Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

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"Well, that didn't make me feel much better, because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people."

OP is a web-tech blogger and he just now learned this? I don't use G+ much so I can't easily evaluate the rest of OPs assertions, but I am questioning them by default because when someone makes one statement I know to be false (or in this case inexcusably ignorant), it calls the rest of their statements into question. This is unfortunate because I think much what OP says is useful, but, c'mon: if you blog about web tech and didn't know google tailors results, it makes you seem like you "don't know how any of this stuff works" and I can't take you seriously in that regard.

I am very confused by the section about plagiarism/mis-attribution/non-attribution. OP says his work was "almost-unattributed" but I couldn't find any link back to him on the G+ posting. Did someone click the share button, or paste in a link to his article? Or did someone copy and paste his article? If it's the latter, this phenomenon is much older than the Internet and has nothing to do with G+, specifically, besides the fact that Google may rate your plagiarized "work" higher than the original on its results (which is a distinct issue that applies to both plagiarized and properly-attributed posts).

EDIT: I see the name now, it was next to the title in the post. Thank you OP.

It's "almost-attributed" because he included my name, but there was no link or mention of my site. I don't care about the name. I care about the site. That's what the whole rant is about.

Of course I knew that Google tailored results. How would I have been able to include any context in this post otherwise? You took a human-written sentence out of context and made it make less sense than it does in the body of the post.

Honestly, I immediately noticed that sentence too, and it really detracts from your article.

As for your attack on G+, the only real problem I see is if they promote G+ posts over the original. But that could also just happen because maybe many of your "friends" liked or shared the G+ post (that wouldn't be surprising), and you being logged in to google, the algorithm interpreted those social cues of high importance for you. The best solution, though, would be if those "social love" was transferred to the linked article.

"I changed it, because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point."

I am polite, point out that much of what you say is useful, and thank you for a correction, and I'm a troll. Reddit is that way, friend. -->

As for my "misinterpreting" the meaning of what you said, there was no misinterpretation at all. 'A friend told me her results were different than mine / I now know that google serves different results.' Without more context, the only reasonable interpretation here is that you learned the latter from the former, there is no misinterpretation.

"My business went under / now I'm broke." If you interpreted the latter as a result of the former, you would be correct, not mistaken. ;)

"because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point."

Don't call people trolls just because they highlight a confusing statement of yours. Judging by the comments here (and on RWW), it was easy to interpret it "wrong" even with the context of the article.

Even if he didn't know, would his not knowing that Google tailors results per-user somehow make his other points worthless? That seems like a form of poisoning the well.

I looked up "poisoning the well" because I didn't know the precise meaning, thanks for the new phrase! In fact I'm not "poisoning the well" because a) My opinion was the one in question; Poisoning the well requires an audience and poisoner and more importantly b) I didn't introduce this information, the author wrote it himself.

Anyway regarding poisoning the well, check out the second example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well#Examples "The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and then when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" [roughly, "You misunderstood me; you are an idiot"] (hence "terroriste")."" Ironically, this does precisely describe the behavior of a commenter here, but it's not me. :p

Thanks for your response. What I meant was that him not knowing Google tailors results has no bearing on his gripes about

1. not being able to link to the original article,

2. Google favoring Google+ posts in search results overall,

3. and the Google+ interface looking and working terribly.

I used poisoning the well because it was a related ad hominem: you're saying him being wrong in this one instance means he is wrong in these other unrelated instances.

Hmm... I certainly didn't mean to say he "is wrong." Given many claims I can't verify, I give the person the benefit of the doubt: I can't say if it's right or wrong so I'll assume the author is right. BUT, once I see one assertion that I know to be way off or highly uninformed, I revoke that "benefit of the doubt" on all the other claims. As I said it's unfortunate, but I can't assume the other assertions are any more valid than the one I know to be wrong/uninformed.

Horse flogging, stop now: If you were to tell my that northern Spain is rainy in the winter and Sweden has long dry summers, I'd take your word for it (I know little about the climates in those countries). BUT if you then told me snow is rare in winter in the US Northeast, which I know to be false, I ask myself "hmm... could his statements about the other places be equally inaccurate? He has demonstrated he does not know what he's talking about vis-a-vis local climate trends." Do you see what I mean? I'm not saying anything he wrote is true or false, it's just called into question by a demonstration of ignorance on the topic.

In this case, it might make the overall thrust of the article - that G+ is reducing the quality of Google search results - worthless, because it calls into question his credibility with regards to his ability to assess that quality.

It's like Yelp reviews of sushi restaurants that start with "I don't usually eat sushi, but..." ... the points involved may still be valid, but the overal credibility of the assessment is seriously impaired.

to be fair to sequoia, that's how I read it too (within the context of the article).

Have you implemented the author markup as Google suggest?

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