Kim Lyons, writing for The Verge: Google added tiny favicon icons to its search results this week for some reason, creating more clutter in what used to be a clean interface, and seemingly without actually improving the results or the user experience. The company says it's part of a plan to make clearer where information is coming from, but how? In my Chrome desktop browser, it feels like an aggravating, unnecessary change that doesn't actually help the user determine how good, bad, or reputable an actual search result might be. Yes, ads are still clearly marked with the word "ad," which is a good thing. But do I need to see Best Buy's logo or AT&T's blue circle when I search for "Samsung Fold" to know they're trying to sell me something? Google says the favicon icons are "helping searchers better understand where information is coming from, more easily scan results & decide what to explore."

If you don't care for the new look, Google has instructions on how to change or add a favicon to search results. Lifehacker also has instructions on how to apply filters to undo the favicon nonsense.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a "privacy-focused" search engine called OneSearch. With OneSearch, Verizon promises there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers.

With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the "off" position which returns a brighter interface, but with this setting deactivated you won't have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. With Advanced Privacy Mode on, links to search results will only be shareable for an hour, after which time they will "self-destruct" and return an error to anyone who clicks on it. More broadly, the OneSearch interface is clean and fairly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before. But at its core, it promises to show the same search results to everyone given that it's not tailored to the individual. In the OneSearch privacy policy, Verizon says it it will store a user's IP address, search query, and user agent on different servers so that it can't draw correlations between a user's specific location and the query that they've made.

"Verizon said that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising; however, the advertising won't be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual -- it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search," reports VentureBeat. OneSearch is currently available on desktop and mobile web, with mobile apps coming later this month.

Prominent figures from Jacob Gottlieb to Betsy DeVos got help from a reputation management firm that can bury image-sensitive Google results by placing flattering content on websites that masquerade as news outlets. The Wall Street Journal reports: Jacob Gottlieb was considering raising money for a hedge fund. One problem: His last one had collapsed in a scandal. While Mr. Gottlieb wasn't accused of wrongdoing, googling his name prominently surfaced news articles chronicling the demise of Visium Asset Management LP, which once managed $8 billion. The results also included articles about his top portfolio manager, who died by suicide days after he was indicted for insider trading in 2016, and Mr. Gottlieb's former brother-in-law, an employee of Visium who was convicted of securities fraud. Searches also found coverage of Mr. Gottlieb's messy divorce in New York's tabloids. So last year Mr. Gottlieb hired Status Labs, an Austin, Texas-based company specializing in so-called reputation management. Its tactic: a favorable news blitz to eclipse the negative stories.

Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured some of the articles on Google News. His online makeover shows the steps some executives and public figures are taking to influence what comes up on the world's top search engine. It also illustrates that despite Google's promises to police misinformation, sites can still masquerade as news outlets and avoid Google's detection. Google removed five websites from Google News after The Wall Street Journal inquired about them. Google, owned by parent company Alphabet, said the sites violated its policies around deceptive practices. Google's news feature forbids "content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content."

Using a divide-and-conquer approach that leverages the power of compressed sensing, computer scientists from Rice University and Amazon have shown they can slash the amount of time and computational resources it takes to train computers for product search and similar "extreme classification problems" like speech translation and answering general questions. Tech Xplore reports: In tests on an Amazon search dataset that included some 70 million queries and more than 49 million products, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues showed their approach of using "merged-average classifiers via hashing," (MACH) required a fraction of the training resources of some state-of-the-art commercial systems. "Our training times are about 7-10 times faster, and our memory footprints are 2-4 times smaller than the best baseline performances of previously reported large-scale, distributed deep-learning systems," said Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice. Medini, a Ph.D. student at Rice, said product search is challenging, in part, because of the sheer number of products. "There are about 1 million English words, for example, but there are easily more than 100 million products online."

