13 ms·

Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet

250 points by jonmwords 15y ago

zalew 15y ago
I enjoy G+ and it's a huge usability improvement over fb, but there's another 'feature' I simply can't stand - that comments are visible in the stream under the post. I don't mind it under my friends' posts, but public popular profiles are another story. I'd like to progressively replace my twitter newsfeed with g+ profiles, but twitter gives me the comfort of not seeing opinions of some random people who like to comment on mainstream, the names who shared (I don't know some John Doe, why would I care he and +320 other people shared it?) and other noise. G+ is nice with the preview and lack of artificial 140char limit, but on twitter I can quickly scan the news without TMI I don't care about. example: http://i.imgur.com/8i8Az.png http://i.imgur.com/8i8Az.png
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  I agree. I'd really like for there to be a "condensed" viewing option, where characters after 140 or so are truncated, and comments are hidden by default. Between that and their new controls for filtering how much of each circle ends up in your main stream, skimming G+ would become a lot easier.
  - cheald 15y ago
    That'd be really easy to do with a Chrome extension.
  - jonmwords 15y ago
    Me, too. This is the crux of the problem. Allowing such huge posts and so many media types makes the stream impossible to scan. All the reactions the post is getting from G+ worshippers skip over this point, so I guess some people like being assaulted.
  - zalew 15y ago
    I don't mind previews longer than 140 or even bigger thumbnails. These is at least good display of valid information (a huge advantage over twitter), while +counters and strangers' opinions are pointless noise. If they want to expose the number of +s why not line it up next to the [+1] button? Why take a full line just for one number? Likewise, the number of shares can be next to the share button.
- Tichy 15y ago
  Doesn't it give you a warm, soothing feeling that 320 people shared something you like? I think we all crave the social proof, no matter what you say...
mike-cardwell 15y ago
As well as the user experience being crap, there are the issues of Google silently removing swearing from your profile, and kicking you off if they don't think your name is real.
thurn 15y ago
His first point is just wrong. You can link to the original post (https://plus.google.com/102025628931490661645/posts/6D2CtDQxgWn https://plus.google.com/102025628931490661645/posts/6D2CtDQx...), but only if it's visible to you. You obviously can't link to a post you can't see.
- sequoia 15y ago
  The plagiarizers response (in the link above) to why he copypasted rather thank linking: You have a good point, I have only kept major content and not the whole article, at times I feel sharing a link just dissuades users from reading the post. Or plain & simple kills interest. I have though started making the change you have suggested few articles too long are again too daunting to read. But overall your feedback taken. Thanks for pointing this out. "I feel sharing a link just dissuades users from reading the post." Wow.
  - shortformblog 15y ago
    The author's problem with G+ is not Google. His problem with G+ is bad curators who don't respect the creators of the content. As curation is my forte (I run a popular Tumblr news blog), Rohit Shrivastava's response really annoys me. Tumblr, which shares a lot of cues with Google+ in terms of how content is shared publicly, has similar users to Rohit. I think it's bad form to post the entire contents of an article. Post small bits, the gist, but encourage people to keep reading if they like the basic idea. IMHO, Tumblr does a better job of encouraging users to respect content creators. But the thing is, the problem is not unique to either of these platforms. How many random WordPress splogs steal RWW's content wholesale and just scrape the RSS feed? A lot. All the big tech sites have this problem. The difference with G+ is, Google seems to enable these copy-wholesale types better by giving them strong positions in search results. Tumblr is not as good at SEO (it makes up for it with design), so it's not as big an issue. To users like Rohit, respect the content creators. It sucks when they get screwed because you couldn't stop after a single paragraph or rewrite the piece.
  - sp332 15y ago
    It's true. I'm much more likely to read a black of text that's already loaded inline with the thread I'm reading, than I am to click over to another page to read the same thing.
j_col 15y ago
From the article: "The quickest way to do that was to type 'jon mitchell jury duty' into the Google search bar. To my astonishment, the post I wanted was not the first result. It was the third. Ranking above the result I wanted were two Google+ posts, one by me, and one by our webmaster Jared, that were nothing more than links to the article with brief comments." So Google continues to use it's search muscle to promote it's own web services first, and yet some people still find this surprising.
- mamp 15y ago
  They should have a section for G+ results which are equivalent of 'paid links' i.e. if their rank has been boosted then mark them as such. Otherwise they risk losing credibility on search results as the first page is not best match but unmarked advertising. While not evil per se, a little naughty.
- benihana 15y ago
  The point is that they're doing this, and it's annoying, not surprising.
- hamax 15y ago
  Did people from your circles +1 any of those 2 posts? If so, the rank is 'reasonable'.
steele 15y ago
Hmm, I enjoy using G+. Maybe I don't have the needs of the e-media i-blog web-news e-lite.
icebraining 15y ago
But never forget that you're Google's product, not its customer. And never forget that you're a ReadWriteWeb product, not its customer. You don't pay for the articles, your eyeballs are sold to RWW sponsors and partners. Sigh. Hypocrisy much? This is how most of the web works. The constant attacks on Google or Facebook over it are ridiculous and tiring.
- funkah 15y ago
  I agree, people keep stumbling upon this saying and parroting it, as if it were any more insightful than "2 + 2 = 4".
- dasil003 15y ago
  Everyone's a hypocrite. If you are not a hypocrite then you aren't saying anything interesting. His point may be a tired one, but it's valid. We rely on Google for a lot and would do well to keep their allegiances in mind; all the more so because Google has traditionally been something of a benefactor to the web user (although the cracks are starting to show since they lose money on most of their free services). The reason his hypocrisy is irrelevant is because we don't have any illusions about ReadWriteWeb's allegiances, and even if we did we don't rely on them for shit.
  - swaits 15y ago
    > We rely on Google for a lot ... Some of us do go out of our way to avoid relying on them for "a lot". I know we're a small minority, but to people like me, it's worth the effort.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    His point may be a tired one, but it's valid. I disagree, but I'll get to that. First, even if it was, it's repeated every single day to the point of exhaustion. And I still wouldn't have minded it, if this was a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on free services instead of a hate piece against Google (oh, and with a jab at Facebook). Secondly, how's the allegiance when Sony pushed a rootkit up their consumer's, or tried to force them to sign away their rights? Or expensive Ubisoft games that stop working when your net connection goes down? Or what about SOPA lobbying, think that will benefit their consumers? (Most) companies are loyal to themselves, their top managers and possibly their shareholders. Whether we're consumers or products is a red herring.
Varun06 15y ago
I also enjoy using G+. and as the writer said that he wanted it to get off his chest, that's what he did. so no problem...keep writing.. People will do what they want to do...
sequoia 15y ago
"Well, that didn't make me feel much better, because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people." OP is a web-tech blogger and he just now learned this? I don't use G+ much so I can't easily evaluate the rest of OPs assertions, but I am questioning them by default because when someone makes one statement I know to be false (or in this case inexcusably ignorant), it calls the rest of their statements into question. This is unfortunate because I think much what OP says is useful, but, c'mon: if you blog about web tech and didn't know google tailors results, it makes you seem like you "don't know how any of this stuff works" and I can't take you seriously in that regard. I am very confused by the section about plagiarism/mis-attribution/non-attribution. OP says his work was "almost-unattributed" but I couldn't find any link back to him on the G+ posting. Did someone click the share button, or paste in a link to his article? Or did someone copy and paste his article? If it's the latter, this phenomenon is much older than the Internet and has nothing to do with G+, specifically, besides the fact that Google may rate your plagiarized "work" higher than the original on its results (which is a distinct issue that applies to both plagiarized and properly-attributed posts). EDIT: I see the name now, it was next to the title in the post. Thank you OP.
