The Case Against Google
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu... YouTube's algorithm recommended extremist/conspiracy content during the 2016 election.
Here's YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/youtube-taking-ex... (behind a free registration wall)
"Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism."
"We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018."
Would you agree that the algorithm recommended this content because people believe in, or at least are interested in, conspiracies? Even if we feel that's a mistake, who are we (or Google) to be the arbiters of truth?
I get that YouTube had no other metric to gauge me by, by there are 10 or 12 recommendations and there's no law that says YouTube can't ease into recommendations. Whether you're for or against Shapiro, this kind of behavior induces people into bubbles and radicalizing in the feedback loop.
Just clickbait titles is all it is.
Regardless, I don't see how any of that can really count as "extremist" or "conspiratorial" content.
In most cases this is harmless - play a song, and YouTube will automatically create a playlist of songs in the same genre. Watch a cooking video, and it'll give you a dozen other recipes by the same chef.
Unfortunately this doesn't work for political videos, as you've noticed. But there is absolutely no incentive for YouTube to insert videos from opposing viewpoints into the recommendations. YouTube is just giving people what they want.
So you watch a video about how the history of vaccines and how many lives have been saved by vaccination. Should YouTube recommend a counterpoint video about how vaccines are going to kill you and everyone you love?
If you are recommending "other sides of issues", either you start showing a lot of really crazy things to people who wouldn't otherwise see it, or you need to start taking an editorial position that some issues are "settled" and one side is just "wrong", and do a one-way gating where you'll show a breath of sanity in the follow-up recommendations to "bad" videos but not show "bad" recommendations on videos that get the subject "right".
Which one would you prefer?
Who is that message for? It's not a discussion or debate, it's linguistic flashing lights to simulate a community around a simulated conflict. Youtube red, solving alienation in a more profitable way than the last red revolution.
The crime of social media is that they've created public solitary confinement. The internet is now a place where you go to be alone with your thoughts as simulated by companies. So boring.
Or you could attempt to take a neutral, quality-driven stance on recommendations: which videos do a good, _honest_ job of explaining the case for a given point of view? Plus of course any videos that present a reasonably balanced look at the pros/cons of multiple sides. You can even still factor in which ones are most engaging, as a secondary element (e.g. preferring Bill Nye over someone droning on boringly about climate change).
Maybe that has a bias toward moderate positions and away from extremes, but that doesn't seem terrible since (a) it's what compromise is built on, and (b) it seems more likely to succeed in winning over more newcomers to that viewpoint anyway (does David Brooks convince more liberals to question some of their beliefs than Alex Jones? I'd bet so).
I think the real problem with this approach is it's very hard to build an _automated_ recommendation engine for this. At scales that matter (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) you need it to be automated and hard to game. And ML doesn't quite seem up to the task of judging ranking things by demagoguery, let alone honesty, at this point...
It's one thing when their team of PhD's extract attention into cat videos, and another thing to extract it into potentially unhealthy amounts of extremist material and conspiracies.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do miss the days before infinite scroll and autoplay.
My best guess? They want you to sit and watch YouTube for hours, so they recommend stuff watched by people who sit and watch YouTube for hours.
This stuff reminds of the word "excitotoxins," which is based on a silly idea yet seems to capture the addictive effect of stimulation. People are stimulated by things that seem novel, controversial, and dangerous. People craving stimulation will prefer provocative junk over unsurprising truth.
I also have to say that there's a certain comic relief to videos by flat-earthers (no moon landing, ancient astronaut) and other conspiracy theorists. Some mix valid points with hyperbole but some are so far out there that they're comical.
So? Obviously people are watching them.
Or are you saying that YouTube has a strong hidden conservative bias?
Ugh, that happened to me. I was halfway through a video making weird, interesting, yet really benign claims when suddenly they connected all the pieces in support of some bizarre white supremacist shit.
Just because I wanted to know about proto-indo-europeans.
I looked over to the recommended videos, and it was already like 20% armchair white supremacist videos.
