Google has a problem with Brooklyn

I made a search for several addresses in Brooklyn and the search results kept displaying NYC instead of Brooklyn. What's going on Google. This is the first time I've seen something like this!

Take a Second to Review Google's Privacy Policy

Take a second and think about what you have searched for, where you have gone on line over the last few years. Google will soon combine all the information it has collected about you. EFF (The Electronic Frontier Foundaton) has an article describing the steps you can do to "erase" this history

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

Google+ and Privacy

Love what I see from Google+. The problem I see from Google all revolves around the issue of personal privacy. Can we make on-line information private? There are, different definitions of privacy. Some/all information will be kept in corporate databases - but who will access this information and how? I don't care about advertising/market research. I do care on "unauthorized" people being able to search or query the data for my personal information.

There are several levels of privacy:
1. Companies using the data for market research
2. Companies advertising goods and services
3. Individuals researching you and finding "unauthorized/private" data
4. The government researching you / keeping dossiers.

All I have to say is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...
4th Amendment to the US Constitution

This YouTube video is an excellent introduction to Google+.

Google Liable for AutoComplete Defamation

More legal news from Italy. An undisclosed plaintiff sued Google for defamation.

People searching via Google ... were apparently presented with autocomplete suggestions including truffatore ("con man") and truffa ("fraud")....

This "caused a lot of trouble to the client, who has a public image both as an entrepreneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance".

Google loses autocomplete defamation case in Italy

Since the auto-complete algorithm was created and maintained by Google the court ruled that Google is to be held responsible for the outcomes.

So what is the result of this? Google must make certain that no words like "loser, fool, fraud, dummy" comes up in their auto-complete? Does Google simply remove auto-complete entirely so as not to invite further lawsuits? I never was a big fan of Google's autocomplete but all this will accomplish is to prevent new products from entering the workplace.

This is another horrible court coming from the EU. I fear with the new privacy ruling, going into effect on May 25, whereby websites must get "explicit consent" from web users before being tracked with a cookie that the EU is destroying innovation and intent on "controlling" the internet. As regards the EU privacy law I'm still not certain if this law applies only to client-side cookies or applies to server-side and session variables as well.

Breaking News and Malware

unmaskparasites.com has a great article on how black-hat websters ensnare Google users and redirect them to malware infected sites which prompts people to download fake anti-virus software.

Apparantly in the moments after a major catastrophe these sites take advantage of the situation:

[in]the first few hours after the event almost any site with relevant information have good chances to rank high on Google. This short window when competition is quite light is all cyber-criminal need to have a steady traffic to their breaking new related doorway pages.

Major Disasters in Poisoned Search Results

Google Takes on the Link Farms

It appears that Google is successfully taking on the link farms that have plagued us for the last several years. Their new algorithm has deprecated many sites, witnessed by the complaints at Google Help and other sites, and hopefully will put an end to the link-farm scourge.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Finding more high-quality sites in search

As with many people I'm both excited about - and concerned about - the new Google Chrome Blocklist extension. Let's hope this extension is made availabe to other browsers and that it cannot to easily be used for evil as well as good.

Apple may build a Search Engine

Data Apple collects about users from its vaunted iPhone is so valuable that the company must build a special search engine just to keep Google from gleaning insight from that data, analysts say.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years.

Google is currently the default search engine on the iPhone, which has tens of millions of users. Pairing the leading search engine -- 65 percent in the U.S., more share abroad -- with one of the most popular smartphones on the planet made good business sense.
Apple-May-Build-a-Search-Engine

OK, now this may be an interesting fight. Google needs some serious competition, Microsoft doesn't seem to be bringing the fight to them; maybe Apple will be able to do so.

Google Changes Privacy Settings on Search History

I've become more than a little unsettled by Google. The latest news from Google only exacerbates that feeling.

Google wants to provide YOU with more accurate searches and wants to do so based upon YOUR search history. That's great. Or is it? Will this search data become integrated with other Google products? This data helps Google know more about YOU. But do we really give our permission to Google (the corporate entity) to use our data throughout its subsidiaries when we use one of these subsidiaries? For example does participation in Google Search mean that YouTube (owned by Google) can share in the use of this data?

Right now Google seems to be limiting their search data collection to Google the search engine. Good. Let's keep it that way. But even here - users MUST have the ability to see what is collected and to be able to remove data from the database - for whatever reason it may be.

Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.
Personalized Search for everyone

IP Delivery and Cloaking: According to Google

Wow!!! I was just having a discussion about this the other day!

Meta-Tag Generators, Which is the best?

Readers of this blog know that I've been saying, for a long time, that META tags are not very useful and, for the most part, not worth your time. Do not waste your time and money developing META tag generators. META tags will not help you get your site ranked higher.

The only value of META tags is that accurate META tag information may help in clickthrough. Google and other SEs will sometimes display the META description in their results page.

See Meta Tags and Title Tags

AOL, Google & Facebook

At one time AOL was the 800 pound gorilla. They were the social networking site of the 1990s (and I must say that I ridiculed the idea at the time). AOL tried to be the portal by which we all entered the web. They failed. At one time people feared the rise of Microsoft. Now Microsoft has become like AT&T: last years powerhouse and today's ho-hum large corporation.

What will become of Google and Facebook? Combined they will make one hell of a team.

Facebook and Third-Party Apps

I have my problems with Facebook, but the one thing they do very well, and for me the most appealing aspect of the site, is their incorporation of third-party applications. There are many options to choose from and it is constantly expanding: quizzes, travel maps, feeds and much, much more.

This willingness to add more functionality, especially third-party apps, gives me confidence that they will not go the way of Friendster. Looking at the popularity of Facebook's Travel apps; their willingness to accept 3rd Party apps; noticing that Google's PicasaWeb is superior to what Facebook has yet done; knowing that Google is becoming an App superstore; it's not unthinkable that the day will come when Facebook and Google will combine forces. Or one will swallow the other.

Which Meta Tags Will Get My Site Rated Higher?

Fortunately or unfortunately there are no major META tags that will help your site be ranked higher. Anybody that says so is trying to sell you something.

Several years ago there were two META tags whose expressed purpose was to help you describe your site.

<meta name="description" content="Place Description Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Place Keywords Here" />

Developers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) quickly started to take advantage of the tags. One of the more eggregious ways that people took advantage of these tags was by putting highly ranked search terms in the tags even though those terms had nothing whatsoever to do with the site in question.

The logic behind this was that people would find and see the site even though it had nothing to do with what the people were searching for. This may or may not have been effective for the sites who were abusing the system but it annoyed people who were using the search engines. It also annoyed the decision makers at Google and other search engines. The result was that these two meta tags became deprecated: search engines no longer valued the information in these tags.

Once again, anybody who says there are meta-tags that will help your site be rated highly is -- at best -- many years out of date.

Is there anything you can do to get your site ranked higher? Yes, there are many things that can be done but none of them include META tags.

SERP: more relevant display

Q: What changes will there be in search results pages over the next 3 years?

Jakob Nielsen: The big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen: Future of the SERP

This is one place where SE need to make drastic changes. I don't see any indication of things happening quickly but this is one of the current technology's weak spots.

As mentioned in the article columnar presentation of search results may improve the situation. Users will continue to scan results, with the majority of users giving higher relevance to top ranked returns, BUT if paid searches and content aggregated sites such as Wikipedia can be sorted out from other returns it would be a useful incremental change.

Will Google make such a change? Only if they see a ROI. Until a competitor forces them to do so I doubt we will see much of a change in the short run.