The PC Informant » Internet topics

Does Google’s search algorithm rule the Web?

Vic Laurie — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:56:43 +0000

That’s the thesis of a Wired Magazine article by Steven Levy. Before Google, there were many search engines. But the search algorithms of Google made a difference. Somehow Google searches were faster and more accurate. And Google grew and grew. The search algorithms also change constantly. As Google amassed greater and greater databases, it kept tweaking its algorithms to match the way people search. In fact, the average searcher does not formulate a search query with any great skill and Google’s forte is figuring out what the searcher actually wants. Misspelled words, mistaken syntax, Google takes it all in and does a remarkable job of interpreting what you really meant. One thing that has come out of the mountains of data that Google has accumulated is the power of really large databases, something that researchers in science and other disciplines are beginning to appreciate.

Levy’s article discusses how Google works. Here is an example excerpt:

And Google keeps improving. Recently, search engineer Maureen Heymans discovered a problem with “Cindy Louise Greenslade.” The algorithm figured out that it should look for a person — in this case a psychologist in Garden Grove, California — but it failed to place Greenslade’s homepage in the top 10 results. Heymans found that, in essence, Google had downgraded the relevance of her homepage because Greenslade used only her middle initial, not her full middle name as in the query. “We needed to be smarter than that,” Heymans says. So she added a signal that looks for middle initials. Now Greenslade’s homepage is the fifth result.

At any moment, dozens of these changes are going through a well-oiled testing process. Google employs hundreds of people around the world to sit at their home computer and judge results for various queries, marking whether the tweaks return better or worse results than before. But Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group. There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,” says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. “Essentially,” he says, “all the queries are involved in some test.” In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat.

FCC plan to increase broadband coverage in US

Vic Laurie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:30:56 +0000

The US Federal Communications Commission wants to increase high-speed Internet in America. The New York Times reports:

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

In the meantime, the FCC is instituting a service to help gather statistics on broadband coverage and usage. The Times article notes:

In a move that could affect policy decisions years from now, the F.C.C. will begin assessing the speeds and costs of consumer broadband service. Until then, consumers can take matters into their own hands with a new suite of online and mobile phone applications released by the F.C.C. that will allow them to test the speed of their home Internet and see if they’re paying for data speeds as advertised.

PC World describes the new FCC service for measuring and reporting your own broadband speed:

The Federal Communications Commission recently launched a free broadband speed test you can use to check the speed of your Internet connection. The test will reveal how fast your connection lets you upload and download data, as well as other provide information about high-speed Internet service. You can then compare your FCC test results with the speeds promised by your Internet service provider (ISP).

You can find the test on the homepage of broadband.gov, but before you use it there are a few things you should know about the broadband test. This isn’t just a free public service; the FCC will store your test data and could use some of your information to form its national broadband strategy.

The new FCC site is here.

The Internet of things

Vic Laurie — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:48:53 +0000

The Bits Blog at the New York Times discusses the possibilities of more than just computers being connected to the Internet. With microprocessors and sensors, all sorts of things might be “online”. The blog reports on an article from McKinsey & Company that begins:

More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.

Creating strong passwords

Vic Laurie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:05:49 +0000

One of the first lines of defense against hackers is the use of strong passwords for Internet logins. However, as numerous posts have noted, many continue to use really weak combinations that are no barrier whatever to hackers. The temptation to use easily remembered passwords is understandable but perilous and there are schemes to help construct stronger passwords that we can still remember. For example, MakeUseOf outlines a way to create robust passwords that can be remembered. One way or the other, be sure to use passwords that are hard to crack.

A view of advertising from the other side

Vic Laurie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:56:22 +0000

The Internet is not free. All those Web sites that you read have to be paid for by somebody, somehow. But, since nobody wants to pay for viewing Web content, ads provide the funds to finance most Web sites. (Or, as is the case for this blog, it comes out of the site owner’s pocket.) I think that most of us accept the fact that advertising is an inevitable part of the Web. Unfortunately, advertising agencies have used in-your-face tactics like popups and Flash that are really annoying and that has lead many, including me, to use ad blockers.

Ars Technica is a site I read regularly and often cite. Saturday, Ken Fisher posted Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love. He begins:

Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising.

I do use some forms of ad blocking and some sites I whitelist. I really dislike obtrusive ads but I understand the role that ads play in keeping the Internet full of “free” content. After many years of creating and personally paying for a number of sites that were ad-free, I have recently begun accepting Google AdSense on some of them and have sold some other sites. The economics are too compelling. This blog remains ad-free.

Do you use ad blockers? What is your feeling about ads on Web pages? If ads didn’t pay the expenses of Web sites, what other way could be used?

