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I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that

by md224 11y ago

I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "unsee" those results. So, searching the world's largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information? What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can't understand how AdWords is ethical.

ntumlin 11y ago
I don't think it's so bad, and more importantly I don't see the solution. Google does what it does to make money, and ads are how it does that. If there's a more ethical solution it'll only be implemented if it's also more profitable. All that is fine with me; Google doesn't have any obligations to me or you or anyone besides their shareholders.
- TaylorAlexander 11y ago
  "I don't see any problem with the way the world's most powerful system for freeing the mind has been co-opted by for-profit enterprise. I am ignorant of any possible alternatives. Capitalist businesses sell goods and services in exchange for money. I accept that no effort will be made to find more ethical alternatives unless it can produce even more money. We as a society have no control or influence over what individual actors do, and thus no discussion of possible alternatives is necessary."
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Your highlighting of "for-profit enterprise" takes me back to old Catholic anti-usury biases. They are rather juvenile. I'm also unsure of how you managed to reduce "capitalism" to the mere monetary exchange economy, which completely evaporates all substance out of the already butchered term. I also hope your idea of "ethical alternatives" doesn't involve what amounts to state corporatism, which all the progressives and Galbraith types are enamored with for some reason. The modern left knows nothing of Proudhon, Bakunin or Kropotkin. It's all top-down planning for them.
    - TaylorAlexander 11y ago
      I don't believe I've said anything about why I dislike for-profit enterprise controlling the world's most valuable institution, so I'm unsure how you could correctly infer my reasons for feeling that way. As far as capitalism, my statement was factually correct and I made no attempt to fully describe the institution. In fact I disagree that capitalism equates to the monetary exchange economy, as the latter has existed far longer than the former. I've made no recommendations for what the alternatives might be, only mocked the idea that, since the parent can't think of anything, we shouldn't ask the question. In fact your assumption that I am for centralized State Capitalism (to use Richard Wolff's definition of Capitalism) and top-down planning is again false. I subscribe to Marx's suggestion that workers should own the means of production, and do a reasonable amount of reading to support that belief. In short, most of what you've assumed is incorrect.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        The Bakunin critique of Marx is then relevant, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is trivially hijacked by vanguardist interests. Moreover, Marx's diagnosis of capitalist breakdown in Vol. III of Capital has failed the test. The scenario of rising organic composition of capital (ratio of constant capital to variable capital) triggering a falling rate of profit and a growing reserve army of labor has not played out. Marxists scrambled to revise the thesis. Lenin and Luxemburg proposed imperialism. Rudolf Hilferding spoke of "finance capital". Ernest Mandel himself identified a stage of "late capitalism" borrowing in turn from Sweezy and Baran's "monopoly capital". Prebisch and Furtado developed the dependency theory model of international trade. The interpretations of capitalism are so numerous that Marxism has become incoherent in explaining it, aside from the problems of historical materialism as a method of historiography with its overt bias to economic determinism. Ideal scenarios of worker cooperatives and revolutionary syndicalism haven't at all materialized. Instead, it has led to platformist organizations that are the laughing stock of anarchism. Don't forget that Georges Sorel's idea of national syndicalism developed from his Marxist revisionism ended up giving us Spanish and Italian fascism.
zabuni 11y ago
Because limiting what order a person puts links on a website, or what their content is, gets pretty quickly into free speech issues?
- md224 11y ago
  I'm not saying Google shouldn't be allowed to do what it does. I'm just saying what it does seems fundamentally unethical.
ska 11y ago
Why are we letting money influence the salience of information? Because it's the only practical and effective way anyone has every come up with of building such a system? This isn't a comment on the ethical nature - just that I don't believe there was any point where you could choose between commercial drivers to the growth of the "information system", and any other approach that would have resulted in similar growth. If the commercial explosion on the web hadn't happened, we wouldn't have anything like the same scope as we do now. For good or ill.
- md224 11y ago
  Ah, the "Omelas" bargain. Fair enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om... It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence. So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence. I wish there was a third way that we could crowdfund a platform without making it beholden to any specific set of donors.
  - personjerry 11y ago
