Racketeering Crimes Layer Atop Each Other
Racketeering crimes tend to seem like a series of bad lucks and misunderstandings to the people they are trying to destroy. In retrospect, under a sober "cui bono" analysis they connect in a way that is logical (though perhaps crazy sounding to a person who does not appreciate the depths organized crime rings go to harm their victims.)
As part of the Timothy Barton cases civil SEC case 25-cv-00946 and criminal case 3:22-cr-00352-K a person named Saksya Bedoya was indicted on December 13, 2023. Saskya Bedoya is listed on Bloomberg as the Pres/Treasurer, Carnegie Development Inc.
Fortune favors the bold. And, at least temporarily, it may favor the criminal. Related current cases: civil SEC case 25-cv-00946 and criminal case 3:22-cr-00352-K.
The back story is probably too long to read, but one of the reasons I have not been blogging is some people in an organized crime group have been spending a lot of money to try to ruin my family.
Many years ago one of our community members mentioned they were at an SEO conference where a speaker from Distilled mentioned that SEOmoz had hired them to try to outrank us for seo tools, though they were unable to. At the time I think Moz had around 200 employees, while I had around 2.
How was I able to outcompete at like a 100:1 ratio? At the time I chalked it up to love for SEO. However, if you are self-employed and are hyper-successful that can hide autism quite well.
For as broad and difficult of a problem running a search engine is and how many competing interests are involved, when Matt Cutts was at Google they ran a pretty clean show. Some of what they did before the algorithms could catch up was of course fearmongering (e.g. if you sell links you might be promoting fake brain cancer solutions) but Google generally did a pretty good job with the balance between organic and paid search.
On February 18, 2025 Google's Hyung-Jin Kim was interviewed about Google's ranking signals. Below are notes from that interview.
"Hand Crafting" of Signals
Almost every signal, aside from RankBrain and DeepRank (which are LLM-based) are hand-crafted and thus able to be analyzed and adjusted by engineers.
User interaction signals
Create relevancy signals out of user read, clicks, scrolls, and mouse hovers.
Not how search works
Search does not work by delivering results which match a query that ends at the user. This view of search is incomplete.
How search works
The flow of the engagement metrics from the end user / searcher back to the search engine helps the search engine refine the result set.
Fake document understanding
Google's mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
That mission is so profound & so important the associated court documents in their antitrust cases must be withheld from public consumption.
I just dusted off the login here to realize I hadn't posted in about a half-year.
Some of Yandex's old source code was leaked, and few cared about the ranking factors shared in the leak.
Mike King made a series of Tweets on the leak.
