Credit Card Agreements Easier to Understand Than Facebook, Google Policies

Just how complex are those user agreements that most people skip reading when they sign up for Facebook or Google?

More complex than a credit card agreement or a government notice, according to a study released Tuesday by branding firm Siegel+Gale. On average, 400 survey participants who had carefully reviewed the agreements were only able to answer four out of 10 comprehension questions about the policies after their review.

What's worse, of users who did understand the policies or had them explained to them, 75% said they would change their Facebook privacy settings and 63% said they would be more careful about how they used Google in the future.

'It's time for these online giants to recognize that their policies bring an unacceptable web of complexity and risk to the lives of their users. The lack of understanding of online privacy is pervasive,' said Thomas Mueller, global director of customer experience of Siegel+Gale. 'Bringing greater simplicity to what Web users read online will engender trust among users and only benefit Facebook's and Google's reputation.'

Among the study's other key findings:

• The comprehension rates for credit card agreements (70%) and government notices (67%) were far higher than those for Google (36%) and Facebook (39%).


• Just one in five Facebook users were able to figure out how to block a third-party application or website from accessing information they shared on Facebook after reading the social network's privacy policy.


• Less than one in four Google+ users could figure out whether their profile was publicly viewable to anyone after reading Google's privacy terms.

All of these issues are compounded by the fact that privacy policies, particularly those used by social networks, are ever-evolving and ever-changing. Even if a user can understand a privacy policy, it can - especially in the case of Facebook - change without their knowledge. 

'This complexity erodes trust and jeopardizes online privacy,' said Irene Etzkorn, executive director of simplification of Siegel+Gale. 'Clearly, Facebook, Google and other online service providers operate based on consumer trust, and failure to address privacy concerns in a meaningful way will lead to consumer disenchantment and additional regulatory restrictions.'

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How Google Searches the Entire Web in Half a Second

It only takes half a second for Google to return a search based on keywords you type in, but there’s a whole lot more happening behind the scenes to give you the results you need. Google on Monday launched a video that explains the science behind how the massive search engine actually works.

Matt Cutts, software engineer head of Google’s webspam team, details in a YouTube video how the search engine giant thoroughly scours the web on a daily basis to provide the most up-to-date results to users.

“There are three things you need to do to be the best search engine in the world. First, you need to crawl the web comprehensively and deeply, then you want to rank or serve those pages and return the most relevant ones first,” Cutts said.

Although Google crawls the web on a daily basis, that wasn’t always the case.

“We used to crawl for 30 days… and then index for about a week and push that data out — and that would take about a week,” Cutts said. “Sometimes you would hit a data center with new data and sometimes you would hit a data center with old data.”

But this method wasn’t optimized since a lot of the information would be out of date. In 2003, Google switched to crawling a significant amount of the Internet each day. By scouring the web each day for new content, it incrementally updated its index.

“We have gotten even better over time, and at this point, we can keep it very fresh,” Cutts said.

To do so, page rank is the key deciding factor as to how likely you are to see a link: “We basically take page rank as the primary determinant and the more page rank you have — that is, the more people that link to you and the more reputable those people are — the more likely it is that we will discover your page relatively early in the crawl,” Cutts said.

Google also places a lot of emphasis on word order. For example, a search for pop singer “Katy Perry” will look for results with those two words next to each other, rather than having “Katy” and the word “Perry” show up in different parts of the content.

Finding the right balance between word proximity, page reputation and links pointing to it is the key.

“That’s kind of the secret sauce,” Cutt added.

Google then sends that query out to hundreds of different machines all at once, which look through their fraction of the web that has been indexed to find the best match.

“We say, ‘what’s the best page that matches this query across our entire index?” Cutts said. “We take that page and we try to show it with a useful snippet, so we show the keywords in the context of the document and get it all back in under half a second.”

How do you think companies can use this information to better show up in Google search results? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Google Is Now a Graphing Calculator

Google has decided to make its simple search box into yet another thing. It's now a WebGL-powered 3D graphing calculator. If you type in a two-variable function, Google's search box on the desktop will graph an animated, interactive, 3D plot right in your browser.

Google is moving increasingly toward providing answers when they're faster than Web results. But putting an advanced graphing calculator into search is an obvious defense against Wolfram Alpha, which is notably Apple's Siri partner for math and science questions. Google search is fighting a two-front war, with Facebook and social search on the other side. How many things can Google search be at once?

Google has had Universal Search for five years, but the landscape has shifted drastically. When Google added images, videos, maps and places to search results, it only secured its dominance over those verticals. Google's competitors freaked out, but Google pressed ahead.

