14 ms·

Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like

605 points by IBM 9y ago

ryandvm 9y ago
Boy, "Do no evil" has really gone out the window hasn't it?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Jach 9y ago
  That was never the slogan. If it was, maybe the good times would have lasted longer, but as it was "don't be evil", a lot of evil actions can be self-justified as long as you still think of yourself as being good.
  - rifung 9y ago
    What do you mean it was never the slogan? It's in the Code of Conduct still: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
    - Jach 9y ago
      Parent used the phrase "do no evil" which it never was but sometimes gets misinterpreted as. As you show, the actual phrase is "don't be evil." The two phrases mean quite different things.
      - logfromblammo 9y ago
        Some of us may have the opinion that you are what you do, and not what you believe. If Google does evil, it is evil. So if the slogan is "don't be evil", then "do no evil" is a natural, logical consequence of that. I don't care what your personal religion says, I don't think you can be a good person if you do bad things, and I don't think you can say your organization is not evil when it can crush individuals and small businesses, such that they have no realistic recourse or means of redress. Google is using its temporary position of power as strength to be wielded against the weak. While it is debatable whether that qualifies as "evil", it is certainly predatory behavior. Google's size would make it a top predator, and anyone smaller should be extremely wary. When swimming with an orca, one never knows if it will play with you, or whether it will drag you under until you drown. But since we are looking as deeds rather than words, it doesn't really matter what Google's motto is or was. All that can tell us is how hypocritical they are. Just look at what Google does, and ask yourself whether you would feel comfortable actively supporting that activity. If the answer is "no", then you probably shouldn't be passively supporting it, either. I have already switched my primary search to DuckDuckGo. HN will never be my only aggregator, because I know it censors certain topics. I never took Slashdot off my launch page, even after Dice took over. You really have to spread your sources out, and not give any one person or organization enough editorial power to sway you by controlling the information you see, and that includes yourself. Get someone else to recommend a news site to you, and force yourself to use it sometimes. The only way to counter centralization on the network is intentional decentralization. What Google is doing is the equivalent of a 51% mining pool attack on Bitcoin. And the solution is the same. If you are part of the pool, leave it. If you are dependent on Google, diversify as quickly as you are able. If you are not dependent, you might want to just suspend using any Google-branded service for a while.
      - rifung 9y ago
        I appreciate the explanation and should learn to read
empressplay 9y ago
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15142853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15142853
- IBM 9y ago
  It's not a dupe of that story, the author is describing her own case. I didn't have enough characters to include the entire title. She does summarize the think tank story in the first three paragraphs, but her own reporting comes after that.
- andrewl 9y ago
  It's definitely related, but it's not a duplicate. This article is written by Kashmir Hill, describing how a story she wrote in Forbes six years ago that was unfavorable to Google was suppressed. The article you linked to is by Barry Lynn writing in the Washington Post about how he was forced out of the New America think tank in June of this year for writing in support of the European Union fining Google for antitrust violations.
brad0 9y ago
Wasn't gizmodo the same site that published the modified Google Manifesto? I'm glad that gizmodo is covering free speech (I believe they're left leaning in general). Just make sure to verify all the claims made in any politically biased publication.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  Yeap - they removed all the citations and several graphs that supported what he was saying. If you didn't know that, you would read it thinking this was completely his own opinion.
  - fenomas 9y ago
    I seem to recall the story being that they published a version of the memo that they received without citations or graphs. Do you have a source that they had the full memo and edited it?
    - Cursuviam 9y ago
      From the Gizmodo article > The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.
      - fenomas 9y ago
        Sure, and that can be read to mean either that they knew graphs and links were missing (e.g. because they received the memo as plaintext) or that they purposely removed them out of political or whatever motives. Isn't the former the more parsimonious assumption? Now that I check back, I notice that the gizmodo version also changed all of Damore's bullet-point list items to be singly-indented, where in the original many of them were doubly-indented. It's hard to imagine any motive for doing that intentionally, but it's what one would expect if Gizmodo got the text without its original formatting.
        9y ago
leoc 9y ago
If true, this also makes Forbes look rather bad, yes?
- IBM 9y ago
  She says it was her own decision to pull the story down. But yes, clearly they were leaning on her. https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/903405823769980928 https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/903405823769980928
mozumder 9y ago
The bigger issue is that people have this mistaken impression that think-tanks are independent academic institutions. They're not. They're private organizations that corporations go to and pay them to write a research paper that aligns with their corporate interests. That's what think-tanks are. That's their business model. They're not academia. Google is this think-tank's customer. And when it fired the guy, the think-tank is basically making themselves more customer-friendly. Calling them "evil" is like calling a customer "evil".
- elihu 9y ago
  The linked article is about a reporter for Forbes who was pressured to take down an article about Google. Forbes isn't a think tank and doesn't work for Google.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Didn't read the article before commenting. ;) When I saw the title, I assumed it was another article on the Open Markets thing too. But the article is a totally different story.
joefkelley 9y ago
So this all hinges on a deleted story being removed from search results too quickly? Google crawls some sites (especially high-traffic news sites like Forbes) more frequently than others. And why should a deleted article still show up in search results? It's entirely plausible to me that there was no manual intervention. Perhaps it's questionable that Google wanted the article taken down in the first place. It's hard to know the legitimacy of that request without knowing the specifics of any NDAs applicable to the meeting. But at the least, the article would damage the relationship between those two groups at those two companies.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  > It's entirely plausible to me that there was no manual intervention. No manual intervention doesn't mean that the algorithm was not planned to work in a criminal way.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Right. It is well established that turning over decision making to an algo that you wrote doesn't absolve you of responsibility for those decisions.
    - owebmaster 9y ago
      I don't know if I'm being downvoted by the ones who think like you or the ones who agree with OP.
