Show Navigation
Notices tagged with google
-
Forty US states get almost $400,000,000 in #Google location #privacy lawsuit https://nu.federati.net/url/288931 [www thecentersquare com]
They spin this as a win, but (1) it wasn't the states' privacy that was being violated, so why is all the money being split by the states?, and (2) it says Google will make its settings more clear, but it does not say that location tracking and data sales will be OFF by default (which is how it should be).
-
#Google will start allow-listing political spam this month https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/19/23362054/gmail-political-spam-fundraising-email-campaign-google [www theverge com]
-
#Google #Chrome and all other browsers based on #Chromium will get some changes to their extensions API which will reduce the ability of ad-blocking extensions. #Mozilla #Firefox is rejecting that part of the change, so Firefox and other browsers based on their code will retain superior ad-blocking capabilities.
-
Someone pointed out that Google is not really a search engine any more. It is an AI machine that tries to interpret your meaning rather than search for what you ask for. As such, there are sites that are very likely to be part of their index, but which appear to be impossible to pull up in a search. Even using quotes, the plus sign, the minus sign, and site won't be enough to overcome its guess about what you really meant to search for.
All of that matches my experience, but I don't believe that makes #Google not a search engine, even if it makes them not very good at search.
-
Search engines with their own indexes: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html
#YaCy: slow, with mostly irrelevant results
Very true, but the second part, mostly irrelevant results is a matter of degree. #Google's results were once fantastic, but these days, a big chunk of the first five pages of a search are irrelevant results, often SEO'd into high positions and knocking relevant results lower.
#Bing (and #Yahoo, #DDG, and others who use Bing's results) are also described with increasing accuracy by "mostly irrelevant results".
But yes, YaCy's results are even worse. I want to set up another YaCy instance, just to crawl sites of interest in various topics. I know there's a major software change needed to get the most improvement in search results, but having the right information in the global index is a necessary precursor to producing good results.
-
More #Google data-collection: https://shitposter.club/objects/8892f630-e064-4f72-933b-20c552b8126c
(Note: someone speculated that this is probably a requirement of all telecom providers, so switching to #Apple phones would not change things.)
-
https://global.royole.com/us/rowrite-2-smart-writing-pad
I know this means I'll have to add a #Google account to my new A7 Lite tablet. (I'm sure this only talks to their own app, which I'm almost 100% sure is only in the Play Store.)
But I've been wanting a handwriting-based notes and drawings app for a while. I sent one to my #SoCal home and one to #sonTwo, so I expect to have a full "this is what works well, this is what works not so well" rundown before I ever open the box.
-
https://briarproject.org/news/2022-briar-removed-from-google-play/
#Briar removed from #Google’s Play Store, expected to return soon.
This is a bad time for such situations; people in certain European countries should be using such #peer-to-peer technologies for their communications, to reduce the chance of interception.
-
From 2021 July: Mermaid spammers using Danish .DK domains near top of #Google search results in #Norway. https://alexskra.com/blog/the-mermaid-is-taking-over-google-search-in-norway/ [alexskra com]
I don't know where I found the link, but the content was interesting.
-
A lot of us are concerned about #Firefox, about #Thunderbird, and about #Mozilla itself. The trouble is, most of the seeds of Moz's current affliction were planted early on, when the #Google search deal was first signed.
They received an unimaginable amount of money, and being good people, they decided to pour it into becoming the Web's advocate and (later on) the Web's privacy advocate.
They built a large organization, with some very high salaries at the top, based on the revenue they received from a single customer. And then that customer launched its own browser, #Chrome, in part because Firefox was going slower than Google desired because so many resources were going into other projects and because Google's plans were not always aligned with what Mozilla believed was best for the Web.
It was always an unsustainable situation, and when things changed due to cooperation being replaced with coopetition, they started a panicked grasping for other revenue sources.
Now, they've cut actual developers, which makes it even more difficult to keep up with Chrome / #Chromium (and the many browsers derived from it). And because they need to find other revenue sources, they keep looking for ad deals ... which runs crosswise with its core users, who want to block ads.
So, yeah, I don't see a way out that leaves them as anything other than a niche product produced by a small team of mostly volunteers.
