Mediastreet
Tag

Google

Browsing
In News

Google to tech-support scammers: We’re about to get even tougher on your ads

No Comments

By

A new verification system for all tech-support advertisers aims to block scammers.

Google is rolling out a new verification system to combat a rise in misleading ads from third-party technical-support services.

Google announced it will implement new restrictions on all tech-support ads after the Wall Street Journal found that fraudsters have been buying ads from Google and posing as authorized service agents for Apple.

“We’ve seen a rise in misleading ad experiences stemming from third-party technical support providers and have decided to begin restricting ads in this category globally,” said David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy.

Google isn’t banning all third-party tech-support ads as Microsoft did for Bing in 2016. But rather it will use a verification program to ensure only legitimate third-party tech-support providers can use its ad network to reach consumers.

The new restrictions on this ad category apply globally while the tech-support verification program will be rolled out in coming months.

SEE: Cybersecurity in an IoT and mobile world (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

It’s not clear what type of verification program it will roll out, but Google has existing advanced verification programs for local locksmith services and addiction treatment centers to prevent fraud. Google has previously banned some ad categories altogether, including those for short-term payday loans, and more recently bail-bond services.

The verification system was needed because Google found it increasingly difficult to sift out bad actors from legitimate businesses because the fraud takes place away from its platform.

This move could help close off one avenue tech-support scammers use to reach potential victims, but there are plenty more, including cold-calling, support-scam malware and spam with links to support-scam sites.

The overall goal of the scammers is to get victims to call a call center where an operator convinces them to install a remote-access tool, which allows the operator to display bogus error warnings.

Microsoft in 2017 received 153,000 reports from customers across the globe who had fallen for a tech-support scam. That figure was up 24 percent on 2016.

Previous and related coverage

Google robocall scam: We’re suing hustlers who pretend to be us, warns Google

Scam robocallers tell victims: call us now or your Google business listing will labeled closed.

Yet again, Google tricked into serving scam Amazon ads

At the top of search results for “Amazon” was a bad ad, trying to tricking users into falling for a tech support scam.

Windows Chrome users: Tech-support scams try new trick to freeze your browser

Get an ad-blocker if you want to dodge tech-support scammers’ latest rapid-download ruse.

Ransomware, tech-support scams or email fraud: Which cybercrimes cost victims most?

Not all online crimes are equal in their impact.

Microsoft to Windows 7, Windows 8 users: We’re about to end forum tech support

If you have a Windows 7 or 8, Office 2013, or Surface Pro problem, you’ll have to rely on the community for answers.

Microsoft: Tech support scams rose by 24% in 2017, costing some victims thousands of dollars TechRepublic

Social engineering scams make even the best security solutions useless, Microsoft said. It wants industry-wide collaboration to solve the problem.

How to avoid tech support scams CNET

Scammers are getting craftier, according to a new report. Follow these tips to keep your money and identity safe.

By

Sourced from ZDNet

Read More
By
In News

Google might be hiding the fact that its own reviews are shoddy

No Comments

By Ethan Wolff-Mann

If you Google “Chiropractor Bethesda Maryland,” you’ll see Google’s famous 10 blue links. But you’ll also see a box with a map — a snippet — at the top with local results, star ratings, and buttons for phone number and directions. Clicking further will show you reviews people left on Google Maps.

Google is ostensibly providing a service to make it easy to get what you want: a chiropractor in Bethesda.

But what if these reviews aren’t particularly good or reliable? This is a question that has come up based on the fact that Google’s library of local reviews is no longer available apart from the Maps platform or the box above search links.

If you Google the exact, unique text of a user review found through the box above in quotes, an interesting thing happens: No results are found, despite the fact that you just saw the text, provided by Google itself in the box above the reviews.

Google appears to have quietly purged its own user-generated review content from its search results.

This is significant, critics of Google say, because it obscures the fact that Google’s search engine judges the company’s own reviews poorly. Google’s search engine ranks content by relevance and quality, and Google’s review content previously showed up deep into the search results, far from the first page of links that takes most of the clicks.

A Google spokesperson disagreed that the review content was “de-indexed,” simply noting that because Google reviews don’t currently live on a web page, they are not displayed as web results.

Given that reviews once showed up in regular Google search results and now do not, it follows that the reviews were moved from a web page to the Maps platform, whose code prevents search engines from crawling it. What was once searchable is now not searchable, something Google did not explain.

As a result, Google reviews do not have to rank highly in search engines. Instead, the Google snippet — the map and reviews box above the standard search result — allows the company to capture clicks that would otherwise flow off the platform to whatever website had the best result in the algorithm made by the search team down the hall at Mountain View deemed as the best.

