Ex-Googlers are sick of the BS and create a news search engine. TikTok Ads is coming. Torrents websites disappear.
Hey there, hope you had a great week-end and a nice Monday.
Today, in the Alternative Search News of 2020, week 26, we talk about:
- Youtube is using entities in the algorithm,
- Some new Ads box is showing up on Google SERP,
- Smart glasses North might get bought out by Alphabet Inc., for $180 millions,
- Starlink, the space internet project by Elon Musk is inviting you to try out the service,
- Two Googlers disgusted by the advertising vision of Google & Youtube are launching a new search engine called Neeva,
- Americans are spending way too much time in front of screens,
- Big companies are boycotting Facebook Ads to support anti hate and racisme movement,
- Google is giving money to the News industry… again,
- Google pretends to care about privacy,
- Google fact checks images,
- Torrent websites don’t show up on Google SERP,
- Hackers found a way to use the Google Analytics tag
- TikTok is also in the spotlight for spying on your smartphone’s clipboard
- TikTok is also opening up an Ads service
Youtube is using entities in the algorithm
On Twitter, Valentin Pletzer found out how to prove that YouTube is using entities.
There is a scientific paper I read years ago but what’s cool is that he found out and here’s the proof.
You search for something on YouTube like Minecraft at the end of the url you have a hashed sequence of characters. You take that and then you inspect the element with a Chrome browser for example, and then you’re gonna find a smaller number. That’s the entity.
For example, he found that the sequence /m/0-9v6kPG could relate to Minecraft. So we simply just typed that number in Google Trends and Minecraft did pop up. So it’s very nice, we can imagine many many use for this kind of things but it was just a proof of concept for now.
Some new Ads box is showing up on Google SERP
Captain Pickard on Twitter found out a new box of People Also Search For that includes ads and more ads and still more ads.
So she googled up marijuana lawyer and found out that box. It’s just a rectangle with some suggested queries and those two ads. It’s in the middle of the ads box. So it’s just ads within the ads.
And that reminds everybody that Google the search engine is only a cash machine for Alphabet, the mother ship and they just don’t care that much about organic search. They just need to make more money. That’s the only thing that matters for this company.
So don’t think for one second that our job as SEO is gonna get easier especially on mobile.
Smart glasses North might get bought out by Alphabet Inc., for $180 millions,
This brand is supposedly gonna get bought out by Google for $180M
What’s very cool for North is that they failed. I heard about them with the release of the first glasses and they’re not bad looking. They’re pretty cool actually. They’re definitely cooler than the Google Glass. Remember them?
Supposedly, Alphabet is not buying this company to keep the brand alive, but they’re gonna take apart the glasses and use the technology. The advantage of buying North is that they’ve been doing this for a while. They didn’t succeed nut the 2.0 version of the glasses. While the other ones are still on version one.
This is the future guys, I mean we’re gonna be streaming 24/7 and augmented reality is going to replace smartphones.
At least that what I believe. We’ll see what the future holds for us, but remember that you heard it here first if one day everybody is wearing this kind of glasses and that everybody is all interconnected.
Starlink, the space internet project by Elon Musk is inviting you to try out the service
He’s asking for your email, your zip code, your country and when the service will be available in your area, you will be able to try it.
What is Starlink? Well Starlink is the satellite internet network By Elon Musk. He sent over 500 satellites in space and they want to bring internet through the entire world.
Very cool. We’ll see where it goes, but I’ll definitely check it out.
Two Googlers disgusted by the advertising vision of Google & Youtube are launching a new search engine called Neeva,
A new search engine, called Neeva, was created by two former googlers, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan.
What’s interesting is that those two guys are from Google.
One is from Ads and the other one is also from monetization at YouTube and they got fed up with the whole thing.
They got fed up with the way Alphabet, Google and YouTube were going as far as Ads and they wanted to do something different.
The only problem I see is it’s using the Bing API or similar to fill in the space. It’s not crawling, it’s not indexing, which is a very very difficult task indeed.
So I understand why you would want to start your search engine like this, but they want you to pay to use the service.
You don’t have ads, but you’re gonna you’re gonna pay for it.
I’m not sure that I believe in this initiative but I’ll be sure to try it.
I don’t know why people would pay for something inferior or just equal to what they have already and it’s really difficult to make people switch, unless there’s a really big incentive and I don’t think that redefining what search does for you.
Neeva finds exactly what matters to you whether it’s on the web or any news, emails or deep in an impossible to find document.
“We never show you this Track It Ads and we keep your searches private.”
U.S. Adult spends spend forty four years staring at screens.
Some study found out that People in U.S. Spend up to 4h30 looking at TV, 5 hours staring at computers, 3h12 using gaming devices and 4h30 on the smartphone screen.
That’s nuts.That’s more than 17 hours and obviously during the 2020 pandemic that number went up; I believe to 19 hours. So when do these people sleep? When do they do any sport or talk or read a book?
That’s scary guys. I mean, I’m a digital marketer. I like when people look online, but that’s a lot of hours.
Big companies are boycotting Facebook Ads to support anti hate and racisme movement,
Facebook is having a hard day because big brands like Coca-Cola, Honda, Hershey’s are banning ads for 30 days.
In the name of #StopHateForProfit. That’s a move suggesting that Facebook is not transparent enough about the fact that some right-wing organization are able to have hate speech ads or even post up on Facebook and that Facebook is not doing enough.
It’s a good thing. As a marketer since 1994, one of my rule is to never get involved and I always advise my clients to never to get involved in politics or religion or related topics. Not that it’s not possible and some brands have done it very well, but it’s difficult. It’s very difficult even if the the mission is a good one and stop hate and racism is a very good message. It’s always very delicate to do it. You’re on a fine line because: Are you doing it for attention? Are you doing it really because you believe in the message?