      - gaius 9y ago
        I didn't downvote you, unless I fatfingered it on my phone!
- Natsu 9y ago
  I wouldn't say that. It seems to revolve around being pushed into pulling a story about something Google was doing. The fact that it vanished from cache is just an anomaly they noticed. I don't see the wrongness of this as revolving around whether or not their actions were technically legal or not, though.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
If this account is even remotely accurate, this goes well beyond "quashing ideas it doesn't like" and into chilling effects on reporting public-interest information. The New America affair was ostensibly about Lynn's opinion of an event that was already public knowledge (and, by extension, the opinionated policy stance of the organization). In this case Google was seemingly trying to keep questionable marketing tactics out of the public eye altogether.
- IBM 9y ago
  It's not questionable marketing tactics they were trying to keep out of the public eye, it was the suggestion that they're abusing their dominance in search to enter a new market (in this case social networks).
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    Aren't (or weren't) Facebook share buttons also likely figured into Google's ranking algorithm? Not an SEO guy but think I remember reading something on that. So why would giving points for including links to their own social network (that ultimately didn't go anywhere) be unsavory if it's treated essentially the same as others? My guess is this more the tone of what was implied rather than "If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer." (Although substantially the outcome may be the same).
- vacri 9y ago
  s/chilling/humdrum/ Go to google, get google's view on things. Go to facebook, get facebook's view on things. Go to X, get X's view on things. Powerful companies using their influence on the media is business-as-usual. Regardless of the moral position in this incident, journalism has always been under such pressures - it's not being 'chilled'.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Not at all. Or at least, there has long been an expectation that owners won't bias news reporting. They can legitimately express their views through editorials, of course. The Wall Street Journal remains an excellent example of this.
caseysoftware 9y ago
Controlling the information that we're exposed to is incredibly powerful. If you tweak the results - positively or negatively - it's easy to nudge, influence, and eventually convince people of what you want. As I've cited often: > "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated." Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
- doctorless 9y ago
  It's interesting. I conducted an experiment on various forms of social media using a form of advanced chatbots of my own creation and found similar results. I'm not surprised to see others found the same results by different means. It's all in the ability to put people into echo chambers. Worse, the effect is reinforcing. Once you've stopped the influence, the group dynamics stay in tact, and help reinforce the effects.
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  One example of Google trying to manipulate the last US elections: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/13/hillary-google-bias-confirmed-experiment/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/13/hillary-google-bias...
  - IMTDb 9y ago
    Yeah breitbart is probably the most neutral source on this issue.
    - kiproping 9y ago
      Are there any truly non-biased news sources left anymore?
at-fates-hands 9y ago
the manipulation of political data is really obvious if you're looking for it. I see this time again when I'm searching for politically hot topics like Charlottesville, both of the riots in Berkely, BLM protests, ANTIFA activities, etc. I started doing multiple searches when I googled, "ANTIFA is a hate group". On the first page of Google were several articles and blog posts titles, "Why ANTIFA is NOT a hate group." Doing the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo returned a combination of articles, with several at the top talking about why ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group and a few other blog posts about why it shouldn't. The interesting part was all the pro-ANTIFA blost posts on other search engines weren't in the top ten results on Google. There were very specific authors in the top results in Google that didn't show up in other SE's. It was obvious to me the Google results were being manipulated to push a different narrative on the notion ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group. It was a real eye opener that I've been able to repeat with some success for other political topics when I'm searching. Bottom line is that I can't trust them anymore; for either political or non-political searches. It makes me wonder what else they're manipulating to push a certain narrative that if I don't actively compare with other SE's, I won't know is happening.
- ams6110 9y ago
  I haven't used Google for search in quite a while. I use DDG as my default. When google first came out it was great, but now it just seems to be all about their ads and their point of view.
- timlod 9y ago
  When I read this (and many other people commenting about how they find certain search results biased) I always wonder how much search personalisation is at play. Google records everything you do that can be connected with their services and creates your profile based on that. Now, if you receive seemingly biased search results, are those Google's 'raw' results or results that Google thinks you'd prefer based on your profile?
  - at-fates-hands 9y ago
    I was thinking about this after I made the comment and should've clarified whether I was logged in or not, since you're right, you will get different results if you're logged in or not. For the record, I wasn't logged into my gmail account when I made the searches.
iamleppert 9y ago
Years ago, I worked at a startup that put business listings online. We were trying to create a community, similar to Yelp, but for small businesses. We actually had quite a nice thing going, and were indexed well in Google and other search engines. The community was growing and becoming vibrant. Then, Google Places came out. Not only did they put their places listings at the top of all organic search results, they removed all traces of our site from their index. We couldn't even find our homepage by searching for it! Not even our company name --- it would literally come up no results, even news articles and content not hosted on our site was removed from the index if it had our name in it. What really put salt in the wound, though, was the fact that it appeared Google had stolen our user data for their own places product. That's right, they actually took our information that we had painstakingly collected, cleaned, and verified (we had our own call center and would take updates from customers) and passed it off as their own. How did I know this? Well, I had a few test accounts that were of completely fake businesses that accidentally made it to prod. They had funny names that would be impossible to exist in the real world. These businesses showed up in Google Places. I checked a few other listings that I knew had been updated by customers, one with a typo, and sure enough they were in places too. Before this we had a good relationship with our Google rep because we used adwords on our site, and Google Analytics. Literally, over night they just stopped responding to us by e-mail and phone. We were cut off, and e-mails and requests to the company went to some robot customer service queue and were closed without being able to speak to anyone. Our search referrer traffic was reduced to almost nothing, our Adsense account was closed, and the business eventually had to close. We considered trying to fight it legally, but after meeting with a lawyer and realizing the reality of the situation I left feeling completely defeated and jaded. How many of these stories are out there? How many people have been silenced by Google, and won't or don't talk about it? You only hear about big time scandals in the news, but I can guarantee there's a huge long tail of destruction in their monopolistic wake. The sad part is I'm forced to use Google products because they are just so big there aren't good alternatives. They are so far ahead. But whenever I do see some Google ad, or post by Larry or Eric about how they are doing god's work over there, curing cancer, working on self driving cars, guarding the world's information or resisting authoritarian, communist governments, I ask myself: are they really that different? Who are they kidding? Maybe they are just so out of touch with the realities of what really made their company successful they can afford to live in such a fantasy land... Is Google evil? Yes, indeed.
