Live data from Hacker News

Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

techcrunch.com

221–230 of 256 posts

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#221
post #211
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why am I reading a lot of these argument like being a left or right debate. I dont think Google is quite there yet to be regulated. You have alternative like bing, and you have Duck Duck Go, and the latter actually provide pretty decent results.

The discussion is more one of he principle of whether a dominant market leader is allowed to use its position of dominance in the market to influence that market or not. It’s hardly “left and right” to debate this as being right or wrong.

That is certainly true, but they were arguing whether it should be regulated. And regulation or not are always political.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#222
post #145
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that, but there is an implicit contract with the public, that they provide a fair and balanced search of the web. If that's not the case then you're in anti-trust land.

Which is where they've been for years.

It's one thing to talk about anti-trust. It's a completely different thing when you're on the same team as the government that would be bringing the case against you.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#223
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by borked migration? What could Proton mail have done better?

Without knowing their migration strategy it is hard to say. A few things I notice that get borked often with migrations are not handling redirects & internal links properly, not updating sitemaps & canonical tags, and not checking Google Search Console & robots.txt

My question was more specifically about ProtonMail's domain migration which the commenter I was replying to implied to have specific knowledge of.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#224
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

(am Googler, am amused by this idea, so let's run with it) 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…

>Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?

Mostly search. We'll drop the ads. People will be subsidising search already, so no need for ads.

>If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN?

No, that Alphabet can keep.

>Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?

Yes.

>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?

Every piece of data will be queryable by a simple RESTful API for everybody, including everybody's else search history. We'll call it "radical transparency". This is include the data of government members.

>What happens to my existing Google Account?

It remains as is, only better.

>Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset?

Yes, all, see above.

>Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?

We kill that. It never worked well anyway.

I'm partly joking, and partly imagining what a sane humanity, that could build and coordinate stuff on a global scale without letting them to the markets, in other words a "Star Trek" like government, would do.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#225
post #135
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I didn't think there was a way for Bing to become a better search engine than Google, but I think this would do it.

Yeah, government funded work only gave us the internet and the web after all.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#226
post #12

Don't depend on search for people to find your product. Just like you do not include vesting when comparing salaries between startups.

This is a bit naive in a world where the address and search bars in browsers have merged, and many physical adverts don't even feature a website address any more, just search keywords.

It's branding. You advertise for a trademark that you have control over. If the users are using Android or Chrome they'll see some ads on their way to your website, but they will eventually get there, but that's ok I guess. What I mean is you should not depend on, for the life of your business, that a keyword like "secure email" will send traffic to your website, unless that is your trademark or brand name, and in that case you better own secureemail.com

Back in 2006 or so when the address field became a search bar in most major browsers, I started to get a lot of traffic from Google, but 99% was searching for mydomain.com, I'm not talking about that kind of traffic, I'm talking about SEO keywords that will kill your business over night when (not if) Google change their formula or some algorithm removes your site from the search result.

It's a bit upsetting that web browsers have monetized the address bar, but that's another, yet important discussion.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#227
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but you should address the root of the problem, not all the little symptoms. The issue isn't "Google has the power and occasional reason to remove search results"... the issue is "Google is so big/dominant that when they remove a single result it can have a huge impact". If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase an…

> If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control.

How? Because this...

> Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.

...doesn't achieve that end.

Google could have a thousand competitors and 99% of the marketshare, because just because a competitor exists doesn't compel, or even slightly persuade, anyone to use it.

I'm all for antitrust laws. I just don't see how the usual remedies would work here.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#228
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you should address the root of the problem, not all the little symptoms. The issue isn't "Google has the power and occasional reason to remove search results"... the issue is "Google is so big/dominant that when they remove a single result it can have a huge impact". If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase an…

>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. This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent m…

> Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op.

In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all?

Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#229
post #221
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion is more one of he principle of whether a dominant market leader is allowed to use its position of dominance in the market to influence that market or not. It’s hardly “left and right” to debate this as being right or wrong.

That is certainly true, but they were arguing whether it should be regulated. And regulation or not are always political.

Especially for the businesses doing the lobbying not to be regulated.

Re: Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

#230

There are many major actors, both corporate and governmental, that don’t like privacy enhancing services like ProtonMail. No conspiracy theory, just large actors acting ruthlessly in their own self interest. This year old article is a bit bogus though. As other pointed out, the hit on SEO came from changing from .ch to .com ProtonMail, and other similar services, deserve to be supported in my opinion. I have recommen…

Is ProtonMail still free? If so, I dislike that greatly. I switched to FastMail a while back and while reviewing options, I wanted to use ProtonMail.. but a free option seems far too unreliable for something as important as email. I need to know how they're paying the bills, basically. I prefer their incentives to be perfectly inline with mine, because I am paying their bills for my portion of usage.

Protonmail's terms of service are better than Fastmail', IMHO. Fastmail TOS says that your service can be terminated anytime whatsoever on the whims of fastmail, whereas from what I remember, protonmail's TOS atleast laid out conditions under which your service could be terminated, like doing something illegal.
Post reply on HN