You've Been Googled

Ed.'s note. And this blog is being hosted on a Google platform. Does the fact Israel tech firms are doing the R&D for Google have any bearing on Google's enormous reach into our lives - if you use Google? What has Google in Israel been researching? Spying?

Israeli security company reportedly has tool that spies on Apple, Google and Facebook cloud data

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Source: GreenMedinfo

GOOGLE: "Organic is a Lie, Supplements are Dangerous, Chiropractic is Fake," and Other Thoughts They Want You To Think

Saturday, June 29th 2019 | By Sayer Ji, Founder

"ORGANIC IS A... LIE, SHAM, MYTH, WASTE OF MONEY, MARKETING GIMMICK"

Recently, a shocking discovery was made: Google is autocompleting the search fields of billions of users with false information (topics ranging from natural health to candidates for election), based not on objective search volume data, but an extremely biased political and socio-economic agenda -- one that is jeopordizing the health and human rights of everyone on the planet.

On June 3rd, 2019, it was discovered that Google had scrubbed their search results clean of natural health sites, resulting in some losing as much as 99% of their traffic. Soon after, it was discovered that Google also manipulates users with their autocomplete function into thinking that natural approaches to health are fraudulent and even harmful. This is Part 2 of our ongoing series exposing these practices. Part 1 can be found here.

Google manipulates your search results in a very specific way. For instance, if you start your search out with "supplements are," Google will autocomplete your search field with the following suggestions:

"SUPPLEMENTS ARE BAD, USELESS, NOT REGULATED, DANGEORUS, SCAMS"

Most Google users believe that its suggestions reflect the volume of searches others are doing on the topic -- a reasonable assumption, given Google says their algorithm is "Based on several factors, like how often others have searched for a term." In fact, Google goes out of their way to say they are not making subjective suggestions, but objective predictions based on real searches:

"Predictions, not suggestions

You'll notice we call these autocomplete "predictions" rather than "suggestions," and there's a good reason for that. Autocomplete is designed to help people complete a search they were intending to do, not to suggest new types of searches to be performed. These are our best predictions of the query you were likely to continue entering.

How do we determine these predictions? We look at the real searches that happen on Google and show common and trending ones relevant to the characters that are entered and also related to your location and previous searches." [italics and bold added] Source: Google

But Google Trends data show the "supplements are" autocomplete results above to be inaccurate, if not blatantly falsified. In fact, keyword search volume trend lines show that since 2004, searches for the phrase "supplements are bad" relative to "supplements are good" (in red) are far lower, and the gap continues to increase, with about 5x more people searching for them in a positive rather than negative light. This is the very definition of the Orwellian inversion: where Good becomes Bad, and War becomes Peace.

Please go to GreenMedinfo to read the entire article.

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Source: Life Site

Google denies blacklisting under oath, despite leaked docs showing otherwise

By Calvin Freiburger | July 17, 2019

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 17, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Google vice president for government affairs and public policy Karan Bhatia declared under oath Tuesday that the internet giant does not employ blacklists to slant its search results, despite leaked materials detailing the practice months ago.

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing focused on alleged political censorship affecting Google's search results. Breitbart reports that Bhatia made the claim in response to questioning from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

"I feel like you all push the boundaries until your hand gets slapped," Blackburn said. "Has Google ever blacklisted, or attempted to blacklist, a company, group, individual, or outlet from its advertising partners or its search results for political reasons?"

"We don't use blacklists, whitelists to influence our search results," he responded.

"For what reason does Google blacklist a company?" she followed up.

"As I said, per your previous question, we do not utilize blacklists or whitelists in our search results to favor political outcomes," he insisted. "That's not, doesn’t happen."

Bhatia's answer conflicts with the January leak of a file named "youtube_controversial_query_blacklist," containing a list of search terms manually curated by Google for its video platform YouTube. While some of the terms referenced fringe conspiracy theories, other terms included "abortion," "Maxine Waters," and items pertaining to the 2018 Irish abortion referendum.