    Like Kickstarter with a low "max donation" amount?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    "It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence" That wouldn't fix the problem. Ultimately, somebody has to decide & implement what goes into the ranking algorithm that determines the search results that people see. That person has significant power, and will be both decried by intellectuals who feel like they're on the losing edge of the power dynamic, and courted by donors/lobbyists/etc. who wish to gain some of that power. If it were funded by taxation, you would see the same distrust that the FBI and NSA face today (both of which are funded by taxation). If it were crowdfunding, it'd be exactly the same problem that Google faces today - Google's AdWords auction essentially is crowdfunding, and if you give Google money, you get to influence the ads shown on some subset of queries. (Try it - you can get started in 10 minutes for a few bucks.) What would fix the problem is if people didn't blindly trust Google, and instead researched in-depth on a number of competing search engines. The article alludes to this - Google's power comes from monopoly, and competition is the way to negate that power. But this only fixes the specific case of Google - if you broke up Google into many competing search engines, then Facebook would simply become the 800 lb. gorilla of how people get their information. Break up Facebook, and it becomes Reddit. Last century, it was ABC/NBC/CBS, and before then, Pulitzer and Hearst (who were a lot more unethical than Google was...Hearst started a war so he could sell more papers). You can't avoid power, you can only understand it, and perhaps manipulate it so it serves yourself better.
pcmaffey 11y ago
The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn't hold weight, as there is no "purity of information". Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc. Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources. That doesn't make it wrong. There's huge value there. Just the same, money is not evil. It's a mechanism for storing value. It's imperfect, and abused, and certainly not the only measurement of value. Keeping those value systems in balance is the key.
- md224 11y ago
  I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out. Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking. Let's just spell this out: money !== relevance, therefore any influence of money on search engine rankings is, by definition, noise.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Power buys presence. Whether that power is national and the presence armed excursions, or the power is political and the presence is your ideas being heard from your pulpit. Money is just a proxy for other types of power. This has never changed.
  - pcmaffey 11y ago
    Money is absolutely part of the formulation of relevance. It's just not the whole equation. Nor is word-matching (altavista), nor is popularity (google). But each is relevant. Someone (advertiser) is paying money because they believe they have information relevant to you. How is that categorically different than the blogger/webmaster who's paying money (time/hosting) because they believe they have information relevant to you? All information has a cost associated with it. And that cost bears some significance on the value of the information. Measuring and weighing that significance relative to other inputs is the beauty of an effective system.
hellbanner 11y ago
Personally I've found Google to be frustratingly difficult to search in recent years. I can't find articles & essays that I remember fondly because the namespace is so polluted with Great SEO.
- daodedickinson 11y ago
  Have you fond a better search engine? I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google, where I find what I was looking for. Of course, one can always suggest that I am just better attuned to Google (I have Google Fu from long experience with Google and wrongfully expect DuckDuckGo Fu to be the same skill and have not developed DuckDuckGo Fu).
  - __jal 11y ago
    I'd suggest spending some time learning DDG. It is a very good engine once you get used to it. Another trick I use with Google, especially when I'm searching things that are outside of my usual interests, is clearing my cookies. Best I can tell, this makes it skip the statistical model of me that, say, suggests 'logging' is more about daemon output than about killing trees. Now if only all the engines didn't have such a bias towards "new" material. My major search-related frustration over the last while has been how buried things become over time, especially if they share identifying lexemes with things in the news.
  - clouddrover 11y ago
    > I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google What's an example of a search that fails to find what you need?
    - blubb-fish 11y ago
      "intitle:duckduckgo site:news.ycombinator.com" and then further narrowing down by restricting to past year.
      - 11y ago
aresant 11y ago
I wrote this a few weeks ago on HN but your argument is missing consideration for Google's "Page Quality Score" (PQS) algorithm - which is designed to provide at least some layer of quality / $$$-bias-arbitration.(1) In short they believe that the most reliable way to drive search relevancy / quality EVEN in paid categories is to make sure the guy on the other end of the table is willing to pay for that user's attention. QPS is designed to penalize the advertiser if they don't hit "relevancy" metrics which makes it more expensive for that advertiser to reach you - as a percentage it can make clicks literally 600% more expensive (worst case). The relevancy metrics they'll use include page speed (good for user), time user spends on site (relevancy), actions taken - tracked by Google Analytics (relevancy), and content quality / uniqueness (relevancy). If you've got a guy willing to pay with high relevancy it's a compelling reason to show nothing but ads. Now is that REALLY good for the user across the board? No way. But there's at least a superficial effort to arbitrage the $$$ bias. (1) Google's PQS documentation https://storage.googleapis.com/support-kms-prod/8E4C3B33697E35B1582E827EF55E6DA01A3A https://storage.googleapis.com/support-kms-prod/8E4C3B33697E... (2) http://searchengineland.com/minimum-quality-score-can-save-money-adwords-226757 http://searchengineland.com/minimum-quality-score-can-save-m... (3) Google's PQS update broken down https://www.convirza.com/resources/the-impact-of-googles-recent-quality-score-update/ https://www.convirza.com/resources/the-impact-of-googles-rec...
return0 11y ago
> which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Money itself is just a tool, it cant be (un)ethical. Best to focus on the human agents and incentives. > should not be biased by monetary influence. Influence will exist because it's part of human nature. Take away monetary incentives and you 'll have political influence, religious influence etc. We 've learned that from history.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior.
sliverstorm 11y ago
What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. But it is biased! The card catalog might be an unbiased representation of what the library has- but have you considered that what the library has is biased by monetary influence? What the book costs. Whether the book is demanded (advertising). Jacket design (you grab the most interesting-looking book). The flaw to libraries is their naturally limited capacity.
pdehaye 11y ago
Read the original PageRank paper. Page and Brin themselves acknowledge that (while they were still academics): [L]ess blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
- WalterGR 11y ago
  For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. Google absolutely does this - for example, to a site that I own. So it's not just theory: Google has put it into practice.
  - mgraczyk 11y ago
    Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site.
    - WalterGR 11y ago
      In this case, my site is subject to the "subtract a factor from results from competitors", but that's equivalent to Google's preferred site buying rank. Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site. Only officially.
dsp1234 11y ago
'House of Cards' recently explored this issue with their fake search engine, Pollyhop. The (fictional) results were.... unsettling to say the least.
the_cat_kittles 11y ago
maybe web search should be a public utility
Kenji 11y ago
But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. Luckily, the world does not have to conform to your standards. What you are arguing for is authoritarianism, that your opinion be forced upon actors. This kind of thinking is exactly what erodes the basis for innovation and liberty. Google is the top search engine because their results are just unmatched in quality. If you don't like the results of google, then visit another search engine - or better, create a better one that conforms to your puritan principles. But please don't tell others what to do, and for goodness' sake, please don't involve the state and more legislation in this.
l33tbro 11y ago
Maybe because libraries are not private compaines? I mean, you mention competitors not having the revenue to crawl an increasingly complex web. But how else do you see them being able to facilitate this without a similar advertising strategy to Google? I just have little patience for complaints about free products like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. They cost you nothing but time and attention - both of which you have complete control over.
CuriouslyC 11y ago
The ads you see for a given search are highly likely to be profitable (since it is so easy to track and manage). That means people are clicking on those links, and a reasonable fraction of those clicks are being converted. From this, I would like to posit that the profitability of an ad is directly related to the product or service's relevance/value to the user (barring deceptive advertising). Lets also assume that people buying the ads are willing to increase their ad bid until the cost per acquisition approaches equilibrium with the expected lifetime value. Over time, this should result in only the most profitable ads being displayed. This implies that only the most valuable/relevant ads are being displayed, given the point previously posited. Thus, over the long term, assuming a fairly efficient market and some restriction on deceptive advertising, the ads can be thought of as an alternate form of result, with a very direct, user-centric ranking metric. Would it be more palatable if the SERPs were divided into two columns, one being "web search results" and the other being clearly labeled "product/service search results"?
- spyder 11y ago
  Just because a product or service is profitable it doesn't mean it's a good product or it's not a scam, and in the case of Google results the companies can make the honest reviews of the product rank lower or basically hide them in the second page of results with their paid ads, which is making it harder for the consumers to figure out the real quality of the product before buying. Of course not every organic result is honest but ads can make it worse.
clouddrover 11y ago
> and Google is the primary portal into that information system. I don't see that you've got no choice but Google. The easy workaround is to switch to another search engine like DuckDuckGo. Wikipedia is said to be exploring a search engine project so that may become another option: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/12/wikipedia_grant_build_search_engine_knight_foundation/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/12/wikipedia_grant_buil...
Sven7 11y ago
I agree with you. Let's just give thanks that Larry Page doesn't run Wikipedia. At this point Google is way past the point of no return. They are more bothered about empire defense than information.
seivan 11y ago