I do think _personalization_ as a differentiator is going to flop, if they're thinking about color schemes and superhero logos. A big chunk of what people did with XUL (the former technology, and what made it so customizable) was produce ad blockers, script blockers, embedded-media blockers, pop-up blockers, cookie and tracking blockers, proxy tools, and web development tools (webdev toolbars, xml toolbars, json tools, css and xsl tools, sqlite tools). I just don't think that the ability to make your browser look like the Spiderman t-shirt you bought last week is going to win over a lot of people who are using Chrome/Chomium/Edge/Opera/Vivaldi/Brave/Iron.
Now, maybe if they make it the most secure and private browser right out of the box, with ad blocking, script blocking, and so on, plus make it faster than the Chromium family while consuming less RAM and crashing less often, then adding the ability to dress the browser up as Dora the Explorer will total enough advantages to make a difference.
-
#Samsung and #Google announce unified watch platform, merging #Tizen and #Android based #WearOS. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22440483/samsung-smartwatch-google-wearos-tizen-watch [www theverge com]
-
Today is a very slow day. Ordinarily, I'd be using the company-paid #LinkedIn / #LockedOut Learning subscription to learn more about #MSAzure, #AWS, #PowerShell, or even #PHP.
I take courses on both #Microsoft and #Amazon clouds, but never #Google, #IBM, #CenturyLink / #Lumen clouds. I need to look into those clouds.
-
I do disagree with this, in that #Bing's search results aren't just bad because they can only crawl 90% of the sites that #Google can. Bing's results are bad because their ranking algorithms fail to put the information people are searching for at the top of the results. If one clicks through 9 or 10 pages of results, one might find something relevant, which was probably why #Yahoo and #DDG used to deliver better results than Bing, while sourcing most or all of their results from Bing.
-
https://nu.federati.net/url/284139 [www abc net au]
Could #Australia build a national search engine to compete with #Google?
-
Today’s #Google doodle celebrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Weigl who created a vaccine for #typhus and one for spotted fever.
NOTE: His vaccines did not confer total immunity, but made people less sick and less likely to die if they did get the disease.
-
@musicman They don't seem to be running Duckbot anymore, just grabbing results straight from #Bing. And Bing's results were almost as bad as Ask's, last time I checked.
So, yeah, I don't know how #DDG (and to some extent #Yahoo) were able to do it before, but their results were far better than Bing's despite mostly coming from Bing. Now, they're pretty similar ... and overall bad.
I still go to #DuckDuckGo first, but more and more, I find myself going to #Startpage or directly to #Google after a failed DDG search.
-
https://therecord.media/google-abandons-experiment-to-show-simplified-domain-urls-in-chrome/ [therecord media]
#Google abandons truncated #URLs. As nearly everyone predicted, the security outcomes were not improved.
-
#Microsoft, #Apple, #Google fight against users' #right_to_repair the devices the user paid for. https://nu.federati.net/url/281249 [www bloomberg com]
-
Apple's App Store had 78% profit margins last year https://nu.federati.net/url/281161 [apple slashdot org]
Though it is hard to feel any sympathy for #Epic_Games (being motivated by wanting to capture gamers in their own store, not to free #iOS users from captivity to Apple's store), I'm leaning toward wanting them to win their suit, just because #Apple and #Google exercise way too much control over what people can install on the devices they pay for.
-
While I was on my walk, I saw a kid on a bike who reminded me of Charlie from the old neighborhood. So I threw Charlie’s full name into #DuckDuckGo and #Google and followed some links to see whether he left any tracks. So neither search produced the sort of results which used to be routine just a few years ago.
First of all, any time you do this, the top half of results are the “search for anyone and we’ll find them … for a fee” sites. If you go to those sites and throw in first-middle-last name and age, you usually get hundreds of results, but that’s because they are not filtered … there will people from 18 to 80, people who only share one of the names in your search, people who have or had relationships with a person with the name, and people who have aliases close to the name in question.
Next are “close, but no cigar” results: Similar names. Mug shots sites.*
Only then will you see any interesting results.
I haven’t been in contact with Charlie since we were both less than half our current ages. I am pretty sure I saw him walking across a store’s parking lot in the 1990s, but no contact was made. Nor was contact the object of my search. A good chunk of the people I once knew have passed on, so I really just wanted to see whether he was still among the living and to have a general idea where he might be.
* In the past, I did find out about both Steve and Jay because of a mug shots site. Steve is presumably still behind bars in another state. Jay served a year or so and was released.