Leaked internal chat logs showed employees speculating that abortion had been added in December, after a Slate writer complained about Live Action videos explaining what abortion procedures actually entail. It "seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists," one employee admitted at the time.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) responded to the claim by calling Google the "most dishonest company to appear before Congress":

Congratulations to ⁦@Google⁩ on becoming the most dishonest company to appear before Congress. Today ⁦@Google⁩ exec denied censoring search results in China, denied ⁦@Google⁩ is doing biz there now, and denied ⁦@YouTube⁩ has catered to pedophiles pic.twitter.com/t1uHmP9KTA

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 17, 2019

And you've been more than willing to do it again: "Google was also working quietly to accommodate Chinese government restrictions. Dragonfly, the censored- search-engine prototype, which has been demonstrated for Chinese officials, blacklists key search terms"

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 17, 2019

Robert Epstein, a research psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, testified Tuesday that he has identified "nine different blacklists Google maintains to suppress information worldwide," referring senators to a 2016 US News & World Report piece in which he elaborated on that conclusion.

These blacklists, he says, encompass Google's search results, autocomplete feature, Google Maps, YouTube searches, Google News, AdWords and AdSense, banned user accounts, and websites it quarantines for supposedly being infected with harmful software.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the subcommittee, declared that Google enjoys a "staggering amount of power to ban speech, manipulate search results, destroy rivals, and shape culture," the Washington Examiner reports. "If Big Tech cannot provide us with evidence that it's not playing Big Brother with its immense powers, we don't need to give them a subsidy through Section 230,” he added, alluding to Hawley's bill to require online platforms to certify their political neutrality with the FCC to retain immunity from being held liable for user content.

Please go to Life Site to read the entire article.
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Source: Google

About Google's Israel R&D Center

Innovation at Google's R&D Center in Israel

 

May 10, 2011

Google's Research and Development Center in Israel - with offices in Haifa and Tel Aviv - is the place to be for software engineers who want to develop the next-generation technologies and push the limits. Here, we build global products and innovate on a large scale.

Our engineers work on problems in a variety of areas including information-retrieval algorithms, massive scalability and storage solutions, and cool applications that enrich the user experience. We also work extensively on networking systems, advertising systems, and complex transaction systems in consumer applications. We are very proud of the key projects that were launched from our site (see a few examples below). Our teams are leading many projects as well as working with teams globally.

Below is a sample of some the areas we are working on:

• Search – We have teams advancing the Search experience, with projects including Google Autocomplete, Live Results (try searching for "weather tel aviv", "goog", or “mlb"), Google Related and more. The teams work closely with global teams on projects such as Google Instant.
• Analytics – We have teams working on technologies to analyze and visualize massive data sets and use the power of that data for the benefit of advertisers, website owners, scholars, and many other users. These include Google Insights for Search, Google Trends, Website Optimizer, Google Chart Tools, In-Page Analytics and more. The teams work closely with global teams on projects such as Google Analytics.
• Applications – We have teams working on backend technologies behind Gmail and other applications, as well as new advanced features (e.g. "got the wrong bob"). The teams work closely with global teams on projects such as Gmail Priority Inbox.
• Infrastructure Software – We are tackling some exciting technological challenges with unique algorithms in making one of the world’s largest networks work more effectively. While much of the work is behind the scenes, it helps driving the great experience users get from Google products.
• Special Projects – In addition to our already established efforts we incubate highly innovative projects in various disciplines. These include projects for emerging markets, projects that involve advanced computer vision technologies, and more. Some special projects were the seeds to some of the current big initiatives while others are kept as small but high-impact projects.

We encourage Googlers to spend 20% of their time on their own ideas. Projects resulted from 20% initiatives in Israel include YouTube Annotations (which is now used in YouTube clips) as well as our partnership with Yad Vashem to make their Holocaust archive accessible and searchable to a global audience. A few Googlers are spending their 20% time on high impact community outreach efforts; these include working with the developers community, leading programs encouraging high school students to consider science and technology, with particular attention to diversity (touching thousands of students to date), or teaching open source and web technologies at universities (for instance, classes given at Tel Aviv University).

Research

 

We seek new and innovative solutions to a variety of computational problems which arise from our engineering projects. Our research is focused on algorithms, machine learning, game theory, computer vision and data mining, however we also employ techniques from other branches of computer science. The fruits of research projects are often published in leading conferences and have an effect on Google's products and the industry at large. We also collaborate with the scientific community and support scientific research at the academia (for instance, our research initiative on auctions and market algorithms).

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Related:

Execs from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft explain why they use Israel for their R&D

Israeli Spyware Firm Accused Of Hacking Apple, Facebook And Google Responds (Updated)