Just imagine what TV/"news papers" used to be and still is. I can see why many left wing extremists worked on TV as it can be easily used to shape people with no alternative source of info. Until that pesky internet came and along and with it a lower barrier to entry. Things have improved, even with Google.
beedogs 11y ago
I'm not even sure why Google has sponsored search at this point. They have more than enough revenue from other sources to jettison this odious practice.
abandonliberty 11y ago
Money buys speech. I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you. Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately. Good news: I agree that this is a problem. Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize. If communication of information isn't democratized, you can't have a democracy. It shouldn't be a surprise then that we don't have a democracy, but an oligarchy [1]. Mind you, this is just one of many factors that makes a true democracy impossible as they currently exist. [2] 1 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
abandonliberty 11y ago
Money buys speech. I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you. Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately. Reality is for sale. Good news: I agree that this is a problem. Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize. If communication of information isn't democratized, you can't have a democracy. It shouldn't be a surprise then that we don't have a democracy, but an oligarchy [1]. Mind you, this is just one of many factors that makes a true democracy impossible as they currently exist. [2] 1 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  We want speech to be pure and abstract. So this relegates money to our expression of the venal. Then we find this, and wonder why it bothers us. You are ultimately responsible for your own perceptions.
  - abandonliberty 11y ago
    >You are ultimately responsible for your own perceptions. Would you consider a Muslim born and raised in the Maldives, where the state and populous are all Muslim and questioning the status quo can result in severe injury and incarceration, personally responsible for their views even though they are denied alternative perspectives? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_Maldives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_Maldives
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      Yes.
bottled_poe 11y ago
hmm.. AdWords seems like the tiny tip of the iceberg. Perhaps you don't realise, but the problem you are alluding to is that money influences which information gets created. Those 'organic' search results are in the same boat as the ads.
Umn44 11y ago
"How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?" You can't have non biased information in a capitalist society, capitalist by their nature want a monopoly on everything. Most people in capitalist society are clueless about how egregiously criminal their own society really is. There is no such thing as non biased information, private institutions push their agenda, always will and always have. You want non biased info you need publically owned and nationalized institutions but that is an anathema to US ideology.
martingoodson 11y ago
Without AdWords those advertising dollars would be spent on manipulating organic search results instead. That would be far worse.
IsaacL 11y ago
I disagree entirely. The essential point I want to make is that just because you have a right to something, does not mean you have a right to the material implementation of that right. (Because that would mean you had a right to the labour and property of others, i.e. a right to violate their rights). You have a right to free speech. You do not have the right to publish your opinions in any outlet of your choice (because that would violate the publishers' rights). Even if you lived in a small town with only one newspaper, and they wouldn't print your letters to the editor, it still wouldn't be right for you to compel them to print your letters by legal means. They built the audience, its their right to communicate with them as they see fit. (This isn't censorship, because you're still free to hand out flyers in the street, start your own newspaper, sue the existing newspaper if they commit libel, etc). Your argument is essentially that because Google is "the world's largest information system", we shouldn't be "letting" them put whatever content they want on their pages, for whatever reason they want. The implication is that if someone builds something really useful, that thing should become public property. (People are saying the same thing about Twitter). AdWords is absolutely moral because a privately-run service needs a source of funding. (I should note that I do think many PPC ad networks are exploitative and immoral, but that's not the case for Google). Unless someone sets up a nonprofit search engine run by donations, the only alternative is a public, state-funded search engine -- that's the only way to get an "information system not biased by money". On the unlikely possibility that the state could build and maintain such a system, it would be the most powerful tool for potential censorship imaginable.
butler14 11y ago
Mostly because the vast majority of adverts are showing against commercial/transactional search queries, not informational ones.
alanwatts 11y ago
"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly." -Marshall McLuhan
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
Information produced costs money. Groups that do not have equal funding can have far less information produced about them. This becomes a significant issue in social science where only certain questions get funding and related but opposite questions do not, resulting in a one sided view of information (especially since many people think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence).

