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HOW TO WORK WITH GOOGLE:
Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

  1. How To Work With Google
  2. Google Books
  3. Robots Exclusion
  4. Search Operators
  5. Ethics and Google Hacking
  6. Google Fraud
  7. Trust Rank Assessed by Humans
  8. Google Transparency
  9. How to get content noticed by Google
  10. Dirty Secrets SEO, & SEM Black Hat Organic Results
  11. How to Remove personal information from google
  12. Google Wifi Network
  13. Google Makes Money with Fake News

 

2017 Google is only looking for about/contact etc pages on sites that are either shopping or related to financial transactions. This means for hobby sites or sites that don't deal with buying/selling - satisfying customer service on the site that this isn't important if the page is primarily for shopping or includes financial transactions. And while this does add to the user experience of your visitors (outside of the raters), it is now only important for shopping/financial sites.

2017 Google admits AdWords was too complex for small businesses
“Over the last decade, AdWords has gone from a very simple platform to a very complicated platform for someone who is a busy small business owner, and for someone who isn't a digital marketer, let alone an expert in AdWords.”

Revealed: Google tried to block media coverage of gender discrimination case. Company tried to dismiss a lawsuit filed by US labor department, claiming that a government attorney may have violated ethics rules in speaking to the Guardian.

Kill Google AMP before it KILLS the web Trust, independence, credibility.

2016 Google's massive restructuring created a new holding company, called Alphabet. This let the company peel off its more fantastical ventures — things like Calico that's “curing” death, or its Wing self-flying-drone delivery service — as Alphabet subsidiaries, while keeping all of its main internet businesses under Google. With $74.5 billion in annual revenue last year, Google is Search, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Maps, and its app and media vending machine, the Google Play Store. by far the largest (and only profitable) business under Alphabet.

Google is sprinting to attract its “next billion” users hich puts Google in the position of being seen as both a corporate NSA and modern East India Company.
Android commands a whopping 64% of the Indian market. And in 2016, for the first time, Google expects to sell more Android phones in India than in the United States. Smartphones have largely saturated the United States, where almost 70% of the adult population, and a full 86% of people in their twenties, has one. But India is still on the way up. Google says it expects the next 300-400 million Internet users in India to come online speaking native languages. And so Google has rolled out support for 11 of them.

Larry Page lives at 100 Waverley Oaks Court, Palo Alto CA and sex palace penthouse at 31 W. 21st Street NY

Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif.,

Google reveals own security regime policy trusts no network, anywhere, ever!
Google sees little distinction between board rooms and bars, cubicles and coffee shops; all are untrusted under its perimeter-less security model detailed in a paper published this week. The "BeyondCorp model" under development for more than five years is a zero-trust network model where the user is king and log in location means little. Staff devices including laptops and phones are logged into a device inventory service which contains trust information and snapshots of the devices at a given time. Employees are awarded varying levels of trust provided they meet minimum criteria which authors Barclay Osborn, Justin McWilliams, Betsy Beyer, and Max Saltonst all say reduces maintenance cost and improves device usability.

 

THE MORALS OF SILLY VALLEY
Facebook thought it was perfectly O.K. to make people into unwitting guinea pigs when it manipulated over a half-million people's news feeds to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw as part of a psychological study.
Snapchat seemed fine not fixing a privacy breach that compromised the phone numbers and user names of as many as 4.6 million accounts. (The company also refused to take any responsibility for the breach, even though it knew about the problem in advance.) Google continued to treat privacy like it was a just a silly thing, when the company updated its privacy policy to scan people'semails. And then (you know where this is going) there's Uber, which took unethical corporate behavior to a new level.
Uber tried to eviscerate its rival, Lyft, by aggressively poaching drivers, sabotaging its fund-raising and ordering and canceling more than 5,000 fake rides. Then last week, a media storm was set off when an Uber executive revealed that the company had spied and tried to dig up dirt on journalists who wrote negative things about it. And, the cherry on top, the company admitted it could geo-track any Uber consumer with an internal tool called “God View.”
Uber is “the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley,” said an investor in Lyft, the PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, in an interview with CNN Money.

Google Monitor | Holding Google Accountable
Watching Unchecked power that is accountable to no one.
Got Info?

