Month: January 2024

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Getty Images)

It's not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO spam.

The study, first spotted by 404media, "monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries," using queries like "best headphones" to study search results. The focus was on product review queries because the researchers felt those searches were "particularly vulnerable to affiliate marketing due to its inherent conflict of interest between users, search providers, and content providers."

Overall, the study found that "the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam." Search engines occasionally update their ranking algorithms to try to combat spam, but the study found that "search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam" and that there are "strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content."

Enlarge / Everyone loves a good van, and Supervan 4.2 is a very good van. (credit: Ford)

Concorde, NC—On Wednesday, Ford Performance held an official launch event for the 2024 season. The new GT3 version of the Mustang makes its competition debut at next weekend's Rolex 24 at Daytona, marking the start of a new approach to racing for the Blue Oval, one that involves selling customer race cars as a business line, not just a factory team. While we were there, we also rode in a new electric racing truck demonstrator, but the main reason I got on the short flight down to Charlotte was to check out one of the most delightfully weird race cars of the past few years, the Ford Transit Supervan 4.2.

It's the latest in a line of wild demonstrator vehicles based on the venerable Transit van, Ford's commercial workhorse in Europe and, increasingly, the US. Ford started making an electric version of the Transit a couple of years ago, and when we drove that electric van, I might have driven a couple of the engineers and PR people to tears by repeatedly asking them, "So, are you going to make a Supervan version of this, too?"

The first Supervan dates back to 1970 (or maybe 1971), when someone had the bright idea to stick a Transit body shell on a Ford GT40 race car chassis as a way to promote the new van. The 1980s and 1990s saw two new Supervans, this time using Formula 1 engines. Now that EVs are the new hotness, the appeal of an electric Supervan probably seemed obvious.

Enlarge / Paul Patterson, co-CEO of Fujitsu's European division, testifies for a public inquiry in London on January 19, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | AFP)

Fujitsu software bugs that helped send innocent postal employees to prison in the UK were known "right from the very start of deployment," a Fujitsu executive told a public inquiry today.

"All the bugs and errors have been known at one level or not, for many, many years. Right from the very start of deployment of the system, there were bugs and errors and defects, which were well-known to all parties," said Paul Patterson, co-CEO of Fujitsu's European division.

That goes back to 1999, when the Horizon software system was installed in post offices by Fujitsu subsidiary International Computers Limited. From 1999 to 2015, Fujitsu's faulty accounting software aided in the prosecution and conviction of more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses who were accused of theft or fraud when the software wrongly made it appear that money was missing from their branches.