The state of the Internet

Vic Laurie — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:09:29 +0000

Here’s a video with some interesting facts about the Internet. The statistics are a few months old but it’s a quick and easy way to see where things are going.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Too many patches

Vic Laurie — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:01:08 +0000

The present way of dealing with security on the Internet just doesn’t work. A major flaw is that the system is predicated on an assumption that the average PC user is savvy about how Windows and the Internet work and is conscientious about keeping his or her computer up to date. This is patently false. The contrary evidence is overwhelming but the tech industry keeps hiding its head in the sand. However, at least one security company, Secunia, is pointing at one broken part of the security system- the way software patches are distributed. At Computerworld, Gregg Keizer reports:

The typical home user running Windows faces the “unreasonable” task of patching software an average of every five days, a security and vulnerability research company said today.

“It’s completely unreasonable to expect users to master so many different patch mechanisms and spend so much time patching,” said Thomas Kristensen, the chief security officer of Secunia. The result is that few consumers devote the time and attention necessary to stay atop the patching job, which leaves them open to attack.

IE8 still incompatible with many Web sites

Vic Laurie — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:38:41 +0000

When Microsoft made Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) more compatible with Web standards, it ran into problems caused by its own past attempts to impose non-standard software on the Internet. As I wrote when IE8 was new:

It has always been Microsoft’s strategy to impose proprietary software and methods wherever possible. This may have worked on the desktop but on the Internet it has been a royal pain. The fact that Microsoft has to do everything differently and hasn’t abided by Web standards has caused programmers and Webmasters endless headaches. The various versions of Internet Explorer (IE) render Web pages each in their own Microsoft way and add complexity to designing Web sites. What works in IE7 doesn’t necessarily work in IE6 and all versions of IE to date are not standards compliant. What works in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and Chrome may not work in IE. Because IE is still the most prevalent browser, Web designers have used many IE hacks and kludges to try to make their sites accessible to all browsers.

What happened was that a lot of Web sites designed to work with the eccentricities of previous versions of IE were broken by IE8. Microsoft tries to get around this by providing a special mode of browsing for incompatible sites. Apparently many popular sites are still incompatible with IE8. (Note that a lot of sites are incompatible with IE6 but that is an entirely different situation. That is due to the ill-behaved nature of IE6.) The latest statistics from Microsoft show about 2000 sites with high traffic are still incompatible.Mary Jo Foley gives some of the numbers at ZDNet:

According to the IE team’s data, only 19 percent of highly trafficked Web sites are currently rendering in IE 8 browsers in full in IE 8 standards mode. The majority (41 percent) are in “IE 8 almost standards mode,” and another 26 percent are being viewed in “quirks” mode. Fourteen percent still require “IE7 standards mode” to be viewed properly

So, if you are having trouble viewing certain sites with IE8, you may have run into a compatibility issue.

Federal government releases some details of cybersecurity

Vic Laurie — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:19:09 +0000

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Obama administration lifted the veil Tuesday on a highly-secretive set of policies to defend the U.S. from cyber attacks.

It was an open secret that the National Security Agency was bolstering a Homeland Security program to detect and respond to cyber attacks on government systems, but a summary of that program declassified Tuesday provides more details of NSA’s role in a Homeland program known as Einstein.

The current version of the program is widely seen as providing meager protection against attack, but a new version being built will be more robust–largely because it’s rooted in NSA technology. The program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary.

Microsoft proposes quarantine and tax to fight botnets

Vic Laurie — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:34:14 +0000

There’s been a big meeting on security going on in San Francisco. It’s the RSA Security Conference and Microsoft Vice-President Scott Charney gave a keynote address with some new proposals for increasing security on the Internet. CNET reports on a quarantine suggestion:

–In his keynote at the RSA security conference on Tuesday, Scott Charney, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing, suggested that the security industry should follow the health care model of quarantining infected PCs to prevent them from being used to send spam and conduct denial-of-service attacks.

In a follow-up interview afterward, Charney elaborated on his vision for reducing the damage from botnets and explains how infected computers should be kept off the Internet just like doctors quarantine sick people and smokers are restricted as to where they can light up in public.

Charney also proposed an Internet tax to pay for cleaning up infected computers. Personally, I think Microsoft itself bears a lot of the responsibility for the security mess. I agree with Sebastian Rupley, who posted at GigaOM:

Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney today at the RSA conference in San Francisco proposed an Internet usage tax to fight malware infections and the effects of botnets. But do users at large really need to pay for one of Microsoft’s own most costly problems?

Added later: Adrian Kingsley -Hughes also thinks that Microsoft’s suggestion that we all be taxed to pay for Windows problems deserves a Bronx cheer:

Where does this idea come from that we should all have to chip in to fight this war of botnets? It’s safe to say that the majority of these botnet systems are Windows-based systems (I’m pegging this number at close to 99% of the botnet PCs). Let’s also not forget that Microsoft has gone out of its way to create a monoculture where one OS dominates, through legal and illegal methods. So the idea that we should now all pay to solve a problem that Microsoft not only wanted to create, but made billions of dollars in the process is frankly a ridiculous idea.

Right on, Adrian.