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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

The way some people are angry at google here reminds of of Brexit. People are saying “google is out of line threatening to leave. They wouldn’t possibly withdraw over paying for news”

That’s not why. They’re threatening to withdraw because the law requires two week advance notice of algo changes. If you have any idea how google works you know this is impossible.

Brexiteers scorned critics and are now learning that indeed some things are impossible, such as control over borders and regulations and unfettered free trade with the eu.

People seem to have such distaste for google that they’re not wrestling with how impossible Australia’s demands really are. Google has faced similar news demands in europe before and didn’t threaten to leave. But those demands didn’t come with impossible to comply with algorithm requests.

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> The way some people are angry at google here reminds of of Brexit.

Indeed. Both are the result of flooding the media with specious arguments designed to make people fight over irrelevant details.

'Google is a grifter' 'The EU are robbing us of our NHS'

Google is not rich because of news articles. The NHS was not underfunded due to the EU.

> If you have any idea how google works you know this (two week advance notice of algo changes) is impossible.

You do have some idea, don't you? Enlighten us how it works and why algo change notices are impossible.

> some things are impossible, such as control over borders

Right, no country outside of EU has control over their borders.

> such as control over borders and regulations and unfettered free trade with the eu.

Not OP but I think this is meant to be read as one full condition, not 3 impossible things

Yes precisely. You can have the first two, or the second, but not all three together.

Because search engine quality control is a cat and mouse game with spammers and grey hat companies trying to game rankings.

Literally a multi billion dollar industry. If google gives advance notice of all of this to australian news orgs, they have an asset worth billions and which would break the web worldwide if leaked.

This is just part of it. Even legit sites do some gaming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing

> You do have some idea, don't you? Enlighten us how it works and why algo change notices are impossible.

I work at Google, but not on search. How do you even interpret "algorithm changes" there? It can be as broad as any code or configuration push. Across a complex service, that's probably happening hundreds of times per day. (And even if you narrow the scope to just some search-specific code, changes are probably still happening many times per day.)

Are you supposed to have a mandatory 14-day waiting period for every change to hit production? With a lawyer to approve and transcribe an external description for each one?

Google has all the cards here. Just threaten to turn off Google and all services for the whole country if this garbage is voted on. I think there would be a huge backlash among the public.

No, they don't. They are too invested. There is a dev campus there with tons of people working.

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