In the future Google will promote news articles that feature original reporting in its search results, the Hill reports. “While we typically show the latest and most comprehensive version of a story in news results, we’ve made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting,” Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president of news, said in…
Tag: algorithms
How Apple Stacked the App Store With Its Own Products
Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search. But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that…
YouTube has become such a garbage fire it is time to dump it for good
To make the internet a better place we could start by switching off the world’s biggest video sharing site amid claims its algorithms magnify fringe views, says Annalee Newitz Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2214110-youtube-has-become-such-a-garbage-fire-it-is-time-to-dump-it-for-good/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Google Open-Sources Live Transcribe’s Speech Engine
Friday Google open-sourced “the speech engine that powers its Android speech recognition transcription tool Live Transcribe,” reports Venture Beat: The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub. Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android’s…
YouTube’s Algorithms Blamed For Brazil’s Dangerous Conspiracy Video-Sharing on WhatsApp
Sunday the New York Times reported that YouTube “radicalized” Brazil — by “systematically” diverting users to conspiracy videos. Yet conventional wisdom in Brazil still puts the blame on WhatsApp, the Times reported in a follow-up story on Thursday shared by Slashdot reader AmiMoJo. “Everything began to click into place when we met Luciana Brito, a soft-spoken clinical psychologist who works with…
Amazon Offered Vendors ‘Amazon’s Choice’ Labels In Return For Ad Spending
DigiDay has reviewed a pitch deck detailing a 2017 bidding program for the “Amazon’s Choice” label, a mark that denotes than an item is recommended and gives certain products higher placement in search results. While the mark is now believed to be operated by Amazon’s algorithms, sources say that Amazon actually offered sellers the chance to bid on the mark back…
Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing
IG Metall, Europe’s largest trade union with 2.3 million members, has joined forces with a German YouTuber who set up a Facebook group called The YouTubers Union after his videos started getting “de-monetized.” The German metalworkers union is throwing itself in the battle between Google and the millions of people whose income derives from uploading videos to the site. It’s inviting…
How Netflix Is Using Its Muscle To Push Filmmaking Technology Boundaries
Carolyn Giardina from The Hollywood Reporter writes about the growing influence Netflix has from hardware and software development to industry display standards. For example, as recently as six months ago, Netflix forbid Hollywood cinematographers from using a highly-popular camera because the standard model employed a 3.2K resolution sensor instead of a 4K sensor required for the streamer’s original programming. Netflix also…
Do Personality Tests Give Companies Too Much Power?
One 2016 human resources study found that 48% of American businesses — and 57% of U.K. businesses — used personality questionnaires for hiring decisions, a new article reports. They add that the personality test industry may now be bringing in up to $4 billion a year. But “By relying on these tests, employers can ask questions that would be inappropriate –…
Trump Asks Social Media Companies To Develop Pre-Crime Algorithms
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Verge: After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters. While delivering a speech on the recent violence, Trump said “we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning…