Google's Take on Search Plus Your World
A few weeks ago Google
announced the launch of
Search Plus Your World, which
deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.
While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with
the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, the Google+ promotions appeared
on queries where they were clearly not the most relevant result even
when users are not logged into a Google account.
Google+ Over-promotion
A couple weeks ago when Google announced Google Search Plus Your World competitors collectively complained about Google over-promoting their own affiliated websites.
Twitter was perhaps the
loudest
complainer, highlighting how Google basically eats all the above-the-fold real estate with self promotion on
this @WWE search.
It is no surprise that folks like
Ben Edelman,
Scott Cleland &
Fair Search chimed in with complaints, as this is just a continuation of Google's path. But the complaints came from a far wider cast of characters on this move:
the mainstream press like CNN,
free market evangalists like the Economist,
Google worshipers indoctrinated in their culture who wrote a book on Google &
even ex-Googlers now
call into question Google's transparently self serving nature:
I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.
Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I'd rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.
The FTC's
Google antitrust probe is to
expand to include
a review of Google+ integration in the search results.
Facebook & Twitter
launched a don't be evil plugin named
Focus On The User, which replaces Google+ promotion with promotion of profiles from Facebook& Twitter.
For the top tier broad social networks framing the idea of integrating promotion of their networks directly in the search results is a natural & desirable conclusion, but is that just a convenient answer to the wrong question?
- Whether
Google ranks any particular organic result above the corresponding Bing ranking in Google's now below-the-fold organic results is a bit irrelevant when the above the fold results are almost entirely Google.com. But is the core problem that we are under-representing social media in the search results? According to Compete.com, Facebook & YouTube combine to capture about 16% of all downstream Google clicks. Do we really need to increase that number until the web has a total of 5 websites on it? What benefit do we get out of
a web that is just a couple big walled gardens?
- If Facebook is already getting something like 20% of US pageviews & users are still looking for information elsewhere, doesn't that indicate that they probably desire something else? Absolutely Facebook should rank for Facebook navigational queries, but given
all their
notes
spam, I don't like seeing them in the search results much more than seeing a site like eHow.
- The
he said /
she said
data
deals are also highly irrelevant. What is really needed is further context. Before Google inserted Google+ in their search results
the Google+ social network was far less successful than MySpace (which recently
sold for only $35 million). If social media is added as an annotation to other 3rd party listings then I think that has the opportunity to add valuable context, but where a thin "me too" styled social media post replaces the publisher content it lowers the utility of the search results & wastes searcher's time. Further, when those social media results
are little more than human-powered content scrapers it also destroys the business models of legitimate online publishers.
Over-promotion vs "Search Spam"
At any point
Google can promote one of their new verticals in a prominent location in the search results & if they are anywhere near as good as the market leader eventually they can beat them out of nothing more than the combination of superior search placement, monopoly search marketshare,
account bundling & user laziness. What's more, they can make paid products free and/or partner with competitors 2 through x in an attempt to destroy the business model of anyone they couldn't acquire (talk to Groupon).
Amit Singhal
is obviously a brilliant guy, but I thought some of the answers he gave
during a recent interview by Danny Sullivan were quite evasive & perhaps a bit inauthentic. In particular, ...
- "The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term." If the product wasn't ready for prime time you were not required to mix it directly into the organic search results right off the bat. It could have been placed at the bottom of the search results,
like the "Ask on Google" links were. Bing has been working on social search for 18 months & describes their moves as
"being very conservative."
- "The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere." Of course publishers who see their content getting scraped & see the scraped copy outranking the original have a financial incentive to care about a free & automated scraper site displacing their work. They don't get those pageviews, they don't get that referrer data, and they don't get those ad impressions. Google's PR team is
anything but impressed when another company dares do that to Google.
- "The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same." Much like the Google Webmaster Tools shows that pages with a +1 in the search results get a higher CTR, this Google+ social stuff also suffers from the same type of sampling bias & giving the listings a larger and more graphical stand out further help them pull in much more clicks.