dennisgorelik 9y ago
I like this story, because the author (Kashmir Hill) seems to be a pragmatic (or even cynical) journalist: she did not fight against the interests of her employer (Forbes) and saved her story until the moment when it is safe and effective to use.
mirimir 9y ago
Well, the top result for this search ... https://www.google.com/search?q=Stick+Google+Plus+Buttons+On+Your+Pages%2C+Or+Your+Search+Traffic+Suffers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Stick+Google+Plus+Buttons+On... ... is just now this 2011 article ... https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-will-be-universal-ranking-signal-then-pulls-the-article/ https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-... ... so Google hasn't done a very effective job of quashing.
caconym_ 9y ago
> Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me > I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance Okay
lern_too_spel 9y ago
It looks like Google is taking cues from Apple for how to treat the press. I hope this does not become the new normal: threatening to retaliate against the press is one thing that nobody should copy from Apple.
- chmaynard 9y ago
  I'm generally skeptical of unsubstantiated Apple-bashing. Tell us a little more about your bold claim. Do you have any evidence that Apple has threatened anyone in the press with retaliation?
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    There's nothing bold about the claim. Apple is well known for retaliating against the press, and all reviews of Apple products should be taken with the appropriate heaping of salt. http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-prs-dirty-little-secret/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-prs-dirty-little-secret/ https://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blacklist-manipulates-the-press/ https://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blacklist-manipu...
jaypaulynice 9y ago
Strangely, I submitted a project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106959) I'm working on here on Show HN and few hours after the show hn link was the second result in Google search when I search "RESTfender", but a day later I can't find it again...it's a project on IoT and Google's IoT platform is in beta... I doubt my little project is a threat to Google, but this seems strange?
- danso 9y ago
  I just did a Google search for "restfender". The Show HN link is the 4th highest. The top 3 links go to the actual app you linked to and the LinkedIn page you created for it. You'd prefer Google return results to a forum post rather than the actual site named?
  - jaypaulynice 9y ago
    Interesting...My 4th result is twitter. I'm wondering now why it's so different...first link is LinkedIn
    - propogandist 9y ago
      Google customizes search results to what you want to see, at your IP level, even if you aren't logged in, from what I've observed. You'll need to mask all your traditional online traits that Google is mining and you're search results will/should change
      - wavefunction 9y ago
        >>Google customizes search results to what you want to see That doesn't appear to be the case with OP's original complaint about not seeing their own company in their searches.
  - jaypaulynice 9y ago
    After this complaint, it's now back as the 5th result. Google definitely messes around with the search results or I don't know how to explain this. External links are validation for a fledging idea/startup. If someone searched "restfender" they would be more likely to learn more if they see a discussion that may or may not help them...
unityByFreedom 9y ago
If these articles were truly concerned about tech monopolies, they would mention ISP's broadband monopolies and net neutrality. Curiously, they never do. Platforms come and go. Google couldn't even get a decent social network off the ground and has had too many failed projects to count. Monopolies built on infrastructure, like ISPs, are the ones that stick around without intervention. I suspect all this news about Google and Facebook being the big bad wolves are meant to distract from net neutrality and ISP monopolies.
- azakai 9y ago
  > If these articles were truly concerned about tech monopolies, they would mention ISP's broadband monopolies and net neutrality. Curiously, they never do. I've seen plenty of articles talk about ISP monopolies and net neutrality. In fact several of the articles around these recent events have tied things to net neutrality as well.
  - unityByFreedom 9y ago
    Where? Can you cite one that argues Google is a monopoly and also argues against ISP broadband monopolies? All the ones I see are slanted, for example [1], > "In their net neutrality fairy tale, internet service providers (ISPs) are the ‘big bad wolf,’ bent on creating paid ‘fast lanes’ and blocking the websites of entrepreneurs (who invariably work out of their garages). It sounds like a frightful tale, except that ISPs have never offered paid fast lanes or blocked small business owners’ web sites (run out of garages or otherwise). Meanwhile, the biggest baddest wolf the world has ever known — Google — swallowed the internet ecosystem whole and spit out its bones." [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2017/05/03/the-truth-about-net-neutrality-the-left-and-google/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2017/05/03/the-tru... Edit: Please explain your downvotes, thanks!
    - azakai 9y ago
      You asked for something more specific now than you asked for earlier. But here's an article that mentions Google is a monopoly and also mentions net neutrality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/30/16226616/barry-lynn-google-new-america https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/30/16226616/b... > New America eventually emerged as one of the most forceful voices in favor of “net neutrality” — a key progressive advocacy goal that also aligned with Google’s corporate objectives. It's not surprising it mentions net neutrality because New America was focused on it (as was Google). The article is also critical of telcoms, > And, indeed, for years it was common to hear telecom industry lobbyists complain that it was inappropriate for journalists to take New America’s policy expertise on these subjects at face value — arguing that the think tank was basically just a cut-out for Google. Telecom companies, too, have their own favorite think tanks. It's not rare to see think pieces that support net neutrality and/or oppose telcom dominance, so it's not surprising there are articles talking about Google's dominance that also mention those.
mudil 9y ago
