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Comment by f_allwein | Hacker News Reader

[2016].

Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters

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So Google's recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don't officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that's a satisfactory solution?

One might think that how satisfactory it is depends on how well it works. The parent is asserting it works pretty well.

He doesn't assert it works pretty well, he just says it is the best option.

Plus the parent also worked for Google.

Hardly the most appropriate source for learning whether the option worked well for the other end.

It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...

I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.

This is not a matter of support, although I understand why it is convenient for Google to consider the issue from this point of view. $$$

The problem is that when a search engine has the overwhelming majority of the online search market, freedom of information has a strict dependence on the QoS of that engine.

Since people (at least in Europe) have a legal right to freedom of information, if Google is not providing support in this regard, then it's responsible for not respecting rights of European citizens.

edit:

Freedom of information is part of the Swiss constitution too.

> Every person has the right to receive information freely, to obtain it from generally accessible sources and to disseminate it [16.3]

That's insanity. So because Google is an information company and governments have granted a "right to information [x]" Google has to provide any information a consumer could possibly want, for free, regardless of the cost to them?

[x] - which is an absurdity in itself - what information? how? when? where? This "right" is just another overreach by the EU et. al. wanting everything to be a "human right" even if it's nonsense. A right to whose information? If I have a unilateral right to information, does that mean I have a right to your medical records? Where do you draw the line? If it's just a right to my own information, which I think is reasonable, Google search results don't qualify.

Yeah, the law looking out for the best interests of her citizens is insanity.

> does that mean I have a right to your medical records

No, because under data-protection legislation nobody has the right to data about you, but you. More European insanity.

I think GP has incorrectly categorised this as an FOI issue, it's more to do with Antitrust, which is a well worn path in the USA as well.

Personally, I continue to believe in free market principles.

That's why I believe a decrease in the investment in "traffic acquisition costs" may be in the best interest of Google itself.

Everyone is responsible for the consequences of his own actions. What did we expect?

It would certainly be an improvement and it would give more leverage in avoiding regulatory impositions that in the long term are certainly deleterious (for all).

Perhaps I'm naïve, but I see two possibilities: the acceptance of the overreach in regulations/fines/.., or a self-limitation of the monopoly.

But I'm certainly not in the position to answer the question.

Interesting. The freedom of information concept seems in direct opposition to the right to be forgotten countries like Germany require.

Right to be forgotten is Europe-wide.

It's not really a big deal that different sets of laws conflict with one another. It's fairly common in fact. For instance Freedom of Speech vs Defamation laws.

Good legislation like good code, accounts for these corner cases. Where it doesn't you have the lawyers and the courts to work it out.

If a company gets a big enough marketshare it's not that simple. If Google would have de-listed Protonmail just because "they could" that would be a problem (legal wise) in the EU. Since they also specifically target EU countries (google.nl) they also can't simply say they don't have to comply because they are based in the US.

If this is an anti-trust matter in a certain jurisdiction then it's an anti-trust matter in a certain jurisdiction, and governments have ways to address that.

If Google has a monopoly on search then break up their monopoly on search in your country.

BUT.

Saying that Google needs to bend over backwards to accommodate every possible edge case of EU human rights (of which there are far too many that are overly broad) as a response to anti-trust concerns is absurd.

In the end, you're just going to end up solidifying Google's monopoly, because Google actually does have the funds to build out such platforms, even if they don't want to. Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources to do the same. If then you governments say "well actually only Google needs to do this", you've found yourself in a position where governments are playing favorites, and that is never a good thing.

It kind of sounds like you're making an argument akin to "auto manufacturers should not be obliged to provide seatbelts, because that increases entry costs for smaller auto manufacturers".

If anything, I'd propose the counter-argument that startups can more nimbly respond to these edge-cases, whereas the cost of change for a large hulking conglomerate is where the problems lie.

> Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources.

