Google is Shutting Down Google+ in April 2019 Following Massive Data Exposure

Google will soon shut down its Google+ social network after searching for other bugs that detect the personal information of millions of customers for software developers.

In a blog post, Google said that 52.5 million people were affected by a bug in a November software update. The latest bug allowed app developers to access profile information not publicly marked.

In October, Google announced that we’d be sunsetting the consumer version of Google+ and its APIs because of the significant challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations, as well as the reduced usage of the platform.

According to Google’s VP of engineering Ben Smith, the company undertook a security and privacy audit earlier this year called Project Strobe. Specifically, Google started looking at its API endpoints over concern developers could abuse them.

Google discovered a problem with the Google+ People API that could allow third-party developers to scrape optional profile information made available to your friends like name, email, occupation, and gender. Google says it does not see any indication that developers made usage of the bug before it was patched back in March, but it can’t be 100 percent certain.

However, Google+ will continue as a product for Enterprise users. This is the most popular use of the social network so far. Therefore, the company has decided that Google+ is better suited as an internal social network for companies, rather than a consumer product. Google will announce new Enterprise-focused products for Google+ in the near future.

With is second embarrassing privacy issue in two months, Google+ will shut down in April 2019. Two months ago, Google said it planned to shutter Google+ in August. Meanwhile, API access for developers will be shut down within the next 90 days.

Since buffer and other apps are keen to avoid a situation whereby posts start failing intermittently, they have made the decision to officially cease support for Google+ on January 25, 2019. They have now disabled new Google+ account connections as a preparation.

I like the journey of Google+ and I hope Google will launch something new in replacement of Google+ soon.

Image and article source: http://seobrain.blogspot.com/2019/01/google-is-shutting-down-google-in-april.html

Google Engineer Cites Complexities Around AI Algorithms Explaining Themselves

Google has been saying for a year or so that they are moving from a mobile first world to an artificial intelligence first world but we’ve been told, at least in search, machine learning won’t take over the algorithm – at least not yet.

So I saw this interesting tweet from Paul Haahr, a top search ranking engineer at Google for over 15 years. He cited a NY Times article named Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself? and wrote “This article by @cliffkuang on Explainable AI is an excellent introduction to hard, important problems. These issues are coming up at work every day; the article describes them well and gives some reasons for optimism.”

It reminded me of when he spoke at SMX some time ago where he said Google doesn’t fully understand RankBrain. I believe this article references what he means by that, because RankBrain is a machine learning, AI based search feature.

If Google cannot debug or understand how the algorithm itself gets better and makes certain decisions then how can Google debug it fully when it goes bad.

“As machine learning becomes more powerful, the field’s researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know — or how they know it.” That is not just a science fiction Terminator movie like fear concept but in reality, it is a topic that engineers need to battle with to understand how to improve their AI.

Anyway, reading the article might shed some light into those challenges and show you maybe how far off we are from robots killing us.

Source: seroundtable.com

Matt Cutts Returns To Google For A Day To Give A Talk

Matt Cutts, who formerly resigned from Google in 2016 to lead up the US Digital Service team in the Defense Digital Service at the Pentagon is coming back to Google. Well, just for a day.

Matt Cutts announced on Google+ that he will be giving a talk today, Friday at 12:30pm Pacific or 3:30pm Eastern. He did not say what the talk is about. We do however know that Matt is in recruitment mode, trying to get other engineers and smart thinkers to come to the USDS.

The USDS might not pay as well as Google but they do good work and recruiting, especially under the Trump administration might have proven to be somewhat hard for Cutts and the USDS team.

Again, it is not clear what Matt Cutts will be talking about but if I had to guess, it would be about doing good with technology and any company you are at. That includes Google but also within large government to solve big problems.

Source: seroundtable.com

Wishing You Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year!

Christmas can be many things or it may be a few, but all I wish on this holiday is the best for you. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year 2017 .

What counts as a high-quality website in Google?

Google’s quality algorithms for websites are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content. Taking a step back, Google wanted to explain some of the ideas and research that drive the development of their algorithms.

Below are some questions that one could use to assess the “quality” of a page or an article. These are the kinds of questions Google team asks itself as they write algorithms that attempt to assess site quality. Think of it as their take at encoding what they think their users want.

Image Courtesy: Googleblog.com

Of course, Google isn’t disclosing the actual ranking signals used in their algorithms because they don’t want folks to game their search results; but if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how they have been looking at the issue.

Consider below question and check your website quality accordingly. These factors will not improve the ranking immediately but obviously improve the quality of the website. If your website have the quality content then your website will rank soon with your keywords.