Showing posts with label Search Engine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Search Engine. Show all posts

Thursday, 17 July 2014

New Google Translation Tools: Edit Text, Change Language & Hear Translation Directly Within Search

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Google has added new translation features, making it easy to edit translation search terms, change languages or hear the translations directly within search.
Going off a tip from @WilliamHarvey, when searching the word “translate,” Google now delivers a quick search option for entering text or choosing the translation language via a dynamic knowledge graph box as shown in this screen shot:
Google search translation feature July 2014Once a full translation search query has been entered, Google offers both the text translation or the option to hear the audio version of the translated word or phrase.
Google search translation options“It is indeed a new feature with added translate tools directly within search,” confirmed a Google spokesperson, “You can say ‘translate where is the closest museum into French’ and you can now edit the text, change the input and output languages, and hear the translation spoken back to you more than once.”
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Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Official: Google Payday Loan Algorithm 2.0 Launched: Targets “Very Spammy Queries”

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spam-viewer-featuredGoogle has confirmed they have released a new algorithm update to their Payday Loan Algorithm update over this weekend.
This algorithm specifically targets “very spammy queries” and is unrelated to the Pandaor Penguin algorithms. A Google spokesperson told us:
Over the weekend we began rolling out a new algorithmic update. The update was neither Panda nor Penguin — it was the next generation of an algorithm that originally rolled out last summer for very spammy queries.
This comes with at no surprise to most SEOs and Webmasters who watch the space. There was a tremendous of rumors and signals of a major update over the weekend, intensifying over the past couple days as webmasters began to look at their analytics and the update has continued to roll out through Google.
The original Payday Loan Algorithm launched just about a year ago on June 11, 2013. Back then, Google’s Matt Cutts told us the algorithm impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries, but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were Web spam is typically higher.
Google told us this specific update is an international rollout and it affects different languages to different degrees, but this impacts English queries by about 0.2% to a noticeable degree. Here is a video back when Matt Cutts of Google announced the update was coming back in 2013:

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Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Google’s Matt Cutts Regrets Not Acting Faster On Paid Links & Content Farms

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In Google’s Matt Cutts latest video, he answers a question I personally asked about what he regrets, what decision he regrets making in the past related to webspam. My question specifically was:
Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret, related to spam?
Matt answered it in than four minutes explained he regrets not acting sooner on (1) paid links and (2) content farms.

Google’s Paid Links Regret

Matt explained that several years ago at a search conference in San Jose, a well-known SEO told him that paid links are too common and there are no ways for Google to fight against it. That is when Matt said he realized that Google has made a mistake and they allowed paid links that passed PageRank to go too far. So in 2005 or so, Google cracked down heavily on paid links and now at this point, Matt said “most people” realize paid links are against Google’s guidelines, possibly against the FTC’s guidelines, that they have algorithms that fight against it and also manual actions around paid links. But Matt regrets not taking action sooner and waiting too long.

Google’s Content Farms Regret

The second regret Matt admitted to was around not acting sooner on content farms. Matt Cutts explained that early on, he did get some user complaints about the horrible user experience some of these content farms had. But when Matt himself went to one of the sites based on a search on how to fix a toilet in his home, he felt the user experience was good. He said he “over generalized” based on that one example, when he should have looked at the site overall and not just one page.
Because of that over generalization, Google didn’t act as fast as they should have on content farms and thus it became more of an issue on the web and for Google to deal with. Here Matt is specifically talking about Panda.
Matt did say that Google does do a lot of “great work” and finds it “rewarding” on the whole. But at the same time, he said he always “wonders” if you could do better by acting one way or another.
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Thursday, 27 March 2014

Google Says Don’t Delete Your Disavow File Prior To Uploading A New One

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disavow links penguinYesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted an interesting tip to SEOs around disavow file submissions.
He said that you should not delete or remove the original disavow file when uploading a new one. He said instead, upload the new one, which will replace the old disavow file. The reason he said was because when you delete the old one and upload a new one, it generates two emails to the Google team and may confuse them when review manual actions.
Here are his tweets:
Quick SEO tip: no need to delete your old disavow links file before uploading a new one. You can just upload the new one.