Google has been making editorial decisions about the types of ads they will carry for years. These companies won the right to reject ads they consider objectionable in 2007, when a Delaware district court ruled that constitutional free-speech guarantees don't apply to search engines since they are for-profit companies and not “state actors.” The decision cited earlier cases that upheld newspapers' rights to decide which ads to run.

THE PLUTO SWITCH
Google treats its infrastructure like a state secret. Google had never discussed in public a networking switch, a way of moving digital data across the massive computing centers that underpin the Internet, it's for the engine room of its rapidly expanding online empire. It uses open-source technology called OpenFlow.

2015 Google 'illegally took content from Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor,' report finds FTC report claims Google 'harmed consumers and competitors'. But the lawsuits it suggested never materialised

Google Take Down Notice Fred von Lohmann, Legal Director, Copyright PTO Multistakeholder Meeting May 2014

Google wants to own it all, starting with you.

Humble beginnings:
It began with the simple benevolence of tracked search and a slogan sign, now pockmarked with virtual bullets that read "Don't be evil." Was it evil to turn tracked search into Google Ads and Google Analytics? That's for future, post-Googlepocalypse generations (if they exist) to decide. But it established an engine whereby Google knows what you're looking for, moves you toward more of the same, and offers merchants a crack at us -- though, merchants and customers alike, we're all pawns in Google's grid.
That's a short and natural hop to e-tailing, and Google jumped in immediately, developing shopping technology alongside its search empire. Witness Google Wallet, Google Catalogs, and most recently Credit Karma, soon to be renamed Google Credit (probably). The timeline might be off, but these plots are constantly evolving -- and why screw up a perfectly good rant with precise information anyway?
From e-tail, it's an easy leap to content: Google News, Google Finance, YouTube, and the rest -- bread and circuses, albeit bread and circuses as programmed by Google. That proceeds today with what looks like a push into console gaming. Which games do you like? Check. Where are you buying them now? Check. Can we sell them to you instead? Check. Where are you playing them and can we own that, too? Check.

6 links that will show you what Google knows about you

 

Want to find out all the things Google knows about you?

1. Find out how Google sees you
Google attempts to create a basic profile of you, your age, gender, interests. They use this data to serve you relevant ads. You can review how Google Preferences sees you here

2. Find out your location history
If you use Android, your mobile device may be sending your location as well as velocity data to Google. You can see your entire location history and export it here:

3. Find out your entire Google Search history
Google saves every single search you have ever done. On top of that, they record every Google ad you have clicked on. This log is available to you here:

4. Find out every device that has accessed your Google account
If you worry that someone else might be using your account, you can find a list of all devices that have accessed your Google account, their IP address and approximate location here:

5. Find out all the apps and extensions that are accessing your Google data
This is a list of all the apps that have any type of access to your data. You can see the exact type of permissions granted to the app and revoke access to your data here:

6. Export all of your data out of Google
Google let's you export all your data: bookmarks, emails, contacts, drive files, profile info, your youtube videos, photos and more here

How to Check if Google Considers your Website as Mobile Friendly then use the Google Web Starter Kit if you need to fix common mistakes.

2014 How to Protect Your Privacy from Google Youtube and how "opt out".
Sign in first to see this but Google's Account Settings page has a new section called "Account History". The section shows some links that let you manage Google search history, Google location history, YouTube search history and watch history (the videos you've watched).
YouTube's watch history is really useful because it shows all the videos you've watched from any device, as long as you are logged in. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't provide a search feature, so you have scroll until you find the right video. YouTube's watch history is the most important source for YouTube's recommendations, so you should delete some of the videos if you see unpleasant recommendations. Google also uses video history to improve ads, but you can opt out of interest-based Google ads. <read more!>


Google Begins Removing Search Results Over “Right To Be Forgotten” Demands. How Google's New “Right To Be Forgotten” Form Works - the form

 

2014 Google's Android head Sundar Pichai:

“We cannot guarantee that Android is designed to be safe… If I had a company dedicated to malware, I would also be addressing my attacks on Android.” Who is gonna think twice about what Google publishes on their maps? Everyone trusts Google implicitly and it's completely unwarranted and it's completely unsafe. I could make a duplicate of the White House and take every inbound phone call from the White House. I could do it for every Senator, every Congressman, every mayor, every governor—every Democratic, every Republican candidate. Every office

