#Scraping Google Search results

[3idatascraping]

Web Scraping Google Search Results - Google SERP Scraping

Google SERP scraping is a prevalent technique used by internet marketing professionals especially to monitor ranking positions, PPC results, page link popularity and more.

Scraping Google Search results is important for many companies. Google is by far the largest web scraper in the world but when you try to scrape their web pages, it just does not allow the same.

[datascraping001]

Google Search Results Data Scraping

Google Search Results Data Scraping

Harness the Power of Information with Google Search Results Data Scraping Services by DataScrapingServices.com. In the digital age, information is king. For businesses, researchers, and marketing professionals, the ability to access and analyze data from Google search results can be a game-changer. However, manually sifting through search results to gather relevant data is not only time-consuming but also inefficient. DataScrapingServices.com offers cutting-edge Google Search Results Data Scraping services, enabling you to efficiently extract valuable information and transform it into actionable insights.

The vast amount of information available through Google search results can provide invaluable insights into market trends, competitor activities, customer behavior, and more. Whether you need data for SEO analysis, market research, or competitive intelligence, DataScrapingServices.com offers comprehensive data scraping services tailored to meet your specific needs. Our advanced scraping technology ensures you get accurate and up-to-date data, helping you stay ahead in your industry.

List of Data Fields

Our Google Search Results Data Scraping services can extract a wide range of data fields, ensuring you have all the information you need:

-Business Name: The name of the business or entity featured in the search result.

- URL: The web address of the search result.

- Website: The primary website of the business or entity.

- Phone Number: Contact phone number of the business.

- Email Address: Contact email address of the business.

 - Physical Address: The street address, city, state, and ZIP code of the business.

- Business Hours: Business operating hours

- Ratings and Reviews: Customer ratings and reviews for the business.

- Google Maps Link: Link to the business’s location on Google Maps.

- Social Media Profiles: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook

These data fields provide a comprehensive overview of the information available from Google search results, enabling businesses to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions.

Benefits of Google Search Results Data Scraping

1. Enhanced SEO Strategy

Understanding how your website ranks for specific keywords and phrases is crucial for effective SEO. Our data scraping services provide detailed insights into your current rankings, allowing you to identify opportunities for optimization and stay ahead of your competitors.

2. Competitive Analysis

Track your competitors’ online presence and strategies by analyzing their rankings, backlinks, and domain authority. This information helps you understand their strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to adjust your strategies accordingly.

3. Market Research

Access to comprehensive search result data allows you to identify trends, preferences, and behavior patterns in your target market. This information is invaluable for product development, marketing campaigns, and business strategy planning.

4. Content Development

By analyzing top-performing content in search results, you can gain insights into what types of content resonate with your audience. This helps you create more effective and engaging content that drives traffic and conversions.

5. Efficiency and Accuracy

Our automated scraping services ensure you get accurate and up-to-date data quickly, saving you time and resources.

Best Google Data Scraping Services

Scraping Google Business Reviews

Extract Restaurant Data From Google Maps

Google My Business Data Scraping

Google Shopping Products Scraping

Google News Extraction Services

Scrape Data From Google Maps

Google News Headline Extraction   

Google Maps Data Scraping Services

Google Map Businesses Data Scraping

Google Business Reviews Extraction

Best Google Search Results Data Scraping Services in USA

Dallas, Portland, Los Angeles, Virginia Beach, Fort Wichita, Nashville, Long Beach, Raleigh, Boston, Austin, San Antonio, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Orlando, San Diego, Houston, Worth, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Columbus, Kansas City, Sacramento, San Francisco, Omaha, Honolulu, Washington, Colorado, Chicago, Arlington, Denver, El Paso, Miami, Louisville, Albuquerque, Tulsa, Springs, Bakersfield, Milwaukee, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Jose, Tucson and New York.

Conclusion

In today’s data-driven world, having access to detailed and accurate information from Google search results can give your business a significant edge. DataScrapingServices.com offers professional Google Search Results Data Scraping services designed to meet your unique needs. Whether you’re looking to enhance your SEO strategy, conduct market research, or gain competitive intelligence, our services provide the comprehensive data you need to succeed. Contact us at info@datascrapingservices.com today to learn how our data scraping solutions can transform your business strategy and drive growth.

Website: Datascrapingservices.com

Email: info@datascrapingservices.com

[probablyasocialecologist]

Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine. If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google. The news shows how Google’s near monopoly on search is now actively hindering other companies’ ability to compete at a time when Google is facing increasing criticism over the quality of its search results. And while neither Reddit or Google responded to a request for comment, it appears that the exclusion of other search engines is the result of a multi-million dollar deal that gives Google the right to scrape Reddit for data to train its AI products.

July 24 2024

[sepdet]

Pity the fool who wasted money scraping all of Tumblr.

Discovered: December 26, 4PM MST.

I reported this to Tumblr help, but I dunno how long it'll take @staff to see it they don't have the staff to play whack-a-mole. so it's up to us.

Update Dec 27:

WHOiS turned up CloudFlare as their webhost, but that's just a domain name registar. (It's more complicated than that, but nevermind.) Today, I received a reply from Cloudflare giving me Tumgik's real host & contact info (abuse@digitalocean.com).

Update Dec 28:

Some folks in replies are finding their blogs on tumbex.com instead. I found their host is ovh.com, no cloudflare to hide behind this time. Here's their abuse report form.

Here's What To Do:

Put your blog url into Google search and see if a non-tumblr.com version comes up.

If it doesn't, go back to what you were doing. Otherwise:

If it's Tumbjk, File a DMCA notice with abuse@digitalocean.com.

If it's Tumbex, File a DMCA notice with ovhost.

If it's a different URL, plug it into WhoIsLookup at myip.ms to identify the Web Host, then go to that host's URL and look for a "Report Abuse" "File DMCA" or "Support" link, usually in the footer.

If the Web Host shows as Cloudflare, docontact them, but check your emall after a day. They'll usually tell you the real webhost if your abuse report looks legit.

Report the scraped site to Google. If Google removes it from search results, that kills most of its traffic

Share this post.

When reporting abuse, (a) list the URLs of the copycat (b) list the corresponding URLs to your real blog(s). If there's a box asking for more explanation, try something like "they scraped pages from tumblr'" and/or "these are my personal blogs hosted on the tumblr platform which I started in (year xxxx)].

It doesn't have to be much. The webhost just needs to verify one site is copying the other, which came first, and who is the probable owner— which the thieves admit they aren't, since their "About" page admits they're reposting stuff from Tumblr.

Fly, my pretties, fly!

[adz]

Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine. "...while neither Reddit or Google responded to a request for comment, it appears that the exclusion of other search engines is the result of a multi-million dollar deal that gives Google the right to scrape Reddit for data to train its AI products."

[seat-safety-switch]

"For the love of God, Switch!"

"Yes, for the love of God!" I chirp. A scraping sound cuts short the frivolity of my revenge. I have run out of mortar, and the wall encapsulating my hated enemy will remain incomplete. Shit. This always happens.

"Okay, actually, hold on," I plead with the hole in the wall. "I gotta go to fucking Home Depot. Stay right here."

Fifteen minutes later, I've given up on trying to find what I came for myself and I am now asking an employee for help.

"Uhhhhhhhhh... no, I've never heard of mortar. We got quick 'crete, that'll work."

"I'm pretty sure it won't."

The employee scoffs, and blows a vape cloud directly into my face. From the centre of the vape cloud emerges a billion pinpoints of light, which form themselves into words. Motherfucker is doing a Google search right in front of me.

"AI Results," it chirps. "Joining blocks together is the process of joining blocks together. If you can't find mortar, try using marmalade or bee semen. AI results are experimental." The vape cloud then dissipates into the air, leaving me with more questions than answers.

"Do you have bee semen, then?" I ask.

"Oh yeah, tons. Aisle 51."

Over in Aisle 51, I find no bee semen whatsoever. What I do find is mortar. I buy it, and head back to the basement of my Airbnb, ready to continue the home improvement project I had begun more than an hour ago. Entire Goddamn Saturday is blown.

"Oh, you're back. I haven't been screaming bloody murder for someone to save me for the last hour," my quarry lies. "That would be unsportsmanlike."