by md224 11y ago

ntumlin 11y ago

I don't think it's so bad, and more importantly I don't see the solution. Google does what it does to make money, and ads are how it does that. If there's a more ethical solution it'll only be implemented if it's also more profitable. All that is fine with me; Google doesn't have any obligations to me or you or anyone besides their shareholders.

TaylorAlexander 11y ago
"I don't see any problem with the way the world's most powerful system for freeing the mind has been co-opted by for-profit enterprise. I am ignorant of any possible alternatives. Capitalist businesses sell goods and services in exchange for money. I accept that no effort will be made to find more ethical alternatives unless it can produce even more money. We as a society have no control or influence over what individual actors do, and thus no discussion of possible alternatives is necessary."
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Your highlighting of "for-profit enterprise" takes me back to old Catholic anti-usury biases. They are rather juvenile. I'm also unsure of how you managed to reduce "capitalism" to the mere monetary exchange economy, which completely evaporates all substance out of the already butchered term. I also hope your idea of "ethical alternatives" doesn't involve what amounts to state corporatism, which all the progressives and Galbraith types are enamored with for some reason. The modern left knows nothing of Proudhon, Bakunin or Kropotkin. It's all top-down planning for them.
  - TaylorAlexander 11y ago
    I don't believe I've said anything about why I dislike for-profit enterprise controlling the world's most valuable institution, so I'm unsure how you could correctly infer my reasons for feeling that way. As far as capitalism, my statement was factually correct and I made no attempt to fully describe the institution. In fact I disagree that capitalism equates to the monetary exchange economy, as the latter has existed far longer than the former. I've made no recommendations for what the alternatives might be, only mocked the idea that, since the parent can't think of anything, we shouldn't ask the question. In fact your assumption that I am for centralized State Capitalism (to use Richard Wolff's definition of Capitalism) and top-down planning is again false. I subscribe to Marx's suggestion that workers should own the means of production, and do a reasonable amount of reading to support that belief. In short, most of what you've assumed is incorrect.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      The Bakunin critique of Marx is then relevant, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is trivially hijacked by vanguardist interests. Moreover, Marx's diagnosis of capitalist breakdown in Vol. III of Capital has failed the test. The scenario of rising organic composition of capital (ratio of constant capital to variable capital) triggering a falling rate of profit and a growing reserve army of labor has not played out. Marxists scrambled to revise the thesis. Lenin and Luxemburg proposed imperialism. Rudolf Hilferding spoke of "finance capital". Ernest Mandel himself identified a stage of "late capitalism" borrowing in turn from Sweezy and Baran's "monopoly capital". Prebisch and Furtado developed the dependency theory model of international trade. The interpretations of capitalism are so numerous that Marxism has become incoherent in explaining it, aside from the problems of historical materialism as a method of historiography with its overt bias to economic determinism. Ideal scenarios of worker cooperatives and revolutionary syndicalism haven't at all materialized. Instead, it has led to platformist organizations that are the laughing stock of anarchism. Don't forget that Georges Sorel's idea of national syndicalism developed from his Marxist revisionism ended up giving us Spanish and Italian fascism.

zabuni 11y ago

Because limiting what order a person puts links on a website, or what their content is, gets pretty quickly into free speech issues?

md224 11y ago
I'm not saying Google shouldn't be allowed to do what it does. I'm just saying what it does seems fundamentally unethical.

ska 11y ago

Why are we letting money influence the salience of information? Because it's the only practical and effective way anyone has every come up with of building such a system? This isn't a comment on the ethical nature - just that I don't believe there was any point where you could choose between commercial drivers to the growth of the "information system", and any other approach that would have resulted in similar growth. If the commercial explosion on the web hadn't happened, we wouldn't have anything like the same scope as we do now. For good or ill.

