11 ms·

Quotes from @searchliaison: "Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." "Ultimately, Google Images is a w

by jakubp 9y ago

Quotes from @searchliaison: "Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." "Ultimately, Google Images is a way for people to discover information in cases where browsing images is a better experience than text." Do you believe any of these statements? I am still surprised how easily corporations will hide their true motives, resolve any cognitive dissonance internally, and how easily others will forgive them. I wonder how people within Google are feeling when this happens. And I don't mean "when a feature gets removed", there may be valid reasons to do that. But when the official communication about them contains manipulative statements such as above, how do employees who aren't allowed to speak up feel?

Pica_soO 9y ago
Any horrible task can be split up and thus be made more fullfillable by the human employed in the process. Lets assume for example, google found some Xenomorphs on the moon- which needed a human host to be transfered to a research lab in moutain view. Instead of having one person do it, the task will be split up. There is one doctor making sure the human hosts are fine. There is a transport pilot flying the human hosts to the moon. ... There is a grief counselor contacting the hosts familys. There is another transport pilot flying them home. Finally there is one person who designs the process, not knowing exactly what will be extracted. And of course a person who tells a nice PR-lie. Its the same distribution of organization that made Auschwitz run so well. Now repeat after me- do not be evil.
- rsync 9y ago
  "Any horrible task can be split up and thus be made more fullfillable by the human employed in the process." I think you're onto something here but I think there is a detail you've missed - hierarchy. It's not the number of people involved that allows a a terrible process to be completed but rather the number of layers of hierarchy. Someone at the top says "just make this (outcome) happen" and if they say that to the person who actually has to carry it out, there is pushback or guilt or exposure. But if that person can, in turn, tell someone else a level below to "just make this (outcome) happen" eventually there is enough insulation (emotional, legal, etc.) that someone at the end of the chain can get the shaft. You can't really do that with a flat (absent) hierarchy.
pfortuny 9y ago
They -like every other hyper corporation- are starting to speak not like Governments but like sects.
ATsch 9y ago
I feel somewhat angry at this tweet. Not because the feature is gone but because they are daft enough to assume that they can sell this as an improvement to their users and anyone will believe it.
- Arnt 9y ago
  They have to say that, no matter whether they mean it. What else could they say that wouldn't anger Getty Images?
  - manuelflara 9y ago
    "We're changing this to comply with a court order / settlement." seems fine to me. I don't think anyone would be angry at them, since they didn't want to do the change nor would be "lying" to users about why they do it.
    - Hoasi 9y ago
      Indeed that would be a much more elegant way to go about it.
    - danaris 9y ago
      But then they wouldn't get to act like they are masters of all they survey. This way, they can continue to claim that they are always entirely in control. At least to themselves.
      - sgc 9y ago
        It's probably as banal as trying to limit future lawsuits by restricting publicity on successful past ones.
- pgeorgi 9y ago
  If the alternative would have been to disable the feature altogether, then this is an improvement. But to make this clear, they'd probably have to disable the feature for 2 days "because of the Getty case", then come up with this as a compromise. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but have nothing to do with that stuff nor any special insights)
glup 9y ago
There's a reason a lot of people choose not to work there.
- YouAreGreat 9y ago
  Google still manages to get far too many non-sociopathic employees, by feeding them a supernormal[1] morality surrogate ("googley values") industrially designed to draw moral attention away from Google. Many employees actually start to perceive whatever they do at Google as "good" because Google has these supernormally good "googley values" of Google's own manufacture. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    I think it's more the $200k salaries and badge of having Google on your resume.
    - fiblye 9y ago
      (Asking out of curiosity and not trying to be a smartass) But is Google still that impressive of a note on your résumé these days? Most of the brightest students from my university off to work for or start innovative startups solving hard problems or they got research jobs at various engineering/energy companies, but a large number who were just kind of OK students got some fuzzy job at google doing who knows what but getting paid a lot to be there. Sometimes I'm shocked by the dumb designs and whatnot that google puts out these days and wonder what kind of people they have making these decisions, then I think back to some of the people I went to school with and things start to click.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - ashtube 9y ago
        yes - look at LinkedIn people who used to work at Google and where they work now. Try 100+ samples.
Buge 9y ago
One of the follow up tweets is more honest: >For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week (see also https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-view-image-button-from-search-results https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v... …). They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964279749802512384 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964279749802512384
- dmitriid 9y ago
  It's the same shit that happened to Google Books, really.
- dspillett 9y ago
  I'm perfectly fine with this, after all they have little choice because of the result from the Getty case, but now that option is gone they need to crack down on sites presenting different images when referred directly from Google than they present more generally: presenting an unaltered image to Google and a heavily watermarked one otherwise for instance, or sometimes the destination page redirecting off to something else if your request doesn't include a Google referrer or agent-string. These things are already against Google's policy and is basically the destination site being dishonest to the user (drawing people away from sites with the same content really but don't pretend to offer something else freely).
  - mason55 9y ago
    I noticed yesterday that you will get image results from YouTube but there’s no way to get the actual image it presents you. If you click on the search result it just takes you to the video. So I guess they need to start by enforcing the rules on their own sites.
    - CamelCaseName 9y ago
