Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I completely sympathize -- this is the first time I've heard of a truly good rationale for search-result modification.

BUT a slippery slope is a slippery slope, and Google would be opening itself up to hundreds of thousands of suits if this one succeeded.

HOWEVER, there are still two options open to him:

1) Embark on an aggressive SEO campaign to link his guesthouse/campsite's name to nice images (though this may be exceedingly difficult)

2) Change the name of his guesthouse/campsite (very annoying, but certainly feasable)

If I were him, I'd change the name.

View on HN

I can tell you of a public figure's kid in another country whose camera was stolen and nude pictures were put up of him in another country. Nobody knows who did it but the pictures are hosted outside the country on a provider who doesn't care. They do know that considerable black hat SEO was put into making this a #1 result for the public figure. (I apologize for being intentionally vague but this is a source of embarrassment to the family.)

Trolls can be assholes. Google seems to favor the troll.

Many systems do. In the US, people advocating for mandatory sentencing say the same thing about the justice system, and the RIAA and the MPAA say the same thing about the DMCA safe harbor and takedown notice provisions.

Outside of getting google to enforce sanctions against whatever "black hat SEO" methods were used, asking Google to act in that case would appear to be asking Google to settle on a single notion of the limits of free speech and defamation when entire countries of people clearly cannot. I'm not sure putting Google in charge of that is a good idea.

(With this sort of thing you start to see why country-specific censorship occurs and may be the best of a set of terrible solutions. See also "the right to forget" vs US court decisions on free speech that is only going to come up more and more)

You should propose a workable solution before making statements like "Google seems to favor the troll". How would you solve this problem given that manually removing the results are probably out the question for legal reasons?

Undesrscores how powerful Google is. To many people internet is what Google shows to them. Though its a slippery slope, If the peson who is requesting for changes is liable for those then Google should comply. DMCA also has similar provision.

Of course, in practice no one is responsible for misuse of the DMCA. Google would have a better incentive to control misuse of any "correction" feature, but it would still probably end up being used to censor things occasionally.

It's a difficult problem to solve both because of Google's primary goal (provide an accurate representation of what people are looking for) and the difficulty of deciding who's actually "responsible" for a given category of content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com