md224 11y ago
Ah, the "Omelas" bargain. Fair enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om... It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence. So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence. I wish there was a third way that we could crowdfund a platform without making it beholden to any specific set of donors.
- personjerry 11y ago
  Like Kickstarter with a low "max donation" amount?
- nostrademons 11y ago
  "It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence" That wouldn't fix the problem. Ultimately, somebody has to decide & implement what goes into the ranking algorithm that determines the search results that people see. That person has significant power, and will be both decried by intellectuals who feel like they're on the losing edge of the power dynamic, and courted by donors/lobbyists/etc. who wish to gain some of that power. If it were funded by taxation, you would see the same distrust that the FBI and NSA face today (both of which are funded by taxation). If it were crowdfunding, it'd be exactly the same problem that Google faces today - Google's AdWords auction essentially is crowdfunding, and if you give Google money, you get to influence the ads shown on some subset of queries. (Try it - you can get started in 10 minutes for a few bucks.) What would fix the problem is if people didn't blindly trust Google, and instead researched in-depth on a number of competing search engines. The article alludes to this - Google's power comes from monopoly, and competition is the way to negate that power. But this only fixes the specific case of Google - if you broke up Google into many competing search engines, then Facebook would simply become the 800 lb. gorilla of how people get their information. Break up Facebook, and it becomes Reddit. Last century, it was ABC/NBC/CBS, and before then, Pulitzer and Hearst (who were a lot more unethical than Google was...Hearst started a war so he could sell more papers). You can't avoid power, you can only understand it, and perhaps manipulate it so it serves yourself better.

pcmaffey 11y ago

The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn't hold weight, as there is no "purity of information". Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc. Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources. That doesn't make it wrong. There's huge value there. Just the same, money is not evil. It's a mechanism for storing value. It's imperfect, and abused, and certainly not the only measurement of value. Keeping those value systems in balance is the key.

md224 11y ago
I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out. Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking. Let's just spell this out: money !== relevance, therefore any influence of money on search engine rankings is, by definition, noise.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Power buys presence. Whether that power is national and the presence armed excursions, or the power is political and the presence is your ideas being heard from your pulpit. Money is just a proxy for other types of power. This has never changed.
- pcmaffey 11y ago
  Money is absolutely part of the formulation of relevance. It's just not the whole equation. Nor is word-matching (altavista), nor is popularity (google). But each is relevant. Someone (advertiser) is paying money because they believe they have information relevant to you. How is that categorically different than the blogger/webmaster who's paying money (time/hosting) because they believe they have information relevant to you? All information has a cost associated with it. And that cost bears some significance on the value of the information. Measuring and weighing that significance relative to other inputs is the beauty of an effective system.

hellbanner 11y ago

Personally I've found Google to be frustratingly difficult to search in recent years. I can't find articles & essays that I remember fondly because the namespace is so polluted with Great SEO.

daodedickinson 11y ago
Have you fond a better search engine? I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google, where I find what I was looking for. Of course, one can always suggest that I am just better attuned to Google (I have Google Fu from long experience with Google and wrongfully expect DuckDuckGo Fu to be the same skill and have not developed DuckDuckGo Fu).
- __jal 11y ago
  I'd suggest spending some time learning DDG. It is a very good engine once you get used to it. Another trick I use with Google, especially when I'm searching things that are outside of my usual interests, is clearing my cookies. Best I can tell, this makes it skip the statistical model of me that, say, suggests 'logging' is more about daemon output than about killing trees. Now if only all the engines didn't have such a bias towards "new" material. My major search-related frustration over the last while has been how buried things become over time, especially if they share identifying lexemes with things in the news.
- clouddrover 11y ago
  > I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google What's an example of a search that fails to find what you need?
  - blubb-fish 11y ago
    "intitle:duckduckgo site:news.ycombinator.com" and then further narrowing down by restricting to past year.
    - 11y ago

aresant 11y ago

I wrote this a few weeks ago on HN but your argument is missing consideration for Google's "Page Quality Score" (PQS) algorithm - which is designed to provide at least some layer of quality / $$$-bias-arbitration.(1) In short they believe that the most reliable way to drive search relevancy / quality EVEN in paid categories is to make sure the guy on the other end of the table is willing to pay for that user's attention. QPS is designed to penalize the advertiser if they don't hit "relevancy" metrics which makes it more expensive for that advertiser to reach you - as a percentage it can make clicks literally 600% more expensive (worst case). The relevancy metrics they'll use include page speed (good for user), time user spends on site (relevancy), actions taken - tracked by Google Analytics (relevancy), and content quality / uniqueness (relevancy). If you've got a guy willing to pay with high relevancy it's a compelling reason to show nothing but ads. Now is that REALLY good for the user across the board? No way. But there's at least a superficial effort to arbitrage the $$$ bias. (1) Google's PQS documentation https://storage.googleapis.com/support-kms-prod/8E4C3B33697E35B1582E827EF55E6DA01A3A https://storage.googleapis.com/support-kms-prod/8E4C3B33697E... (2) http://searchengineland.com/minimum-quality-score-can-save-money-adwords-226757 http://searchengineland.com/minimum-quality-score-can-save-m... (3) Google's PQS update broken down https://www.convirza.com/resources/the-impact-of-googles-recent-quality-score-update/ https://www.convirza.com/resources/the-impact-of-googles-rec...

