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      Yelp: It’s gotten worse since Google made changes to comply with EU rules

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 24 February - 11:34 · 1 minute · 3 visibility

    illustration of google and yelp logos

    Enlarge (credit: Anjali Nair; Getty Images)

    To comply with looming rules that ban tech giants from favoring their own services, Google has been testing new look search results for flights, trains, hotels, restaurants, and products in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is supposed to help smaller companies get more traffic from Google, but reviews service Yelp says that when it tested Google’s design tweaks with consumers it had the opposite effect—making people less likely to click through to Yelp or another Google competitor.

    The results, which Yelp shared with European regulators in December and WIRED this month, put some numerical backing behind complaints from Google rivals in travel, shopping, and hospitality that its efforts to comply with the DMA are insufficient—and potentially more harmful than the status quo. Yelp and thousands of others have been demanding that the EU hold a firm line against the giant companies including Apple and Amazon that are subject to what’s widely considered the world’s strictest antitrust law, violations of which can draw fines of up to 10 percent of global annual sales.

    “All the gatekeepers are trying to hold on as long as possible to the status quo and make the new world unattractive,” says Richard Stables, CEO of shopping comparison site Kelkoo, which is unhappy with how Google has tweaked shopping results to comply with the DMA. “That’s really the game plan.”

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      Google Search results are showing Reddit URLs altered to include a slur

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 December - 17:03

    A magnifying glass is photographed with Google logo displayed

    Enlarge (credit: Getty )

    Reddit URLs are being manipulated to include a slur in the subdomain, and those URLs are coming up in Google Search results.

    The Verge experienced the problem on Tuesday, reporting that while doing a Google search, Reddit results that came up had a URL that looked like this: "https://2goback-[slur].reddit.com/r/[the rest of the URL]".

    One Reddit user posted about the problem on Monday , and other Redditors also noticed the issue (examples here and here ).

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      Cette requête sur la sexualité est la plus recherchée par les internautes français

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Wednesday, 29 November - 15:21

    Exusondage

    L'évolution des tendances de recherche sur Internet peut souvent révéler des changements importants dans les attitudes et les comportements sociaux.

    Cette requête sur la sexualité est la plus recherchée par les internautes français

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      Apple considered ditching Google for DuckDuckGo in Safari’s private mode

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 5 October - 21:17

    John Giannandrea gestures while speaking at a TechCrunch conference

    Enlarge / Apple AI executive and former Google search lead John Giannandrea. (credit: Steve Jennings / TechCrunch / Flickr )

    In iOS 17 , Apple recently made it easier to use alternatives to Google search in private browsing mode—but the company considered going even further by making DuckDuckGo, which is marketed as a more private alternative, the default choice in that context.

    As reported by Bloomberg's Leah Nylen, the information came to light when Amit Mehta, the US District Judge who is handling the US antitrust trial over Google search, unsealed transcripts of testimonies by DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple SVP of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannandrea. Giannandrea worked as Google's head of search before his current role at Apple .

    Weinberg claimed in his testimony that his company had 20 or so meetings with Apple about the possibility and that he believed the change would happen based on prior DuckDuckGo integrations make their way into Safari. He even said this was the one proposed integration that didn't make it "all the way through the finish line."

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      Report: Google’s money was “key” factor in Apple rejecting Bing purchase

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 29 September - 15:39

    iPhone showing a Bing upgrade prompt

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    A few years before Microsoft went all-in on a ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine , the company had another idea for its perennial, also-ran search engine: sell it to Apple.

    A report in Bloomberg , sourced from people familiar with the early theoretical sales talks, states that Microsoft pitched Bing as a way for Apple to replace Google as the default search provider on iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices.

    The deal didn't make it past the conversation stage, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft executives approached Eddie Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, who brokered Apple's deal with Google—purportedly worth between $4 and $7 billion in 2020—for Google's long-standing default placement. Google's paid presence on Apple devices has been reviewed in court recently as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust trial over Google's search business.

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      Google Search Asked to Remove One Billion ‘Pirate’ Links in 9 Months

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Monday, 7 August, 2023 - 20:22 · 3 minutes

    google old Roughly 25 years ago, Google started its business as a simple and straightforward search engine.

    The startup swiftly captured a dominant market share which it managed to retain and grow as the years passed by.

    Google’s position as a search leader also brings responsibility, an issue copyright holders hammered on for a long time. Slowly but steadily, Google tweaked its policies to hinder pirate sites.

    The most direct way for the search engine to address the piracy problem is by responding to DMCA notices. If copyright holders spot pirate sites in search results, they can direct Google to remove these links from its indexes.

    Seven Billion Reported URLs

    Google first started to keep track of these takedown notices at the beginning of the last decade. In the spring of 2012, Google launched its Transparency Report which publishes all DMCA requests the company receives, including the targeted links and their senders. This provided fuel for hundreds of news reports as well as academic research.

