Wired: “Remember when web browsers were useful tools? Remember when you could follow sites you liked, check your email, and see your calendar, all without leaving the browser? Or, I should say, remember when you could do all that without Big Tech feeding your personal data into the yawning maw of surveillance capitalism? I remember… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
Google Seeks to Break Vicious Cycle of Online Slander
The New York Times: “For many years, the vicious cycle has spun: Websites solicit lurid, unverified complaints about supposed cheaters, sexual predators, deadbeats and scammers. People slander their enemies. The anonymous posts appear high in Google results for the names of victims. Then the websites charge the victims thousands of dollars to take the posts… Continue Reading
The First ‘Google Translate’ for Elephants Debuts
Scientific American: “An online animal catalogue lets you decode communications and other behaviors for everyone’s favorite pachyderm..Elephants possess an incredibly rich repertoire of communication techniques, including hundreds of calls and gestures that convey specific meanings and can change depending on the context. Different elephant populations also exhibit culturally learned behaviors unique to their specific group.… Continue Reading
How to make your offline self harder to find online
The Verge: “There are two key concepts in information security: threat model and attack surface. “Threat model” is another way of asking, “Who’s out to get you?” If your threat model includes the curiosity of nation-state intelligence services, you have many more things to worry about than J. Random User. It’s more likely that voicing… Continue Reading
Competitive Intelligence – A Selective Resource Guide – Updated May 2021
Via LLRX – Competitive Intelligence – A Selective Resource Guide – Updated May 2021 – This guide on competitive intelligence resources on the web was first published in 2005, and Sabrina I. Pacifici has continued to edit, revise and update it over the course of 16 years. Her objective is to provide researchers with a… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 30, 2021
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 30, 2021 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the… Continue Reading
A Map of the Internet 2021
Kottke.org – “Translating sites, search engines, social networks, browsers, ISPs, and other internet entities into geographic features, Martin Vargic has created a map of the internet circa 2021. It includes several thousand of some of the most popular websites, represented as distinct “countries”, which are grouped together with others of similar type or category, forming… Continue Reading
Google revives RSS – Sort of
TechCrunch: “Chrome, at least in its experimental Canary version on Android (and only for users in the U.S.), is getting an interesting update in the coming weeks that brings back RSS, the once-popular format for getting updates from all the sites you love in Google Reader and similar services. In Chrome, users will soon see… Continue Reading
The Sifter – Search the World of Food
A Tool for Food History Research – “The Sifter is a free website for searching and comparing authors, their works and the details of their works regarding food and related topics around the world and throughout history. Browse and search through thousands of historical cookbooks and manuscripts dating back to the Middle Ages! We have… Continue Reading
Microsoft Academic discontinued & Semantic Scholar withdraws hosting of “Open access” papers
Musings About Librarianship – “In the last month, there were two interesting developments that caused quite a stir in my twitter feeds (see discussions here and here). Firstly, there was an interesting announcement on the Unpaywall mailing list, that Unpaywall had detected that Semantic Scholar which was one of the biggest repository sources they were… Continue Reading
Rethinking Search: Making Experts out of Dilettantes
MIT Technology Review: “…a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model—a future version of BERT or GPT-3. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users… Continue Reading
Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban
The Markup: “…Last year, the Federal Trade Commission sued On Point Global, a company that allegedly advertised websites via Google search where you could renew your driver’s license, buy a fishing license, or determine if you were eligible for public benefits like Section 8 housing. But in fact, when people signed up for any of… Continue Reading