Until Alphabet buys out that startup for a couple of millions. Imho that's a factor barely mentioned on the issue of "Google monopoly". If anything pops up that looks like it could disrupt the Google dominance, long or short-term, it's quickly acquired and welcomed to the flock.

On one hand that's good because puts the immense resources of Alphabet behind interesting and sometimes important ideas, on the other hand, it leads to a situation where meaningful competition can't grow to a size where it could actually oppose Google's dominance, at least not independently.

My point is that if you believe Google's "monopoly" to be detrimental to the populace, you should address that head-on, instead of dancing around it and applying lots of little regulations which, though they do "address the problem" and help make Google less anti-trust, they could also (are likely to?) hurt other companies that are not monopolistic down the line.

Attack anti-trust at it's source. If you find this story worrying, your worry should not be "Google is removing search results", but rather "Google has so much dominance, them removing results is a serious concern".

This addresses your first point: don't force Google to do certain things and then let them buy any and all competitors, instead don't let them buyout all competitors in the first place. It's a much more elegant solution, in my opinion.

>It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...

It should be, though.

It's not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it's a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.

The law shouldn't be written like we live in the stone age.

So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you're gunning for.

>So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely?

Forced (inter-)nationalization of Google under the control of the UN.

>Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge?

Pretty much yes. Charges should be bared by the Global Federation of Essential Services.

You're going to nationalize Google before nationalizing the internet itself? I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

I think he means globalize rather than nationalize ...

I guess someone's been reading Picketty ..

Sure, but then again Google is like 30% of the internet (if not more in traffic, if we add YouTube in the mix).

And even more important than 30% perhaps, culturally, business-wise, etc.

I can't even put into words how shockingly bad this "idea" is.

This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.

Unless you're on reddit of course ...

I didn't think there was a way for Bing to become a better search engine than Google, but I think this would do it.

Yeah, government funded work only gave us the internet and the web after all.

(am Googler, am amused by this idea, so let's run with it)

Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?

If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN? Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?

If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?

What happens to my existing Google Account? Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset? Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?

I'm very honestly curious how you would orchestrate this, or expect it to work.

>Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?

Mostly search. We'll drop the ads. People will be subsidising search already, so no need for ads.

>If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN?

No, that Alphabet can keep.

>Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?

Yes.

>If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?

Every piece of data will be queryable by a simple RESTful API for everybody, including everybody's else search history. We'll call it "radical transparency". This is include the data of government members.

>What happens to my existing Google Account?

It remains as is, only better.

>Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset?

Yes, all, see above.

>Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?

We kill that. It never worked well anyway.

I'm partly joking, and partly imagining what a sane humanity, that could build and coordinate stuff on a global scale without letting them to the markets, in other words a "Star Trek" like government, would do.

What will be the fate of search "verticals" (Map Search, Product Search, Video Search, ...)?

Will UNGoogle have the "one box" answers (eg, music lyrics, weather) which give real information from the search results, or just ten blue links?

Will the employment contracts of existing staff (SWEs, SREs, PMs, lawyercats) be transferred to the UN as well? Will employment be maintained on the current terms?

Will the UN employ more "customer service representatives"? What would staffing levels look like, across the UNGoogle?

Will UNGoogle maintain the existing data relationships as Google? Will UNGoogle purchase eg, Geo data from third-parties, or will it just be their privilege to submit their data to UNGoogle?

What will the process look like at UNGoogle for making changes to the ranking algorithms? Will there be an appeals process if a ranking change is detrimental to your business or national interests?

Ungoogle, that's a very inspiring verb. I'll use that to describe the act of getting out of the Google bubble (ie. stop using Google products). Thank you for the inspiration.

So what happens when another company makes a search engine that's better than UN Search and users switch to that? Does the UN just eat them up too? Round and round? Or do we make everybody sign a Search Antiproliferation Treaty that bans private search engines?

Identifying a problem caused by a monopoly is not the same as having to provide a solution for it. Some sort of regulation. No-one said they had to do it free.