Content recommendation algorithms reward engagement metrics. One of the metrics they reward is getting a user's attention, briefly. In the real world, someone can get my attention by screaming that there is a fire. Belief that there is a fire and interest in fire are not necessary for my attention to be grabbed by a warning of fire. All that is needed is a desire for self-preservation and a degree of trust in the source of the knowledge.
Compounding the problem, since engagement is improved and people make money off of videos, there is an incentive in place encouraging the proliferation of attention grabbing false information.
In a better world, this behavior would not be incentivized. In a better world, reputation metrics would allow a person to realize that the boy who cried wolf was the one who had posted the attention grabbing video. Humanity has known for a long time that there are consequences for repeated lying. We have fables about that, warning liars away from lying.
I don't think making that explicit, like it is in many real world cases of lying publicly in the most attention attracting way possible, would be unreasonable.
That's one of the arguments against them. People become siloed into filter bubbles by their algos and are insulated against conflicting viewpoints.
But, we know that they are.
I haven't been swayed by such radicals, but I have been turned off and disgusted by them, feelings which bleed over to people who I associate with them. I can see that effect as one that re-enforces political polarization.
At least with fbook and twitter, people are figuring out that much can not be trusted, and that some "friends" are easily duped into sharing things that are not 100% right. I agree we still need to deal with repeated things affecting the subconscious as everyone scrolls past things, and we need methods to screen capture and research other viewpoints on things that come into a feed.. You can mute people view these other networks, with google you can't mute individuals, or tell it stop prioritizing "xx group thinks". It's not a mild player by any means, it's used like most use wikipedia, but it's used much more. That is a threat to many minds and the future, not just democratic whatever.
But I get the point and I think there is some value in Google making everyone dance every time they change their algorithm. Things might have been better if they have some kind of review board. Apparently having zero or negligible customer facing teams seems to be the norm.
"In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory [regarding the federal antitrust lawsuit], but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor."
edit: I just realized this article is from "The New York Times Magazine", so that explains the verbose story-like quality it has.
I'm personally worried about the dominance of big newspapers. It seems that the field of "trusted online newspapers" has narrowed down to only the New York Times and Washington Post. Most non-Tech Hackernews submissions come from either Nytimes or WaPo.
I worry because these newspapers seem to increasingly be setting the political and social narrative for the entire country. That's a lot of power to give Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim.
It is the 'paper of record'
I am just pointing that out because your comment doesn't make sense as it reads like these newspapers are becoming 'increasingly' dominant or narrative setting.
They have been that way for decades.
Second, the old-school newspapers still have a very strong culture of research and reporting interwoven deeply within their walls. Sure, they make mistakes, but they have a much greater stake in the accuracy and importance-weighting of their news reporting than a user-driven content company like Facebook or Twitter.
You missed numbers 1 (the Wall Street Journal), 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in America’s top eight by circulation [1]. Not to mention the proliferation of specialist papers (e.g. Axios, POLITICO, the Information, et cetera) and foreign papers (e.g. the BBC, Economist, FT, et cetera) and wire services (e.g. Reuters, AFP, the AP, et cetera).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Un...
If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it.
I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non-technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam emails.
As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know and they'd be lost without it.
If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use Google?
I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also can't handle that google returns different results on different computers.
I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the address because it's consistent and faster.
Probably something similar holds for Amazon.
Or DDG it.
I have seen my father type a web address into a google search page because he doesn’t understand that he can use the location field to go directly to that address. I corrected this behavior the first time I saw it. He was doing it again the next time I visited.
This is a man with a high level of education and a healthy mind. He’s utterly lost on many of the basic concepts of his computer. The thing is, it works for him and I would never know he was making this mistake without watching him because he still gets the desired result in a roundabout way.
- It's a tax on the services you use who have to pay to be the top result, you burden companies you patronize when you do this. When you search for Dell.com in search and click the top link for Dell, Dell just had to pay a couple quarters to not have you redirected to a seedy scam site instead. Times millions for every other person who does this.