      In case you are curious, you can get the image by going to https://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.... [0] E.g. https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/0.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/0.jpg [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068344/how-do-i-get-a-youtube-video-thumbnail-from-the-youtube-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068344/how-do-i-get-a-y...
imron 9y ago
> Do you believe any of these statements? Well, technically "to help connect users and useful websites" is true. You now have to visit the website that had the photo if you want to download the full-size version, whereas previously you could bypass the site and download it from Google Images directly.
- xg15 9y ago
  In the same sense that ads "inform you about the existence of useful products". It's technically true but also completely irrelevant.
- ianamartin 9y ago
  I don't normally do this because we aren't Reddit here, after all. But this is stupidly appropriate. https://www.xkcd.com/1475/ https://www.xkcd.com/1475/
- amelius 9y ago
  > You now have to visit the website that had the photo if you want to download the full-size version, whereas previously you could bypass the site and download it from Google Images directly. I'm guessing that soon we'll have a browser extension that will do it for us.
- Feniks 9y ago
  This new move is QUITE annoying on mobile. After a tip I've switched to an alternative search engine that still works in the old fashion https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/
bitL 9y ago
Google is now a firm part of establishment, i.e. protecting the old ways of making money instead of inventing new ones. They initially looked like a company that could find better ways but it seems like prevailing winds were stronger in the end. The "to help connect users and useful websites" while removing that possibility is just usual expected spin associated with classical businesses. YouTube is also turning into an expensive lower-quality cable TV. How innovative!
- moocowtruck 9y ago
  sounds like yegge was actually right
- leeoniya 9y ago
  next stop: EME-wrapped (DRM) images
- bitwize 9y ago
  Speaking of cable TV -- back in the 80s and 90s, Nickelodeon was groundbreaking. Today it's basically Disney Channel 2. Anything that rebelsagainst cable TV will end up looking like cable TV,just like the cable networks rebelled against the status quo before becoming the status quo. Maybe what we have is a sort of local maximum, a formula that best "works" for our local culture.
  - JakeAl 9y ago
    That's known as 'the structure of scientific revolutions' but it applies to revolution/innovation in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... The book is free online.
    - sah2ed 9y ago
      I know this doesn't really add to the discussion but thanks for the reference.
- PricelessValue 9y ago
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
> I am still surprised how easily corporations will hide their true motives, resolve any cognitive dissonance internally, and how easily others will forgive them. People stopped caring a long time ago. It's became a new social norm. A corporation can't speak openly, they always need to "act in the best interest of the customer" and use other bs phrases. This battle has long been lost. Not just corporations - startups are equally bad, especially when recruiting employees who are supposed to work hard for their success.
Gravityloss 9y ago
Honesty has a cost.
- Zarath 9y ago
  Yes, for bad actors
sidcool 9y ago
Sorry but I do not understand Google's hidden motives behind this. Can you elaborate?
dalbasal 9y ago
I agree on the general point. Corporate culture and the meaningless ways of talking that go with it are both (a) extremely dominant part of overall culture and (b) extremely disengenious and repressed. We talk like this a lot, among colleagues, to customers, politicians talk this way. I'm not sure what's going on here though. It definitely isn't "some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." It's probably more to do with the fact that Google images is designed for viewing images, not finding links and that kind of makes it a content scraping site. The idea that Google (or anyone) would speak normally (like a googler would speak, in a cafe) is oddly insane. "After years of complaints and some lawsuits, we've decided to bite the bullet and take away the damned view image button. People use google images by searching for a thing and looking at the pictures. They don't really visit the website because well... they're looking for pictures not some random website that happens to have a picture. That means this isn't really a websearch site. It's pinterest with stolen content. Basically, Google images is kind of ilegal, but still dead useful. Hopefully this change will get the most litiguous photographers off our case and it'll be more or less business as usual." I guess in this case speaking plainly actually does have nasty legal implications, but we do corporate speak regardless. When OKCupid killed their app by making it a poorly implemented tinder clone with vestigial features, they pretended they had just discovered new and exciting things about first names, swiping and such. Would it have really harmed them to say, real names are more normal now. Tinder is eating our lunch. Our average user keeps getting older. Our UI isn't as good for mobile or whatever reasons really drove those decisions. I'd be more interested in reading it then. At the very least, ommit the meaningless stuff. Just say we're taking away this button and don't give a reason. It would feel incredibly odd to lie like this between unincorporated natural persons in a noncommercial setting. Can you imagine telling your friends you'll noshow a bbq with some corproate-speak nonsense?.
- marnett 9y ago
  It is not non-sense or meaningless though, and thinking that is dangerous. It is corporate propaganda and it is outrageously effective at shaping thought both internally and externally (internally being, perhaps, the most important portion). Linguistically speaking, the language we use has a material impact on how we think about the underlying ideas.
jacquesm 9y ago
As soon as a big corporation tells you something is for your benefit you should check the contents of your pockets and make sure all your fingers are still there. It's a sure sign something has gone missing.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
joemi 9y ago
> "Ultimately, Google Images is a way for people to discover information in cases where browsing images is a better experience than text." That's my primary use of Google Images. I find that for a lot of things (at least things I'm searching for), that helps cut through a lot of the spam or generally lesser quality sites, even if the image itself isn't all that important to my search. Also, it's excellent when I don't know the specific name for an object... just use the best search terms I can think of for the object then browse images until I see one that's what I'm thinking of (or looks like it could be used for what I'm thinking of). That said, I've also used it for grabbing images of something. But more and more often, I've used it just for searching in general.
imhelpingu 9y ago
I'm sure it doesn't feel like they work for a stereotypical evil corporation or anything like that.

