Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

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Absofuckinglutely. These sites thrive solely because Google ranks them at the top. Crapware sites appear so consistently at the top of searches for software that excludes the term "linux" that coincidence is many sigma less likely than intent.

Considering that what most Windows crapware installers do is mercilessly track users for the purposes of marketing and that Google's main business is tracking users mercilessly for the purpose of marketing, it is hard to see how this is some random event.

Google's definition of "best search results" is related to their bottom line, and the goal is to be as intrusive as possible without driving searches away. This is why the Google ad network laden "weather.com" is returned before the ad free and purely scientific "weather.gov" from a US search for "weather."

For real fun, search for "pdf to html" and "pdf to html linux" to compare the degree to which Google promotes solutions that collect data on users. A Windows user would never know that a free quick private and powerful alternative is just one VM away.

You are confusing search results and paid search ads. Google will happily put whoever bids the highest in the ads, but they don't force weather.com to rank above weather.gov in the organic results. That's a totally baseless conspiracy theory.

Google decides who can run ads with them and who doesn't. They're running malware ads, and those appear above the legitimate search results.

A lot of ordinary consumers confuse search results and paid search ads, and this is _entirely_ Google's fault. It would be very simple to make them look completely different.

Also, it's not just malware. Google also makes money by promoting scam sites that charge people for free government services.

Of course they do. Unless google is not in charge of the ranking algorithm behind their web search engine.

The search algorithm is not the only tool in the ranking as we know google has a way to penalize a specific website among others.

Explain how Google's corporate officers better meet their fidudiary duty to maximize shareholder value by not structuring search results to optimize revenue than they meet that fiduciary duty by structuring search results to maximize returns.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's basic business and doing otherwise would be the basis for a tort.

There's no actual fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value (though a few cases in the early 20th century said otherwise). The fiduciary duties of a public corporation are a lot more narrow, mostly involving not prejudicing some shareholders at the expense of others, or enriching the officers at the expense of the shareholders. Making unprofitable market decisions out of principle (even if misguided), however, is not a breach of fiduciary duty. For that kind of run-of-the-mill disagreement over how to run a business, the shareholders' remedies don't lie in the courts, but in their control over the board. Courts in the past few decades really aren't interested in second-guessing strategic/policy/market decisions, certainly not getting into stuff as detailed as whether Google could choose to ban malware ads, for any definition of "malware" they choose.

You're simply wrong. It is in Google's long-term financial interest to continue to provide objective, trustworthy search results. For a non-Google example of something similar, see the recent story of Apple CEO Tim Cook challenging a shareholder who challenged the impact of Apple's environmental policies on Apple's bottom line: http://gizmodo.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-shuts-down-anti-enviro...

Oh bloody fucking hell, Cook told shareholder activists to piss off because a CEO's job is to tell shareholder activists to piss off. Rarely is it so easy as in Cook's case where the activists were total wingnuts, had no business case since Apple's investment in renewable energy is almost certain to payoff over the long term, and presented a massively unpopular position. They got the microphone because their pitch had homerun written all over it.

In Google's case, their officers are responsible for optimizing the mix of objective search results with revenue producing search results. That optimum can be described as just good enough not to drive too many queries away while maximizing clicks to their customers. There's no legal requirement or demand from shareholders for a wall.

And indeed the very idea of tailoring search results to an individual's past browsing history is always going to push sites that share data with Google to the top of the results page.

TANSTAAFL.

You should read Google's corporate filings. It's clearly not a fiduciary duty of their executives to maximize shareholder value. They were very clear about that when they went public. There is also no SEC - or any other - regulation stipulating this as the prime directive for corporate officers.

The constantly repeated 'duty to maximize shareholder value' line is nothing more than a myth.

In the case of Google, the triangle of Page / Brin / Schmidt basically control Google outright, regardless of the other shareholders, due to their voting shares. So they absolutely do not have any duty what-so-ever to maximize anything. Buyer beware, is basically what they stapled to the prospectus.

http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-lette...

In fact it's no more complicated than this: if some random shareholder is upset, they can stir the pot accordingly, and the waves they'll make is almost always in proportion to the shares they can vote directly or indirectly. There is no singular objective qualification on what would lead to the maximization of shareholder value, it's an opinion that varies from one shareholder to the next as to what they think is "best" for the company.

