I do this "for a living". Reputation Management is when you pay someone like me to make that result fall to the 5th page of Google so people searching for you only see the happy fun stuff you have done.
What is missing from the implementation from Google, that Google really needs to be "fair" is an OPT OUT.
You see when I go in and fix a reputation by outranking bad stuff with good, the bad stuff is still there if you know what you are looking for.
BBC JOHN DOE KILLS BABYSITTER is not going away, just not showing up when you Google JOHN DOE BABYSITTER because I will have place the top 40 results with things about How awesome SUSAN THE 16 YEAR OLD is who is now JOHN DOE's babysitter.
If Google did an OPT OUT, you would be able to say, "I am John Doe of Hicksville, IN" here is my picture, remove me from the interwebs. And nothing about you would be there. No good, No Bad.
Is this just me having sour grapes that my business of shaping reality is going away? No. If anything this is good for business. People will want what the EU has and flock to me.
For those who think I am a bad person. Yeah, I know that http://www.blackwaterops.com didn't pick its name because we thought we were the good guys.
But at the same time a lot of what we do is good. We work with organizations that share the name with bad people. You know how hard it is when you share the name with a serial killer to get a job even after that serial killer was executed?
You know how hard it is to recover from stuff 20+ years after the the Jack in the Box ecoli outbreak?
Or being named Play Boy's Hottest X and then trying to get a job working with kids? Even if you didn't ask to be associated with Play Boy?
It doesn't all have to be "bad neighbor" linking. Negative SEO can be contacting the people who are lending authority to a link and getting them to "nofollow" or remove the link.
Negative SEO can also be convincing Google to AutoSuggest things that don't paint your competition in a good light. "Cheezy Poofs Calories" seems like things people might ask, but people will reconsider if they want Cheezy poofs if the top suggestions in Google's autocomplete is "Cheezy Poofs Explosive Diarrhea" or "Cheezy Poofs Rectum Rash" Or better yet both.
That all Said. Bad Neighbor penalties and the ability to get a site delisted by link bombing has been well known for a long time. Anything that you could do to try and get your self upranked but that is sketchy could also be used to get your competitor delisted.
One thing to note however, is that along the way typically that competitor gets insane rankings just before getting delisted. That isn't always worth it.
I am an AirBnB Host. In Phoenix. I run close to a full time furnished Apartment Rental business.
I like AirBnB for that.
However, I have seen in SF places that are closer to hostel's and are far from safe or sanitary. Short Term Furnished Rental Properties feel like they should be legal, but 12 people squeezed in to a two bedroom apartment shouldn't be.
There may be need for some disruption, but that should be balanced with public health and safety.
There is a lot more to it. I am pretty well known as an SEO, and while I would love this to be true it isn't.
Google's improvements to GoogleBot are mostly targeting spam, and obfuscation of content. The ideas is not to discover content as much as it is to avoid having content hidden.
Previously you could have a webpage that appeared to be about Puppies, but then used any number o dynamic methods to instead show naked cam girls. Google worked to fix this.
Google is now doing some indexing of named anchors, and this allows for linking to a page with in a page as it were. But that is a Long ways from building indexable single page applications.
Ease of use is as important as raw power. This is slower to load than the pure HTML versions of Flappy Bird that are out there, but the idea of Write once publish many is appealing.
I am not 100% certain I'd pay $19 a month as a hobbyist, but an excellent deal for a small game shop.
Coding is easy. The problem is too many "teachers" expect you to have a larger vocabulary than you need.
I taught 3rd graders to code. I also taught 1st graders, but the 3rd graders it really clicked. They would come up with solutions to things I would not have thought were possible given the limited language we were working in.
We started in "Project Europa" it is object oriented, module based, and the vocabulary is very limited. But students built all sorts of virtual robots to do all sorts of interesting things.
When I learned to code I learned in RPG, and that doesn't stand for Role Playing Game. Then I moved on to Basic. Turbo Basic, and later QBasic. I wrote a 3D boxing game in QBasic. Yes. 3D graphics from QBasic.