- Google Ads allow advertisers to spoof addresses, and display a different destination address than where clicking the link actually takes you. I've seen amazon.com, bestbuy.com, and even, hilariously, youtube.com hijacked in very authentic-looking malicious Google Ads at the top of Google Search. For security reasons, you should never, ever click on a Google Ad.
- Entering a query that is sent to Google by one of many channels (google.com, browser omnibox, Android omnibox)
- Choosing a result from a Google search
- Pages following guidelines defined by Google
- With ads displayed, published and managed through Google-owned platforms
- Atop standards initially implemented in Google Chrome, with design influenced by them
- Displayed on a browser made by Google
- Retrieved through protocols often designed with influence from Google
- From an IP resolved by Google Public DNS
- The client device is running on an operating system made by Google
I also just searched "Best Museums in Las Vegas" on Google and Duck Duck go, and DDG does not produce as many quality results in the top 10 as Google. They do make up for it, if you are doing a really micro search, because they list soooooo many more results on the first page. But they are definitely still vulnerable to Groupon spam in a way Google searches are not.
Many of the results do not include both of these quoted strings. So Google went from discarding your search terms and requiring quotes, to even discarding your quoted terms. I had to fire up duckduckgo to complete my search, which is something I never use but I had no choice.
Read The Inmates are Running the Asylum, and you might understand that better. It helped me to see how pathetically unhelpful and badly designed interfaces are everywhere, something I accepted and took for granted before.
A couple of metaphors he uses, there or in About Face: Programmers are like those into extreme sports, revelling in the difficulties of working with computers, but most people aren't like that. When they board an aeroplane, they want to sit down and get where they're going without concerning themselves with the details. Programmers head for the cockpit.
Genghis Khan was one of Mongolia's strengths. Standard Oil was one of 19th century America's strengths. An empire can be great and still stifle good things. It's hard to know what we're missing.
They really buried the lead.
* Tech companies' role in 2016 election interference (agents buying ads, trolls)
* Tech companies' impact on journalism (Google News, decline in subscriptions, shift in advertising)
The first one is explicit, and they have every right and responsibility to hold it up to the light, given its seriousness.
The second one is a more of a speculation about their motivations. Newspapers are clearly frustrated -- how much does it factor into NYT's recent trend of aggressive coverage of tech & social media?
Here's a simple example I ran into recently:
I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible.
I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it.
Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.
Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.
Google is being attacked hard by Apple (blocking ads), amazon&azure (cloud)
and ads (facebook).
What Government really needs to do isn't break up Google per se, but generally give more natural advantages to smaller startups versus larger corps. One example would be corporate tax.
Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.
In fact, if I were the democratic party this would be my rallying cry. Time to really re-invigorate the american dream.
(Note I'm not a big fan of corporate taxes in general, I'd rather we not tax corporations and tax individuals more aggressively. Get rid of special rates for capital gains and have a much more progressive individual tax system.)
Not trivial in practice, but sounds like it would be much better if we could figure out a way to make it happen. The first step towards more federated standards and interoperability is to have a larger number of players in the market.
Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.
For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well?
If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players.
For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on.
For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc.
For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian, FreeBSD, etc.
For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS, Replicant, etc.
(For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps, which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware Android.)
I limit my searches to com,org,net,io domains and the first pages are still full of spam.
The UI is race-to-the-bottom terrible.
Choosing "verbatim" takes 3 mouse clicks FFS!
Google is becoming only useful with esoteric knowledge. E.g. you need to append site:stackexchange for the search to be useful.
I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me.
Try a search from an incognito tab and compare.
No, it's still far inferior to Google search.
Try "D without garbage collection" in both, and get back to me.
Google: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13574552/d-programming-w...
Same exact thing, so what is your point exactly?
Of the top 10 Google results, 9 specifically relate to the D programming language.
Of the top 10 DuckDuckGo results, the number is 3.
Yeah... good to see you’re not reaching or anything.
Don't be silly.
Googley, but without the personal dossier.