So it would be ok with you if Google said "we exclude any search results we want, you can pay for Google premium to have uncensored results"?

That would actually be okay for me. But it wouldn't be okay for google as it would directly affect their revenue model of using traffic analysis as a means to promote advertising. There's probably more money in it for them that way. But Google's right to make money doesn't trump all other rights.

Well said, making us pay them for the quality/uncensored search results basically destroys the main source of how they can create insights on data by letting people use their services for free. Google's search business is now a public utility but so far I do not see regulatory systems capable of regulating it without destroying it (catch 22 so far).

Why am I reading a lot of these argument like being a left or right debate.

I dont think Google is quite there yet to be regulated. You have alternative like bing, and you have Duck Duck Go, and the latter actually provide pretty decent results.

The discussion is more one of he principle of whether a dominant market leader is allowed to use its position of dominance in the market to influence that market or not. It’s hardly “left and right” to debate this as being right or wrong.

That is certainly true, but they were arguing whether it should be regulated. And regulation or not are always political.

Especially for the businesses doing the lobbying not to be regulated.

> Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge

Sigh - anybody remember when this was pretty much a given?

For the most part, no new law needs to be put in place. Anti-trust legislation should protect consumers from these practices.

When they, by virtue of their overwhelming market share, nuke a competitor's product off the face of the internet, whether algorithmically or intentionally, it feels reasonable to me to compel them to provide more detail than "we fixed the glitch".

Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.

Not only that, but there is an implicit contract with the public, that they provide a fair and balanced search of the web. If that's not the case then you're in anti-trust land.

Which is where they've been for years.

It's one thing to talk about anti-trust. It's a completely different thing when you're on the same team as the government that would be bringing the case against you.

Yes, but you should address the root of the problem, not all the little symptoms. The issue isn't "Google has the power and occasional reason to remove search results"... the issue is "Google is so big/dominant that when they remove a single result it can have a huge impact".

If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. Do things that are actual anti-trust prevention. Saying that the solution is to regulate all these little edge cases is ineffective and inefficient, because you need a different regulation for each concern that are all rooted in the same sentiment: Google is too big.

>If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.

This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs.

You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.

> Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op.

In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all?

Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.

You use a different co-op, naturally. You are conflating two solutions I offered, they are distinct and incompatible. A market but with worker controlled firms OR nationalized search. In one case you pick a different firm exactly like today, in the other you vote or petition the government.

But then you're back to square one as far as de facto monopolies go: Everyone cares about that specific co-op, because everyone uses it, so you get the same feedback loop which created Google's dominance.

Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.

> If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control.

How? Because this...

> Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.

...doesn't achieve that end.

Google could have a thousand competitors and 99% of the marketshare, because just because a competitor exists doesn't compel, or even slightly persuade, anyone to use it.

I'm all for antitrust laws. I just don't see how the usual remedies would work here.

Obvious solution: quotas. If there are 10 billion searches per month, we limit each company to 25% of that. After Google performs 2.5 billion searches in one month, they have to shut down until the end of the month. Easy peasy. What could go wrong?

Regulation helps the monopolies like Ma Bell. I heard that argument this morning from the FCC chair. I'm guessing that argument is not valid around here?

It's definitely a very case-by-case argument, but I definitely think there are times when regulation has hindered progress thru capitalism without improving any lives.

There are also plenty of cases where regulations have greatly improved outcomes by curbing capitalistic eventualities.

I'm personally conflicted about this particular case, and have no idea which will result in a "better" outcome when choosing between non-regulastion and regulation.

However, I strongly believe that limiting Google's overall power is a better solution than regulating particular ways that Google could abuse their power, as I think the former is a better route if regulation is the route you choose.

I am pretty sure Google derives a lot of its revenue from advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial. There can be special cases, but they should not be statistically significant. Thus it is in Google's own interest to keep providing efficient, unbiased search or at least the appearance of it. Break this and the customers will flee to other search engines and advertisers will follow. So yes, I expect Google to provide information to consumers free of charge as this is a key part of its business model.

