Since late 2011, Google has been gradually encrypting more and more of the keywords people use when searching for something. The company started with the searches conducted by users who were logged into Google products. It has now added searches conducted from Firefox, Safari, iOS and other devices. And the company has said that it’s moving towards the position where all search queries will be encrypted. 
What that means is that web masters will eventually have no idea what keywords bring up their site as a result of a Google search. And this in turn means that the prospects of the existing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry seem to have suddenly, er, dimmed. Some people are blaming Edward Snowden for this, on the grounds that his disclosures strengthened Google’s resolve to protect their users’ searches from the prying eyes of the NSA. This seems unreasonable, if only because Google embarked on this strategy long before anyone had heard of Snowden. It’s doing this for its own commercial reasons. The fact that it helps to defend us from NSA snooping is just a bonus. In light of these changes, the role of an seo company canada becomes even more crucial for businesses aiming to maintain their online presence. These companies will need to innovate, developing new strategies that align with Google’s focus on user privacy and content relevance. While the loss of direct keyword data might seem like a setback, it also presents an opportunity to prioritize comprehensive content strategies that enhance overall site authority and user satisfaction. This evolution in SEO practices underscores the importance of adaptability and the continuous pursuit of cutting-edge techniques in the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing. As the landscape of SEO continues to evolve with Google’s increased emphasis on user privacy, businesses must adapt their strategies to stay competitive. This shift underscores the growing importance of working with an experienced SEO consultant. These professionals are adept at navigating the complexities of search engine algorithms and can provide valuable insights into optimizing content and improving site authority in a world where direct keyword data is less accessible. Link building remains a cornerstone of effective SEO strategies, especially in the current landscape where search engines prioritize content relevance and user experience. This is where partnering with a specialized service like SERPninja can be invaluable. Their expertise in building strategic link networks ensures that your website gains the credibility needed to thrive in competitive search environments. Working with experts allows businesses to navigate the complexities of modern link-building strategies, ensuring that every link contributes positively to their SEO goals. In this shifting landscape, the synergy between web design and SEO is more important than ever. A web design agency that understands the SEO basics can play a critical role in helping businesses navigate these changes. By integrating SEO principles into the design process, agencies can ensure that websites are not only visually appealing but also optimized for search engine visibility. This approach requires a deep understanding of how design elements impact SEO, from site structure and navigation to the use of keywords and meta tags. As the SEO industry adapts to new challenges, a web design agency that effectively combines design expertise with SEO knowledge will be well-positioned to deliver comprehensive solutions that drive traffic and improve search rankings.
Author Archives: jjn1
Breaking through the Reality Distortion Field
This morning’s Observer column.
When Steve Jobs was still with us, many commentators – yours truly included – used to complain about the “reality distortion field” that surrounded Apple’s charismatic leader. Those in attendance when Jobs launched the devices and services (iPod, iTunes, OS X, iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPad) that blew such huge holes in the business models of established industries told of events that were more like religious revival meetings than corporate press conferences. As Apple’s dominance grew, the man who led it came to be seen as a unique combination of visionary, guru, saint and mogul.
But then mortality intervened and His Steveness passed away. The reality distortion field persisted, however, though now in reverse. It led people to conclude that the death of the magician would inevitably lead to the end of the magic that made Apple the most valuable company in the world. In comparison to Jobs his successor, Tim Cook, was seen as charismatically challenged. And while we could expect Apple to thrive for a little longer, it was only because Cook would be unveiling innovations that were in the works when Jobs was alive. After that, the well would surely run dry.
It was against this background that the hapless Cook unveiled the new iPhones on 10 September…
Why I’m thinking of saving up for an iPhone 5s
Stranger than fiction: the Umbrella Man and the assassination of JFK
Over at our research project I’ve been brooding on the conspiracy theories surrounding what happened to Building 7 in 9/11, and then fell to thinking about frame 313 of the famous Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK (which, at least until the advent of YouTube must have been the most-watched home movie in history). Here’s how Ron Rosenbaum, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, summarises the key sequence in the film:
As the motorcade approaches, we see JFK’s car emerge from behind a sign that had been temporarily blocking the view. Suddenly, we see JFK clutch his throat. Jackie leans over to attend to him. An instant later, in Frame 313, it looks like a lightning bolt strikes JFK’s head. We see it blown up and thrown back. Jackie frantically crawls over the rear seat of the open car and climbs onto its rear deck grasping at something that has been described as a piece of her husband’s shattered skull. If Frame 313 is the forensic peak of the Zapruder film, this sight is the almost-unbearable emotional heart of it.
Rewind to Frame 313: The visceral impression that the blast came from in front of JFK and blew his head backward is powerful. There have been arguments that this is a kind of optical illusion—the most convincing to me being that JFK had been hit from behind after the previous frame, 312, slamming his chin forward to his chest, and his head was rebounding backward in Frame 313.
And it would be so much easier to dismiss the impression of a frontal shot as an illusion, because otherwise you’d have to doubt the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was positioned behind the president, was the lone gunman.
But it would be a dozen years before most of the world would see Frame 313.
What brought Building 7 to mind was the parallel with the critical frames in the Zapruder film: any lay observer of the Building 7 collapse would probably conclude that it must have been an example of controlled demolition; and I guess that most lay observers of that awful moment in the Zapruder film would conclude that the shot must have come from the front rather than from the rear — and therefore that there must have been more than one gunman.
