5 ms·

One thing that I have been saying for years is that google is a dichotomy. Google claims that their intention is to organize and show the most objectively rele

One thing that I have been saying for years is that google is a dichotomy. Google claims that their intention is to organize and show the most objectively relevant content as possible and yet all their income is from advertising which is a completely different objective. It's offering up relevance to the highest bidder. This can work in certain circumstances (if I'm willing pay more for a search term than anyone else I likely have relevant content) but it is far from the promise of objectivity. To wit: The P.R. team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.” (Searching online for “Tyrone Hayes” now brings up an advertisement that says, “Tyrone Hayes Not Credible.”) Is everyone really cool with the premier organizer of information being so easily bribed(through a fucking API) to essentially lie to it's users.

md224 13y ago
I've been pondering the ethics of AdWords for a while... I can maybe understand how tech people perceive ads as this "black box thing" that they can just tune out of their vision, and therefore assume that ads aren't a problem. But I do think there may be something inherently problematic about it. If we drop this "invincibility-to-advertising" assumption and look at the facts: the largest information search engine in the world displays a portion of results whose presence and salience on the page is determined, in part, by how much someone was willing to pay. That seems a little weird to me.
- siliconc0w 13y ago
  Worse, all their art and technology goes into knowing what the most relevant results are and yet they promote the sponsored result instead. It's one thing to point me to a potentially inferior washing machine but even when the search is about a potentially dangerous chemical in wide use throughout the US they point users to information they know to be less relevant. And they do it for money. How is this not clearly acting against the public good? This isn't "weird" - this is plain dishonesty and immoral by pretty much any standard. Just because it's a web application doing it shouldn't change anything. For now, we're in the technological twilight where it's somewhat foreseeable someone could challenge Google but when they increasingly control both the client and the server -the ability to ad block will go away and the 'sponsored' links will be more difficult to ignore (their business essentially depends on it). The technology (patents/software/hardware/expertise) required to parse the increasingly unwieldy stream of information that describes this world will be held by a single entity - one whose revenue is the open betrayal it's user's interests. Whats fucked up is it's probably more expensive to mislead me about the washing machine. I feel like there should at least be a fee of some sort. They could use geolocation to see if the user is in an affected area and apply a surcharge of charge, say 40%, for the privilege of manipulating evidence of dangerous chemicals in a user's environment.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    Ultimately this is you complaining that people are not thoughtful enough consumers of information. I'm fine with regulating commercial speech to make sure that it is true (and maybe even that it is not misleading, harder to say, a lot more ambiguity there), but let's also focus on fixing the real problem.
    - hobs 13y ago
      That people are uneducated/ignorant of technology? Good luck fixing that one! Taking advantage of people who don't understand is still unethical, even if you say "oh well that's the problem of education."
danso 13y ago
Traditionally, newspapers had that same conflict, where political groups of all stripes can buy some of the most visible space to advance their causes, regardless of truthiness. In fact, you could even buy an ad in the NYT to slam the NYT itself: http://m.deadline.com/2013/05/scott-rudin-slams-nyt-reporter-testament-of-mary/ http://m.deadline.com/2013/05/scott-rudin-slams-nyt-reporter... Think of it this way: this kind of ad purchasing allows for the editorial side, or in Google's case, the search results, to remain independent of outside influence
- jordanb 13y ago
  Not sure you're using the word "truthiness" correctly. "Truthiness" refers to something "feeling true" without regard to if it's actually true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
  - lovemenot 13y ago
    Crockford gives us a definition of truthy in Javascript as anything other than one of the six values such as 0 and NaN which evaluate to false. This maybe closer to your parent's intended meaning.
  - raganwald 13y ago
    The original word for that is "verisimilitude." I may be alone in this, but I consider "truthiness" to be something that you want to be true even though it's obviously not true. From where I'm sitting, Mayor Rob Ford being the victim of a "lefty elitist conspiracy" has zero verisimilitude but plenty of truthiness amongst his supporters.
srean 13y ago
Google has stopped being about "organizing the world's information" a long time ago. Now its more about how can I make everything look like Plus even if it breaks the application and how can Plus be a Facebook clone, and how can I drag everyone to Plus. A distinguishing characteristic of erstwhile Google used to be: get them out of your system with what they need, as fast as you can, and be so seamless that people want to come back. This was a welcome change compared to Microsoft's: make leaving so annoying that nobody dares to. Even that has changed. This seems to be well correlated with Page taking over Schmidt's duties.