As you can see, I am making an assumption that the “folks” being confused are those at Google who review reconsideration requests.
So as a note, when you go ahead and revise your disavow files, make sure you just replace it and not delete the original one.
For more details, see our Disavow link tool category.
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Wednesday, 26 March 2014

Five Days Later, It Looks Like Google Has Penalized Web Design Library For Selling Links

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We all saw this one coming: Web Design Library, the website that was using Twitter to renew paid links last week, appears to have earned a Google penalty.
While I was researching last week’s article, I saw the site ranking at No. 8 for the term web design. Today, I’m seeing it at No. 48 for that same query.
But the more obvious indicator of a penalty is that the site no longer ranks for its own name, Web Design Library.
web-design-library
If you missed the original story, someone using the name “Vince” and tweeting from the@vitaliykoloswdl account was reaching out via Twitter to renew paid link agreements with a number of companies. One of the biggest was T-Mobile, as shown in this conversation that began in February:
wdl-tmobile-link-tweets
But if you look through that account’s tweets, it appears that “Vince” isn’t just reaching out to renew some two-year-old paid links, he’s also tweeting at dozens of companies asking tocontact their “link building guy” or “marketing guy” — often mentioning “link building” and “cooperation” between his site and theirs. (Whatever he’s doing, and no matter where you stand on the ethics of buying/selling links, Twitter isn’t the place for it.)

What About T-Mobile & Others?

At the moment, I’m not seeing that T-Mobile has been penalized. It still shows up in Google’s search results for its own name, as well as for prime queries like “cell phones” and “samsung galaxy s4.” And SearchMetrics’ SEO Visibility tool isn’t showing any significant drop in T-Mobile’s visibility.
Why not? It could be that Google hasn’t penalized T-Mobile (and the other link buyers) yet, it could be that there’s not enough evidence that the link actually was bought, or it could be something entirely different. We don’t know. It’s worth mentioning again that, when Google webspam chief Matt Cutts saw the Twitter exchange last week, he directed an “I’m watching you” tweet at “Vince” and not at T-Mobile or any of the other accounts that “Vince” was tweeting at.

  1. @TMobileHelp The link was bought via iAcquire
@VitaliyKolosWDL ಠ_ಠ

Source - http://searchengineland.com/five-days-later-looks-like-google-penalized-web-design-library-selling-links-187591 
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BrandVerity Offers Feedback From Google, Bing On Paid Search Trademark Complaints

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TrademarkBrands aiming to protect themselves from trademark infringement in paid search are often met with white noise after they submit complaints to the search engines. They typically aren’t told if any action was taken — and even more frustrating, if no action was taken and/or why.
To help solve this problem, BrandVerity has added a process to its paid search ad monitoring system to give clients direct feedback from Google and the Yahoo Bing Network on trademark violation complaints.
After reporting a violation, BrandVerity clients will be alerted when an infringing ad has been disabled. If an ad is not taken down, the support teams at Google or Bing will respond with an explanation of why the ad is allowed to keep running.
We’re very excited to have Google and Bing involved here. With their feedback, our clients can really close the loop on trademark abuse. Having the assurance that an ad was truly taken down—and knowing when it was taken down—provides some much-needed visibility and transparency into the trademark complaint procedure. We look forward to seeing an ever clearer boost to our clients’ paid search campaigns because of this new feature,” BrandVerity CEO, Dave Naffziger wrote via email.
The functionality is live globally with Google and in the US and Canada with the Yahoo Bing network, with plans to expand coverage.
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Google Misattributing Content From Major News Publishers

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google-hotel-featuredA reader has sent us examples of Google misattributing content from dozens of large online news publications, with hundreds thousands of examples of Google indexing URLs and pages, but that content being pulled from a different source.
For example, if you search for [hometownlocator site:post-gazette.com], the first result is local.post-gazette.com/boardman+florist.9.125954212p.home.html:
google-misattribution-gazette
If you look at the cached result, it brings up a page from hometownlocator.com instead of from site:post-gazette.com. Here is the cached result:
google-misattribution-homelocator
But when you click through it takes you to the post-gazette.com page.
google-misattribution-gazette-page
The issue can be with Google or with the publisher. I’ve seen examples of this issue being on both Google’s end and on the publisher’s end.
We’ve emailed Google for a statement on what is going on here but have not heard back after about 12 hours. We will update this post as soon as we hear back.

