4 ms·

The FTC never had a prayer on the "manipulating search results" charge. Google's search product is a great big "filter-and-sort." Regulating the "sort" was ridi

The FTC never had a prayer on the "manipulating search results" charge. Google's search product is a great big "filter-and-sort." Regulating the "sort" was ridiculous. To my mind, the strange part of the settlement is the FTC's claim that websites benefit from hits coming from organic search but are somehow harmed by hits from Google local/shopping results. It seems the only sites harmed by being included in Google Shopping results are those with high prices. I didn't realize the FTC had a mandate to protect arbitrageurs.

seiji 14y ago
Google recently turned shopping search into a paid service for the seller. You have to pay for inclusion in results. Maybe that's the icky behavior they wanted to go after?
- natrius 14y ago
  How is that practice anticompetitive?
elsewhen 14y ago
just because "regulating the sort" seems tricky doesn't mean you just throw your hands up and concede. what if google just put all of its own properties on the right column of the SERPs (search engine results pages) and all the organic results unfettered in the center. what google already does, and now will likely do more of, is intersperse its own results _among_ the organic results.
- dangerlibrary 14y ago
  If Google's products answer my question / solve my problem, their search engine would be worse if those products were excluded from the results. If the government starts regulating the CSS, I'm even more worried.
  - elsewhen 14y ago
    does it bother you that cigarette companies are required to put warning labels on their products. is it a problem that the font-size, contrast, element size are also monitored. would it be ok for cigarette companies to put their warning messages in size-4 font in light grey inside the package?
    - dangerlibrary 14y ago
      Gmail doesn't cause cancer.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
greglindahl 14y ago
Google's search engine competitors were really hoping that the FTC wasn't going to regulate the "sort". We all have editorial voices that we want to be free to use, for what we think is good and bad. If you don't like a search engine's editorial voice, go find a new one.
- rbarooah 14y ago
  I agree with you that Google should be free to have their own editorial voice, and it seems like a really bad idea for that to be interfered with directly by government. However, as you have done, I often see this idea coupled with a quip like "If you don't like it, go find a new one." Why do people keep saying this? It's clearly not a valid option. Doing fast, high quality search has gigantic barriers to entry. Some of these may literally be insurmountable because the data Google has archived from the past of the web will never be available to new entrants. We simply don't have a range of search 'voices' to choose from. Telling people to choose from a range of options that doesn't exist solves nothing. Personally, I think there's an argument for forcing Google to at least publicize that their search actually has an editorial voice to counteract the misleading idea that it was somehow algorithmically objective and free of bias, which was their position for many years. At least that way consumers might question what they are seeing and recognize that it's not 'the web' but Google's opinion of what you should see.
  - greglindahl 14y ago
    I said that because I'm the CTO of a competitor (blekko) that some users think is a viable alternative. It's true that we don't the bazillion clicks that google has logged. But google doesn't have our human curation, and brand new content on the Internet doesn't have a result click history yet.
    - rbarooah 14y ago
      I commend you for trying to offer an alternative, seriously! Google may not have hand curation, but they do use manual raters as one of their signals. It's also true that new content doesn't have a click history, but the click history as well as topological history of the internet can tell Google a lot more than just the history of individual items. In any case, my main point here is that the position of competitors like yourselves would be strengthened if more people realized that Google wasn't somehow based on 'objective' algorithms. You guys claim subjectivity and editorial quality as a strength and I agree that it is, but I think there's an argument that Google has been falsely advertising itself as objective and free of bias and could be forced to rectify that through advertising. Indeed the reportage around this FTC settlement implies that Google has been 'cleared of allegations of bias', which is essentially the opposite of the truth.
fpgeek 14y ago
Even regulating the filter is hard as anyone involved with DMCA complaints knows.
fpgeek 14y ago
Even regulating the filter is hard as anyone involved with DMCA complaints knows.

seiji 14y ago

Google recently turned shopping search into a paid service for the seller. You have to pay for inclusion in results. Maybe that's the icky behavior they wanted to go after?

natrius 14y ago
How is that practice anticompetitive?

elsewhen 14y ago

just because "regulating the sort" seems tricky doesn't mean you just throw your hands up and concede. what if google just put all of its own properties on the right column of the SERPs (search engine results pages) and all the organic results unfettered in the center. what google already does, and now will likely do more of, is intersperse its own results _among_ the organic results.

dangerlibrary 14y ago
If Google's products answer my question / solve my problem, their search engine would be worse if those products were excluded from the results. If the government starts regulating the CSS, I'm even more worried.
- elsewhen 14y ago
  does it bother you that cigarette companies are required to put warning labels on their products. is it a problem that the font-size, contrast, element size are also monitored. would it be ok for cigarette companies to put their warning messages in size-4 font in light grey inside the package?
  - dangerlibrary 14y ago
    Gmail doesn't cause cancer.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

greglindahl 14y ago

Google's search engine competitors were really hoping that the FTC wasn't going to regulate the "sort". We all have editorial voices that we want to be free to use, for what we think is good and bad. If you don't like a search engine's editorial voice, go find a new one.

rbarooah 14y ago
I agree with you that Google should be free to have their own editorial voice, and it seems like a really bad idea for that to be interfered with directly by government. However, as you have done, I often see this idea coupled with a quip like "If you don't like it, go find a new one." Why do people keep saying this? It's clearly not a valid option. Doing fast, high quality search has gigantic barriers to entry. Some of these may literally be insurmountable because the data Google has archived from the past of the web will never be available to new entrants. We simply don't have a range of search 'voices' to choose from. Telling people to choose from a range of options that doesn't exist solves nothing. Personally, I think there's an argument for forcing Google to at least publicize that their search actually has an editorial voice to counteract the misleading idea that it was somehow algorithmically objective and free of bias, which was their position for many years. At least that way consumers might question what they are seeing and recognize that it's not 'the web' but Google's opinion of what you should see.
- greglindahl 14y ago
  I said that because I'm the CTO of a competitor (blekko) that some users think is a viable alternative. It's true that we don't the bazillion clicks that google has logged. But google doesn't have our human curation, and brand new content on the Internet doesn't have a result click history yet.
  - rbarooah 14y ago
    I commend you for trying to offer an alternative, seriously! Google may not have hand curation, but they do use manual raters as one of their signals. It's also true that new content doesn't have a click history, but the click history as well as topological history of the internet can tell Google a lot more than just the history of individual items. In any case, my main point here is that the position of competitors like yourselves would be strengthened if more people realized that Google wasn't somehow based on 'objective' algorithms. You guys claim subjectivity and editorial quality as a strength and I agree that it is, but I think there's an argument that Google has been falsely advertising itself as objective and free of bias and could be forced to rectify that through advertising. Indeed the reportage around this FTC settlement implies that Google has been 'cleared of allegations of bias', which is essentially the opposite of the truth.

fpgeek 14y ago

Even regulating the filter is hard as anyone involved with DMCA complaints knows.

fpgeek 14y ago

Even regulating the filter is hard as anyone involved with DMCA complaints knows.