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Google and World Brain Domination: Its the Books!

Google hits the books …

Veteran documentarian Ben Lewis travels the world speaking to futurists like Wired Magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly and scholars such as Harvard University cultural historian Robert Darnton for his mind-bending film Google and the World Brain, a fascinating look at the Google Books Project and its global implications.

From TechCrunch

“Google And The World Brain” is a new documentary about Google’s plan to scan all of the world’s books, which triggered an ongoing lawsuit being heard today. The hair-raising film sees Google import millions of copyrighted works, get sued, lose, but almost get a literature monopoly in the process. It’s scary, informative, and worth watching if you recognize its biased portrayal of Google as evil.

The film is getting wider release as Google continues to fight the Author’s Guild in court today. The organization is demanding $3 billion in damages from Google for scanning and reproducing copyrighted books. Google is asking the court to prevent the group from filing a class-action suit.

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Google Will Know What You Seek BEFORE You Do!

Google Search Guru Amit Singhal

Inside Google’s search quality group, Amit Singhal heads up the main search-ranking team, which is who creates those infamous algorithms that you hear so much about these days. Amit’s division ran some 16,000 experiments in 2010 that attempted to adjust those mathematical formulas, ultimately producing over 1000 greater and lesser changes in Google’s search formula.

Dr. Singhal, a former researcher at AT&T Labs (the former Bell Labs), joined Google in 2000 and now is a Google Fellow, a title reserved for its most accomplished engineers.Eleven years on, the search guru is still obsessed by information retrieval – the name by which search was known in academic circles until the advent of the internet in the late nineties.

“The big issue is semantics—the idea that sleep, sleeping, and running are all variations of the same fundemental word. This has been researched intently by academia for over five decades. In my academic life, I said, of course, apple means the same as apples,” reminisces Singhal in a 2009 Business Week interview.

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Will New Google Algorithm Punish ‘Alternative News?’

The new Google Algorithm is live.  Just over a month ago, Google announced that they were changing their algorithm in order to weaken the search engine rankings of sites they deem to be “content farmers. Read Google’s announcement here

Google Algorithm Changes May Hurt Alternative News Sites

“Whereas most of Google’s algorithm changes are barely noticeable,” Eric Blair & Michael Edwards write at Activist Post. “The current change that they have been working on since last January will affect 12% of U.S. searches.”

There has been much debate about what “content farming” is, and Google has done little to offer a clear explanation, simply stating, “low quality” or “shallow” sites would be affected. This is similar to the vague definition of pornography — you’ll know it when you see it.

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Using Twitter to Predict The Market

Many expert traders claim to know how to predict whether the market will rise or fall at any particualr time. But there are few, if any, who can actually do it consistently better than simply tossing a coin.

Twitter Stock Market TimingFor many economists that’s easy to explain. Conventional economic theory (ie, Efficient Market Theory) holds that the movement of prices in a perfect market should follow a random walk and should be impossible to predict with an accuracy greater than 50 per cent.

But the efficient market hypothesis no longer holds water because numerous studies have shown that stock market prices are not entirely random and may very well be tied to mass psychology and related factors.  If so there may be a way to gauge the mass consciousness for predictive signs.

Researchers at Indiana University say they’ve found just such a predictor buried in the seemingly endless chatter that emanates from the Twitterverse. (Study results posted at bottom)

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