Which, however, has nothing to do with the article's point -- disappearance of a single entry with competitive advantage over Google. No statistical significance for search, but instead wielding its enormous power to squelch a small competitor. IMO, if true, this is the case for the government to address via rulemaking, courts or some other means.

I don't think advertisers care about the impartiality of the results, so long as their ads are getting eyeballs/clicks.

An advertiser might care if there were another, more impartial search engine that was drawing those eyeballs away, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given the current ubiquity of Google as a household name and company.

Sure, DuckDuckGo or whatever might draw some of the more tech-literate or paranoid crowd if Google started aggressively filtering results (which, for the record, I don't think they are doing or are likely to do), but why would advertisers care? Those people represent a tiny fraction of their eyeballs, perhaps so small as to be lost in statistical noise. Besides, many/most of the tech-literate folks use adblockers anyway, and the paranoids probably don't want to transmit their personal information online to buy things.

I'm sorry, are you arguing that it is all right for Google to abuse it's monopoly position because it is a monopoly? At least, from the advertiser's position?

I'm not making an argument about the rightness of any action. GP suggested that there exist

> ...advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial.

I do not believe that is factually accurate. I think advertisers don't have a compelling reason to care whether or not searches are impartial for the reasons I expressed.

> I don't think advertisers care about the impartiality of the results, so long as their ads are getting eyeballs/clicks

Agreed completely. But users will (eventually) run away if they do not perceive the search as efficient. There are now options in search. People use google exactly because they consider results good enough. If googling "photos from X" starts returning most pictures from Google-associated resorts and this gets coverage from first tier news agencies Google will see non-negligible defections.

I also do not think Google is likely to do aggressive search filtering, not because this is "not right" but for pure self preservation -- aggressive filtering would be cutting the branch they sit on.

> So what exactly is your solution?

Enforce antitrust laws.

Strawman garbage aside, Google is a private company (in the sense that it is not owned by the government), and you objectively do not have any right to appear in their search results.

If you can make an argument to the contrary that doesn't revolve around "it's not 1776!" I'd love to hear it, but I seriously doubt that it would be in line with any US law. I don't think there's anything "stone age" about not requiring private companies to do things to help other private companies without compensation.

It seems that every discussion about Google, Facebook and the like doing something that is not good always ends with the “it’s a private company” wildcard.

As if this excuses any kind of behavior.

Specifically, in this case there are in many countries antitrust laws, which target public and private companies alike.

We are not talking about "any kind of behavior". We are talking about whether a private company whose business model is to provide internet search results should have the right to decide whether to exclude certain content from those results. You can make an argument that entities like Google and Facebook have too much power, but I don't see the argument that compels such companies to include X in their service based on whether its "fair" or not.

> I don't see the argument that compels such companies to include X in their service based on whether its "fair" or not.

If our system worked, Google would almost certainly broken up and most of their databases (full of people's private information) couldn't exist legally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_business_practices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_...

While your misunderstanding of the comment may be a genuine mistake, your comment could be considered "straw man garbage" itself. Your tone is condescending and you might want to consider re-phrasing.

The post you're replying to is suggesting that removal from Google results _should_ be part of US law. Perhaps the impact of Google is such that there should be legislation regulating Google's behaviour.

In the UK we have a public phone book maintained by British Telecom. I can opt out of the phone book but BT cannot choose not to include me if I've opted IN. BT is a private company but this one aspect of their output is regulated by law.

The difference between a private company selling a service and something considered an essential utility is legislation, presumably?

BT doesn't need to decide which people are important enough to appear on page one. Google earned their position by doing just that—by being dramatically better than an unordered list of all web pages containing your substring.

