Google will soon require all advertisers to verify their identity, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. It's making the change to prevent advertisers from misrepresenting themselves and says it it should allow consumers to see who's running ads and which country they're located in. From a report: Consumers have seen a proliferation of ads for products from dubious advertisers, like fake vaccines, in recent months. Fake businesses have also been an issue. Existing advertisers will have 30 days to complete the verification process, according to a spokeswoman. If they don't submit the documents by then, Google said it will suspend the account and the advertiser's ability to serve ads until they provide it. The company said consumers will start seeing disclosures that list this information on the advertiser when they click "Why this ad?" on placements beginning this summer. Google will begin by verifying advertisers in the U.S. and will expand globally, expecting that the process will take a few years to complete. Google began requiring political advertisers to verify their identity back in 2018 before running election ads.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Remember that story about the Polish dentist who pulled out all of her ex-boyfriend's teeth in an act of revenge? It was complete and utter bullshit. 100% fabricated. No one knows who wrote it. Nevertheless, it was picked up by Fox News, the Los Angeles Times and many other publishers. That was eight years ago, yet when I search now for "dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth," I get a featured snippet that quotes ABC News' original, uncorrected story. Who invented the fidget spinner? Ask Google Assistant and it will tell you that Catherine Hettinger did: a conclusion based on poorly-reported stories from The Guardian, The New York Times and other major news outlets. Bloomberg's Joshua Brustein clearly demonstrated that Ms. Hettinger did not invent the low friction toy. Nevertheless, ask Google Assistant "who really invented the fidget spinner?" and you'll get the same answer: Catherine Hettinger.

In 1998, the velocity of information was slow and the cost of publishing it was high (even on the web). Google leveraged those realities to make the best information retrieval system in the world. Today, information is free, plentiful and fast moving; somewhat by design, Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. But, it's not our bodies that are turning into mush: It's our minds.

Since Covid-19 began to spread, Google has aggressively intervened in some of its most popular online services to limit the spread of misinformation. This is a departure for a company that has relied heavily on software and automation to index and rank information throughout its 22-year existence. From a report: Google searches related to the virus now trigger an "SOS Alert," with news from mainstream publications including National Public Radio, followed by information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization displayed prominently. In contrast, a recent search for "flu season" showed the website verywellhealth.com at the top, while another search for "flu" produced tweets, including one from U.S. President Donald Trump comparing coronavirus to the common flu. The coronavirus has killed more than 3,900 people out of 113,000 confirmed cases.

Online platforms have been inundated with rumors and misinformed concerns about the pathogen as it spread west from Asia, particularly in floods of messages on Twitter, according to Carl Bergstrom, a professor at the University of Washington. Google is swept up in this because it has a deal with Twitter to show tweets in search results, especially for queries about live and recent events. "It's really just a churning mess right now," Bergstrom said. On YouTube, Google's video service, the company is trying to quickly remove videos claiming to prevent the virus in place of seeking medical treatment. And some apps related to the virus have been banned from the Google Play app store, prompting complaints from developers who say they just want to help. The company is also giving up revenue.

Jake Voytko, who previously worked at Google, writing in a blog post: [...] Let's move away from Google's competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo does a good job. I haven't found a reason to switch back to Google. I combed through my browser's history of DuckDuckGo searches. I compared it to my Google search history. When I fell back to Google, I often didn't find what I wanted on Google either. Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. DuckDuckGo serves good results for my searches. I'll admit that I'm a paranoid searcher: I reformat error strings, remove identifiers that are unique to my code, and remove quotes before searching. I'm not sure how well DuckDuckGo would handle copy/pasted error strings with lots of quotes and unique identifiers. This means that I don't know if DuckDuckGo handles all technical searches well. But it does a good job for me.

There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you're a programmer, you know what I'm talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches. Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn't, Google often doesn't help either.

Google is indexing invite links to WhatsApp group chats whose administrators may want to be private. This means with a simple search, random people can discover and join a wide range of WhatsApp group chats. From a report: "Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are," Jordan Wildon, a multimedia journalist for German outlet Deutsche Welle, tweeted on Friday. Using particular Google searches, people can discover links to the chats, Wildon explained. App reverse-engineer Jane Wong added in a tweet that Google has around 470,000 results for a simple search of "chat.whatsapp.com," part of the URL that makes up invites to WhatsApp groups.

Motherboard used a number of specific Google searches to find invite links to WhatsApp groups. Some of the groups appear to not be overly sensitive or for a particular audience. Many of the links on Google lead to groups for sharing porn. But others appear to be catered to specific groups. Motherboard entered one WhatsApp group chat that described itself as being for NGOs accredited by the United Nations. After joining, Motherboard was able to see a list of all 48 participants and their phone numbers.