MACH takes a very different approach [than current training algorithms]. Shrivastava describes it with a thought experiment randomly dividing the 100 million products into three classes, which take the form of buckets. "I'm mixing, let's say, iPhones with chargers and T-shirts all in the same bucket," he said. "It's a drastic reduction from 100 million to three." In the thought experiment, the 100 million products are randomly sorted into three buckets in two different worlds, which means that products can wind up in different buckets in each world. A classifier is trained to assign searches to the buckets rather than the products inside them, meaning the classifier only needs to map a search to one of three classes of product. [...] In their experiments with Amazon's training database, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues randomly divided the 49 million products into 10,000 classes, or buckets, and repeated the process 32 times. That reduced the number of parameters in the model from around 100 billion to 6.4 billion. And training the model took less time and less memory than some of the best reported training times on models with comparable parameters, including Google's Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, Medini said. He said MACH's most significant feature is that it requires no communication between parallel processors. In the thought experiment, that is what's represented by the separate, independent worlds. The research will be presented this week at the 2019 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019) in Vancouver.

Google has announced that it will stop indexing Flash content in Search as the internet prepares to bid a (not so fond) farewell to the multimedia software platform next year. From a report: "In web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content," said Google engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee in a blog post. "Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files." It is no secret that Adobe Flash is well and truly on its way out -- two years ago, a consortium of internet companies (including Adobe itself) committed to killing Flash by 2020. Preceding that, Steve Jobs' famous Thoughts on Flash letter from 2010 helped set the wheels in motion for the proprietary software's eventual demise, with the Apple cofounder citing numerous reasons why his company's hardware would not support Flash, including performance on mobile and poor security.

"Where's the best place to hide a body? The second page of a Google search." The gallows humor shows that people rarely look beyond the first few results of a search, but Lee Griffin isn't laughing. From a report: In the 13 years since he co-founded British price comparison website GoCompare, the 41-year-old has tried to keep his company at the top of search results, doing everything from using a "For Dummies" guide in the early days to later hiring a team of engineers, marketers and mathematicians. That's put him on the front lines of a battle challenging the dominance of Alphabet's Google in the search market -- with regulators in the U.S. and across Europe taking a closer look. Most of the sales at GoCompare, which helps customers find deals on everything from car and travel insurance to energy plans, come from Google searches, making its appearance at the top critical. With Google -- whose search market share is more than 80% -- frequently changing its algorithms, buying ads has become the only way to ensure a top spot on a page. Companies like GoCompare have to outbid competitors for paid spots even when customers search for their brand name.

"Google's brought on as this thing that wanted to serve information to the world," Griffin said in an interview from the company's offices in Newport, Wales. "But actually what it's doing is to show you information that people have paid it to show you." GoCompare is far from the only one to suffer from Google's search dominance. John Lewis, a high-end British retailer, last month alluded to the rising cost of climbing up in Google search results. In the U.S., IAC/InterActive, which owns internet services like Tinder, and ride-hailing company Lyft have signaled Google's stranglehold on the market.

A CBS News investigation found that some companies that are hired to make negative web pages disappear appear to be forging judges' signatures to trick Google into changing its search results. From the report: One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes. "It never even crossed my mind that people would have the guts to actually go out there and just forge a court document," said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in internet law. Volokh points out that forging a court document is criminal. "Part of it is just how brazen it is. They take a judge's signature and they copy it from one order to another order and they pretend something is a court order. It's cheaper and it's faster -- if they don't get caught," Volokh said.

CBS News worked with Volokh and identified more than 60 fraudulent court orders sent to Google. Some are obviously fake, like one with a case number of "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9." Others are more sophisticated, and appear to be drawn from nine different federal courts across the country. The most recent fake court document we identified was submitted in April. It's not just about making a bad review of a local restaurant disappear. CBS News uncovered bogus court documents submitted on behalf of two convicted criminals who wanted Google to forget about their crimes. Both were child sex offenders. Of the more than 60 phony documents, we found that 11 had signatures forged from judges in Hamilton County, Ohio.

Robert Epstein, an American psychologist, professor, author and journalist critical of Google, argues that Google's monopoly on search can be broken by making its index public. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report via Bloomberg: Different tech companies pose different kinds of threats. I'm focused here on Google, which I've been studying for more than six years through both experimental research and monitoring projects. (Google is well aware of my work and not entirely happy with me. The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Google is especially worrisome because it has maintained an unopposed monopoly on search worldwide for nearly a decade. It controls 92 percent of search, with the next largest competitor, Microsoft's Bing, drawing only 2.5%. Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company's monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its "index" -- the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content -- into a kind of public commons.

