runs the digital marketing firm Forte Analytica. “It’s been a big issue.” (Boyd admits that he has even created similar sites in the past, though he says he doesn’t do it anymore.)
In February, WIRED reported on several AI clickbait networks that used domain squatting as a strategy, including one that took the websites for the defunct indie women’s website The Hairpin and the shuttered Hong Kong-based pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily and filled them with AI-generated nonsense. Another transformed the website of a small-town Iowa newspaper into a bizarro repository for AI blog posts on retail stocks. According to Google’s new policy, this type of behavior is now explicitly categorized by the company as spam.
In addition to domain squatting, Google’s new policy will also focus on eliminating “reputation abuse,” where otherwise trustworthy websites allow third-party sources to publish janky sponsored content or other digital junk. (Google’s blog post describes “payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website” as an example.) While the other parts of the spam policy will start enforcement immediately, Google is giving 60 days notice prior to cracking down on reputational abuse, to give websites time to fall in line.
Nayak says the company has been working on this specific update since the end of last year. More broadly, the company has been working on ways to fix low-quality content in search, including AI-generated spam, since 2022. “We’ve been aware of the problem,” Nayak says. “It takes time to develop these changes effectively.”
Some SEO experts are cautiously optimistic that these changes could restore Google’s search efficacy. “It’s going to reinstate the way things used to be, hopefully,” says Ray. “But we have to see what happens.”
wired.com |
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| From: Julius Wong | 5/1/2024 9:21:32 PM | | | | | | Google to lay off hundreds in 'Core teams,' move some jobs to India, Mexico: report
May 01, 2024 2:15 PM ET
By: Chris Ciaccia, SA News Editor
 JHVEPhoto
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has laid off at least 200 employees in its "Core" teams and will undergo a reorganization that results in some jobs moving to India and Mexico, CNBC reported.
The "Core" unit is responsible for the technical work behind Google's flagship products and protecting online safety, the news outlet added. At least 50 engineering positions in Google's Sunnyvale, Calif. location were eliminated. Corresponding roles will be hired in India and Mexico, CNBC added, citing internal documents.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
Shares rose 1.4% in mid-day trading.
Google has made several rounds of layoffs since the start of the year. In January, the tech giant let go hundreds of staff working on its voice assistant, hardware and engineering teams.
Several hundred employees were let go from its advertising sales division while more recent cuts impacted its finance and real estate divisions.
In January, CEO Sundar Pichai warned that cuts would continue through this year, even if they weren't substantial.
Alphabet said in January 2023 that it planned to eliminate about 12,000 jobs. The company also made other smaller trims in 2023. |
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| From: Sr K | 5/3/2024 8:01:35 AM | | | | | | May 3, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
On Tuesday, Google’s employees gathered for an all-hands meeting named T.G.I.F. These companywide meetings are rarely held on Fridays these days, but the name has stuck.
Executives shared highlights from a recent earnings report and cloud-computing conference, and warned workers against taking disruptive actions in the wake of internal protests against a cloud-computing contract with Israel.
But no one in the meeting, two employees said, broached a topic that could have a dramatic impact on Google: its landmark antitrust trial with the Justice Department, where arguments are finally coming to an end this week.
For eight months, while tech policy experts have tried to divine what a Google victory or loss would mean for the power of tech giants in the United States, Google’s employees have mostly ignored the antitrust fight, according to interviews with a dozen current and recent workers, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the legal matter.
Even among Google’s outspoken employees, the legal risks facing the company have become background noise. For two decades the company has been one of Silicon Valley’s apex predators, and its workers have grown accustomed to Google’s breezing past regulatory scrutiny. Why expect something different this time?
Besides, they added, the more pressing threat to Google is a competitive one posed by Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
Closing arguments in the trial began on Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and are expected to last two days. The Justice Department has taken aim at Google’s search business, claiming the company illegally extended its monopoly by forging default search deals with browser makers, such as Apple and Mozilla. Google has said that the contracts are legal and that its innovations have broadened competition, not constricted it.
Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesman, said in a statement that the Justice Department’s case “is deeply flawed.”
“Our employees know that we face intense competition — we experience it every day,” Mr. Schottenfels said. “That’s why we are focused on building innovative and helpful products that people choose to use.”
Image
Even among Google’s outspoken employees, the legal risks facing the company have become background noise.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
On Thursday, Judge Amit P. Mehta stress-tested the Justice Department’s and Google’s arguments in court. He prodded the Justice Department on its assertion that Google’s market power had hindered its search engine’s innovation or quality for consumers.
