It’s the end of an era at VeriSign - Stratton Sclavos, the company’s CEO, has resigned. “[T]he leading provider of digital infrastructure for the networked world” will now be managed by William A. Roper, Jr.
Why Sclavos stepped down remains unclear, however; an official statement from VeriSign mentions a potential reason - “the review of the company’s historical stock option grant practices by an ad hoc group of independent members of VeriSign’s Board of Directors is substantially completed” - but then goes on to point out that “[t]he review did not find intentional wrongdoing by any current member of senior management, including Sclavos.”
In the end, we may never know. Sclavos is, in any event, staying positive, and has stated, “I want to thank the people of VeriSign for their support and contributions over the past 12 years. I am proud of my role in building VeriSign into the great company it has become, and wish all of my associates the very best in the coming years.”
Sounds like a nice fella, right? No word on any “golden parachutes,” but it seems reasonable to assume that any CEO who’s wisely managed his (or her) money has nothing to worry about.
VeriSign’s stockholders also appear to be in the clear - after an initial dive in value, the company’s shares are now trading near a 52-week high. Yet, from our eBusiness angle, it’ll be interesting to see if Sclavos’s resignation has an effect on domain name prices and his (former) company’s scuffles with ICANN.
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It’s a well-known fact that Google frequently lets its employees do their own thing on company time. Many of those employees then come up with brilliant ideas, but the search engine giant - wealthy as it is - doesn’t have money to pursue them all. In the long term, do those employees go on to get rich, or get screwed?
Robert Cringely votes for “rich.” After considering several aspects of the company’s operations, he writes, “[W]e’ll shortly see a dribble, then a river, then a flood of former Google employees with time, money, and experience, and some of them will have the drive to realize the dreams of those thousands of ideas that were rejected by their former company.”
That sounds like a pretty sweet deal - work for a famously “fun” company, then go do whatever you like best. But Google Watch’s Steve Bryant found a flaw with the plan, and it relates to a clause in Google’s standard employee agreement form; Googlers appear to forfeit the rights to just about everything they think of while working for the company.
“In other words, everything you do here, stays here,” writes Bryant. “So that fabled 20% free time at Google is really just 20% more time for Google. . . . Google knows what it’s doing. And while I have no doubt that the current Google employees will go on to make wondrous companies, Google is ensuring they snatch up most of the good ideas first. In that light, working for Google could be the worst decision an entrepreneur ever makes.”
Yikes. I don’t know if free food balances that out.
Source: www.webpronews.com
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Once upon a time, if you typed “she invents,” Google tried to tell you it was “he invents.” This applied to a lot of other queries, as well, and a number of people grew unhappy with these apparent examples of sexism. Now Google’s programmers seem to have gone in and tweaked the engine, and “she” is allowed to invent things.
After all, being accused of sexism isn’t good for a company’s reputation, regardless of whether the charges are true. (As Valleywag’s Nick Denton interpreted an official Google statement, “It’s the world that’s sexist; we just index it.”)
And so, though it remains unclear what had to be done or undone, Google fine-tuned this aspect of its search engine. “It might be Google engineers manually corrected this using a blacklist, or they advanced their algorithm to return more relevant spellcheckings for cases like these,” writes Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped.
Problem solved? Not quite. Lingering cases of insulting “did you mean” suggestions may still be out there, as Seth Finkelstein discovered. His search for “she invent” returned a “did you mean” of “he inventt.” But as Finkelstein asked, “Why is this significant?”
“Because ‘she’ is a common English word, ‘inveent’ is not a common English word, and the naive correction of ‘inveent’ to ‘invent’ should yield a suggestion of ‘she invent,’” he answered. “But it seems to be doing some sort of statistical best-match for the phrase as a whole. . . . [I]t shows it’s harder than it might appear to remove all aspects of structural bias (which is not to trivialize addressing an obvious case).”
Well, Google’s sexist “did you mean”s may not be entirely gone, but at least they’re on the way out.
Source: www.webpronews.com
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Submitted by David A. Utter on Fri, 05/25/2007 - 17:25.
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The early results of a click fraud study by Fair Isaac found advertisers being charged for illicit clicks, at a far higher rate than search engines like Google claim takes place.
The 10 to 15 percent rate of pathological traffic hitting Fair Isaac’s small sample of advertisers, less than a dozen sites, far exceeds the 0.02 percent rate touted by Google.
It’s news that has grabbed the attention of the search industry. Even though Fair Isaac has been careful to note it only discussed early results of its study at InterACT 2007, the figures they have found for advertisers being charged for illicit clicks corroborates some third party research into the matter.
We talked with Dr. Joseph Milana, who worked on the Fair Isaac click fraud study. He stressed the expertise Fair Isaac possesses after years of fraud detection in other industries, and that it could be applied to illicit clicks.
A follow-up message we received from Google bears out Dr. Milana’s point. Google and Fair Isaac both use statistical anomaly detection as part of their click fraud detection process. Here’s Google’s response:
• We have post-click data from thousands of advertisers through our conversion tracking tool. They are claiming post-click data from a “handful” of advertisers.
• It sounds like FI is doing the same kind of analysis we’re doing - statistical anomaly detection - only with considerable less data. That is, if you assume an advertiser has a 1% CTR, that means they are receiving 100 ad impressions (no one but Google gets ad impression data) for every one click. As a result, Google has 101 pieces of data to analyze vs. their 1.
• Most clicks don’t result in conversions, and in fact many/most (depending on the site) clicks don’t result in much “advertiser side data”. Imagine legitimate users who click an ad and then immediately leave if they don’t like their site. That’s obviously not click fraud.
One point Dr. Milana made at InterACT will be of interest to the statisticians among our readership. He said Google’s automated effectiveness claims at detecting click fraud would be roughly equal to a Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test score of 95.
He called that figure “not believable.” Without some more openness from Google into their fraud detection methods, which they guard closely for the protection of their advertisers, or more results from the Fair Isaac test, it’s hard to tell who to believe right now.
Google, Fair Isaac, Click Fraud
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Source: www.webpronews.com
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