To this day my vocabulary in any programming language is pretty limited. Those around me get upset because I'll use a While loop and increment a counter rather than a For loop and the Index of the thing I am looping through. It is not that I don't want to use the wider vocabulary, or that I have anything against Lambda's. I don't dislike Tuples. I have nothing against using a Class. But I don't usually need more than my 12 word vocabulary to build things. If I do, that is a performance optimization. What? Itertools and product will do the same thing I did with nested For Loops? So? I didn't know there was an itertools. I didn't know there was a product.
Someone said you need to develop a knack for asking the right question of google... Nah, sure StackOverflow has 90% of the answers you'd ever need to know, and they have a clever code snippet that I will admit comes in handy, but if you have to break thought to Google, you aren't breathing the code. It is like trying to learn Spanish by carrying the pocket guide with you rather than making do with the 12 words you know until you can learn 6 more, and then 12 more then 24 more words.
Take the training wheels off and suck it up. Machines are big and fast, large vocabularies are for people who want to speak concisely. A 3rd grader may not use the best choice of words, but he can still explain to you how to make a peanut butter sandwich, or build something in mine craft.
So don't let anyone tell you Programming is hard. Programming is easy. But there are a lot of ass hats who care if you should have built a function rather than copy and pasting the same code with minor variations 20 times. Or will say "you could have done that in one line with a lamba and a reciprocal function"
"Yeah, and Einstein had someone else do most of the math for his proofs because he kind of sucked at calculus. I'll get to optimizations after I have something that runs."
> But there are a lot of ass hats who care if you should have built a function rather than copy and pasting the same code with minor variations 20 times.
That larger vocabulary you sneer at is much of what allows developers to be multiplicatively productive, allows them to do much more work and do it in a faster and less error-prone way.
Or, put another way: are they having to maintain your code when you get tired of it and move on or are they having to deal with second-order effects from your code being more brittle, less flexible, and slower to work on? 'Cause if so, they're not the asshat.
I looked at the nightly order-processing workflow for the regional retailer I worked for one time. I was gobsmacked to find that one section of it consisted of launching the same suite of 5-6 programs one time for each of our 25 locations. And "launching" meant setting a handful of run-time variables, executing the object, waiting for it to finish running, and examining the result.
It was fairly easy to see why this happened. That workflow was the heart and soul of the company's revenue processing, and no one wanted to touch it any more than absolutely necessary, to avoid breaking anything. So when they expanded from one warehouse to two, it made more sense to simply re-iterate the existing code with the new location id. When they added another location, re-iterate it again, and so forth.
I created a Launch subroutine, then replaced all those hundreds of lines of code with a for loop that simply called the Launch subroutine for each object needed. Then I went through the rest of the workflow and swapped in Launch calls where appropriate. Overnight, that workflow became much shorter, more readable, and most importantly, significantly more maintainable. Previously, if you wanted to change what programs were run per branch, you had to insert the launching logic in twenty-five separate spots. Now? Once.
That, my friends, is why we build functions, rather than copypasta-ing the same code over and over.
You might as well say "basketball is easy". Sure, dribbling a ball can be taught instantly, but your 3 pt percentage or rebounding skill can continually improve over the course of a career.
Just because you taught some 3rd graders a for loop doesn't make them coders and it certainly doesn't make them engineers.
The programming is easy myth is doubly bad: it sets a false expectation for the aspirants and belittles actual engineers' lifetimes of study.
You know how the moon looks HUGE when it is low on the horizon? That is just perspective, but you should write on the moon then. Your brain does this built in Zoom thing when it has something to scale against, and you could use that to your advantage.
Rather than smoothing the surface to reduce shadows, Why not write in a color other than black? I'm thinking a laser in Green would work well and would contrast against black and white quite well.
If google wants to "own the grid" and we know they do. Then power will need to be efficiently converted from DC to AC.