by jakubp 9y ago

Pica_soO 9y ago

Any horrible task can be split up and thus be made more fullfillable by the human employed in the process. Lets assume for example, google found some Xenomorphs on the moon- which needed a human host to be transfered to a research lab in moutain view. Instead of having one person do it, the task will be split up. There is one doctor making sure the human hosts are fine. There is a transport pilot flying the human hosts to the moon. ... There is a grief counselor contacting the hosts familys. There is another transport pilot flying them home. Finally there is one person who designs the process, not knowing exactly what will be extracted. And of course a person who tells a nice PR-lie. Its the same distribution of organization that made Auschwitz run so well. Now repeat after me- do not be evil.

rsync 9y ago
"Any horrible task can be split up and thus be made more fullfillable by the human employed in the process." I think you're onto something here but I think there is a detail you've missed - hierarchy. It's not the number of people involved that allows a a terrible process to be completed but rather the number of layers of hierarchy. Someone at the top says "just make this (outcome) happen" and if they say that to the person who actually has to carry it out, there is pushback or guilt or exposure. But if that person can, in turn, tell someone else a level below to "just make this (outcome) happen" eventually there is enough insulation (emotional, legal, etc.) that someone at the end of the chain can get the shaft. You can't really do that with a flat (absent) hierarchy.

pfortuny 9y ago

They -like every other hyper corporation- are starting to speak not like Governments but like sects.

ATsch 9y ago

I feel somewhat angry at this tweet. Not because the feature is gone but because they are daft enough to assume that they can sell this as an improvement to their users and anyone will believe it.