“When a mom does a search for ‘local pediatrician’ on Google today, instead of being matched with the most relevant information, she’s being redirected into a service with fewer reviews and lower quality information — a product Google’s own meritocratic algorithms deem inferior,” Luther Lowe, SVP of public policy for Yelp, which competes with Google on local reviews, told Yahoo Finance in an email.

Search rankings of Google reviews were poor. Now they don’t exist.

A year ago, Google’s search engine found this review content. But Google’s search algorithms, which judge content based on being “useful and relevant” according to Google, apparently didn’t find Google’s reviews very useful or relevant — so it consistently ranked them poorly.

In to a complaint submitted to Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense, Yelp, which competes with Google in local search reviews, showed an example by Googling restaurants in Brasilia and filtering results for Google and TripAdvisor to tune out the noise. Google results came up on the eighth, after seven pages of Tripadvisor results.

Other examples Yahoo Finance reviewed showed Google results emerging as deep as the 17th page. Today, no results are found as Google’s search engine skips over them while it crawls the internet.

In a recent tweet-squall, Yelp’s Lowe raised the question of why Google de-indexed reviews. The obvious implication, from the previously dismal search rank, is because Google reviews lag competitors like TripAdvisor and Yelp.

Analysis from Piper Jaffray, which Lowe cites, backs up the implications of Google’s search algorithm in detail. The investment bank found Google reviews were less than a quarter the length, and 25% had no text at all.

Why is Google looking to push its own local reviews so much? The company declined to comment, but our search queries reveal a possible motive: There are a lot of local searches.

Local search makes up a significant amount of the queries that Google fields every day, and keeping users engaged on the platform rather than off it presents opportunities for more monetization. That’s something Google appears to be focusing on, going so far as to track user locations even when user preferences explicitly say not to, according to a recent investigation by the Associated Press. The AP noted that Google was pushing into targeted local advertising using data.

As a paper on similar issues from Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca, Columbia Law School’s Tim Wu, and others noted, “prominently displaying Google content in response to search queries…may reduce consumer welfare if the internal content is inferior to organic search results.”

So what does this mean for you? In layman’s terms: You might get a worse experience if you don’t look past the first thing Google shows you.

Feature Image Credit: A logo is pictured at Google’s European Engineering Center in Zurich, Switzerland July 19, 2018 REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo 

By Ethan Wolff-Mann

Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, retail, personal finance, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.

Sourced from YAHOO! Finance

Read More
By
In News

Google image search is now a design tool

No Comments

By Katharine Schwab

Picular analyses the top Google image search results to suggest colours that relate to any topic you search for.

A new design tool called Picular is built around an unlikely data source: Google image search.

Picular is a new color search tool that lets you enter any search term and presents you with a slew of options, basing all of its color choices on what pops up first in Google image search. It’s a color-picker, courtesy of internet hive mind.

[Image: Future Memories]

For instance, if you type the word “desert” into Picular’s search bar, the tool scrapes the top 20 image results from Google and finds the most dominant color in each image. It presents these results in a series of tiles: A sea of sandy browns and oranges, with a few blues (presumably from the sky) thrown in. Each tile has the color’s RGB code that instantly copies to your clipboard when you click on the tile, making it easy to instantly try out the colors in your work.

[Image: Future Memories]

Picular is a quick and handy way to get color ideas for a design project, especially because you can type in more emotional, evocative words and see what Google instantly associates with each idea. “Peace” conjures a bunch of cool colors, like grays and blues, with a couple brighter colors in the mix. “Dreamy” is almost entirely blues and purples, while “desire” returns warm reds and browns. “Dynamic” has an eclectic jumble of blue, yellow, and red.

[Image: Future Memories]

The tool is the brainchild of the Sweden-based digital design studio Future Memories, which now uses the tool on a daily basis. According to the studio, about 15,000 other creatives frequently use the tool to test whether search terms are strongly related to particular colors. Of course, it still requires a designer’s eye and aesthetic to make any final decisions, but Picular serves as a crowd-sourced answer to which colors a certain topic corresponds with.

You can check out the tool here.

By Katharine Schwab

Sourced from Fast Company

Read More
By
In News

The 100 Most Searched Keywords on Google in the Past Year [Infographic]

No Comments

By 

Search trends are, logically, always changing, which can make it hard to keep up with what’s happening in your industry – and impossible to stay on top of the broader shifts overall.

But knowing the biggest picture can be helpful, not only to see what’s trending based on topical interests, but also based on where things are headed – which is particularly relevant for industry and niche related terms.