This ill will is coming back to bite Google now. Yelp, the highest-profile company that objected to Google's Universal Search practices, is now going public and hitching its wagon to Apple. When iPhone 4S users use Siri to search for a restaurant or gas station, it will bypass Google altogether and use Yelp.

Likewise, Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for math and science questions. It's a 'computational knowledge engine' built on the theories and proprietary programming language of Stephen Wolfram. Graphing isn't just built into it; it's a primitive concept of the language underlying it. Can Google compete with that?

Well, not until WebGL works on phones. But at least on the desktop, Google is still devoted to the idea of using search as a starting point for everything on the Web. It's contending with Wolfram Alpha on the side of computed answers, and it has Facebook's dominant social graph on the other side in personalized search. Facebook is reportedly building new search technology, too.

Time will tell whether the convenience of having all these disparate services in one place will win out, or whether Google's notion of search will be stretched too thin.

The new graphing capabilities work internationally on modern desktop browsers like Chrome and Firefox, as well as Safari, which Google's blog post unsurprisingly neglected to mention - if, that is, you don't have a 'low-end' system like the most recent MacBook Air.

You can try it out by pasting this function into Google on your desktop:

sqrt(cos(3*x))*cos(100*y)+1.5*sqrt(abs(x)) + 0.8 x is from -1 to 1, y is from -1 to 1, z is from 0.01 to 2.5

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Google Nexus tablet 'will get its own store'

Google looks set to follow in the footsteps of Apple and Amazon, as reports say the search giant will set up its own online store to sell the upcoming Google Nexus tablet.

The iPad and Kindle ranges both appear on their manufacture's own websites and Google is thought to be considering this method to help turn around slow sales of Android tablets.

In Depth
Google Nexus tablet release date, news and rumours

The Wall Street Journal claims to have spoken to "people familiar with the matter", who confirmed the Nexus tablet will be built by third party manufactures and sold via a Google-branded online shop.

Asus and Samsung

We reported earlier in the month that Google was set to name Asus as the manufacturer for its first Google Nexus tablet, after ruling out the likes of Acer and HTC.

The sources which spoke to the WSJ confirmed that Asus would indeed be one of the manufacturers producing a Google branded tablet, along with another Google partner, Samsung.

This wouldn't be the first time Google has set up a dedicated online store for a product, as it did so back in 2010 for the Google Nexus One, which was manufactured by HTC.

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Angry Birds Celebrates 2nd

It’s a big day for Angry Birds lovers, with Rovio busting out a free upgrade today for iOS with 15 special levels to honor the game’s

All episodes of the original Angry Birds game will be unlocked, so no matter how poorly you play the game, you can now take a peek into the first level of each episode. Whether you can climb up each level within those newly revealed episodes is entirely up to you. second birthday on December 11.

In addition, Rovio‘s teamed up with Barnes & Noble, and on December 11 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. there will be various special events such as scavenger hunts, high-score contests, designing Angry Birds characters, parades and guessing games in many of Barnes & Noble’s U.S. stores.

Toys “R” Us gets in on the fun, too, with discounts on Angry Birds plush toys, and that includes an unlock code for an Angry Birds Chrome “Seasons Greedings” bonus level.

This is starting to sound like the next Star Wars franchise.

Rovio certainly does have a lot to celebrate with its Angry Birds games, explosively successful and contributing to the company’s astonishing value, which its CMO says is worth more than $1 billion. As of last month, fans have played 266 billion levels of the game, shot 400 billion birds and collected 44 billion stars. In fact, according to Rovio, people play Angry Birds for a combined 1.825 billion hours per month.

You might say this game, in its own way, is taking over the world:

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Google+ rolling out facial recognition feature

Google is rolling out a feature that lets members of its online social network automatically find themselves in photos posted by friends.

The "Find My Face" feature being added to Google+ over the next several days is opt-in only, meaning people have to make a point to turn it on.

By leaving it to Google+ members to activate the feature, the Internet giant was sidestepping privacy concerns raised when social networking rival Facebook added facial recognition in an opt-out style this year.

"By turning on Find My Face, Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos," Google+ photos team engineer Matt Steiner said in a blog post.

"Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject," he explained. "We hope this makes tagging your photos much easier."

Google remains undaunted in its bid to create a flourishing online community that can go toe-to-toe with social networking powerhouse Facebook.

The California firm's popular products and services will increasingly be woven into its nascent but fast-growing Google+ social network to make joining irresistible, executives said at an Internet conference here in October.

"We are in an enviable position that we have people who come to Google," Vic Gundotra, vice president in charge of Google+, said at a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

"We are in this for the long haul... By Christmas you will see Google+ strategy coming together."

Google+ has attracted more than 40 million users since it opened to the public in September, but has a long way to catch up with Facebook's membership of approximately 800 million.

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