Any form of visual highlighting & listing differentiation can lift CTR. I might be likely to click on some of my own results more, but when I do so you might just be grabbing a slice of navigational searches I was going to do anyway where I was looking for something else I posted on Google+ or my Google+ account or the account of a friend & so on. Further, aggregate data hides many data points that are counter to the general trend. I have seen instances of branded searches where the #1 organic site was getting a CTR above 70% (it even had organic sitelinks, further indicating it was a navigational search) and for such a search in some cases there were 2 Adwords ads above the organic results & then the Google+ page for a brand outranked the associated brand in the SERPs for those who followed it! That is a terrible user experience, particularly since the + page hasn't even had any activity for months.
- "Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through." First, publishers are not fake users. Secondly, as mentioned above, there is a sampling bias & the + listings stand out with larger & more graphical listings. If they didn't get a higher CTR that would mean they were *really* irrelevant.
- "out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results." They could have been placed at the bottom of the search results or off to the side or some such until there was greater confidence in the training set.
- "People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships." If a publisher promotes a site to the top of the search results & then says something like 'we will improve quality later' they are branded as spammers. In the past Google has justified penalizing a site
based on its old content that no longer exists on the site. Investing in depth, quality & volume is a cycle. If others get prohibited from evolving through the cycles due to algorithms like Panda then it becomes quite hard to compete with a new start up when Google can just insert whatever it wants right near the top & then work on quality after the fact.
- "We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries." If this is the case then why does it only promote Google+?
- "We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish." The problem is, if a company builds a reputation as a secretive one that clones the work of its partners & customers then people don't want to do open-ended transparent relationships. Naive folks might need to see the blood and tears 3 or 4 times to pick up on the trend, but even the slowest of the slow notice it after a dozen such moves.
- "I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed." Considering Google's lack of transparency & self-promotional bias on the social networking front, would you be fully transparent and open with Google? If so, then aren't the search algorithms complex enough that it would make sense to make those transparent as well? How can you ask other social networks to increase transparency at the same time Google is locking down their search data on claims of protecting user privacy?
- "It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl." This is where being trustworthy is so crucial. Past interactions with Yelp, TripAdvisor & Groupon likely make future potential partners more risk adverse & cautious. Outrageous "accidents" like those that happened with Mocality & Open Street Map from playing fast and loose further erode credibility. And even when Google hosts the media & has full access to user data they still rank inferior stuff sometimes (like
the recent Santorum YouTube cartoon fiasco), even on widely searched core/head keywords.
The big issue is that if people feel the game is rigged they won't have much incentive to share on Google+. I largely only share stuff that is irrelevant to tangentially relevant to our business interests & won't share stuff that is directly relevant, because I don't want to be forced to compete against an inferior version of my own work when the deck is stacked so the inferior version wins simply because it is hosted on Google.
As we move into the information age a lot of physical stores are shutting down. Borders went bust last year. Sears announced the closure of many stores. And many of the people shopping in the physical stores that remain
are using cell phones for price comparisons. Given Google's mobile OS share this is another area where they can build trust or burn it. A friend today mentioned how their online prices on Google Product search almost always show a lower price near the header than the lowest price available in the list - sometimes by a substantial margin.
Identity vs Anonymous Contractors
In the past we have mentioned that
transparency is often a self-serving & hypocritical policy by those atop power systems who want to limit the power of those whom they aim to control.
When
Google was caught promoting illegal drug ads there was no individual who took the blame for it. When the Mocality scraping & the Open Street Map vandalism issues happened, all that we were told was that Google "was mortified" and it was "a contractor." If people who did hit jobs could just place all the blame on "the contractor" then the world would be a pretty crappy place!
Eric Schmidt
warned that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." That sage advice came from the same Eric Schmidt
that blackballed cNet for positing personal information about him. Around the same time Eric offered the above quote,
Google was engaged in secret & illegal backdoor deals with direct competitors to harm their own employees.
What happened to Google recruiters who dared to go against the illegal pact?
They were fired on the hour:
"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.
Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."
When Google+ launched they demanded that you use your real name
or don't use the product. They later claimed that
you can use a nickname on your account as well, but
there is a difference between a nickname and pseudonyms.