return0 11y ago

> which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Money itself is just a tool, it cant be (un)ethical. Best to focus on the human agents and incentives. > should not be biased by monetary influence. Influence will exist because it's part of human nature. Take away monetary incentives and you 'll have political influence, religious influence etc. We 've learned that from history.

x5n1 11y ago
Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior.

sliverstorm 11y ago

What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. But it is biased! The card catalog might be an unbiased representation of what the library has- but have you considered that what the library has is biased by monetary influence? What the book costs. Whether the book is demanded (advertising). Jacket design (you grab the most interesting-looking book). The flaw to libraries is their naturally limited capacity.

pdehaye 11y ago

Read the original PageRank paper. Page and Brin themselves acknowledge that (while they were still academics): [L]ess blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

WalterGR 11y ago
For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. Google absolutely does this - for example, to a site that I own. So it's not just theory: Google has put it into practice.
- mgraczyk 11y ago
  Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site.
  - WalterGR 11y ago
    In this case, my site is subject to the "subtract a factor from results from competitors", but that's equivalent to Google's preferred site buying rank. Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site. Only officially.

dsp1234 11y ago

'House of Cards' recently explored this issue with their fake search engine, Pollyhop. The (fictional) results were.... unsettling to say the least.

the_cat_kittles 11y ago

maybe web search should be a public utility

Kenji 11y ago

But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. Luckily, the world does not have to conform to your standards. What you are arguing for is authoritarianism, that your opinion be forced upon actors. This kind of thinking is exactly what erodes the basis for innovation and liberty. Google is the top search engine because their results are just unmatched in quality. If you don't like the results of google, then visit another search engine - or better, create a better one that conforms to your puritan principles. But please don't tell others what to do, and for goodness' sake, please don't involve the state and more legislation in this.

l33tbro 11y ago

Maybe because libraries are not private compaines? I mean, you mention competitors not having the revenue to crawl an increasingly complex web. But how else do you see them being able to facilitate this without a similar advertising strategy to Google? I just have little patience for complaints about free products like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. They cost you nothing but time and attention - both of which you have complete control over.

CuriouslyC 11y ago

The ads you see for a given search are highly likely to be profitable (since it is so easy to track and manage). That means people are clicking on those links, and a reasonable fraction of those clicks are being converted. From this, I would like to posit that the profitability of an ad is directly related to the product or service's relevance/value to the user (barring deceptive advertising). Lets also assume that people buying the ads are willing to increase their ad bid until the cost per acquisition approaches equilibrium with the expected lifetime value. Over time, this should result in only the most profitable ads being displayed. This implies that only the most valuable/relevant ads are being displayed, given the point previously posited. Thus, over the long term, assuming a fairly efficient market and some restriction on deceptive advertising, the ads can be thought of as an alternate form of result, with a very direct, user-centric ranking metric. Would it be more palatable if the SERPs were divided into two columns, one being "web search results" and the other being clearly labeled "product/service search results"?

spyder 11y ago
Just because a product or service is profitable it doesn't mean it's a good product or it's not a scam, and in the case of Google results the companies can make the honest reviews of the product rank lower or basically hide them in the second page of results with their paid ads, which is making it harder for the consumers to figure out the real quality of the product before buying. Of course not every organic result is honest but ads can make it worse.

clouddrover 11y ago

> and Google is the primary portal into that information system. I don't see that you've got no choice but Google. The easy workaround is to switch to another search engine like DuckDuckGo. Wikipedia is said to be exploring a search engine project so that may become another option: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/12/wikipedia_grant_build_search_engine_knight_foundation/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/12/wikipedia_grant_buil...