    A few days ago, Google reached a new milestone when it processed the seven billionth removal request. It’s a mind-boggling number that comes less than a year after the six billionth takedown was recorded.

    7 billion

    Looking more closely at the timeline, we see that a billion URLs were reported to Google search in less than nine months. For comparison, it took twice as long to go from five to six billion, suggesting that the takedown volume picked up again after a previously reported decline.

    There’s no denying the recent surge in reported links but much of the increase was generated by a single rightsholder in an effort to remove a particular pirate operation from Google search.

    Two Domains, One Pirate

    Around the start of the year MG Premium began to increase its takedown efforts. The company is an intellectual property vehicle of the MindGeek conglomerate, known for popular adult sites such as PornHub. One of MG Premium’s main goals is to shut down ‘unlicensed’ sites or at least make when unfindable.

    Last year, MG Premium scored a multi-million dollar damages win in a U.S. federal court against pirate ‘tube site’ Daftsex . This order also took down the main .com domain, but that didn’t stop the site. Daftsex simply continued using alternative domains which remain available to this day.

    This defiant stance prompted MG Premium to start a DMCA takedown spree on a scale never witnessed before. In the first few months of the year, the company flagged more than a quarter billion Daftsex URLs, mostly dsex.to and daft.sex.

    mg premium

    The surge is clearly visible in the graph above and at times the company was averaging more than two million takedown requests per day. More recently the volume has come down a bit, but it’s been a major contributor to Google’s takedown uptick.

    7 Billion in Perspective

    The seven billion figure itself also deserves some clarification. This number only refers to the URLs that were reported to Google, and includes duplicates, as well as pages that were not in Google’s index. The latter category is placed on a special watchlist to make sure they’re not added again in the future.

    Google also rejects millions of takedown requests because they fail to show links to infringing content. This applies to more than one hundred TorrentFreak URLs that were flagged incorrectly, as well as pages from Netflix, IMDb , The White House, NASA, and even the FBI .

    Finally, it’s worth mentioning that not all takedown notices are sent by the people or companies listed in them. Over the past several years, we have seen numerous imposters sending notices on behalf of legitimate rightsholders. These are often sent by pirate site owners attempting to take out the competition.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      You can now search comments within a Reddit post—even on desktop

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 27 February, 2023 - 21:18

    Reddit has expanded its search features.

    Enlarge / Reddit has expanded its search features. (credit: Reddit )

    Today, Reddit announced a new feature that addresses one of the more frustrating limitations of the platform over the years: You can now type in a query to search all the comments within a single Reddit post.

    On desktop, the search field appears alongside the sort options, nestled underneath the comment box for leaving a new comment and above the feed of all previous comments.

    It might seem basic, but it hasn't been possible on the modern desktop version of Reddit before. CTRL + F or CMD + F for browser search didn't always work, either, as some comments had to be expanded to be exposed to the browser's search feature. That meant that to search all the comments within a thread, you had to go and expand them all before starting your search—something that simply wasn't practical for popular posts with numerous comments.

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      Massive Yandex code leak reveals Russian search engine’s ranking factors

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 30 January, 2023 - 17:37 · 1 minute

    Yandex logo at company headquarters

    Enlarge / The Russian logo of Yandex, the country's largest search engine and a tech company with many divisions, inside the company's headquarters. (credit: SOPA Images / Getty Images)

    Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech giant Yandex's many apps and services. It also revealed key ranking factors for Yandex's search engine, the kind almost never revealed in public.

    The " Yandex git sources " were posted as a torrent file on January 25 and show files seemingly taken in July 2022 and dating back to February 2022. Software engineer Arseniy Shestakov claims that he verified with current and former Yandex employees that some archives "for sure contain modern source code for company services." Yandex told security blog BleepingComputer that "Yandex was not hacked" and that the leak came from a former employee. Yandex stated that it did not "see any threat to user data or platform performance."

    The files notably date to February 2022, when Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A former executive at Yandex told BleepingComputer that the leak was "political" and noted that the former employee had not tried to sell the code to Yandex competitors. Anti-spam code was also not leaked.

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      Apple beefs up smartphone services in “silent war” against Google

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 25 January, 2023 - 14:38

    Apple allegedly still holds a ‘grudge’ against Google ever since co-founder Steve Jobs called its rival Android operating system a "stolen product."

    Enlarge / Apple allegedly still holds a ‘grudge’ against Google ever since co-founder Steve Jobs called its rival Android operating system a "stolen product." (credit: FT montage/Reuters)

    Apple is taking steps to separate its mobile operating system from features offered by Google parent Alphabet, making advances around maps, search and advertising that has created a collision course between the Big Tech companies.

    The two Silicon Valley giants have been rivals in the smartphone market since Google acquired and popularized the Android operating system in the 2000s.

    Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called Android “a stolen product” that mimicked Apple’s iOS mobile software, then declared “thermonuclear war” on Google, ousting the search company’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt from the Apple board of directors in 2009.

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