What is so outrageous about the claims for this need for real identities is that past studies have shown that
pseudonymous comments are best & Bruce Schneier highlighted how we lose our individuality
if we are under an ever-watchful eye:
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
In many markets
ads and content are blended in a way that is hard to distingush between them. Whenever Google wants to enter
they can demand greater
transparency
to participate (and then use the standard formatted data from that transparency to create a meta-competitor in the market.)
Increasingly Google is placing
more of their search data & their webmaster-related functions
behind a registration wall.
If you are rich & powerful they will
sell you the data. If you are
the wrong type of webmaster that aggregate data can be used
in *exceptionally* personal ways.
User Privacy
Ahead of Google updating their privacy policy Google has directed a large portion of their ad budget toward ads about
how they protect users online.
What better way to ensure user privacy than to allow them to register their accounts under psydonyms? The real name policy on Google+ was part of what made Google want to stop providing referrer data for logged in users who search on Google. This has had a knock on effect where other social sites are
framing everything,
requiring registration to read more of public user generated content &
sending outbound traffic through redirects.
Google's
new
privacy policy allows them to
blend your user data from one service into refining the experience (and ads) on another:
If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.
Google & Facebook's
war (against) user privacy is catching
media and
governmental attention. Microsoft highlighted some of Google's issues in
their "putting people first" ad campaign & the blowback has caused Google not only to publish PR-spin
"get the facts" styled blog posts, but to launch
yet another ad campaign.
EU regulators have asked Google to
pause their privacy policy changes.
Bogus Testimonials & Social Payola
Is social media a cleaner signal than links? If search engines put the same weight on social media that they put on links it would get spammed to bits. It won't be long until a firm like Ad.ly offers sponsored Google+ posts.
Some have suggested that
you won't be able to buy Google+ followers however Google already includes user pictures on AdWords ads (even when they desire not to be &
even when they didn't endorse the product that Google suggests they endorsed). In due time I expect Google will indeed sell followers & other user interactions as ad units (just like Twitter & Facebook do).
Further, celebrities
sell Tweets to advertisers. When they are hot
their rates go up:
When Ad.ly introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for Internships.com generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to Internships.com.
Search engines might consider these to be clean signals if those same search engines were not busy buying the manipulation of said "relevancy" signals.
Attention is purchased to create demand. It isn't comfortable to put it this way, but we are trained to obey authority &
to like what
others like:
The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which equates with four degrees of separation to thousands of people, Mr. Fischer said. Metrics like that led him to believe that if Facebook could figure out a way to capitalize on "social endorsements," it would be like creating a word-of-mouth campaign that could reach millions of people simultaneously. Since the campaigns would come from a friend, they would theoretically be taken more seriously than, say, a TV commercial, he said.
On an individual basis
reviews and
ratings get faked everywhere. Even stodgy old slow-moving institutions like colleges
game their ranking systems.
There recently was a question raised about
how Google's rating systems skewed high on the underlying data. Surely Overstock (the same Overstock Google penalized earlier this year) wouldn't promote Google's trusted stores aggressively on their own site if it made their business appear worse than it actually is, thus a positive bias must be baked in to the system.
Entire categories of demand are created by those
tied in
with power cost shifting to create bubbles. The federal reserve helped spark a real estate bubble with low interest rates.
FBI warnings of mortgage fraud were ignored. Consumers were constantly fed propaganda about "real estate only goes up." Then when that bubble popped, the US government bailed out those who caused it & burned trillions of Dollars propping up home prices. The government even bailed out a company that is
now shorting the housing market (when that company was about to get bailed out
the secretary of treasury leaked that material non-public information to some of his criminal investor buddies).
Does all the above sound circular, conflicting, corrupt & confusing? It should, because that is how power works & comes off as seeming semi-legitimate when acting in illigitimate ways. The
perception of
reality is
warped to create profitable opportunties that are monetized on the way up and the way down.
Millions of kids take drugs that
address the symptoms of being a child full of energy, imagination & entusiasm.
In some cases they may need them, but in most cases they probably don't. The solution with the highest economic return gets the largest ad budget, even if it only treats symptoms.
