201–210 of 256 posts
"Google's search results should contain exactly what I personally think they should in every case," said the HN commentator. "But they mustn't be personalized," said his boon companion. "Oh no, personalization is Evil." They nodded in agreement and upvoted each other's comments.
Note: open the link in an incognito window.
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It's important to realize that Google censorship to appease a foreign government sometimes affects search results in all countries, including the U.S. For example, search results worldwide are partly determined by Google's decision to avoid offending the government of Pakistan with content that may be critical of some aspects of Islam: https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/
This isn't reserved to Pakistan, the US, Islam or Google. [0] Tbh if I had a choice between nudity being censored and bigotry being somewhat buried, I'd always go with the later. But for whatever reason a certain demographic, from a certain country, takes quite a lot of offense at the sight of something as silly as a female nipple. [0] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/censorship-is...
ProtonMail is the first result when I search for "secure email", even when not signed in.
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So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you're gunning for.
> So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Forced (inter-)nationalization of Google under the control of the UN. > Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Pretty much yes. Charges should be bared by the Global Federation of Essential Services.
Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?
If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN? Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
What happens to my existing Google Account? Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset? Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
I'm very honestly curious how you would orchestrate this, or expect it to work.
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If this is an anti-trust matter in a certain jurisdiction then it's an anti-trust matter in a certain jurisdiction, and governments have ways to address that. If Google has a monopoly on search then break up their monopoly on search in your country. BUT. Saying that Google needs to bend over backwards to accommodate every possible edge case of EU human rights (of which there are far too many that are overly broad) as…
> Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources. Until Alphabet buys out that startup for a couple of millions. Imho that's a factor barely mentioned on the issue of "Google monopoly". If anything pops up that looks like it could disrupt the Google dominance, long or short-term, it's quickly acquired and welcomed to the flock. On one hand that's good because put…
Attack anti-trust at it's source. If you find this story worrying, your worry should not be "Google is removing search results", but rather "Google has so much dominance, them removing results is a serious concern".
This addresses your first point: don't force Google to do certain things and then let them buy any and all competitors, instead don't let them buyout all competitors in the first place. It's a much more elegant solution, in my opinion.
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So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you're gunning for.
When they, by virtue of their overwhelming market share, nuke a competitor's product off the face of the internet, whether algorithmically or intentionally, it feels reasonable to me to compel them to provide more detail than "we fixed the glitch". Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.
If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. Do things that are actual anti-trust prevention. Saying that the solution is to regulate all these little edge cases is ineffective and inefficient, because you need a different regulation for each concern that are all rooted in the same sentiment: Google is too big.
ProtonMail is the first result when I search for "secure email", even when not signed in.
"Google's search results should contain exactly what I personally think they should in every case," said the HN commentator. "But they mustn't be personalized," said his boon companion. "Oh no, personalization is Evil." They nodded in agreement and upvoted each other's comments.
Google's PR monkeys hard at work I see! I find it very, very hard to believe that HN readers would vote such a comment to the top.
Apropos of which, it's in the site guidelines not to bring in insinuations of astroturfing unless there's actual evidence, so could you please not do that on HN?
"Google's search results should contain exactly what I personally think they should in every case," said the HN commentator. "But they mustn't be personalized," said his boon companion. "Oh no, personalization is Evil." They nodded in agreement and upvoted each other's comments.
Amusing quip, and perhaps characteristic of certain classes of HN comments, but it's important to distinguish between the claim that something ought to appear in the search results and the claim that the results ought to conform to my personal preferences. Relevance w.r.t. subject matter is not the same as relevance w.r.t. a particular person's preferences. By analogy, sampling a population to determine the statistic…
But again, you are acting as if there is a definitive answer to the query [secure email] (which is one mentioned at the top of the article, and what inspired my comment). Among the results - after a healthy block of ads (and since this is an article from 2016, Protonmail) - I saw a page about setting up Mozilla Thunderbird, Hushmail, and numerous blogs/articles about eg "The 5 Best Secure Email Solutions". This is not to say there wasn't a problem back in 2016; I just mean that on a broad query like [secure email] with probably dozens or hundreds of good results, not seeing one in particular is not really a red flag that something is wrong to me, the way not seeing ProtonMail for the query [protonmail] would be.
Meanwhile, people immediately jump in with accusations of "Perfidy!", assuming that Google must have Done Something, and simultaneous with that demands that Google Do Something, and complaints that it is hard to get Google to Do Something whenever you find such an obvious problem.
And from the inside, you just sort of have to laugh-cry whenever this comes up, because (despite some fraction of techies wanting Google to act like an SQL query on the web) you are intimately familiar with the legendary Algorithm as an immense, constantly mutating series of heuristics running on inputs which (being from the web) are frequently garbage. You debug queries constantly, and while very rarely there is an obvious, correctable data problem or bug, you are really working to identify "loss patterns", large numbers of queries that are wrong in the same way for the same reasons. Your job as a ranking engineer is to then try to correct these loss patterns, knowing that when you do you'll be creating new, smaller loss patterns. Smaller because you spend years of your life evaluating your changes to make sure they are creating fewer problems than they fix.
And though you spend all your days carrying baskets of pebbles from the valley of losses to the mountaintop of good answers people crowd around you to point at a particular pebble lying on the ground, declare it the most important pebble and demand you put down your basket and carry it to the top of the mountain first, cradled gently in both hands. And each person in the crowd points at a different pebble, demanding the same thing.
(No, really, it's a very rewarding job with challenging work and they treat you pretty good here; if you're interested in the problem, I encourage you to apply. There are a lot of pebbles left.)