- jonmwords 15y ago
  It's "almost-attributed" because he included my name, but there was no link or mention of my site. I don't care about the name. I care about the site. That's what the whole rant is about. Of course I knew that Google tailored results. How would I have been able to include any context in this post otherwise? You took a human-written sentence out of context and made it make less sense than it does in the body of the post.
  - ed209 15y ago
    to be fair to sequoia, that's how I read it too (within the context of the article).
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    Have you implemented the author markup as Google suggest?
icebraining 15y ago
And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump through hoops." Hoops like reading the article? Sigh. No, jumps to comment. He likes the G+ links for the same reason I prefer HN over a simple RSS feed: because we can read the article and then comment easily in a good community. The thing is: he can get to your article through the G+ link, but he can't get to the G+ comments page from your article. Therefore, the G+ link is richer. (Not that I'm condoning that Google put his products above everything else. But to the G+ user, it's obviously better)
- stanleydrew 15y ago
  I like this point, but i wonder: how would people feel if, for instance, this HN conversation page ranked higher in Google search results than the actual RWW article?
  - gdw2 15y ago
    In many cases, I find the HN comments just as insightful as the articles and at least the HN comments link to the article (doesn't usually work the other way around). Perhaps the best situation would be if sites such as HN and + didn't take up their own slot but were listed subordinate to the original article (underneath it as an icon or a single-lined link).
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >how would people feel if, for instance, this HN conversation page ranked higher in Google search results than the actual RWW article? Arguably it's of more value.
- tmarthal 15y ago
  You raise a good point. How many of us would comment on articles if the YC HN article feed if it was just a Google+ hangout with posted links? It sure seems that the barrier to entry would be lower to comment/discuss articles, however it is unclear if whomever the moderaters are here would have as much control.
devmach 15y ago
Google isn't the internet and if it fails , it's google's problem not ours( or internet's ?). There is other alternatives to google's services, if one finds the others better than google, he is free to use them. Seriously, just don't use it if you hate it, that's the best response that you can give. I don't use G+ because of the "Real Name Policy". It's my choice to give my real name or not and Google don't respect my choices. I have FB, e-mail (yay!), blog, skype etc... I have everything to communicate with my friends or with the world ! I don't need some Nazi to give me an advice like "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It"....
- j_col 15y ago
  I'm sorry, but for a large amount of people who only use Google for search, Google is the Internet. That's why I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago, but people like me are a tiny minority. Now speaking as a web publishing, if people started to copy-and-paste my articles into Google+ and these entries got higher rankings on Google search than my original content, I'd be pretty upset too. It isn't a question of what search engine I use in this instance, but what the majority of everyone else is using.
  - devmach 15y ago
    Google can be a giant now but it isn't mean that it's invincible. Google isn't innovative since "Gmail", keeps making mistakes (buzz etc) and make people angry. Nowadays people aren't royal to the products and even "normal" users can change their habits (remember icq -> msn transformation)
    - danso 15y ago
      Can you elaborate on...well, everything, in your post? What do you mean "keeps making mistakes." That Google, like everyone else, makes mistakes, and will continue to do so until the end of the world? Or that it is making a higher-than-expected number of mistakes?
      - 15y ago
Cybersky 15y ago
G+ is an abomination. I'm glad no one is using it except non-influential geeks.
dasil003 15y ago
I'm torn on this issue. Before Google+ things were all over the place. Google had lots of great services, but they were poorly integrated, appeared and disappeared frequently, didn't work with apps users or vice versa. Now Google clearly is moving in a direction that promises better unification and clean-up of annoying edge cases. The problem is that Google is losing track of its mission statement. It's seeing everything through the lens of social, which is not really in its DNA to begin with. I understand they don't want to dismiss a threat and get their lunch eaten, but they are throwing away a lot of what made them great. There's gotta be a happy medium between completely ignoring up-and-coming threats and throwing yourself so fiercely behind every trend that you end up sabotaging your own strengths that are the very weak points of your feared competitors.
jroseattle 15y ago
Google search results are beginning to bore the life out of me, and part of it has to do with inane google-plus entries in the search results. WTF goog search? It seems like ever since Bing showed up and did that little left-hand column of filters, you started running around doing all sorts of "innovation" and it seems messy and quality control is just starting to suck wind. It's obvious you're tinkering with search results to promote your own services -- did you not think anyone would notice? Goog search, I don't even know you anymore.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  That's really not what's happening here. I have a fairly unique name, and the basic problem is that when you search for a person's name, their personal website has a lower rank than any social network, so LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and G+ will often show up above someone's personal site. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how the ranking algorithm works.
  - jroseattle 15y ago
    Thanks Luke, but my use case doesn't involve searching on someone's name.
    - lukeschlather 15y ago
      Sorry, what was your case again? I thought we were talking about the article and the "jon mitchell jury duty" query.
      - jroseattle 15y ago
        I was complaining about Google search, the inclusion of google-plus entries, and how it's search results have taken a turn for the worse. In my experience, I've started to see more and more google plus entries in search results, and those results are often crappy.
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
lukeschlather 15y ago
This is not actually a Google+ problem. It's a social networking problem. Facebook.com, linkedin.com, and google.com are all preferred over anyone's personal site. My name is a good case study because it is, as far as I know, unique. Google is currently doing the "right thing" but previously it had been returning my Facebook page above my personal website. That's broken, but it has nothing to do with G+, and everything to do with the way all search engines rank people. (Bing does the "wrong thing" with respect to my name, and shows LinkedIn first. DDG also throws in two random things from years ago in before getting to my modern website.) Search is a hard problem, and the result is subjective.
bradleyland 15y ago
Maybe this is obvious to everyone, but this is clearly Google's reactionary response to the assertion that social is the future of search. At some time in the past, there were a slew of articles espousing the belief that users would change from searching Google for their quandaries to a more personal exchange of information: asking someone you know. I don't know what the underlying causes are, but I know three kinds of internet users: A) Those who are capable of finding information using a search engine B) Those who aren't capable of finding information using a search engine C) Those who never even try; they just ask someone It's easy to jump to the conclusion that the type A individuals are simply more "savvy", but my father, who hardly uses a computer, astounded me the other day by deftly searching out a fantastic manual for the carburetor on his Suzuki Samurai. My father is the type that would much rather be out de-gunking his carb than sitting at a computer. How is he so effective at search? I would have expected him to fall under the type C user category. Google knows this scenario all too well. They're watching it play out in real time on the web. They have to get in front of it and provide solutions for all three types of users. For better or worse, giving Google+ pages "website" status in their results is their way of getting ahead of sites like Facebook and Quora.
takinola 15y ago
Because Google favors G+ results in search, G+ is going to become a very powerful SEO tool and this is going to push publishers to become more and more invested in G+. Search is Google's advantage over Facebook and they are going to press this advantage to the max in order to take on Facebook. I can't say I blame them but I do wonder if there are no real anti-trust issues here. How is this different than when MSFT used its OS dominance to promote its (late-to-the-party) browser? Google is basically using their own dominance in search to promote their (late-to-the-party) social network
- jrockway 15y ago
  I'm not sure that this is true. Typically, Google's results are tailored for you based on your circles and browsing history. This tweaking does not help people that aren't already your friends. As an example, when I search for the article this article is about with the terms "wired world jury duty", I get the readwriteweb article (with a picture of Jon Mitchell beside it) as the first result. Only the 7th result is a Google+ page, and it's not explicitly advertised in any special way. Google+ is about your social network, not "the" social network. (I personally love seeing the "8 of your friends have +1'd this" on the search result page. Instant authenticity!)
manojlds 15y ago
"It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time" The above line really shows the author doesn't get Google+. While I do have my own grievances about Google+, the author doesn't make valid claims and shouldn't be making any because the author has not understood it.
- cheald 15y ago
  I have to agree. Google+ is more of a "rich Twitter" than a "not-Facebook Facebook". People often mistake it for the latter, which I think may be a large part of the reason that so many people are ho-hum about it.
gregguida 15y ago
What a bunch of link bait... The title is blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It should have been "My free Google service is messing up my free Google service" The beauty of the internet is and always has been that if you don't like something its really way to switch to something else.
- aaronwall 15y ago
  The core issue isn't just how one free Google service interacts with another free Google service, but how when combined they undermine the copyright & revenue potential for a content creator by displacing that person's work with Google's copy of that person's work. If you are not in business (and don't care if your favorite non-Google sites eventually disappear) then it is no big deal. For everyone else it has the potential to be a big deal. If publishers do not complain about it now then it will get worse. How bad does it have to get before the complaints are valid to you?
ferrofluid 15y ago
Mess up "The Internet"? I don't think so. If you don't like Google, switch to Altavista.
- waqf 15y ago
  For a lot of purposes I have switched to Wikipedia. Automated web search simply isn't the right tool these days for many of the niches in which Google got its foothold in the '90s.
yanw 15y ago
This sort of post is further evidence that whenever G+ adds some new feature or publishes new numbers a PR attack is imminent. Usually you can tell straight away by the hyperbolic headlines.
VikingCoder 15y ago
> The stream is so noisy... See "Pump up (or down) the volume!" here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-few-big-improvements-before-new.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-few-big-improv... > Culturally, it feels like walking into a religious school. Your Google+ is made up of who you Circle. Just like the parties you go to are made up of the people who are at the parties you go to. If yours feels a certain way, it is because of who you Circle, and who you share posts with. > It was familiar because I had written it. I didn't see any attribution, though, let alone a link to the story. Rohit Shrivastava was a bad actor, in this case. Plagiarism is a terrible problem, and it's childish of you to blame Google+ for it. It is very easy to correctly link to an article, or share it. I agree that you have legitimate usability problems in many of the versions of Google+ that you used, but Rohit intentionally plagiarized you. You don't want attribution, you want links - that's understandable. Encourage people to use the tool the way it was intended to be used, don't blame the tool for existing. > Google thought I would prefer to click through Google+ to find my article than to go straight to it. Google thought that you and your friends are more interesting to you than the unwashed internet. In general, I think that's the correct choice. If I search "Steve Smith," I probably care a lot more about my friend, than any of the other Steve Smiths on the internet. > One comment (to which Google+ allows no way to link) I can't link to comments on your site either, Jon. > Hoops like reading the article? Hoops like Disqus, which you use allow people to comment. > All this personalization and real-time stuff surely helps Google organize its content, but it's breaking search. No, it's not. It's combining multiple searches into one interface. Searching your Google+ friends is one aspect of what a person could possibly want to search for. It sounds like you don't want to search the people you've Circled, and what they say. Other people do. If you want to search the internet with as little personalization as possible, your best bet is to open an incognito window. > Remember when it was "minimal?" This is what it looks like now: Look at your own site, Jon. No, seriously - go back and look at it for a moment. Sites got rich, with lots of content. > But Google is different. Google used to be about organizing the world's information. It was a service to the entire Web. But this social tangent is changing that. No, it's not. It's an outreach of that. It's a recognition that your view of the people that you know, and what they think, and how they're talking, is information - information that they're trying to help you organize, if you wish to use their tools. If you wish to use Google News. If you wish to use Android. If you wish to use Google+. > Thanks to the Scoble effect, I have 8,000 encirclements on Google+. It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time. There are people who want to know if you say anything publicly. If you don't want to say anything publicly, don't. > I changed it, because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point. Trolls? Do you want people to care what you say, or don't you? Whose job is it to make sure that people think you're saying what you mean to say? > Google+ Hates The Internet Who is the troll? No, seriously - please define the word troll such that it includes the people who pointed out how ridiculous it was for you to say "because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people", but excludes you, when you say "Google+ Hates The Internet." > I hate Google+. That's unfortunate. I wish it was a valuable tool for you, to help you organize how you're sharing content with people you know. If it's not, then oh well. My mom hates email. If she wrote an article like yours about how email is ruining cursive, she'd have a valid point. But the world is moving forward - and social interactions on the internet are going to spread everywhere. The only question is, what tools are we going to want to use? Again, you have legitimate complaints about sharing links on some platforms. I hope they get fixed, over time. But your other complaints strike me as either being your own fault for how you used the tool, other people's fault for doing the same bad things that people have been doing forever, or minor differences of opinion about usability... or just lamenting the decline of cursive.
toddh 15y ago
While I agree Google is deprecating the URL, as indicated by the removal of the Shared in Reader features, isn't this just a case of somebody cutting and pasting without attribution? G+ can't do anything about that.
obilgic 15y ago
irony that his post is +1'ed 50 times (more than facebook shares)
Vivtek 15y ago
Yargh. OP searched on his name plus "jury duty" and is complaining because Google returns two G+ hits with his name in the title before getting to the article he wrote about jury duty?
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I hate to do a tl;dr, but here it is: Google has bought and/or acquired so many web properties that they all can't appear in their own little special spot in search results. If you type in the name of an article you wrote and it's the 3rd or 4th listing, below somebody just mentioning it on G+? It's broken. Like Facebook, but to a greater degree, Google is making the internet crap by putting it's own little frame around everything. To me Google isn't evil by any means, but it has way too many smart people all trying to jump on whatever the latest popular bandwagon might be. It's definitely getting a "McGoogle" feel to it. Whatever is getting popular on the web, some little Googlite is busy working to assimilate it. I like Google a lot. The author has a point. At some point enough is enough. I think he exaggerates to a much greater degree than is necessary. So far.
- willy1234x1 15y ago
  Google.com has a high page rank. Thus plus.google.com has a high pagerank, it's not gaming the system. It's just inheriting the pagerank.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    The specific mechanics are irrelevant, it's still broken.
    - willy1234x1 15y ago
      That's not broken. If you had website foo.com and then added bar.foo.com you would expect that your pagerank transfer to your subdomain as well. Of course when the owner of pagerank has this apply to them it's suddenly "broken" though huh?
      - Simucal 15y ago
        I think you ignored mseebach's point. The mechanics of how the search results are ranked (pagerank) is irrelevant. The system is "broken" when original source content is ranking below people merely linking to it from another site.
vectorpush 15y ago
>One commenter said, "It's an algorithm. Get over yourself." Typical, orthodox devotion to the Almighty Google Algorithm and its Infallible Wisdom. That's a pretty disingenuous take on his comment. He's actually suggesting that algorithms are not perfect and that it's silly to infer intention from an arbitrary search result.
- eCa 15y ago
  On the other hand.. An algorithm exists to reduce arbitrarity, and until recently there wasn't much question about Google's success in that department. Now though, they are a competitor against other search results and - since the algorithm is in Google's possession - it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour.
  - vectorpush 15y ago
    it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour No, it is not a "big leap", but that doesn't mean it's true. It is conceivable that the search results are organic, especially given the content. It is also conceivable that an impartial query could determine that a G+ page (or any other page) is more relevant than the source article.
endtime 15y ago
> And it hit me: True Believers of the Holy + might see this re-shared Google+ post of an almost-unattributed rip of my story instead of the original. Google+ hates the Internet! Stopped reading here. This is a waste-of-time troll article.
resnamen 15y ago
I'm on several Internet forums where people copy and paste entire articles with no attribution. Slideshows are unrolled, images are hyperlinked, etc. They're breaking the Internet! No, wait, they have been the Internet since the very beginning.
gospelwut 15y ago
Ah, SEO, how much I loathe everything you spawn and touch.
jc4p 15y ago
It seems like most people here are jumping on this guy's throat about minor problems in what he wrote. Let me instead back-up one of his points with more evidence: First off: I am a huge Google fanboy, I'm a full-time Android developer and Google scholarships even helped pay for my college. It seems that every time I say anything bad about Google anywhere on the Internet people call me an Apple fanboy so I just wanted to state that. > Google's Weird Attempt At Social Let's take a look at how many different ways I can do a simple chat with my friends using Google products on my Android Ice Cream Sandwich device. Google Voice - My main way of text messaging. Google Talk - My main way IM client Google+ Messaging (Formerly known as Huddle) - A mobile only way to communicate with my G+ friends. Here's where it gets weird: Google Voice - Anything I can is instantly synched with the Google Voice app on my iPad, Google Voice on my browser, the third party Google Voice app I use on my computer and my phone. Google Talk - Anything I do is synched up to Google Talk on my computer or any place I'm logged in, which also means all my Google Talk conversation logs can be found using the GMail app on my phone. Google+ Messaging - Boom. Say something to any of my friends on here, unable to look back at the messages unless I get on my phone again. "Oh, where did Kyle say we're meeting up tonight? I should print directions" Oh, my phone's out of battery and charging. Well, there goes that plan. The craziest thing is that if I want to do Google+ Hangout (worst name I've ever heard for any product) I have to either use the website or the Google+ Messaging app. That's right, if I want to do a Hangout on my phone (a feature they're really pushing with their ICS video ads) I have to do it in a self-contained application that will not reflect any changes on the website. How does this make any sense? It's even worse when you think about it. If I want to do a video chat with my friends using ONLY Google products I actually have two different choices! I can either Google+ Hangout with them using the Messenger application on my phone (try to comprehend that sentence, seriously.) or I can use Google Talk's video chatting (the feature they were pushing very hard with Honeycomb). Why couldn't they just integrate group messaging and video chatting right into Google Talk? I already have a fully functioning video chatting application on my phone that doesn't require people to be on a website or their phones to use it! I can use Google Talk's video chat to talk to anyone using Google Talk anywhere! I know that Google's Weird Attempt At Social is due to buying so many different companies and not consolidating them, but it's not anything close to an ideal user experience. Sidenote: As soon as my Sprint contract is done I'm switching over to an iPhone, iOS 5's text + iMessage all in one application is a wonderful implementation of what Google should be doing with all of their conversational products.
Zimahl 15y ago
"And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump through hoops." Hoops like reading the article?" The hoops I think he is talking about here is having to typically set up an account on a third-party site to comment. I've not commented on a blog post or article because I don't feel like figuring out a username/password (and then remembering it), doing the typical confirmation steps, etc., just to give some feedback. Some have Facebook integration to save you a step but I, like others, don't particularly like having every comment I ever make aggregated by Facebook.
mcgwiz 15y ago
Out of desperation, Google's gone evil. For all of the shady things that Google had done in the past that people said were evil, nothing approaches the infection of their search service with Google+ rankings. Google had always largely maintained the integrity of their search product which, despite minor adulterations added over the years, was still essentially based on little more than a strict, normative interpretation of the HTTP and HTML standards. By doing so, they maintained the integrity of the company itself. The standards now take a back seat to Google+. The author is spot on about this. It's evil. In my estimation, it's disrespectful to users. And it therefore creates a huge opportunity for Bing, et al. What remains to be seen is whether, on balance, this degradation of the search service is significant enough to drive away a substantial number of users.
jonmwords 15y ago
Hi everybody. Sorry I can't respond to everyone, but this conversation has been very productive, I think. Thanks so much.
lubujackson 15y ago
Lol, I just Googled "jon mitchell jury duty" myself and the first 4 links were 1) this post about google+, 2) google+ page 3) google+ page 4) the original article. So writing about this problem has only made things worse!
- rehack 15y ago
  For me its the 5th one now. It shows another blog based on this post( http://meta.ath0.com/2012/01/05/googleplusungood/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/01/05/googleplusungood/ ) as 2nd in the search for "jon mitchell jury duty".
gldalmaso 15y ago
I believe that Google itself will end up being the 'Google killer'. I used to enjoy google products because they had very little branding footprint (or maybe I just thought they did), but now I'm constantly trying to avoid branded/sponsored content in order to get the real thing I wanted. I'll be slowly migrating away from google products from now on because of that. Like the post puts it, I'm tired of being the product. If search and social web won't change it's ways, then I'll be changing away from it.

250 points by jonmwords 15y ago

zalew 15y ago

I enjoy G+ and it's a huge usability improvement over fb, but there's another 'feature' I simply can't stand - that comments are visible in the stream under the post. I don't mind it under my friends' posts, but public popular profiles are another story. I'd like to progressively replace my twitter newsfeed with g+ profiles, but twitter gives me the comfort of not seeing opinions of some random people who like to comment on mainstream, the names who shared (I don't know some John Doe, why would I care he and +320 other people shared it?) and other noise. G+ is nice with the preview and lack of artificial 140char limit, but on twitter I can quickly scan the news without TMI I don't care about. example: http://i.imgur.com/8i8Az.png http://i.imgur.com/8i8Az.png

Pewpewarrows 15y ago
I agree. I'd really like for there to be a "condensed" viewing option, where characters after 140 or so are truncated, and comments are hidden by default. Between that and their new controls for filtering how much of each circle ends up in your main stream, skimming G+ would become a lot easier.
- cheald 15y ago
  That'd be really easy to do with a Chrome extension.
- jonmwords 15y ago
  Me, too. This is the crux of the problem. Allowing such huge posts and so many media types makes the stream impossible to scan. All the reactions the post is getting from G+ worshippers skip over this point, so I guess some people like being assaulted.
- zalew 15y ago
  I don't mind previews longer than 140 or even bigger thumbnails. These is at least good display of valid information (a huge advantage over twitter), while +counters and strangers' opinions are pointless noise. If they want to expose the number of +s why not line it up next to the [+1] button? Why take a full line just for one number? Likewise, the number of shares can be next to the share button.
Tichy 15y ago
Doesn't it give you a warm, soothing feeling that 320 people shared something you like? I think we all crave the social proof, no matter what you say...

mike-cardwell 15y ago

As well as the user experience being crap, there are the issues of Google silently removing swearing from your profile, and kicking you off if they don't think your name is real.

thurn 15y ago

His first point is just wrong. You can link to the original post (https://plus.google.com/102025628931490661645/posts/6D2CtDQxgWn https://plus.google.com/102025628931490661645/posts/6D2CtDQx...), but only if it's visible to you. You obviously can't link to a post you can't see.

sequoia 15y ago
The plagiarizers response (in the link above) to why he copypasted rather thank linking: You have a good point, I have only kept major content and not the whole article, at times I feel sharing a link just dissuades users from reading the post. Or plain & simple kills interest. I have though started making the change you have suggested few articles too long are again too daunting to read. But overall your feedback taken. Thanks for pointing this out. "I feel sharing a link just dissuades users from reading the post." Wow.
- shortformblog 15y ago
  The author's problem with G+ is not Google. His problem with G+ is bad curators who don't respect the creators of the content. As curation is my forte (I run a popular Tumblr news blog), Rohit Shrivastava's response really annoys me. Tumblr, which shares a lot of cues with Google+ in terms of how content is shared publicly, has similar users to Rohit. I think it's bad form to post the entire contents of an article. Post small bits, the gist, but encourage people to keep reading if they like the basic idea. IMHO, Tumblr does a better job of encouraging users to respect content creators. But the thing is, the problem is not unique to either of these platforms. How many random WordPress splogs steal RWW's content wholesale and just scrape the RSS feed? A lot. All the big tech sites have this problem. The difference with G+ is, Google seems to enable these copy-wholesale types better by giving them strong positions in search results. Tumblr is not as good at SEO (it makes up for it with design), so it's not as big an issue. To users like Rohit, respect the content creators. It sucks when they get screwed because you couldn't stop after a single paragraph or rewrite the piece.
- sp332 15y ago
  It's true. I'm much more likely to read a black of text that's already loaded inline with the thread I'm reading, than I am to click over to another page to read the same thing.

j_col 15y ago

From the article: "The quickest way to do that was to type 'jon mitchell jury duty' into the Google search bar. To my astonishment, the post I wanted was not the first result. It was the third. Ranking above the result I wanted were two Google+ posts, one by me, and one by our webmaster Jared, that were nothing more than links to the article with brief comments." So Google continues to use it's search muscle to promote it's own web services first, and yet some people still find this surprising.

mamp 15y ago
They should have a section for G+ results which are equivalent of 'paid links' i.e. if their rank has been boosted then mark them as such. Otherwise they risk losing credibility on search results as the first page is not best match but unmarked advertising. While not evil per se, a little naughty.
benihana 15y ago
The point is that they're doing this, and it's annoying, not surprising.
hamax 15y ago
Did people from your circles +1 any of those 2 posts? If so, the rank is 'reasonable'.

steele 15y ago

Hmm, I enjoy using G+. Maybe I don't have the needs of the e-media i-blog web-news e-lite.

icebraining 15y ago

But never forget that you're Google's product, not its customer. And never forget that you're a ReadWriteWeb product, not its customer. You don't pay for the articles, your eyeballs are sold to RWW sponsors and partners. Sigh. Hypocrisy much? This is how most of the web works. The constant attacks on Google or Facebook over it are ridiculous and tiring.

funkah 15y ago
I agree, people keep stumbling upon this saying and parroting it, as if it were any more insightful than "2 + 2 = 4".
dasil003 15y ago
Everyone's a hypocrite. If you are not a hypocrite then you aren't saying anything interesting. His point may be a tired one, but it's valid. We rely on Google for a lot and would do well to keep their allegiances in mind; all the more so because Google has traditionally been something of a benefactor to the web user (although the cracks are starting to show since they lose money on most of their free services). The reason his hypocrisy is irrelevant is because we don't have any illusions about ReadWriteWeb's allegiances, and even if we did we don't rely on them for shit.
- swaits 15y ago
  > We rely on Google for a lot ... Some of us do go out of our way to avoid relying on them for "a lot". I know we're a small minority, but to people like me, it's worth the effort.
- icebraining 15y ago
  His point may be a tired one, but it's valid. I disagree, but I'll get to that. First, even if it was, it's repeated every single day to the point of exhaustion. And I still wouldn't have minded it, if this was a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on free services instead of a hate piece against Google (oh, and with a jab at Facebook). Secondly, how's the allegiance when Sony pushed a rootkit up their consumer's, or tried to force them to sign away their rights? Or expensive Ubisoft games that stop working when your net connection goes down? Or what about SOPA lobbying, think that will benefit their consumers? (Most) companies are loyal to themselves, their top managers and possibly their shareholders. Whether we're consumers or products is a red herring.

Varun06 15y ago

I also enjoy using G+. and as the writer said that he wanted it to get off his chest, that's what he did. so no problem...keep writing.. People will do what they want to do...

sequoia 15y ago

"Well, that didn't make me feel much better, because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people." OP is a web-tech blogger and he just now learned this? I don't use G+ much so I can't easily evaluate the rest of OPs assertions, but I am questioning them by default because when someone makes one statement I know to be false (or in this case inexcusably ignorant), it calls the rest of their statements into question. This is unfortunate because I think much what OP says is useful, but, c'mon: if you blog about web tech and didn't know google tailors results, it makes you seem like you "don't know how any of this stuff works" and I can't take you seriously in that regard. I am very confused by the section about plagiarism/mis-attribution/non-attribution. OP says his work was "almost-unattributed" but I couldn't find any link back to him on the G+ posting. Did someone click the share button, or paste in a link to his article? Or did someone copy and paste his article? If it's the latter, this phenomenon is much older than the Internet and has nothing to do with G+, specifically, besides the fact that Google may rate your plagiarized "work" higher than the original on its results (which is a distinct issue that applies to both plagiarized and properly-attributed posts). EDIT: I see the name now, it was next to the title in the post. Thank you OP.

jonmwords 15y ago
It's "almost-attributed" because he included my name, but there was no link or mention of my site. I don't care about the name. I care about the site. That's what the whole rant is about. Of course I knew that Google tailored results. How would I have been able to include any context in this post otherwise? You took a human-written sentence out of context and made it make less sense than it does in the body of the post.
- ed209 15y ago
  to be fair to sequoia, that's how I read it too (within the context of the article).
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  Have you implemented the author markup as Google suggest?

icebraining 15y ago

And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump through hoops." Hoops like reading the article? Sigh. No, jumps to comment. He likes the G+ links for the same reason I prefer HN over a simple RSS feed: because we can read the article and then comment easily in a good community. The thing is: he can get to your article through the G+ link, but he can't get to the G+ comments page from your article. Therefore, the G+ link is richer. (Not that I'm condoning that Google put his products above everything else. But to the G+ user, it's obviously better)

stanleydrew 15y ago
I like this point, but i wonder: how would people feel if, for instance, this HN conversation page ranked higher in Google search results than the actual RWW article?
- gdw2 15y ago
  In many cases, I find the HN comments just as insightful as the articles and at least the HN comments link to the article (doesn't usually work the other way around). Perhaps the best situation would be if sites such as HN and + didn't take up their own slot but were listed subordinate to the original article (underneath it as an icon or a single-lined link).
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >how would people feel if, for instance, this HN conversation page ranked higher in Google search results than the actual RWW article? Arguably it's of more value.
tmarthal 15y ago
You raise a good point. How many of us would comment on articles if the YC HN article feed if it was just a Google+ hangout with posted links? It sure seems that the barrier to entry would be lower to comment/discuss articles, however it is unclear if whomever the moderaters are here would have as much control.

devmach 15y ago

Google isn't the internet and if it fails , it's google's problem not ours( or internet's ?). There is other alternatives to google's services, if one finds the others better than google, he is free to use them. Seriously, just don't use it if you hate it, that's the best response that you can give. I don't use G+ because of the "Real Name Policy". It's my choice to give my real name or not and Google don't respect my choices. I have FB, e-mail (yay!), blog, skype etc... I have everything to communicate with my friends or with the world ! I don't need some Nazi to give me an advice like "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It"....

j_col 15y ago
I'm sorry, but for a large amount of people who only use Google for search, Google is the Internet. That's why I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago, but people like me are a tiny minority. Now speaking as a web publishing, if people started to copy-and-paste my articles into Google+ and these entries got higher rankings on Google search than my original content, I'd be pretty upset too. It isn't a question of what search engine I use in this instance, but what the majority of everyone else is using.
- devmach 15y ago
  Google can be a giant now but it isn't mean that it's invincible. Google isn't innovative since "Gmail", keeps making mistakes (buzz etc) and make people angry. Nowadays people aren't royal to the products and even "normal" users can change their habits (remember icq -> msn transformation)
  - danso 15y ago
    Can you elaborate on...well, everything, in your post? What do you mean "keeps making mistakes." That Google, like everyone else, makes mistakes, and will continue to do so until the end of the world? Or that it is making a higher-than-expected number of mistakes?
    - 15y ago

Cybersky 15y ago

G+ is an abomination. I'm glad no one is using it except non-influential geeks.

dasil003 15y ago

I'm torn on this issue. Before Google+ things were all over the place. Google had lots of great services, but they were poorly integrated, appeared and disappeared frequently, didn't work with apps users or vice versa. Now Google clearly is moving in a direction that promises better unification and clean-up of annoying edge cases. The problem is that Google is losing track of its mission statement. It's seeing everything through the lens of social, which is not really in its DNA to begin with. I understand they don't want to dismiss a threat and get their lunch eaten, but they are throwing away a lot of what made them great. There's gotta be a happy medium between completely ignoring up-and-coming threats and throwing yourself so fiercely behind every trend that you end up sabotaging your own strengths that are the very weak points of your feared competitors.

jroseattle 15y ago

Google search results are beginning to bore the life out of me, and part of it has to do with inane google-plus entries in the search results. WTF goog search? It seems like ever since Bing showed up and did that little left-hand column of filters, you started running around doing all sorts of "innovation" and it seems messy and quality control is just starting to suck wind. It's obvious you're tinkering with search results to promote your own services -- did you not think anyone would notice? Goog search, I don't even know you anymore.

lukeschlather 15y ago
That's really not what's happening here. I have a fairly unique name, and the basic problem is that when you search for a person's name, their personal website has a lower rank than any social network, so LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and G+ will often show up above someone's personal site. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how the ranking algorithm works.
- jroseattle 15y ago
  Thanks Luke, but my use case doesn't involve searching on someone's name.
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    Sorry, what was your case again? I thought we were talking about the article and the "jon mitchell jury duty" query.
    - jroseattle 15y ago
      I was complaining about Google search, the inclusion of google-plus entries, and how it's search results have taken a turn for the worse. In my experience, I've started to see more and more google plus entries in search results, and those results are often crappy.
mike-cardwell 15y ago

lukeschlather 15y ago

This is not actually a Google+ problem. It's a social networking problem. Facebook.com, linkedin.com, and google.com are all preferred over anyone's personal site. My name is a good case study because it is, as far as I know, unique. Google is currently doing the "right thing" but previously it had been returning my Facebook page above my personal website. That's broken, but it has nothing to do with G+, and everything to do with the way all search engines rank people. (Bing does the "wrong thing" with respect to my name, and shows LinkedIn first. DDG also throws in two random things from years ago in before getting to my modern website.) Search is a hard problem, and the result is subjective.

bradleyland 15y ago

Maybe this is obvious to everyone, but this is clearly Google's reactionary response to the assertion that social is the future of search. At some time in the past, there were a slew of articles espousing the belief that users would change from searching Google for their quandaries to a more personal exchange of information: asking someone you know. I don't know what the underlying causes are, but I know three kinds of internet users: A) Those who are capable of finding information using a search engine B) Those who aren't capable of finding information using a search engine C) Those who never even try; they just ask someone It's easy to jump to the conclusion that the type A individuals are simply more "savvy", but my father, who hardly uses a computer, astounded me the other day by deftly searching out a fantastic manual for the carburetor on his Suzuki Samurai. My father is the type that would much rather be out de-gunking his carb than sitting at a computer. How is he so effective at search? I would have expected him to fall under the type C user category. Google knows this scenario all too well. They're watching it play out in real time on the web. They have to get in front of it and provide solutions for all three types of users. For better or worse, giving Google+ pages "website" status in their results is their way of getting ahead of sites like Facebook and Quora.

