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Google: Open Letter to Australians

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Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#71

Post by mgraczyk »

skissane wrote: post #60
mgraczyk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience The only type of search personalisation I wan…

You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`.

news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#72

Post by mgraczyk »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
option wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as another person who worked on personalization I can assure you that way over 90% of users prefer personalization. Decades of A/B tests have proven that. And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.

Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube? A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.

I don't work at Youtube, but different teams probably optimize for different things. Time spent is really, really hard to change directly, so they probably focus on things like p(like), p(watch > X% of vid), p(watches another video).

Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#73

Post by jjj123 »

mgraczyk wrote: post #36
awalton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.

It's definitely possible to have a good experience without personalization. Depending on how much you inherently value google not storing data about you, it may be the only way for you to be happy. But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.

There are lots of examples of where personalization results in a worse experience for users but better metrics for the tech company.

Somehow the Instagram ads algorithm has figured out exactly what I’m self conscious about with my own body; all I see are ads for invisible braces, skin cleansers, and hair treatments.

I don’t actually want to buy any of these things, and they make me feel bad to look at. A de-personalized Instagram experience would be far superior to me.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#74

Post by reaperducer »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #46
reaperducer wrote: post #43

To all the people (hopefully Australians) who paint this as the government propping up legacy media: Isn't it better to have control of your media in local, Australian-owned and regulated megacorps, rather than some faceless megacorp in another country?

Jokes on us, our media is run by a faceless megacorp in another country anyway (News Ltd).

According to Wikipedia, it's not in another country. Unless "Surry Hills, Sydney" is another country.

If Wikipedia is wrong, you should update it for the benefit of the rest of us.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#75

Post by skissane »

stirlo wrote: post #58
louisstow wrote: post #8

Open letter to Australians We need to let you know about new Government regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube. A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia. # The way Aussie…

It's been highlighted below but the reason this is posted here and up voted is that Google choose to 404 any requests coming from non Australian IP addresses. Hardly seems to be the thing you do when you're acting above board...

It turns out there are two URLs for this, one which only works for Australian IPs, one which works for everybody.

Australia-only URL: https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/

Global URL: https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...

Alias which redirects to Global URL: http://g.co/australia-letter

However, when I first posted this, Google was showing a message to people using Google Search in Australia, directing them to the Australia-only URL not the global one. It appears since then they've changed the popup to use the global URL.

At first I (and others) worried there may be something intentional and under-handed in this, now I realise it is probably just some sort of Google-internal stupidity. Hanlon's razor strikes again

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#76

Post by lokedhs »

mgraczyk wrote: post #18
ImaCake wrote: post #6

Link to the draft law is below [0]. Quoted from that page: >The code also includes a set of ‘minimum standards’ for: >providing advance notice of changes to algorithmic ranking and presentation of news; appropriately recognising original news content; and >providing information about how and when Google and Facebook make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content. This sounds great to…

As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

Not the original poster, but I've disabled all personalisation that it's possible to disable since forever, and my biggest problem with it is that it still doesn't seem to disable it entirely.

So yes, I definitely prefer it. And looking at the other replies to your message suggests that I'm not alone here.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#77

Post by spacehunt »

reaperducer wrote: post #74
StopHammoTime wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jokes on us, our media is run by a faceless megacorp in another country anyway (News Ltd).

According to Wikipedia, it's not in another country. Unless "Surry Hills, Sydney" is another country. If Wikipedia is wrong, you should update it for the benefit of the rest of us.

If you look a few lines down in the same infobox, you'll see its parent is "News Corp" which is in the US.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#78

Post by lokedhs »

chrstphrknwtn wrote: post #56
mgraczyk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience. You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

As someone who makes widgets, and can confidently assure you that you need widgets.

I'm wondering if this assertion comes from some kind of "search bubble" among developers of these tools.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#79

Post by skissane »

mgraczyk wrote: post #71
skissane wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said. I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience The only type of search personalisation I wan…

You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`. news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.

I know about `-site:`, but it is a pain to have to keep on typing it in, they used to have a feature to permanently block certain domains in results, from your Google settings. (Plus, `-site:` only works for a few sites, since it counts against the search keywords limit.)

When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share"

Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#80

Post by spacehunt »

jp0d wrote: post #68
jp0d wrote: post #10

I'd probably trust the Australian govt to protect my data better than Google or even worse Facebook. The way the article has twisted the words in Google's favour is commendable though. Marketing really is everything.

I don't understand why my comment got down voted. But yes, as one of you have pointed out, it's just my opinion. And I don't think the original draft of this law as much to do with giving your data to the govt, but more about Google/Fb being more transparent with the conditions under which, our data will be used by them. I'm not a legal expert and I may have misunderstood some of it. It's my opinion that big monopoli…

The context you're missing is that in Australia, the "big monopoly" is News Corp and not FAANG.
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