Sven7 11y ago

I agree with you. Let's just give thanks that Larry Page doesn't run Wikipedia. At this point Google is way past the point of no return. They are more bothered about empire defense than information.

seivan 11y ago

Just imagine what TV/"news papers" used to be and still is. I can see why many left wing extremists worked on TV as it can be easily used to shape people with no alternative source of info. Until that pesky internet came and along and with it a lower barrier to entry. Things have improved, even with Google.

beedogs 11y ago

I'm not even sure why Google has sponsored search at this point. They have more than enough revenue from other sources to jettison this odious practice.

abandonliberty 11y ago

Money buys speech. I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you. Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately. Good news: I agree that this is a problem. Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize. If communication of information isn't democratized, you can't have a democracy. It shouldn't be a surprise then that we don't have a democracy, but an oligarchy [1]. Mind you, this is just one of many factors that makes a true democracy impossible as they currently exist. [2] 1 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

abandonliberty 11y ago

Money buys speech. I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you. Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately. Reality is for sale. Good news: I agree that this is a problem. Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize. If communication of information isn't democratized, you can't have a democracy. It shouldn't be a surprise then that we don't have a democracy, but an oligarchy [1]. Mind you, this is just one of many factors that makes a true democracy impossible as they currently exist. [2] 1 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
We want speech to be pure and abstract. So this relegates money to our expression of the venal. Then we find this, and wonder why it bothers us. You are ultimately responsible for your own perceptions.
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  >You are ultimately responsible for your own perceptions. Would you consider a Muslim born and raised in the Maldives, where the state and populous are all Muslim and questioning the status quo can result in severe injury and incarceration, personally responsible for their views even though they are denied alternative perspectives? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_Maldives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_Maldives
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Yes.

bottled_poe 11y ago

hmm.. AdWords seems like the tiny tip of the iceberg. Perhaps you don't realise, but the problem you are alluding to is that money influences which information gets created. Those 'organic' search results are in the same boat as the ads.

Umn44 11y ago

"How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?" You can't have non biased information in a capitalist society, capitalist by their nature want a monopoly on everything. Most people in capitalist society are clueless about how egregiously criminal their own society really is. There is no such thing as non biased information, private institutions push their agenda, always will and always have. You want non biased info you need publically owned and nationalized institutions but that is an anathema to US ideology.

martingoodson 11y ago

Without AdWords those advertising dollars would be spent on manipulating organic search results instead. That would be far worse.

IsaacL 11y ago

I disagree entirely. The essential point I want to make is that just because you have a right to something, does not mean you have a right to the material implementation of that right. (Because that would mean you had a right to the labour and property of others, i.e. a right to violate their rights). You have a right to free speech. You do not have the right to publish your opinions in any outlet of your choice (because that would violate the publishers' rights). Even if you lived in a small town with only one newspaper, and they wouldn't print your letters to the editor, it still wouldn't be right for you to compel them to print your letters by legal means. They built the audience, its their right to communicate with them as they see fit. (This isn't censorship, because you're still free to hand out flyers in the street, start your own newspaper, sue the existing newspaper if they commit libel, etc). Your argument is essentially that because Google is "the world's largest information system", we shouldn't be "letting" them put whatever content they want on their pages, for whatever reason they want. The implication is that if someone builds something really useful, that thing should become public property. (People are saying the same thing about Twitter). AdWords is absolutely moral because a privately-run service needs a source of funding. (I should note that I do think many PPC ad networks are exploitative and immoral, but that's not the case for Google). Unless someone sets up a nonprofit search engine run by donations, the only alternative is a public, state-funded search engine -- that's the only way to get an "information system not biased by money". On the unlikely possibility that the state could build and maintain such a system, it would be the most powerful tool for potential censorship imaginable.

butler14 11y ago

Mostly because the vast majority of adverts are showing against commercial/transactional search queries, not informational ones.

alanwatts 11y ago

"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly." -Marshall McLuhan

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

Information produced costs money. Groups that do not have equal funding can have far less information produced about them. This becomes a significant issue in social science where only certain questions get funding and related but opposite questions do not, resulting in a one sided view of information (especially since many people think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence).