5 ms·

Wouldn't it be simpler explanation that they just rank down everything with mail in the name?

by quickben 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago
Is that happening to FastMail?
- brongondwana 10y ago
  Nah, we come up number 2 for a search for "reliable email" when I'm logged in and number 5 when I'm logged out - which sounds bad, but the stuff about it is all questions about how reliable email delivery is. Fair enough. We don't even rate a mention for "professional email" because it's all about how to not come across like a n00b when writing emails. (interestingly, bing search for professional email has an ad for Google's email above the search results)
  - tptacek 10y ago
    FastMail, unlike ProtonMail, actually has traction. Why is Google supposedly penalizing ProtonMail, but not FastMail?
    - quickben 10y ago
      Eh, we are entering an area of speculation. The right answer is 'only google knows', but since you are asking twice this question, let me try to take a wild guess: - Google, an advertising company, benefits from having access to the plaintext of people's messages. They can advertise this as 'secure' but only for the comm channel. - Proton mail, advertises itself as: "ProtonMail is the world's largest secure email service, developed by CERN and MIT scientists. We are open source and protected by Swiss privacy law.", featuring end to end encryption, anonymous email, mobile clients etc. - Fastmail: "Secure, reliable email hosting for businesses, families and professionals. Premium email with no ads, excellent spam protection and rapid personal support." If I'm a product manager of GMail, I'd be more scared from Proton mail than FastMail. In fact, anything featuring end-to-end encryption will be approached with negativity, because then GMail can't target ads, which are the main cash cow for google.
      - puzzle 10y ago
        And a product manager for Gmail can affect ranking of a random website exactly how?
        tedunangst 10y ago
        They just pop over to the search fixer dashboard and drag protonmail into the penalty box. Two clicks, boom, boom.
      - twr 10y ago
        Protonmail is another crappy provider filling the void left by Lavabit. It doesn't have any additional security benefits beyond regular webmail providers that provide TLS: - Encryption is performed inside the browser. By delivering a modified JavaScript payload, it can steal encryption keys. - No support for POP, IMAP, or SMTP. If you want to use GPG, you can't. To see it being compared to Fastmail and Gmail, which don't engage in parlor tricks, is a travesty.
        matt4077 10y ago
        I can see all sorts of criticism leveled at ProtonMail, but this seems a bit disingenuous. They're trying something different than GPG, which had 20 years to prove itself and failed to gain any traction. Sure, you have to trust their software, but is that fundamentally different than trusting the GPG software, or did you do a full audit of that?
        twr 10y ago
        GPG, when used correctly, is theoretically secure. Protonmail, like Lavabit, is insecure by design. They make no mention of this; they claim the inability to read your messages, which is trivially false. GPG has a track record of being secure against many adversaries, including the NSA. It's used by most Linux distributions for package signing, so you probably already depend on it -- even if indirectly. I don't expect GPG to be completely secure. But it's not based on deception.
rtpg 10y ago
The even simpler explanation is that Google's Algo changed and that there's a lot of websites about encrypted email.
- jklinger410 10y ago
  This is the likely result. Google probably dampened the authority of many of the sites linking to ProtonMail, for one reason or another. This most likely brought Protons rank down without them doing anything wrong.
- quickben 10y ago
  As a person that's actually running a hobby search engine: It's simpler to apply a coefficient on a hostname string than process associated data; may it be during a fetch, a processing or a search phase.

Wouldn't it be simpler explanation that they just rank down everything with mail in the name?

tptacek 10y ago

Is that happening to FastMail?

brongondwana 10y ago
Nah, we come up number 2 for a search for "reliable email" when I'm logged in and number 5 when I'm logged out - which sounds bad, but the stuff about it is all questions about how reliable email delivery is. Fair enough. We don't even rate a mention for "professional email" because it's all about how to not come across like a n00b when writing emails. (interestingly, bing search for professional email has an ad for Google's email above the search results)
- tptacek 10y ago
  FastMail, unlike ProtonMail, actually has traction. Why is Google supposedly penalizing ProtonMail, but not FastMail?
  - quickben 10y ago
    Eh, we are entering an area of speculation. The right answer is 'only google knows', but since you are asking twice this question, let me try to take a wild guess: - Google, an advertising company, benefits from having access to the plaintext of people's messages. They can advertise this as 'secure' but only for the comm channel. - Proton mail, advertises itself as: "ProtonMail is the world's largest secure email service, developed by CERN and MIT scientists. We are open source and protected by Swiss privacy law.", featuring end to end encryption, anonymous email, mobile clients etc. - Fastmail: "Secure, reliable email hosting for businesses, families and professionals. Premium email with no ads, excellent spam protection and rapid personal support." If I'm a product manager of GMail, I'd be more scared from Proton mail than FastMail. In fact, anything featuring end-to-end encryption will be approached with negativity, because then GMail can't target ads, which are the main cash cow for google.
    - puzzle 10y ago
      And a product manager for Gmail can affect ranking of a random website exactly how?
      - tedunangst 10y ago
        They just pop over to the search fixer dashboard and drag protonmail into the penalty box. Two clicks, boom, boom.
    - twr 10y ago
      Protonmail is another crappy provider filling the void left by Lavabit. It doesn't have any additional security benefits beyond regular webmail providers that provide TLS: - Encryption is performed inside the browser. By delivering a modified JavaScript payload, it can steal encryption keys. - No support for POP, IMAP, or SMTP. If you want to use GPG, you can't. To see it being compared to Fastmail and Gmail, which don't engage in parlor tricks, is a travesty.
      - matt4077 10y ago
        I can see all sorts of criticism leveled at ProtonMail, but this seems a bit disingenuous. They're trying something different than GPG, which had 20 years to prove itself and failed to gain any traction. Sure, you have to trust their software, but is that fundamentally different than trusting the GPG software, or did you do a full audit of that?
        twr 10y ago
        GPG, when used correctly, is theoretically secure. Protonmail, like Lavabit, is insecure by design. They make no mention of this; they claim the inability to read your messages, which is trivially false. GPG has a track record of being secure against many adversaries, including the NSA. It's used by most Linux distributions for package signing, so you probably already depend on it -- even if indirectly. I don't expect GPG to be completely secure. But it's not based on deception.

rtpg 10y ago

The even simpler explanation is that Google's Algo changed and that there's a lot of websites about encrypted email.

jklinger410 10y ago
This is the likely result. Google probably dampened the authority of many of the sites linking to ProtonMail, for one reason or another. This most likely brought Protons rank down without them doing anything wrong.
quickben 10y ago
As a person that's actually running a hobby search engine: It's simpler to apply a coefficient on a hostname string than process associated data; may it be during a fetch, a processing or a search phase.