I was reading an article on Yahoo news titled : Big Brother Britain ‘going to far’

Big Brother Britain is going a step too far, the UK’s Information Commissioner has warned.

Richard Thomas has spoken out against apparent plans for a massive new Government database which could contain every phone call, text message, email and internet search made by each and every one of us.

Mr Thomas said the proposal raises serious concerns about data protection.

the Original story was from ITN : here

If you look at the Yahoo article you will see that I have made the links in the Yahoo snippet bold instead of actual links, but in my opinion a news article should only link to sources that backs up the article or give a little more information, so why add in more links ?, why would Yahoo do this ?

.. ok we know the answer is seo, but why the fuck are they just doing a text find and replace, without any context to the article I mean “Big Brother Britain” linking to results for a Game show, are we going to see one of George Bushes aids linking to results about plants or HIV ??
What yahoo are doing imo is changing the POV of the article, which is a serious issue for privacy and the first link goes to a game show.. when Microsoft buy you I hope they sack the idiots in charge of these areas !

DaveN

SEroundtable Pointed me to to a story about “Another Insulting Algorithmic Search Result from Google” I didn’t want to blog about the swastika on Google Trends, but this is kinda odd, when you search for Special People you get :

Ok WTF !

DaveN

Money talks, well it certainly may do at Yahoo. Investors line up for the kill and  any fears about change of  Yahoo ownership are of course allayed with all contenders emphasising maximum shareholder values. Icahn’s proposal to change the Yahoo board may well take flight. Meanwhile, as if  waiting in the wings Microsoft are now in ” it’s good to talk” mode providing the board changes take place.

Google remains quiet in the equation, perhaps quietened after advertising testing and concerns over privacy again.

Will the Yahoo board remain intact ?

Dan Horton lost a bet today .. to me HAHAHA, after I blogged about Marc Chagall, he said that I was trying to rank for that term, so I bet him a £10 that the post wouldn’t rank in www.google.co.uk by 5 o’clock today.

So why did I win, well it was pretty obvious that if that Google was going to fix the Logo Link to Serps and Universal Serps.. remember “50th anniversary of the LEGO brick” I was #2 with in 1 hour of that logo.

butPatrick Altoft spoilt it :) at least I won a tenner.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Marc+Chagall&num=100

DaVeN

Ideas on a postcard for what this switch does, Seen quite a Few in my referrers recently.

Dave

This is pretty damn Awesome, I have only been playing on it for a little while now but Live Mesh “I’m lovin it”,

The syncing of Laptops, Work PC’s and Home Computers, is soooo easy, at present it’s just me and Dan that are playing with it in the office, but I can see me wanting more and more staff on this.

My Favourite part of this is the News : I can quickly see what’s happening in my Folders and Dan or myself can leave comments about what changed.

You can see that from the screen shot below that I Added a new folder and then renamed the folder Bnet1.

I did this from my computer in the office using a normal browser, all I needed was my Live login and I’m on My Live desktop.

I then connected to my Laptop at home, grabbed a CSV and synchronized it to the Mesh,

I then went back to my desk

,

Clicked the Bnet1 and Synchronised, Now if Dan was sharing Bnet1 he would have got that file too, now who ever edits that file the cloud will keep track, so if Dan deletes some sites from that csv dump, he can leave a quick note so I know what’s going on :)

at Present I only have a few devices connected but thats going to expand soon:

DaveN

 
ok if I was Matt Cutts this is what I would do ..

ok first things first we know Matt Cutts does not like people buying links we also now that Matt Cutts said they use cookies and Ip addresses to help them catch spam..

So what I would do  is run a search query in Google Logs for anyone that went to text link ads then find your IP and Cookie, then look at all the sites you visit, remove common sites like the BBC, Twitter Facebook and CNN etc,

Then I would look at the sites you go to the most ( those will be your own or your clients, at a wild guess) then cross reference all the other sites you have visited, the chances are if you are buying links you will be checking them at least 1 a month to make sure everything is ok, you may even be telling google via the Toolbar that you are in tla and going to sitea, then back to tla then siteb etc etc

Then I would correlate the data, find out which sites are linking to the prime sites.

but I wouldn’t do anything just yet, you see if I find a site that’s buying links, the chances are the other links the link selling sites will have been purchased, via the same network so in a few months I can watch the trades happening and I just would collect all the data, then 1 day I would just devalue all the PR on the selling sites, if the buying sites didn’t have enough links holding them up I would ban them has well

Now you would think that if you did everything possible to stop me from finding you out, well think about all the others that are buying links, how many are buying links where you are what if they are stupid and get caught, in turn I would find you

DaveN

update this is a YouTube bug pointed out by Barry at SEROUNDTABLE

Google removes informational Videos on Google Privacy

There used to be a Video on YouTube
href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY”>here, it was on the official Google channel and it was Maile Ohye, explaining how Google uses your browser cookie..

But what’s worse is it looks like Google have removed all videos about Privacy ..

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=google+privacy

DaveN

Update: The videos are now coming back (11.57)

I have had a few emails about the what to do with the “Google Cookie” issues been used in logs, so here is a quick tip.

Use firefox clear you cache :

To clear your cache for Mozilla Firefox:

1. Open Firefox.
2. Clear your browser’s cache.
   • For Firefox version 2.0:
     1. Click Tools > Options > Advanced.
     2. Click the Network tab.
     3. Click Clear Now under the Cache heading.
   • For Firefox version 1.5 or earlier:
     1. Click Tools > Options > Privacy.
     2. Click Cache > Clear.
3. Click OK to exit.

Next step Clear you Cookies : also note this could also remove your saved settings for sites you’ve previously visited.

To clear your cookies for Mozilla Firefox:

1. Click Tools > Options > Privacy.
2. Delete your cookies.
   • For Firefox version 2.0, click Clear Now under the Private Data heading.
   • For Firefox version 1.5 or earlier, click Cookies > Clear.
3. Click OK to exit.

Now we need to make sure that we delete cookies when we Close the Browser 1

If you set tick all the the boxes like I have, you will delete the cookie when you close the browse, but if you really want to make sure, click on Exceptions and add something like :

But be Warned, Google really wants that cookie on you system.. so while you can browse Google and see Google ads !! if you want to use Gmail, Google analytics’s or Google Adwords you will see this screen

So I would advise take the Cookie but delete it when you close the browser

DaveN

I’M trying to workout why Google have come forward with this,

quote from Google :

Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam).

Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.

So where are the pitfalls here, first off the big one that jumps out here is the amazing amounts of botnets and malware that’s out there in the wild that could be set to create fake traffic..

example: botnet users

search google for : keyword phrase you want to rank for,automate page click through keep on google don’t pass you brand, if brand found fake a click. If brand not found in first 2 -5 pages, random per user, search brand + keyword, brand.com + keyword

also

log spamming has been around for years, also if you thought you need protection before from Google, set up a caching proxy, take all your own data and look at you search patterns what sites you visit, a there are couple of things you will notice,

so you might want to do or at least think about.

a) Think about work search V personal searches
b) Install, foxy proxy or another firefox proxy plugin
c) Make sure you purge your cookie on closing your browse
d) Run a dictionary on google when your not searching
e) Pray that Sergy never wants to be the president of America

DaveN