Mashable: DuckDuckGo, the pro-privacy search engine, hits 30 million daily searches. “DuckDuckGo, which bills itself as ‘the search engine that doesn’t track you,’ has just hit 30 million daily searches. According to the company, this is a new daily record for the search engine. DuckDuckGo makes its traffic stats publicly available in an effort to be as transparent as possible.”
search engines
English first: Suicide prevention (EurekAlert)
EurekAlert: English first: Suicide prevention. “Queries submitted to Internet search engines not only reveal a lot about the individual user’s interests, they may also permit inferences to be drawn about one’s state of health. In such cases, some search engines display information pointing to appropriate advisory services, such as emergency hotlines, whenever queries imply that a search might be motivated by the intent to self-harm. However, as LMU researchers Mario Haim and Florian Arendt in collaboration with their colleague Sebastian Scherr (KU Leuven) have now shown in a paper that appears in the journal New Media & Society, the probability of being confronted with such information varies widely depending on one’s location and in particular one’s language.”
VentureBeat: Findera taps a database of 133 million records to connect professionals
VentureBeat: Findera taps a database of 133 million records to connect professionals. “Ever meet someone at a party whose name you can’t remember? LinkedIn or Facebook can lend a helping hand, but they’re not exactly tailor-made for such searches — at least, not unless you’ve got a few details to go on. That’s why Christophe Daligault, a former general manager at Microsoft, launched Findera, a new search engine designed to help everyday folks, businesspeople, and recruiters find individuals — and their place of work — more quickly. After launching in private alpha earlier this year, it’s available for free starting today.”
Gizmodo Australia: Google Is Getting Some New AI Search Features
Gizmodo Australia: Google Is Getting Some New AI Search Features. “Google is celebrating its 20th birthday this week, and is taking the opportunity to announce some new search features which aim to improve the experience for users, as well as keep them using it for longer. Unsurprisingly, they all utilise integrated AI and have a strong focus on mobile. Here is what you’re going to be seeing in the near future.”
CNBC: We sat in on an internal Google meeting where they talked about changing the search algorithm — here’s what we learned
CNBC: We sat in on an internal Google meeting where they talked about changing the search algorithm — here’s what we learned. “In an effort to demystify how it runs its search engine, the company invited CNBC to sit in on an internal meeting where search executives discussed whether or not to approve one particular change: whether to put images next to some kinds of search results. The proposed change was small and hyper-specific, and Google’s decision was predictably data-driven. Ultimately, the meeting revealed both the grand complexity and the incremental simplicity of how Google shapes its search product.”
SEO Roundtable: Google Search Broke For 12 Hours On A Query
SEO Roundtable: Google Search Broke For 12 Hours On A Query . “It is rare to see Google bug out, not work, when you try to use it. But yesterday starting around 3pm EDT through this morning at 3am EDT Google could not give you search results for the query [compare the market]. It is not clear why it was broken, but it was for about 12 hours – which is really unheard of.”
Techdirt: There’s A Reason That Misleading Claims Of Bias In Search And Social Media Enjoy Such Traction
Techdirt: There’s A Reason That Misleading Claims Of Bias In Search And Social Media Enjoy Such Traction. “President Trump’s tweets charging that Google search results are biased, against him and against conservatives, are the loudest and latest version of a growing attack on search engines and social media platforms. It is potent, and it’s almost certainly wrong. But it comes at an unfortunate time, just as a more thoughtful and substantive challenge to the impact of Silicon Valley tech companies has finally begun to emerge. If someone were truly concerned about free speech, news, and how platforms subtly reshape public participation, they would be engaging these deeper questions. But these simplistic and ill-informed claims of deliberate political bias are the wrong questions, and they risk undermining and crowding out the right ones. Trump’s charges against Google, Twitter, and Facebook reveal a basic misunderstanding of how search and social media work, and they continue to confuse “fake news” with bad news, all in the service of scoring political points. However, even if these companies are not responsible for silencing conservative speech, they may be partly responsible for allowing this charge to gain purchase, by being so secretive for so long about how their algorithms and moderation policies work.”