“I’m struggling to see how I could reach findings of fact that would say, ‘Google has not done enough,’ or ‘Google’s product has worsened over the course of 10 years,’ in such a way that I could say it’s because of lack of competition,” Judge Mehta said.
He also questioned Google’s assertion that it faced competition from sites like Amazon, where consumers go to search for pricing and other results while shopping, saying the average person would see a difference between Google and Amazon.
Soon, it will be up to Judge Mehta to decide. If Google loses, there is a wide range of potential consequences. Google could be forced to make small changes to its business practices or face a ban on the types of default contracts that have helped make its search engine ubiquitous. The Justice Department could also call for the divestiture of one of Google’s search distribution platforms like the Chrome browser or the Android mobile operating system — a drastic but less likely outcome.
For more than a decade, Google has faced fines and government lawsuits in Europe and elsewhere, while notching significant revenue and profit gains. That has made all the legal wrangling look like the cost of doing business to some employees, two people said.
Google employees have been taught to avoid talking or writing about lawsuits. The company always tells employees to “communicate with care,” as laid out in an internal document reviewed by The Times. In other words, what you write can end up becoming an embarrassing bit of evidence in court.
When an employee in Google’s advertising department recently mentioned news articles about the antitrust lawsuit at the office, co-workers shook their heads and said, “We don’t talk about that,” the person said.
But lawsuits happen all the time. In the last six months, Google has settled cases at a steady clip, ending privacy, patent and antitrust claims against the company. Those suits didn’t cause much to change, leading some employees to believe that this case is no different.
When employees do talk about the Justice Department suit, they echo one of the company’s arguments: that the allegations against Google Search are outdated, especially as the tech industry has rushed to develop artificial intelligence systems that could alter the search market, two people said.
Excerpt |
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| From: Thomas M. | 6/9/2024 11:13:26 AM | | | | | | Portions of Google's search algorithm were leaked:
An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them
By Rand Fishkin
On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from inside Google’s Search division. The email further claimed that these leaked documents were confirmed as authentic by ex-Google employees, and that those ex-employees and others had shared additional, private information about Google’s search operations.
Many of their claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular the company’s repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed, denial that subdomains are considered separately in rankings, denials of a sandbox for newer websites, denials that a domain’s age is collected or considered, and more.
Naturally, I was skeptical. The claims made by this source (who asked to remain anonymous) seemed extraordinary–claims like:
- In their early years, Google’s search team recognized a need for full clickstream data (every URL visited by a browser) for a large percent of web users to improve their search engine’s result quality.
- A system called “NavBoost” (cited by VP of Search, Pandu Nayak, in his DOJ case testimony) initially gathered data from Google’s Toolbar PageRank, and desire for more clickstream data served as the key motivation for creation of the Chrome browser (launched in 2008).
- NavBoost uses the number of searches for a given keyword to identify trending search demand, the number of clicks on a search result (I ran several experiments on this from 2013-2015), and long clicks versus short clicks (which I presented theories about in this 2015 video).
- Google utilizes cookie history, logged-in Chrome data, and pattern detection (referred to in the leak as “unsquashed” clicks versus “squashed” clicks) as effective means for fighting manual & automated click spam.
- NavBoost also scores queries for user intent. For example, certain thresholds of attention and clicks on videos or images will trigger video or image features for that query and related, NavBoost-associated queries.
- Google examines clicks and engagement on searches both during and after the main query (referred to as a “NavBoost query”). For instance, if many users search for “Rand Fishkin,” don’t find SparkToro, and immediately change their query to “SparkToro” and click SparkToro.com in the search result, SparkToro.com (and websites mentioning “SparkToro”) will receive a boost in the search results for the “Rand Fishkin” keyword.
- NavBoost’s data is used at the host level for evaluating a site’s overall quality (my anonymous source speculated that this could be what Google and SEOs called “Panda”). This evaluation can result in a boost or a demotion.
- Other minor factors such as penalties for domain names that exactly match unbranded search queries (e.g. mens-luxury-watches.com or milwaukee-homes-for-sale.net), a newer “BabyPanda” score, and spam signals are also considered during the quality evaluation process.
- NavBoost geo-fences click data, taking into account country and state/province levels, as well as mobile versus desktop usage. However, if Google lacks data for certain regions or user-agents, they may apply the process universally to the query results.