Years ago when Matt Drudge used to have his radio show on Sundays (ah, the good old days!) he used to say that Google is fascism. He didn't mince his words, it was pretty much a constant topic for him. And that was 10 years ago. Since then, Google has grown, extended itself in all kinds of ways, including its Washington lobbying. People are always concerned about big pharma, or big agra, or big Monsanto, or big banks. What about Google, a multi national company that knows no limits? It follows you, it knows where you've been, it knows your sexual preferences, it knows what you eat, your hobbies, your contacts. Everything, just to show you an ad! It also decides on what speech is acceptable, what website is eligible to exist. Where is outrage? Where is the left fighting against the multinational behemoth, the big corporate brother?
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  "Big tech". You heard it here first folks.
pdkl95 9y ago
> Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. I strongly suspect I saw this happen in realtime in late 2013 and early 2014 when Snowden's documents were being disclosed every few weeks by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, etc. I was curious how the story was being reported on and interpreted by the traditional (non-technical) media. I wanted a general sense of how well the "slow drip" strategy was working, if the original disclosures were being reported on with a reasonable accuracy, or even if anybody even cared at all. For about 8-10-ish months I made a habit of spending a few minutes each morning skimming the results of basic searches for "nsa", "snowden", etc on Google's main search as a simple /search?q=$term request, and again with the "Past 24 hours" and "Past week" features. I would also check the same search terms on Google News. Most of the time it there were no surprises: e.g. The Post publishes an important document from Snowden's archive in a detailed article that attempts to explain the underlying tech to a general audience. The other large players in the traditional media quickly followup with articles that add a layer of indirection, cut out all the technical explanations that don't fit into a sound byte. It didn't take long for that process to devolve into lots of clickbait headlines for articles that generally lacked technical - or legal - details. My point here is that this process generally followed a fairly consistent process as the original disclosure diffused into clickbait. However, on two (perhaps three?) occasions, I noticed a story still early in that process. I know at least one of those involved Google specifically. While chasing pointers back to the original disclosure article and opening a new browser window for for the usual test searches, I noticed Firefox was becoming annoyingly slow and leaking memory like it always did. After restarting the browser and reloading the test searches... every trace of the story was gone. The articles themselves became 404s a few minutes/hours later. Unfortunately, I have no useful evidence. I was "just" informally skimming headlines to get a general sense of the reporting, so by the time I finally realized I should have been recording everything I had already missed the interesting stuff. It's hearsay, but I am very certain I saw articles suddenly vanish from Google search and Google news after restarting Firefox and pressing F5 on several tabs.
- wyck 9y ago
  This is an accurate example of today's internet news machine. Very few highly investigated sourced articles compared to the extremely high volume, low pay, click bait titles. The media is strangled by their diminished role and costs, most outlets have gone for the low hanging fruit for the clickbait generation. The good news is that strong brands are now dumping google Ads for more trustworthy sources, if Google's trust continues to erode they will eventually turn into a flea market for advertisement.
nippples 9y ago
I'm so glad we're handing out the responsibility to establishing what's true and what's moral to megacorporations. Absolutely nothing can go wrong this way, after all they told us that "they care" and they are "not evil".
Animats 9y ago
Here's the article Google suppressed.[1] [1] https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-will-be-universal-ranking-signal-then-pulls-the-article/ https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-...
cm2187 9y ago
I fail to see how a NDA could protect a company from the press reporting on abusing of a dominant position.
chinathrow 9y ago
Another data point that Google might be in need for heavy regulation.
jlebrech 9y ago
redefine evil, do no evil
profpandit 9y ago
The tile of this post seems like a non-sequiter. Why would a company not do that? If you trying to project your own ideas, a part of that process is killing competing ideas
Nano2rad 9y ago
"Nucleus os vxp" has very less results in google. There are more results in bing.
Shivetya 9y ago
Google is using threats of lose of adsense revenue to accomplish the same. the trouble with any control of speech on the internet is that that control can eventually be manipulated to serve the purpose of those who are not allowed to suppress speech; government
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
AKifer 9y ago
It all began like this for Uber, bad stories here and there. Do we already prepare the ousting of some of the top Google executives ?
- wavefunction 9y ago
  You're saying that all the scandals Uber has been involved in were the result of Google's manipulation of search results? What about the Uber scandals that predate Waymo's existence?
pmlnr 9y ago
And there are many sites out there using google for in-site search - the customised google search results, like https://www.notebookcheck.net/ https://www.notebookcheck.net/ does. I'm guessing it's possible to hide our own data from ourselves as well.
dispo001 9y ago
Early on we had real organic traffic. Reasons aside, people stopped making websites and (specially those who didn't) started to act hysterical when one dared to share a link to theirs. It was just better not to promote your website (and give up on it) Without organic traffic the right to be seen shifts to an increasingly small number of judges/players. It use to be that if you knew your topic and put a lot of effort into writing an article you could post it any place, even on your own website. Its audience would take notice of it then at the very least tell you they didn't like it. I'm not trying to complaint or express a desire to get back to the good old times. You could argue there was no money in freedom. Digital slavery was just more profitable and those who could/should have defended the freedom sold us out in stead. (made a handsome profit at that) It is a kind of "you don't know what you have until it is gone" type of situation. While I don't want to promote the 99% meme either, the thing is, if you exclude 99% from "collective" opinion making you will have the 1% doing it. Thats just how basic logic works. What kind of shape or form this takes is not very interesting imho. What is interesting is the growing opportunity it represents. You could say the proverbial Google has a million points of trustworthiness left. At some point they will find ways to sell it for a price that is right to them. When enough of these entities sell enough of their trust there will be room for new innovations.
mcbruiser3 9y ago
why do we have to use google? there are other search engines. I just started using bing only because I just started using Windows 10 for the first time and it comes preloaded with edge which defaults to bing. I've hardly noticed a difference. actually, in some ways I prefer the way it organizes images and video results. I think people just default to google because, well, I'm not sure.