takinola 15y ago

Because Google favors G+ results in search, G+ is going to become a very powerful SEO tool and this is going to push publishers to become more and more invested in G+. Search is Google's advantage over Facebook and they are going to press this advantage to the max in order to take on Facebook. I can't say I blame them but I do wonder if there are no real anti-trust issues here. How is this different than when MSFT used its OS dominance to promote its (late-to-the-party) browser? Google is basically using their own dominance in search to promote their (late-to-the-party) social network

jrockway 15y ago
I'm not sure that this is true. Typically, Google's results are tailored for you based on your circles and browsing history. This tweaking does not help people that aren't already your friends. As an example, when I search for the article this article is about with the terms "wired world jury duty", I get the readwriteweb article (with a picture of Jon Mitchell beside it) as the first result. Only the 7th result is a Google+ page, and it's not explicitly advertised in any special way. Google+ is about your social network, not "the" social network. (I personally love seeing the "8 of your friends have +1'd this" on the search result page. Instant authenticity!)

manojlds 15y ago

"It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time" The above line really shows the author doesn't get Google+. While I do have my own grievances about Google+, the author doesn't make valid claims and shouldn't be making any because the author has not understood it.

cheald 15y ago
I have to agree. Google+ is more of a "rich Twitter" than a "not-Facebook Facebook". People often mistake it for the latter, which I think may be a large part of the reason that so many people are ho-hum about it.

gregguida 15y ago

What a bunch of link bait... The title is blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It should have been "My free Google service is messing up my free Google service" The beauty of the internet is and always has been that if you don't like something its really way to switch to something else.

aaronwall 15y ago
The core issue isn't just how one free Google service interacts with another free Google service, but how when combined they undermine the copyright & revenue potential for a content creator by displacing that person's work with Google's copy of that person's work. If you are not in business (and don't care if your favorite non-Google sites eventually disappear) then it is no big deal. For everyone else it has the potential to be a big deal. If publishers do not complain about it now then it will get worse. How bad does it have to get before the complaints are valid to you?

ferrofluid 15y ago

Mess up "The Internet"? I don't think so. If you don't like Google, switch to Altavista.

waqf 15y ago
For a lot of purposes I have switched to Wikipedia. Automated web search simply isn't the right tool these days for many of the niches in which Google got its foothold in the '90s.

yanw 15y ago

This sort of post is further evidence that whenever G+ adds some new feature or publishes new numbers a PR attack is imminent. Usually you can tell straight away by the hyperbolic headlines.

VikingCoder 15y ago

> The stream is so noisy... See "Pump up (or down) the volume!" here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-few-big-improvements-before-new.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-few-big-improv... > Culturally, it feels like walking into a religious school. Your Google+ is made up of who you Circle. Just like the parties you go to are made up of the people who are at the parties you go to. If yours feels a certain way, it is because of who you Circle, and who you share posts with. > It was familiar because I had written it. I didn't see any attribution, though, let alone a link to the story. Rohit Shrivastava was a bad actor, in this case. Plagiarism is a terrible problem, and it's childish of you to blame Google+ for it. It is very easy to correctly link to an article, or share it. I agree that you have legitimate usability problems in many of the versions of Google+ that you used, but Rohit intentionally plagiarized you. You don't want attribution, you want links - that's understandable. Encourage people to use the tool the way it was intended to be used, don't blame the tool for existing. > Google thought I would prefer to click through Google+ to find my article than to go straight to it. Google thought that you and your friends are more interesting to you than the unwashed internet. In general, I think that's the correct choice. If I search "Steve Smith," I probably care a lot more about my friend, than any of the other Steve Smiths on the internet. > One comment (to which Google+ allows no way to link) I can't link to comments on your site either, Jon. > Hoops like reading the article? Hoops like Disqus, which you use allow people to comment. > All this personalization and real-time stuff surely helps Google organize its content, but it's breaking search. No, it's not. It's combining multiple searches into one interface. Searching your Google+ friends is one aspect of what a person could possibly want to search for. It sounds like you don't want to search the people you've Circled, and what they say. Other people do. If you want to search the internet with as little personalization as possible, your best bet is to open an incognito window. > Remember when it was "minimal?" This is what it looks like now: Look at your own site, Jon. No, seriously - go back and look at it for a moment. Sites got rich, with lots of content. > But Google is different. Google used to be about organizing the world's information. It was a service to the entire Web. But this social tangent is changing that. No, it's not. It's an outreach of that. It's a recognition that your view of the people that you know, and what they think, and how they're talking, is information - information that they're trying to help you organize, if you wish to use their tools. If you wish to use Google News. If you wish to use Android. If you wish to use Google+. > Thanks to the Scoble effect, I have 8,000 encirclements on Google+. It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time. There are people who want to know if you say anything publicly. If you don't want to say anything publicly, don't. > I changed it, because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point. Trolls? Do you want people to care what you say, or don't you? Whose job is it to make sure that people think you're saying what you mean to say? > Google+ Hates The Internet Who is the troll? No, seriously - please define the word troll such that it includes the people who pointed out how ridiculous it was for you to say "because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people", but excludes you, when you say "Google+ Hates The Internet." > I hate Google+. That's unfortunate. I wish it was a valuable tool for you, to help you organize how you're sharing content with people you know. If it's not, then oh well. My mom hates email. If she wrote an article like yours about how email is ruining cursive, she'd have a valid point. But the world is moving forward - and social interactions on the internet are going to spread everywhere. The only question is, what tools are we going to want to use? Again, you have legitimate complaints about sharing links on some platforms. I hope they get fixed, over time. But your other complaints strike me as either being your own fault for how you used the tool, other people's fault for doing the same bad things that people have been doing forever, or minor differences of opinion about usability... or just lamenting the decline of cursive.

toddh 15y ago

While I agree Google is deprecating the URL, as indicated by the removal of the Shared in Reader features, isn't this just a case of somebody cutting and pasting without attribution? G+ can't do anything about that.

obilgic 15y ago

irony that his post is +1'ed 50 times (more than facebook shares)

Vivtek 15y ago

Yargh. OP searched on his name plus "jury duty" and is complaining because Google returns two G+ hits with his name in the title before getting to the article he wrote about jury duty?

