That's a great question - why not? For many consumers, Google essentially is the internet, and by meddling with search results (which they already do to try to personalise my results) they could make or break companies or politicians by presenting one-sided or even false material. That's a lot of power - why shouldn't we know how it works to make sure they're not abusing it?
The bigger question is: why do you think that there is some kind of pure, objective ranking of websites that Google is now tampering with? Do you think that someone whose IP is located in Utah should get the same result for "good hamburgers late night" as someone in New York? If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user? Or to en.wikipedia.org's version, because besides having a shitton more inbound links, it's likely to have also many, many more eyes and editors on it? These are complicated things that we don't need a review of source code to debate. But your suspicions toward them seems to be based off of a worldview in which there is One True Web for everyone, which seems as problematic as the mindset that surely Google can do no evil.
Given that Google uses personal data to shape the web its users see...isn't it even more relevant to see the data they collect? AFAIK, Google still allows us to download virtually every bit of data we've explicitly generated on its services, including all the emails and search requests we've conducted.
I don't find this one so complicated; they're better sent to en.wikipedia.org, because that page, like their query, is written in english.
Even if the Vietnamese page were better, there's no excuse for replying to an English query with a Vietnamese result.
There is One True Web, of course, which is the collection of all documents on the web at any given point in time. But the interface to that web is nearly always a search engine which are all obviously presenting a list of suggestions according to some criteria. Google used to use PageRank, which was a relatively "objective" criteria in that at least it applied equally to all pages. Google now uses tons of data to make decisions about what to show me when I search, but neither you nor I have any idea what they are. Maybe they do actually use some algorithm which applies equally to all pages. Maybe they use some deep neural net, and not even they know how it actually works. Maybe they have a list of heuristics that they're evilly using to manipulate all the world's information. We'll never know without seeing the source code.
Again, I'm not tabling it as a serious proposal, or claiming that Google are doing anything evil. But given that they have the potential to essentially manipulate the sum total of the world's knowledge as seen by 99.999% of the population it doesn't seem ridiculous to consider whether we might like more insight into what they're doing.
To be fair, a lot of people at Google probably don't know either. Peter Norvig had a great talk [1] in which he discussed searching Google's code base for "naive Bayes" and found some code in 2006 with a funny comment:
> “And it was fun looking at the comments, because you’d see things like ‘well, I’m throwing in this naive Bayes now, but I’m gonna come back and fix it it up and come up with something better later.’ And the comment would be from 2006. And I think what that says is, when you have enough data, sometimes, you don’t have to be too clever about coming up with the best algorithm.”
[1] https://youtu.be/ql623nyCdKE?t=5m25s
I don't want to sound like an anti-algorithm-think-of-the-humans advocate...I love algorithms...but I think your statement:
> Google used to use PageRank, which was a relatively "objective" criteria in that at least it applied equally to all pages.
...besides being too oversimplyfing for even a simplification -- I don't think the evolution of Google could remotely be reduced as: first there was purity of math, then came the money -- but I also think that you overlook the bigger issue...No one argues that algorithms are statements based in mathematical truths. It's the decision to use an algorithm -- including the weighting of its tradeoffs -- that is decidedly biased and opinionated.
How is "a page should be evaluated by the number of pages (plus the authority of those pages) link to it" not an opinionated statement of the way information should be organized, versus the pre-Google algorithms of "If a page has a lot of mentions of a word, it must be particularly relevant to that word"?
The fact that PageRank had to be changed and modified as soon as people figured out how to create networks of backlinks should in itself be evidence that an algorithm -- and the decision to use it -- is not just objective truth in the way that 1 + 1 = 2 is.
Yes, I absolutely do. What if they want to find out what "people in general, according to Google" think and write about that? That question isn't even possible anymore, if you will.
> If someone from Vietnam searches for "Vietnam War"...should they be sent to the entry at vi.wikipedia.org because it's in Vietnamese and perhaps more relevant to the Vietnam user?
No, because "Vietnam War" is an English phrase. I doubt it's spelled that way in Vietnamese.
> of a worldview in which there is One True Web for everyone, which seems as problematic
How so? When I watch a movie, I see what everybody sees. If it's full of advertisement or laced with propaganda, I know it's that way for everybody. I think that has value in itself. Not every query is about getting what I want, sometimes I want to see "how the world is", and for that purpose Google, Facebook and others aren't helping with their being overly helpful. Others may feel different, but FWIW, I never heard anyone say that typing "ordering pizza in X" is just too much work compared to just typing "ordering pizza". Thinking such things are neat were, as far as I can tell, unilateral decisions made by these corporations. Nobody asked for it, nobody would miss it, and I think it's harmful just for destroying the idea of a "consensus reality" on the web even being possible.
