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Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That bei

by cletus 15y ago

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem like good things to me. As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). To me this seems to be another of these "bubble" issues. Take Apple as an example of that. Every time they release a new (iPhone, iPad, whatever) you'll see people in the tech bubble (largely of SF and NYC) dig up tired old cliches like "its evolutionary not revolutionary" (seriously, I'm so sick of hearing that phrase) and it's "not the upgrade I was hoping for". On HN you'll find people who are still somehow shocked that you can't out-of-the-box sideload a bootloader onto an iPhone (or whatever). Consumers (outside the bubble) however love these new products. Just look at Apple's 2011Q4 results, which are simply astounding. Thing is, that happens every time and yet the same old jaded "bubblistas" meet every new release with the same mix of lukewarm cliches, disappointment and derision. I see this as much the same way. All of this is about (IMHO) improving the user experience. You don't have to look very far to see accounts from users who love these new features. If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? EDIT: as far as including Twitter/FB goes, Eric Schmidt addressed this [1]: > I countered that Google seemed to have all the permission it needed, in that they’re not blocked from crawling pages. > “That’s your opinion,” Schmidt said, then joked: “If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.” > I pushed back that both have effectively given those letters since their robots.txt files — a method of blocking search engines — weren’t telling Google to go away. > “That’s your interpretation of their policies,” Schmidt said. [1]: http://marketingland.com/schmidt-google-not-favored-happy-to-talk-twitter-facebook-integration-3151 http://marketingland.com/schmidt-google-not-favored-happy-to...

