6 ms·

>It all begins with our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, and today, our mission feels as relevant as e

>It all begins with our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, and today, our mission feels as relevant as ever. I said this 15 years ago and I will repeat it again. Google is like a man selling boats after a dam brake. They are profiting by managing the problem, not by fixing it. It is to their benefit if the problem actually gets worse. In other words, looking at their long-running effects and initiatives, I see that they aim to change the Internet so that it's completely unusable without their services. (The recent stunts with AMP and Gmail are great, obvious examples, but it didn't start there. It was going on for a very long while.) This not the kind of thing that I want to spread to my offline life.

falcolas 7y ago
Google is also holding the plunger that helped create the dam breakage. Not to mention the pry-bars being applied to any attempts to fix the dam. EDIT: For those who want to downvote, consider that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads, and that most of the advances in ad targeting using personal data have been made by Google.
- darkwizard42 7y ago
  I think you are espousing an "ADS ARE INHERENTLY BAD" mentality that just doesn't resonate with people. I want to know about the best services that are useful for me. I do not want to be advertised women's swimsuits on Instagram (I'm a male with no interest in purchasing said item). When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much inclined to explore or purchase a product that I will genuinely be happy with. So, ads aren't inherently bad, they become bad or unfulfilling when they aren't personally relevant or become overly invasive in experience or content.
  - gervase 7y ago
    It resonates with me, because I view ads as (intrinsically) mentally intrusive. I find seeing any ad, regardless of its relevance, infuriating; the advertiser is paying someone, not me, to place a thought or perception into my brain that I do not want there. If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) information about jackets and make my own decision. Some of that might be in the form of advertising, but I will have made the decision to seek it out, rather than my plane ticket purchase being mined and then targeted with a clothing company ad. I consider it to be equivalent to someone unexpectedly spooning food into my mouth, then arguing "Well, you have to eat anyway, why are you complaining?" It violates my sense of agency. Perhaps I have a higher desire for agency than most?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - djakjxnanjak 7y ago
      Do you believe you are being force-fed thoughts any time you hear or read anything anyone else expresses? Seems to be just as much the case whether on not that expression is part of an ad. I personally have a pretty strong desire for agency. I’m also conscious that my understanding of the world is entirely constructed by the sum of my interactions with said world, and advertising is only a tiny part of it. I’m thankful for the sensory input this world provides me - without them my brain would have nothing to do and my agency wouldn’t be very useful. It sounds like you are suffering a lot because your experience of advertising in the world is incompatible with your opinions about advertising. I can see two ways to solve this problem: 1) Adjust your opinions about advertising, so that you think of them as part of your voluntary engagement with the world around you, not something that is being forced on you. 2) Remove advertising from your life.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    There’s a difference between ads targeted to information you provide explicitly (age & gender when you signed up, etc) and information that is obtained by stalking you across the entire internet. I’m all in for the former, but the latter should be made illegal.
    - mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
      Retargetting is a curse that needs to be eliminated. The idea of following people for up to (30?) days without an easy opt out is just so wrong. Just because I visited your website doesn’t mean I care to buy what you sell, no matter how long you stalk me.
  - blub 7y ago
    "However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much inclined to explore or purchase a product that I will genuinely be happy with" You've been trained to buy things and don't even realise it. What would happen if you didn't see that ad for the jacket, would you go without clothes? Heck, maybe you'd go visit a store and meet new people. Or you'd save more money. The whole premise that we need advertising to make us happy is ridiculous.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    First and foremost - ads do not require personal information. Newspapers, television, and blogs have thrived on non-personalized ads for decades. The advent of targeted ads (the dam getting blown to hell) is what made general ads unfavorable (personalization and the absolute saturation of ads in every aspect of our lives). /rant That said, given that ads are a psychological trick to get you to purchase something (often something that you don't need in the first place), you're right: I do consider ads to be inherently bad. "But mah blog isn't sustainable without ads" - If your blog depends on collecting a heap of pennies generated by psychological manipulation of your viewer base, your blog provides a net negative value to your viewers. /end rant
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Newspapers, television, blogs, direct mail, billboards, etc. all rely on a modicum of audience targeting. Don't pretend that P&G would naively pay for laundry detergent ads in Playboy magazine because they didn't know who the magazine's audience was. As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).
      - falcolas 7y ago
        There’s a marked difference between targeting ads based on the surrounding content and targeting ads based on my age, gender, location, browsing history, purchasing history, religion, job, income, and social network. Claims that they are equivalent feel like an attempt to normalize such invasive ad targeting.
        bduerst 7y ago
        Nothing in my comment said they were equivalent - As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).
  - mceachen 7y ago
    Please don't discount how deep the rabbit hole goes with adtech. I spent over a decade in adtech. I have several patents from > 8 years ago for metadata-based ad targeting. While I agree with you that it is better to see relevant ads over irrelevant ads, the datastores that enable fine-grained behavioral targeting is, simply put, just too much power for any corporation (or government) to wield. Corporations directly profit from larger data stores. The more invasive the data extraction, and the more available it is to their true customers, which are advertisers, the more they profit. The advertiser dashboards and ability to explore potential audiences based on targeting, both on G and FB, are astoundingly detailed. I try to convince everyone in my life to run an adblocker and stay off FB. One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work.
    - lwhsiao 7y ago
      > One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work. This sounds interesting. Do you have any links you can share?
      - aerique 7y ago
        Or perhaps an ad supported blog?
  - craftinator 7y ago
    Targetted ads are inherently bad, and that resonates with most people I've talked to about it. I want to be able to specifically search for things that solve my problems; I don't need a torrent of competing products that I have no interest in distracting me from reading a cool article. I blacklist products advertised to me, refuse to buy them, because I hate the snake oilery the advertising profession has become. And, Google is evil and has perpetuated and propagated (and profiteered) the monetization of personal information, and bolstered that environment by sabotaging the open web.
  - titzer 7y ago
    > When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. Yeah, me too. The difference is that nowadays all the platforms, services, devices, and tracking are being used intrude into every single corner of life. They are constantly tracking you, analyzing you, studying your every move. And they are trying to interpose into every waking moment of your life. The day that my guitar tuner app for Android showed me an ad in the middle of tuning my guitar (which usually takes 20 seconds), intruding to the very thing that I need most to unplug from this shit show, I just about lost my mind. Fuck advertisers. I hope that whole ecosystem implodes.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 7y ago
  > the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads The vast majority of the revenue comes from search ads, which are intent-based on the keywords in the query. What you're talking about are display ads / adsense, which is not even close to the majority of their revenue.
lostmsu 7y ago
Also > our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible to Google
- Fins 7y ago
  And to make the wrong information inaccessible.
  - andromeduck 7y ago
    Ahh so Google should only be the universal arbiter of truth.
    - Fins 7y ago
      Should everything be marked with a sarcasm tag?
  - UncleMeat 7y ago
    Yeah. What else do you think search ranking does? Do you want an unsorted list of all websites that contain your keywords?
    - neuralk 7y ago
      >Do you want an unsorted list of all websites that contain your keywords? Yes, because then I could apply my own ranking. More realistically, it would be useful as various web services could select from among various forms of ranking as desired by their users. Right now, the internet as a collective is at the whim of the particular ranking Google elects to use. If they don't like you, too bad, you lose. What's more, I would even settle for a sorted list of all websites that contain my keywords, but Google provides no such thing. Google's algorithm has changed significantly in just the past few years, making it very difficult to do research of unusual topics, no matter how broad or specific you make your search. For instance, just today I was looking up information related to an event in the life of Andre Gide. After you get through a few pages (maybe 150 or so useful links from the grab bag of what appears), Google makes it such that you can explore no further. Entering a new term with a slight variation can yield a set of another ~150 results with no overlap with the previous search's results, making any kind of exhaustive research quite frustrating.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
What exactly are you suggesting here? What's the fundamental problem that Google is managing instead of fixing, once and for all?
- harryf 7y ago
  Discovery. From a technical point of view search doesn’t have to be centralized. Economics and the nature of markets may say different though
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    Maybe I'm just dumb, but I'm not following. How could they solve discovery once and for all, instead of managing it? I don't see how decentralization would permanently solve discovery. I can see how it could be useful in other ways, but you'd still be managing an ongoing problem.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      I _think_ the GP's point is that Google is "managing" discovery, i.e., if Google were to up and disappear we would have a large problem on our hands. If search were decentralized then no single entity could bring it down.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        I mean, there are a bunch of other search engines out there, and I still don't see how having even more would somehow 'solve' search for good.
        Draiken 7y ago
        I think Google is way more than just "search". No other engine knows everything about you. Knows what you read, what you dislike, your appointments, your travels, etc. While there are alternatives for search, it's only search. Everything else is scattered. Google lives and breathes through the mesh of services they offer. Search is at the core, but everything attached to it is what makes Google so different. It is a scary prospect IMO. We already sold our souls to it whether we like it or not. We live on our tech bubble and perhaps try to make better choices but it will never happen to the majority. Most of what I said can also be said about Facebook, with the social network at the centre instead.
gbrown 7y ago
Case in point: Google Play Services on Android.
docr 7y ago
There, I fixed it for you: https://imgur.com/a/enJ3C8V https://imgur.com/a/enJ3C8V

falcolas 7y ago

Google is also holding the plunger that helped create the dam breakage. Not to mention the pry-bars being applied to any attempts to fix the dam. EDIT: For those who want to downvote, consider that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads, and that most of the advances in ad targeting using personal data have been made by Google.

