Disclaimer: This is speculation. Take both this article and my post with a grain of salt.
We see so many different cases here on hacker news that have one thing in common: Bad things happen and those affected have no idea why these things have happened.
It doesn't mean that companies need huge support organisations. I'm sure 99.9% of these questions can be answered by an automated system. Support can dig into the more exceptional cases and doesn't necessarily have to be free.
If people wanted transparency they'd switch to companies which are transparent.
(</NaiveToMakeAPoint>)
In other words, the people who need more transparency aren't the ones who can choose what search engine is being used.
But more generally I see it like this: Without the law, Google would not exist as a legal entity. Incorporation is what allows Google to become a legal entity and it is also what protects Google's owners from having their personal possessions seized in case of insolvency.
So Google's owners have asked society for protection beyond what is provided solely based on market principles. In other words, they wanted rights, not just incentives.
I'm asking for the same thing. Rights that are independent of my ability to pay and are difficult to emulate through market mechanisms.
I think corporations are part of market principles.
Your analogy is incorrect because the rights are different.
I am not you have any idea of how long it takes for General populace to realize that they are being screwed.
Ordinary people don't yet know because they trust Google - A trust which was build by constant "Don't be evil" rhetoric for over a decade. This trust also helped them acquire a monopolistic position so when they break that promise they need to be investigated.
Search is now a public utility and Google should be treated as utility provider.
And those are just the manual changes. There are fully automated systems that crawl the web and use information from millions of web pages simply to rank your website. Any of those web pages changes, and your ranking might change with it. For true transparency, you should be able to verify that you got the right ranking as documented, yet merely calculating that is going to require you to get a copy of every other webpage in the world. No simple task.
Someone at Google, hopefully. At least I wouldn't want to work at/be customer of a company where no one knows how their core product actually works.
If Google employees are able to keep track, so are regulators. If not, then the "cost" of requiring it may actually be a benefit.
There is a more general issue here. As we use more machine learning and AI, the problem of having to explain why a particular decision was taken will come up more often, especially if the decision has grave consequences.
All "AI-first" companies would be well advised to work on this problem. This is like computer security in the 1990s. It's going to be absolutely central to many applications of AI and it will be a key legal issue in future.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologi...
In search, email, etc there's continual competition between people trying to trick the span detection algorithm and people trying to extend the algorithm to counter them. Secrecy is a critical tool on both sides of this fight. Force transparency on the algorithm maintainers and it's output will get much worse.
Keeping the algorithm secret has downsides, but is worth it (for society at large) on balance.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, on unrelated things, and don't know anything Google-specific here.)
But if there is a dramatic change in ranking or my site is removed entirely, it should be possible to ask Google to investigate (possibly automated) and tell me if something out of the ordinary has happened.
Secrecy shouldn't mean to hide simple mistakes on either side. That makes search results worse not better, as it was clearly the case with protonmail.com
Only if you do it wrong. If you do it write, there should be negligible impact.
Moving domains always comes with its risks.
However, it doesn't change that I use Gmail and will continue to use it. It's still the better product for the money (free).
Not sure how I missed it.
PS: Same goes for http to https, some years ago you've got a huge huge drop in rankings while today it's a no brainer.
Moving a domain is always a high risk operation for your search results position.
Unfortunately a lot of ecommerce sites are of low quality and coded by the finance directors golfing mates "friends" company.