Second result from Google: https://dlang.org/blog/2017/06/16/life-in-the-fast-lane/ (on StartPage this is the third result)
Second result from StartPage: https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html (on Google this is the third result)
DDG is just a wrapper for Bing.
Fwiw, I switched to DDG a ~year ago (can't remember honestly lol), and I've been quite happy. With that said, not a week goes by where I don't use the !g bang to run my search on Google. DDG just has terrible results. It's good enough a lot, maybe even most of the time, but frequently it's too terrible.
I'm still happy I switched, the "good enough" results are heavily reinforced by privacy, and not giving Google everything. The fact remains though, DDG misses the mark for me frequently.
"generates those results from over 400 individual sources, including key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Yummly.[6][7]" as well as DuckDuckBot.
Also, more importantly, Bing, like google and facebook is building personal dossiers on everyone, while DDG is not.
“Just a wrapper” is misleading, but DDG returns bing results at least some of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_...
If bing offers up the best results most of the time DDG will, as a result, offer up bing results most of the time. "Best results" easily determinable even with DDG privacy constraints.
They're definitely doing some cool stuff at DDG and its certainly a hell of a lot more than "a wrapper around bing." I just don't think expanding their own index infrastructure is something feasible for them right now.
- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.
- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.
- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.
- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.
...and the cycle begins, again.
From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you.
Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese food near ZIP code" or "Chinese translation" instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.
That's when I switched back to Google.
Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g", such as "gg" or "/g" for example?
If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.
I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing <BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.
javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();
To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.
The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query (which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how fast you type).
BTW, you can also search through StartPage instead by using !sp, or Bing, etc so there's nice flexibility there.
Sometimes for programming related questions DDG does a better job I noticed.
For local results, DDG sucks by default. Google, when I enter something local or German, has great results, DDG only if I flip the local switch to "Germany". But besides that I prefer their results for most things besides rare searches (if there are under 100 results, DDG is almost useless). But bangs make it preferable to me even then.
(After spending a while with "Basic" to convince myself the results were just as good and I just had a trained reaction to the visual style, I went back to Default. And after a while, now Google results seem subtly off.)
It looks like my mind over-fitted on blue title/green url/black pull-text as the code for a web search result hit.
Where I run into trouble is on anything technical. Trying to find research or technical references is a hopeless cause and Google is still my work computer default.
I'm guessing it has to be the (what I once thought was subtle, but apparently is not) positive effect that Google promises it will deliver due to building a profile of me personally and returning different results based on what it knows about me.
I see many people say results from [whatever] are bad - but not enough info to know if they are tech people who 99% search for debian docs and uber eats... and or other people who say [other] are good / bad.. we need to start posting examples. If there were some way to use the firefox screen capture and share tool for example, to upload good / bad searches, i'd love to see how others see things.
I really want to make new search engine options, and want to show examples of the others and how they could be done better. Crowd sources examples of good and bad would be a benefit to many.
One of the biggest difference is something that happened very recently. Google is much faster at updating then the alternatives for some reason.
I suspect it is about event driven versus polling. That Google is given update when things happen from trusted news sites instead of having to poll or crawl for new things. Would not be surprised Google just has a lot more of these connections than MS has.
But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.
A big one is my ISP is allowed to sell my data without even me knowing. So I use Google DNS instead of my ISP and also use YouTube TV. All to try to keep my data away from my ISP.
My biggest issue is companies being hacked and people getting my data like what happened to Yahoo. I just trust Google better able to protect.
I made just the opposite choice, instead trying to offer different parts of my data to different companies. That way, when one company gets hacked, changes its terms of service, gets bought, etc., my losses are limited.
There's a couple things I do still use Google for, like YouTube. But since they no longer have 95% of my personal data, the impact of them having my YouTube history is drastically reduced.
Secondly, don't you think that actually maintaining it is very difficult? One inadvertant click could expose one of those accounts to another with a different service provider, etc. Arguably, it can work should you define a different browser profile for each of those accounts!? Nonetheless, it is neither easy nor smooth, in my opinion.