To help with this, the teams from Ahrefs and Siege Media have teamed up to analyze the most searched terms on Google among U.S.-based users over the last 12 months (finishing June 1st, 2018).

There are some off ones, but also some interesting trends – check out the full list below.

A listing of the top 100 most search keywords on Google over the last year

A version of this post was first published on the Digital Information World blog.

By 

Follow Irfan Ahmad on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

Read More
By
In News

Google to automatically verify your Google Search Console account if you are the property’s owner in Google Analytics

No Comments

By 

Google is opening up Google Search Console automatically, so countless webmasters and site owners will have more access to data and important website alerts.

Google has announced that it will soon automatically verify you for a website in Search Console if you are already a verified owner of the same property in Google Analytics.

This means you don’t have to request manual verification within Google Search Console if you’ve already set up Analytics, and it streamlines the process of giving site owners access to Google Search Console.

Even more importantly, those with Google Search Console access will get emails and notifications of issues in their inboxes. These messages can include manual actions, hacks, WordPress and other CMS upgrade alerts, as well as other notifications — all aimed at helping you keep your website healthy, indexed and ranking.

Google said, “If you don’t want to be verified for Search Console, simply delete the property in Search Console.”

Google explained why Google Search Console is important and useful:

Search Console is a free tool that provides website owners with information which can be critical to performance in Google Search. Once verified, Search Console compiles reports on the website’s performance in Search, including search queries, the website’s rankings, and the number of clicks and impressions. Additionally, there’s information about a site’s indexing, the status of various implemented features on the website, as well as reports and notifications of critical issues.

Here is a screen shot showing the notification when someone is automatically verified via this method:

By 

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.

Sourced from Search Engine Land

Read More
By
In News

Google Starts To Give Marketers More Access To Data

No Comments

By 

After years of holding the data close to its vest, Google has begun to give advertisers more data to help them make better decisions and run successful campaigns. Earlier this month, Google confirmed that it would run a small-scale rollout of an Insights analytics report in Google My Business that shows business owners the most popular search keywords that people use to find listings.

On Friday Google announced that the Search Analytics API found in the Search Console now allows advertisers to retrieve 25,000 rows of data per request, up from 5,000 rows previously. Marketers can query all their search analytics data without exceeding their quota by running a daily query for one day’s worth of data.

Marketers need to choose the information requested, such as search types — web, image and video — along with the dimensions such as page, query, country, or device and whether to group results by page or property.

Along with the news, Google published a guide to take marketers through data retrieval. It includes an overview and describes how to group results by page or property and the dos and don’ts for the process, as well as defaults and nuances of how the queries work.

Google also notes that impressions, clicks, position, and click-through rates are calculated differently when grouping results by page rather than by property.

Earlier this week, Google announced the integration of Hotel Ads into the Google Ads platform with the introduction of a new type of campaign and a new dashboard for managing hotel price feeds.

Although Hotel Ads have been around for about eight years — initially in sponsored listings in Google Maps and then in Google Search — they were managed in a separate ad platform.

Now all the data resides in one place. Overall, it means marketers gain more data from one dashboard to support campaigns across the board.

By 

Sourced from MediaPost

Read More
By
In News

‘It’s impossible’: Google has asked ad tech firms to guarantee broad GDPR consent, assume liability

No Comments

By Tim Peterson

Google has rankled publishers and ad tech firms with its General Data Protection Regulation compliance strategy. But a pledge the company has presented to ad tech firms is considered particularly burdensome.

In the lead-up to the GDPR’s enactment May 25, Google asked ad exchanges and supply-side platforms to guarantee that the publishers whose inventory they help sell have gotten consent across hundreds of vendors for any ads sold through Google’s automated ad-buying platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager, according to three ad tech executives with knowledge of the matter. The EU privacy law requires businesses to justify collecting people’s online data, by getting their consent or through other means.

In signing Google’s consent guarantee agreement, the exchanges and SSPs as well as their respective publishers would assume liability for any corresponding GDPR violations that Google’s DBM is charged with, the execs said. Under the GDPR, any company found violating the law can be fined up to 4 percent of its annual revenue.

Google is asking that the exchanges and SSPs guarantee that their publishers have received consent for each of the roughly 200 vendors on Google’s commonly used vendor list. The ad tech platforms can compromise by creating their own whitelist with a subset of those vendors that they provide to Google, according to the execs. In either case, Google will assume that any exchange or SSP requesting personalized ads from DBM has received consent for all of the vendors on the respective whitelist, the execs said.