darkwizard42 7y ago
I think you are espousing an "ADS ARE INHERENTLY BAD" mentality that just doesn't resonate with people. I want to know about the best services that are useful for me. I do not want to be advertised women's swimsuits on Instagram (I'm a male with no interest in purchasing said item). When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much inclined to explore or purchase a product that I will genuinely be happy with. So, ads aren't inherently bad, they become bad or unfulfilling when they aren't personally relevant or become overly invasive in experience or content.
- gervase 7y ago
  It resonates with me, because I view ads as (intrinsically) mentally intrusive. I find seeing any ad, regardless of its relevance, infuriating; the advertiser is paying someone, not me, to place a thought or perception into my brain that I do not want there. If I decide that I want to purchase a new jacket, for example because I'm traveling to a much colder climate, I want to be able to seek out (ideally unbiased) information about jackets and make my own decision. Some of that might be in the form of advertising, but I will have made the decision to seek it out, rather than my plane ticket purchase being mined and then targeted with a clothing company ad. I consider it to be equivalent to someone unexpectedly spooning food into my mouth, then arguing "Well, you have to eat anyway, why are you complaining?" It violates my sense of agency. Perhaps I have a higher desire for agency than most?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - djakjxnanjak 7y ago
    Do you believe you are being force-fed thoughts any time you hear or read anything anyone else expresses? Seems to be just as much the case whether on not that expression is part of an ad. I personally have a pretty strong desire for agency. I’m also conscious that my understanding of the world is entirely constructed by the sum of my interactions with said world, and advertising is only a tiny part of it. I’m thankful for the sensory input this world provides me - without them my brain would have nothing to do and my agency wouldn’t be very useful. It sounds like you are suffering a lot because your experience of advertising in the world is incompatible with your opinions about advertising. I can see two ways to solve this problem: 1) Adjust your opinions about advertising, so that you think of them as part of your voluntary engagement with the world around you, not something that is being forced on you. 2) Remove advertising from your life.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  There’s a difference between ads targeted to information you provide explicitly (age & gender when you signed up, etc) and information that is obtained by stalking you across the entire internet. I’m all in for the former, but the latter should be made illegal.
  - mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
    Retargetting is a curse that needs to be eliminated. The idea of following people for up to (30?) days without an easy opt out is just so wrong. Just because I visited your website doesn’t mean I care to buy what you sell, no matter how long you stalk me.
- blub 7y ago
  "However, when I see an ad for Allbirds or a cool new leather jacket, I feel very much inclined to explore or purchase a product that I will genuinely be happy with" You've been trained to buy things and don't even realise it. What would happen if you didn't see that ad for the jacket, would you go without clothes? Heck, maybe you'd go visit a store and meet new people. Or you'd save more money. The whole premise that we need advertising to make us happy is ridiculous.
- falcolas 7y ago
  First and foremost - ads do not require personal information. Newspapers, television, and blogs have thrived on non-personalized ads for decades. The advent of targeted ads (the dam getting blown to hell) is what made general ads unfavorable (personalization and the absolute saturation of ads in every aspect of our lives). /rant That said, given that ads are a psychological trick to get you to purchase something (often something that you don't need in the first place), you're right: I do consider ads to be inherently bad. "But mah blog isn't sustainable without ads" - If your blog depends on collecting a heap of pennies generated by psychological manipulation of your viewer base, your blog provides a net negative value to your viewers. /end rant
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Newspapers, television, blogs, direct mail, billboards, etc. all rely on a modicum of audience targeting. Don't pretend that P&G would naively pay for laundry detergent ads in Playboy magazine because they didn't know who the magazine's audience was. As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).
    - falcolas 7y ago
      There’s a marked difference between targeting ads based on the surrounding content and targeting ads based on my age, gender, location, browsing history, purchasing history, religion, job, income, and social network. Claims that they are equivalent feel like an attempt to normalize such invasive ad targeting.
      - bduerst 7y ago
        Nothing in my comment said they were equivalent - As with all things, it scales with technological advancements, which also includes new responsibilities (that this article is mentioning).
- mceachen 7y ago
  Please don't discount how deep the rabbit hole goes with adtech. I spent over a decade in adtech. I have several patents from > 8 years ago for metadata-based ad targeting. While I agree with you that it is better to see relevant ads over irrelevant ads, the datastores that enable fine-grained behavioral targeting is, simply put, just too much power for any corporation (or government) to wield. Corporations directly profit from larger data stores. The more invasive the data extraction, and the more available it is to their true customers, which are advertisers, the more they profit. The advertiser dashboards and ability to explore potential audiences based on targeting, both on G and FB, are astoundingly detailed. I try to convince everyone in my life to run an adblocker and stay off FB. One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work.
  - lwhsiao 7y ago
    > One of the richest sources of metadata about you and your loved ones are your photos. I quit my day job to build a self-hosted, life-scale photo store, partly as a passion project, partly driven by disgust and penance from prior adtech work. This sounds interesting. Do you have any links you can share?
    - aerique 7y ago
      Or perhaps an ad supported blog?
- craftinator 7y ago
  Targetted ads are inherently bad, and that resonates with most people I've talked to about it. I want to be able to specifically search for things that solve my problems; I don't need a torrent of competing products that I have no interest in distracting me from reading a cool article. I blacklist products advertised to me, refuse to buy them, because I hate the snake oilery the advertising profession has become. And, Google is evil and has perpetuated and propagated (and profiteered) the monetization of personal information, and bolstered that environment by sabotaging the open web.
- titzer 7y ago
  > When I see ads that are useless its infuriating. Yeah, me too. The difference is that nowadays all the platforms, services, devices, and tracking are being used intrude into every single corner of life. They are constantly tracking you, analyzing you, studying your every move. And they are trying to interpose into every waking moment of your life. The day that my guitar tuner app for Android showed me an ad in the middle of tuning my guitar (which usually takes 20 seconds), intruding to the very thing that I need most to unplug from this shit show, I just about lost my mind. Fuck advertisers. I hope that whole ecosystem implodes.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bduerst 7y ago
> the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from the use of your personal information to target you with ads The vast majority of the revenue comes from search ads, which are intent-based on the keywords in the query. What you're talking about are display ads / adsense, which is not even close to the majority of their revenue.