Web Scrape Plus+ (Now With More Scraping)
When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted
how they would use the + button usage as a "relevancy" signal. Google recently started
inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start
they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.
Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create
a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.
I recently read a blog post about
how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can't state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.
Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again
via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that
it was "childish" to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!
Google determines
how much information is shown near each listing & can create "relevancy" signals in ways that
things tied to Google get over-represented (
look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course*
Google deserves
100% of the blame.
Thin Content & Scraper Sites
Remember the whole justification for Panda was that thin content was a poor user experience?
In spite of sites like eHow getting hit,
Google is still pre-paying them to upload content to Youtube.
Now that the (non-Google hosted) thin content has been disappeared (
and the % of downstream traffic from Google to Youtube has more then doubled in the past year) it is time for Google to take another slice of the search traffic stream with
Search Plus Your World:
The Google vs Facebook locked down walled garden contest will retard innovation. As the corporate internet silos grow larger
the independent web withers. Them going after each other may leave room for Twitter, but
it doesn't leave lots of room is left for others, as
the economics of publishing have to work or the publishers die.
Start ups that were on a successful trajectory
were killed by Panda:
The startup had been on a roll up until last February when Google altered its ranking algorithm with the release of “Panda.” The changes decimated TeachStreet’s traffic, and the company never quite recovered.
“We lost a lot of our traffic, and overnight we started talking to partners for biz dev, not for acquisition,” he said. However, many of the potential partners wanted to know about an outright acquisition.
About.com
was also smoked by Google:
The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of About.com itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.
The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.
Keep in mind that the reason these websites were hit was that they were claimed to be thin & thus a poor user experience. When the NYT bought About.com one of the top competing bidders
was Google!
Now that the "thin content" has been demoted in the search results Google can integrate deep content silos from Google+, like this one:
That is an 8-word Google+ post about how short another blog post is. I like Todd & do like to read his writings, but here Google is clearly favoring the same sort of content they would have torched if it was done on an independent webmaster's website.
How Google has raters view other websites that redirect traffic is based upon those sites having a substantial value add. Clearly in the above example there was nothing added to the interaction beyond sharing a bookmark with a punchy tagline.
If Google wants to use the + notation to pull up that other referenced page then perhaps that can make sense, but to list an 8-word Google+ page in the search results nearly a year after the Panda algorithm is outrageous. This sort of casual mention integration in the search results occurs on expensive keywords as well. Not only do they list your own Google+ posts...
...but they also list them from anyone you follow...
In addition to information pollution, the other big issue here is time. Google wants to make forms more standardized
to make filling them out faster &
they give regular sermons on the importance of fast search results. Yet when I do a navigational search, Google delivers two AdWords ads, a huge Google+ promotion, and then the navigational search result barely above the fold.*
*Since I thought the above was obnoxious, I renamed our Google+ company page to
S_E_O Book
to help Google fix their relevancy problems.
Can anyone explain how Google's speed bias is aligned with putting plus junk right at the top, even on brand searches? Yahoo! has been pretty aggressive with putting shopping ads in the search results, but their implementation is still a better user experience than what Google did above.
And Bing offers an even cleaner experience than that.
Due to
how Google integrates Google+ in such a parasitic way I see
no incentive for participating on their network except when I have something that is outside of my domain of expertise, something that I am not targeting commercially, something that is thin, or something irrelevant to say! That incentive structure combined with
Google's photo meme feature will ensure that
content marketers will help plenty of people see Star Wars stuff ranking for
mortgage loan
search queries.
When you own search/navigation you own language. that position can easily be extended into any other direction/market
in a way a social graph can not:
"The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English," McNealy said. "All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business."
Further, Google can chose at any point to
respond to or
ignore market regulations in accordance with whatever makes them the most money. They can also fund 3rd parties doing the same (
like undermining copyright) to force others to strike an official deal with Google to be "open."
A lot of businesses live on small profit margins, so Google's ability to insert itself & fund criminal 3rd parties aligned with Google's internal longterm interests is a big big big deal. Companies will learn that you either work with Google on Google's terms or you die.
When a public relations issue brews they can
quickly change their approach and again position themselves as the white knight.
