Gaming Poseidon
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This weekâs reflection is later and shorter than usual. My apologies!
SAILORS USED TO PRAY to Poseidon before taking voyage. They did not yet know the explanations of air temperature and atmospheric pressure; the open sea was mysterious, unpredictable, scary. So they exchanged praise and sacrifice for the hope of safe passage.
Googleâs search engine is like the ancient open sea. It connects everything. Itâs how people find each other. Itâs where trade and travel happen. The pilgrim about to brave its waves has no idea what to expect from it, if it will take her where she wants to goâor if Poseidon is feeling cranky. And so she tries to play the game and bend the deity toward benevolence.
Iâm describing search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the practice of crafting web content in such a way that appeases Googleâs algorithm and thus might display your website to the front page of a search engine result.
The âSEO communityâ has been abuzz this past week because Google rolled out an algorithm update called BERT, which uses natural language processing to more accurately understand the context and motivation behind a Google query (itâs no longer just a bucket of keywords; how you ask your question is finally given its due emphasis). Because of this update, the results on a Google search result page are bound to shuffle around a bit. This could potentially mean the difference between having Website A be visible without having to scroll down, or having it drop to the second page, which, letâs be honest, youâre not clicking over to.
Fun fact: About half of Google searches donât result in a click. Enough people get the answer they need just by glancing at headlines or, increasingly, a Featured Snippet (those little information boxes that sometimes appear on your searches, which Google owns because they donât like you clicking off-platform).
When I zoom out and think about how our access to information is arranged this wayâby a single corporation, whose methodology is as mysterious to the average Internet sailor as Poseidonâs moodâI am sort of in shock. There will come a day when I Google âHow to buy a houseâ and my ensuing opinions on that process will probably be shaped by a blackbox algorithm and whatever island its waves push me toward.
Oh, and Google just bought Fitbit.
Yet somehow that platform was only the third-most-talked-about one this past week. Facebook made the news after announcing it wouldnât fact-check political ads (probably because itâs impossible to do well). Then Twitter subtweeted Facebook by announcing it would no longer display paid political ads on its websiteâthough its definition of âpoliticalâ is interesting.
At least we have the streaming wars to look forward to.
Elsewhere
đď¸My own private Iceland
âWe can travel to see what exists instead of wishing for some mythical untouched state, the dream of a place prepared perfectly for visitors and yet empty of them. Instead of trying to âlive like a local,â as Airbnb commands, we can just be tourists.â [The Goods]
đłThe Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout
âThereâs a certain elegant symmetry to Patternâs mission, after all: Who better to counter the anomie of the bourgeois millennial experience than those whoâve not only lived it â but helped construct it in the first place?â [BuzzFeed News]
đ§śBundling and unbundling
âThe process [of unbundling] rests on a faith that technology can isolate the true value of anything useful, removing it from its context without any loss of utility or desirability.â [Real Life]
đŁHow memes got weaponized: A short history
âMemes online make hoaxes and psychological operations easy to pull off on an international scale. We should view them as a serious threat.â [MIT Technology Review]
đ´Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation
âIn choosing what to worry about, parents have followed scientistsâ lead ... They worry mainly about how much time their children spend online without giving equal attention to the critical question of what they are doing there.â [Scientific American]
â Hal