alexgartrell 15y ago
> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. For the majority of users, Facebook/Twitter results are more relevant than Google Plus results. There's nothing in the rule book that says you can't leverage a successful property to promote another, but it's unfair to everyone to try to pass that off as a move to increase relevance in search results. Disclaimer: I'm a Facebook engineer who doesn't take SPYW personally.
- chintan 15y ago
  > For the majority of users Can I have an independent "authoritative" search engine and "cool" social networking tool. You both have Ad platforms on your respective platforms to "promote" products. Thank you. Disclaimer: A singleton instance of an average user
  - petenixey 15y ago
    You're THE Average User? We've been trying to sign you up for months!
  - freehunter 15y ago
    >Can I have an independent "authoritative" search engine and "cool" social networking tool. Yes, you can. But Google wants to make search better. There's no denying it's gotten worse as time goes on (and SEO gets better). The only thing to do next is to understand what you're looking for by understanding you. "I don't want relevant search results, I just want relevant search results!" This is the problem Google faces. They've made their choice.
    - DanBC 15y ago
      But I don't want relevant search results. I want accurate search results. I hate being limited by the bubble; I hate having to cut away rubbish related to what a search engine thinks I want.
      - zmj 15y ago
spqr 15y ago
"If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing?" Sure, everything is harmless until it's not. Just yesterday I was on a conference call that was fairly boring. I was surfing in the background when suddenly I was reminded I didn't have my speakers muted by the sound of a massively loud Dulcolax laxative commercial from some asshat site that started up a video ad automatically. I couldn't shut it down for 7 or 8 seconds while the person talked about being constipated in full earshot of my conference call until I could find the mute button on the unfamiliar phone I was using.
incongruity 15y ago
> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). Except adwords is in this mix. This makes it one step closer (or is it already upon us?) for ads to be targeted to me based on the contents of emails I send and receive. To me, email is one of the more personal and private things that I do online and even the possibility that Google will use my gmail account to target ads is too much. edit: perhaps I should clarify – as I understand it, the ads that are currently displayed are relevant only to the email on screen when using gmail's web interface. What I meant was that SPYW opens the door to ads everywhere targeted based on the contents of all of my email. I don't believe that Google does that currently, but I have every reason to expect it's coming. And that bothers me.
- bishnu 15y ago
  But...Google already scans your email for AdWords.
  - rhino42 15y ago
    But at the moment those ads ate only email-relevant when served to your email- that's my understanding
  - incongruity 15y ago
    My understanding was that it was extremely limited – if using the web UI, you'd see ads related to the currently visible email. Am I mistaken in that understanding?
- tbatterii 15y ago
  any time I read an email in gmail, I look to the right and I see adsense. it's been there for as long as I can remember. I always assumed that what you are describing might happen already has since it's rather obvious that the ads are trying to be somewhat relevant to the email I'm reading. Is it somehow worse because it shows up on your search results page too?
JanezStupar 15y ago
On one side I always used Google service under presumption that Google is already collecting and analyzing all of its data as a complete profile. On the other hand I really dislike the way Google is heading. In the olden days when Google was dumber having high Google Fu allowed you to get required information faster and with greater accuracy. When Google was dumber you could use its flaws to get where you wanted. Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going.
- manish_gill 15y ago
  >Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going. Preciously the reason why I've started using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. In my experience, it almost always provides unbiased results.
  - smspence 15y ago
    Could you give a specific example of a search that you've done on Google that gives you bad results? And that would give you better "unbiased" results on DuckDuckGo? I would like to try and do a side-by-side comparison. Also, what do you mean by "unbiased"? What is the "bias" that Google has? I am trying to find real, concrete examples of all of the complaints in this thead, and I can't really find any.
    - Turing_Machine 15y ago
      I'm not the original poster, but it's really annoying to me that Google has changed its default behavior so it returns results that don't necessarily contain all my search terms, often higher on the page than results that do contain all my terms. While this may be helpful to the clueless, I'd love a "yes, I really know what I'm doing" user pref that lets me switch back to the old behavior.
Ihadtocomment 15y ago
Wow, your post is wrong on so many levels. So for users Google+ is most relevant in social? Not even one link from Facebook or Twitter? Just like Google Local is best for the users when showing 100% Google links. Please do not insult people's intelligence. Google is doing this for a few reasons and plastering more ads is the main one. With Google+ a lote users get to stay on Google+ due to placement not go to our sites. Just because some criticize Apple and some are now criticizing Google doesn't mean that Google is doing the right thing, considering Apple's success. Apple works perfectly for 99+% of users and APPL never touches that, Google is adding crap and hiding what the users want with dozens of ads (Please don't go into "they're relevant." Yeah, so relevant to your CFO that Google feels the need to show me a full page of them and I need to turn my laptop screen to see what are ads and what is content.) Now imagine if Apple added 2-3 extra tasks to their most basic functions. Tracking is another beast. Do not poke the government or users in the eye or they will make you cry. A tiny change in the law and there goes half of your revenue. Once they determine you're "evil," everything you do is under scrutiny and that includes ads, tracking, anti-trust and everything. And next time you advertise illegal abortion drugs through Adwords they will just jail your execs and cripple the company.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  Downvoted for being truculent and inflammatory, and not much else.
  - daedalus_j 15y ago
    Upvoted for "truculent".
- fred_nada 15y ago
  A little over the top, but to your point. See this search for cars I just did... 2 real results on the entire page. http://oi39.tinypic.com/2s62a9k.jpg http://oi39.tinypic.com/2s62a9k.jpg
5l 15y ago
> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? Yes (it's certainly convenient), but: a) People will naturally question your motivations for these changes and b) they will wonder at the privacy implications The problem is (especially from the perspective of the tech press) you appear to be primarily motivated by "beating" Facebook, and people are now looking uncomfortably at their personal data juxtapositioned with public search results. It may be that you held all this data already, and it may be that it's just as siloed off and protected at the back-end as it ever was, but the public is slow to wake up to the implications of the data you already hold. What might have flown below their radar yesterday, they're increasingly worried about today. Naturally the tech community who are better informed and think about these things much earlier are going to be amongst the first to start questioning you. You're really shoving it in everyone's faces, so don't be surprised that there's some backlash.
luser001 15y ago
> This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). And conveniently, most users will never bother to change their defaults. My concern is not only that my particular interests are being tracked. My concern is about the worsening of the power asymmetry between the general public and their (for lack of a better word) rulers (i.e., govt.+corporate complex). What good can come of the fact that the rulers will know the zeitgeist of society at arbitrarily fine levels of resolution? (The feel-good answer is that if they know, they'll cater to the wishes of those whom they nominally serve, but I think there are enough examples to show otherwise). For instance, can't an outsider's campaign to a high public office be squished more easily just before the cusp of him/her becoming "too big to ignore"?
bambax 15y ago
> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail with my friends about past or future parties. If you try to use one to help the other you will produce a soup of irrelevant garbage. Please just show me the most relevant links in the whole Web. I don't care what my friends think (I know already).
- HPBEggo 15y ago
  This. Considering the vastly different uses people put different portions of Google's services towards, combining all of them seems rather counter-productive to me. I suppose an option to partition different services into different relevancy 'portfolios' would solve the problem, but that puts a lot of burden on the user that, at least in my opinion, most users are not looking for.
  - beatle 15y ago
    time to switch to Bing
    - sebphfx 15y ago
      switch to Duckduckgo.They don't track you and it's awesome for programming questions. The first result is from Stack Overflow. You have categories on the right side. It's awesome. You can customize everything. The best search engine I ve seen in a while.
      - fred_nada 15y ago
        bing for main searches - DDG for tech searches... thats the play.
- pron 15y ago
  +googol. I just have to repeat this. Google, YOU WILL GUESS WRONG! And my hunch is, you'll guess wrong about, oh, 8 times out of ten. Google search is the last place I go to look for something that's already one of my interests. For that I have twitter, my feed reader etc. I only google things that I have no, or little, familiarity with. Google search is supposed to tell me WHAT I DON'T ALREADY KNOW. In fact, now when I think about it, you could use my information to make search better by LOWERING rather than increasing the rank of any result that I'm likely to already know.
cpt1138 15y ago
I love the arrogance of "it's all about giving the users more relevant results." Its not about that at all, its all about the maximization of advertising which is totally different. I'm not the typical user, I have divorced myself from all Google products, and use adblocker and ghostery to prevent trackers. Before doing all this, since I'm interested in bicycles and talk about bicycles, Google would push the same bicycle ad in my face on every site I visited. I made a mental note never to purchase anything from that site. This is nothing but evil masked as "were doing this for the user."
Steko 15y ago
"EDIT: as far as including Twitter/FB goes, Eric Schmidt addressed this" Not to the satisfaction of many people. I don't need FB or Twitter or G+ results but it seems clear to me that: (1) if subject X is more active by far on network Y, then even partial results results including network Y are better (read: "more relevant") then results only showing network Z. (2) Most subjects are more active by far on Twitter or FB then they are on G+. (3) Results only showing G+ therefore are inferior to more inclusive but partial results from FB/Twitter. LONG EDIT: I guess even given the above we'd have to consider whether results that only include network Z are better then results that include no network. Google's case apparently is that it does, and that, while better worlds may exist where FB and Twitter sign deals, what Google delivers today is better for the user then what it delivered a few weeks ago. The skeptical counterargument is that this just amounts to favorable placement for Google's product. Imagine if Google launched a Flickr clone tomorrow with very few users and suddenly on GIS's a quarter of the top results were reserved for Google's Flickr clone. Why bother earning a higher page rank the right way when you can just host your images with Google's services and get a free SERP boost? That is exactly what Danny Sullivan talked about although he used video for his example.
fred_nada 15y ago
Cletus: The outrage is from people who feel they were lied to and instead of apologizing google seems to be defending their actions. You said: As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). This is not true. Example 1: Search for cars while "opted" out of G+ results. Ferarri's G+ page is on top on the right, but no link to Ferrari's actual website or their FB page. So if this was focused on relevancy wouldn't the Ferrari link be to Ferrari's home page? Not that I think Ferrari is the most relevant result period, but wouldn't that make sense? Not only that, in your main results Ferrari.com isn't listed in the top 100. So how could they be relevant? This gives pageviews to G+ where the user should be going elsewhere. This isn't just about Twitter/Facebook. Google is driving users to its content over other publishers. This is an ADVERTISEMENT for Google+. 100% Which is against your policies not to mark them clearly as ads. http://www.google.com/competition/howgoogleadswork.html http://www.google.com/competition/howgoogleadswork.html Example 2: I searched for NFC Championship Game in Google while being opted in. I got a status update from MG Siegler stating he was going to the game in the top 5 results. MG Siegler is not in my circles. Wouldn't an article on the game be 100X better than this result. So you are driving users to your irrelevant content in replace of ESPN. That makes no sense. Example 3. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/ - Cutts did a search for werewolf. Was he looking for a picture of himself? Does anyone here find that useful? Most of the comments on his post didn't. I would like to know honestly. Would that be useful to you? Also, in the future, when I search for cars will I see my friends driving their cars as the 2nd result? I would personally rather see some info about how to buy a car or research a car or car prices. Example 4: You can't opt out 100%. That is disingenuous to say you can. Example 5: Google was supposed to be "Do No Evil" and you have squashed that. It is worse to be screwed by someone who claims to be trustworthy than someone you know is not. For example, we all knew Microsoft was shady from the beginning so we didn't expect much. But you guys said it was all about relevancy, the user, do no evil, etc. Look at this way, if a girl married Gene Simmons could she honestly be pissed if he was cheating on her? But if a girl married a guy like Donnie Osmond and he cheated she would be devastated. She was probably only with him in the first place because he was trustworthy. You are Donnie Osmond. :) Anyway, if you guys came clean and said that you are trying to promote your network then maybe people wouldn't be so pissed. As of right now, it looks like you are trying to drive traffic to your own irrelevant content over legitimate content businesses. Since you have a dominant position in search and hundreds of thousands of companies/sites depend on your traffic, they are scared. Google is rapidly getting into the content game and people can only assume you will put your new content above everyone else's. That is bad for business and bad for startups which are country needs so badly right now.
kaffiene 15y ago
I agree. I was just chatting with some Software Engineers work mates and we are all at a loss to know why the Whine-o-sphere are up in arms about this. How hard is clicking the option to exclude SPYW results? If you had no opt-out I'd think they had a tiny shred of an issue, but given that you can opt out, this whole issue is a giant WTF???? for me.
drhowarddrfine 15y ago
While Google makes the news on this, everyone loves to forget every marketing firm in the world has been collecting exactly the same data on them since the stone age. And being able to collect the data about them to serve better results is a business decision. Some may like or dislike it's done that way but it's no different than liking/disliking any product you use now.
yanw 15y ago
Much of these "bubble" issues are created by interested parties (mainly your competitors) the best you could do about it is assembling a better PR team.
hendrix 15y ago
So Google should know everything about everyone's search/social/youtube/whatever? Combining this data creates a very complete psychological profile on someone. Since Google is based in the USA all of this data could then be acquired by the government under the patriot act and used against innocent Americans. Never mind that the FBI (who could also request Google's data) has already done this sort of thing to anti-war groups http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/20/AR2010092003100.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09.... Also, Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" which in my opinion is fucking crazy. If I want to search for black panthers/Jewish defense league/Aryan nations/journal articles on explosive synthesis/bacillus anthracis/obscure soviet weaponry then I sure as hell don't want Google logging everything. Never mind that I'm just curious, but it sounds like Herr Schmidt and company are ready to send the Stasi out to get me. I have since switched to ssl + duckduckgo and blocked Google in my hosts file. Time for Google to stop trying to be god.
- cynwoody 15y ago
  So use Yandex via https. That way, only Kommittee will know what you searched for. Seriously, it's not a half-bad search engine. Throw it a bone once in while to make sure it survives!
bonch 15y ago
> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. If it was about more relevant results, than Google would be delivering results for the competing social networks already indexed in the search engine.
rdtsc 15y ago
> This is something you can opt out of Alright so if this all about improving user experience, let users know they can opt in then?
eternalban 15y ago
I don't want Google Inc. to know my interests. I wanted a search butler (and that was the original Google), not a e-Mommy (to run on my iDaddy). Yes, Apple is getting out of hand, as well. That is why I am now a DuckDuckGo user. Of course I can't do anything about Google's prying eyes /everywhere/ on the net, so I guess we need to ask Congress to help out there.
rat87 15y ago
> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No absolutely not, a search that is more relevant occasionally is only slightly useful maybe getting a slightly better link a few percentage points of the time(past a certain amount how much more relevant can you get. If you go to far in trying to guess the persons mind based on persons external history rather then their search it seem like you would get more way of answers and if you don't the answer would likely have been near the top anyway), keeping less information on users for shorter amounts of time should be preferred.
kahawe 15y ago
The difference is that for the up-coming change, you can NOT opt out of it and it goes far beyond "we'll also search your google+ profile for you!". If it was really all about the users and their experiences, then why is there no way to opt-out 100%? And the last time GOOG did what AAPL just did yesterday... must have been, hmm, never.
tallanvor 15y ago
> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. When I search for something, I want the most relevant results, not what you think are most relevant to me. I'm a liberal, and I tend to visit more liberal sites for political information - Crooks and Liars, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, etc. for general news. I'm also more likely to share links to those sites. But if I'm searching for information that could be considered related to a political issue, I don't want Google deciding that the most relevant results will only come from left leaning sites when a conservative site may have better information about a specific issue. I believe someone even gave a TED talk about this issue.
batista 15y ago
* As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. * And I call BS. Nobody asked for results to be more relevant by going THAT particular way. On the contrary, people have asked for more relevant results by eliminating this kind of artificial results. I see this as much the same way. All of this is about (IMHO) improving the user experience. Really? Because it looks like it's all about competing with Facebook and improving the bottom line.
jmcqk6 15y ago
>If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? Generally speaking, yes, but there is the danger of creating a [filter bubble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble).
tripzilch 15y ago
> On HN you'll find people who are still somehow shocked that you can't out-of-the-box sideload a bootloader onto an iPhone (or whatever). Not "shocked", but pissed off and outraged. I really hate this default "I can't believe you're surprised that ..." response whenever someone brings something to their attention that worries or angers them. It's even on Cracked.com's list of most stupid Internet reactions: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-internet-reactions-to-shocking-news-stories/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-internet-reactio...

