About Me 0093: Making Money Working

If you have been frustrated lately by search results on Google, you’re not alone, and Google knows it.

There’s been a drumbeat of criticism of Google’s search results coming out of Silicon Valley — and now the Internet giant has responded, saying it has heard “the feedback from the Web loud and clear” and believes it “can and should do better.”

In particular, the company is talking about stopping “content farms,” which provide low-quality, often unreliable and sometimes plagiarized information on a certain topic, just to get traffic from search.

Google has been making changes to its algorithm to keep low-quality sites from appearing high in searches, search guru and principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in an official blog post Friday.

But he also writes that, despite Google’s efforts, “The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.”

It’s unclear whether today’s post has anything to do with yesterday’s announcementthat co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric Schmidt as chief executive. But the mea culpa highlights one of the big questions Google has been facing lately: whether its search quality has taken a hit.

Just this month, there have been several posts from prominent tech insiders lamenting the state of Google results.

“Google has become a jungle: A tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to Web sites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search,” wrote University of California at Berkeley visiting scholar Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch.

Software developer Jeff Atwood has complained about content farms in particular. “Last year, something strange happened: The content syndicators began to regularly outrank us in Google for our own content,” he wrote.

Content farms, in general, publish thousands of Web pages a day in an effort to draw views from Google searches. A Wired article from 2009 described their goal this way: “To predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results.”

Sometimes the goal is achieved through low-quality but original articles and videos. Sometimes the sites cut and paste or compile content written elsewhere and use “search-engine optimization” techniques to get their own pages to appear higher in results.

In fairness, content farms are a problem that all major search engines are facing — but Google gets the lion’s share of the attention because it has the lion’s share of the search market.

And Google makes the point that it has made significant progress against “search spam,” in which sites patently lie about what is on the page, inserting keywords to attract people to sites that don’t actually have appropriate content at all.

“A decade ago, the spam situation was so bad that search engines would regularly return off-topic webspam for many different searches. For the most part, Google has successfully beaten back that type of ‘pure webspam,’” Mr. Cutts writes.

Content farms, however, are a different story — much trickier, and when you get down to it, just as annoying for readers.

Google’s algorithm proved to be fairly adept at detecting blatant lies about what was on the page. But information from content farms really is pertinent to the search terms at hand — even if it’s not actually what the reader wants. It’s something that a human is easily able to recognize, but maybe computer intelligence isn’t quite there yet.

And if Google’s algorithm just favors “trusted” sites like major media companies, that could create problems for sites that are obscure but contain legitimate information.

Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront.

While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.

The company has just raised $4 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong. And the space has gotten so red hot, in fact, that we hear they’re already out raising another round.

And it’s an easy bet for investors to make not only because of the space, but because of where the project originated: The U.S. Department of Energy. Specifically, RFinity was born when a bunch of infrastructure security experts working for the government were assigned to find all the vulnerabilities in cell phones. Through software they came up with, they were able to quite easily eavesdrop, manipulate SMS messages, and even compromise LAN security. Then they set out to figure out a way to stop people from doing those very things. That work led directly to RFinity.

Work originally began in the person-to-person and person-to-vendor sales space by way of mobile applications that route transactions through RFinity’s own secure servers. But now that NFC appears ready, RFinity is making sure they’re ready for it. The idea is that their technology could cut out the middle man here: themselves.

Obviously, the company isn’t going to share all the details on how they secure NFC transfers. But the basic overview is that they verify an incoming NFC signal and ask for a user’s permission before taking any action. Further, if the action is a transaction, it requires a PIN, just as you might do an ATM withdrawal. That’s all pretty standard. But the key is one-time-use transaction codes that RFinity creates on the fly along with complex cryptographic signatures. These ensure that an transaction is secure since it means that every transaction can only happen once. Even if those numbers were intercepted by a hacker, they would be useless beyond the one-time payment.

And even if your phone is lost or stolen, a thief couldn’t do anything without your PIN. And you can remotely shut down your NFC capabilities via RFinity. It’s enough to make me wish I could throw out all my credit cards right now. “Today’s identification and transaction systems are based on what? A magnetic strip on the back of a card, based on a 1950’s technology that relies on a base station to read the information embedded as a series of simple magnetic markers in plastic tape,” writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, who is working with the company to bring them to market.

Again, NFC as a technology is great and potentially game-changing. But the software is still needed to make it actually work. And some of the big guys began realizing that early on as companies like PayPal, Bank of America, and even Subway have been testing out different things with RFinity for some time. In fact, RFinity has actually been doing field tests of the software end of their technology since 2009 in places like Idaho, well before most people in the U.S. had ever thought about NFC.

But now people are starting to care. And soon, they could be caring a lot more. NFC is already built-in to Google’s new Nexus S device — and the company has put out a call for developers to start using the tech. Rumors have the next iteration of the iPhone gaining the technology as well. In other words, I suspect we may be seeing acquisition rumors starting to fly around RFinity in about six months or so. Provided their technology proves up to the NFC challenge, of course.

bench craft company reviews

About Me 0093

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Making Money Working

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan in hospital after sexual assault in Egypt <b>...</b>

CBS <b>News</b>' Lara Logan Sexually Assaulted in Egypt | Fancast <b>News</b>

No comments:

Post a Comment