lostmsu 7y ago

Also > our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible to Google

Fins 7y ago
And to make the wrong information inaccessible.
- andromeduck 7y ago
  Ahh so Google should only be the universal arbiter of truth.
  - Fins 7y ago
    Should everything be marked with a sarcasm tag?
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Yeah. What else do you think search ranking does? Do you want an unsorted list of all websites that contain your keywords?
  - neuralk 7y ago
    >Do you want an unsorted list of all websites that contain your keywords? Yes, because then I could apply my own ranking. More realistically, it would be useful as various web services could select from among various forms of ranking as desired by their users. Right now, the internet as a collective is at the whim of the particular ranking Google elects to use. If they don't like you, too bad, you lose. What's more, I would even settle for a sorted list of all websites that contain my keywords, but Google provides no such thing. Google's algorithm has changed significantly in just the past few years, making it very difficult to do research of unusual topics, no matter how broad or specific you make your search. For instance, just today I was looking up information related to an event in the life of Andre Gide. After you get through a few pages (maybe 150 or so useful links from the grab bag of what appears), Google makes it such that you can explore no further. Entering a new term with a slight variation can yield a set of another ~150 results with no overlap with the previous search's results, making any kind of exhaustive research quite frustrating.

TulliusCicero 7y ago

What exactly are you suggesting here? What's the fundamental problem that Google is managing instead of fixing, once and for all?

harryf 7y ago
Discovery. From a technical point of view search doesn’t have to be centralized. Economics and the nature of markets may say different though
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Maybe I'm just dumb, but I'm not following. How could they solve discovery once and for all, instead of managing it? I don't see how decentralization would permanently solve discovery. I can see how it could be useful in other ways, but you'd still be managing an ongoing problem.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    I _think_ the GP's point is that Google is "managing" discovery, i.e., if Google were to up and disappear we would have a large problem on our hands. If search were decentralized then no single entity could bring it down.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      I mean, there are a bunch of other search engines out there, and I still don't see how having even more would somehow 'solve' search for good.
      - Draiken 7y ago
        I think Google is way more than just "search". No other engine knows everything about you. Knows what you read, what you dislike, your appointments, your travels, etc. While there are alternatives for search, it's only search. Everything else is scattered. Google lives and breathes through the mesh of services they offer. Search is at the core, but everything attached to it is what makes Google so different. It is a scary prospect IMO. We already sold our souls to it whether we like it or not. We live on our tech bubble and perhaps try to make better choices but it will never happen to the majority. Most of what I said can also be said about Facebook, with the social network at the centre instead.

gbrown 7y ago

Case in point: Google Play Services on Android.

docr 7y ago

There, I fixed it for you: https://imgur.com/a/enJ3C8V https://imgur.com/a/enJ3C8V