I don't currently have any issues with Google search result but I won't be surprised if underlying PageRank is slowly crumbling away. After all forums died off, blogs popularity has drastically dropped and most links between users are exchanged on closed platforms (FB) / communicators. Wisdom of the crowd might no longer be available in open web.
I gotta be honest, from my perspective, that feels like a weird thing to say. It's totally different from what I've seen.
I always get sites like MDN/W3C when I search for HTML/JS stuff, usually there isn't any blogspam at all on the first page of results. I always get Wikipedia articles and main company websites when I search for a company's name.
I have a lot of problems with Google, but I almost never see 'spammy' search results. It's weird that our experiences are so different.
Another annoying one is Postgres ('postgres add primary key'), which always has an ancient version as the first result, sometimes as far back as 7.x.
Well, the quality of the search results is not always as good as with Google. I do look back. But DuckDuckGo improved a lot over the last couple of years. Nowadays, DDG is my go-to search engine, and Google is the fallback when I hit a really hard problem; the more obscure the question, the more like it is in my experience that Google will yield more helpful results than DuckDuckGo.
In some way, DuckDuckGo is even better than Google. For specific questions, it often replies with a short snippet from stackoverflow or some other site that answers my question before I ever click on a link. That is just brilliant!
Google does that, too, sometimes, but for coding questions, DuckDuckGo seems to be better at it.
I've done a few googles over the last year, like on my girlfriend's computer, but I really find their results are so commercially-oriented that when looking for information it all gets in the way.
Krylon, eh? Are you a painter?
But at home I tend to look up stuff on Wikipedia more often than I search things on Google/DuckDuckGo. At work, I have used Google until I made an effort to switch to DDG.
The best I can paint are stick figures. ;-) I came across that word long before I had any idea what it meant. I remember being very confused, though, when somebody showed me a picture of some rapper wearing a T-shirt that said Krylon. (As so often in life, it was a lot less funny when I was told what it meant... :-/ )
I'd actually prefer the 3rd party searches on google over duckduckgos, because I could easily refine the search on google by appending "MDN" in search and get the result. Not only that, I know I can find the MDN and W3C doc easily, so I want to broaden my search horizon normally when doing a google search anyhow
DDG doesn't give you as much of an oppurtunity to see the 3rd party sites though, so its more limited
Finally, biased searches. I actually prefer biased searches the vast majority of time, partially because I'm too lazy to bookmark sites I visit a lot. If I wanted an unbiased search result DDG is my go to tool
Probably because you either haven’t searched often enough, or because you’ve been clicking on too many irrelevant links when presented with results.
I consistently get MDN and StackOverflow results in the top when I search because those are the links I click the most so Google has learned that I prefer those sites.
Speaking of W3C, in case you are not aware the site W3Schools has nothing to do with W3C, and W3Schools used to be filled with a lot of outdated information. I’ve heard they’ve gotten better but I still never intentionally click on W3Schools links and when I do by accident I immediately navigate away. Even though they’ve allegedly gotten better I don’t like them and I urge others not to use W3Schools. Use MDN, StackOverflow and the real W3C resources instead.
I don't think raising that starting figure is going achieve much but maybe it works differently in other countries.
Corporations, like many other organisms, will do what is best for them at any given moment, including deciding whether or not behaving ethically is in their best interests
Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it's not the best outcome.
If you've got a better idea let's hear it.
Edit: The Chickenshit Club is a good read which relates this in more detail.
Edit:...And the death penalty, which I oppose, but has been a constant for thousands of years.
The US could elect some Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn like figure who is actually tough on corporations. It could happen! Some measure similar to what the Fed did to Wells Fargo would be unthinkable to people used to this pessimistic political climate, but it's happening now. It wouldn't be hard to get elected on a message of raising corporate taxes and bend the rules however necessary to get them to actually pay.
Heck, I'd settle for tax reforms that didn't give large corporations that can afford an army of tax accountants/lawyers and a host of offshore shell corporations an advantage over small corporations that can't afford those things. You don't even need to get into giving advantages to startups to begin with, just stop hamstringing them by making them compete against folks that can sidestep the tax code.