- During the Covid-19 pandemic, Google employed whitelists for websites that could appear high in the results for Covid-related searches
- Similarly, during democratic elections, Google employed whitelists for sites that should be shown (or demoted) for election-related information
[continued ...]
sparktoro.com
Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real
theverge.com
Tom |
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| From: zax | 7/25/2024 5:58:02 PM | | | | | | OpenAI is launching an online search tool in a direct challenge to Google, opening up a new front in the tech industry's race to commercialize advances in generative artificial intelligence
openai.com |
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| To: Thomas M. who wrote (15697) | 7/31/2024 9:17:01 PM | | From: Thomas M. | | | | Google & Meta function as extensions of the US Intelligence Community. With Jacqueline Lopour, Google's Head of Trust & Safety, and Aaron Berman, Meta's Head of Elections Content/Misinformation Policy, both being career CIA officers, it underscores the CIA's substantial control over online censorship.
Why is this CIA-Big Tech revolving door, where career CIA officers wield power to censor & decide what misinformation is, purposefully suppressed in the broader conversation about censorship?
Why are career CIA officers like Jacqueline Lopour & Nick Rossmann, who both have a history of spreading misinformation & promoting the RussiaGate conspiracy theory, now in senior roles in Trust & Safety at Google, deciding what is misinformation & overseeing content moderation?
The cumulative number of former Intelligence Community personnel hired by Meta & Google since 2018 is staggering. Before 2018, there were only a handful. Here are the combined hires by both companies:
CIA-36
FBI-68
NSA-44
DHS/CISA-68
State Dept-86
DOD-121
x.com
threadreaderapp.com
Tom |
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| From: zax | 8/5/2024 3:21:17 PM | | | | | | Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance
cnn.com
Google has violated US antitrust law with its search business, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing the tech giant a staggering court defeat with the potential to reshape how millions of Americans get information online and to upend decades of dominance.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta Mehta wrote in Monday’s opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
The decision by the US District Court for the District of Columbia is a stunning rebuke of Google’s oldest and most important business. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars on exclusive contracts to secure a dominant position as the world’s default search provider on smartphones and web browsers.
... Read the rest here: cnn.com |
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| From: Thomas M. | 9/13/2024 8:40:36 PM | | | | | | Google Exec Says ‘Big Tech, Big Companies’ Are ‘Coordinating’ to Help Kamala Harris Win
Google Growth Strategist Dakota Leazer told an undercover journalist with O’Keefe Media Group, that there is “a coordinated effort by Big Tech and big companies” to help Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 election and “be our next CEO,” adding that it is “most profitable” for Google when Americans are in “crisis” and “fearful” of “some impending sense of doom” and that “democracy is going to end.”
“Google is a very liberal, progressive company,” Leazer said. “If they have a belief that one side will allow them to make more money — at the very, very top I don’t think it’s political, I think it’s, like, economic. I think it’s all about, like, the shares and the stock price,” Leazer says in the recently released video.
Leazer went on to suggest that political headlines “fueled out of hate” help generate ad revenue for Google, adding that the tech giant has promoted ads with “rhetoric that was very pro-Kamala” that “seemed to link out to legitimate news” sites.
“These political headlines that are generating clicks, which generates ad revenue, it’s all fueled out of hate,” he said.
“Google was essentially promoting through its ads, like, rhetoric that was very pro-Kamala, and it seemed to link out to legitimate news publication sites,” Leazer added. “It would seem like it was an ad for PBS, but it was really an ad for the Kamala campaign or whatever.”
The Google executive added that this is “A coordinated effort by Big Tech and big companies to try and get her to win — it’s definitely coordinated.”
“When you zoom out and look at who’s really pulling the strings of this country, it’s like a handful of billionaires, a lot of them are in tech, and it’s like tech controls the media, essentially,” Leazer said.
“Not completely, but it’s like you go to Google, they’re reorienting the search engine such that Kamala is more favored,” he added.
“Facebook, I feel like is promoting content that is favorable towards her,” Leazer continued. “A lot of the AI stuff that’s sort of, like, liberating right now, is doing so in a way that’s generally favorable to her.”
Leazer then reiterated his belief that a handful for billionaires are trying to control the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
“I feel like it’s a coordinated effort by billionaires at the top who want Kamala to be our next CEO,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s a chance that she wins.”
After being asked if he “feels bad” that Google is actively “deceiving” voters, Leazer replied, “No,” adding, “I feel like if it’s not Google, it’s going to be someone else. I mean, it’s all like a psyop [psychological operation].”
The Google executive also suggested that fear sells, noting that it is very “profitable” when Americans fear there is “some impending sense of doom” and are having an “existential American crisis that democracy is going to end.”
“I think whatever demographic is most fearful is going to be most profitable,” Leazer said. “And I think right now the left is more fearful than the right is.”
breitbart.com
Tom |
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