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Category Archives: Search Engines

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record

Internet Archives Blogs: “In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at… Continue Reading

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Krebs on Security: “…Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. helps its users remove their personal information from the clutches of consumer data brokers, and from people-search services online. Backed by millions of dollars in litigation financing, Atlas so far this year has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes more than… Continue Reading

Google Scholar is not broken (yet) but there are alternatives

London School of Economics: “…Google Scholar has advantages over traditional academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science: it’s free to use, requires no log in for searching, and has more comprehensive coverage, especially of non-journal sources such as books and theses. These benefits are particularly important for unaffiliated scholars without institutional access to resources,… Continue Reading

A baseline structure inventory with critical attribution for the US and its territories

Data is Plural: “Leveraging high performance computing, remote sensing, geographic data science, machine learning, and computer vision,” Hsiuhan Lexie Yang et al., researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have “partnered with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to build a baseline structure inventory covering the US and its territories to support disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.”… Continue Reading

Media Monitoring Guide Everything You Need to Know

Muck Rack – Media monitoring is the practice of listening, watching, and tracking media coverage and conversation about your organization, your industry, your competition, and topics that relate to your industry. Table of contents What media monitoring means in PR Why is media monitoring so hard? What to monitor and where to start What functionality… Continue Reading

Modernizing Congressional Data – Senate Legislation and Amendments on Congress.gov

In Custodia Legis: “Continuing our series on modernizing the legislative data exchange behind Congress.gov, we are going to look at the next phase of the project – modernizing the exchange of Senate measures and amendments data. The Legislation collection is comprised of bills and resolutions, along with associated actions (including Action Codes), titles, sponsors, cosponsors, and committee-related activity. Legislation text… Continue Reading

Google’s AI Fails At 43% Of Finance Queries, Study Finds

Search Engine Journal: A study by The College Investor finds significant inaccuracies in Google’s AI-generated summaries for finance queries. Out of 100 personal finance searches, 43% had misleading or incorrect information. Key Findings -The study evaluated AI overviews across various financial topics, including banking, credit, investing, taxes, and student loans. The results showed: 57% of… Continue Reading

How to find helpful content in a sea of made-for-Google BS

HouseFresh: “Uncovering the tactics used by big media content farms, SEO pattern makers, content thieves and AI slop creators to fool Google’s enshittified algorithm (so you don’t fall for them, too). At the beginning of 2024, we said Google was killing independent sites with its bias towards established media outlets, even in cases where these… Continue Reading

We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages

Business Insider via MSN: “The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death… Continue Reading