Google holds the power to influence en masse. If not policed, Google has the power, if so it was to choose, to remove critical human knowledge from results. Perhaps the moonlanding never happened, or perhaps chemical weapons were faked. etc...

Their results can influence a great number of people, it can make or break a business, and it can (probably) cause or at least greatly contribute to a revolution in some countries.

You know, hence why countries like China want to control such power.

It's not a "private company" thought is it? Not only is it "Publicly Held", but it's also a "Corporation" which historically meant it has certain rules it has to operate by. Not withstanding, of course, that such rules have been relaxed a lot in the last 40 years to appease big businesses, like Google.

The US does have anti-trust legislation on the books.

Internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T are private companies as well, and recent events make clear just how comfortable we are asserting a "right" to fair treatment of all traffic through their service (as we should).

Google indexing fairly is every bit as essential to the maintaining equal opportunity for websites and businesses on the internet as net neutrality is.

Google is literally just a company.

United Fruit was also "just a company" but it could topple governments and influence politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

> It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...

Yes you have. If Google is not representing competitors fairly in search results, that's abuse of dominant position.

correct, as seen by the successful anti competitive lawsuits against Google in the European Union.

It is not about the right to appear in Google's search results. It is about abusing market dominance to put competing businesses at disadvantage. There are also other running/solved cases/investigations against Google.

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf...

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm?fusea...

No it isn't. If you want to ensure that you're in the search results then you're supposed to buy an ad.

Edit: To everyone downvoting, can you explain why you expect to be provided guaranteed service from a business that you have no business relationship with?

it only is abusing if they push their products before others, if you fail to rank highly in search results whose fault is that?

are we going to use the IE solution, but instead now force it on providers whom you have to voluntarily choose over another to provide selected results? who gets to choose who appears?

> it only is abusing if they push their products before others, if you fail to rank highly in search results whose fault is that?

Well, if that failure to rank highly is due to Google manually removing you, I think it's fairly clear whose fault it is.

(It's Google's.)

Sooner or later Google will probably regulated akin to other "utilities", at least in some jurisdictions.

You say that, but we can't even get Internet as a utility currently. I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying something as basic as internet is being abused "for profit", search being made into a utility sounds vastly more difficult.

I like to think we are indeed slowly progressing, but at the same time it's clear that companies in power are "progressing" too. I'm unsure if humanitarian goals like this are possible if we regard them as "sooner or later it'll happen".

Interesting thought nonetheless.

You're strongly implying some kind of targeting by Google. Whereas the parent comments above you indicate simply a lack of caring by ProtonMail to improve its ranking or a lack of free general support by Google to any website that happens, not just ProtonMail.

Asking Google to be responsive to any website demanding special treatment for higher search rankings is unreasonable. Best practices are published and tools are available. It's hard to see monopolistic abuse there.

The only difference is that Gmail (and other Google products) are listed when you, shockingly, go to google.com. Are you saying Google can't mention Google products on google.com? Do you think gmail is somehow not as popular as it is and wouldn't rate the #1 spot for searches for email?

Promising to provide tech support and troubleshooting to every website in the world for free is a lot to ask of a search engine, even if they're the dominant market leader.

google can destroy businesses in an instant, and they are too large to not offer proper support, and their damages are too great to not face legal liability to any damages they inflict upon companies at their whim.

this is quite baffling. tech companies are making money hand over fist, they have massive margins, a company like google can afford real support and if they dont think so they should pay in court

Does Google care about the quality of its search results? You don't need to bring rights into the discussion to see why "post on this forum and maybe somebody will read it" is a poor solution.

"Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines"

Or, Google can get around that by repeatedly tweaking the algorithm on purpose to demote specific types of sites. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/. (long read, but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines)

There's also the issue of false positives. Machine learning algorithms that demote sites (panda/penguin/vince) certainly have some amount of unintended victims.

> but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines

most comparsion shopping sites were anoying and did get ranked for everything I wanted to buy. I.e. "buy television" gave you 1. amazon, 2-6. comparsion sites.

