In Response to Google
wheresyoured.at
wheresyoured.at
Reading Ed's post reminded me of this, and whether (or to what extent) it's true, it certainly was conventional wisdom at the time.
Around the ‘10s I had speculated to my company’s leadership that we should consider devoting a couple of positions for google banner advertising to our site for a while to see if it would improve search engine results. I always felt like the algorithm may have been tuned to give a little bump to sites participating in revenue streams for google. We never did it, but I bet we might have seen some small indications of result position improvements.
I interpret Google's response as "you're not 100% correct in every way, but we don't want to tell you which 95% you're right about".
Calling something "inaccurate" is utter BS. In an actual legal proceeding, the parties are enjoined to speak "with specificity," meaning that kind of crap isn't tolerated. But in a public statement, anything goes, apparently.
You can see why they do it: if they did answer with specificity, people would just argue about the details. Calling it "inaccurate" is equivalent to, "sit down and shut up."
You mean, besides all the directly quoted emails that were presented as evidence in a Federal court case?
In this case "baseless speculation" would mean "it's all true, but you can't prove it" and "inaccurate" means "one minor detail is a bit off."
Puts me in mind of a different saying: just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
That's completely untrue!
Is he over 48 feet tall?
... No comment.
dang editorialised the previous headline into a Betteridge Law question - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no" - when it in fact is not such a thing, and strongly makes its case.
But we checked directly with Ian Betteridge on Mastodon (in a local post) and he said "I love Ed's pieces so he gets a thumbs up from me." FWIW.
On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the general perspective of the original article.
On the other hand, that the same person is writing “hit pieces” and running a media relations company bears a certain resemblance to protection rackets of yore
As fun as it is to outline such a scheme, it seems incredibly implausible, since a person who's entire income is reliant on corporate media relations wouldn't bite the hand that feeds them to make a few dollars from a corporate enshittifier. Also, the path from 'hit piece' to 'rolling in the dough' seems kind of long and windy, and there are a few steps in there that I don't really get how they would work.
This is why the OP just insinuated the whole thing instead of saying it -- because when you write it down fully it sounds ridiculous.
If this guy loses a $10M/year job over these posts, his lawyer may well go through them to see if they are defamatory.
I mean _come on_ how stupid do they think we are?