Technology

59388 readers

3706 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

884

Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

140 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.

The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] douglasg14b 44 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Where can one get a hold of these documents?

This appears to be the original blog post, but I'm not finding a way to download this. https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/

Is this not leaked past this one person?

Edit 2: No, these appear to be normal public docs.

Edit: seems these are the docs? https://hexdocs.pm/google_api_content_warehouse/0.4.0/GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.QualityNavboostCrapsCrapsData.html

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Grab it while it's still up: https://github.com/yoshi-code-bot/elixir-google-api/commit/d7a637f4391b2174a2cf43ee11e6577a204a161e

[–] douglasg14b 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wait why is that commit still up if this is a data leak?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's not a data leak, it's a a leak of internal documentation in a google api client which supposedly contains "leaks" of how the google algorithm might works, e.g. the existence of domain authority attribute that google denied for years. I haven't actually dig in to see if its really a leak or was overblown though.

[–] douglasg14b 2 points 5 months ago

Internal documentation leaking is still a data leak, it's just a subset of a data leak.

If it was sensitive information that commit would have been purged by now. The original PR (on the Google Clients repo) has no mention of problems, and there are no issues of discussions around rewriting the git history on that item.

This makes me think this isn't actually a problem.

My org is less practiced on operational security than Google and we would purge that information within minutes of any of us hearing about it. And this has been on blog posts for a while now.