algorithm Archives - Longreads

The Perfect Webpage

Cheri Lucas Rowlands — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:52:12 +0000

For The Verge, Mia Sato writes about Google’s power over the internet—and how Google Search has shaped the way we do so many things, including finding information, writing and creating, building businesses, and making websites. The feature, sleekly animated by Richard Parry, also takes us through the process of creating a hypothetical website about pet lizards; the result is a visual journey showing just how much “the internet has been remade in Google’s image,” writes Sato. “And it’s humans—not machines—who have to deal with the consequences.” While this may not be anything new to industry experts and people who know the SEO game, it’s an accessible read about Google’s homogenizing force on the web for a more general audience.

Google’s outsized influence on how we find things has been 25 years in the making, and the people running businesses online have tried countless methods of getting Google to surface their content. Some business owners use generative AI to make Google-optimized blog posts so they can turn around and sell tchotchkes; brick-and-mortar businesses are picking funny names like “Thai Food Near Me” to try to game Google’s local search algorithm. An entire SEO industry has sprung up, dedicated to trying to understand (or outsmart) Google Search.

The small, behind-the-scenes changes site operators deployed over the years have made browsing the web — especially on mobile — more frictionless and enjoyable. But Google’s preferences and systems don’t just guide how sites run: Search has also influenced how information looks and how audiences experience the internet. The project of optimizing your digital existence for Google doesn’t stop at page design. The content has to conform, too.

But no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding “reddit” to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google.

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Denied by AI: How Medicare Advantage Plans Use Algorithms to Cut Off Care for Seniors in Need

Cheri Lucas Rowlands — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 22:52:20 +0000

This STAT investigation at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medical care is frightening and infuriating. Casey Ross and Bob Herman have found that health insurance companies are relying on AI to make crucial decisions about patient care and coverage. One such company, NaviHealth, uses technology called nH Predict to generate algorithmic reports that assess a patient’s mobility and cognitive capacity, and predicts their need for care, their length of stay, and their discharge date. It’s a slick and shiny product, but as Ross and Herman report, it’s an unregulated algorithm “under the guise of scientific rigor” — its “suggestions” leading to the delay or denial of care for patients and ultimately favoring health insurance companies.

Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient’s treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations.

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The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming

Cheri Lucas Rowlands — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 19:50:45 +0000

The reviews editor at Pitchfork writes about the effects of streaming music on listeners and artists, the differences between passive and intentional music consumption, and the overall loss of our individual connection to music.

The more time I spend on Spotify, the more it pushes me away from the outer edges of the platform and toward the mushy middle.

Gone are the filigrees and the autobiography of the song and how it existed in the world to you, the listener. Instead, everyone’s experience is now the same.

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