In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won't find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word "did." TorrentFreak reports: In 2018, [Sinclair Target, the owner of computing history blog, Two-Bit History] wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who some credit as being the world's first computer programmer, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, however, those who search for that article today using Google won't find it. As the image below shows, the original Tweet announcing the article is still present in Google's indexes but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint that also claimed several other victims.

Sinclair's article was deleted because an anti-piracy company working on behalf of a TV company decided that since its title (What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do?) contained the word 'DID,' it must be illegal. This monumental screw-up was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that "Computers are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge." At risk of running counter to Sinclair's claim, in this case -- as Lovelace herself would've hopefully agreed -- it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the DMCA complaint sent to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs Dance India Dance. Now in its seventh season, Dance India Dance is a dance competition reality show that is often referred to as DID. And now, of course, you can see where this is going. Because Target and at least 11 other sites dared to use the word in its original context, RightsHero flagged the pages as infringing and asked Google to deindex them. In the complaint sent to Google, "the notice not only claims Target's article is infringing the copyrights of Dance India Dance (sorry, DID), but also no less than four online dictionaries explaining what the word 'did actually means," adds TorrentFreak. "Perhaps worse still, some of the other allegedly-infringing articles were published by some pretty serious information resources [including the U.S. Department of Education, Nature.com, and USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey]."

Alphabet's appeal against a multibillion-dollar fine for alleged anticompetitive behavior by its Google unit risks backfiring after a European Union court floated the prospect of increasing the fine (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), rather than scrapping it. The Wall Street Journal reports: In a surprise twist Friday at the end of a three-day hearing, one of five judges on the panel said the EU's General Court has the power to increase the $2.6 billion fine, levied in 2017, if it finds that the sum was insufficient to deter the company from further anticompetitive behavior. "The fine of ~$2.6 billion was described as eye-catching, but it is a small amount of cash in your hands," Judge Colm Mac Eochaidh said in court. "Did that level of fine deter you from repeating your behavior?" he asked Google's counsel. Increasing a fine has only one precedent in the court's history, according to Mr. Mac Eochaidh, when German chemicals giant BASF SE was ordered to pay ~$58,000 in 2007 on top of an initial ~$38 million fine for participating in a chemicals cartel.

Christopher Thomas, a counsel for Google, dismissed the idea that the fine was warranted and said the company takes the entire antitrust process "with extreme seriousness." Google disputes the findings of the commission that it had willingly or negligently squeezed competitors out of its shopping searches. The prospect of raising the fine was described as theoretical by the panel's presiding judge. Still, it sent Google lawyers scrambling for arguments, with one sitting on the floor outside the courtroom frantically researching how to contest such a move. If Google loses the case, it has the right to appeal to the bloc's highest court, the European Court of Justice.

The California Supreme Court in a decision (PDF) delivered on Thursday found Apple broke state law by not paying retail workers for the time they spent participating in mandatory bag and device searches, leaving the company liable for millions in unpaid wages. AppleInsider reports: In a unanimous ruling, the court holds employees were and are in Apple's control during mandatory exit searches of bags, packages, devices and other items. As such, Apple is required to compensate its employees for time spent on the anti-theft program, which in this case allegedly amounted to up to 20 minutes worth hundreds or thousands of dollars a year.

Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye notes courts should consider a number of factors when evaluating employer-controlled conduct, including location, degree of employer control, benefit to employees and disciplinary consequences. Applying the logic to the current case, "it is clear that plaintiffs are subject to Apple's control while awaiting, and during, Apple's exit searches. Apple's exit searches are required as a practical matter, occur at the workplace, involve a significant degree of control, are imposed primarily for Apple's benefit, and are enforced through threat of discipline," Cantil-Sakauye writes. Apple's policy demands hourly retail employees submit to a search of personal packages and bags at the end of each shift and when clocking out for meal breaks. The checks are performed off-the-clock, meaning workers do not get paid for the mandatory procedure.

Microsoft's built-in Windows search went down for more than three hours today due to access and latency issues "with multiple Microsoft 365 services." While the issues have since been resolved, it comes just days after Microsoft's Teams service experienced a widespread outage after the company forgot to renew a SSL certificate. The Verge reports: Windows search is built into Microsoft's latest Windows 10 operating system, and it started presenting blank search results for apps or any other search queries at around 8AM ET today. Windows search uses the Bing backend to search for results across the web, and it appears that this was the source of the issue. Microsoft blames a "third-party networking fiber provider" for experiencing a network disruption resulting in multiple Microsoft 365 services issues. "This issue has been resolved for most users and in some cases you may need to reboot your machine," says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

Justice Department officials will meet on Tuesday with representatives of state attorneys general to discuss their investigations of Google and whether the company broke antitrust law. "The probes focus on search bias, advertising and management of Google's Android operating system," adds Reuters. From the report: The meeting is in the afternoon, according to one source, and will include officials from six or seven states, including Texas, according to a second source familiar with the matter. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all the focus of federal, state and congressional investigations following complaints that the four tech giants abused their clout in dealings with smaller companies. The probes are being carried out by the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the House Judiciary Committee. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has said he would like to see them wrapped up this year.