by cletus 15y ago

alexgartrell 15y ago

> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. For the majority of users, Facebook/Twitter results are more relevant than Google Plus results. There's nothing in the rule book that says you can't leverage a successful property to promote another, but it's unfair to everyone to try to pass that off as a move to increase relevance in search results. Disclaimer: I'm a Facebook engineer who doesn't take SPYW personally.

chintan 15y ago
> For the majority of users Can I have an independent "authoritative" search engine and "cool" social networking tool. You both have Ad platforms on your respective platforms to "promote" products. Thank you. Disclaimer: A singleton instance of an average user
- petenixey 15y ago
  You're THE Average User? We've been trying to sign you up for months!
- freehunter 15y ago
  >Can I have an independent "authoritative" search engine and "cool" social networking tool. Yes, you can. But Google wants to make search better. There's no denying it's gotten worse as time goes on (and SEO gets better). The only thing to do next is to understand what you're looking for by understanding you. "I don't want relevant search results, I just want relevant search results!" This is the problem Google faces. They've made their choice.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    But I don't want relevant search results. I want accurate search results. I hate being limited by the bubble; I hate having to cut away rubbish related to what a search engine thinks I want.
    - zmj 15y ago

spqr 15y ago

"If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing?" Sure, everything is harmless until it's not. Just yesterday I was on a conference call that was fairly boring. I was surfing in the background when suddenly I was reminded I didn't have my speakers muted by the sound of a massively loud Dulcolax laxative commercial from some asshat site that started up a video ad automatically. I couldn't shut it down for 7 or 8 seconds while the person talked about being constipated in full earshot of my conference call until I could find the mute button on the unfamiliar phone I was using.

incongruity 15y ago

> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). Except adwords is in this mix. This makes it one step closer (or is it already upon us?) for ads to be targeted to me based on the contents of emails I send and receive. To me, email is one of the more personal and private things that I do online and even the possibility that Google will use my gmail account to target ads is too much. edit: perhaps I should clarify – as I understand it, the ads that are currently displayed are relevant only to the email on screen when using gmail's web interface. What I meant was that SPYW opens the door to ads everywhere targeted based on the contents of all of my email. I don't believe that Google does that currently, but I have every reason to expect it's coming. And that bothers me.

bishnu 15y ago
But...Google already scans your email for AdWords.
- rhino42 15y ago
  But at the moment those ads ate only email-relevant when served to your email- that's my understanding
- incongruity 15y ago
  My understanding was that it was extremely limited – if using the web UI, you'd see ads related to the currently visible email. Am I mistaken in that understanding?
tbatterii 15y ago
any time I read an email in gmail, I look to the right and I see adsense. it's been there for as long as I can remember. I always assumed that what you are describing might happen already has since it's rather obvious that the ads are trying to be somewhat relevant to the email I'm reading. Is it somehow worse because it shows up on your search results page too?

JanezStupar 15y ago

On one side I always used Google service under presumption that Google is already collecting and analyzing all of its data as a complete profile. On the other hand I really dislike the way Google is heading. In the olden days when Google was dumber having high Google Fu allowed you to get required information faster and with greater accuracy. When Google was dumber you could use its flaws to get where you wanted. Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going.

manish_gill 15y ago
>Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going. Preciously the reason why I've started using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. In my experience, it almost always provides unbiased results.
- smspence 15y ago
  Could you give a specific example of a search that you've done on Google that gives you bad results? And that would give you better "unbiased" results on DuckDuckGo? I would like to try and do a side-by-side comparison. Also, what do you mean by "unbiased"? What is the "bias" that Google has? I am trying to find real, concrete examples of all of the complaints in this thead, and I can't really find any.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    I'm not the original poster, but it's really annoying to me that Google has changed its default behavior so it returns results that don't necessarily contain all my search terms, often higher on the page than results that do contain all my terms. While this may be helpful to the clueless, I'd love a "yes, I really know what I'm doing" user pref that lets me switch back to the old behavior.

