8 ms·

The Case Against Google (2018)

76 points by dotcoma 8y ago

cromwellian 8y ago
"Left unsaid was that Google itself generates millions of new subpages without inbound links each day, a fresh page each time someone performs a search. And each of those subpages is filled with text copied from other sites" Absurd. The article is complaining that Google SERP doesn't penalize Google SERP results. Google doesn't index its own search result pages.
- laser 8y ago
  I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no? Consumers would be overjoyed to find that a new website existed out there that gave better results than Google for anything they might be looking for, yet they would never find out about the existence of such a website, as Google would suppress it in its results. This may be purely innocent intention—based in an understanding that users want results immediately instead of entering another engine or aggregator, but it's not completely apparent that is indeed the case. I was completely neutral (or as neutral as one can be, foremost concerned with ascertaining truth) at the end of the last sentence, so I decided to investigate a little myself. The results seem to me like Google isn't doing anything obviously of egregiously wrong from a first pass, though obviously I don't have the benefit of the 1.7b queries the EU had in their investigation. I searched, "price comparison website" and was presented first with this link: https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shopping-engines-to-increase-ecommerce-sales https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shop... I then searched for the name of each of the companies I didn't recognize. As I actually searched for Pronto first, I thought this verified Foundem's claims, but I think that Pronto didn't come up as it's a Brazilian site, as then when I searched for all the other sites they came up as the first result, except Become, which was on the first page but further down (presumably because it's such a common word). Nextag (dead) [1] PriceGrabber (first link on SERP) Shopzilla (first link on SERP) Become (bottom of first page) Pronto (not on the first ten pages) Bizrate (first result on SERP) So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term. It's unclear to what degree that's the case, though, if it is ultimately true. [1] WSJ piece from Nextag CEO 2012 https://outline.com/n8rW7a https://outline.com/n8rW7a They shutdown last year.
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    Even if the issue were valid, the analogy itself is absurd. He could have said that Google Search surfaces links from Maps, YouTube, Groups, etc and doesn't penalize them using identical criteria (I don't know if it does or not). But saying Search doesn't penalize Google Search leads to infinite regress, or contradiction: If SERP generates a Link to a Next 10 results page, it must then derank the next page and filter it, but then since it wouldn't generate an internal link, it should rank in the results and be granted pagination. It's like Godelian Incompleteness Statement for Search. More then that, the entire argument relies on a technicality: Links as UI buttons. Pagination uses links for UI interaction, but after Web 2.0 arrived, it doesn't have to. Infinite scrollers, pure JS pagination + XHR that doesn't generate links could be used. (yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it, but if you search back far enough before 2010 when I joined, you'll find my opinion on these matters has not changed. I'm a copyright minimalist, I favor decentralized, mostly unregulated web, where everyone can scrape everything, remix, reuse, and repurpose data for permissionless innovation, and I do not favor the government getting involved so it can artificially create categories like 'vertical search' or decide what search algorithms should do)
    - rebornshellfish 8y ago
      >I'm a copyright minimalist Yet you work for a company most of whose business model is based on using intellectual property laws to its competitive advantage?
    - mercer 8y ago
      > yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it While I don't personally care too much, I suppose it could be problematic if you remove this information from your profile at a later date, and from that point on people reading your comments wouldn't (easily) be able to know that you work at Google.
      - Filligree 8y ago
beenBoutIT 8y ago
The downside of "Google" becoming synonymous with "Internet search" is that normal people don't understand that Google is a search engine and that it's possible to use the Internet without Google. You don't need Google to search the web or visit websites, Google is optional. Alternative search engines are garbage, but it was like that back before Google.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  > "Alternative search engines are garbage," Maybe it's just me, but it seems like that gap has been narrowing rapidly. Partially because other search engines are getting better, but also because google has been getting worse.
dazc 8y ago
"Each time someone used Foundem to buy something, the Raffs would receive a small payment from the website making the sale.." Maybe people actually prefer Google because for a lot of the results you get, nobody is paying?
open-source-ux 8y ago
The case against Google is surely that it tracks and records online behaviour on an industrial scale that has no equal among technology companies. Yet, of all the many large technology companies, it mostly escapes scrutiny. Thousands of people in the tech field happily rush to it's defence. Does a giant multi-billion company with an army of lawyers need your defence? Google probably knows more about you that you know about yourself. The tracking begins at a young age - with kids who uses ChromeOS in school (pity the poor kids who don't even get the choice of whether they get tracked, the adults decide for them). Google doesn't build marketing profiles of students, but they are still recording the online behaviour of students. Even if that data is detached from individual accounts and then aggregated it still amounts to data from millions of students. Horrible. So normalised has online tracking become, no-one even bothers to ask why we should be tracked to this degree in the first place. Generic catch-all phrases like "to improve our services" are meaningless without specifics. The case against Google is arguably also a case against the tech field that seems complicit in supporting such unprecedented online tracking. When it comes to privacy and online tracking, this industry is rife with hypocrisy.