- a3n 13y ago
  > Google has stopped being about "organizing the world's information" a long time ago. Now they're trying to organize the world's money.
stuaxo 13y ago
I complained about that adword, maybe everyone else should.
- contingencies 13y ago
  Sure. Link to complaints form? They should have a no personal names policy, IMHO.
weland 13y ago
> Is everyone really cool with the premier organizer of information being so easily bribed(through a fucking API) to essentially lie to it's users. I'm not, and it's part of why I'm willing to put up with the occasional lack of relevance ordering in DuckDuckGo/Bing's results. A search engine that narrows the range of its results through the slit of advertising is not only useless for research, it's actually counterproductive to anything but bias reinforcement.
tim333 13y ago
To google's credit it keeps the organic search and the paid search separate and everyone knows the paid results are 'bribed(through a fucking API)' as you put it. To me when that came it that was great - I think the biggest competitor at the time Google came in was Yahoo which I think allowed straight bribery in the main results and most other information came through main stream media, in my case in the UK things like the Guardian and the BBC which were ok but had an official kind of politically correct line and not much coverage of anything else. I'm not quite sure how Google could do better while still making money. Perhaps if they allowed people to rate the paid ads as good or rubbish etc.?
- DanBC 13y ago
  Google could make the paid ads more distinct. Many people don't know the ads are ads, even though their on a different background colour and that box is labled "ads". They could also allow me to tell them that an ad has zero interest to me. I don't block ads, but it's frustrating when I get a blitz of car insurance ads. I don't own a car; I am never going to buy car insurance. It would be great to be able to turn those ads off. I imagine some alcoholics or gambling addicts would like to turn off alcohol and gambling ads too.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    That "different background color" becomes invisible on cheap TN laptop screens at a slight deviation from vertical. I wouldn't be surprised if Google A/B tested background colors until they happened upon one that effectively disappears for a lot of users.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  > To google's credit it keeps the organic search and the paid search separate There is just this oh so very faint difference in background color (rgb(255, 247, 237) instead of rgb(255, 255, 255) which is a joke of a distinction, and depending on viewing angle they both look white on this monitor) and a first line that is very easily overlooked. Most people here know where the actual results begin, but I bet you that a lot of people do not; my mother sure never realized it until I pointed it out to her. As Erich Schmidt said: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.", and it shows. So technically organic and paid search are separate, but practically that separation is so thin it's next to worthless. They A/B test everything, so they surely know that some or even a lot of people confuse ads and actual search results. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240348/FTC_advises_Google_Yahoo_others_to_be_clearer_in_labeling_paid_search_results http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240348/FTC_advises_G... Search companies were already advised in 2002 by the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection about the potential for consumers to be deceived, in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, "unless search engines clearly and prominently distinguished advertising from natural search results," Mary K. Engle, associate director at FTC's division of advertising practices, said in the letter. Companies followed those recommendations in 2002, the FTC said, but since then "we have observed a decline in compliance with the letter's guidance," the group said. "Top ads," or advertising that is located immediately above the natural results, may be partly to blame, the FTC suggests. The group cites a recent survey by the search strategies company SEOBook that found that nearly half of searchers did not recognize top ads as distinct from natural search results. > I'm not quite sure how Google could do better while still making money. Of course, making a clear separation (#ccc for the background, an actual border, the possibilities are endless) would cost them some money, but it's not like they have to be this creepy to make any money at all. I searched for "google separation of ads and search results" to see how they did it in the past (I'm pretty sure it wasn't always that thin a separation), the first result is https://www.google.com/honestresults.html https://www.google.com/honestresults.html and returns 404. Hah!
malandrew 13y ago
I would really like to get Matt Cutts view on this story and what Google is doing to limit unethical uses of AdWords like this and punish the companies who do use it unethically.

