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Google responds to NY Times article by improving its algorithms
- arman0 16y agoThis post is a great rebuttal to those who think that Google is becoming a lumbering giant. I wonder how long it would have taken Microsoft to respond to a similar situation.
- kqr2 16y agoOne of the search terms mentioned in the NY Times articles was "Christian Audigier glasses". On Bing, the questionable www.decormyeyes.com site is still the 5th listing. http://www.bing.com/search?q=Christian+Audigier+glasses&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n&sk=&sc=1-23 http://www.bing.com/search?q=Christian+Audigier+glasses&...
- achille 16y agoThey're still the 4th result when searching for "discount designer sunglasses" -- so they have not been banned quite yet.
- kqr2 16y agoConfirmed: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1822&bih=1323&q=discount+designer+sunglasses&aq=f&aqi=g6g-m1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=182... Google's algorithm needs some more improvement.
- almond 16y agoI see it only on Page 2 an hour later. You were probably on the trailing end of the rollout.
- chollida1 16y agoI don't see it in the bing search results anymore. I guess the answer to how long would it take Bing to change is, about as long as it takes Google.
- Frazzydee 16y agoThey're on the 4th page, as of this writing.
- yoak 16y agoNot at all! For the reason that google explained on the blog, it is a dumb response to remove or penalize this particular company in the wake of the media froth. The admirable and responsible thing to do is to figure out how to make the thing work better in general to cover the hundreds or thousands of similar cases not in the New York Times. This issue is complex and I don't have great overall answers. It isn't clear how search results should bias based on sentiment. (That's discussed on the blog and here.) One thing I am sure of is that I respect discovering a result they consider bad and looking at the algorithms that caused the result and I don't respect deciding that you got egg on your face for the results of your algorithm in this case and jiggering the results. Of course, we don't know that Bing didn't come up with algorithmic improvements, but the comment you're replying to isn't refuted in any way by the fact that the result has disappeared (or greatly diminished) in Bing. To the contrary, in addition to my bias to agree with the OP on Google / Bing, when one company says, "We've taken a look, made small improvements already that have some impact, and we're looking to make more" and the search result simply disappears in the other case, I'm inclined to take that as specific evidence of the former doing the better job.
- doty 16y agoLet's be more specific with our arguments. You can't argue that Microsoft didn't respond quickly, because there has been a change in Bing's results. The original comment asked "how long until Microsoft addressed this problem?", and it appears that Microsoft has now addressed it, so the point that the comment made stands. The fact that Microsoft may or may not have addressed the problem by "jiggering the result" has nothing to do with it. There is no evidence one way or the other. You may be deeply suspicious of Microsoft's behavior, and that's perfectly fine. Let's just be clear about what we're saying. It would have been more direct to say "Microsoft may have responded quickly, but I bet they just cheated."
- Encosia 16y ago> I wonder how long it would have taken Microsoft to respond to a similar situation. When ASP.NET's AES implementation was exposed to automated attack recently, the DevDiv guys got out in front of the issue with a workaround in about four days: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/18/important-asp-net-security-vulnerability.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/18/important-... Then, they continued to stay on top of it, providing guidance until a real patch was available: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/20/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-asp-net-security-vulnerability.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/20/frequently... http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/24/update-on-asp-net-vulnerability.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/24/update-on-... http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/27/asp-net-security-update-shipping-tuesday-sept-28th.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/27/asp-net-se... http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/28/asp-net-security-update-now-available.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/28/asp-net-se... http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/30/asp-net-security-fix-now-on-windows-update.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/30/asp-net-se...
- CWuestefeld 16y agoBefore making a non-trivial purchase online, I typically do a search for "$vendorname sucks" and/or "$productname sucks", and this has saved me headaches on more than one occasion. I hope that Google's solution won't interfere with finding bad reviews in this case.
