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The Washington Post details the travails of a couple seeking treatment and the problems that befell them after they picked a provider based on what turned out to be fake reviews. The article looks at the lack of incentives to do reviews right and the lack of disincentives to not cheat. The article discussed how Section 230 creates an environment where review companies can “look the other way”.

Google’s recent announcements about advanced in AI, for understanding the written word, creating new original text and their increasing ability to understand the content of images puts line under their recent paper Rethinking Search: Making Experts out of Dilettantes where Google details new architectures to over come the limits of index driven search and the inability of the Knowledge Graph to do no more than extract small snippets. Essentially they are proposing a new model based system that could write the equivalent of a Wikipedia article in response to a query. 

Guest author Miriam Ellis details how one business person running a bookshop in Lawrence KS to not only survive but thrive in light of the Amazon onslaught. Lot of practical tips on the steps he took as well as his the epiphany of the damage that Amazon was doing to the rest of the community

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands. 
Near Memo #18

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