How One of Google’s Best Customers Could Steal Away Search

Shopping is key to Google’s fortunes, Jordan writes in a commentary just posted over at Fortune. And search is central to what Amazon does:

Amazon is a vertical search engine focused on helping users find products. The overwhelmingly dominant way to find things on their site is the search box. Users enter a keyword phrase and are presented with results that match his or her query. The order of the search results is determined by algorithms that seek to optimize relevance and monetization. Sound familiar?

The big difference between shopping on the two, Jordan says, is that the Amazon user experience is better, to say nothing of price, selection and shipping. “Buying on Google takes chunks of an hour, not an Amazon minute,” he says.

Read more at Wired

NSA Google Search Tips to Become Your Own Spy Agency

There’s so much data available on the internet that even government cyberspies need a little help now and then to sift through it all. So to assist them, the National Security Agency produced a book to help its spies uncover intelligence hiding on the web.

Read more at Wired

How to turn an iPhone into a professional video camera

The Telegraph used an iPhone to film, edit and upload instant video reviews from Glastonbury festival. Chris Stone reviews the accessories he used to do it.

Read the story here

it’s possible to automatically identify fake images on Twitter

A recent paper presented by researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, IBM Research Labs and the University of Maryland found that it was possible to identify tweets containing fake Sandy images with up to 97 percent accuracy.

“Hence, in cases of crisis, people often retweet and propagate tweets that they find in Twitter search or trending topics, irrespective of whether they follow the user or not,” the researchers write. This dynamic of out-of-graph retweets helps things spread rapidly, and it also illustrates how during breaking news events, social search can become more important than one’s social graph.

Another related piece of data in the paper is that fake images did not begin to spread rapidly until roughly 12 hours after they were first introduced on Twitter. The researchers note that “the sudden spike in their propagation via retweets happened only because of a few users.” So a fake will lay dormant until someone with the ability to amplify it comes along and retweets it. That’s what the fakers rely on, in fact.

Read more at Poynter

Teens Care About Online Privacy—Just Not the Same Way You Do

The data suggest that teens care less about data privacy and more about more socially oriented forms of privacy, those designed to protect the integrity of a community.

But there is evidence in Pew’s latest data set that suggests the privacy paradox could be fading, primarily with regard to reputation management. Pew notes that more than half of online teens (57 percent) say they have decided not to post something online because they were concerned it would reflect badly on them in the future, and other teen social media users are more likely than other teens who do not use social media to refrain from sharing content due to reputational concerns (61 percent vs. 39 percent). While this isn’t the same as having personal information used to target ads, it indicates an increasing awareness among teens online that their privacy concerns may need to expand to encompass how their online actions will resonate beyond the confines of the strange social ecosystem of childhood.

Read more here

TV Is Americans' Main Source of News

Television is the main place Americans say they turn to for news about current events (55%), leading the Internet, at 21%. Nine percent say newspapers or other print publications are their main news source, followed by radio, at 6%.

Read more at Gallup