md224 13y ago

I've been pondering the ethics of AdWords for a while... I can maybe understand how tech people perceive ads as this "black box thing" that they can just tune out of their vision, and therefore assume that ads aren't a problem. But I do think there may be something inherently problematic about it. If we drop this "invincibility-to-advertising" assumption and look at the facts: the largest information search engine in the world displays a portion of results whose presence and salience on the page is determined, in part, by how much someone was willing to pay. That seems a little weird to me.

siliconc0w 13y ago
Worse, all their art and technology goes into knowing what the most relevant results are and yet they promote the sponsored result instead. It's one thing to point me to a potentially inferior washing machine but even when the search is about a potentially dangerous chemical in wide use throughout the US they point users to information they know to be less relevant. And they do it for money. How is this not clearly acting against the public good? This isn't "weird" - this is plain dishonesty and immoral by pretty much any standard. Just because it's a web application doing it shouldn't change anything. For now, we're in the technological twilight where it's somewhat foreseeable someone could challenge Google but when they increasingly control both the client and the server -the ability to ad block will go away and the 'sponsored' links will be more difficult to ignore (their business essentially depends on it). The technology (patents/software/hardware/expertise) required to parse the increasingly unwieldy stream of information that describes this world will be held by a single entity - one whose revenue is the open betrayal it's user's interests. Whats fucked up is it's probably more expensive to mislead me about the washing machine. I feel like there should at least be a fee of some sort. They could use geolocation to see if the user is in an affected area and apply a surcharge of charge, say 40%, for the privilege of manipulating evidence of dangerous chemicals in a user's environment.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Ultimately this is you complaining that people are not thoughtful enough consumers of information. I'm fine with regulating commercial speech to make sure that it is true (and maybe even that it is not misleading, harder to say, a lot more ambiguity there), but let's also focus on fixing the real problem.
  - hobs 13y ago
    That people are uneducated/ignorant of technology? Good luck fixing that one! Taking advantage of people who don't understand is still unethical, even if you say "oh well that's the problem of education."

danso 13y ago

Traditionally, newspapers had that same conflict, where political groups of all stripes can buy some of the most visible space to advance their causes, regardless of truthiness. In fact, you could even buy an ad in the NYT to slam the NYT itself: http://m.deadline.com/2013/05/scott-rudin-slams-nyt-reporter-testament-of-mary/ http://m.deadline.com/2013/05/scott-rudin-slams-nyt-reporter... Think of it this way: this kind of ad purchasing allows for the editorial side, or in Google's case, the search results, to remain independent of outside influence

jordanb 13y ago
Not sure you're using the word "truthiness" correctly. "Truthiness" refers to something "feeling true" without regard to if it's actually true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
- lovemenot 13y ago
  Crockford gives us a definition of truthy in Javascript as anything other than one of the six values such as 0 and NaN which evaluate to false. This maybe closer to your parent's intended meaning.
- raganwald 13y ago
  The original word for that is "verisimilitude." I may be alone in this, but I consider "truthiness" to be something that you want to be true even though it's obviously not true. From where I'm sitting, Mayor Rob Ford being the victim of a "lefty elitist conspiracy" has zero verisimilitude but plenty of truthiness amongst his supporters.

srean 13y ago

Google has stopped being about "organizing the world's information" a long time ago. Now its more about how can I make everything look like Plus even if it breaks the application and how can Plus be a Facebook clone, and how can I drag everyone to Plus. A distinguishing characteristic of erstwhile Google used to be: get them out of your system with what they need, as fast as you can, and be so seamless that people want to come back. This was a welcome change compared to Microsoft's: make leaving so annoying that nobody dares to. Even that has changed. This seems to be well correlated with Page taking over Schmidt's duties.