- kqr2 16y agoAlso, many vendors these days will sell through Amazon.com. It's a lot safer purchasing through Amazon.com since they are very intolerant of bad merchants. From the original NY Times article: In other words, Mr. Borker is perfectly capable of minding his manners. And he does so, right now, with every order that comes through a store he runs through Amazon.com’s affiliate program. (He declines to provide that store’s name.) He handles those transactions like a Boy Scout because Amazon doesn’t mess around, he says — the company just kicks you off its site if you infuriate customers.
- SandB0x 16y agoHow does that work though? Doesn't this method just return negative results by definition? There are a lot of results confirming that "apple sucks" or "toyota sucks". Genuinely interested, because the only reliable way I've found is to spend hours and hours reading through niche forums and reviews, and for every great product there are plenty of bad comments out there.
- joe_the_user 16y agoYou then have to read the review and see the content. You contrast "one star, it doesn't this obscure thing it didn't to do but otherwise it's great" versus "one star, it fell apart in three days, seriously" and get the idea. It's a constant battle, altogether. Hopefully, the Internet will continue to be deeper than the scamsters' ability to game. And hopefully Google will keep helping in this regard.
- praptak 16y agoOf course it returns negative results. The key is not to take them blindly. If they mention specific facts (extra bonus for verifiable ones), do not sound like ones written by poopheads or mass produced by competition, then it's a very strong red flag. Things like unfavorable terms of service or checked-by-default, hard-to-notice checkboxes subscribing you to worthless additional services are easy to verify, even if you give zero trust to anonymous reviews.
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- _delirium 16y agoWhile I can understand not giving out details, to avoid gaming, this post as a result doesn't have much content! As far as I can tell, this is the entirety of the description of the change: we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide a extremely poor user experience The explanations of what Google didn't do and why are informative, though.
- amichail 16y agoMaybe there was no change? They just want to discourage people from doing something similar until they come up with a good solution?
- barmstrong 16y agoDoubtful - "lets release a fake announcement" type ideas I think would get shot down quickly at Google.
- tsbaron 16y agoGoogle's "opinion" for better or worse is fact. Let's hope they figured out a way to differentiate between genuine bad reviews and those with underlying motives.
- joe_the_user 16y agoEven more, once you move to anything slightly controversial, an opinion can be genuine, meaning sincere, but still not valid for the person searching ("they sold me the movie I asked for but it had too much violence!").
- CWuestefeld 16y agoYes, just as with voting on HN -- does that downvote mean it's an inane comment, or just that someone disagrees?
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- daten 16y agoBut if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying. Google admits, and I agree, that this is a bad idea. But then why are they continuing to attempt it? Wouldn't neutral search results be better than those that favored a subjectively positive or negative business?
- yanw 16y agoAnd how would you go about ranking them then? alphabetically? More research and trial/error never hurts.
- daten 16y agoResearch may not hurt. Trial and error does if the error affects the users. If something bad is happening in the world, like thousands of people being murdered in some remote country, and every page that links to articles about it has a negative tone because they're condemning what's happening, should google hide those articles? I would be fine with alphabetical results if they would give me a regular expression search instead of recommended results.
- joe_the_user 16y agoThis is an excellent point and deserves more votes. Google does have somewhat "sneekier" options: - Demote negatively reviewed items only on searches which seem "inherently commercial" - ie, act differently depending on whether the search is for a store or an opinion. - Have some sort of "realness" index: is this entity actually selling sunglasses. These aren't necessarily easy so your question stands.
- nitrogen 16y agoMaybe they are continuing to research it because enough people outside Google think it's a good idea that not researching it would make them appear unresponsive or irresponsible? Kind of like politicians doing something for the sake of being seen doing something.
- mcritz 16y agoGoogle’s headline is “Being bad to your customers is bad for business”. I always thought “being bad” was analogous to “evil”.
- aristidb 16y ago"Improving algorithms" now involves writing a blacklist? Blacklists are fine, but please don't call them algorithms.