Ihadtocomment 15y ago

Wow, your post is wrong on so many levels. So for users Google+ is most relevant in social? Not even one link from Facebook or Twitter? Just like Google Local is best for the users when showing 100% Google links. Please do not insult people's intelligence. Google is doing this for a few reasons and plastering more ads is the main one. With Google+ a lote users get to stay on Google+ due to placement not go to our sites. Just because some criticize Apple and some are now criticizing Google doesn't mean that Google is doing the right thing, considering Apple's success. Apple works perfectly for 99+% of users and APPL never touches that, Google is adding crap and hiding what the users want with dozens of ads (Please don't go into "they're relevant." Yeah, so relevant to your CFO that Google feels the need to show me a full page of them and I need to turn my laptop screen to see what are ads and what is content.) Now imagine if Apple added 2-3 extra tasks to their most basic functions. Tracking is another beast. Do not poke the government or users in the eye or they will make you cry. A tiny change in the law and there goes half of your revenue. Once they determine you're "evil," everything you do is under scrutiny and that includes ads, tracking, anti-trust and everything. And next time you advertise illegal abortion drugs through Adwords they will just jail your execs and cripple the company.

georgieporgie 15y ago
Downvoted for being truculent and inflammatory, and not much else.
- daedalus_j 15y ago
  Upvoted for "truculent".
fred_nada 15y ago
A little over the top, but to your point. See this search for cars I just did... 2 real results on the entire page. http://oi39.tinypic.com/2s62a9k.jpg http://oi39.tinypic.com/2s62a9k.jpg

5l 15y ago

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? Yes (it's certainly convenient), but: a) People will naturally question your motivations for these changes and b) they will wonder at the privacy implications The problem is (especially from the perspective of the tech press) you appear to be primarily motivated by "beating" Facebook, and people are now looking uncomfortably at their personal data juxtapositioned with public search results. It may be that you held all this data already, and it may be that it's just as siloed off and protected at the back-end as it ever was, but the public is slow to wake up to the implications of the data you already hold. What might have flown below their radar yesterday, they're increasingly worried about today. Naturally the tech community who are better informed and think about these things much earlier are going to be amongst the first to start questioning you. You're really shoving it in everyone's faces, so don't be surprised that there's some backlash.

luser001 15y ago

> This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). And conveniently, most users will never bother to change their defaults. My concern is not only that my particular interests are being tracked. My concern is about the worsening of the power asymmetry between the general public and their (for lack of a better word) rulers (i.e., govt.+corporate complex). What good can come of the fact that the rulers will know the zeitgeist of society at arbitrarily fine levels of resolution? (The feel-good answer is that if they know, they'll cater to the wishes of those whom they nominally serve, but I think there are enough examples to show otherwise). For instance, can't an outsider's campaign to a high public office be squished more easily just before the cusp of him/her becoming "too big to ignore"?

bambax 15y ago

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail with my friends about past or future parties. If you try to use one to help the other you will produce a soup of irrelevant garbage. Please just show me the most relevant links in the whole Web. I don't care what my friends think (I know already).

HPBEggo 15y ago
This. Considering the vastly different uses people put different portions of Google's services towards, combining all of them seems rather counter-productive to me. I suppose an option to partition different services into different relevancy 'portfolios' would solve the problem, but that puts a lot of burden on the user that, at least in my opinion, most users are not looking for.
- beatle 15y ago
  time to switch to Bing
  - sebphfx 15y ago
    switch to Duckduckgo.They don't track you and it's awesome for programming questions. The first result is from Stack Overflow. You have categories on the right side. It's awesome. You can customize everything. The best search engine I ve seen in a while.
    - fred_nada 15y ago
      bing for main searches - DDG for tech searches... thats the play.
pron 15y ago
+googol. I just have to repeat this. Google, YOU WILL GUESS WRONG! And my hunch is, you'll guess wrong about, oh, 8 times out of ten. Google search is the last place I go to look for something that's already one of my interests. For that I have twitter, my feed reader etc. I only google things that I have no, or little, familiarity with. Google search is supposed to tell me WHAT I DON'T ALREADY KNOW. In fact, now when I think about it, you could use my information to make search better by LOWERING rather than increasing the rank of any result that I'm likely to already know.