a3n 13y ago
> Google has stopped being about "organizing the world's information" a long time ago. Now they're trying to organize the world's money.

stuaxo 13y ago

I complained about that adword, maybe everyone else should.

contingencies 13y ago
Sure. Link to complaints form? They should have a no personal names policy, IMHO.

weland 13y ago

> Is everyone really cool with the premier organizer of information being so easily bribed(through a fucking API) to essentially lie to it's users. I'm not, and it's part of why I'm willing to put up with the occasional lack of relevance ordering in DuckDuckGo/Bing's results. A search engine that narrows the range of its results through the slit of advertising is not only useless for research, it's actually counterproductive to anything but bias reinforcement.

tim333 13y ago

To google's credit it keeps the organic search and the paid search separate and everyone knows the paid results are 'bribed(through a fucking API)' as you put it. To me when that came it that was great - I think the biggest competitor at the time Google came in was Yahoo which I think allowed straight bribery in the main results and most other information came through main stream media, in my case in the UK things like the Guardian and the BBC which were ok but had an official kind of politically correct line and not much coverage of anything else. I'm not quite sure how Google could do better while still making money. Perhaps if they allowed people to rate the paid ads as good or rubbish etc.?

DanBC 13y ago
Google could make the paid ads more distinct. Many people don't know the ads are ads, even though their on a different background colour and that box is labled "ads". They could also allow me to tell them that an ad has zero interest to me. I don't block ads, but it's frustrating when I get a blitz of car insurance ads. I don't own a car; I am never going to buy car insurance. It would be great to be able to turn those ads off. I imagine some alcoholics or gambling addicts would like to turn off alcohol and gambling ads too.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  That "different background color" becomes invisible on cheap TN laptop screens at a slight deviation from vertical. I wouldn't be surprised if Google A/B tested background colors until they happened upon one that effectively disappears for a lot of users.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
> To google's credit it keeps the organic search and the paid search separate There is just this oh so very faint difference in background color (rgb(255, 247, 237) instead of rgb(255, 255, 255) which is a joke of a distinction, and depending on viewing angle they both look white on this monitor) and a first line that is very easily overlooked. Most people here know where the actual results begin, but I bet you that a lot of people do not; my mother sure never realized it until I pointed it out to her. As Erich Schmidt said: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.", and it shows. So technically organic and paid search are separate, but practically that separation is so thin it's next to worthless. They A/B test everything, so they surely know that some or even a lot of people confuse ads and actual search results. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240348/FTC_advises_Google_Yahoo_others_to_be_clearer_in_labeling_paid_search_results http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240348/FTC_advises_G... Search companies were already advised in 2002 by the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection about the potential for consumers to be deceived, in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, "unless search engines clearly and prominently distinguished advertising from natural search results," Mary K. Engle, associate director at FTC's division of advertising practices, said in the letter. Companies followed those recommendations in 2002, the FTC said, but since then "we have observed a decline in compliance with the letter's guidance," the group said. "Top ads," or advertising that is located immediately above the natural results, may be partly to blame, the FTC suggests. The group cites a recent survey by the search strategies company SEOBook that found that nearly half of searchers did not recognize top ads as distinct from natural search results. > I'm not quite sure how Google could do better while still making money. Of course, making a clear separation (#ccc for the background, an actual border, the possibilities are endless) would cost them some money, but it's not like they have to be this creepy to make any money at all. I searched for "google separation of ads and search results" to see how they did it in the past (I'm pretty sure it wasn't always that thin a separation), the first result is https://www.google.com/honestresults.html https://www.google.com/honestresults.html and returns 404. Hah!

malandrew 13y ago

I would really like to get Matt Cutts view on this story and what Google is doing to limit unethical uses of AdWords like this and punish the companies who do use it unethically.