- joshuacc 16y ago"we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience." The implication seems to be that they've found a way of programmatically identifying these offenders.
- coliveira 16y agoOf course, this solution probably produces lots of false positives, so they will have to change it later when other complains are raised. I think the original idea of Google was great, but with each iteration their search results get worse. In the end, it seems that anything they do can be gamed in some way.
- aristidb 16y agoI originally read it the way that they feed the list of merchants manually. But it is possible that I understood that wrong, yeah.
- arbitrarywords 16y agoAlgorithm Psuedocode? If website in manually fed list Then demote.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoaristidb, it is an algorithm, not a blacklist. The rankings for hundreds of websites change as a result of this new algorithm.
- martincmartin 16y agoWhen the NY Times article first appeared, the merchant still showed in Google's and Bing's results, but interestingly not in Duck Duck Go's.
- ntulip 16y agothe duck missed it
- patrickaljord 16y ago"But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials," Good one Google.
- ry0ohki 16y agoSo can I essentially destroy my competitors search rankings by getting enough people to disparage them on the Internet now?
- brianpan 16y agoFortunately, libel/defamation is against the law.
- ry0ohki 16y agoSeriously good luck suing an anonymous person on Get Satisfaction for libel
- brianpan 16y agoIf Google's problem has been pushed from "people can be bad and game our system" to "people can be bad and break the law" then I'd say they don't have to chase the problem much further than that. Also, you don't think ISPs can be subpoenaed[1] for the names and addresses of "anonymous" people? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act#Title_II:_Surveillance_procedures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act#Title_II:_Surve...
- inerte 16y agoYou mean by getting a (single) programmer.
- ankimal 16y agoRule number one in online retail is looking up the vendor before you buy anything, no matter how much money you are saving. I dont see why any one should blame Google for this. Next thing you know, people are gonna want directions on google maps which others recommend as opposed to other metrics. If I got car jacked on a certain route, blame Google, it gave me directions.
- TotlolRon 16y ago"A wise old owl sat in a Valley, The more he saw, the less he believed, The less he believed, the more he saw, We never ask: what is the last straw?" -- @taylorbuley in TC comments regarding something else, 2010
- mixmax 16y agoderefr actually proposed using sentiment analysis in the discussion on the original NY Times article. Not a bad call. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949064
- kenjackson 16y agoWhy not just put sentiment analysis directly in the search results? Search for: Designer Discount Glasses and maybe this page still is on the first page, but have a frowny face by the link, to indicate that sentiment analysis is largely negative. Don't hide anything, but make how the site is relevant more apparent.
- thefool 16y agoThey seemed to say that such an option was still on the table.
- JangoSteve 16y agoHow cool would it be if the guy behind this site did a writeup now to show what happens to search traffic and income when you shit on customers, then get your very own article in the NYTimes, and then Google tweaks their search algorithm specifically to hurt you?
- jeffreyrusso 16y agoThis was an artful response. Google took what was essentially a piece of negative press from the New York Times and used it as an argument against the call for transparency in the algorithm that so many major media sources are pushing for lately.
- dcdan 16y agoThis feels like mostly a PR piece to me. And reports seem conflicting. Google doesn't seem to say what they did beyond that they "developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience." Danny Sullivan claims they are "Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal" (http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant-reviews-as-ranking-signal-57445 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant...). Techcrunch claims Google "compiled a list of hundreds of merchants (including DecorMyEyes) that provided “bad user experience” and algorithmically forced them lower" (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/googl/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/googl/). edit: typo
- lawrence 16y agoHopefully this is PR spin. If it's not, it's pretty disturbing that allegations of one mean merchant can cause an algo change. How many businesses will be collateral damage of this update? How many fake negative review campaigns with this spawn? If this is a real algo change, it was done in an extraordinarily hasty, reactionary, and cavalier manner. (Please don't ding my site G, nothing personal)
- smiler 16y agoThe techcrunch piece is nothing more than some filler around the Google blog post. I don't think it's offering any extra insight.
