8 ms·

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".

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.
- nickff 11y ago
  Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square. Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views. In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing people's minds, as it rarely does that.[1] Advertisements and the like usually serve to give voice to the views people already hold, and inform them of things they were not aware of. An advertisement will never convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
  - chc 11y ago
    Try to sell a bad product? It's done all the time. Heck, a tube of wax called "HeadOn" managed to sell pretty well with an ad campaign that stopped just short of claiming it helped headaches.
    - nickff 11y ago
      The fact that one product which seems to be a placebo may have made some money does not disprove my point; I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product, just that it is vanishingly unlikely. If you think that selling diluted ingredients in wax is an easy way to make money, please go ahead and try your hand at it. My position is that advertising a bad product is a very bad bet; the fact that someone has won the lottery does not mean that anyone should play it.
      - devishard 11y ago
        Are you kidding me? Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule. They're leaders in their industries.
- danso 11y ago
  > Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. How is this not implicitly the case with "only organic" search results? PageRank was built off of the idea that a website's value was based off of inbound links. Back in the day, high school kids could get $50/hour (in 1990s dollars) to build and upload a simple webpage for a local business. Money has always been a factor in influence, before and after search engines. > It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking Again, this purity is an illusion -- the things that can be objectively ranked are things in which the metric is simple, i.e. alphabetical order. Stray from that and rankings are no longer "pure" by any stretch of the imagination. Not even early PageRank -- the many easy ways to game it, and the many ways that PageRank has evolved to avoid such gaming, should make that assertion self-evident.
- dilemma 11y ago
  PageRank isn't transparent and objective, it is opaque and arbitrary.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    PageRank is of ... anthropically/existentially significant importance to the continuation of Google as a going concern. You can't trust people to be transparent about things that are anthropically significant and that they realize are anthropically significant. Now throw in that it's legally protected as proprietary... It's just one of those things... The fact that Stallman cannot or will not accept this troubles me. I view this as a mechanism for choosing continued disappointment on his part. But it does serve as part of a dialogue.
- tbabb 11y ago
  I don't think sponsored results are a big deal, as long as it's transparent, and "pure" results are easily accessible too (and they are). We live in a society where advertising exists. I'm not saying I like advertising, but it is a basic skill to be able to differentiate advertising from content. If some people can't tell the difference, I don't think that's a very strong argument for saying the practice should be banned. Having some cruft around my search results is a small price to pay for a free service that basically powers modern society.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  At the risk of sounding flip: Install adblock. If this "purity" is really that important to you, you're about 3 clicks away from banishing the paid advertising and only having organic results show.
  - tunap 11y ago
    I use AB+ AND NoScript(Google-free whitelist) and my results aren't even organic-ish. I searched for cabling a few weeks back & monoprice.com's first result was on page 12. First 3 or 4 pages were almost exclusively amazon & ebay. That's google's algo, sans adsense.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      And those are organic results, not paid ones. The algo has learned that when people search for a product, having results from the most common places up front is more relevant. Monoprice's google juice just isn't as good.
- seivan 11y ago
  Then you can keep claiming your results are non-biased long after it stop being organic as these things tend to do with fresh people and their friends with same mindset. I've come to dismiss everything that claims to be neutral. DailyMail, Guardian, the sheets of toilet paper, all used for the same purpose.
pessimizer 11y ago
The library doesn't make money through directing you to particular books or sell publishers your reading habits.
- aapierce 11y ago
  That's because the library is funded by taxpayers – it doesn't need the money. How would you feel about a government-sponsored search engine? I think China has one of those.
  - clock_tower 11y ago
    Quite frankly, it might not be the worst solution. Britain has a government-sponsored TV station which is generally pretty well-regarded, for example...
    - nickff 11y ago
      So we'll all be happy to do our searches through NSA.gov? Or would you prefer the alternative, google.nsa.gov? We can even make searches like FOIA requests, where if you search something they don't like, they redact the results you wanted, and if you don't phrase the search correctly, they just give you nothing.
    - yarou 11y ago
      Government-sponsored is totally different than government-led. China has the latter in terms of their search engine.
      - clock_tower 11y ago
        Indeed -- but the grandparent talked about "government-sponsored."
    - leereeves 11y ago
      The BBC is sponsored by a licence fee collected from British people, whether they want to pay for the BBC or not. Similarly, if the government pays for a search engine, they'll be paying with taxes taken from us anyway.
coldtea 11y ago
>The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. That's not what he asked though. Generally libraries don't have special "sponsored" books, and don't control and push certain books to people more than others. Those libraries that do, fall into 2 categories: 1) Promoting widely recognized cultural works (e.g. with events like "Mark Twain Year", etc). 2) Promoting some ideological agenda (e.g. a creationist library in a religious school). The latter are dangerous. Google, besides the opportunities for pushing its own corporate/political agenda, has also financial motives for pushing ads/brands. Besides there's another key difference: there are thousands upon thousands of libraries (and people don't care much about them anyway). There's only one Google (and the majority of web users use it everyday). >That doesn't make it wrong. I wonder what some people DO find wrong. Apart from things like cannibalism and hurting kittens, which we all probably agree on.
- pcmaffey 11y ago
  You're missing the point that organic results are also hugely influenced by financial motive. The underlying concept is that all information is biased. A system that incorporates bias is vastly more useful than one that ignores it.
  - md224 11y ago
    > The underlying concept is that all information is biased. Right, but why add more bias if we don't have to? Organic results are influenced by the content of the pages as well as their relationship to other pages. Sure, people spend thousands of dollars on SEO to make their page more attractive to Google, but at least they're trying to fit Google's idea of what makes a useful web page. With AdWords, money is directly influencing rank. Why is it good for Google to incorporate more financial bias than it has to?
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  "Wrong" is at best ordinal. Not absolute. We make up our own lines we won't cross and then complain because others disagree.

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.
nickff 11y ago
Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square. Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views. In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing people's minds, as it rarely does that.[1] Advertisements and the like usually serve to give voice to the views people already hold, and inform them of things they were not aware of. An advertisement will never convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
- chc 11y ago
  Try to sell a bad product? It's done all the time. Heck, a tube of wax called "HeadOn" managed to sell pretty well with an ad campaign that stopped just short of claiming it helped headaches.
  - nickff 11y ago
    The fact that one product which seems to be a placebo may have made some money does not disprove my point; I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product, just that it is vanishingly unlikely. If you think that selling diluted ingredients in wax is an easy way to make money, please go ahead and try your hand at it. My position is that advertising a bad product is a very bad bet; the fact that someone has won the lottery does not mean that anyone should play it.
    - devishard 11y ago
      Are you kidding me? Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule. They're leaders in their industries.
danso 11y ago
> Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. How is this not implicitly the case with "only organic" search results? PageRank was built off of the idea that a website's value was based off of inbound links. Back in the day, high school kids could get $50/hour (in 1990s dollars) to build and upload a simple webpage for a local business. Money has always been a factor in influence, before and after search engines. > It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking Again, this purity is an illusion -- the things that can be objectively ranked are things in which the metric is simple, i.e. alphabetical order. Stray from that and rankings are no longer "pure" by any stretch of the imagination. Not even early PageRank -- the many easy ways to game it, and the many ways that PageRank has evolved to avoid such gaming, should make that assertion self-evident.
dilemma 11y ago
PageRank isn't transparent and objective, it is opaque and arbitrary.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  PageRank is of ... anthropically/existentially significant importance to the continuation of Google as a going concern. You can't trust people to be transparent about things that are anthropically significant and that they realize are anthropically significant. Now throw in that it's legally protected as proprietary... It's just one of those things... The fact that Stallman cannot or will not accept this troubles me. I view this as a mechanism for choosing continued disappointment on his part. But it does serve as part of a dialogue.
tbabb 11y ago
I don't think sponsored results are a big deal, as long as it's transparent, and "pure" results are easily accessible too (and they are). We live in a society where advertising exists. I'm not saying I like advertising, but it is a basic skill to be able to differentiate advertising from content. If some people can't tell the difference, I don't think that's a very strong argument for saying the practice should be banned. Having some cruft around my search results is a small price to pay for a free service that basically powers modern society.
Karunamon 11y ago
At the risk of sounding flip: Install adblock. If this "purity" is really that important to you, you're about 3 clicks away from banishing the paid advertising and only having organic results show.
- tunap 11y ago
  I use AB+ AND NoScript(Google-free whitelist) and my results aren't even organic-ish. I searched for cabling a few weeks back & monoprice.com's first result was on page 12. First 3 or 4 pages were almost exclusively amazon & ebay. That's google's algo, sans adsense.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    And those are organic results, not paid ones. The algo has learned that when people search for a product, having results from the most common places up front is more relevant. Monoprice's google juice just isn't as good.
seivan 11y ago
Then you can keep claiming your results are non-biased long after it stop being organic as these things tend to do with fresh people and their friends with same mindset. I've come to dismiss everything that claims to be neutral. DailyMail, Guardian, the sheets of toilet paper, all used for the same purpose.

pessimizer 11y ago

The library doesn't make money through directing you to particular books or sell publishers your reading habits.

aapierce 11y ago
That's because the library is funded by taxpayers – it doesn't need the money. How would you feel about a government-sponsored search engine? I think China has one of those.
- clock_tower 11y ago
  Quite frankly, it might not be the worst solution. Britain has a government-sponsored TV station which is generally pretty well-regarded, for example...
  - nickff 11y ago
    So we'll all be happy to do our searches through NSA.gov? Or would you prefer the alternative, google.nsa.gov? We can even make searches like FOIA requests, where if you search something they don't like, they redact the results you wanted, and if you don't phrase the search correctly, they just give you nothing.
  - yarou 11y ago
    Government-sponsored is totally different than government-led. China has the latter in terms of their search engine.
    - clock_tower 11y ago
      Indeed -- but the grandparent talked about "government-sponsored."
  - leereeves 11y ago
    The BBC is sponsored by a licence fee collected from British people, whether they want to pay for the BBC or not. Similarly, if the government pays for a search engine, they'll be paying with taxes taken from us anyway.

coldtea 11y ago

>The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. That's not what he asked though. Generally libraries don't have special "sponsored" books, and don't control and push certain books to people more than others. Those libraries that do, fall into 2 categories: 1) Promoting widely recognized cultural works (e.g. with events like "Mark Twain Year", etc). 2) Promoting some ideological agenda (e.g. a creationist library in a religious school). The latter are dangerous. Google, besides the opportunities for pushing its own corporate/political agenda, has also financial motives for pushing ads/brands. Besides there's another key difference: there are thousands upon thousands of libraries (and people don't care much about them anyway). There's only one Google (and the majority of web users use it everyday). >That doesn't make it wrong. I wonder what some people DO find wrong. Apart from things like cannibalism and hurting kittens, which we all probably agree on.

pcmaffey 11y ago
You're missing the point that organic results are also hugely influenced by financial motive. The underlying concept is that all information is biased. A system that incorporates bias is vastly more useful than one that ignores it.
- md224 11y ago
  > The underlying concept is that all information is biased. Right, but why add more bias if we don't have to? Organic results are influenced by the content of the pages as well as their relationship to other pages. Sure, people spend thousands of dollars on SEO to make their page more attractive to Google, but at least they're trying to fit Google's idea of what makes a useful web page. With AdWords, money is directly influencing rank. Why is it good for Google to incorporate more financial bias than it has to?
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
"Wrong" is at best ordinal. Not absolute. We make up our own lines we won't cross and then complain because others disagree.