605 points by IBM 9y ago

ryandvm 9y ago

Boy, "Do no evil" has really gone out the window hasn't it?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Jach 9y ago
That was never the slogan. If it was, maybe the good times would have lasted longer, but as it was "don't be evil", a lot of evil actions can be self-justified as long as you still think of yourself as being good.
- rifung 9y ago
  What do you mean it was never the slogan? It's in the Code of Conduct still: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
  - Jach 9y ago
    Parent used the phrase "do no evil" which it never was but sometimes gets misinterpreted as. As you show, the actual phrase is "don't be evil." The two phrases mean quite different things.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      Some of us may have the opinion that you are what you do, and not what you believe. If Google does evil, it is evil. So if the slogan is "don't be evil", then "do no evil" is a natural, logical consequence of that. I don't care what your personal religion says, I don't think you can be a good person if you do bad things, and I don't think you can say your organization is not evil when it can crush individuals and small businesses, such that they have no realistic recourse or means of redress. Google is using its temporary position of power as strength to be wielded against the weak. While it is debatable whether that qualifies as "evil", it is certainly predatory behavior. Google's size would make it a top predator, and anyone smaller should be extremely wary. When swimming with an orca, one never knows if it will play with you, or whether it will drag you under until you drown. But since we are looking as deeds rather than words, it doesn't really matter what Google's motto is or was. All that can tell us is how hypocritical they are. Just look at what Google does, and ask yourself whether you would feel comfortable actively supporting that activity. If the answer is "no", then you probably shouldn't be passively supporting it, either. I have already switched my primary search to DuckDuckGo. HN will never be my only aggregator, because I know it censors certain topics. I never took Slashdot off my launch page, even after Dice took over. You really have to spread your sources out, and not give any one person or organization enough editorial power to sway you by controlling the information you see, and that includes yourself. Get someone else to recommend a news site to you, and force yourself to use it sometimes. The only way to counter centralization on the network is intentional decentralization. What Google is doing is the equivalent of a 51% mining pool attack on Bitcoin. And the solution is the same. If you are part of the pool, leave it. If you are dependent on Google, diversify as quickly as you are able. If you are not dependent, you might want to just suspend using any Google-branded service for a while.
    - rifung 9y ago
      I appreciate the explanation and should learn to read

empressplay 9y ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15142853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15142853

IBM 9y ago
It's not a dupe of that story, the author is describing her own case. I didn't have enough characters to include the entire title. She does summarize the think tank story in the first three paragraphs, but her own reporting comes after that.
andrewl 9y ago
It's definitely related, but it's not a duplicate. This article is written by Kashmir Hill, describing how a story she wrote in Forbes six years ago that was unfavorable to Google was suppressed. The article you linked to is by Barry Lynn writing in the Washington Post about how he was forced out of the New America think tank in June of this year for writing in support of the European Union fining Google for antitrust violations.

brad0 9y ago

Wasn't gizmodo the same site that published the modified Google Manifesto? I'm glad that gizmodo is covering free speech (I believe they're left leaning in general). Just make sure to verify all the claims made in any politically biased publication.

at-fates-hands 9y ago
Yeap - they removed all the citations and several graphs that supported what he was saying. If you didn't know that, you would read it thinking this was completely his own opinion.
- fenomas 9y ago
  I seem to recall the story being that they published a version of the memo that they received without citations or graphs. Do you have a source that they had the full memo and edited it?
  - Cursuviam 9y ago
    From the Gizmodo article > The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.
    - fenomas 9y ago
      Sure, and that can be read to mean either that they knew graphs and links were missing (e.g. because they received the memo as plaintext) or that they purposely removed them out of political or whatever motives. Isn't the former the more parsimonious assumption? Now that I check back, I notice that the gizmodo version also changed all of Damore's bullet-point list items to be singly-indented, where in the original many of them were doubly-indented. It's hard to imagine any motive for doing that intentionally, but it's what one would expect if Gizmodo got the text without its original formatting.
      - 9y ago

leoc 9y ago

If true, this also makes Forbes look rather bad, yes?

IBM 9y ago
She says it was her own decision to pull the story down. But yes, clearly they were leaning on her. https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/903405823769980928 https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/903405823769980928

mozumder 9y ago

The bigger issue is that people have this mistaken impression that think-tanks are independent academic institutions. They're not. They're private organizations that corporations go to and pay them to write a research paper that aligns with their corporate interests. That's what think-tanks are. That's their business model. They're not academia. Google is this think-tank's customer. And when it fired the guy, the think-tank is basically making themselves more customer-friendly. Calling them "evil" is like calling a customer "evil".

elihu 9y ago
The linked article is about a reporter for Forbes who was pressured to take down an article about Google. Forbes isn't a think tank and doesn't work for Google.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Didn't read the article before commenting. ;) When I saw the title, I assumed it was another article on the Open Markets thing too. But the article is a totally different story.

joefkelley 9y ago

So this all hinges on a deleted story being removed from search results too quickly? Google crawls some sites (especially high-traffic news sites like Forbes) more frequently than others. And why should a deleted article still show up in search results? It's entirely plausible to me that there was no manual intervention. Perhaps it's questionable that Google wanted the article taken down in the first place. It's hard to know the legitimacy of that request without knowing the specifics of any NDAs applicable to the meeting. But at the least, the article would damage the relationship between those two groups at those two companies.

owebmaster 9y ago
> It's entirely plausible to me that there was no manual intervention. No manual intervention doesn't mean that the algorithm was not planned to work in a criminal way.
- gaius 9y ago
  Right. It is well established that turning over decision making to an algo that you wrote doesn't absolve you of responsibility for those decisions.
  - owebmaster 9y ago
    I don't know if I'm being downvoted by the ones who think like you or the ones who agree with OP.
    - gaius 9y ago
      I didn't downvote you, unless I fatfingered it on my phone!
Natsu 9y ago
I wouldn't say that. It seems to revolve around being pushed into pulling a story about something Google was doing. The fact that it vanished from cache is just an anomaly they noticed. I don't see the wrongness of this as revolving around whether or not their actions were technically legal or not, though.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

If this account is even remotely accurate, this goes well beyond "quashing ideas it doesn't like" and into chilling effects on reporting public-interest information. The New America affair was ostensibly about Lynn's opinion of an event that was already public knowledge (and, by extension, the opinionated policy stance of the organization). In this case Google was seemingly trying to keep questionable marketing tactics out of the public eye altogether.