- debatem1 8y ago
  Facebook is surely at least an equal to Google in the tracking department, no? Google is also part of the student privacy pledge: https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-pledge/ https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-pledge/, which seems like a reasonable document. Edit: should have said earlier, I worked at Google many years ago.
  - 908087 8y ago
    A "student privacy pledge" involving Google kind of makes my blood boil, given their push to have schools force children onto their platform via chromebooks. It's just like "don't be evil": nothing more than underhanded, cynical corporate PR window dressing.
    - debatem1 8y ago
      Or, alternatively, they're telling the truth. I've pointed out previously that critics of Google and Facebook often assert that every word they say is a lie, then use that to support the position that they can't be trusted. Absent other information that's a fallacious argument. So, with regard to Chromebooks specifically-- not your view of Google as a whole-- what bad behavior do you claim is happening and how do you know that to be true?
astuary 8y ago
The scrutiny of Google is warranted, but misdirected. Remember that advertisers are are Google's customers, not individual search users. If drawing an analogy between Standard Oil and Google, the question to answer is: are advertisers being harmed as a result of a Google-Facebook duopoly? I don't have the expertise to investigate this question, but I'd love to hear from someone who does. (disclaimer: ex-googler)
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  If we shouldn't get consideration in antitrust discussions because we're the not the customer, we're the product being sold, perhaps adtech needs regulations akin to animal cruelty laws. It's okay to slaughter us, you just can't be unnecessarily cruel while doing so...
  - FutureSpec 8y ago
    Not a great analogy -- animal cruelty laws are far too lenient. For example, they exempt farm animals. In fact, there are laws against things that would reveal abuse of such animals - https://www.aspca.org/animal-protection/public-policy/what-ag-gag-legislation https://www.aspca.org/animal-protection/public-policy/what-a...
ilovecaching 8y ago
What is it with all this tech bashing lately? Certainly they aren't perfect, but silicon valley is far down on my list on things we need to fix. What about ISP monopolies that have required massive amounts of regulation just to let small ISPs ask for a bit of dark fiber? What about the gambling house that is wall street? Or our crumbling rail infrastructure? What about our exceedingly ineffective health care system full of insurance middle men and price gouging? The difference between Google and those other issues, is that Google actually has a mission, and they use their money to generally do good things. In fact, I'd say it's a small miracle that Google isn't 10x evil. If Google was as evil as the big TelCos or some of the other scummy businesses out there, we would absolutely be having a bad day. Part of that is google's culture. Not every company can afford to hire the best, and put them in an environment where work is fun and people feel compelled to do good. Break up Google and you get 1000x more companies all gathering the same data, except each one of them is staffed by idiots that leak data every day. Google is working as hard as possible and it's still a challenge to keep nation state attackers at bay with unlimited sums of money. Let's get real here. The journalists are mad because they work for tech illiterate companies who gave in to shilling fear stories in the 90s. Now they have the jester-as-king calling them out as fake news, and the irony is that it's true. Maybe 5-10% of each story as some nugget of truth to it. The politicians of course have to lap those stories up so they can virtue signal to their ignorant constituents who barely understand tech any better than the politicians too.
- alecco 8y ago
  If you use basic encryption your ISP can't know much about you. But you can't lie to Google. Search "red spot in my groin" + tracking on Android/Maps -> Google knows you have a venereal disease and likely from who. Not even Facebook knows you this well. On social media you present a highlight reel and hide your ugly side. You can't lie to your search engine and Google tracks you even when you don't think it's doing so. Google gives hundreds of variables about a user on real-time bidding. That's you.
  - 908087 8y ago
    Google Analytics also pierces the encryption that hides much of your activity on the modern web from your ISP.
burroisolator 8y ago
Wow! This is a long article but I believe it is worth a read to the end: in short, don't dismiss this as yet another "top N evil things that Google has done" article. It is a narrative about anti-trust regulation that happens to pick on Google. In fact, given the paragraphs at the end, I wouldn't even classify this as anti-Google. The paragraphs detailing the fears of Microsoft in 2000 when they were under public scrutiny were especially insightful - they touch upon aspects that the Wikipedia summary of the Microsoft anti-trust cases [1] do not really highlight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
pmoriarty 8y ago
"If you're old enough to remember the internet before 1998, when Google was founded, you'll recall what it was like when searching online involved AltaVista or Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or porn." The main things I remember were that AltaVista showed ads along with its results, while Google was, ironically, ad-free. And Google was also much, much faster.
dang 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

