Google admits to running experiments which remove some media sites from results | Hacker News Reader

Google admits to running experiments which remove some media sites from results

theguardian.com

39 pointssiquick13 comments

As I understand it, the newspapers in Australia want Google to pay for the right to show them in search results. Google is experimenting with not showing them in the results at all, which I assume is the alternative if Google doesn't want to pay. And now the newspapers cry foul? So the idea is that Google must show them in results and must pay?

Seems absurd to legislate that company A must pay company B with no alternative.

Perhaps, my understanding is the government came up with this though likely as a result of lobbying.

As an Australian I have found the campaign by Google very distasteful. They have ads everywhere against it and it's prominent on their home page.

Now, as for the law itself. It's probably flawed, but I appreciate that the government is looking into this space and the effects on discourse.

Hopefully next on the radar is newspapers and media.

>Google sought to downplay the significance of the move by noting the company conducted “tens of thousands of experiments in Google Search” every year.

Assuming it's not just simple A/B testing, I'd be interested in a list of these tens of thousands of annual experiments to see what Google has been up to. It's messed up to think that even just searching Google on any particular day could be more or less accurate/helpful because we're in the middle of some experiment we never explicitly consented to.

they're trying to find out/tune what is accurate/helpful right?

Normally, yes.

In this case I suspect (EDIT: no, I just guess) that they might be trying to find out how much their advertising take changes if they include/exclude/boost/depress/whatever the search results that link to Murdoch sites and other major Australian media sites.

Sure, on any particular day it could be more or less helpful. But It if they weren't experimenting for years prior it would probably be even less helpful than a bad experiment of today.

(Of course this depends a lot on how your definition of "helpful" aligns with Google's)

My guess is that “tens of thousands” is the rough SELECT count(*) from their systems. And I’d bet most of these experiments are old Boolean feature flags that were essentially acceptance tests, the final hurdle before global launch. For example, seeing that your new Gmail POP3 settings workflow drives engagement down 50% is a pretty clear indication you’ve got a bug that wasn’t caught in development. The interesting tests would be buried between such mundanities.

This kind of information would also be highly proprietary so I doubt such a list would see the light of day.

Yes, all very well timed “experiments” I’m sure.

Google's going to need to negotiate. Of course they run experiments to find out what they can pay and still make a profit, and at what price it's better to just leave the market.

There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding of this news story that seems to stem from not reading the post. Any connection to current events and big tech are coincidental only. This has been in discussion for years before today.

There is a guardian article that explains the context to date reasonably well. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/dec/09/australia-is-m...

As far as I understand it (you can read the explanatory memorandum for more plain-english explanations) https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat... this merely sets up a process for Google (and other companies) to negotiate with media providers.

Google (and Facebook) are obviously strongly opposed to this (and the potential for precedents to be set around the world). This story doesn't seem particularly bad for Google but they have definitely been fighting it out in the public sphere. https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/australia/d...

I also haven't seen any media organisations (that I've seen) crying foul over this - though obviously this would be reported on. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/google-admits-to-rem...

Anyway keen to hear other perspectives on this. I haven't looked into this in detail and have actively tried to ignore all the advertisements - but I am up and thought to try to explain this from my perspective.

And would those sites be conservative media, who also advocate breaking up big tech?

No - that's not much of a talking point over here, nor would it make any sense

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