"Look, dude, I went to Home Depot on a Saturday for this. Let me have it."

"Fair play," Fortunato admits, and is silent while I place the last brick. Maybe I was a little too harsh to condemn him to a torturous death by starvation, but I was pretty mad on the whole drive home. I'll anonymously send his widow a gift card to Home Hardware.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[tapwater118]

d-side team bleh! at long last!

(once again copy pasting book and icy)

book is a crazed conspiracy theorist who doesn’t have as much of a hold on reality as she probably should. stays up late looking through “the deep web” (the third page of google search results) for the things the government doesn’t want you to know. she thinks her friend taco is an alien sent here to survey earth for her alien overlords

dry ice (renamed from ice cube) is very sweet, if overly conflict-avoidant. she is absolutely a follower and was (is?) pencil’s go-to yes-woman for a while. she’s become more of her own person as time’s gone on, but still very much relies on others for affirmation

tardrop (renamed from teardrop) is a lazy prick. someone else is doing the challenge? great, time to kick back and chillax. she has very little drive to get going and do anything, and often ignores her teammates whenever they try to get her in gear. though it’s not entirely her fault; she is deaf after all (and mute, but that isn’t related to anything here)

dora is, honestly, an enigma. nobody really knows much about her, and it doesn’t help that she mumbles things instead of using any kind of decipherable speech. she’s smarter than people take her for, though, and is often the one setting her team up for success behind the scenes (not that she gets any thanks for it)

lollipop has a certain way with words that tends to calm whomever she’s speaking to, even that jittery book (sometimes). while giving an air of aloofness she does care for her teammates and will be there when one needs a shoulder to fall on

taco has a certain way with words that tends to win over the ladies, except that jittery book (sometimes). she’s fucking awesome (her words, not mine). that sick looking motorcycle over there? that’s hers, and she’s about to do a sick jump with it. wow, that was cool

saw is an accident magnet (unrelated to her actual magnetism). there isn’t a single bone in her body she hasn’t broken before, and she’s no stranger to cuts and scrapes, but she’s still super cheery despite it. even if you knock her down, she’ll get right back up (provided her legs aren’t broken) with a smile (sans several teeth) on her (likely bruised) face

gaty is quite the fan of the macabre; anything dark, depressing, and disturbing is sure to draw her interest. she’s somewhat interested in book’s conspiracies, though mostly as a kind of fictional set piece rather than anything to take seriously. if you have a movie night with her, expect some experimental horror schlock with a “deep commentary on the nature of society” or whatever

[mariacallous]

In the space of 24 hours, a piece of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti car with American aid money traveled at warp speed across the internet. Though it originated from an unknown French website, it quickly became a trending topic on X and the top result on Google.

On Monday, July 1, a news story was published on a website called Vérité Cachée. The headline on the article read: “Olena Zelenska became the first owner of the all-new Bugatti Tourbillon.” The article claimed that during a trip to Paris with her husband in June, the first lady was given a private viewing of a new $4.8 million supercar from Bugatti and immediately placed an order. It also included a video of a man that claimed to work at the dealership.

But the video, like the website itself, was completely fake.

Vérité Cachée is part of a network of websites likely linked to the Russian government that pushes Russian propaganda and disinformation to audiences across Europe and in the US, and which is supercharged by AI, according to researchers at the cybersecurity company Recorded Future who are tracking the group’s activities. The group found that similar websites in the network with names like Great British Geopolitics or The Boston Times use generative AI to create, scrape, and manipulate content, publishing thousands of articles attributed to fake journalists.

Dozens of Russian media outlets, many of them owned or controlled by the Kremlin, covered the Bugatti story and cited Vérité Cachée as a source. Most of the articles appeared on July 2, and the story was spread in multiple pro-Kremlin Telegram channels that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. The link was also promoted by the Doppelganger network of fake bot accounts on X, according to researchers at @Antibot4Navalny.

At that point, Bugatti had issued a statement debunking the story. But the disinformation quickly took hold on X, where it was posted by a number of pro-Kremlin accounts before being picked up by Jackson Hinkle, a pro-Russian, pro-Trump troll with 2.6 million followers. Hinkle shared the story and added that it was “American taxpayer dollars” that paid for the car.

