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Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech.

The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out.

Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking. Let's just spell this out:

money !== relevance, therefore any influence of money on search engine rankings is, by definition, noise.

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Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square.

Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views.

In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing people's minds, as it rarely does that.[1] Advertisements and the like usually serve to give voice to the views people already hold, and inform them of things they were not aware of. An advertisement will never convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

Try to sell a bad product? It's done all the time. Heck, a tube of wax called "HeadOn" managed to sell pretty well with an ad campaign that stopped just short of claiming it helped headaches.

The fact that one product which seems to be a placebo may have made some money does not disprove my point; I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product, just that it is vanishingly unlikely. If you think that selling diluted ingredients in wax is an easy way to make money, please go ahead and try your hand at it.

My position is that advertising a bad product is a very bad bet; the fact that someone has won the lottery does not mean that anyone should play it.

Are you kidding me?

Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule. They're leaders in their industries.

I disagree with you on every point here. McDonalds provides a consistent array of food and beverages across many countries, and many people (especially children) enjoy the experience in their restaurant. Comcast is often the only provider of Internet services, and in other instances provides faster or cheaper service than their competitors. Fox News is like every other news channel, in that it informs their viewers with the information the viewers want in a format they enjoy for a price they accept. Fox News is no more biased than CNN, NBC, or just about any other news sources; there is no arbiter of truth, and most of the perceived bias comes from the stories each outlet chooses to pursue.

I say this as a person who hasn't gone to McDonalds in 11 years, has no access to Comcast, and doesn't watch television news. The fact that you or I dislike a product does not make it 'bad'.

What does make a product bad then?

My definition of a bad product would simply one where the purchaser would not have bought it given the information they learned after acquiring it. A simple way to measure how good a product is would be to see whether the product is recommended by the purchaser, or whether they buy similar products from the same brand/source again.

Ah so you don't mean good and bad in terms of morality or the harm it will bring to the user but solely upon consumption preference. By this definition crystal meth can be considered a good product.

>The fact that you or I dislike a product does not make it 'bad'*

Yes. Bad requires either a quantifiable judgement (McDonalds fares poorly in healthiness, nutricients, calories and lots of other metrics), or a qualitative one, based on some sort of agreed ypon "what constitutes good food" standard -- which in the end comes from what vision one has for the world.

Even if the latter is not objectively verifiable (that a steak at Peter Luger is better than a Chipotle one for example), I still find a society where isn't enough common agreement to label McDonalds as bad, a sad one.

If these things are so bad, why do people consume them?

Is everybody else but you so stupid as to be consuming these obviously 'bad' products?

Just because you think something is bad, doesn't mean it is bad. I would have no trouble selling something you think is the 'worst shit in the known universe' as long as everybody else thinks it's pretty good.

You raise an interesting point. Do people consume things they know are bad because they want to or because they are manipulated to?

And here's Stimpy with the red shiny history eraser button...

I am ashamed that I had to look up this reference.

I should probably be ashamed that I brought it up :)

Because they are laced with a highly addictive substance? Why else would HFCS be added to fries or a burger, to make them sweet?

Because "bad" outside of context is utterly meaningless.

People consume bad products because they are in bad circumstances. Maybe they are too stressed to cook and can't afford a healthier alternative, and then become addicted to the sugar content (McDonald's), maybe the company has a monopoly on something people need for work and school so people have to buy it (Comcast), or maybe human psychology makes us susceptible to certain kinds of deception (Fox News).

Claiming that a product can't be bad if people consume it is incredibly naive.

> McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible.

Oh please, I had a Big Mac meal for lunch today, delicious!

>I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product,

from last comment in the thread -

>An advertisement will _never_ convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works.

le contradiction

"We just had a misunderstanding, I thought I lived in the U.S.A, the United States of America, and actually we live in the U.S.A, The United States of Advertising -- freedom of speech is guaranteed, if you've got the money!"

-Bill Hicks on being censored by CBS

Bill Hicks was both wonderful and a very talented troll.

> Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech.

How is this not implicitly the case with "only organic" search results? PageRank was built off of the idea that a website's value was based off of inbound links. Back in the day, high school kids could get $50/hour (in 1990s dollars) to build and upload a simple webpage for a local business. Money has always been a factor in influence, before and after search engines.

> It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking

Again, this purity is an illusion -- the things that can be objectively ranked are things in which the metric is simple, i.e. alphabetical order. Stray from that and rankings are no longer "pure" by any stretch of the imagination. Not even early PageRank -- the many easy ways to game it, and the many ways that PageRank has evolved to avoid such gaming, should make that assertion self-evident.

Money is absolutely part of the formulation of relevance. It's just not the whole equation. Nor is word-matching (altavista), nor is popularity (google). But each is relevant.

Someone (advertiser) is paying money because they believe they have information relevant to you. How is that categorically different than the blogger/webmaster who's paying money (time/hosting) because they believe they have information relevant to you?

All information has a cost associated with it. And that cost bears some significance on the value of the information. Measuring and weighing that significance relative to other inputs is the beauty of an effective system.

At the risk of sounding flip: Install adblock. If this "purity" is really that important to you, you're about 3 clicks away from banishing the paid advertising and only having organic results show.

I use AB+ AND NoScript(Google-free whitelist) and my results aren't even organic-ish. I searched for cabling a few weeks back & monoprice.com's first result was on page 12. First 3 or 4 pages were almost exclusively amazon & ebay. That's google's algo, sans adsense.

And those are organic results, not paid ones. The algo has learned that when people search for a product, having results from the most common places up front is more relevant.

Monoprice's google juice just isn't as good.

I don't think sponsored results are a big deal, as long as it's transparent, and "pure" results are easily accessible too (and they are).

We live in a society where advertising exists. I'm not saying I like advertising, but it is a basic skill to be able to differentiate advertising from content. If some people can't tell the difference, I don't think that's a very strong argument for saying the practice should be banned.

Having some cruft around my search results is a small price to pay for a free service that basically powers modern society.

Power buys presence. Whether that power is national and the presence armed excursions, or the power is political and the presence is your ideas being heard from your pulpit. Money is just a proxy for other types of power. This has never changed.

Then you can keep claiming your results are non-biased long after it stop being organic as these things tend to do with fresh people and their friends with same mindset. I've come to dismiss everything that claims to be neutral. DailyMail, Guardian, the sheets of toilet paper, all used for the same purpose.

PageRank isn't transparent and objective, it is opaque and arbitrary.

PageRank is of ... anthropically/existentially significant importance to the continuation of Google as a going concern.

You can't trust people to be transparent about things that are anthropically significant and that they realize are anthropically significant. Now throw in that it's legally protected as proprietary...

It's just one of those things...

The fact that Stallman cannot or will not accept this troubles me. I view this as a mechanism for choosing continued disappointment on his part. But it does serve as part of a dialogue.

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