8 ms·

Google is a great example of "it's difficult to get someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on not understanding it". Even before google was

• lemper 3y ago
  well articulated. if any of you google employees reading this thread, if you love open and free web, get out of google. you're part of the problem.
  • guessmyname 3y ago
    > if any of you google employees reading this thread, if you love open and free web, get out of google. you're part of the problem. Shouldn’t we give the opposite advice? To stay at Google in order to gain influence as to create initiatives to guide the company into a better direction?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • generic92034 3y ago
      You will not get into such a position if you are advocating for things that harm Google's bottom line (or at least you would not stay there for long).
  • scarface_74 3y ago
    So how do you have “free” without ads?
    • nottheengineer 3y ago
      You start differentiating between free and gratis.
      • scarface_74 3y ago
        And you still didn’t answer the question. What does an “open” search engine look like and who is going to pay for the infrastructure?
    • ziftface 3y ago
      The same way libraries are free: they're actually paid for by taxpayers. If the internet was invented in America's earlier days, a lot of these information tools would be a public service, similar to libraries, and we'd all be better for it.
      • krapp 3y ago
        You're under the mistaken impression that Americans like their taxes to go towards public services. Many public libraries are underfunded, and what funding they get is sometimes wrapped up in censorship laws serving an increasingly hostile and paranoid constitutency. "Public service" is synonymous with "government controlled service." Google would be no different. Forget any "innovation" any of Google's satellite projects may have had, they simply wouldn't exist, too expensive. The service would be stripped down to a bare bones minimum of functionality and farmed out to lowest-bid contractors to save money. The CIA, NSA and law enforcement would have backdoors everywhere (so no difference there), "controversial" sites would be delisted or fined (because broadcast decency laws would probably apply, and the taxpayers would insist any indecency be removed) and the whole thing would wind up privatized by the Republicans anyway, so it would still run ads at the end.
        • 3y ago
  • knorker 3y ago
    Not everyone at Google works on ads.
    • superchroma 3y ago
      [flagged]
• gizmondo 3y ago
  > I've never worked at Google, but I would bet that part of their induction is to train their employees how to combat these ideas. You'd lose the bet. Rather I think the entire topic of monetization is glossed over.
  • drt5b7j 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • gizmondo 3y ago
      I skimmed both articles and they seem to be about anti-trust, which is orthogonal to the relevance-revenue conflict you described. Have I missed anything, or did you think a random unrelated fact proves your point somehow?
• wkat4242 3y ago
  Google may not be the worst but it's the biggest offender that reaches consumers. Their BS motto "Don't be evil", it makes me sick thinking of it now. They really made the world a much worse place.
  • ahofmann 3y ago
    While I understand what you mean, you should state at least one reason of why you think they are deeply evil people. To me, it's the story of how they systematically convince small firms that they want to do business, only to screw them over. Like Google Earth and Terra Vision, for example. Also, from the beginning, the proximity to the U.S. government was very noticeable, such as Keyhole or leasing military land. Edit: To make it very clear, I think Google is evil and was evil all the time. It is at least one step further to a brave new world dystopia.
    • sneak 3y ago
      https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/update-on-google-clouds-work-with-the-us-government https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/upd... One can make a strong argument that actively seeking collaboration with an organization that runs a global network of extralegal and extrajudicial torture centers qualifies as evil. AWS, for example, operates a special airgapped "region" at Langley for the CIA to store and process their data, which presumably includes operational information related to the global network of assassination and torture personnel they develop, own, and operate. Many people give the military and military-adjacent a moral pass on things like mass murder (or mass murder adjacent things like extrajudicial assassination, kidnapping, or torture), but not all of us do. You may or may not personally disagree, but it is still a reasonable and cogent argument that seeking active collaboration with DoD qualifies for the title of "evil" on the grounds that it will more effectively enable mass murder, assassination, torture, and other deprivations of human rights. Google also rebooted their censored search project, known as Dragonfly, to re-enter the Chinese market, which included the specific feature that would display government-provided AQI indicators/values instead of the real ones. Eventually word got out and they stopped again. This shows that they are willing and able to collaborate with any government, no matter how repugnant their stance on human rights, if it will result in increased revenue or market access for Google. That's evil, in my book.
• msoad 3y ago
  Now think of ChatGPT with this framework. Because it is paid to do, it will slowly try to convince you to buy something or even worse think of some politician or party differently. Scary stuff!
  • dmarchand90 3y ago
    The nice thing with ChatGPT is they've established a viable funding model through paid subscriptions from day 1. On the other hand I predict that we will see the next ten years as a 'golden age' of steadily improving performance from ChatGPT, which will then plateau and 'enshittify'.
    • mike_hearn 3y ago
      I don't think we know yet if it's viable or not. All they've said is that Plus is break even on "compute" (i.e. probably not training, definitely not staff/data costs).
    • _ahxg 3y ago
      I don't think that will be enough to stop ads there, given that $2k+ smart TVs are blotted with permanent factory ads now.
    • xnx 3y ago
      Monthly fees don't stop cable TV from showing ads.
  • wschfdkbrmcdf 3y ago
    It doesn’t matter in the slightest which Party you prefer
    • catchnear4321 3y ago
      the presence of the preference matters far more than the preference itself, at least to those that profit from polarizing people.
    • onionisafruit 3y ago
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Even before google was founded and the founders discussed how they could monetize their search, they understood that paid ads create a conflict of interest: the point of search which is to to return the most relevant results, but the incentive in paid ads is to return the best paying ads. One of their papers contains this point _in writing_. It's not just their papers. Their philosophy - which was a big part of everyone moving from other search providers in the late 90s - was never having ads in the search results.