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Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Bing Ads Now Shows Zero-Click Search Queries, Offers 20 To 40X More Data Than Before

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Formerly dubbed the Search Query Report, Bing Ads has updated what’s now called the Search Term Report, which houses the data on the terms users actually typed before clicking on an ad.
Included in the new release are results on zero-click search queries. These terms had been excluded from the report, but advertisers had been requesting to see them in order to build out stronger negative keyword lists and to better understand the terms for which their ads are not resonating with users. With the update advertisers now have access to 20 to 40 times more search term data than in the past, according to the announcement.Bing Ads Search Term ReportFocusing in on these terms can help advertisers improve click-through rates and quality scores.  Additionally, Fady Khoury, Program Manager for Bing Ads Platform reports in the blog post that “the issue of understated impressions and overstated CTR for a search term has been completely solved. Advertisers now have the complete picture around the search terms to make more precise evaluations.” (Emphasis is his.)
Note that if you’re looking at search terms from the Dimensions tab, you’ll still only see terms with at least one click.
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Google Testing New Sponsored Shopping Boxes, With 3D View

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Google continues to experiment with Google Shopping displays beyond the traditional thumbnail box panel of Product Listing Ads. This latest version is larger than the sponsored result spotted earlier this month for the book “Don’t Make Me Think”.
Found by Twitter user Britney Muller of Pryde Marketing, the sponsored result for “Nest thermostats” — now owned by Google — incorporates Google Shopping’s 3D product view. The result presents information from Google Shopping including a list of merchants with prices, product details and reviews all in one box in the search result.
Google Shopping New PLA Display
Clicking on the tiny “3D” icon brings up window with the full product view. Users can view each side of the product by moving it manually with their mouse or by clicking on the individual product shots.
3d Product View Google Shopping
Expanding the number of products with 3D views in Google Shopping has been a priority for the gTech Partner Solutions team which is producing the images in partnership with manufacturers. This search results presentation is likely to garner many more impressions for the 3D product views than they receive from within Google Shopping itself.
We haven’t been able to replicate this for other products yet, including other Google produced products such as Nexus and Chromebooks, but we can expect to see Google continue to experiment with incorporating more Google Shopping content into the search results.
Update: I haven’t been able to replicate this, but Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive spotted this version for the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook.

View image on Twitter
Here's another 3D View PLA (for the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook) http://glennga.be/1fSh7No  cc: @GinnyMarvin
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Matt Cutts: Google Mobile Queries May Surpass PC Search This Year

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mobile searchSpeaking at SMX West last week Google’s Matt Cutts said that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if mobile search exceeded desktop queries this year. A similar comment was made by a Google speaker informally during a roundtable discussion at the International Franchising Association conference in New Orleans earlier this year.
We asked Google for an official statement and the company declined to provide one. Google doesn’t want to oppose mobile and PC search. Rather it wants to emphasize cross-platform marketing and experiences.
Mobile vs. PC search india
The comments above refer to global query volumes not in the US or North America where PC-based search still far outstrips mobile queries. However in many developing countries, such as India, mobile internet traffic has eclipsed the desktop.
Globally mobile traffic is about 30 percent of all internet activity. That’s also the case in North America.
There are roughly 2 billion PCs in the world and more than 5 billion mobile devices. Thus it is inevitable that both mobile internet traffic and mobile search will ultimately surpass the PC globally.
Still when it happens it will be sobering and perhaps even a shock to some who still see mobile as a kind of secondary channel.
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Thursday, 13 March 2014

