Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

#frc

"A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."

~Shigeru Miyamoto

@ocdtrekkie A funny thought just occurred to me re: the "mapquest directions" search:

It's ironic how much the search is improved by just removing "mapquest" from the criteria. Like, if people are searching for MapQuest just because it's a name they know, training them to go to maps.google.com or maps.bing.com instead is a strict improvement.

MapQuest pops two banner ads and two block display ads these days. It's kinda crap anymore.

@ocdtrekkie Oh, it still is (in the sense that if everybody does it, the web ecosystem collapses and it becomes a pay-to-play space completely). But "seniors should use ad blockers" isn't "everybody does it" in the same sense that if everybody had handicap access placards, handicap access spots practically wouldn't exist, but we should still hand those out to people who need them.

@ocdtrekkie I think at this point, I may start advising my elderly relatives to use Bing for the same reason I advised them to use Apple back when Microsoft didn't have its malware-and-viruses house in order. Ethics / "evil" aside, there's such a thing as being a victim of one's own success, and if Google can't police this crap purely because they're the biggest target, well, strong incentive to use the smaller targets.

Bing is certainly good enough for the 90% search space to act as a substitute, especially for queries like that.

@ocdtrekkie All of that to say: I definitely agree that Google really effed up pushing ads into the main search flow in a way that only the technically-savvy elite can distinguish an ad from an organic result anymore. Bad move.

@ocdtrekkie Oh, this one's clever. It appears to be grey-walking the policy very carefully. *Technically,* its disclosure and the text on the page says exactly what it's going to do, but you and I both know it doesn't pass the smell test.

But ads policy isn't made of smell tests; it's made of bright-line rules (because Google can be sued for anticompetition if it isn't consistent in enforcing those rules). I've no doubt this one is playing cat-and-mouse with Google ads policy.

@ocdtrekkie I'd be interested. If you can pass the keywords my way I'll be happy to do my own research too.

Senior scams are *absolutely* insidious. I field phone calls for a relative, and it's all damn day with those people. Manage to get one cursing me out because he called back-to-back with his colleague in the same call center; that was a fun day. ;)

@ocdtrekkie There's no doubt Google buys a lot of companies.

Not sure that's the same as stifling innovation (also not convinced Silicon Valley's idea of "innovation" is a qualitative good by itself). Google tends to be able to bring scale to companies with neat ideas but without the tools to do them with the work needed for scale, accessibility or (most importantly) security.

I wonder how many data breaches Google has inadvertently prevented by buying a company that was storing user data in plain-text databases.

@ocdtrekkie (Incidentally, if you catch one of those scam ads, feel free to screenshot and send my way. I'm curious how they're beating the filters)

@ocdtrekkie > Nearly every scam or malware install I've ever dealt with has been traced back to a search ad

No surprise there, but if Google has most all of the searches, that's expected. What does that look like relative to total ads clicked?

> And of course, search ads are permitted to lie about the destination URL

That's just patently untrue; it's one of the oldest violations of ads policy. I don't doubt that some novel vectors slip through the cracks.

What is the alternative? Disable ads? Then there's no search. I'm reluctant to hand the reigns of the Internet ot Bing and Microsoft's stellar corporate track record.

@ocdtrekkie Agreed. Happy to solicit suggestions for better. But a lot of those suggestions won't offer the opportunity to make the world better Google's scale does, sadly.

@ocdtrekkie We will.

Me, I take some solace in the fact that their computer is the only machine my older relatives have ever used that works for them, isn't trying to sell them something, isn't perpetually advertising at them, isn't perpetually broken, and is locked down enough that they can't install anything that breaks it.

There's obviously room for improvement and Brin's behavior (and the behavior of several execs) is indefensible. I'm not sure we're covering a lot of "special evil" ground by calling out American CEOs for being personally trash, but yes, room for improvement.

(Insert Summer Smith's rant about working for the devil here ;) ).

@ocdtrekkie It's already been years.

I think I'd have to get a better idea of what you define as unethical (besides, broadly, pursuing their mission statement "To organize the world's information and make it university accessible and useful") to have any thoughts on whether they're current staff is unethical. More often than not, ethics at their scale is hard to pin down (especially given how many mutually-exclusive templates there are at global scale).

I mean, if your assertion is simply "no company can be that big and ethical at the same time," agree to disagree.

@ocdtrekkie I literally know people currently at Google, so your "all of" assertions are falling on deaf ears here.

Google got hit with a fine by Russia for letting prohibited Ukraine news and information discrediting the Russian military on its services, particularly YouTube.

I follow your content and generally like it, but on the Google topic you're far off-base, no offense intended.

@ocdtrekkie I was just mentioning to someone earlier today: lost my insurance card. As you know, that can be a pretty significant risk to health in the US.

I'd taken a photo of it, but no idea when.

Google photo searched for "insurance card" and it was right there.

All that creep powers magic that keeps me sane, so I'm gonna be a hard sell on "most evil." I was there for the engineers revolting when management even considered AI for drones. I was there to see the internal fights on figuring out what ethics looks like in a tech space that never existed before. And yeah, I bore witness to a lot of less-than-perfect.

But dude... There are actual defense contractors out there. I have no idea where you put the "evil" bar, but it must encompass a pretty wide swath if Google is over it.

@ocdtrekkie Implying Google isn't reputable. They're one of the safest vaults to put someone's data in.

@jaredwhite I mean those tools (the training of the images, the training of the audio models) were created using vast quantities of data curated under means that people are increasingly finding questionable.

Google voice recognition, for example, was trained on the labeled dataset from Goog411. A lot of problems that were intractable three-ish decades ago became trivial when Big Data warehouses allowed machine learning developers to start utterly swimming in labeled samples.

I should look up how Apple trained up their systems though. I know they were working on them for decades before the Big Data approach became popular.

@jaredwhite I lost my insurance card. As you probably know, as an American this can be dangerous to one's health.

Fortunately, I had taken a photo of it.

Unfortunately, I had no idea when, or even what year.

... fortunately, you can type "Insurance card" into Google Photos and it will find it for you. It knows what cards look like.

Thanks for ingesting all my data and looking after my well-being, Big Tech.

@3psboyd Oh man. God bless municipal sewage viral inspection. What a brilliant tool.