  • onionisafruit 3y ago
    I had forgotten about that, but now that you remind me I used to make that point when I recommended Google to friends. Now I feel like a sucker all over again.
• shapefrog 3y ago
  > part of their induction is to train their employees how to combat these ideas You dont need to indoctrinate people; the selection process takes care of most of the heavy lifting and the rest is taken care of by the fat paycheque and stock options. imo there is absolutely nothing wrong with the conflict of interest, pretending it doesnt exist however suggests either dishonesty or a special kind of stupidity.
  • drt5b7j 3y ago
    > imo there is absolutely nothing wrong with the conflict of interest, pretending it doesnt exist however suggests either dishonesty or a special kind of stupidity Right, in principle I don't strongly disagree with you. Certainly in the short term the intelectual dishonesty bothers me more than making money by bumping up results. But whether that is a real issue or not, depends on how relevant Google is in our society. If there's alternatives, people can try them. If there's no alternatives, having the power to control the results to benefit yourself is maybe too much power concentrated in too few hands. It's unclear to me where we stand right now. I haven't used Google search in many years (DDG), but I'm aware they're hugely influential to basically everyone else.
• luag 3y ago
  [dead]
• The_Colonel 3y ago
  Yes, there is a conflict, but it's not an unsolvable one. Google implemented a compromise - paid ads get displayed at the top, but they are marked as ads, so if you want the most relevant results, you scroll below the paid ads.
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Paid ads used to be displayed to the side of the results. Being displayed instead of the results isn't so much of a "compromise".
    • The_Colonel 3y ago
      "instead" suggests that the actual results aren't there, which isn't true. You just need to scroll a bit. Google needs to tread the balance to stay usable, otherwise people stop using it.
      • thaumasiotes 3y ago
        If the results are there, but not displayed, then whatever is displayed is being displayed instead of the results.
        • The_Colonel 3y ago
          The results are displayed on the page, just a little bit below the ads.
          • thaumasiotes 3y ago
            If you have to scroll, they are not displayed. You seem to have a working definition of "display" which does not include making something visible, but that conflicts with every actual definition of the term.
            • The_Colonel 3y ago
• vinay_ys 3y ago
  One of the most shocking thing I experienced working at Google compared to my previous job (e-commerce with very thin operating margins) is that hardly anyone cared about potential revenue vs cost tradeoffs or monetization more broadly. Vast majority of people are working on building some feature functionality or enhancing an underlying system infra for more scale or performance or such non-functional capability which they genuinely think will improve user experience and hence make users prefer to use their product more than anything else. People didn't focus on business metrics (most people don't know what they are) – this was most disorienting for me. It took me sometime to understand the luxury provided by strong margin business that is google ads which allows you gloss over short-term inefficiencies while exploring new product spaces. It is assumed monetization in the form of ads or subscription can be done if there is strong user engagement for the product and that revenue vs cost equation will work out. (If not, they kill it, which they do badly). Another culture at Google is people are openly critical of their product in very large internal discussion forums.
• mike_hearn 3y ago
  Some of the arguments aren't actually Olympian, although if you have a pre-existing bias against commerce or capitalism it may feel that way. Most obvious example query of where PageRank totally fails: [flowers]. The correct top result here for 99.9% of searchers is a local flower shop or possibly a big flower delivery chain, but it's not the Wikipedia page for flowers. Likewise for [hotel near me] which an algorithm like PageRank will yield garbage for, [oppenheimer showtimes] and many other very popular query types. Link based ranking just doesn't work for this sort of result. You need data that isn't on the web which means you then need a way to rank it. And how exactly do you plan to rank flower shops or movie theatres? You've got no data on which to do that. Even if they have a website at all (big if) people don't organically link to them. Attempts to gain ranking data via things like user reviews will fail, almost nobody real reviews local stores or cinemas so if you rely on that then either you'll be flooded with fake reviews, or companies will aggressively push people to write them, or both, and users hate both outcomes. Ad auctions work much better. Users don't have to do anything directly, they just buy things from the best businesses as they see it, revenue flows to those businesses enabling them to bid higher for ads, so users see the most successful businesses as determined by the market as a whole, which is much harder to game than user reviews or PageRank. When the original Google was built, it was built by students. Their first ever test query was the name of the guy who ran the university. Their edge was ranking publicly available web pages using link graphs, so they just weren't thinking about commercial queries at all and if that's the scope of your ambition then yeah it will look like ads are always a conflict of interest because the only model you can imagine is re-ranking organic informational results surreptitiously. Once they turned on their first search backend deal and got experience running a search engine with serious non-nerd user traffic for the first time, they realized there were tons of popular queries that their whole approach just sucked at and would always suck at. That's when they realized that in some cases "ads are information", as they put it. That wasn't some sort of paycheque-induced intellectual blindness, if it was then Google would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. It was an actual fundamental realization about the nature of what people use search engines for.
  • drt5b7j 3y ago
    That's one interpretation. An alternative interpretation is they realized that making non-paid results worse increases the clickthru rate for the paid results.
• soraminazuki 3y ago
  > I would bet that part of their induction is to train their employees how to combat these ideas. Exactly. This has been reported [1] and expanded on [2]. In a nutshell, they have internal learning materials designed to train employees to not recognize anti-competitive behavior. [1]: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc... [2]: https://zyppy.com/seo/googlespeak/ https://zyppy.com/seo/googlespeak/
• tomjen3 3y ago
  Advertised search also incentivise bad results so you will do more searches.