cpt1138 15y ago

I love the arrogance of "it's all about giving the users more relevant results." Its not about that at all, its all about the maximization of advertising which is totally different. I'm not the typical user, I have divorced myself from all Google products, and use adblocker and ghostery to prevent trackers. Before doing all this, since I'm interested in bicycles and talk about bicycles, Google would push the same bicycle ad in my face on every site I visited. I made a mental note never to purchase anything from that site. This is nothing but evil masked as "were doing this for the user."

Steko 15y ago

"EDIT: as far as including Twitter/FB goes, Eric Schmidt addressed this" Not to the satisfaction of many people. I don't need FB or Twitter or G+ results but it seems clear to me that: (1) if subject X is more active by far on network Y, then even partial results results including network Y are better (read: "more relevant") then results only showing network Z. (2) Most subjects are more active by far on Twitter or FB then they are on G+. (3) Results only showing G+ therefore are inferior to more inclusive but partial results from FB/Twitter. LONG EDIT: I guess even given the above we'd have to consider whether results that only include network Z are better then results that include no network. Google's case apparently is that it does, and that, while better worlds may exist where FB and Twitter sign deals, what Google delivers today is better for the user then what it delivered a few weeks ago. The skeptical counterargument is that this just amounts to favorable placement for Google's product. Imagine if Google launched a Flickr clone tomorrow with very few users and suddenly on GIS's a quarter of the top results were reserved for Google's Flickr clone. Why bother earning a higher page rank the right way when you can just host your images with Google's services and get a free SERP boost? That is exactly what Danny Sullivan talked about although he used video for his example.

fred_nada 15y ago

Cletus: The outrage is from people who feel they were lied to and instead of apologizing google seems to be defending their actions. You said: As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). This is not true. Example 1: Search for cars while "opted" out of G+ results. Ferarri's G+ page is on top on the right, but no link to Ferrari's actual website or their FB page. So if this was focused on relevancy wouldn't the Ferrari link be to Ferrari's home page? Not that I think Ferrari is the most relevant result period, but wouldn't that make sense? Not only that, in your main results Ferrari.com isn't listed in the top 100. So how could they be relevant? This gives pageviews to G+ where the user should be going elsewhere. This isn't just about Twitter/Facebook. Google is driving users to its content over other publishers. This is an ADVERTISEMENT for Google+. 100% Which is against your policies not to mark them clearly as ads. http://www.google.com/competition/howgoogleadswork.html http://www.google.com/competition/howgoogleadswork.html Example 2: I searched for NFC Championship Game in Google while being opted in. I got a status update from MG Siegler stating he was going to the game in the top 5 results. MG Siegler is not in my circles. Wouldn't an article on the game be 100X better than this result. So you are driving users to your irrelevant content in replace of ESPN. That makes no sense. Example 3. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/ - Cutts did a search for werewolf. Was he looking for a picture of himself? Does anyone here find that useful? Most of the comments on his post didn't. I would like to know honestly. Would that be useful to you? Also, in the future, when I search for cars will I see my friends driving their cars as the 2nd result? I would personally rather see some info about how to buy a car or research a car or car prices. Example 4: You can't opt out 100%. That is disingenuous to say you can. Example 5: Google was supposed to be "Do No Evil" and you have squashed that. It is worse to be screwed by someone who claims to be trustworthy than someone you know is not. For example, we all knew Microsoft was shady from the beginning so we didn't expect much. But you guys said it was all about relevancy, the user, do no evil, etc. Look at this way, if a girl married Gene Simmons could she honestly be pissed if he was cheating on her? But if a girl married a guy like Donnie Osmond and he cheated she would be devastated. She was probably only with him in the first place because he was trustworthy. You are Donnie Osmond. :) Anyway, if you guys came clean and said that you are trying to promote your network then maybe people wouldn't be so pissed. As of right now, it looks like you are trying to drive traffic to your own irrelevant content over legitimate content businesses. Since you have a dominant position in search and hundreds of thousands of companies/sites depend on your traffic, they are scared. Google is rapidly getting into the content game and people can only assume you will put your new content above everyone else's. That is bad for business and bad for startups which are country needs so badly right now.