2014 How a Hacker Intercepted FBI and Secret Service Calls With Google Maps It's easy to spam Google Maps [Scams] with fake listings. This all could have been avoided if Dan Pritchett, a director of engineering at Google made closing its loopholes a priority. But [evil google] There's a cottage industry around flooding Google Maps with fake listings for businesses.
To build sham government locations, start with Google's Map Maker tool (for roads and such) and then switch to Google Places, which is purely for businesses and just update its "quality guidelines," to tweak the listings in the final stage. Begin with a brand new IP addresses and new Gmail accounts. Then, Google gives you two options, ...type in this code and you can get verified to prove you're human so that it doesn't look like an automated machine. Just opt out of that and go directly to phone verification because the way that these people build these computer systems is assuming that no one wants to do more work—assuming everyone wants the easy way out. So if you choose the easy way then we don't trust you, if you choose the harder way and verify by phone immediately, 'Oh you must be a person and you must be legit.'

See Hubs and Spokes - 8/12/14 Google helps build 'Faster' cable under Pacific Ocean with a host of Asian telecoms giants - China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel.

2013 Massive huge Google Play #privacy security flaw with every purchase. Google 'flaw' puts users' details on display

2012 The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently found that Google was the preferred search engine of 83 percent of US survey respondents. Based on a survey of roughly 2,200 US adults, Pew observed that "Fully 83% of searchers use Google more often than any other search engine. Yahoo is a very distant second at just 6%." Many regulators and political officials, encouraged by anti-Google lobbying from rivals, have concluded that Google is simply too powerful and has too much control over the online ecosystem. Facebook is developing a search engine The world's largest social network will be bringing search to its 900+ million users around the globe.

Retired Cindy McCaffrey Google Inc. cindy@google.com 650-930-3524
McCaffrey
says she'll never forget her first interview with the two Stanford geniuses. “You have to remember what the California dot-com boom was like in the spring and summer of 1999,” she explains with a rush of warm nostalgia. “There were so many Internet startups going on, and everyone had a story to tell. And everyone wanted to go public or figure out a way to sell their startup ventures. It was a very frothy time, really. I mean, these were the days of the 'sock puppets' and the gerbils being fired out of cannons (TV advertising gimmicks related to the dot.com boom). "Anyway, it was very, very noisy out there, very frothy, but when I sat down with Larry and Sergey, I could see right away that they were different. They were on a different level. I think they'd already figured out the technology that would make Google so amazingly powerful as a search engine, and that was important, but in the end I don't think technology was their real goal. They had a vision of how access to information could help people, help the entire planet, and that's what they really cared about. I can't tell you how refreshing it was, to meet these two guys and hear them talking about something that was just way bigger than everything else going on. And I also liked the way they questioned everything you told them. They're both real 'contrarians,' and they absolutely refused to let anyone else do their thinking for them."
http://gobigred.unl.edu/featured/husker/Cindy_McCaffrey/

Paul Kedrosky: "In the beginning there was curation, and it was good. People found interesting things on the web, created directories of those things, and then you found what you were looking for inside those curated lists. That was the origins of the original lists and directories, from Yahoo on outward.
But then that got too hard. The web got bigger faster than anyone could keep track. Curation steadily gave way to algorithmic search, which at first was just spidering of the web, and then more intelligent spidering with keywords. And then it became Google, with ranking algorithms that placed websites into a hierarchies of keyword-related relevance based on things like authoritativeness, as defined, in part, by links from other sites -- by those original hand-curated lists, ironically enough.


Q. What has happened to Google?
A. Google's ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha. Damage done by keyword-driven content
It no longer has lists to draw from and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance -- in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape.
Search results in many categories are now honey pots embedded in ruined landscapes -- traps for the unwary. Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It has turned search back into something like it was in the dying days of first-generation algorithmic search, like Excite and Altavista: results so polluted by spam that you often started looking at results only on the second or third page -- the first page was a smoking hulk of algo-optimized awfulness. Think of Twitter as a new Curation."

"Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it's terrible for content providers because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content."
- Robert Thomson, Wall Street Journal, Charlie Rose show, 2009-02-11

1/2012 Google Just Killed Its Search Engine. Google's latest search revamp is a blow to both privacy and competition, critics complain. Google "Search, Plus Your World" is a huge step backwards. Google broke itself. Search engines are supposed to bring the most relevant results ... as quickly as possible"and that's it. Google was the king of that. Google is integrating search results with content from its Google+ social network, meaning searchers will soon see results from content they have shared with friends as well as from the wider Internet, the Los Angeles Times reports. " "I don't like it for its effect on competition, and I don't like it for what it does to people's privacy,” a professor specializing in Internet law tells the New York Times. “It breaks down a very clear conceptual divide between things that are private and things that are public online."

8/12 Google Financial Tables Investor Relations

On the heels of Google's “disappointing” earnings announcement last Thursday - they generated a whopping $37.9 billion in revenues in 2011 - we conducted our own analysis to determine the top 10 industries that spent the most money on Google advertising in 2011.

Google earnings

4/12 Google Rolls Out Its Real-Time DoubleClick Ad Exchange in China
Google's China country manager for media and platforms solutions, David Chen, announced the DoubleClick roll-out on the company's local blog (which is, lamentably, blocked in China along with the whole Blogspot domain). The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.
http://www.techinasia.com/google-doubleclick-ad-network-china-launch/

2012 How Google personalizes search results. “Based on what Google thought it knew about the users, the types of results were remarkably different, Davisson says. For example, while some people were shown biographical information about [Michele] Bachmann, others were prompted to search for her in conjunction with words like 'joke,' 'naked' and 'lies.'” Instead of being an inherently objective search engine, Google reinforces people's existing opinions.“Google isn't deciding what we need to know,” Davisson says. “It's telling us what it thinks we want to know.” The number of results also varied between users, with the greatest difference totaling 20 million, Davisson says. “If we aren't all seeing the same web, we aren't all having the same conversation,” Davisson says about what her data revealed. “When the search results differ this drastically, having a productive conversation becomes virtually impossible.” also see TRENDS

2011 Google has been boosting large brands in its search rankings as part of a deliberate strategy to take business away from thousands of third-party affiliates -- small businesses that make money selling larger brands. This strategy has managed to generate billions of dollars in extra revenue for Google this year. It is a war against small businesses, a major source of jobs in the US. And it's largely a secret war with very few people following, or able to understand what is happening. Not only can Google determine people's ages by how fast they type and the number of spelling mistakes they make, it can infer users' reading levels, locations and interests. Furthermore, Google keeps a yearlong record of searches tied to individuals, Davisson says. “You should be nervous with how much Google knows,” she says. “Instead of giving you an image of the world, it's giving your image back to you. It's like looking in the mirror." “Suggested searches was a major issue,” Davisson says. “Google directs you to different parts of the web that are more salacious because it thinks that's what you want to know. Its searching algorithms are not inherently objective.”


Large brands are able to sell that favored Google status to other companies. Google's shift in strategy and how it now favors large brands over small businesses. Google favors large brands by sending them lots of traffic rather than to small businesses who make affiliate fees. Those brands can then sell access to that traffic to other companies by essentially forming small advertising networks of their own. Google doesn't want attention on this strategy because in today's tough economy and high unemployment, Google is destroying jobs at countless small companies.

These brands can not only leverage internal resources to further build off the boost Google offers them, but they can then take that attention and sell it back off to the highest bidder. ... the biggest retailers are now becoming ad networks.


Filter Bubbles

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles

 

Eric Schmidt, of Google:
"It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." I want to decide what I see from a search engine.That's why I never use google. I use scroogle. Personalized filters make a search engine behave like a mirror - you see yourself. Your search information is controlled by algorithms that have no ethics and decide what you'll see and what you won't. All done without your permission or awareness. Corporations are run by sociopaths when corporate coders are the gatekeepers who have no sense of civic responsibility and citizens don't get good information which only hurts our democracy.

How to Remove and Image from Google

 

WEB FREEDOM

Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin

Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style 'walled gardens'

He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.
"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps - that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."
Brin's criticism of Facebook is likely to be controversial, with the social network approaching an estimated $100bn (£64bn) flotation. Google's upstart rival has seen explosive growth: it has signed up half of Americans with computer access and more than 800 million members worldwide.
Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

Google is fined $25,000 (£15,700) after US authorities found the internet giant stalled an investigation into its Street View mapping feature. The Federal Communications Commission said Google "deliberately impeded and delayed" the investigation for months.

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