IBM 9y ago
It's not questionable marketing tactics they were trying to keep out of the public eye, it was the suggestion that they're abusing their dominance in search to enter a new market (in this case social networks).
- mythrwy 9y ago
  Aren't (or weren't) Facebook share buttons also likely figured into Google's ranking algorithm? Not an SEO guy but think I remember reading something on that. So why would giving points for including links to their own social network (that ultimately didn't go anywhere) be unsavory if it's treated essentially the same as others? My guess is this more the tone of what was implied rather than "If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer." (Although substantially the outcome may be the same).
vacri 9y ago
s/chilling/humdrum/ Go to google, get google's view on things. Go to facebook, get facebook's view on things. Go to X, get X's view on things. Powerful companies using their influence on the media is business-as-usual. Regardless of the moral position in this incident, journalism has always been under such pressures - it's not being 'chilled'.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Not at all. Or at least, there has long been an expectation that owners won't bias news reporting. They can legitimately express their views through editorials, of course. The Wall Street Journal remains an excellent example of this.

caseysoftware 9y ago

Controlling the information that we're exposed to is incredibly powerful. If you tweak the results - positively or negatively - it's easy to nudge, influence, and eventually convince people of what you want. As I've cited often: > "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated." Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

doctorless 9y ago
It's interesting. I conducted an experiment on various forms of social media using a form of advanced chatbots of my own creation and found similar results. I'm not surprised to see others found the same results by different means. It's all in the ability to put people into echo chambers. Worse, the effect is reinforcing. Once you've stopped the influence, the group dynamics stay in tact, and help reinforce the effects.
anotherbrownguy 9y ago
One example of Google trying to manipulate the last US elections: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/13/hillary-google-bias-confirmed-experiment/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/13/hillary-google-bias...
- IMTDb 9y ago
  Yeah breitbart is probably the most neutral source on this issue.
  - kiproping 9y ago
    Are there any truly non-biased news sources left anymore?

at-fates-hands 9y ago

the manipulation of political data is really obvious if you're looking for it. I see this time again when I'm searching for politically hot topics like Charlottesville, both of the riots in Berkely, BLM protests, ANTIFA activities, etc. I started doing multiple searches when I googled, "ANTIFA is a hate group". On the first page of Google were several articles and blog posts titles, "Why ANTIFA is NOT a hate group." Doing the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo returned a combination of articles, with several at the top talking about why ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group and a few other blog posts about why it shouldn't. The interesting part was all the pro-ANTIFA blost posts on other search engines weren't in the top ten results on Google. There were very specific authors in the top results in Google that didn't show up in other SE's. It was obvious to me the Google results were being manipulated to push a different narrative on the notion ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group. It was a real eye opener that I've been able to repeat with some success for other political topics when I'm searching. Bottom line is that I can't trust them anymore; for either political or non-political searches. It makes me wonder what else they're manipulating to push a certain narrative that if I don't actively compare with other SE's, I won't know is happening.

ams6110 9y ago
I haven't used Google for search in quite a while. I use DDG as my default. When google first came out it was great, but now it just seems to be all about their ads and their point of view.
timlod 9y ago
When I read this (and many other people commenting about how they find certain search results biased) I always wonder how much search personalisation is at play. Google records everything you do that can be connected with their services and creates your profile based on that. Now, if you receive seemingly biased search results, are those Google's 'raw' results or results that Google thinks you'd prefer based on your profile?
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  I was thinking about this after I made the comment and should've clarified whether I was logged in or not, since you're right, you will get different results if you're logged in or not. For the record, I wasn't logged into my gmail account when I made the searches.

iamleppert 9y ago

Years ago, I worked at a startup that put business listings online. We were trying to create a community, similar to Yelp, but for small businesses. We actually had quite a nice thing going, and were indexed well in Google and other search engines. The community was growing and becoming vibrant. Then, Google Places came out. Not only did they put their places listings at the top of all organic search results, they removed all traces of our site from their index. We couldn't even find our homepage by searching for it! Not even our company name --- it would literally come up no results, even news articles and content not hosted on our site was removed from the index if it had our name in it. What really put salt in the wound, though, was the fact that it appeared Google had stolen our user data for their own places product. That's right, they actually took our information that we had painstakingly collected, cleaned, and verified (we had our own call center and would take updates from customers) and passed it off as their own. How did I know this? Well, I had a few test accounts that were of completely fake businesses that accidentally made it to prod. They had funny names that would be impossible to exist in the real world. These businesses showed up in Google Places. I checked a few other listings that I knew had been updated by customers, one with a typo, and sure enough they were in places too. Before this we had a good relationship with our Google rep because we used adwords on our site, and Google Analytics. Literally, over night they just stopped responding to us by e-mail and phone. We were cut off, and e-mails and requests to the company went to some robot customer service queue and were closed without being able to speak to anyone. Our search referrer traffic was reduced to almost nothing, our Adsense account was closed, and the business eventually had to close. We considered trying to fight it legally, but after meeting with a lawyer and realizing the reality of the situation I left feeling completely defeated and jaded. How many of these stories are out there? How many people have been silenced by Google, and won't or don't talk about it? You only hear about big time scandals in the news, but I can guarantee there's a huge long tail of destruction in their monopolistic wake. The sad part is I'm forced to use Google products because they are just so big there aren't good alternatives. They are so far ahead. But whenever I do see some Google ad, or post by Larry or Eric about how they are doing god's work over there, curing cancer, working on self driving cars, guarding the world's information or resisting authoritarian, communist governments, I ask myself: are they really that different? Who are they kidding? Maybe they are just so out of touch with the realities of what really made their company successful they can afford to live in such a fantasy land... Is Google evil? Yes, indeed.