Your opinion is that what is usable to people around the world is knowing which page ranks highest according to a metric such as PageRank when it comes to "late night hamburger place". Because numerical metrics is "how the world is". There's no way you could be a casual habitant of Earth and think that that's how many other people evaluate things in this world.
But here's an example: What if a user types, "late night hamburger place near me"? How should Google interpret that? At what point does "pure" PageRank shut off and "Google as the new Yellow Pages" kick in? That in itself is an opinion not just about how information should be organized and what is useful, but about linguistics: whether or not that query is interpreted as a question or a user typing in the words he remembers from a song he likes and hoping that this blind query finds it.
Yes, and? The question was what I find better. I answered that. That others find something else better is not relevant to what I find better. I'm more than just a casual habitant of Earth and I notice people generally gobble up anything just because it's there and someone is pushing it. The success of corp X or Y means as much as the success of Hitler to me, I still have to make up my OWN mind, people are mostly useless even as individuals and doubly so in aggregate. What they like or don't like doesn't matter unless they can present a good argument for it. Yes, I'm arrogant. And I do not expect Google to agree, they "have a business to run". But that doesn't change my opinion.
Also, I said "how the world is according to Google".
> But here's an example: What if a user types, "late night hamburger place near me"? How should Google interpret that?
Where to buy product X or eat Y is below even trivial, I find it nauseating but not surprising that such stuff is constantly brought up. And yet that's the "killer application" I have to find a replacement for, with "why would anyone even think about that much less spend one second programming anything related to it" not being a valid answer, and my concerns about people seeing what others see not even worth being mentioned, much less addressed.
Don't interpret it at all, and people will have to be more specific, try out various phrases, which they will learn to do quickly. Adding "in [name of city]" to a query shouldn't be that hard.
Also, I'm tired of "information" being held hostage by what is merely about products and those who sell them. Yes, technically that's information too, but it's a very high-minded word for the lowliest of human aspirations in my books. The ones that matter when I am (indirectly) asked what I like or don't like.
The 'one true web' idea is a red herring. We absolutely need to know how google biases the results.
That's a double-edged sword here. The current problem with search, and one of the reasons the exact algorithms stay undisclosed, is not Google. It's your average Joe the small business owner, who sees no problem with poisoning the Internet with spam and fake websites, just to gain a competitive edge. There's even a whole industry (SEO/SEM) serving such Joes, that specializes in extreme "meddling with search results". As long as Google maintains some control over it, it can tweak and twist their algorithms to counteract the manipulation, or even explicitly penalize biggest offenders. Take that control away and the Internet will go to shit.
Search is a common resource, and it needs to be managed. I'm far more willing to trust Google than a mob of hundreds of millions "entrepreneurs" trying to one-up one another at the cost of everyone else.
Would Bing suddenly become a lot better? Certainly. Would people start using Bing over Google if it just became as good as Google search? Certainly not. The only candidates that might take market share are DuckDuckGo and StartPage, who preach privacy and thus a lot of users (including myself) prefer them despite their poorer search results. If they could get Googles algorithms, they would produce better results and probably steal market share.
How much market share? 1%? Do privacy savvy searchers even constitute 1% of search traffic now?
Yes, it is absolutely a bad business decision for them to publish their source. They are much more likely to lose money than to see third party contributions to their code make their search so much better they offset the cost of everyone having access to the same quality search. But I still postulate it would not be much revenue and market share, and that there are tremendous applications for extremely sophisticated search algorithms like Googles that could produce tremendous economic prosperity for other disciplines, and I imagine their work might be applied in completely unrelated industries for other search domain problems. Their algorithm is ultra-specific to web page indexing, but I'm sure in that Goliath beast of code there is some novel ingenuity that we are missing due to its closed nature.
as digital copies in most cases have no or negligible variable costs (support may be regarded as variable) the earnings for certain products can be way out of any sensible relation- but who should say: enough is enough? als long as there is no sensible answer to this question there can only be one: let the market decide...
Are you talking about a market with or without a regulated strong copyright law?
I realize it would be tricky to implement, but considering the societal benefit of more even wealth distribution the idea itself is worth exploring.
That's their problem.