76 points by dotcoma 8y ago

"Left unsaid was that Google itself generates millions of new subpages without inbound links each day, a fresh page each time someone performs a search. And each of those subpages is filled with text copied from other sites" Absurd. The article is complaining that Google SERP doesn't penalize Google SERP results. Google doesn't index its own search result pages.

laser 8y ago
I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no? Consumers would be overjoyed to find that a new website existed out there that gave better results than Google for anything they might be looking for, yet they would never find out about the existence of such a website, as Google would suppress it in its results. This may be purely innocent intention—based in an understanding that users want results immediately instead of entering another engine or aggregator, but it's not completely apparent that is indeed the case. I was completely neutral (or as neutral as one can be, foremost concerned with ascertaining truth) at the end of the last sentence, so I decided to investigate a little myself. The results seem to me like Google isn't doing anything obviously of egregiously wrong from a first pass, though obviously I don't have the benefit of the 1.7b queries the EU had in their investigation. I searched, "price comparison website" and was presented first with this link: https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shopping-engines-to-increase-ecommerce-sales https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shop... I then searched for the name of each of the companies I didn't recognize. As I actually searched for Pronto first, I thought this verified Foundem's claims, but I think that Pronto didn't come up as it's a Brazilian site, as then when I searched for all the other sites they came up as the first result, except Become, which was on the first page but further down (presumably because it's such a common word). Nextag (dead) [1] PriceGrabber (first link on SERP) Shopzilla (first link on SERP) Become (bottom of first page) Pronto (not on the first ten pages) Bizrate (first result on SERP) So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term. It's unclear to what degree that's the case, though, if it is ultimately true. [1] WSJ piece from Nextag CEO 2012 https://outline.com/n8rW7a https://outline.com/n8rW7a They shutdown last year.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Even if the issue were valid, the analogy itself is absurd. He could have said that Google Search surfaces links from Maps, YouTube, Groups, etc and doesn't penalize them using identical criteria (I don't know if it does or not). But saying Search doesn't penalize Google Search leads to infinite regress, or contradiction: If SERP generates a Link to a Next 10 results page, it must then derank the next page and filter it, but then since it wouldn't generate an internal link, it should rank in the results and be granted pagination. It's like Godelian Incompleteness Statement for Search. More then that, the entire argument relies on a technicality: Links as UI buttons. Pagination uses links for UI interaction, but after Web 2.0 arrived, it doesn't have to. Infinite scrollers, pure JS pagination + XHR that doesn't generate links could be used. (yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it, but if you search back far enough before 2010 when I joined, you'll find my opinion on these matters has not changed. I'm a copyright minimalist, I favor decentralized, mostly unregulated web, where everyone can scrape everything, remix, reuse, and repurpose data for permissionless innovation, and I do not favor the government getting involved so it can artificially create categories like 'vertical search' or decide what search algorithms should do)
  - rebornshellfish 8y ago
    >I'm a copyright minimalist Yet you work for a company most of whose business model is based on using intellectual property laws to its competitive advantage?
  - mercer 8y ago
    > yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it While I don't personally care too much, I suppose it could be problematic if you remove this information from your profile at a later date, and from that point on people reading your comments wouldn't (easily) be able to know that you work at Google.
    - Filligree 8y ago

beenBoutIT 8y ago

The downside of "Google" becoming synonymous with "Internet search" is that normal people don't understand that Google is a search engine and that it's possible to use the Internet without Google. You don't need Google to search the web or visit websites, Google is optional. Alternative search engines are garbage, but it was like that back before Google.

darkpuma 8y ago
> "Alternative search engines are garbage," Maybe it's just me, but it seems like that gap has been narrowing rapidly. Partially because other search engines are getting better, but also because google has been getting worse.

dazc 8y ago

"Each time someone used Foundem to buy something, the Raffs would receive a small payment from the website making the sale.." Maybe people actually prefer Google because for a lot of the results you get, nobody is paying?

open-source-ux 8y ago

The case against Google is surely that it tracks and records online behaviour on an industrial scale that has no equal among technology companies. Yet, of all the many large technology companies, it mostly escapes scrutiny. Thousands of people in the tech field happily rush to it's defence. Does a giant multi-billion company with an army of lawyers need your defence? Google probably knows more about you that you know about yourself. The tracking begins at a young age - with kids who uses ChromeOS in school (pity the poor kids who don't even get the choice of whether they get tracked, the adults decide for them). Google doesn't build marketing profiles of students, but they are still recording the online behaviour of students. Even if that data is detached from individual accounts and then aggregated it still amounts to data from millions of students. Horrible. So normalised has online tracking become, no-one even bothers to ask why we should be tracked to this degree in the first place. Generic catch-all phrases like "to improve our services" are meaningless without specifics. The case against Google is arguably also a case against the tech field that seems complicit in supporting such unprecedented online tracking. When it comes to privacy and online tracking, this industry is rife with hypocrisy.

