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

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

#71

Post by jsiepkes »

fastball wrote: post #60
joosters wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Google's recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don't officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that's a satisfactory solution?

It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results... I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.

If a company gets a big enough marketshare it's not that simple. If Google would have de-listed Protonmail just because "they could" that would be a problem (legal wise) in the EU. Since they also specifically target EU countries (google.nl) they also can't simply say they don't have to comply because they are based in the US.

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

#72

Post by coldtea »

tobltobs wrote: post #53
mquander wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might think that how satisfactory it is depends on how well it works. The parent is asserting it works pretty well.

He doesn't assert it works pretty well, he just says it is the best option.

Plus the parent also worked for Google.

Hardly the most appropriate source for learning whether the option worked well for the other end.

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

#73

Post by coldtea »

fastball wrote: post #60
joosters wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Google's recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don't officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that's a satisfactory solution?

It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results... I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.

>It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...

It should be, though.

It's not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it's a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.

The law shouldn't be written like we live in the stone age.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #58
flipp3r wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're now 5+ posts down the tree and people still aren't getting the post, probably the reason it was flagged and silenced. Currently a human is making the judgement call to ban someone, based on their feelings. They could very well be looking at misinformation, but have no way of verifying. The address banned could be completely unrelated to this hate group, maybe the hate group doesn't even exist, this is the point…

Please see my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15814530 For future reference, since the OP is now gone, the address in question was YouWillNotReplaceUs@protonmail.com.

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by zakk »

fastball wrote: post #60
joosters wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Google's recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don't officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that's a satisfactory solution?

It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results... I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.

> It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...

Yes you have. If Google is not representing competitors fairly in search results, that's abuse of dominant position.

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

#76

Post by tpolzer »

f_allwein wrote: post #70
StreamBright wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean violate the political stance of Google or any other arbitrary properties they got. You can go and compare search results across Duckduckgo, Bing and Google to get a full picture how much the search results are censored. When people talk about "net neutrality" I always wonder why isn't there outrage against this, because it is definitely not neutral. Same goes to many Google services, most notably Youtube. ht…

No, this is an entirely separate process. The wikipedia link you shared relates to content that is illegal in a country, so consequently Google does not show it. E.g. in my home country (Germany), this includes some types of Nazi propaganda. I would assume all other search engines follow the same rules.

In theory all other search engines have to follow the same rules, in practise nobody cares if ddg shows illegal results.

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

#77

Post by crankylinuxuser »

rocqua wrote: post #57
dvdkhlng wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Posteo could probably still be coerced to push out a fraudulent client update that still breaks their encrpytion, but that is a very hard problem to deal with. They are based in Germany and would need to be coerced in accordance to german law. I don't think that there is something like National Security Letters in Germany, so doing such a thing without (eventual?) public disclosure seems unlikely. Also posteo regul…

There are other methods of coercion than courts, but I agree that the German courts are probably much safer than the American courts. In any case, the fraudulent client update is a very hard hole to patch. The only solution for this I know of is local hosting. At the moment, defending against this in web-apps is simply not possible.

There's one way I know to stop that.

Ipfs. Its immutable, for a given key. And its easy to see what an IPNS link points to.

It may not be a way to verify, but others could do that hard work.

But it strictly shows proof that codebase for a web app hasn't changed.

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

#78

Post by vetinari »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #67
StreamBright wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean violate the political stance of Google or any other arbitrary properties they got. You can go and compare search results across Duckduckgo, Bing and Google to get a full picture how much the search results are censored. When people talk about "net neutrality" I always wonder why isn't there outrage against this, because it is definitely not neutral. Same goes to many Google services, most notably Youtube. ht…

Concrete examples?

This is more about youtube than google search, but it will be not that different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0c1Bph1jrQ

After all, it goes from the top "We're not arguing for censorship, we're arguing just take it off the page. Put it somewhere else. Make it harder to find." - Eric Schmidt

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

#79

Post by dmitriid »

A friend of mine tweeted a couple of days ago:

On the one hand, net neutrality is truly a problem: evil ISPs decide for you what you will and will not see. On the other hand, google, youtube, facebook, twitter and others already decide this for you. But you don't even know that they don't show things to you.

(sorry for poor translation from Russian)

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

#80

Post by tyingq »

f_allwein wrote: post #7

[2016]. Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt,…

"Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines"

Or, Google can get around that by repeatedly tweaking the algorithm on purpose to demote specific types of sites. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/. (long read, but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines)

There's also the issue of false positives. Machine learning algorithms that demote sites (panda/penguin/vince) certainly have some amount of unintended victims.

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