Doesn't Google already share its index with everyone in the world? Yes, but only for single searches. I'm talking about requiring Google to share its entire index with outside entities -- businesses, nonprofit organizations, even individuals -- through what programmers call an application programming interface, or API. Google already allows this kind of sharing with a chosen few, most notably a small but ingenious company called Startpage, which is based in the Netherlands. In 2009, Google granted Startpage access to its index in return for fees generated by ads placed near Startpage search results. With access to Google's index -- the most extensive in the world, by far -- Startpage gives you great search results, but with a difference. Google tracks your searches and also monitors you in other ways, so it gives you personalized results. Startpage doesn't track you -- it respects and guarantees your privacy -- so it gives you generic results. Some people like customized results; others treasure their privacy. In closing, Epstein writes that dozens of Startpage variants would turn up within months of opening up access to Google's index. "Many would target niche audiences -- some small, perhaps, like high-end shoppers, and some huge, like all the world's women, and most of these platforms would do a better job of serving their constituencies than Google ever could," he writes.

"These aren't just alternatives to Google, they are competitors -- thousands of search platforms, each with its special focus and emphasis, each drawing on different subsets of information from Google's ever-expanding index, and each using different rules to decide how to organize the search results they display. Different platforms would likely have different business models, too, and business models that have never been tried before would quickly be tested."

A senior search engineer at Google revealed that the company had to tweak its algorithm to combat misinformation after mass shootings. The Guardian reports: "In these last few years, there's been a tragic increase in shootings," Pandu Nayak, who joined the company 14 years ago to work on its search engine, said. "And it turns out that during these shootings, in the fog of events that are unfolding, a lot of misinformation can arise in various ways. "And so to address that we have developed algorithms that recognize that a bad event is taking place and that we should increase our notions of 'authority', increase the weight of 'authority' in our ranking so that we surface high quality content rather than misinformation in this critical time here."

Authority, by Google's definition, means pages that comply with the company's search quality evaluator guidelines, a 166-page document (PDF) that the company distributes to its 16,000 search quality raters. Those employees are responsible for checking tweaks to Google's algorithm to ensure that they give the best results, rating search results on two scales: one that marks whether the searcher's needs are met (if the search is for "Google Jobs," for instance, a maps result showing the location of Google's head office "fails to meet" needs, while the company's career's page "fully meets"), and a second that marks the page's quality, defined over 80 pages of the guidelines with "very high quality MC" (main content), "very high level of E-A-T" (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) and "very positive reputation."

From a blog post: For 25 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) was only a de-facto standard. This had frustrating implications sometimes. On one hand, for webmasters, it meant uncertainty in corner cases, like when their text editor included BOM characters in their robots.txt files. On the other hand, for crawler and tool developers, it also brought uncertainty; for example, how should they deal with robots.txt files that are hundreds of megabytes large? Today, we announced that we're spearheading the effort to make the REP an internet standard. While this is an important step, it means extra work for developers who parse robots.txt files.

We're here to help: we open sourced the C++ library that our production systems use for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files. This library has been around for 20 years and it contains pieces of code that were written in the 90's. Since then, the library evolved; we learned a lot about how webmasters write robots.txt files and corner cases that we had to cover for, and added what we learned over the years also to the internet draft when it made sense.

H. Claire Brown, reporting for The New Food Economy: GrubHub's commission fees had been inching upward over the years she'd [anecdote in the story] been working with the platform. There was the flat transaction fee, which hovered around 3 or 4 percent. Then there were marketing fees and costs for additional promotions. Shivane says she feels like the platform is increasingly pay to play: Spend more to promote your restaurant, and see your search rankings rise. Cut down on marketing spend, and watch your restaurant fall to the bottom of the page and lose sales.

"It's putting us in a financial hole. Last month, I paid $7,000 to GrubHub. That's my rent for the month," Shivane says. The New Food Economy viewed the company's invoice to Shivane's restaurant -- it was actually $8,000. We agreed to use only her first name and last initial in this story because she still uses the platform and fears the company could retaliate by dropping her restaurant to the bottom of its search rankings. Frustrated, Shivane started exploring other options. She says she thought about bulking up her restaurant's web presence and offering orders on her own site through a different service, one that offered a flat monthly rate and no commission fee.