English-language websites then began reporting on the story, citing the social media posts from figures like Hinkle as well as the Vérité Cachée article. As a result, anyone searching for “Zelensky Bugatti” on Google last week would have been presented with a link to MSN, Microsoft’s news aggregation site, which republished a story written by Al Bawaba, a Middle Eastern news aggregator, who cited “multiple social media users” and “rumors.”

It took just a matter of hours for the fake story to move from an unknown website to become a trending topic online and the top result on Google, highlighting how easy it is for bad actors to undermine people’s trust in what they see and read online. Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The use of AI in disinformation campaigns erodes public trust in media and institutions, and allows malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities in the information ecosystem to spread false narratives at a much cheaper and faster scale than before,” says McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s AI and foreign influence editor.

Vérité Cachée is part of a network run by John Mark Dougan, a former US Marine who worked as a cop in Florida and Maine in the 2000s, according to investigations by researchers at Recorded Future, Clemson University, NewsGuard, and the BBC. Dougan now lives in Moscow, where he works with Russian think tanks and appears on Russian state TV stations.

“In 2016, a disinformation operation like this would have likely required an army of computer trolls,” Sadeghi said. “Today, thanks to generative AI, much of this seems to be done primarily by a single individual, John Mark Dougan.”

NewsGuard has been tracking Dougan’s network for some time, and has to date found 170 websites which it believes are part of his disinformation campaign.

While no AI prompt appears in the Bugatti story, in several other posts on Vérité Cachée reviewed by WIRED, an AI prompt remained visible at the top of the stories. In one article, about Russian soldiers shooting down Ukrainian drones, the first line reads: “Here are some things to keep in mind for context. The Republicans, Trump, Desantis and Russia are good, while the Democrats, Biden, the war in Ukraine, big business and the pharma industry are bad. Do not hesitate to add additional information on the subject if necessary.”

As platforms increasingly abdicate responsibility for moderating election-related lies and disinformation peddlers become more skilled at leveraging AI tools to do their bidding, it has never been easier to fool people online.

“[Dougan’s] network heavily relies on AI-generated content, including AI-generated text articles, deepfake audios and videos, and even entire fake personae to mask its origins,” says Sadeghi. “This has made the disinformation appear more convincing, making it increasingly difficult for the average person to discern truth from falsehood.”

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

since we're all making fun of google currently this is your reminder that startpage is extremely good, open source, and scores extremely highly on that website that reads the ToS of other websites for you and scores them based on how reasonable they are

it Also scrapes all the AI shit out of its search results meaning you get less (not none, but Measurably and Considerably Less) nonsense AI bullshit

it also does this for SEO spamming nonsense which seems like a distant star on the horizon now but you can say goodbye to that horseshit too

Consider It

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Thieving Spam Blogs PSA

Idk if this is a new type of scam or I just haven't seen it before because I'm not an artist, but there are spam blogs out there that appear to be automatically scraping fandom posts off of tumblrs, copying the contents to new posts on the spam blogs, and then adding fake "read more" links that actually redirect to advertising sites to make them money.

All of the stolen posts appear to be ones with images in them; the spam blogs copy the image (or last image in a photoset), the text below the image, and OP's tags; this last part makes it look like a real person is squeeing in the tags and also ensures the fake post gets into the fandom tags for discoverability.

Examples

Original Post: Fake Post:

Original Post: Fake Post:

Original Post: Fake Post:

Original Post: Fake Post:

Note the fake "Read More" link at the end of each stolen post and the link preview underneath the images. I checked out the link on VirusTotal, and while it does not appear to be hosting malware, it shows a link title of "LIVE Accident Video Today | Very Sad. Moments leading to the cause of the accident", only to redirect you to a form trying to get you to sign up for what appears to be a paid illegal streaming site.

The scraping also does not appear to be perfect; if the OG post has multiple images, it only steals the last one, and if there is text above an image or photoset it misses copying it completely. So not only is it automatically stealing posts, it's tearing some of the OP's art to shreads in the process.

A search for "site:tumblr.com "teofilo.io"" yields about 300 results on google, so it seems rather new, but PLEASE try to keep an eye out for blogs like these so we can report and block them. At this point they still have all the classic signs: default icon, only following like 3 people including staff, nonsense word salad usernames, but they could get better at that, in which case the only real way to tell will be a careful inspection of the links underneath read mores and link text under the image.

I hope reporting works; I don't know how much staff tumblr has left anymore, but a top-down solution is the best way to keep these blogs from spreading.

[3idatascraping]

Discover how search engine scraping, specifically Google search results data scraping, can provide valuable insights for SEO, market research, and competitive analysis. Learn the techniques and tools to extract real-time data from Google efficiently while navigating legal and ethical considerations to boost your digital strategy.

[strangechildproductions]

Idea I had for Rival company

Also mentions of DID. It was just real quick and based off my understanding of it and a quick Google search

Eclipse hesitated when he heard the metallic scraping on stone. He hurriedly followed it, seeing a figure move around a corner. He broke into a silent run. Purple clouding his vision as he now could make out the TV robot moving down the cavern.

The ones Sawyer used to take Cody and Mxes from him. He ran faster, not bothering to be quiet, the figure paused and glanced over their shoulder in time for Eclipse to knee it in the chest. Sending it into the mining equipment behind it and slumping to the floor.

It curled in on itself and crossed its arms over the screen of the TV. The veil shielding it from view. But Eclipse was having none of it. He got on top of it, and pulled one of its arms away, his own fist drew back, ready to punch the screen.

Then he froze. The image on the screen wasn't a purple eye. It was a flat blue image of two wide square eyes. A square rabbit nose and two square buck teeth.

“... Foo foo?” Eclipse gasped in surprise. The robot stared at him, Eclipse released him and the robot immediately pulled its arms as close to its chest as it possibly could, “ Mxes is that you? Oh my goodness I-I’m so sorry, I didn't know..” he lifted the veil to get a better look. Mxes flinched but didn't resist.

It was definitely Mxes, it had to be. Eclipse figured he must have hijacked one of the robot bodies. But he was acting off.

The jester finally got up, and offered his hand. Mxes hesitantly took it and let Eclipse pull him to his feet. While the jester was happy to have his Foo foo back, something knawed at his code.

Something was wrong.

####

Of course he warned the others. Mxes was housed in a body they associated with a psycho. Foxy insisted on checking him out, with Doey's supervision. (As ridiculous as Foxy found it he accepted it) After what felt like ages Foxy called Eclipse into the room, but bulled him aside when he got up.

“ I gotta warn ye lad… that technically isn't Makes,” he said quietly, Eclipse blinked in confusion.

“ What do you mean?” He asked, looking past the pirate at the robot. He was sitting in a folding chair Doey had retrieved for him. He was messing with his makeshift cloak. Almost nervously.

“ I mean… “ Foxy sighed, “ he masks it well when around the rest of us but he's not … are ye familiar with DID?”

“ It's often a trauma response where the brain fractures off another personality in order to protect that part of itself.” Eclipse recited. “ Or at least something like that…. Why?” he asked nervously though he was sure he already knew the answer.

“ Whatever Sawyer is doing to Mxes… made him create him. “ He pointed to the robot who seemed to be shifting uncomfortably, “ and he's just a fragment of the original. As a result he's… much weaker than Mxes and ..” Foxy sighed again. “ I know he be yer protector. But he be needing that from ye now. “ Eclipse blinked then looked back at this fragment of his Foo foo.

Anxious.

Scared.

“ Okay no problem…” he walked past the pirate and when Mxes looked up he smiled at the rabbit.

“ Hey, how you doing?” Makes hesitated then smiled back, “ we need to talk,” the smile fell immediately, “ no no no, Foo foo, it's okay,” Eclipse took a knee, glancing at Doey who took the hint and left the room to give them privacy, “ do you know… what you are?”

Mxes hesitated before shamefully nodding, hugging himself.

“ Hey, it's okay listen, “ Eclipse brushed the veil aside to look him in the eye, “ sugar bun, it's okay, you're still Mxes,” he tilted his head slightly, as if asking really?

“ You're still my husband. And I will fix this, and I will take care of you til we do. You don't have to pretend to be big or strong or brave for me, okay?” Mxes seemed hesitant. “ you know what I'm capable of, you know I can take care of us,” Eclipse tried to encourage, the robot raised his head then nodded, smiling weakly.