The ad tech execs don’t want to assume liability for violations against Google and they don’t think they could honor it in practice. Further, they said Google’s agreement goes against the spirit of the GDPR, which says people have to have the option to withhold consent from individual vendors.

“It’s impossible to get 100 percent consent for every reader for the entire vendor list because most consent management platforms have to, by GDPR law, allow the reader the option to select potentially opting out of specific vendors, and so there’s no way to guarantee 100 percent of readers for 100 percent of the partners or vendors have given consent,” said one of the ad tech execs.

At least one ad tech firm, Sovrn, has declined to sign the agreement. “The changing landscape of GDPR has brought a lot of uncertainty for publishers. Due to the strict requirements around consent in the Google agreement, Sovrn has elected to wait until Google joins the IAB consent framework, which will make it easier for publishers to comply,” Sovrn CTO Jesse Demmel emailed.

“The GDPR is a big change for everyone. We’ve been working hard to make sure that Google complies with its obligations under the GDPR, and to help our partners in their compliance efforts too,” a Google spokesperson said.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that AppNexus and Teads said they have struck deals with Google to guarantee consent. Reuters earlier this month reported that AppNexus and Rubicon Project have guaranteed to Google that they will only sell inventory to DBM for which publishers have received people’s consent. The articles didn’t say if the agreements were initiated by Google or if the companies and their publishers assumed liability for GDPR violations charged against DBM. Spokespeople for AppNexus and Rubicon Project declined to say if their respective companies signed Google’s agreement and assumed liability. A spokesperson for Teads did not return a request for comment by press time.

If an exchange or SSP declines to sign the agreement, it is limited to only selling non-personalized ads through DBM. Those generic ads generate less revenue for publishers than personalized ads that are targeted to specific audiences based on data collected about them. Some publishers that are heavily reliant on DBM have seen their revenues decline by 70-80 percent since GDPR took effect because they were limited to non-personalized ads, said another ad tech exec. That revenue drop has put pressure on exchanges and SSPs to sign Google’s consent agreement lest their publishers move their inventory to other platforms that can run DBM’s personalized ads on their sites, the second exec said.

Google’s consent guarantee agreement is considered by the ad tech execs to be a stopgap measure until the tech giant adopts the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe’s and IAB Tech Lab’s GDPR consent framework. Google has said that it plans to complete its integration of the industry framework by August, at which time publishers and ad tech platforms will be able to pass consent to Google on a per-visitor, per-vendor basis.

By Tim Peterson

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

Read More
By
In News

Microsoft relaunches its news app to take on Google and Apple’s offerings

No Comments

By Abhimanyu Ghoshal

Remember MSN.com? It’s still around – and Microsoft is trying to bring it back by relaunching its mobile apps with a new moniker.

Available for Android and iOS, Microsoft News brings you stories from the company’s MSN News effort, that’s been online for several years – with a modern interface that should be familiar to folks who’ve tried Apple News and Google News.

The service brings curated news from more than 1,000 publishers and 3,000 brands. Microsoft says that its AI scans more than 100,000 pieces of content each day, and has over 800 human editors across the globe to select the top stories that its app will surface on your device.

This effort also “powers news on Microsoft Edge, the News app in Windows 10, Skype, Xbox and Outlook.com.” To that end, signing in with your Microsoft account syncs your news preferences across all the devices you’re logged in on.

I spent a few minutes with the Android app, and found the interface to be simple enough to navigate. You’ll initially be prompted to indicate your interests to aid curation, after which you can browse through stories sorted into the categories you selected.

There’s also a section for local news; testing it in my hometown of Bangalore, India, I was served up stories from various outlets covering my city. However, these articles were displayed in an in-app browser, as opposed to the native view.

You can choose between a light and dark theme, and opt to receive notifications for breaking news stories. One feature I missed from Google News is the ‘Full Coverage’ button, which brings up multiple publications’ perspectives on the same topic or event in a single list.

Microsoft says it supports publishers by offering them channels to earn revenue, but it didn’t exactly how that works. It’s likely through partnerships and a bespoke advertising platform (you can see ads in the app which aren’t present in the articles’ original web view); the company noted that it’s “delivered more than $600 million back to our publishers” in the past four years.

While I prefer Google News’ UI, Microsoft’s offering is a formidable rival that arguably does a better job of surfacing local content. You can try it now by grabbing the free app from Google Play and the App Store.

Feature Image Credit: Microsoft

By Abhimanyu Ghoshal

Sourced from TNW

Read More
By
In News

AppNexus takes on Google and Facebook with tool that offers ‘100% viewable buying’

No Comments

By Rebecca Stewart

AppNexus is looking to take on the Facebook-Google ‘duopoly’ with a tool it has claimed will give advertisers “100% viewable buying at scale”.