If I wanted to compare televisions I would've entered "compare televisions pricing", etc.

If you follow the FTC link above, though, the human testers Google used liked them.

You mean violate the political stance of Google or any other arbitrary properties they got. You can go and compare search results across Duckduckgo, Bing and Google to get a full picture how much the search results are censored. When people talk about "net neutrality" I always wonder why isn't there outrage against this, because it is definitely not neutral. Same goes to many Google services, most notably Youtube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Concrete examples?

This is more about youtube than google search, but it will be not that different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0c1Bph1jrQ

After all, it goes from the top "We're not arguing for censorship, we're arguing just take it off the page. Put it somewhere else. Make it harder to find." - Eric Schmidt

Christina Hoff Sommers, Dave Rubin, Prager University, all of their content is delisted and demonetized on Youtube. Non of them is illegal content.

But it's available? Seems like your comparison with Tienanmen Square falls a little flat.

I was pointing out that I am very well aware of the difference between government initiated censorship vs. Google just randomly filtering something that it disagrees with.

I don't think google is to blame for this. This is being driven by what google (rightly) thinks advertisers want and advertisers are worried about their brands being associated with this content. Google is just reflecting the values that a lot of people in society hold. Most people aren't comfortable with people expressing opinions different from what they hold and so this is where we end up.

No need to delist it for advertisers benefit. Demonetising it would have worked fine. If you can’t show ads on it what have advertisers got to complain about?

No, this is an entirely separate process. The wikipedia link you shared relates to content that is illegal in a country, so consequently Google does not show it. E.g. in my home country (Germany), this includes some types of Nazi propaganda. I would assume all other search engines follow the same rules.

In theory all other search engines have to follow the same rules, in practise nobody cares if ddg shows illegal results.

So in your country can you look stuff up about China and Tiananmen Square? Well you can't in China. This is censorship coming from the state. Now go on Youtube and look for PagerU videos. I understand that conservative views are not popular in Google but filtering legitimate content is just bad.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1406441&st...

What about Dave Rubin? Does he fall into the same category as nazi propaganda according to you? What about Christina Hoff Sommers? Same question. And the list goes on an on. I do not necessarily agree with these viewpoint but I strongly against censoring them just because it does not fall inline with Google's political agenda.

It's important to realize that Google censorship to appease a foreign government sometimes affects search results in all countries, including the U.S. For example, search results worldwide are partly determined by Google's decision to avoid offending the government of Pakistan with content that may be critical of some aspects of Islam: https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/

This isn't reserved to Pakistan, the US, Islam or Google. [0] Tbh if I had a choice between nudity being censored and bigotry being somewhat buried, I'd always go with the later. But for whatever reason a certain demographic, from a certain country, takes quite a lot of offense at the sight of something as silly as a female nipple.

[0] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/censorship-is...

I'm confused by your mention of "bigotry". Does it have anything to do with the content of my comment?

On much of this, it's not Google's political agenda here from what I see... it's advertisers in general.

You are aware that Youtube faced a huge backlash earlier this year from large scale advertisers over "hate videos" and "extremist content": https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/google-youtube-a...

Defining what a "hate video" and is "extremist" can be vague, so it's not surprising that some strong political channels are caught in the crosswinds, even if they are not necessarily "hate speech" or "extreme". (After all, Youtube is probably relying heavily on user feedback to determine what to flag). It's also not surprising that other things are caught in the crosswind (as the Ars Technica article mentions, LGBT content was also caught in the crosswinds.)

Youtube's most recent advertiser-drive purgek came over "inappropriate" videos aimed at children. Again, advertisers are driving what some might call "censorship". https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-deletes-150000-videos-foll...

Basically, I feel like strong advertiser presence in the future is going to heavily focus Youtube towards more "mainstream" oriented material in the future, especially on what can be monetized.