TripAdvisor is cutting hundreds of jobs underscoring the company's need to reduce costs as competition from Google intensifies. From a report: The online travel information provider is eliminating about 200 workers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company had just over 3,800 staff at the end of September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A TripAdvisor spokesman declined to comment, but pointed to a recent earnings conference call in which the company said it was "prudently reducing and re-allocating expenses in certain parts of our business to preserve strong profitability." Google has launched new travel search tools that compete with TripAdvisor, while adding its own reviews of hotels, restaurants and other destinations. Google has also crammed the top of its mobile search results with more ads. This has forced many companies, including TripAdvisor, to buy more ads from the search giant to keep online traffic flowing.

Google's latest design change to its search results received blowback from some who said it blurred the lines between search ads and regular search results. On Friday, Google responded, saying it will be experimenting with different designs, some that will not include the icons that make ads look similar to those organic search results. From a report: As part of a recent redesign to desktop search results, the company made paid links look more like the unpaid search results users see. The word "Ad" in bold text appears next to the advertisements, which typically appear as the first few results in a search and are therefore more likely to be clicked on and generate ad revenue for Google.

Users of Google search on desktops may have noticed a slight change over the last week and that change is affecting what they perceive as an ad. This represents a further blurring of the lines between ads and organic sources in search. From a report: Beginning Jan. 13, Google redesigned its desktop search experience to feature favicons, or preferred icons, next to every single entry, including an ad. Always shown at the top of a page of search results, ads receive the same favicon treatment: the word "Ad" appears in bold, yet small black lettering. Site owners can also choose their featured favicon. This redesign first appeared in May on Google search for mobile devices. At the time, Google said the move was prompted by a desire to help users "better understand where the information is coming from and what pages have what [they're] looking for." Bringing that same design to desktops this month adds to the consistency of the search experience, regardless of the device, according to Google. This isn't the first time Google has changed the look of ads in search. "What an ad looks like has gotten more subtle over the years," said Brooke Osmundson, associate director of paid search for NordicClick, a pay-per-click agency. "It's started to blur the lines between what users thought was an ad or wasn't."

Kim Lyons, writing for The Verge: Google added tiny favicon icons to its search results this week for some reason, creating more clutter in what used to be a clean interface, and seemingly without actually improving the results or the user experience. The company says it's part of a plan to make clearer where information is coming from, but how? In my Chrome desktop browser, it feels like an aggravating, unnecessary change that doesn't actually help the user determine how good, bad, or reputable an actual search result might be. Yes, ads are still clearly marked with the word "ad," which is a good thing. But do I need to see Best Buy's logo or AT&T's blue circle when I search for "Samsung Fold" to know they're trying to sell me something? Google says the favicon icons are "helping searchers better understand where information is coming from, more easily scan results & decide what to explore."

If you don't care for the new look, Google has instructions on how to change or add a favicon to search results. Lifehacker also has instructions on how to apply filters to undo the favicon nonsense.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a "privacy-focused" search engine called OneSearch. With OneSearch, Verizon promises there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers.

With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the "off" position which returns a brighter interface, but with this setting deactivated you won't have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. With Advanced Privacy Mode on, links to search results will only be shareable for an hour, after which time they will "self-destruct" and return an error to anyone who clicks on it. More broadly, the OneSearch interface is clean and fairly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before. But at its core, it promises to show the same search results to everyone given that it's not tailored to the individual. In the OneSearch privacy policy, Verizon says it it will store a user's IP address, search query, and user agent on different servers so that it can't draw correlations between a user's specific location and the query that they've made.

"Verizon said that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising; however, the advertising won't be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual -- it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search," reports VentureBeat. OneSearch is currently available on desktop and mobile web, with mobile apps coming later this month.

Google announced last week the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place. From a report: EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android's home screen search box. A dedicated app for that provider will also be installed on their device.