- adammichaelc 16y agoSeems to have worked (not like I was expecting it not to). This search term used to show DecorMyEyes on the 1st page, but no longer does: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Christian+Audigier+glasses&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
- chintan 16y agoAnd they are still on the Index http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Christian+Audigier+glasses&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&source=hp&q=Christian+Audigier+glasses+decormyeyes&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=3f2d83e828bdfbc http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
- Google_franke 16y agoNow mute google conversations the smarter way. The unmute feature added to More Actions on Emails. http://bit.ly/gX0roM http://bit.ly/gX0roM
- econner 16y agoI couldn't help but fix on these two sentences: "We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said." Doesn't this sound like the exact things security people used to say before realizing that they needed to make their mechanisms public in order to ensure their security.
- skm 16y agoWould anyone else like sentiment controls in google's search tools sidebar? Three settings I'd use would be: • Show more results about which people talk positively • Show more results about which people talk negatively • Show results which generate strong opinions, both positive and negative Alternatively, a "show sentiment for this search" which added a small indicator next to the search results might do the trick. (Just to be clear, I'm not proposing adjusting the ranking of pages based on the sentiment on the page itself, interesting though that might be, but rather based on the sentiment in the text surrounding links to that page.) From Google's blog: As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.
- pzxc 16y agoNow if they could only get rid of BigResource.com pages. They come a lot on my searches, especially coding specific ones, and that site has no content of its own. It just aggregates forum threads from other forums (not its own), and what's worse it's usually in such a broken way as to not let you read the thread on the page you're given OR find the original forum thread it was scraped from. Yeah, I know, there are a lot of questionable sites cropping up more and more as everyone is going all DemandMedia on monetizing SERPs without providing much real value. That's kind of my point, and why I don't bother reporting BigResource even if I thought it would accomplish something (which it wouldn't) -- because it is by far not alone. Google used to be so good at identifying scraped sites or made-for-adsense and it seems more and more are not only slipping through the cracks but in fact dominating the search results. To me this is a much more important issue than that of people getting a ton of backlinks from negative stories/comments which anyone with half a brain would be wary of giving money to if they actually checked (by searching for the company itself directly and discovering all the bad press instead of just searching for "$mycity $productname" and then giving their credit card info). Yes, I know that's too much to expect of most people. But really, I think google should try to help people who can effectively use their engine and try hard to do so but get poor-quality results before people who can't or won't bother to use it effectively.
- subbu 16y agoAnd thanks to Google Earth, he can faux-stalk his customers without leaving his house Add google streetview and their latest Google Earth 6 (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-google-earth-6the-next.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-google-ea...), it makes it even more easier to stalk people without leaving your chair.
- shasta 16y agoI wonder if they're going to apply this filtering technology to their sponsored links. There are paying scammers, too.
- tomger 16y agoI don't understand why people think the internet works any different than real life. You don't just buy products in a dodgy shop, even if it's the first shop you see. Google is as responsible for this as a phonebook company would be for giving you a bad phone number.
- NikkiA 16y ago> Google is as responsible for this as a phonebook company would be for giving you a bad phone number. Generally, I agree, except that there is an important distinction to be made - the phonebook generally doesn't rank businesses into any order other than alphabetical. Yes, the phonebook has 'paid listings' in addition, which are bigger and more prominent, but google has these too, and like the phonebook these are labelled as such. But the general google listings are sorted into a form of meaningful order, people expect (rightly or wrongly) that the higher up in the general listings a result is, the better it is likely to be because more people use it. I'm not sure what the best solution to the issue is, perhaps just to accept that google isn't the best resource for finding reputable businesses, and try and educate people on the alternatives.
- jalpino 16y agoI wonder if Google took into consideration their own customer service into the equation? Non-existent support is just as bad as being a douche.