Yahoo Goes Live With Yelp Local Reviews

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Yahoo-Yelp dealLast month the Wall Street Journal reported that Yelp reviews were being integrated into Yahoo search results. This morning Yahoo formally announced the partnership:
Now when you use Yahoo Search to look up a local business in the U.S. on your smartphone, tablet, or PC, you’ll see user reviews, business information, and star ratings from Yelp. We’ve also added a new photo viewing experience to show high-quality photos from Yelp, other partners, and the businesses themselves.
The information is equally available from Yahoo Search and Maps. When you click on “read all  . . .  reviews” or “write a review” (see image below) you’re taken to the Yelp profile or review page for the specific business. Yelp content is integrated in a similar way on Bing search results.
Yahoo + Yelp
Yahoo + Yelp
Yelp reviews don’t yet appear to be integrated into Yahoo mobile search results. I’m sure that will come shortly.
At one time Yahoo was the local search leader. Few people remember that Yahoo was the first company (after a modest implementation by Verizon’s Superpages) that offered interactive mapping — before Google. Over time Yahoo gave up on the maps arms race.
Now Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is making some encouraging moves to make Yahoo relevant again in search but especially on mobile devices, which means making an investment in improving local and maps content.
The new integration of Yelp reviews and photos, as well as new enhanced local results generally, give Yahoo a boost and more utility. However the company is still playing catch-up to Google in most respects.
It will have to move beyond these now “must have” features if it  hopes to restore or regain momentum in local search.
Postscript: I was corrected by Yahoo that the content is now available on mobile. I was apparently just unable to find it in the couple of quick searches I did on the mobile web this morning.
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Google Confirms Giant Banner Ad Test Is Dead

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sports authority google brand banner adBack in October, Google started experimenting with large banner ads at the top of branded search results on Google.com. If you haven’t noticed them lately, there’s a reason. In his SMX West keynote discussion with Danny Sullivan yesterday, Google’s Amit Singhal said the test failed and is over.
Presumably the click-through rates (CTR) on the graphic banner ads weren’t high enough to justify keeping around. Though CTR seems like an odd performance metric to place on a banner that functions more as a graphic introduction to the organic listings and has no call-to-action.
The test only ran in the U.S. and was small with about 30 advertisers participating and banners showing on about 5 percent of search queries.
We will post the video clip of Singhal’s discussion of the test when it’s available. If you’re interested in taking a stroll down memory lane, Marketing Land captured many of these banner ads during the test in the Slideshare below.
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Monday, 10 March 2014

Privacy Groups Want to Stall FB-Whatsapp Deal?

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Privacy advocates have asked U.S. regulators to halt Facebook Inc's $19 billion acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp until there is a clearer understanding of how the company intends to use the personal data of WhatsApp's 450 million users.





WhatsApp, a service that allows mobile phone users to send each other messages, has had a longstanding commitment to not collect user data for advertising purposes.


But there's no guarantee that that commitment will hold true once the service becomes part of Facebook, according to the filing to the Federal Trade Commission by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, both non-profit groups.


The complaint asks regulators to investigate the deal "specifically with regard to the ability of Facebook to access WhatsApp's store of user mobile phone numbers and metadata."


Facebook, the world's No.1 social network with 1.2 billion users, generates the majority of its revenue by showing ads that target users by age, gender and other traits.

"As we have said repeatedly, Whatsapp will operate as a separate company and will honor its commitments to privacy and security," Facebook said in a statement in response to the filing. The FTC declined to comment.


Facebook stunned the technology industry last month when it announced its intention to buy the five-year old WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock. WhatsApp does not show ads on its service, charging some of its users a $1 annual fee to use the service.

WhatsApp stores users' mobile phone numbers, but unlike many online services, it does not collect user names, emails, and other contact information.


Despite assurances by WhatsApp and Facebook that the privacy policies will not change, the groups that wrote the FTC filing note that Facebook has in the past amended an acquired-company's privacy policies, such as the Instagram photo-sharing service that Facebook acquired in 2012.


Regulators must require that Facebook "insulate" WhatsApp user information from access by Facebook's data collection practices, reads the complaint.


"WhatsApp users could not reasonably have anticipated that by selecting a pro-privacy messaging service, they would subject their data to Facebook's data collection practices," reads the filing.

