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Google has (very effectively) played the "oh noes, it's all machine learning" card. But machine learning is nothing more than codified human judgement (yes, I

by x0x0 12y ago

Google has (very effectively) played the "oh noes, it's all machine learning" card. But machine learning is nothing more than codified human judgement (yes, I get that for example the conditional expectation minimizes the expected squared error, but who picked the expected squared error to minimize?) The point is, they wish the ranking algorithm to be seen as some divine choice and hence not subject to criticism rather than a mathematical extension of human choices. So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised. Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly. It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)

cromwellian 12y ago
The fallacy is, there's mostly likely no one single 'algorithm' anymore. There are most likely hundreds, farmed out in a distributed manner, with the final SERP page coming from merging many different rankings together.
- x0x0 12y ago
  That doesn't matter. At the end of the day, for each query, there is produced a single ranking. Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query, one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer. edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled (GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a site, could tend to produce lower ratings no matter what those features are. This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And statistics can answer these questions.
  - minot 12y ago
    Imagine if latency was one of the signals Google used to determine ranking. Now imagine that Googlebot gets a ping of half for an application that uses Google App Engine as opposed to someone who uses a raspberry pie at home. Would you say that the makers and users of Raspberry pie now have grounds to sue Google for ranking them lower?
    - walterbell 12y ago
      What about geographic latency? Could user or regional preferences be an input into ranking?
    - x0x0 12y ago
      Because lots of the internet is being served off raspberry pis located in peoples' living rooms? Don't be deliberately obtuse.
      - jfoster 12y ago
        Raspberry Pi was a poor example for him to use, but App Engine (or any Google Cloud solution) was a good example. The Google-hosted sites (including the properties Google owns & operates) will always seem to have lower latency to Google versus everything from AWS down to a Raspberry Pi in a basement. Should that be considered an unfair impartiality in Google's algorithm?
        x0x0 12y ago
        Lower latency to google should have no bearing on serps. Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster and hence are more lowly ranked. I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be derived from that.
- curun1r 12y ago
  Moreover, even if you concede that there's a single algorithm at one point in time, there's still not a single algorithm since the Google search result you get today will be the result of a different algorithm than the one that determined the result of the same query last week. It's not only necessary for the French government to ask how the algorithm works, but they'll need a daily changelog or the algorithm description will become stale quite quickly.
deleted 12y ago
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by x0x0 12y ago

cromwellian 12y ago

The fallacy is, there's mostly likely no one single 'algorithm' anymore. There are most likely hundreds, farmed out in a distributed manner, with the final SERP page coming from merging many different rankings together.

x0x0 12y ago
That doesn't matter. At the end of the day, for each query, there is produced a single ranking. Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query, one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer. edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled (GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a site, could tend to produce lower ratings no matter what those features are. This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And statistics can answer these questions.
- minot 12y ago
  Imagine if latency was one of the signals Google used to determine ranking. Now imagine that Googlebot gets a ping of half for an application that uses Google App Engine as opposed to someone who uses a raspberry pie at home. Would you say that the makers and users of Raspberry pie now have grounds to sue Google for ranking them lower?
  - walterbell 12y ago
    What about geographic latency? Could user or regional preferences be an input into ranking?
  - x0x0 12y ago
    Because lots of the internet is being served off raspberry pis located in peoples' living rooms? Don't be deliberately obtuse.
    - jfoster 12y ago
      Raspberry Pi was a poor example for him to use, but App Engine (or any Google Cloud solution) was a good example. The Google-hosted sites (including the properties Google owns & operates) will always seem to have lower latency to Google versus everything from AWS down to a Raspberry Pi in a basement. Should that be considered an unfair impartiality in Google's algorithm?
      - x0x0 12y ago
        Lower latency to google should have no bearing on serps. Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster and hence are more lowly ranked. I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be derived from that.
curun1r 12y ago
Moreover, even if you concede that there's a single algorithm at one point in time, there's still not a single algorithm since the Google search result you get today will be the result of a different algorithm than the one that determined the result of the same query last week. It's not only necessary for the French government to ask how the algorithm works, but they'll need a daily changelog or the algorithm description will become stale quite quickly.

deleted 12y ago

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