Rather than this (which would be complex and unenforceable), just remove the loopholes (double Irish etc.) that allow those large corps to avoid taxes while smaller competitors can't.
Financially, I believe startups would actually want to see higher taxes instead of lower ones due to their ability to take advantage of net operating losses, which is a carry-forward that allows them to write off taxes for the future.
Also the Foundem guys tell a good story, but where’s the Hustle? If they had such good technology, why didn’t they pivot? Why didn’t they try to sell to Amazon or NextTag? In 1998 I met people that created a price comparison website scraping engine at a conference, they failed to get significant traction and sold for a ton of money to Amazon. The technology they created VDB or treating the internet as a virtual sql database, turned out to be backed by none other than Anand Rajaraman and someone most people will be familiar with Peter Norvig.
I mean, honestly, if these guys had something truly innovative, I’m pretty sure they could have arranged an acquisition.
Is there any scientific evidence at all that innovation is being crushed? This seems like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence beyond a few anecdotes from losing startups. 95% of businesses fail to be viable for a host of reasons.
If you’re doing product search your main competitor these days is Amazon anyway.
New algorithms can certainly be invented. The question is whether they catch on, which is the only way they do any good.
Look at it the other way: what's the impact of removing the massive incentives of commercialization and profit?
We may have reached a point that a single improved algorithm, by itself, cannot provide a better search experience without a lot of expensive operationalization.
Questions of malice, or of intent more generally, are irrelevant. Antitrust law is intended to promote consumer welfare. If consumers would be better off knowing about a service than not, and because it threatens Google, Google is relegating it to page 70 of their search results, that's bad for consumers. Even if Google is trying to make everyone happy, regulators can help society by stepping in.
Make businesses under $1M/year exempt, increase taxes proportionally to earnings above that.
" If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings."
Maybe 20 years from now, this would be different with majority of the people being tech savvy (like the majority of people who can drive today).
Of course one can argue that it is the consumers' fault for not looking for better options...
Email-based startups and open source projects don't seem to move very fast though, likely because due to the Gmail monopoly, they don't get a lot of support.
Also, they don't automatically extract information from a mail into my calendar (e.g. event/flight/...).
Can't see in which sense those are "better" than free gmail.
(For example, when I used Gmail, the "multiple inboxes" feature didn't work well with third party mail apps, because it isn't really multiple inboxes, it's just Gmail sorting the inbox on the fly. I ended up disabling them and adding custom rules into Gmail to sort them into proper folders.)
As the case is FastMail does actually have that feature, I just prefer to use actual rules and folders. ;)
Snooze is, from my understanding, an Inbox feature, not a Gmail feature, and I still fail to see any value. (But maybe as a non-Inbox user I just don't know?) You have read, unread, and pinned/starred functionality, how and why one would hide one's emails from oneself until a later point, I have no idea.
Extracting data from emails automatically is an antifeature, since it's privacy-invasive. I specifically pay FastMail for it not to do things like that to my mail!
But on the opposite end:
* FastMail's interface is faster and cleaner than Gmail's and contains no advertising.
* FastMail's email/calendar service is fully standards compliant, unlike the number of hacks required to interoperate with Gmail's proprietary nonsense. Just yesterday I was reading about this: http://blog.fruux.com/2014/10/16/google-carddav/
* FastMail gives me incredibly fine-grained control over how my mail is handled, including it's spam filtering.
* When I have an issue with FastMail, I can ask for help, and a real human (and one random time, literally the CEO) will respond, and assist me with my problem.
----
FWIW, Outlook.com has a pretty nice email client too, and their account management is a lot more mature than Google's (I can change my Microsoft account's email address, something Google remains incapable of to this day, somehow).
Gmail has been around for over a decade, it's the least common denominator now, most email services are at least as good as Gmail.