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I hate to do a tl;dr, but here it is: Google has bought and/or acquired so many web properties that they all can't appear in their own little special spot in search results. If you type in the name of an article you wrote and it's the 3rd or 4th listing, below somebody just mentioning it on G+? It's broken. Like Facebook, but to a greater degree, Google is making the internet crap by putting it's own little frame around everything. To me Google isn't evil by any means, but it has way too many smart people all trying to jump on whatever the latest popular bandwagon might be. It's definitely getting a "McGoogle" feel to it. Whatever is getting popular on the web, some little Googlite is busy working to assimilate it. I like Google a lot. The author has a point. At some point enough is enough. I think he exaggerates to a much greater degree than is necessary. So far.

willy1234x1 15y ago
Google.com has a high page rank. Thus plus.google.com has a high pagerank, it's not gaming the system. It's just inheriting the pagerank.
- mseebach 15y ago
  The specific mechanics are irrelevant, it's still broken.
  - willy1234x1 15y ago
    That's not broken. If you had website foo.com and then added bar.foo.com you would expect that your pagerank transfer to your subdomain as well. Of course when the owner of pagerank has this apply to them it's suddenly "broken" though huh?
    - Simucal 15y ago
      I think you ignored mseebach's point. The mechanics of how the search results are ranked (pagerank) is irrelevant. The system is "broken" when original source content is ranking below people merely linking to it from another site.

vectorpush 15y ago

>One commenter said, "It's an algorithm. Get over yourself." Typical, orthodox devotion to the Almighty Google Algorithm and its Infallible Wisdom. That's a pretty disingenuous take on his comment. He's actually suggesting that algorithms are not perfect and that it's silly to infer intention from an arbitrary search result.

eCa 15y ago
On the other hand.. An algorithm exists to reduce arbitrarity, and until recently there wasn't much question about Google's success in that department. Now though, they are a competitor against other search results and - since the algorithm is in Google's possession - it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour.
- vectorpush 15y ago
  it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour No, it is not a "big leap", but that doesn't mean it's true. It is conceivable that the search results are organic, especially given the content. It is also conceivable that an impartial query could determine that a G+ page (or any other page) is more relevant than the source article.

endtime 15y ago

> And it hit me: True Believers of the Holy + might see this re-shared Google+ post of an almost-unattributed rip of my story instead of the original. Google+ hates the Internet! Stopped reading here. This is a waste-of-time troll article.

resnamen 15y ago

I'm on several Internet forums where people copy and paste entire articles with no attribution. Slideshows are unrolled, images are hyperlinked, etc. They're breaking the Internet! No, wait, they have been the Internet since the very beginning.

gospelwut 15y ago

Ah, SEO, how much I loathe everything you spawn and touch.

jc4p 15y ago

It seems like most people here are jumping on this guy's throat about minor problems in what he wrote. Let me instead back-up one of his points with more evidence: First off: I am a huge Google fanboy, I'm a full-time Android developer and Google scholarships even helped pay for my college. It seems that every time I say anything bad about Google anywhere on the Internet people call me an Apple fanboy so I just wanted to state that. > Google's Weird Attempt At Social Let's take a look at how many different ways I can do a simple chat with my friends using Google products on my Android Ice Cream Sandwich device. Google Voice - My main way of text messaging. Google Talk - My main way IM client Google+ Messaging (Formerly known as Huddle) - A mobile only way to communicate with my G+ friends. Here's where it gets weird: Google Voice - Anything I can is instantly synched with the Google Voice app on my iPad, Google Voice on my browser, the third party Google Voice app I use on my computer and my phone. Google Talk - Anything I do is synched up to Google Talk on my computer or any place I'm logged in, which also means all my Google Talk conversation logs can be found using the GMail app on my phone. Google+ Messaging - Boom. Say something to any of my friends on here, unable to look back at the messages unless I get on my phone again. "Oh, where did Kyle say we're meeting up tonight? I should print directions" Oh, my phone's out of battery and charging. Well, there goes that plan. The craziest thing is that if I want to do Google+ Hangout (worst name I've ever heard for any product) I have to either use the website or the Google+ Messaging app. That's right, if I want to do a Hangout on my phone (a feature they're really pushing with their ICS video ads) I have to do it in a self-contained application that will not reflect any changes on the website. How does this make any sense? It's even worse when you think about it. If I want to do a video chat with my friends using ONLY Google products I actually have two different choices! I can either Google+ Hangout with them using the Messenger application on my phone (try to comprehend that sentence, seriously.) or I can use Google Talk's video chatting (the feature they were pushing very hard with Honeycomb). Why couldn't they just integrate group messaging and video chatting right into Google Talk? I already have a fully functioning video chatting application on my phone that doesn't require people to be on a website or their phones to use it! I can use Google Talk's video chat to talk to anyone using Google Talk anywhere! I know that Google's Weird Attempt At Social is due to buying so many different companies and not consolidating them, but it's not anything close to an ideal user experience. Sidenote: As soon as my Sprint contract is done I'm switching over to an iPhone, iOS 5's text + iMessage all in one application is a wonderful implementation of what Google should be doing with all of their conversational products.

Zimahl 15y ago

"And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump through hoops." Hoops like reading the article?" The hoops I think he is talking about here is having to typically set up an account on a third-party site to comment. I've not commented on a blog post or article because I don't feel like figuring out a username/password (and then remembering it), doing the typical confirmation steps, etc., just to give some feedback. Some have Facebook integration to save you a step but I, like others, don't particularly like having every comment I ever make aggregated by Facebook.

mcgwiz 15y ago

Out of desperation, Google's gone evil. For all of the shady things that Google had done in the past that people said were evil, nothing approaches the infection of their search service with Google+ rankings. Google had always largely maintained the integrity of their search product which, despite minor adulterations added over the years, was still essentially based on little more than a strict, normative interpretation of the HTTP and HTML standards. By doing so, they maintained the integrity of the company itself. The standards now take a back seat to Google+. The author is spot on about this. It's evil. In my estimation, it's disrespectful to users. And it therefore creates a huge opportunity for Bing, et al. What remains to be seen is whether, on balance, this degradation of the search service is significant enough to drive away a substantial number of users.

jonmwords 15y ago

Hi everybody. Sorry I can't respond to everyone, but this conversation has been very productive, I think. Thanks so much.

lubujackson 15y ago

Lol, I just Googled "jon mitchell jury duty" myself and the first 4 links were 1) this post about google+, 2) google+ page 3) google+ page 4) the original article. So writing about this problem has only made things worse!

rehack 15y ago
For me its the 5th one now. It shows another blog based on this post( http://meta.ath0.com/2012/01/05/googleplusungood/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/01/05/googleplusungood/ ) as 2nd in the search for "jon mitchell jury duty".

gldalmaso 15y ago

I believe that Google itself will end up being the 'Google killer'. I used to enjoy google products because they had very little branding footprint (or maybe I just thought they did), but now I'm constantly trying to avoid branded/sponsored content in order to get the real thing I wanted. I'll be slowly migrating away from google products from now on because of that. Like the post puts it, I'm tired of being the product. If search and social web won't change it's ways, then I'll be changing away from it.