Brand Equity & Forcing the Brand Buy
Yahoo! put out
a research paper highlighting activity bias, stating that the efficacy of online advertising is often over-stated because people who see ads about a topic were already more closely tied in with that particular network & that particular topic before they even saw the ad. As an example, any person who sees an AdWords ad for
hemorrhoid treatment
was already searching for hemorrhoid-related topics before they saw your ad (thus they were in the subset of individuals that might have came across your site in some way if you were in the search ad ecosystem or not).
This sort of activity bias-driven selection bias (homophily) exists on social networks
online &
offline.
Google did
research on incrementality of ads & they came to the opposite conclusion as Yahoo! did. Google suggested you should buy, buy, buy, even on your own branded keywords. They suggested that testing was expensive (no mention that the only reason it is expensive is because Google chooses not to make such tools easily accessible to advertisers) & that the clicks were so cheap on branded keywords that you should buy, buy, buy. Many advertisers who mix brand & non-brand keywords together don't realize that
they are using the "returns" from bidding on their own brand to subsidize over-paying for other keywords.
Google Analytics is the leading & most widely used web analytics program. They can share
whatever metrics help them sell more ads (defaulting to crediting the last click for conversions, even if it was on a navigational search to your site) & pull back on features that are not aligned with their business interests (SEO referral data anyone?)
This goes back to
Scott McNealy's quote: "The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English. All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business."
Analysts
didn't understand why
Google CPC rates were down 8%
last quarter while overall search clicks were up 34%. The biggest single reason was likely more clicks on adlinks on branded AdWords ads. While a brand buying its own keyword typically pays far less per click than
what some of the biggest keywords go for, the branded keywords typically have an exceptionally high CTR.
Those additional clicks dragged down Google's average CPC, but the extra revenue they offered was a big par of the reason why Google was about to grow at 25% even though their display network only grew at 15%.
That slow growth of display is in spite of Youtube now serving over 4 billion video streams per day & Google adding display ads to log out pages.
Online views
are not the same as TV views. A comScore study found that
31% of display ads are never seen. In spite of that, US online advertising will
reach nearly $40 billion this year.
Google wants to insert itself as a needed cost of business in the same way
credit card companies have.
On Google Maps they put an ad inside your location box.
Even if
most people don't participate on Google+, Google can
still force advertiser buy in through over-promotion of the network in the search results. On your branded keywords they may drive your organic listing below the fold & put Google+ front & center.
Facebook earnings
are still growing much faster than Google's & Facebook encourages advertisers to
advertise their Facebook pages, so even when you pay for the click Facebook still keeps the user. Facebook is
adding apps to the timeline &
is trying to win VEVO music video hosting from YouTube.
While Google is primarily known as a search company, it is getting harder to get off of Google though any channel other than a toll booth. Google keeps
driving the organic search results downward, while Google verticals fill up many of the organic results that remain. Many companies already buy Google ads on their own YouTube content. Some buy ads on Google to drive them to their Youtube videos & then buy ads on their own Youtube video to promote their websites. Soon Google will try to push you to buy them on your Google+ page as well.
Google is becoming a walled garden:
Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.
Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.
A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.
...
To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find.
I suspect there will be plenty of bloodshed before Google figures that one out.
"This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else." -
Larry Page
Google no longer believes in the concept of the open web. Blame it on Larry Page becoming the CEO, blame it on him talking to Steve Jobs & Steve telling him to make fewer and tighter products, blame it on Google funding eHow, or blame it on basically anything. But if you go back far enough, much of the stuff that is going on now
was clearly envisioned a decade ago:
I was lucky enough to chat with Larry one-to- one about his expectations for Google back in 2002. He laid out far-reaching views that had nothing to do with short-term revenue goals, but raised questions about how Google would anticipate the day sensors and memory became so cheap that individuals would record every moment of their lives. He wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA - not just a mediator of digital music licensing - but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content. I left that meeting with a sense that Larry was thinking far more deeply about the future than I was, and I was convinced he would play a large role in shaping it. I would rather jump on board that bullet train than ride a local that never missed a revenue stop but never." - Douglas Edwards
What happens when the Google+ version of your content outranks the version on your own site? And what happens when your branded channel and/or your fans become a vertical ad silo Google sells to your competitors?
I tested submitting a couple posts to Google+ with a Wordtracker top keywords list & valuable keywords (on a cpc*traffic) basis in posts about top keywords. Those posts rank #2 or #3 in Google for many people that follows me. No harm to me since those posts were irrelevant to this site, but if they were about my theme & topic I just would have out-competed myself. When Google outranks you (even with a copy of your content) they get to taste the data again and sell off the attention another time. You only get a slice of that monetization, even when it is your work that is being monetized. Maybe it is great for stuff that is somewhat less relevant and/or keywords that are so competitive that you otherwise wouldn't score for them, but we have to be really careful we don't out-compete ourselves. Though if Googke keeps this up they won't be the only ones monetizing it. Give it a few months and celebrities will be selling sponsored Google+ posts based on some metric created by multiplying search volume, CPC & how many followers they have.
Is Bing Better? Will Enough People Ask That Question to Matter?
For years Google built their reputation as being the search engine that offered the cleanest & fastest search results. They were known for monetizing less aggressively than the competition. But over the past couple years
Google has dialed up their ads to where
they now send a greater ratio of ad traffic than organic search traffic. One Google engineer recently described the ability to rank highly in Google without buying their ads as
being a bug that was getting fixed!
Google's big risk in their coupling of aggressive monetization,
aggressive self-promotion & changing how users feel about user privacy is that they can create the perception that users should go elsewhere for for an honest or trustworthy search. This not only builds momentum for smaller search services like
DuckDuckGo &
Blekko, but has also won praise for Bing from
Gizmodo,
Dave Winer &
The Next Web.
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When hired on after college at the Idaho State Journal, I inherited the police beat. It was usually the first beat assignment daily newspapers gave to rookie reporters who did not know anything. I knew a lot less than that.
For many months, I wrote for the ISJ, but I worked at the Pocatello Police Department. When I learned I had access to incident reports, arrest reports, jail logs and the like without any restriction, I remember asking Chief Perkins why this daily gold mine of information was freely made available to me. He replied, " 'Cause we are the good guys and if you do your job, the public will trust we are doing ours."
Chief Perkins knew more about public trust than all of Washington D.C. and Atlanta GA agency heads with their "transparency" budgets running into the millions. These days we know Americans don't much trust government, especially the one in Washington D.C.
Why top federal officials do not try harder to earn that trust is the only mystery.
Sadly, in the past six months, we've had performances from two such officials involved in food safety that did not restore trust, but only further opened that gap between the people and their government.
I am speaking of Margaret Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, and Robert Tauxe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) deputy director of foodborne, waterborne and environmental diseases.
After cantaloupe contamination led to last year's deadly Listeria outbreak, Hamburg defended FDA's lame "ask your retailers" policy for consumers who wanted to find out where those Jensen Farms melons were being sold.
As food safety author and microbiologist Phyllis Entis observed, "Consumers should not have to play detective in order to find out whether or not they have been exposed to the risk of infection from a recalled food." That would appear to be especially true for an outbreak where the product being sold at the retail level far outran the distribution area.
Then we had this pitiful set of excuses from Tauxe for the reason CDC withheld Taco Bell's name from its report on a 10-state, 70 sickened Salmonella outbreak, where the food source responsible for the illnesses also could not be determined.
Lots of other people have commented on this, and I don't mean to pile on. By contacting the state public health departments, and finding one more interested in following its own state law than in currying favor with Atlanta, we were able to report that the CDC's "Restaurant Chain A" was Taco Bell. Tauxe's rationale that he is the J. Edgar Hoover of public health, able to keep secrets and reel out information to the public when he sees fit, is very dangerous and must be challenged.
For goodness sake, many in the public think - presumably incorrectly - that Dr. Tauxe is covering for Taco Bell.
Since we outed Taco Bell as "'Restaurant Chain A" and Taco Bell confirmed it, we are wondering how long it will be before CDC updates its Jan. 19 final report on the SE outbreak to include, for the sake of history and researchers, the real name?