dennisgorelik 9y ago

I like this story, because the author (Kashmir Hill) seems to be a pragmatic (or even cynical) journalist: she did not fight against the interests of her employer (Forbes) and saved her story until the moment when it is safe and effective to use.

mirimir 9y ago

Well, the top result for this search ... https://www.google.com/search?q=Stick+Google+Plus+Buttons+On+Your+Pages%2C+Or+Your+Search+Traffic+Suffers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=Stick+Google+Plus+Buttons+On... ... is just now this 2011 article ... https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-will-be-universal-ranking-signal-then-pulls-the-article/ https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-... ... so Google hasn't done a very effective job of quashing.

caconym_ 9y ago

> Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me > I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance Okay

lern_too_spel 9y ago

It looks like Google is taking cues from Apple for how to treat the press. I hope this does not become the new normal: threatening to retaliate against the press is one thing that nobody should copy from Apple.

chmaynard 9y ago
I'm generally skeptical of unsubstantiated Apple-bashing. Tell us a little more about your bold claim. Do you have any evidence that Apple has threatened anyone in the press with retaliation?
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  There's nothing bold about the claim. Apple is well known for retaliating against the press, and all reviews of Apple products should be taken with the appropriate heaping of salt. http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-prs-dirty-little-secret/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-prs-dirty-little-secret/ https://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blacklist-manipulates-the-press/ https://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blacklist-manipu...

jaypaulynice 9y ago

Strangely, I submitted a project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15106959) I'm working on here on Show HN and few hours after the show hn link was the second result in Google search when I search "RESTfender", but a day later I can't find it again...it's a project on IoT and Google's IoT platform is in beta... I doubt my little project is a threat to Google, but this seems strange?

danso 9y ago
I just did a Google search for "restfender". The Show HN link is the 4th highest. The top 3 links go to the actual app you linked to and the LinkedIn page you created for it. You'd prefer Google return results to a forum post rather than the actual site named?
- jaypaulynice 9y ago
  Interesting...My 4th result is twitter. I'm wondering now why it's so different...first link is LinkedIn
  - propogandist 9y ago
    Google customizes search results to what you want to see, at your IP level, even if you aren't logged in, from what I've observed. You'll need to mask all your traditional online traits that Google is mining and you're search results will/should change
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      >>Google customizes search results to what you want to see That doesn't appear to be the case with OP's original complaint about not seeing their own company in their searches.
- jaypaulynice 9y ago
  After this complaint, it's now back as the 5th result. Google definitely messes around with the search results or I don't know how to explain this. External links are validation for a fledging idea/startup. If someone searched "restfender" they would be more likely to learn more if they see a discussion that may or may not help them...

unityByFreedom 9y ago

If these articles were truly concerned about tech monopolies, they would mention ISP's broadband monopolies and net neutrality. Curiously, they never do. Platforms come and go. Google couldn't even get a decent social network off the ground and has had too many failed projects to count. Monopolies built on infrastructure, like ISPs, are the ones that stick around without intervention. I suspect all this news about Google and Facebook being the big bad wolves are meant to distract from net neutrality and ISP monopolies.

azakai 9y ago
> If these articles were truly concerned about tech monopolies, they would mention ISP's broadband monopolies and net neutrality. Curiously, they never do. I've seen plenty of articles talk about ISP monopolies and net neutrality. In fact several of the articles around these recent events have tied things to net neutrality as well.
- unityByFreedom 9y ago
  Where? Can you cite one that argues Google is a monopoly and also argues against ISP broadband monopolies? All the ones I see are slanted, for example [1], > "In their net neutrality fairy tale, internet service providers (ISPs) are the ‘big bad wolf,’ bent on creating paid ‘fast lanes’ and blocking the websites of entrepreneurs (who invariably work out of their garages). It sounds like a frightful tale, except that ISPs have never offered paid fast lanes or blocked small business owners’ web sites (run out of garages or otherwise). Meanwhile, the biggest baddest wolf the world has ever known — Google — swallowed the internet ecosystem whole and spit out its bones." [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2017/05/03/the-truth-about-net-neutrality-the-left-and-google/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2017/05/03/the-tru... Edit: Please explain your downvotes, thanks!
  - azakai 9y ago
    You asked for something more specific now than you asked for earlier. But here's an article that mentions Google is a monopoly and also mentions net neutrality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/30/16226616/barry-lynn-google-new-america https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/30/16226616/b... > New America eventually emerged as one of the most forceful voices in favor of “net neutrality” — a key progressive advocacy goal that also aligned with Google’s corporate objectives. It's not surprising it mentions net neutrality because New America was focused on it (as was Google). The article is also critical of telcoms, > And, indeed, for years it was common to hear telecom industry lobbyists complain that it was inappropriate for journalists to take New America’s policy expertise on these subjects at face value — arguing that the think tank was basically just a cut-out for Google. Telecom companies, too, have their own favorite think tanks. It's not rare to see think pieces that support net neutrality and/or oppose telcom dominance, so it's not surprising there are articles talking about Google's dominance that also mention those.

mudil 9y ago

Years ago when Matt Drudge used to have his radio show on Sundays (ah, the good old days!) he used to say that Google is fascism. He didn't mince his words, it was pretty much a constant topic for him. And that was 10 years ago. Since then, Google has grown, extended itself in all kinds of ways, including its Washington lobbying. People are always concerned about big pharma, or big agra, or big Monsanto, or big banks. What about Google, a multi national company that knows no limits? It follows you, it knows where you've been, it knows your sexual preferences, it knows what you eat, your hobbies, your contacts. Everything, just to show you an ad! It also decides on what speech is acceptable, what website is eligible to exist. Where is outrage? Where is the left fighting against the multinational behemoth, the big corporate brother?