REUTERS
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Friday, 28 February 2014

Now Official: Google Adds Restaurant Menus To Search Results

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bonefish-grill-menu
That Google menus experiment we told you about a couple weeks ago?
It’s now official. But it’s only available in the U.S. at the moment.
Google announced that it’s now showing restaurant menus as a OneBox-style answer at the top of its search results. It seems to be primarily triggered by searches that involve both the restaurant name and the word “menu,” although Google’s example involves a query that starts with “show me the menu for….”
The menu OneBox shows multiple food options and is divided into different categories, depending on how the individual restuarants (or chains) organize their menu. You’ll typically see tabs such as lunch, dinner, entreés, sandwiches and the like.
There’s actually more that we don’t know about the menus than we do. For example:
  • Where is Google getting the menu details? It seems to be from sites like AllMenus.com and Gayot.com, but there’s no official list.
  • Has Google made a deal with its sources to show the menus, or is it just scraping that information?
  • What should a restaurant do if it wants its menu showing like this?
  • What if it doesn’t want its menu showing this way for some reason? (It’s outdated, for example.)
  • How often will Google be updating the menu information?
We’ve put some of these questions to our contacts at Google, but since it’s Friday evening, we may not get a reply immediately.
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weet Showing How Google Itself Is A “Scraper Site” Goes Massively Viral

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what_is_a_scraper_site_-_Google_Search-9
Perhaps it’s SEO’s “Oreo moment,” a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to do.
Yesterday, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts announced a new Google Scraper Report for publishers to use if they see a site that has copied or “scraped” its content and which outranks the publisher in Google searches.
That quickly brought up a number of people joking in various places about how Google itself borrows content from other sites to make the direct answers it displays in its own search results. But, no joke hit it as right as that from digital marketer Dan Barker on Twitter, who tweeted back to Cutts:

View image on Twitter
It was super clever. Barker did a search for what is a scraper site, which brought up Google’s own web definition at the top of the results. And that definition technically outranks the original source of the content, Wikipedia, which comes right below.
Google does link to Wikipedia in its excerpt, which is in keeping with how its other search results work and generally on the right side of the law, when these things have been challenged in various places. And by scraper site, Google’s really talking about sites that wholescale copy all of someone’s content, rather than aiming for a fair use excerpt.
But still, as Google has increased the amount of web definitionsdirect answers andKnowledge Graph box answers that are drawn from the content of other sites, the tensions have been rising.
With regular search listings, Google typically showed enough information for a searcher to decide if they want to visit a website and, if so, they’d click through. But the changes over the past few years (which Bing also does) have been to provide actual answers drawn from sites, so that there’s no need to click through.
It’s a difficult balancing act, because there are good reasons why it makes more sense for Google (or Bing) to just show the direct answer of something, rather than having dozens of sites all fight to be number one for “What time is the Super Bowl,” as they do.
But, it’s also a fundamental change to the unwritten contract between search engines and publishers — that yes, search engines can build their “content” on the back of publisher content, but only if there’s a fair exchange of traffic.
Barker’s tweet is perhaps the biggest sign ever that publishers are feeling like the balancing act is tipping too much into Google’s side. I’ve never, in 18 years writing about search, seen such a response like this. Last year’s Oreo tweet, when the Super Bowl had a blackout, was a darling example of huge engagement.
That tweet, associated with a prime time event, has about 16,000 retweets as of today, over a year later. Barker’s tweet, not associated with any major sporting event and about an issue that’s usually only of concern to SEOs, is over 14,000 tweets as I write this — and over 12,000 favorites.
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Study: Women Spotlighted In Only 17% Of Google Doodles Between 2010 & 2013

