Google is FUBAR • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is FUBAR

#181

Post by yanw » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:01 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #145

bambax wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

+googol. I just have to repeat this. Google, YOU WILL GUESS WRONG! And my hunch is, you'll guess wrong about, oh, 8 times out of ten. Google search is the last place I go to look for something that's already one of my interests. For that I have twitter, my feed reader etc. I only google things that I have no, or little, familiarity with. Google search is supposed to tell me WHAT I DON'T ALREADY KNOW. In fact, now whe…

Use the toggle to turn off the social stuff then.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#182

Post by hendrix » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:03 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

So Google should know everything about everyone's search/social/youtube/whatever? Combining this data creates a very complete psychological profile on someone. Since Google is based in the USA all of this data could then be acquired by the government under the patriot act and used against innocent Americans. Never mind that the FBI (who could also request Google's data) has already done this sort of thing to anti-war groups http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09....

Also, Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" which in my opinion is fucking crazy. If I want to search for black panthers/Jewish defense league/Aryan nations/journal articles on explosive synthesis/bacillus anthracis/obscure soviet weaponry then I sure as hell don't want Google logging everything. Never mind that I'm just curious, but it sounds like Herr Schmidt and company are ready to send the Stasi out to get me. I have since switched to ssl + duckduckgo and blocked Google in my hosts file. Time for Google to stop trying to be god.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#183

Post by sebphfx » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:12 PM UTC

beatle wrote: post #176

HPBEggo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Considering the vastly different uses people put different portions of Google's services towards, combining all of them seems rather counter-productive to me. I suppose an option to partition different services into different relevancy 'portfolios' would solve the problem, but that puts a lot of burden on the user that, at least in my opinion, most users are not looking for.

time to switch to Bing

switch to Duckduckgo.They don't track you and it's awesome for programming questions. The first result is from Stack Overflow. You have categories on the right side. It's awesome. You can customize everything. The best search engine I ve seen in a while.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#184

Post by kc0bfv » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:16 PM UTC

jinushaun wrote: post #7

Destroyer661 wrote: post #3

I have a hard time understanding the whole deal everyone is making of Google finally combining the whole ecosystem they have into one nice package. I don't think the author knows that Google already knows what you use in Google docs, they already mine your email to show ads to you, they already do everything he talks about, they're just now going to let you have access to it through search instead of having to go to…

I agree. In fact, I'm surprised that Google services don't already work this way.

I agree too. I think it was naive of anybody to think that this wouldn't eventually happen. For years people have said that Google's goal was to control the information - all of it. I suppose that never bothered me because I know that I control what information I give Google, and I don't feel that Google has tried to subvert that control yet.

I'm a little disappointed that Google is returning Goog+ results above other social networks when the + results clearly are not as relevant, but hopefully they'll iron that out over time.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#185

Post by jowiar » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:19 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #123

cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

Think back to CW circa 1997. The internet is too complex to find the most relevant results by machine. These things must be hand-indexed. There is no better way to do it.

All Google does is guess as to what the "most relevant" results are. What you and your friends say/do/click/whatever is just another data point in the model. Presumably, it trains itself based on the results you/others actually click.

Google will almost certainly model how much a particular friend influences a particular search. It almost certainly will help, and certainly can't hurt (in the long run, if the weight goes to zero).

Re: Google is FUBAR

#186

Post by bonch » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:22 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results.

If it was about more relevant results, than Google would be delivering results for the competing social networks already indexed in the search engine.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#187

Post by Jach » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:34 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #123

cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

Google's an AI company. If they are guessing wrong, then they're doing poorly as a company and will suffer financially. They have every incentive to make sure it guesses wrong as infrequently as possible. You have many interests, but a finite number, they can all play a role in the model of you. Similarly with people you know.

Now, if you're suggesting that for some reason there's an inherent "you will never be able to predict me with >x% accuracy", that's another topic.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#188

Post by joebadmo » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:40 PM UTC

5l wrote: post #180

joebadmo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...it would be wise not to put yourself in a position where you're either forced to do evil, or worse, can't tell if what you're doing is evil or not. I think you're conflating two perspectives. While we as bystanders can parse and decide whether what Google is doing is evil, this has no bearing on what Google itself considers evil. If evilness is not readily discernable, then there will be deviations between the t…

> Why do you think Google considers its actions evil? I don't want to sound prickly but you keep putting words in my mouth. As I said, it's less about the specifics of what they're doing now , and more about the apparent switch of focus from "organising the world's information" [0] to "deliver[ing] online experiences tailored to each individual's interests and social circles" [1] which, I believe, may lead to a bad o…

First, I'm enjoying this discussion and I'm glad it remains civil. Thanks!

> As I said, it's less about the specifics of what they're doing now, and more about the apparent switch of focus from "organising the world's information" [0] to "deliver[ing] online experiences tailored to each individual's interests and social circles"

I don't see these as divergent. Information about individuals is information, too, and needs to be organized. It also affects how the rest of the information is organized.

> And it's obvious many people within the company are uneasy about this too (and do, arguably, think it's wrong)

> Does this mean "Google" thinks itself to be evil? Well it becomes meaningless to talk about Google as a monolithic entity at that point because it's made up of individuals.

It also becomes meaningless to get that granular, doesn't it? Does Google have to not be evil in the eyes of every one of its employees?

> But here we have an institution. People build institutions. We can build it in such a way that's it's likely to fail, or build it in such a way that it wont. Surely you can see it's important to make it as easy as possible for Google to do the right thing and difficult, if not impossible, for them do the wrong things.

Could you describe in what ways you think Google is building an institution that leads them inevitably toward doing evil? Maybe the part I don't understand is what lies at the bottom of the personal data mine. Is it a matter of how much data they collect? What they do with the data?

Re: Google is FUBAR

#189

Post by fred_nada » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:52 PM UTC

yanw wrote: post #174

fred_nada wrote: post #170

Wow - 65% of people say they will cancel their Google Account over the Privacy changes... http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-user-polls/post/wil...

Full disclosure: Washington Post Co. Chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board of directors. They omitted it this time it seems.

disclosure of what? Do you think he voted 15,000 times?

Re: Google is FUBAR

#190

Post by fred_nada » Wed, Jan 25, 2012, 11:53 PM UTC

sebphfx wrote: post #183

beatle wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

time to switch to Bing

switch to Duckduckgo.They don't track you and it's awesome for programming questions. The first result is from Stack Overflow. You have categories on the right side. It's awesome. You can customize everything. The best search engine I ve seen in a while.

bing for main searches - DDG for tech searches... thats the play.