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
"Big tech". You heard it here first folks.

pdkl95 9y ago

> Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. I strongly suspect I saw this happen in realtime in late 2013 and early 2014 when Snowden's documents were being disclosed every few weeks by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, etc. I was curious how the story was being reported on and interpreted by the traditional (non-technical) media. I wanted a general sense of how well the "slow drip" strategy was working, if the original disclosures were being reported on with a reasonable accuracy, or even if anybody even cared at all. For about 8-10-ish months I made a habit of spending a few minutes each morning skimming the results of basic searches for "nsa", "snowden", etc on Google's main search as a simple /search?q=$term request, and again with the "Past 24 hours" and "Past week" features. I would also check the same search terms on Google News. Most of the time it there were no surprises: e.g. The Post publishes an important document from Snowden's archive in a detailed article that attempts to explain the underlying tech to a general audience. The other large players in the traditional media quickly followup with articles that add a layer of indirection, cut out all the technical explanations that don't fit into a sound byte. It didn't take long for that process to devolve into lots of clickbait headlines for articles that generally lacked technical - or legal - details. My point here is that this process generally followed a fairly consistent process as the original disclosure diffused into clickbait. However, on two (perhaps three?) occasions, I noticed a story still early in that process. I know at least one of those involved Google specifically. While chasing pointers back to the original disclosure article and opening a new browser window for for the usual test searches, I noticed Firefox was becoming annoyingly slow and leaking memory like it always did. After restarting the browser and reloading the test searches... every trace of the story was gone. The articles themselves became 404s a few minutes/hours later. Unfortunately, I have no useful evidence. I was "just" informally skimming headlines to get a general sense of the reporting, so by the time I finally realized I should have been recording everything I had already missed the interesting stuff. It's hearsay, but I am very certain I saw articles suddenly vanish from Google search and Google news after restarting Firefox and pressing F5 on several tabs.

wyck 9y ago
This is an accurate example of today's internet news machine. Very few highly investigated sourced articles compared to the extremely high volume, low pay, click bait titles. The media is strangled by their diminished role and costs, most outlets have gone for the low hanging fruit for the clickbait generation. The good news is that strong brands are now dumping google Ads for more trustworthy sources, if Google's trust continues to erode they will eventually turn into a flea market for advertisement.

nippples 9y ago

I'm so glad we're handing out the responsibility to establishing what's true and what's moral to megacorporations. Absolutely nothing can go wrong this way, after all they told us that "they care" and they are "not evil".

Animats 9y ago

Here's the article Google suppressed.[1] [1] https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-will-be-universal-ranking-signal-then-pulls-the-article/ https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-...

cm2187 9y ago

I fail to see how a NDA could protect a company from the press reporting on abusing of a dominant position.

chinathrow 9y ago

Another data point that Google might be in need for heavy regulation.

jlebrech 9y ago

redefine evil, do no evil

profpandit 9y ago

The tile of this post seems like a non-sequiter. Why would a company not do that? If you trying to project your own ideas, a part of that process is killing competing ideas

Nano2rad 9y ago

"Nucleus os vxp" has very less results in google. There are more results in bing.

Shivetya 9y ago

Google is using threats of lose of adsense revenue to accomplish the same. the trouble with any control of speech on the internet is that that control can eventually be manipulated to serve the purpose of those who are not allowed to suppress speech; government

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

AKifer 9y ago

It all began like this for Uber, bad stories here and there. Do we already prepare the ousting of some of the top Google executives ?

wavefunction 9y ago
You're saying that all the scandals Uber has been involved in were the result of Google's manipulation of search results? What about the Uber scandals that predate Waymo's existence?

pmlnr 9y ago

And there are many sites out there using google for in-site search - the customised google search results, like https://www.notebookcheck.net/ https://www.notebookcheck.net/ does. I'm guessing it's possible to hide our own data from ourselves as well.

dispo001 9y ago

Early on we had real organic traffic. Reasons aside, people stopped making websites and (specially those who didn't) started to act hysterical when one dared to share a link to theirs. It was just better not to promote your website (and give up on it) Without organic traffic the right to be seen shifts to an increasingly small number of judges/players. It use to be that if you knew your topic and put a lot of effort into writing an article you could post it any place, even on your own website. Its audience would take notice of it then at the very least tell you they didn't like it. I'm not trying to complaint or express a desire to get back to the good old times. You could argue there was no money in freedom. Digital slavery was just more profitable and those who could/should have defended the freedom sold us out in stead. (made a handsome profit at that) It is a kind of "you don't know what you have until it is gone" type of situation. While I don't want to promote the 99% meme either, the thing is, if you exclude 99% from "collective" opinion making you will have the 1% doing it. Thats just how basic logic works. What kind of shape or form this takes is not very interesting imho. What is interesting is the growing opportunity it represents. You could say the proverbial Google has a million points of trustworthiness left. At some point they will find ways to sell it for a price that is right to them. When enough of these entities sell enough of their trust there will be room for new innovations.

mcbruiser3 9y ago

why do we have to use google? there are other search engines. I just started using bing only because I just started using Windows 10 for the first time and it comes preloaded with edge which defaults to bing. I've hardly noticed a difference. actually, in some ways I prefer the way it organizes images and video results. I think people just default to google because, well, I'm not sure.