Prominent figures from Jacob Gottlieb to Betsy DeVos got help from a reputation management firm that can bury image-sensitive Google results by placing flattering content on websites that masquerade as news outlets. The Wall Street Journal reports: Jacob Gottlieb was considering raising money for a hedge fund. One problem: His last one had collapsed in a scandal. While Mr. Gottlieb wasn't accused of wrongdoing, googling his name prominently surfaced news articles chronicling the demise of Visium Asset Management LP, which once managed $8 billion. The results also included articles about his top portfolio manager, who died by suicide days after he was indicted for insider trading in 2016, and Mr. Gottlieb's former brother-in-law, an employee of Visium who was convicted of securities fraud. Searches also found coverage of Mr. Gottlieb's messy divorce in New York's tabloids. So last year Mr. Gottlieb hired Status Labs, an Austin, Texas-based company specializing in so-called reputation management. Its tactic: a favorable news blitz to eclipse the negative stories.

Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured some of the articles on Google News. His online makeover shows the steps some executives and public figures are taking to influence what comes up on the world's top search engine. It also illustrates that despite Google's promises to police misinformation, sites can still masquerade as news outlets and avoid Google's detection. Google removed five websites from Google News after The Wall Street Journal inquired about them. Google, owned by parent company Alphabet, said the sites violated its policies around deceptive practices. Google's news feature forbids "content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content."

Using a divide-and-conquer approach that leverages the power of compressed sensing, computer scientists from Rice University and Amazon have shown they can slash the amount of time and computational resources it takes to train computers for product search and similar "extreme classification problems" like speech translation and answering general questions. Tech Xplore reports: In tests on an Amazon search dataset that included some 70 million queries and more than 49 million products, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues showed their approach of using "merged-average classifiers via hashing," (MACH) required a fraction of the training resources of some state-of-the-art commercial systems. "Our training times are about 7-10 times faster, and our memory footprints are 2-4 times smaller than the best baseline performances of previously reported large-scale, distributed deep-learning systems," said Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice. Medini, a Ph.D. student at Rice, said product search is challenging, in part, because of the sheer number of products. "There are about 1 million English words, for example, but there are easily more than 100 million products online."

MACH takes a very different approach [than current training algorithms]. Shrivastava describes it with a thought experiment randomly dividing the 100 million products into three classes, which take the form of buckets. "I'm mixing, let's say, iPhones with chargers and T-shirts all in the same bucket," he said. "It's a drastic reduction from 100 million to three." In the thought experiment, the 100 million products are randomly sorted into three buckets in two different worlds, which means that products can wind up in different buckets in each world. A classifier is trained to assign searches to the buckets rather than the products inside them, meaning the classifier only needs to map a search to one of three classes of product. [...] In their experiments with Amazon's training database, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues randomly divided the 49 million products into 10,000 classes, or buckets, and repeated the process 32 times. That reduced the number of parameters in the model from around 100 billion to 6.4 billion. And training the model took less time and less memory than some of the best reported training times on models with comparable parameters, including Google's Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, Medini said. He said MACH's most significant feature is that it requires no communication between parallel processors. In the thought experiment, that is what's represented by the separate, independent worlds. The research will be presented this week at the 2019 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019) in Vancouver.

Google has announced that it will stop indexing Flash content in Search as the internet prepares to bid a (not so fond) farewell to the multimedia software platform next year. From a report: "In web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content," said Google engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee in a blog post. "Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files." It is no secret that Adobe Flash is well and truly on its way out -- two years ago, a consortium of internet companies (including Adobe itself) committed to killing Flash by 2020. Preceding that, Steve Jobs' famous Thoughts on Flash letter from 2010 helped set the wheels in motion for the proprietary software's eventual demise, with the Apple cofounder citing numerous reasons why his company's hardware would not support Flash, including performance on mobile and poor security.

For Google's namesake search engine, delivering the right results is about understanding what people are asking for. And understanding that involves zeroing in on the meaningful keywords in a search query and ignoring the rest. Words like "a" and "the," for instance, can generally be safely ignored. From a report: The problem is that there are lots of searches where it's difficult for even a search engine as smart as Google to know how the words relate to each other and which ones matter. One example the company provides: If a user searches for "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy," the "someone" is absolutely critical, since it's shorthand for "someone other than myself." A person would likely infer that that; a traditional search algorithm, not so much. But now Google is rolling out an update to its English-language search engine designed to give it a deeper understanding of such subtle queries, which will let it deliver more relevant results. For the above search, results are now topped with a "featured snippet" involving the specific issue of picking up another person's prescription. (Previously, the snippet involved prescriptions but failed to address the specific gist of the query.) I attended a press preview at Google headquarters earlier this week, where some of company's search executives showed examples of the new algorithm's improved results and explained the new technology that went into them. And they set the bar high for expectations; VP of search Pandu Nayak called them "the single biggest change we've had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning of the company."