If you do this at the outlet, then LED's and other DC favoring electronics could be powered by wires that are DC, and AC would only be used when necessary.
Think of all the devices you have with a power brick to take AC to DC. All of those are losing electrons along the way... (most power supplies are less than 75% efficient).
Power does not need to be stored as DC. Flywheels store rotational energy, and starting with a spinning flywheel it's pretty simple to get AC out of it.
True, but your electrical output would be variable-frequency AC at the drive terminal. This isn't particularly useful unless you use a back-to-back converter (i.e. DC link) to get constant-frequency AC.
I'm no mechanical engineer but at first glance the conversion efficiency of using a CVT with a synchronous AC drive (vs. direct coupling the motor rotor and the flywheel rotor and using a variable-frequency induction motor + back-to-back converter) would seem to be lower.
Modern VFDs have very high part-load efficiency and we can easily maintain a constant power characteristic through the full speed range by operating in the field weakening mode. One way or another you're losing energy in frequency conversion, it's just a question of whether you do that mechanically (with CVT) or electrically (with back-to-back converters).
Also keep in mind that for grid storage devices, we're usually talking about 500+ kW on each flywheel which, at low speed, is A LOT of torque.
That would not be efficient. Yes you could also store the energy by pumping water up hill and letter it turn a turbine later, but you'd lose a LOT of power.
You could store the energy in springs ala the da Vinci cart, but again not efficient.
All of these methods require a conversion, where as a Battery, Capacitor, or Leyden Jar will store DC as DC.
Converting electric power to and from a battery requires an electrochemical reaction to occur. That is a conversion just the same - I don't really buy this "no conversion required" argument, just because you started and ended with direct current.
The efficiency gained by stepping up AC to higher voltage (and correspondingly lower current) is far greater than that lost to skin effect. Since there is no way to efficiently step up DC (modern DC-DC converters are still horribly lossy), AC transmission ends up being more efficient, by a long shot.
There are scenarios where HVDC can be more suitable than AC, in particular, very long distance links (e.g. to a remote hydraulic station). All of the substation equipment is much more expensive in HVDC but the benefit of eliminating line reactance can outweigh this if you're doing 1000+ km without any interconnections.
Also, interconnection between neighbouring AC grids is an important HVDC application since we don't have to worry about transient stability.
Neither AC or DC are superior. Different technologies for different applications.
Can you explain like I'm a physics major why HVDC becomes more efficient than AC over ~1000km? A scale analysis would be great - where does the distance D come into the equation?
I get why AC is better than DC on ~100km, but I don't understand how it changes again at larger scales.
Both systems have resistive loses proportional to the square of the current. However:
1. Total power transferred in a DC system is proportional to the voltage, whereas power transferred in an AC system is proportional to the RMS voltage (which is roughly 0.7 of nominal for a sine wave), so more energy is transmitted at the same current level in HVDC.
2. AC systems manifest impedance which has a resistive (aka DC) component as above as well as a reactive (aka AC) component, i.e. Z = R + jX. In DC systems X = 0. In a theoretical transmission line no energy is absorbed or supplied from line reactance, but in practice we have to transmit a certain amount of reactive power (VARs) to charge the line capacitance/inductance each AC cycle. This reduces the amount of our current capacity (limited by thermal constraints) that actually carries current that can be delivered to the load as active power (watts).
This effect is somewhat although not directly proportional to distance (characteristic impedance has no dependence on line length, but voltage drops along the line due to resistive effects meaning the variation from the optimal reactive power-minimizing voltage level increases).
The effect of (1) and (2) is that for any given conductor, at a given voltage level, more usable energy can be transmitted with DC than AC, and that differential increases with distance.
That being said, building DC converter and switching stations is much more expensive than AC. So for a shorter line, or one that has many switching stations, I could counter the above by simply generating 5-8% more power at the generating station and still come out ahead (because in real engineering everything is about $).