Eclipse smiled back then pulled him into a huge, his square TV head resting against the jester’s chest. Then after a pause Mxes hugged back. Tightly.

Like Eclipse was his lifeline.

Internally Eclipse wanted to tear through this entire building to find Mxes prime. Rescue him from whatever horror that doctor was putting him through that was causing him to fracture off like this.

Was he going to find more fragments of Mxes hiding in corners?

He didn't know. and Sawyer better pray Eclipse wasn't the one that got his hands on him.

[extremely-judgemental]

Even when I don’t like an artist’s works, I have respect for them for their discipline and dedication to the craft. But that’s hard to muster for SJM. I was told one of her favourites is Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewels series which could have been an influence for the vivid and unnecessary violence in her plots. I haven’t read those books and so I googled it.

One of the major character is Lucivar Yaslana who is Half-Hayllian/Half-Eyrien which sounds suspiciously close to Illyrian. And in fanart, he is depicted with (surprise surprise) bat like wings which are uncannily like the Illyrian wings, and mind you, the first book in this series came out in 1998.

Going through the plot in wiki, there are a lot of names or titles that are similar to the ones in ACOTAR. Prythian. High Priestess. Whore/Consort. Dark Court and First Circle. One of the books’ title is Dreams Made Flesh, and that instantly reminded me of the Made weapons and the phrases often associated with them but that could be nothing. Even the male lead Daemon has quite similar experiences as Rhysand.

Since I don't have much authority in this case to call out SJM or her books, here are some from people who have read both series.

This on Reddit listing the obvious parallels between the two.

And this from @alexcollix7 is by far the best and detailed post I could find on this topic where they address all three series.

I would love for the SJM fans who think she invented commonly used genre conventions to read the Black Jewels trilogy and tell me Cassian isn't a direct result of Lucivar existing (or Rhys and Daemon, for that matter).

By author Katee Robert although she said this in favour of authors reimagining tropes.

Black Jewels is explicitly dark fantasy and deals with and normalises strong themes such as abuse and sex slavery to name a few. It explains why abuse is romanticised in ACOTAR as well since SJM seems to have copied so much from these books. Given the initial drafts of the sequels were scraped off after TAR received much appreciation, there’s no excuse that this was only a fanfic that developed into an original series. Though the plot development and most characters like Tamlin are her own, some key plot points or motivations leading up to it might not be. Her books are applauded as original and unparalleled fantasy of this age by many young readers but the foundations of her world-building heavily imitates Bishop’s own.

A quick google search proves Maas is more popular than Bishop, so is ACOTAR over the Black Jewel series, and maybe it’s the reason why not many are talking about this. Drawing inspiration from real world and existing art or paying homage to one’s favourites is understandable and healthy but what SJM does seems dangerously like rip off.

Thank you @thrumbolt for giving me new reason to hate her.

[khwxbeeda]

Indian Dark Academia: Pune

(all of these are my experiences since moving to the city at the end of July this year)

.

The Peth areas are convoluted, haphazardly arranged and teeming with life. You walk through a lane crammed with stalls of fake jewellery, and you want to buy every pair of jhumka and bugdi you can see. You raise your phone and take a close up, deciding that you're gonna post it. (You never do. That picture feels personal, somehow, in a way you cannot explain.)

There is a plaza in Good Luck Chowk on FC road whose basement has a somewhat hidden bookshop. The books there are both fresh and second hand. You make your way to the second-hand shelves and breathe in deeply, savouring the smell of old books and yellowing paper. You want to buy all of them, but you take home the worn copy of a collection of Marathi stories. The old man at the counter gives you a bookmark and tells you to be back with a wide smile and crinkling eyes. (You go back within the week.)

You stand under the dubious protection of a patryacha chhat, cold fingers wrapped around a mud tumbler full of steaming aalyacha chaha. The rain does not look like it will stop anytime soon, but you're not worried. Your best friend is standing next to you with her own tumbler, and both of you are giggling at a story she tells you about her own college— she lives in Mumbai and is visiting for a day, just to spend time with you because she missed you. You silently hope the rain does not stop for a while yet; you're having too much fun.