debatem1 8y ago
Facebook is surely at least an equal to Google in the tracking department, no? Google is also part of the student privacy pledge: https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-pledge/ https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-pledge/, which seems like a reasonable document. Edit: should have said earlier, I worked at Google many years ago.
- 908087 8y ago
  A "student privacy pledge" involving Google kind of makes my blood boil, given their push to have schools force children onto their platform via chromebooks. It's just like "don't be evil": nothing more than underhanded, cynical corporate PR window dressing.
  - debatem1 8y ago
    Or, alternatively, they're telling the truth. I've pointed out previously that critics of Google and Facebook often assert that every word they say is a lie, then use that to support the position that they can't be trusted. Absent other information that's a fallacious argument. So, with regard to Chromebooks specifically-- not your view of Google as a whole-- what bad behavior do you claim is happening and how do you know that to be true?

astuary 8y ago

The scrutiny of Google is warranted, but misdirected. Remember that advertisers are are Google's customers, not individual search users. If drawing an analogy between Standard Oil and Google, the question to answer is: are advertisers being harmed as a result of a Google-Facebook duopoly? I don't have the expertise to investigate this question, but I'd love to hear from someone who does. (disclaimer: ex-googler)

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
If we shouldn't get consideration in antitrust discussions because we're the not the customer, we're the product being sold, perhaps adtech needs regulations akin to animal cruelty laws. It's okay to slaughter us, you just can't be unnecessarily cruel while doing so...
- FutureSpec 8y ago
  Not a great analogy -- animal cruelty laws are far too lenient. For example, they exempt farm animals. In fact, there are laws against things that would reveal abuse of such animals - https://www.aspca.org/animal-protection/public-policy/what-ag-gag-legislation https://www.aspca.org/animal-protection/public-policy/what-a...

ilovecaching 8y ago

What is it with all this tech bashing lately? Certainly they aren't perfect, but silicon valley is far down on my list on things we need to fix. What about ISP monopolies that have required massive amounts of regulation just to let small ISPs ask for a bit of dark fiber? What about the gambling house that is wall street? Or our crumbling rail infrastructure? What about our exceedingly ineffective health care system full of insurance middle men and price gouging? The difference between Google and those other issues, is that Google actually has a mission, and they use their money to generally do good things. In fact, I'd say it's a small miracle that Google isn't 10x evil. If Google was as evil as the big TelCos or some of the other scummy businesses out there, we would absolutely be having a bad day. Part of that is google's culture. Not every company can afford to hire the best, and put them in an environment where work is fun and people feel compelled to do good. Break up Google and you get 1000x more companies all gathering the same data, except each one of them is staffed by idiots that leak data every day. Google is working as hard as possible and it's still a challenge to keep nation state attackers at bay with unlimited sums of money. Let's get real here. The journalists are mad because they work for tech illiterate companies who gave in to shilling fear stories in the 90s. Now they have the jester-as-king calling them out as fake news, and the irony is that it's true. Maybe 5-10% of each story as some nugget of truth to it. The politicians of course have to lap those stories up so they can virtue signal to their ignorant constituents who barely understand tech any better than the politicians too.

alecco 8y ago
If you use basic encryption your ISP can't know much about you. But you can't lie to Google. Search "red spot in my groin" + tracking on Android/Maps -> Google knows you have a venereal disease and likely from who. Not even Facebook knows you this well. On social media you present a highlight reel and hide your ugly side. You can't lie to your search engine and Google tracks you even when you don't think it's doing so. Google gives hundreds of variables about a user on real-time bidding. That's you.
- 908087 8y ago
  Google Analytics also pierces the encryption that hides much of your activity on the modern web from your ISP.

burroisolator 8y ago

Wow! This is a long article but I believe it is worth a read to the end: in short, don't dismiss this as yet another "top N evil things that Google has done" article. It is a narrative about anti-trust regulation that happens to pick on Google. In fact, given the paragraphs at the end, I wouldn't even classify this as anti-Google. The paragraphs detailing the fears of Microsoft in 2000 when they were under public scrutiny were especially insightful - they touch upon aspects that the Wikipedia summary of the Microsoft anti-trust cases [1] do not really highlight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

pmoriarty 8y ago

"If you're old enough to remember the internet before 1998, when Google was founded, you'll recall what it was like when searching online involved AltaVista or Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or porn." The main things I remember were that AltaVista showed ads along with its results, while Google was, ironically, ad-free. And Google was also much, much faster.

dang 8y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]