Therefore, DC is only more cost-effective ($/MVA of energy delivered) at long distances.
Reactive power is the control then. With AC, we have to increase reactive power to shove more real power along the line, but reactive power doesn't transmit very well.
Follow on: in a national grid, could we just distribute the production of reactive power with capacitor banks in each town / neighbourhood? Heavy flywheels spinning at 50hz?
> building DC converter and switching stations is much more expensive than AC
Is this intrinsic to the technology or is it more because we have economies of scale from building infrastructure around AC for 100 years?
'Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted as about 3.5% per 1,000 km, which is less than typical losses in an AC transmission system.[16]'
At line-frequency skin effect is not significant for almost any practical conductor (ie. reasonably conductive and with reasonable cross-section). What gets significant for long distance transmission is that few thousand kilometer long power transmission line starts behaving like, well, transmission line even on frequencies as low as 50/60Hz. Also HVDC elegantly sidesteps problem of grid synchronization.
Oh, that is completely not true for commercial AC power transmission -- just look up at a big power pylon and see the multiple power conductors per phase.
I assumed that skin depth at 50/60Hz is on the order of 20mm and that 40mm diameter conductor is not entirely practical to install on pylons (or generally in longer lengths than few meters), obviously I was slightly off in that estimate.
The problem with building the world's best power inverter in your garage is: Who do you sell it to? It's only worth $250M if you can connect with the buyer who is prepared to spend that much. The real value with something like a $1M prize is that it will lead to interest from people who are prepared to pay $250M. $1M for non-exclusive rights may be cheap for Google, but it is probably still good value for the inventor if it leads to bigger things.
I would assume if you actually did build it in the garage and it worked, the next step would be to get a patent and after that go talk to a venture capitalist.
Strangely enough, probably not much different to the way Google itself came to being.
If such incentives are already in place, Google risks nothing by drawing attention to them. Either way potential inventors go, Google may make this happen sooner.
It's a great recruiting tool. Plus the possibilities of how it will scale for projects like robotics/fiber/wifi etc... who wouldnt want an inside track like that?
This isn't a business model rebuild. It is hardly a business remodel. You changed your pricing, and a purchase model.
If you changed your business model you would be going from Hourly Design Consulting for pay, to something like Selling predesigned websites.
Or offering self service design.
AirBNB changed the "hotel" business model because it went from B2C to C2C.
Tesla changed the Car business model from Franchisee to Consumer to "Direct to consumer".
Several Design studios, and stock photo companies changed their business model from "Design once sell once" to "Design once sell many" but all you did was change your pricing model.
They are indeed redesigning how they frame their work to their clients. Even though the technical work is similar, the customer relationship is different.
What is missing from the implementation from Google, that Google really needs to be "fair" is an OPT OUT.
You see when I go in and fix a reputation by outranking bad stuff with good, the bad stuff is still there if you know what you are looking for.
BBC JOHN DOE KILLS BABYSITTER is not going away, just not showing up when you Google JOHN DOE BABYSITTER because I will have place the top 40 results with things about How awesome SUSAN THE 16 YEAR OLD is who is now JOHN DOE's babysitter.
If Google did an OPT OUT, you would be able to say, "I am John Doe of Hicksville, IN" here is my picture, remove me from the interwebs. And nothing about you would be there. No good, No Bad.
Is this just me having sour grapes that my business of shaping reality is going away? No. If anything this is good for business. People will want what the EU has and flock to me.
For those who think I am a bad person. Yeah, I know that http://www.blackwaterops.com didn't pick its name because we thought we were the good guys.
But at the same time a lot of what we do is good. We work with organizations that share the name with bad people. You know how hard it is when you share the name with a serial killer to get a job even after that serial killer was executed?
You know how hard it is to recover from stuff 20+ years after the the Jack in the Box ecoli outbreak?
Or being named Play Boy's Hottest X and then trying to get a job working with kids? Even if you didn't ask to be associated with Play Boy?