Or better yet, when might we expect CDC to update its Dec. 8 final report on the cantaloupe Listeria outbreak to include two more of those confirmed infected in the death toll? As the keeper of the final record, CDC should honor the dead by including them and accurately marking both their passing and the lethality of the epidemic.
We are not going to hold our breath.
But acknowledging public information publicly would be good for CDC. Issuing retail distribution lists for recalled products to assist the public during outbreaks would be good for FDA.
Lately, however, neither public agency is doing much to restore the public trust the late Chief Perkins knew should never be lost in the first place.
Is there any question why the people are questioning their government?
If the New England Patriots try to run a fake sweep on Sunday, there's an awfully good chance that Osi Umenyiora or Jason Pierre-Paul of the New York Giants will be there to shut things down. And if fake Super Bowl merchandise is being sold, then Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be there to shut that down, too.
Operation "Fake Sweep," which began on Oct. 1, 2011 and ended this past week, is an anti-counterfeit operation which resulted in $4.8 million worth of fake NFL merchandise being confiscated, including 42,692 non-authentic Super Bowl items. Special agents with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) along with officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were part of the national sweep which targeted stores, flea markets and street vendors. This effort also included targeting several hundred websites where contraband came into the country from overseas.
Last year, a similar operation resulted in $3.72 million in fake NFL related apparel and collectibles being seized. The uptick in merchandise and dollar value this year is a sign to ICE that counterfeiting is a real and growing problem.
"Counterfeiting is a modern-day crime of global proportions, and selling counterfeit football jerseys is just the tip of the iceberg of intellectual property rights crime. Nearly any item that will turn a profit is subject to being counterfeited. Counterfeiters are pervasive, increasingly sophisticated, and a real threat to the U.S. economy," Gail Montenegro, spokeswoman for ICE, told Yahoo! Sports.
"This type of crime takes jobs away from American workers and profits away from U.S. businesses."
The NFL, which assisted in this operation, was not the only professional sports league to feel the pinch of counterfeit sales. The dragnet for "Fake Sweep" netted items from Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. All told, ICE reports 65,262 counterfeit items worth $6.4 million taken in by the four-month operation.
"Our message to consumers is simple — 'buyer beware.' Purchase from reputable dealers. Just as guns and drugs are smuggled into the U.S., these counterfeit items were brought into the country by criminals and the profits go to further their criminal activities. Look for quality stitching, NFL holograms, and substandard goods, just to name a few," Montenegro said.
"Counterfeiters use inferior materials and craftsmanship to produce look-alike products that do not benefit the teams, the players, or the hard working employees of legitimate U.S. companies and trademark holders."
ICE will continue "Fake Sweep" throughout the Super Bowl.
Follow Kristian R. Dyer on Twitter
@KristianRDyer
Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain
It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.
All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake's untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book,
A New Science of Life
, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal
Nature
, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a "book for burning" and that Sheldrake was to be "condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy".
For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. "It was," he says, "exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists." That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that "conventional, materialist science" cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry.
His new book,
The Science Delusion
, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the "scientific dogmatism" that sets itself up as gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: "Are the laws of nature fixed?"; "Is matter unconscious?"; "Is nature purposeless?" "Are minds confined to brains?"
Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to "learn" how to grow, to some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work –
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World
,
Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home
– been generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.
One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins's
The God Delusion
. Was that, I wonder, his express intention in writing it?
"Slightly," he suggests. But the title was really his publisher's idea. "It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind, so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title."
Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake's ideas could be boiled down to a sentence, you might borrow one from
Hamlet
: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…"
"What we have in common," Sheldrake says, "is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe."
Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now thought to be "dark matter" and subject to "dark energy" forces that "nothing in our science can begin to explain".
Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to "the recurrent fantasy of omniscience". The science delusion, in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that is left to do is to fill in the details. "In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think is bad for science," he says. In America, the book is called
Science Set Free
, which he thinks is probably a better title. "They were aware that if they called it
The Science Delusion
it would be seen as a rightwing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that."
The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.
"I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14," he says, with a grin. "I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: 'If Adam and Eve were created by God, why do they have navels?' That kind of thing."
Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, that human beings were in Dawkins's term "lumbering robots" – did not accord with his own experience of it. Sheldrake was a gifted musician and "electrical changes in the cortex didn't seem able to fully explain Bach". Likewise: "To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world."
The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. "Every weekend in the season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand."
They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun's position and an internal clock and scent traces, but what "they weren't prepared to say was that it was a total mystery". That refusal, and others like it, troubled Sheldrake. "There is a lot of science that you can't directly experience," he says, "but to concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn't begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me," he suggests, "a great distortion."
For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts about the idea that "conventional, materialist" science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be. "I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had been exposed."
Returning to Cambridge, Sheldrake became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close affinities with Carl Jung's ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He was profoundly influenced by a book called
Matter and Memory
by the philosopher Henri Bergson. "When I discovered Bergson's idea that memory is not stored in the brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that there might potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was wrestling with."
In 1974, Sheldrake returned to south-east Asia and took a job at an agricultural institute near Hyderabad developing new varieties and cropping systems in chickpeas. "By day, I was working on these practical things," he recalls, "but in the evening I was reading a lot about crystallography and the philosophy of form." He had become friendly with an eccentric woman called Helen Spurway, widow of JBS Haldane, the great British biologist. She lived in a remote full of animals, with a tame jackal and wasps' nests in the living room; Haldane's library was being eaten by termites; Sheldrake felt right at home.
"At around the same time," he recalls, "I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs." Alongside that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was "a lot more in my makeup that was 'Christian' than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church."
Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?
"Well," he says, "I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. 'Thy will be done', that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend." By the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George's, Hyderabad. It was at about that time, "living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree", that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade's worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called "morphogenetics".
Was he aware that the book would be incendiary?
"Well," he says, "I wrote it to try to find a broader framework for biology. A more holistic one, proposing the argument that the laws of nature were also evolving in time."
For the first three months after it was published, the speculative book got a generally favourable reception. But then the "book for burning" editorial was written in
Nature
, by its editor, Sir John Maddox, and Sheldrake's new life began, as a discredited scientist and bestselling author.
Far from refuting his ideas in the face of this broadside, Sheldrake went on the offensive. His research since then has concentrated almost entirely on the kinds of phenomena that science dismisses out of hand "but which people are generally fascinated by and made to feel stupid about". He has a long-running experiment that collects data about how dogs "know" when their owners are coming home; another is concerned with the apparently strong deviations from chance in human ability to predict when they are being stared at from a distance. He retains an interest in subjects as diverse as the mysteries of crystal formation, the efficacy of Chinese medicine, the forces that trigger migrations of birds and animals over vast distances, and the nature of consciousness.
None of these pursuits has enhanced his standing in the professional scientific community. Sheldrake is unrepentant. He cites Darwin as an example. "If you look at his books, almost all the data there come from amateur naturalists, practical breeders, gardeners. TH Huxley, meanwhile, 'his bulldog', was very much against amateurs, largely because many of them were vicars and he was very anti-religious. He wanted to marginalise anyone who saw science and faith as compatible and mutually reaffirming."
Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.
"I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing," he suggests. "A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic. I think it is a uniquely open moment..."
His hope is that there will be a "coming out" moment in science. "It's like gays in the 1950s," he suggests. "I think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…"
The imminence of Sheldrake's three score years and ten has made questions of mortality and consciousness seem a little more pressing to him. He almost came face to face with his morphic energies in 2008; speaking at a consciousness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was attacked with a knife by a Japanese paranoid schizophrenic. He suffered a huge wound in his thigh, which just missed his femoral artery. "Apparently," he says, "he was aiming at my heart and stumbled at the last moment. It certainly made death a bit more present."
Given his speculative nature, I wonder what he imagined, as his life flashed before him, would happen next?
"I've always thought death would be like dreaming," he says, "but without the possibility of waking up. And in those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will." He trusts in a more colourful future for himself. After Sheldrake shows me out, I walk to work across the heath, imagining how his dream eternity might work out: hammering out
The Goldberg Variations
on his Hyderabad organ, while the jungle grows around him, wondering all the time how he got here.
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