CNET – “Find your My Activity page and purge it of all those awkward Google Home or Google Nest voice searches. People were understandably freaked out when reports surfaced in 2019 that Google and Amazon were giving human contractors access to audio clips from their customers’ Google Home (now Google Nest) and Echo devices. Google… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700 Million Users Exposed
Restore Privacy – “Data from 700 million LinkedIn users has been put up for sale online, making this one of the largest LinkedIn data leaks to date. After analyzing the data and making contact with the seller, we have updated this article with more information, including how the data was obtained and the possible impact… Continue Reading
Google launches new search tool to help combat food insecurity
The Verge: “Google announced a new website designed to be a “one-stop shop” for people with food insecurity. The “Find Food Support” site includes a food locator tool powered by Google Maps which people can use to search for their nearest food bank, food pantry, or school lunch program pickup site in their community. Google… Continue Reading
What does this new Google Scholar “Public Access” feature mean for me or my work?
Libvine, Melissa Rothfus – “Google Scholar recently released a new feature to the Scholar Profile section that tracks whether articles that are supposed to be open access under funder mandates are actually freely available. The feature is controversial. Some have decried the accuracy of the information and the suggestion to use Google Drive to make… Continue Reading
How to See Trending Searches on Google With Google Trends
Make Use Of: “With Google’s ubiquity, seeing what people search for is quite interesting. By looking at trending searches, you can easily find what the hottest topics are, which terms people care about, and gain insight into the minds of internet users. Did you know that Google provides a powerful tool called Google Trends that… Continue Reading
Google’s No-Click Searches—Good Or Evil?
Forbes: “…Google is an early case study in my book Friction, where I show how they focused on minimizing user effort. Their home page was essentially white space with a search box in the middle—no confusion or distraction. This focus on the user’s intent stood in stark contrast to their competition. The big difference, though,… Continue Reading
Google gets a new rival as Brave Search opens to the public
CNET: “About 32 million people now use Brave’s ad-blocking browser each month. Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. Brave Search will become the default search engine in… Continue Reading
Physics explains why there is no information on social media
ZDNet – Physics dictates machines should minimize entropy, and humans are complying on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms…Social media is…trying to recover a signal from noise in a communications channel. But what kind of communications channel is social media? It’s not a communications channel between people, for the problem of how to send a… Continue Reading
Alexa’s recording you. What’s she doing with it?
YouTube: “Read Sara’s article about the privacy settings on your smart speaker…In fact, over one-third of U.S. adults has a smart speaker. In 2014, Amazon debuted a simple but industry-changing product: the smart speaker. Technically the Amazon Echo was just a microphone attached to the internet that you installed in your home. But it let… Continue Reading
Hidden Chrome Features That Will Make Your Life Easier
PC Magazine: “If search engines are our window to the internet, a web browser is the window frame. A good browser should support basic search functions, but the most popular choices act as their own operating system for accessing the web. However, no option has become more ubiquitous with online living than Google’s Chrome browser,… Continue Reading
Making it easier to find government agencies
USA.gov Blog: “Finding contact information for a federal department or agency is a top task at USA.gov and USAGov en Español. Our A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies directory is a popular feature and the result of many years of user testing and website user metrics. Over time, we’ve noticed a pain point… Continue Reading
DuckDuckGo’s Quest to Prove Online Privacy Is Possible
Wired: “…DuckDuckGo is on a mission to prove that giving up one’s privacy online is not, in fact, inevitable. Over the past several years, it has expanded far beyond its original search engine to provide a suite of free privacy-centric tools, including a popular browser extension, that plug up the various holes through which ad… Continue Reading