Is it censorship? Not really -- no one is going to force companies to spend money to advertise where they don't want to. Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure.

At this point, in my opinion, the energy some are spending in fighting Youtube's monetization policy ("1st Amendment" lawsuits against Youtube are going to fail, in my opinion) would be better spent in making sure the web remains open. So that any Youtube competitors, some of which might focus on hosting "non-mainstream" content that Youtube might ignore in the future, actually have a chance.

I disagree. You are mixing together two categories: legitimately bad content (like the scary kid videos) and content does not fall in line with Google's political stance. As an advertiser you are targeting a very specific narrow population anyways and it is super easy to exclude your ads showing up in videos that you do not approve. And just a counter example to your point:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facebook-halts-potenti...

This was in production for god knows how long.

"Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure."

Well I do not use Youtube as much as I can. I use alternative video content providers. Anyways, this argument is silly at the very least.

Why is the argument silly? Any "solution" to this that I can think of would be awful.

Let's throw a counter example on another platform. Most American talk radio is conservative. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2015/07/13/why-all-t...) IMHO the reasons for this are largely demographic oriented as specified in the Forbes article -- consequently, liberal specific talk radio has not done as well as a business model since, say, the 1980s. Conservative specific talk radio has.

It's pretty easy to Google grumbling from liberals about Clear Channel being conservative and crowding out liberal talk and whatnot. These arguments seem as silly to me as the arguments about the political stance of Google (which I also think is more driven by business dollars and cents, not explicit political lean).

At any rate, what's the solution here? Force Clear Channel to host liberal political talk via government decree? That would be about as awful as forcing Youtube to monetize conservative videos via government decree.

The only arguments that make sense in this direction to me is that American radio, in effect, is a monopoly. It might be difficult to start a "liberal specific talk radio" format even if there was a solid business case for it, because the airwaves are dominated by only a few corporations. (I would argue that this actually played itself out more in the world of music -- a lot of music never crossed into the playlists of corporate radio or MTV, because of various reasons. Which is why Napster was so heavily embraced by many once it showed up.)

Likewise with Google / Youtube: I would be much more receptive to arguments along these lines. If they became a defacto monopoly (I don't think they are there yet, but this is a danger these days), only one "content policy" would exist. And that definitely would be a problem.

Hence why I think the real issue here is keeping the web open and competitive.

It would be better to say this includes some types of "Nazi" propaganda, since the modern usage of the label is far broader than literal Nazism.

Usual response I get is that its easier to switch search engines so its not necessary[1]. Neutrality seems to be a function of availability of choice and ease of switching.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15045653

It's interesting, but this is probably one of the reasons google has become so terrible. It's treating searches as a game, not something it needs to improve. Resulting in a steady decline year after year.

I don't understand. Google is putting considerable resources and effort into improving search quality.

And yet they are failing.

For any given search many websites have an economic incentive to be at the top and are willing to understand the process and jump though some hoops. However, jumping though hoops has zero correlation with quality and only minimal correlation with relevancy.

It's not an easy job to find a useful mattress review website or whatever, but Google's users don't care about easy they care about how useful something is. Even worse Google's actions end up changing the websites they are linking to. It's a slow but vicious cycle that I don't have a solution to, I just finally realized what the problem was.

I think you nail it, here: the biggest problem of google is support :)

This is something notorious and traversal to all its products.

Which is interesting because the #1 way to improve your product is to listen to your customer complaints.

This is Business 101 everywhere except Silicon Valley, which thinks it knows better than everyone else in the world.

Please, no need to be hateful, Intercom and Zendesk are from SF too :)

> Google would only manually remove sites

What you mean is that low level employees can only manually remove sites following a set of strict guidelines.

Senior management can make whatever editorial decisions they like.

> which is frequented both by smart and helpful users

... as well as loud and obnoxious know-it-alls that tag team, upvote their own answers and drown any discussion in irrelevant bickering and deferrals to their own wisdom.

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