Arnt 9y ago
They have to say that, no matter whether they mean it. What else could they say that wouldn't anger Getty Images?
- manuelflara 9y ago
  "We're changing this to comply with a court order / settlement." seems fine to me. I don't think anyone would be angry at them, since they didn't want to do the change nor would be "lying" to users about why they do it.
  - Hoasi 9y ago
    Indeed that would be a much more elegant way to go about it.
  - danaris 9y ago
    But then they wouldn't get to act like they are masters of all they survey. This way, they can continue to claim that they are always entirely in control. At least to themselves.
    - sgc 9y ago
      It's probably as banal as trying to limit future lawsuits by restricting publicity on successful past ones.
pgeorgi 9y ago
If the alternative would have been to disable the feature altogether, then this is an improvement. But to make this clear, they'd probably have to disable the feature for 2 days "because of the Getty case", then come up with this as a compromise. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but have nothing to do with that stuff nor any special insights)

glup 9y ago

There's a reason a lot of people choose not to work there.

YouAreGreat 9y ago
Google still manages to get far too many non-sociopathic employees, by feeding them a supernormal[1] morality surrogate ("googley values") industrially designed to draw moral attention away from Google. Many employees actually start to perceive whatever they do at Google as "good" because Google has these supernormally good "googley values" of Google's own manufacture. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  I think it's more the $200k salaries and badge of having Google on your resume.
  - fiblye 9y ago
    (Asking out of curiosity and not trying to be a smartass) But is Google still that impressive of a note on your résumé these days? Most of the brightest students from my university off to work for or start innovative startups solving hard problems or they got research jobs at various engineering/energy companies, but a large number who were just kind of OK students got some fuzzy job at google doing who knows what but getting paid a lot to be there. Sometimes I'm shocked by the dumb designs and whatnot that google puts out these days and wonder what kind of people they have making these decisions, then I think back to some of the people I went to school with and things start to click.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - ashtube 9y ago
      yes - look at LinkedIn people who used to work at Google and where they work now. Try 100+ samples.

Buge 9y ago

One of the follow up tweets is more honest: >For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week (see also https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-view-image-button-from-search-results https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v... …). They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964279749802512384 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964279749802512384

dmitriid 9y ago
It's the same shit that happened to Google Books, really.
dspillett 9y ago
I'm perfectly fine with this, after all they have little choice because of the result from the Getty case, but now that option is gone they need to crack down on sites presenting different images when referred directly from Google than they present more generally: presenting an unaltered image to Google and a heavily watermarked one otherwise for instance, or sometimes the destination page redirecting off to something else if your request doesn't include a Google referrer or agent-string. These things are already against Google's policy and is basically the destination site being dishonest to the user (drawing people away from sites with the same content really but don't pretend to offer something else freely).
- mason55 9y ago
  I noticed yesterday that you will get image results from YouTube but there’s no way to get the actual image it presents you. If you click on the search result it just takes you to the video. So I guess they need to start by enforcing the rules on their own sites.
  - CamelCaseName 9y ago
    In case you are curious, you can get the image by going to https://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.... [0] E.g. https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/0.jpg https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/0.jpg [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068344/how-do-i-get-a-youtube-video-thumbnail-from-the-youtube-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068344/how-do-i-get-a-y...

imron 9y ago

> Do you believe any of these statements? Well, technically "to help connect users and useful websites" is true. You now have to visit the website that had the photo if you want to download the full-size version, whereas previously you could bypass the site and download it from Google Images directly.

xg15 9y ago
In the same sense that ads "inform you about the existence of useful products". It's technically true but also completely irrelevant.
ianamartin 9y ago
I don't normally do this because we aren't Reddit here, after all. But this is stupidly appropriate. https://www.xkcd.com/1475/ https://www.xkcd.com/1475/
amelius 9y ago
> You now have to visit the website that had the photo if you want to download the full-size version, whereas previously you could bypass the site and download it from Google Images directly. I'm guessing that soon we'll have a browser extension that will do it for us.
Feniks 9y ago
This new move is QUITE annoying on mobile. After a tip I've switched to an alternative search engine that still works in the old fashion https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/

bitL 9y ago

Google is now a firm part of establishment, i.e. protecting the old ways of making money instead of inventing new ones. They initially looked like a company that could find better ways but it seems like prevailing winds were stronger in the end. The "to help connect users and useful websites" while removing that possibility is just usual expected spin associated with classical businesses. YouTube is also turning into an expensive lower-quality cable TV. How innovative!