I don't think FastMail can really compete with G Suite on anything except "not being the leviathan." Which is not nothing! But as a tool, it's just not as good. And Outlook which you mention in the comment below doesn't even have this.
Let's not underestimate Google here. They offer a full productivity suite, an excellent, tight integration with Android, plus Chrome sync for multiple profiles. They're tough competition.
> Email-based startups and open source
> projects don't seem to move very fast
> though, likely because due to the
> Gmail monopoly, they don't get a
> lot of support.
So far Gmail is by far the best email client/service that I've found.
I have regularly seen people moving from Google Apps to personal Gmail accounts just because the integration with other Google services is so bad.
It's understandable Google wants it's business customers to have well-tested robust software, but more often then not, the support cycle can leave them excluded for years, with no way to opt in.
Everything else I've tried. Office 365 isn't better. What I could stitch together with OwnCloud wasn't better.
All the important Google tools are in the G Suite. There's Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Photos, and the whole web office suite: Drive, Docs, Sheets. It also works and syncs with Android.
Kodak invented digital photography way back in the 1970s, patented it, and did nothing with it. It was only when the patents expired that digital cameras came to the fore (likely also because of intervening decades’ worth of technological improvement), and it killed them off. Until the beginning of the 20th Century the Royal Navy had an unassailable advantage in terms of ships and then Admiral Fisher designed the HMS Dreadnought which instantly obsoleted everything afloat and dialled back the UK's advantage to a single ship, and the Germans instantly took advantage of it and started building their own new dreadnoughts.
This keeps happening.
With Google in particular, if their dominance was so unassailable, we wouldn't have slack or zoom, which exist essentially because gchat and google hangouts were so half-assed.
No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.
Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides.
Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC.
For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...
The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.
This is why we need more ethics, logic, rationality, and the promotion of epistemology as moderators. Capitalism, democracy, and meritocracy all in their own way are prone to people gaming the system, might making right.
Which people are those? One of Microsoft's defining features has always been the juxtaposition of software iterations that consumers truly despise with those that they're sort of ok with.
Does that say more about the success of antitrust at spurring competitors to catch up or that "technological dominance" is only good as long as long as the paradigm doesn't shift (i.e. Kodak is now pretending to be a crypto company as a last resort)?
I'm not sure if it's relevant but I get an exact result when I do this search. Not sure if that is horizontal search...
I still love Google and wouldn't be where I am today without it but it makes a fair point when camparing this time to the early oil industry. It's not like there's no competition against Google, it's just been a fantastic tool and why use anything else.
Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an awful lot of logic in the way internet works. Seems like the real world is catching on, trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)
Comments like yours are stupid and add nothing for these reasons:
1) A journalist or writer likely does not have technical control over their paper's website design. This is certainly true for someone writing for the NYT. They're not going to hold back their article because someone on the website team chose to use a product from the company they're critiquing.
2) Google, Facebook, etc. are so dominant that it's often not really possible to avoid them and their technology and still have a functioning business.
More on point: what choices does a startup have when wanting to operate in a vertical that Google/Facebook et.al. also want to infiltrate? Find a smaller niche that doesn't hold enough interest (or money) to interest them? It's funny, I wouldn't have thought the RSS reader niche would have appealed to them originally, and yet here we are today where RSS reader startups still find themselves competing on price against a product that no longer exists.
It really does seem like its not enough to just be better; the "worse is better" paradox in action.
We see it with each thing. From Search, to Ecommerce, to social media, etc.
So we need to think through would someone else be better than Google? Because that is just what will happen.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to copy search result link. Not just "difficult".
it's a pain. but it works.
currently greasemonkey 'direct link out' and 'bypass google redirect'
I bet if they subpoena Google, they WILL find A/B tests and experiments on increasing engagement & time spent on google.com through AMP changes. How that fits into the antitrust framework is not my subject area, but Google needs to be reigned in.
https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=...
Expect a lot of press on this subject over the next few weeks.
There is going to be some financial aspect that makes him money. Not saying he is not accidentally aligned with the greater good but most certainty not the driver.
Looks like a good time to short.