kaffiene 15y ago

I agree. I was just chatting with some Software Engineers work mates and we are all at a loss to know why the Whine-o-sphere are up in arms about this. How hard is clicking the option to exclude SPYW results? If you had no opt-out I'd think they had a tiny shred of an issue, but given that you can opt out, this whole issue is a giant WTF???? for me.

drhowarddrfine 15y ago

While Google makes the news on this, everyone loves to forget every marketing firm in the world has been collecting exactly the same data on them since the stone age. And being able to collect the data about them to serve better results is a business decision. Some may like or dislike it's done that way but it's no different than liking/disliking any product you use now.

yanw 15y ago

Much of these "bubble" issues are created by interested parties (mainly your competitors) the best you could do about it is assembling a better PR team.

hendrix 15y ago

So Google should know everything about everyone's search/social/youtube/whatever? Combining this data creates a very complete psychological profile on someone. Since Google is based in the USA all of this data could then be acquired by the government under the patriot act and used against innocent Americans. Never mind that the FBI (who could also request Google's data) has already done this sort of thing to anti-war groups http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/20/AR2010092003100.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09.... Also, Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" which in my opinion is fucking crazy. If I want to search for black panthers/Jewish defense league/Aryan nations/journal articles on explosive synthesis/bacillus anthracis/obscure soviet weaponry then I sure as hell don't want Google logging everything. Never mind that I'm just curious, but it sounds like Herr Schmidt and company are ready to send the Stasi out to get me. I have since switched to ssl + duckduckgo and blocked Google in my hosts file. Time for Google to stop trying to be god.

cynwoody 15y ago
So use Yandex via https. That way, only Kommittee will know what you searched for. Seriously, it's not a half-bad search engine. Throw it a bone once in while to make sure it survives!

bonch 15y ago

> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. If it was about more relevant results, than Google would be delivering results for the competing social networks already indexed in the search engine.

rdtsc 15y ago

> This is something you can opt out of Alright so if this all about improving user experience, let users know they can opt in then?

eternalban 15y ago

I don't want Google Inc. to know my interests. I wanted a search butler (and that was the original Google), not a e-Mommy (to run on my iDaddy). Yes, Apple is getting out of hand, as well. That is why I am now a DuckDuckGo user. Of course I can't do anything about Google's prying eyes /everywhere/ on the net, so I guess we need to ask Congress to help out there.

rat87 15y ago

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No absolutely not, a search that is more relevant occasionally is only slightly useful maybe getting a slightly better link a few percentage points of the time(past a certain amount how much more relevant can you get. If you go to far in trying to guess the persons mind based on persons external history rather then their search it seem like you would get more way of answers and if you don't the answer would likely have been near the top anyway), keeping less information on users for shorter amounts of time should be preferred.

kahawe 15y ago

The difference is that for the up-coming change, you can NOT opt out of it and it goes far beyond "we'll also search your google+ profile for you!". If it was really all about the users and their experiences, then why is there no way to opt-out 100%? And the last time GOOG did what AAPL just did yesterday... must have been, hmm, never.

tallanvor 15y ago

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. When I search for something, I want the most relevant results, not what you think are most relevant to me. I'm a liberal, and I tend to visit more liberal sites for political information - Crooks and Liars, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, etc. for general news. I'm also more likely to share links to those sites. But if I'm searching for information that could be considered related to a political issue, I don't want Google deciding that the most relevant results will only come from left leaning sites when a conservative site may have better information about a specific issue. I believe someone even gave a TED talk about this issue.

batista 15y ago

* As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. * And I call BS. Nobody asked for results to be more relevant by going THAT particular way. On the contrary, people have asked for more relevant results by eliminating this kind of artificial results. I see this as much the same way. All of this is about (IMHO) improving the user experience. Really? Because it looks like it's all about competing with Facebook and improving the bottom line.

jmcqk6 15y ago

>If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? Generally speaking, yes, but there is the danger of creating a [filter bubble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble).

tripzilch 15y ago

> On HN you'll find people who are still somehow shocked that you can't out-of-the-box sideload a bootloader onto an iPhone (or whatever). Not "shocked", but pissed off and outraged. I really hate this default "I can't believe you're surprised that ..." response whenever someone brings something to their attention that worries or angers them. It's even on Cracked.com's list of most stupid Internet reactions: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-internet-reactions-to-shocking-news-stories/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-internet-reactio...