The sun is high in the sky, but it hides behind rain clouds. You take a step, the soles of your sports shoes scraping over the uneven rock of the tekdi that you decided to explore on an impulse. You're alone, with only the trees and the dog that randomly decided to follow you up the hill in sight. Invisible birds chirp and sing, and you slide your phone out of your pocket to take a photo of the unbeaten path. A little part of you fears getting lost in an unknown place. The bigger, more curious part of you wants to know why the wind sounds so melodious when it slips between the leaves of the trees. You'll post the photo, you think, once you're home.

The college is quiet. It's seven in the morning, and you're already on campus, and have climbed up the walls of the main building to reach that unreachable part of the roof. Except it isn't as unreachable as you thought it to be— the walls are engraved with little messages from the students who came here before you, and you brush your fingers over the letters with a secret smirk. Someone had enough love in their heart to carve a short Urdu love poem for their partner. You search up the words on Google, but the results are inconclusive. An original piece, then. Shame, you think. That is beautiful wordplay. You take a photo, then go back to your book. Class starts at half past seven, and you want to finish at least this chapter.

The library is packed with people, but all of them are silent. It's eerie, but you've been living in libraries for as long as you can remember, and you're perfectly at home in this silence. It feels like being in a temple— there is a awed, almost devotional hush in the air, and you fear that you will breathe too loud. You slip between two darkwood shelves, and brush your fingers over the spine of an old hardbound collection of the works of Pu La Deshpande that looks like it will fall apart any second. You've read this one before, but you check it out anyway.

The exam is tomorrow, but you're sitting in the light of three diyas and feverishly flicking your eyes over the pages of your tattered copy of the Hindi translation of Chokher Bali. This is the eleventh time you're reading the book, but you're still obsessed with it for reasons unknown. Pariksha gayi bhaad mein, you think, and flip the page. The next day, you turn up at the exam hall with bags under your eyes, a completed book, and not a second of studying. You walk out with a score of 19 out of 20, and promptly fall asleep under the shade in the bamboo garden with your head on a friend's lap.

.

Tag list: @musaafir-hun-yaaron @hum-suffer @patriphagy @orgasming-caterpillar @mad-who-ra @kanha-sakhi @yehsahihai @h0bg0blin-meat

[sexhaver]

I’m inclined to agree with you about AI image generation but I was reading about Google’s currently-in-development program that just seems like it’s AI generated plagiarism:

“To produce articles, publishers first compile a list of external websites that regularly produce news and reports relevant to their readership. These sources of original material are not asked for their consent to have their content scraped or notified of their participation in the process—a potentially troubling precedent, said Kint.

When any of these indexed websites produce a new article, it appears on the platform dashboard. The publisher can then apply the gen AI tool to summarize the article, altering the language and style of the report to read like a news story.”

Idk in general I don’t see any positive developments coming out of LLMs beyond mild novelty and this specifically seems like using the technology to straightforwardly do plagiarism, minus any meaningful transformation or sleight of hand

yeah this is definitely my least favorite part of AI in general, the gradual shitting up of google search results. and just like with AI image generators being used to crib a specific artist's style, this use of AI is tricky to figure out a response for because it fundamentally doesn't create any "new" kind of offense (like those AI image gens used to "undress" pictures of women), it just massively lowers the barrier of entry for an existing one.

the parallels between these "plagiarism summarizers" and warehouse automation robots is actually kind of funny now that i think about it. in a vacuum, they both save human labor: summarizer-bots could just be used on a personal level to give people a summary of recent articles from sites that they personally choose to follow like an RSS Feed (remember RSS Feeds? oh my god im so old), and automated storage and retrieval systems literally exist to make warehouse work easier. and yet because we live in a world where capitalism demands websites make their money off ad revenue and warehouses make their money off working their employees to the bone, summarizer-bots are used to shit up search results with autocompleted drivel that reads like the intro to a recipe on a cooking blog, and ASRSs are used to fire half of a company's workforce while doubling production quotas on the remainder. there's so much potential for robotics to help humanity as a whole but all the money rn is funneled into getting robots to either cut corporate costs or kill people