The product, dubbed ‘guaranteed views’ will give brands the chance to purchase only ads that they classify as ‘viewable’ against their own standards across the web, offering a solution to the typically complex process brands and agencies often have to go through when setting up threshold viewability targeting online.

Allowing clients to target “the entire open internet” AppNexus’ latest feature will let buyers use viewability as a given outcome. The company didn’t reveal which buyers had been testing the guaranteed views, but said clients “typically” see improvement in cost-per-view, unique reach, click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC).

AppNexus, which has been vocal about the “considerable strain” it believes to have been placed on the industry through the dominance of the duopoly, said it believes this fresh tool “will help reverse the disproportionate flow of advertising dollars going to walled gardens like Google and Facebook.”

Viren Tellis, senior director, marketplace management, AppNexus claimed a point of difference for guaranteed views was that instead of layering multiple optimization types, “buyers can assume viewability is a given” and focus on achieving the performance KPIs advertisers care about.

While the move from adtech firm doesn’t guarantee buyers 100% in-view ads; instead giving them the option to purchase their inventory only against their measurement standards, it comes amid ongoing discussion between advertisers about what exactly that standard should be.

Just months ago, the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (Isba) launched a 100% viewability standard in the UK, calling for brands to be given the facility to buy digital display ads in 100% view.

Key industry figures are split on what exactly the viewability standard should be. Unilever’s top marketer Keith Weed, for instance, subscribes to the 100% view. Others like rival Procter and Gamble (P&G) believe in the standard set by US-based body the Media Ratings Council (MRC) that ads should be at least 50% in view.

According to the World Federation of Advertisers, in the UK alone almost £600m per-year is believed to be wasted on non-viewable ads, with 63% of members saying they are now only investing in viewable impressions which meet industry standards.

Facebook currently offers buyers 100% viewability on some products in tandem with Moat. Google, meanwhile, lets advertisers, agencies and publishers using its active view product to see custom metrics that allow them to go beyond transacting on the Media Ratings Council (MRC) defined industry standard for viewability (which is 50%).

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

 

Read More
By
In News

Google Feed is a Tempting Feast for Marketers

No Comments

By Ariella Brown 

More personalization is in the cards with Google Feed

Google has always dominated search, but it has not done so well with social as evidenced by the perceived failure of Google+. So, capitalizing on its strengths, it set up a feed for users that uploads items of interest based on their own signals, rather than on what their friends shared or Twitter connections posted online.

Back in December, Google introduced an app update that promised “load your life’s interests and updates” with just “a single tap” that can bring up “useful cards.”  Seven months later, Google proclaimed “Feed Your Need to Know,” announcing that — thanks to machine learning advances — the algorithms that direct the feed can “better anticipate” the type of content that an individual would want to see.

Google promises a personalized experience that improves  with use. In addition to giving users updates on the topics they choose to follow, it will take cues from a user’s viewed videos on YouTube, their search history, and their location: “Now, your feed will not only be based on your interactions with Google, but also factor in what’s trending in your area and around the world.”

In other words, it is bringing together your own signaled interests with real-time trends that are linked to your location. That sounds like a potential big win for marketers.

The same data mining that is used to form a comprehensive profile of Google users could easily be directed to create a consumer profile. As much of the information that Google draws on in customizing a person’s feed would not constitute what it calls “sensitive personal information,” its privacy policy, would allow it to share information (at least in the US; the EU tends to be much more stringent on privacy rights).

What makes this so powerful for marketing is that it brings together the same kind of data connections Amazon and Netflix use so effectively to offer customers recommendations, along with deeper knowledge about them that comes from seeing which types of news stories and outlets they favor as well as their actual location identification. With all that information about an individual, marketing can become much more personalized and targeted.

Someone who sets their Feed to supply news on renewable energy, fashion, and organic options would likely be receptive to marketing that shows a new line of organic goods in their local supermarket, for example, or clothes from the Zara Just line.  Someone with a flight booked could be shown attractions in the destination city, ads for transportation options there, and travel accessories. People who have added articles on parenting young children to their Feeds may get directed to children’s programming, toys, college funds, and preschools in their area.

Of course, Google doesn’t say that it’s rolling out the Feed as a tool for marketers, but then again, Facebook didn’t admit that its social network was geared toward ads either. I’m sure we’ll be seeing marketers make use of this feature in the near future.

By Ariella Brown

Sourced from DMN Data. Strategy. Technology.

Read More
By
Load More