It’s very complicated and here Facebook might lose money. I heard about two billions dollars.
That’s quite a lot but on Facebook’s level, it’s ok, it’s like one month where some big names withdrew the ads budget, but I believe they can take the hit.
Now
Google News is initiating a new licensing program to support the news industry.
Here is the article from Google blog: A new licensing program to support the news industry.
That’s really really funny because they’ve been pouring in money into news organization all over the world because News companies are starving. They are dying.
Why are they dying? Because of the web, because of Facebook, because of Google News.
So it’s nothing new they’re just doing some new stuff.
But I don’t see what’s different between what they were doing before and now. They’re just advertising it.
They founded more than 5,300 local publications just during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
They gave fifteen million to support a local news campaign.
That’s a lot of money. If the news industry doesn’t find a solution on its own, how do you want they to survive by just having governments and companies like Google giving them money.
If your business model doesn’t work, you need to adapt.
You adapt or die. That’s the way I do it.
That was my only path in business. So I guess it’s cool. It’s cool if you got a paper and Google or the government or others are giving you money, but it says a lot about your business model.
Are they made to survive? I don’t think so. I think the news industry is doomed to fail. It’s failing already.
Joke of the day: Google pretends to care about privacy,
Another Google news by the boss, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet.
Remember that Google and the other ones Facebook, Apple, Amazon are investigated by DOJ, Department of Justice, in America, and they better take it seriously.
It’s about the fact that they don’t let anybody get in the market and about privacy.
If you ever went into your history or your Google account to check what does Google know about you, there’s a lot.
Now they just made it a little easier for you to get rid of all that history, especially on mobile.
So you can for example auto-delete activity older than three months, 18 month or don’t auto-delete.
It’s a simple switch because before it was a little bit hidden. Not a little bit! Way hidden, especially on the mobile.
But Google caring about privacy?
The business model is about profiling people so I guess in 2020 it’s time for Google to chill about our private data.
It’s a good thing even if I believe the web is a big mess as far as privacy and Google equals to over 90% of this profiling and the hits, the bandwidth of your smartphone is about Google sending data from your smartphone to the servers, even if your smartphone is off. You believe it’s off. No, it’s not off. It’s still sending data and receiving data and especially on Android Smartphones, you can imagine how much is that.
Google in bringing fact checks information to Google images
Official information here on Google Blog.
If you look on Google Images you can have a little line saying “fact-checked from” and that means that the site showing the photo is included into a database of safe sources.
That doesn’t mean the safe source can’t show fake images but at least it’s interesting from an SEO, a digital marketer point of view, how they whitelisted some sites and that they are able to tag the images and figure out whatever is inside them and figure out if it comes from a trusted source or not.
Torrent websites don’t show up on Google SERP,
TorrentFreak.com is saying: Popular pirate sites slowly disappear from Google’s top search results.
This is something I’ve seen going on for years. At least 8 years and now it’s stronger than ever and it’s worse because they get rid of the official websites. So if you type any of your favorite Torrent search engine website, the real website won’t show up, but a bunch of other websites are going to show up and these websites might not be so cool.
They might have adwares or spywares or they will make you go into a loop about you search for something and then it doesn’t give you the results. It makes you click again and click again. It’s a trap, okay?
So, I don’t think it’s good. It’s good but obviously pressures from Movie studios and music industry is making Google get rid of torrent websites. Now you can use Qwant.com and search for torrent websites and you will most likely find them on there or another
Hackers use Google Analytics to steal credit cards and bypass CSP
Found on BleepingComputer.
Content Security Policy, CSP, is made so that you can trust that your data will be safe and the problem is that everybody trusts that Google is safe and these guys are very smart because they used an especially crafted Analytics tag and they are able to get all bunch of informations with this.
Like always, be careful. Be careful when you have outgoing traffic going out of your machine.
I don’t know how it works on PC, but on the Mac I use Little Snitch.
It will tell you if there is something weird happening. Except this is going on the web. And if they are able to hack the Analytics tag, you are doomed. That’s crazy. I mean that’s really crazy. I hope they fix it soon. Google wake up, please.
TikTok and 53 other iOS apps are snooping on your clipboard
Whatever you copy and paste might be available to an app like TikTok.
And that’s not good because a lot of things are copied and pasted on your smart phone.
TikTok said it was a mistake and that they fixed it. Don’t believe one second that it was a mistake.
I feel safer on iOS. Whether you like it or not, the App Store from Apple is safer. It’s crazy what’s going on the Google Play Store.
They removed millions and millions of apps that have malware spyware all kind of dirty shit on it.
It’s sneaky what they did. It’s definitely sneaky and I don’t feel that we can trust anyone now.
It’s definitely becoming a dangerous world when I see all this posts about the problem of Security online. I think I should stop reading it.
If I stop reading it, it doesn’t mean the problem is gonna go away.
TikTok ads is coming
TikTok for Business. Don’t make ads, make news.
Two years. It’s been two years since the official launch of TikTok.
Previously it was Musically and it was born a little bit before 2018.
But it was in 2018 that it got momentum, especially from the US and I always said that a good thing only lasts about two years on the web.
On the Internet in general. After two years people like me, people like you, people like us : marketers, SEO come in and it becomes different…just to stay polite.
So it’s TikToks turn.
You will have to be very creative if you want your ads to have some traction on TikTok and we’ll see what goes on from there.
But yeah one and a half years to two years. That’s the maximum time that any platform remains marketing free on the internet.
It’s the end of the news!
Hope you liked it, please drop a line to talk about what you think about all this.
Thanks for your time, until next week.
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