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Category Archives: E-Commerce

Find books with just one search

“Since 1997, BookFinder has made it easy to find any book at the best price. Whether you want the cheapest reading copy or a specific collectible edition, with BookFinder, you’ll find just the right book. BookFinder.com searches the inventories of over 100,000 booksellers worldwide, accessing millions of books in just one simple step.” Continue Reading

Gem Vintage Clothing Search

“Gem finds products [for women and men] from marketplaces such as eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Grailed, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Mercari, Rubylane, Farfetch, Fashionphile, Garmentory, ASOS Marketplace, LiveAuctioneers, Reversible, GoodwillFinds and hundreds of independent online stores. No extra cost for users or sellers – Gem doesn’t promote or endorse any search result over others. Results are… Continue Reading

OpenAI Is Just Facebook Now

The Atlantic [unpaywalled] “Facing one controversy after the next, the artificial-intelligence company enters a new phase. OpenAI appears to be in the midst of a months-long revolt from within. The latest flash point came yesterday, when a group of 11 current and former employees—plus two from other firms—issued a public letter declaring that leading AI… Continue Reading

You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads?

Wired [unpaywalled]- How Advertising Broke the World. “The internet is a cesspool of misinformation, and the biggest blue-chip brands and their ad agencies are the ones funding it—by stuffing money into a Rube Goldberg machine called programmatic advertising…You Are the Product Being Sold. Spending on programmatic advertising globally is estimated to reach more than $300… Continue Reading

A Devil’s Bargain With OpenAI

The Atlantic via MSN: The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly referenced in response to queries in… Continue Reading

Huge Google Search document leak reveals inner workings of ranking algorithm

Search Engine Land: “A trove of leaked Google documents has given us an unprecedented look inside Google Search and revealed some of the most important elements Google uses to rank content. What happened. Thousands of documents, which appear to come from Google’s internal Content API Warehouse, were released March 13 on Github by an automated… Continue Reading

PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data

The Verge: “PayPal is launching an advertising platform built on a trove of customer transaction data. The company’s new advertising business will encompass purchase information and customer spending habits from PayPal and its sister app Venmo, according to The Wall Street Journal. PayPal has brought on Mark Grether, the former vice president and general manager… Continue Reading

What are location services and how do they work?

Proton: “Location services refer to a combination of technologies used in devices like smartphones and computers that use data from your device’s GPS, WiFi, mobile (cellular networks), and sometimes even Bluetooth connections to determine and track your geographic location. This information can be accessed by your operating system (OS) and the apps installed on your… Continue Reading

How to Clear Your Browser’s Cache, and Why You Should

Wired: “Every web browser has what’s called a cache: a temporary storage space for web pages that syncs online content to your computer or mobile device. This syncing is designed to help websites load up faster and put less strain on your internet bandwidth. It’s a good idea, and it works well most of the… Continue Reading

Dataset containing detailed purchase histories from 5027 US Amazon.com consumers

Data is Plural: “The MIT Media Lab’s Alex Berke et al. have compiled “a first-of-its-kind dataset containing detailed purchase histories from 5027 U.S. Amazon.com consumers, spanning 2018 through 2022, with more than 1.8 million purchases […] crowdsourced through an online survey and shared with participants’ informed consent.” The published data include “order date, product code,… Continue Reading

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

Pluralistic: “The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to “AI search” – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you’ll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web: https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/ – Google bills this as… Continue Reading

Google now offers ‘web’ search and an AI opt-out button

The Verge: “This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine. The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content… Continue Reading