And here we come to one possible explanation for why some conspiracy theories can be so compelling: it is that non-conspiratorial explanations seem so implausible or far-fetched that the most rational approach is to reject them. And at this point I came on this intriguing short film by Errol Morris, the documentary-maker who won an Oscar for The Fog of War, his film about Robert MacNamara and the Vietnam War. Morris was the guy (I think) who first noticed that just as the motorcade reached the point where the President was shot, there was a man standing under a black umbrella (this on a brilliantly sunny morning), and this observation led to some pretty arcane conspiracy theories. But I will let him tell the story in his own words.
The JFK assassination is probably the most inquired-into killing in history. But intensity of re-examination can have various results. As John Updike observed in the New Yorker of December 9, 1967 when reviewing some of that re-examination,
“We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses – gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where a person is how the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for the absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.”
Or, as Errol Morris puts it in the film:
“If you put any event under a microscope you will find a complete dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research with things sort of obeying natural laws, the usual things happen, unusual things don’t happen. And then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.”
I like his concluding riff:
“What it means is if you have any fact which you think is really sinister, right, is really obviously a fact which can only point to some really sinister underpinning, forget it, man. Because you can never on your own think of all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations.”
It’s also worth noting that in 1976, after frame 313 was finally shown on US TV, the House of Representatives set up a special inquiry to re-examine the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. In relation to the Kennedy assassination, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll in Dallas and that JFK was therefore killed by a conspiracy. But that conclusion was largely based on acoustic evidence which was later challenged and discredited.
An interesting factoid: the part of the Guardian office in London where the investigative reporters’s desks are clustered is sometimes irreverently referred to as “the grassy knoll”.
Why having a passcode might not protect your iPhone 5s from unauthorised use
Well, well. Alongside the discovery that the iPhone 5s fingerprint system isn’t quite as secure as advertised comes this.
If you have an iPhone 5 or older and have updated your operating system to Apple’s new iOS 7 version, you should be aware that the password (or “passcode”) required on your phone’s lock screen no longer prevents strangers from accessing your phone.
They can use Siri, the voice-command software, to bypass the password screen and access your phone, instead.
The good news is that distressed iPhone 5S owners can apparently foil this workaround by controlling access to Siri in the phone’s settings menu. The trail is: Settings –> General –> Passcode Lock [enter passcode] –> Allow access when locked > Siri > switch from green to white.
Canarios: John Williams
Many years ago I worked (on the New Statesman) with John Williams’s mother. One day a lovely, long-haired boy appeared in the office with a present for his Mum. It was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on the lad, who was already prodigiously successful, earning more money than he knew what to do with. (He once tried to buy his mother a Range Rover, despite the fact that she didn’t drive.) Yesterday, I came on this video on YouTube which shows him exactly as I remember him. And playing one of my favourite pieces too.
Twitter and the transformation (?) of democracy
My Comment piece about news of Twitter’s impending IPO.
One of the most striking aspects of the epoch-making Commons debate on Syria was the way many MPs cited the emailed opposition of their constituents to armed intervention as a reason for voting against the proposed action.
In the United States, members of Congress told much the same story. It’s impossible to know whether MPs and congressmen were using constituents’ hostility as a way of legitimising their own, private, views, but their protestations gave a dramatic new twist to an old conundrum: are parliamentarians representatives (legislators who make up their own minds) or mere delegates (people who vote as instructed by their constituents)?
Edmund Burke famously raised the question in a speech to the electors of Bristol on 3 November 1774. “Government and legislation,” he said, “are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?”
In Burke’s time, when Bristol was two days’ ride from London, the idea that constituents might determine the votes of their MP in Westminster in anything resembling real time was moot. So deliberative democracy was the only option available.
MPs’ recent rationalisations of their votes suggest that some of our politicians have embarked down a slippery slope. Technologies such as Twitter, which offer real-time tracking of public opinion, do make Burke’s nightmare realisable. Which means that a company that can regulate expressions of that opinion might be very powerful indeed. And that should make us nervous.
Eagle fouls its own nest
This morning’s Observer column
‘It’s an ill bird,” runs the adage, “that fouls its own nest.” Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us.
Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for digital affairs, put it in a speech on 4 July: “If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn’t matter – any smart person doesn’t want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.”
Which providers? Why, the big US internet companies that have hitherto dominated the market for cloud services – a market set to double in size to $200bn (£126bn) over the next three years. So the first own goal scored by the NSA was to undermine an industry that many people had regarded as the next big thing in corporate computing.
Mr Dodd, I believe
The bronze statue of comedian Ken Dodd, Lime Street Station, Liverpool.
Ye olde drunken louts
As any university teacher (and administrator) knows, binge drinking by undergraduates is one of the curses of university life — which is why the decision by University College Cork to offer students the option of alcohol-free accommodation is such a good idea.
But then I was reading Parson Woodforde’s diary and found this entry for November 4, 1761 (when he was a Scholar at New College, Oxford):
“Dyer laid Williams 2s 6d that he drank 3 pints of wine in 3 Hours, and that he wrote 5 verses out of the Bible right, but he lost. He did it in the B.C.R. [Bachelor’s Common Room], he drank all the Wine, but could not write right for his Life. He was immensely drunk about 5 Minutes afterwards.
Plus ca change…