moocowtruck 9y ago
sounds like yegge was actually right
leeoniya 9y ago
next stop: EME-wrapped (DRM) images
bitwize 9y ago
Speaking of cable TV -- back in the 80s and 90s, Nickelodeon was groundbreaking. Today it's basically Disney Channel 2. Anything that rebelsagainst cable TV will end up looking like cable TV,just like the cable networks rebelled against the status quo before becoming the status quo. Maybe what we have is a sort of local maximum, a formula that best "works" for our local culture.
- JakeAl 9y ago
  That's known as 'the structure of scientific revolutions' but it applies to revolution/innovation in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... The book is free online.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    I know this doesn't really add to the discussion but thanks for the reference.
PricelessValue 9y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

> I am still surprised how easily corporations will hide their true motives, resolve any cognitive dissonance internally, and how easily others will forgive them. People stopped caring a long time ago. It's became a new social norm. A corporation can't speak openly, they always need to "act in the best interest of the customer" and use other bs phrases. This battle has long been lost. Not just corporations - startups are equally bad, especially when recruiting employees who are supposed to work hard for their success.

Gravityloss 9y ago

Honesty has a cost.

Zarath 9y ago
Yes, for bad actors

sidcool 9y ago

Sorry but I do not understand Google's hidden motives behind this. Can you elaborate?

dalbasal 9y ago

I agree on the general point. Corporate culture and the meaningless ways of talking that go with it are both (a) extremely dominant part of overall culture and (b) extremely disengenious and repressed. We talk like this a lot, among colleagues, to customers, politicians talk this way. I'm not sure what's going on here though. It definitely isn't "some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." It's probably more to do with the fact that Google images is designed for viewing images, not finding links and that kind of makes it a content scraping site. The idea that Google (or anyone) would speak normally (like a googler would speak, in a cafe) is oddly insane. "After years of complaints and some lawsuits, we've decided to bite the bullet and take away the damned view image button. People use google images by searching for a thing and looking at the pictures. They don't really visit the website because well... they're looking for pictures not some random website that happens to have a picture. That means this isn't really a websearch site. It's pinterest with stolen content. Basically, Google images is kind of ilegal, but still dead useful. Hopefully this change will get the most litiguous photographers off our case and it'll be more or less business as usual." I guess in this case speaking plainly actually does have nasty legal implications, but we do corporate speak regardless. When OKCupid killed their app by making it a poorly implemented tinder clone with vestigial features, they pretended they had just discovered new and exciting things about first names, swiping and such. Would it have really harmed them to say, real names are more normal now. Tinder is eating our lunch. Our average user keeps getting older. Our UI isn't as good for mobile or whatever reasons really drove those decisions. I'd be more interested in reading it then. At the very least, ommit the meaningless stuff. Just say we're taking away this button and don't give a reason. It would feel incredibly odd to lie like this between unincorporated natural persons in a noncommercial setting. Can you imagine telling your friends you'll noshow a bbq with some corproate-speak nonsense?.

marnett 9y ago
It is not non-sense or meaningless though, and thinking that is dangerous. It is corporate propaganda and it is outrageously effective at shaping thought both internally and externally (internally being, perhaps, the most important portion). Linguistically speaking, the language we use has a material impact on how we think about the underlying ideas.

jacquesm 9y ago

As soon as a big corporation tells you something is for your benefit you should check the contents of your pockets and make sure all your fingers are still there. It's a sure sign something has gone missing.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

joemi 9y ago

> "Ultimately, Google Images is a way for people to discover information in cases where browsing images is a better experience than text." That's my primary use of Google Images. I find that for a lot of things (at least things I'm searching for), that helps cut through a lot of the spam or generally lesser quality sites, even if the image itself isn't all that important to my search. Also, it's excellent when I don't know the specific name for an object... just use the best search terms I can think of for the object then browse images until I see one that's what I'm thinking of (or looks like it could be used for what I'm thinking of). That said, I've also used it for grabbing images of something. But more and more often, I've used it just for searching in general.

imhelpingu 9y ago

I'm sure it doesn't feel like they work for a stereotypical evil corporation or anything like that.