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Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

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Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#131

Post by dredmorbius »

hlau wrote: post #123
dredmorbius wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very rarely click on Google Web Search ads. I very rarely use Google Web Search. Poor relevance and ubiquitous tracking is a key condern. But the ad-spamming is also tremendously out of hand. I'd switched to Google from AltaVista in 1999. I ditched GWS effectively by 2013. Yes, I'll still occasionally run a "!g" bang search. And there are Google services I find genuinely useful --- Google Books and Ngram Viewer mos…

Really surprised to hear that you’re not getting the relevance out of Google. Are most of your searches in a specific domain that’s somehow not covered properly by Google? And is there a search engine that does a better job for you? I’ve tried using services like DDG and find myself falling back to Google more often than not.

The problem is generally typical of online content as a whole given SEO gaming and commercialisation. DDG's bang searches and the ability to fluidly target searches to specific sites with less typing and fewer hops is a key differentiator.

The most relevant quality content tends to come from published rather than online sources, or by going direct to source.

The Web has been a mistake.

That said, Google's SERP page content, layout, tracking, and advertising all effectively drop relevance by a tremendous amount --- I've got to consciously filter out Google's own crap on top of the irrelevant web results returned.

DDG's cleaner presentation increases effective quality by a subjectively-assessed factor of 2--10.

Date-bounded search remains one of the very few reasons to favour GWS for a specific search, though even that is highly unreliable. Often what I want is a searchable archive from a given period, not a guestimate of a date-ranged search over the live Web.

Even in Google Books, date-ranged search results very often fail to return content from the requested period.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#132

Post by refenestrator »

kyrra wrote: post #33
refenestrator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working there in the first place limits thought. Nobody wants to think of themselves as part of the problem. The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a little easier.

Googler, opinion is my own. When I started at Google in 2015, in my first week here chatting with some peers, some of them were complaining about some of our policies around Android and that they much preferred Apple (the person didn't work anywhere near Android, but was complaining about it more as a user). There are many people at Google that have issues with various parts of Google's businesses. Some are more voca…

Those are minor product quibbles.

I'm not saying Google is the great Satan or anything, I'm just saying it's impossible for most people, especially the typical Googler, to simultaneously work at a place for a nice paycheck and think it's bad for society. Everyone justifies, whether it's Phillip Morris or Google.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#133

Post by ekianjo »

Thats not Googlespeak. Thats legal protection. Whenever a company is open to investigation you can bet emails will be searched and if something suggesting something borderline illegal is written there it can be used against you. A lot of companiea give such trainings to their employees.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#134

Post by ekianjo »

bogwog wrote: post #85
tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

At what point does *market share* not become a KPI? At what point does market share become so irrelevant, that you stop tracking it altogether in your entire multibillion-dollar megacorp, and make your employees stop talking about it? Answer: When you become a monopoly (or are on your way there), and need to hide from regulators. That's the point where the market becomes irrelevant, so tracking market share is nothin…

if you create a product thats unique or defines a category you start by having a market share of 100 percent. Market share does not define monopolies. What defines monopolies is the absence of alternatives. Like you know, the postal service to send letters. funnily nobody talks about those.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#135

Post by sidlls »

kens wrote: post #116
tytso wrote: post #25

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post. Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is…

> 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits. The first point is that…

No rational person is going to see “Area” in this context as anything but a synonym for “Market.”

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#136

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

titzer wrote: post #32
skybrian wrote: post #8

This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do you want to end up in court years later explaining what you meant? Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the damage from random chatter and speculation. It’s more cumbersome to have to talk about some th…

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.

You get more of the behaviors you encourage and less of the ones you discourage. The US legal system strongly discourages retaining email, since it rarely works in favor of the entity making the retention decision. And there is no particular reason to keep emails that old, so naturally companies want to get rid of them.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#138

Post by pc86 »

sidlls wrote: post #135
kens wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits. The first point is that…

No rational person is going to see “Area” in this context as anything but a synonym for “Market.”

Especially when Google is distributing documentation saying to use the word "Area" explicitly instead of "Market."

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#139

Post by kens »

ineedasername wrote: post #111

For a more complete look at the concept that linguistic structure & lexicon set the boundaries of thought, see the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [0]. Spoiler alert: the "strong" version doesn't quite hold up under experimental scrutiny, but the "light" version has some legs. As a bonus, follow-up with George Lakoff's Metaphors we Live By . [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I second your recommendation of Metaphors we live by. It is a book that had a lasting impact on how I view the world and I think most HN readers would find it interesting.

Re: Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

#140

Post by brandmeyer »

greatgib wrote: post #52

I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years ago. Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus phones. (I don't remember the exact details) And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation were published on internet a few days before the official announcement. Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a few years ago it was not yet the case.…

> So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google was bad for them personally!

I think your interpretation of this experience is incorrect. Their visceral reaction was against leaking specifically, not negative information generally. Part of the propaganda behind TGIF, the internal newsletters, and so on is the idea that this inside information is part of what makes you special as a Googler.

> "...we hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to have him dead."

While I'm sure you caught a big fish that day, I'm also sure it wasn't that big (come on: the retelling of this anecdote does not need quite that much exaggeration).

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