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SPARK logoIn its expansive Google: Doodle Us study, female advocacy group SPARK revealed only 77 women were represented in the 445 Google Doodles featured on the site’s various country-specific homepages between 2010 and 2013.
Analyzing the individuals honored by Google logos appearing on the site’s global and regional homepages, as well as homepages for individual countries, the study concentrated on actual people, excluding any Doodles highlighting fictional characters or individuals connected to a holiday or festival.
According to SPARK:
Out of the 445 total Doodles Google created to honor people between the years of 2010 and 2013, a full 74 percent honored white people. Only 17 percent honored women of any race. And even more abysmal 4.3 percent honored women of color.
Google Doodle women vs men
In response to the study, Google Doodle team lead Ryan Germick acknowledged Google’s poor showing when it comes to spotlighting women on its homepage.
“Women have been underrepresented in history in almost all fields: science, school, curricula, business, politics – and, sadly, doodles – despite incredible contributions both directly and behind the scenes,” said Germick in an email, “We’ve been working to fix the imbalance in our doodles – this year we’re hoping to have women and men equally represented.”
Germick pointed out that his team has created as many Doodles for women as men since the start of 2014. So far this year, the US homepage has featured logos for Zora Neale HurstonDian Fossey and Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman Google Logo
The underwhelming representation of women in tech is not exclusive to Google’s homepage. AWall Street Journal report on SPARK’s study noted Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s calling attention to the issue in her book Lean In.
HBO was also under fire just this week when AdAge’s Simon Dumenco’s called out the cable network for its trailer promoting the new HBO show Silicon Valley, “See the Trailer for HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’: Apparently There Are No Women in Tech (Except for Go-Go Dancers.”
In an email to Marketing Land, a Google spokesperson outlined Google’s efforts to support women. Listing initiatives like Google’s Women Techmakers interview series, the $1.2 million grant Google endowed to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and the launching of the WeTech (Women Enhancing Technology) Fund, the Google spokesperson claimed the company is doing its part to raise the visibility of women, not only in the tech industry, but on a global level.
“We’re working with partners in education to add hands-on STEM/STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) curriculum to schools and to encourage more girls and underrepresented minority youth to get excited about professions in technology,” said the Google spokesperson.
Beyond evaluating the number of women represented by Google Doodles, the SPARK study also tracked Google Doodle honorees by region and found an overwhelming majority were European.
Google Doodles by region
“When we look at whose stories are told in public spaces – from statues in public parks to the Google home page – it tells us who is important in the world,” said SPARK executive director Dana Edell as quoted in the Wall Street Journal report.
SPARK is asking people to raise awareness by sharing its research on social media pages using the hashtag #DoodleUs or signing its “Give Us Doodles Like Us” petition on Change.org.
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Thursday, 27 February 2014

Google Yanks Fake FBI Listing From Google Maps, Puts New Blocks In Place To Stop Further Abuse

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google-maps-appIn response to a string of cases where fake business/organization listings have been added to Google Maps, Google says it has removed those listings and put in place new hurdles to make it more difficult for this kind of abuse to get through its system.
This latest run of problems came to light about a week ago, when some users discovered they could use Google Map Maker to create fake businesses that would be verified via a phone call. In the beginning, many of the fake listings were harmless.
More recently, the same user took advantage of Map Maker tocreate fake FBI and Secret Service office listings using his own phone number, and even managed to intercept calls to both agencies. Both of those listings were created in close proximity to actual offices, adding to the confusion over which listing was real.
google-maps-fake-fbi
Google has now removed the fake FBI and Secret Service listings, as well as others that have been exposed over the past week.
In addition, contacts at the company tell us that they’ve put new restrictions in place that will make it more difficult for this kind of activity to produce a “live” place listing on Google Maps.
This is hardly the first time users have found a hole in Google’s systems that allowed the creation of fake business listings in Google Maps. More than five years ago, for example, Danny Sullivan wrote about being able to “hijack” Yahoo’s listing and changing the company name to Microsoft.
In this latest case, though, the timing is particularly bad since Google just released its new Google Maps product out of beta.
The hole actually involved Map Maker, Google’s product that allows for crowd-sourced improvements to Google Maps. Hundreds of thousands of edits over the years have helped improve Maps, but it was also still open to the kind of exploits that have been detailed over the past week.
Given the competitive nature of local search, it probably won’t be too long before we find out if Google’s new restrictions succeed in preventing more of this kind of abuse … or if users find other holes they can exploit.
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