There was just one problem: Someone already owned the web domain that matched her restaurant's name. She looked up the buyer. It was GrubHub. The New Food Economy has found that GrubHub owns more than 23,000 web domains. Its subsidiary, Seamless, owns thousands. We've published the full list here. Most of them appear to correlate with the names of real restaurants. The company's most recent purchase was in May of this year. Grubhub purchased three different domains containing versions of Shivane's restaurant's name -- in 2012, 2013, and 2014. "I never gave them permission to do that," she says.

Hackers working for Western intelligence agencies broke into Russian internet search company Yandex in late 2018 deploying a rare type of malware in an attempt to spy on user accounts, Reuters reported Thursday, citing four people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The malware, called Regin, is known to be used by the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing alliance of the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the sources said. Intelligence agencies in those countries declined to comment. Western cyberattacks against Russia are seldom acknowledged or spoken about in public. It could not be determined which of the five countries was behind the attack on Yandex, said sources in Russia and elsewhere, three of whom had direct knowledge of the hack. The breach took place between October and November 2018.

Yandex spokesman Ilya Grabovsky acknowledged the incident in a statement to Reuters, but declined to provide further details. "This particular attack was detected at a very early stage by the Yandex security team. It was fully neutralized before any damage was done," he said.

A new strain of malware intercepts and tampers with internet traffic on infected Apple Macs to inject Bing results into users' Google search results. The Register reports: A report out this month by security house AiroAV details how its bods apparently spotted a software nasty that configures compromised macOS computers to route the user's network connections through a local proxy server that modifies Google search results. In this latest case, it is claimed, the malware masquerades as an installer for an Adobe Flash plugin -- delivered perhaps by email or a drive-by download -- that the user is tricked into running. This bogus installer asks the victim for their macOS account username and password, which it can use to gain sufficient privileges to install a local web proxy and configure the system so that all web browser requests go through it. That proxy can meddle with unencrypted data as it flows in and out to and from the public internet.

A root security certificate is also added to the Mac's keychain, giving the proxy the ability to generate SSL/TLS certs on the fly for websites requested. This allows it to potentially intercept and tamper with encrypted HTTPS traffic. This man-in-the-middle eavesdropping works against HTTP websites, and any HTTPS sites that do not employ MITM countermeasures. When the user opens their browser and attempts to run a Google search on an infected Mac, the request is routed to the local proxy, which injects into the Google results page an HTML iframe containing fetched Bing results for the same query, weirdly enough. As for why, "it's believed the Bing results bring in web ads that generate revenue for the malware's masterminds," the report says.

Zorro shares a report from CBS News: If you're looking for more "Avengers: Endgame" content to fill the void until you get to see the movie, Google has the perfect Easter egg for you. Open Google, search "Thanos," click the Infinity Gauntlet on the right side -- and watch as half of your search results turn to dust. The gauntlet -- complete with the six Infinity Stones -- will snap its fingers when clicked, just as Thanos did in "Avengers: Infinity War." But this time, instead of eliminating half of the universe's population, Thanos will eliminate half your Google Search results, perfectly balancing the internet. Make sure you turn the sound on.

Google executives are conducting a secret internal assessment of work on a censored search engine for China. "A small group of top managers at the internet giant are conducting a 'performance review' of the controversial effort to build the search platform, known as Dragonfly, which was designed to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest," reports The Intercept. From the report: Performance reviews at Google are undertaken annually to evaluate employees' output and development. They are usually carried out in an open, peer review-style process: Workers grade each other's projects and the results are then assessed by management, who can reward employees with promotion if they are deemed ready to progress at the company. In the case of Dragonfly, however, the peer review aspect has been removed, subverting the normal procedure. In a move described as highly unusual by two Google sources, executives set up a separate group of closed "review committees," comprised of senior managers who had all previously been briefed about the China search engine.

The existence of the Dragonfly review committees has not been disclosed to rank-and-file Google employees, except for the few who have been evaluated by the committees because they worked on China search. Fewer than a dozen top managers at the company are said to be looped in on the review, which has involved studying documents and technical work related to Dragonfly. "Management has decided to commit to keeping this stuff secret," said a source with knowledge of the review. They are "holding any Dragonfly-specific documents out of [employees'] review tools, so that promotion is decided only by a committee that is read in on Dragonfly." Executives likely feared that following the normal, more open performance review process with Dragonfly would have allowed workers across the company to closely scrutinize it, according to two Google sources.

Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire has found an unusual glitch in Facebook's search function. Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to let you look up pictures of your male friends. The Next Web has managed to replicate the glitch across several Facebook accounts. "When you type 'photos of my female friends' into the search bar, Facebook will return a seemingly-random selection of photos from your female friends," reports TNW. From the report: Switching out "female" with "male" returns something completely different. Instead of pictures of friends from within your social network, you're instead shown a selection of pictures from across the social network. In our experience, these came from accounts and groups we did not follow. Facebook will also ask if you meant to type "female," assuming you mistyped your query.

If you're feeling an overwhelming sense of deja vu, you're not alone. The predecessor to Facebook was a deeply unsavory site called Facemash that allowed Harvard University students to rate their female colleagues based on perceived physical attractiveness. It's a far cry from the now-hugely popular social network site, used by millennials and grandparents alike. Facebook has desperately tried to shed this deeply questionable part of its history for something more saccharine and innocuous. [...] The main difference though is that this is almost certainly an innocent mistake, rather than the product of dorm-room shenanigans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from France 24: The Microsoft-run search engine Bing was unavailable in mainland China late Wednesday, raising concerns among some social media users that it could be the latest foreign website to be blocked by censors. Attempting to open cn.bing.com results in an error message, though users can still access Bing's international site using a virtual private network (VPN), which allows people to circumvent China's "Great Firewall" of censorship. It is not clear whether or not Bing has joined China's long list of prohibited websites or if its China service is experiencing technical difficulties.

On Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media site, people complained about the lack of access, with some speculating that Bing too had been "walled off." Others aired their dissatisfaction about having to use Baidu, China's largest domestic search service. "I can't open Bing, but I don't want to use Baidu -- what to do?" wrote one user. "Bing is actually dead -- is this to force me to use Baidu??" said another, cursing. Update January 24, 00:10 GMT: Microsoft says it is aware that some users are unable to access Bing in China and says it is investigating the matter.

On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google's offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark, protesting the company's plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Intercept reports: Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government. In December, The Intercept revealed that an internal dispute had forced Google to shut down a data analysis system that it was using to develop the search engine. This had "effectively ended" the project, sources said, because the company's engineers no longer had the tools they needed to build it.

But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday's protests -- which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day -- said that they would continue to demonstrate "until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all." Google "should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent," said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. "Google's directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don't, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation."

Search engine DuckDuckGo now displays location information from Apple Maps in its search results. "DuckDuckGo now uses Apple Maps both for small maps in location-related search results and for larger, interactive search results that appear in a separate maps tab," reports CNET. "That replaces a combination including MapBox, OpenStreetMap and homegrown technology." From the report: The top reason DuckDuckGo argues you should try it is that it doesn't keep any personal information on you and what you searched for, unlike search leader Google. That dovetails nicely with Apple's sustained push to improve online privacy. But maintaining your privacy can be tough when you're looking for location-related information. DuckDuckGo says it's struck a balance, though. It doesn't send personally identifiable information such as your computer's Internet Protocol network address, to Apple or other third parties, DuckDuckGo said. "For local searches, where your approximate location information is sent by your browser to us, we discard it immediately after use," the company added.

Google shouldn't have to apply the so-called right to be forgotten globally, an adviser to the EU's top court said in a boost for the U.S. giant's fight with a French privacy regulator over where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech. From a report: While backing Google's stance, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar of the EU Court of Justice said that search engine operators must take every measure available to remove access to links to outdated or irrelevant information about a person on request. The Luxembourg-based court follows such advice in a majority of its final rulings, which normally come a few months after the opinions.

Google has been fighting efforts led by France's privacy watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten, which was created by the EU court in a landmark ruling in 2014, without defining how, when and where search engine operators should remove links. This has triggered a wave of legal challenges. The Alphabet unit currently removes such links EU-wide and since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU Google sites when accessed from the EU country where the person concerned by the information is located -- referred to as geo-blocking. This approach was backed by Szpunar.