Simple example: some shareholders might think it'd be better to slash salaries at Costco to boost the bottom line. Others believe part of the reason Costco is so successful is their employee culture.

If users lose their trust in Google (as I have, FWIW), then it loses its eyeballs to sell.

Short-term-ism in terms of maximizing ads revenue which costs long-term goodwill is a serious negative for Google.

I'd argue that in the past year or three, the company has started showing its vulnerabilities. I'm not sure who will take over from it, or how, or what that company's business model will be, but I see vulnerabilities.

I switched to DDG a while ago as my "default" search. Unfortunately, Google does reliably provide better results. They'll maintain a user base as long as that's true; I still switch to them when DDG fails.

Well, it provides better results when it doesn't rewrite your search into oblivion in an attempt to save you from typos you didn't make. Unfortunately, DDG being worse at everything else still leaves Google in the lead. But it also still leaves me very unhappy when I search.

You may be a better typist than most. For me, Google is fixing a broken search most of the time it makes changes.

Usually it's turning an uncommon domain specific word into something uselessly common (and completely unrelated) for me.

Or when I put an entire error message in quotes and it deems the number of results for that error message too low to be intentional so it deconstructs it into a useless mashy search of all the words in the error. Note, I don't mean when the results are zero, but even then I usually have to spend an annoying amount of time before I realize that my search actually had zero results instead of the millions it claims it had.

There was a time when google's cleverness was just enough to be useful, but it gets more and more clever (and frustrating) every year now.

Convincing Google that I don't want its assumption that I want a typo fixed is getting more difficult.

The dynamic Google results page means that it's really difficult to refine a search based on the presently visible results which disappear as I update the search. I find that that behavior incredibly annoying, and greatly appreciate that DDG doesn't do this.

It took me two goes to make DDG stick but since June of last year (just after the Snowden revelations started) I've been using DDG as my primary and nearly exclusive search engine.

It's much better than the first time around: more relevant, faster, and very few technical hangups.

I still fall back to Google periodically, especially for:

• Date-bounded search. DDG doesn't support this.

• Specialty searches: news, books, scholar. I've also keyed up custom searches for a bunch of sites in my browser.

• Rarely: I don't seem to find what I'm looking for on DDG. Usually first an !sp re-search, if that fails, !g. About 2 times out of 3, I still don't find what I'm looking for and return to DDG for more refinement.

RSA maximized their profits up $10 million by selling their customers out to the NSA, and that cost them some serious long term goodwill and reputation. Were their shareholders happy about that piece of financial calculus?

Ignoring for the moment that you are wrong about them having to maximise shareholder value, and ignoring that just taking any money doesn't maximse value anyway, you are still wrong.

Google has a dual class stock. The only shareholders with any power are Larry and Sergy. That was done to avoid short term thinking (precisely like you are proposing). Investors know this when they buy on.

Learn to write clear sentences first. Then you can add big words and concepts.

A long time ago, I started treating downvotes as a critique of my writing. My first response is always to edit the post to express my ideas more clearly, my second is to consider if the comment is doing little more than inflaming passions for no benefit to the community. In the latter case, I tend to delete the post.

This is a case where I posted in a rush. The basic idea that Google's ranking algorithm is optimized to serve Google's interests first and those of its customers second is the only possible way for Google's officers to fulfill their legal obligations to the shareholders they serve.

The key to understanding this idea of the best search ranking algorithm is that people who query Google's search engine are not Google's paying customers. Google Search's paying customers are almost exclusively advertisers.

The best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue. Not enough traffic directed to ad buying customers and advertising dollars may go somewhere else. Sure too much obvious selling might drive queries elsewhere but the threshold for tolerating advertising keeps going up. So many people take tracking across sites for granted that Google can push a "weather" search onto an advertising affiliate's site and still meet the expectations of the data point making the query. There is no objective reason other than income for ranking secondary sources above the primary source, "weather.gov".

Occam's razor just cutts that way.

This is a bit simplistic, and I'm not saying that to be rude.

It's true that searchers don't pay Google money, and advertisers do. But Google is running a platform. In the past I've compared it to an information marketplace. And the goal for Google is to make the market run as efficiently as possible, otherwise they risk losing one side.

Searchers don't pay Google, but they do (presumably) pay Google's advertisers, who pay Google. If you lose the searchers, you lose the advertisers.

Now of course there is a balancing act, which you allude to in your last paragraph. But there are plenty of easy examples where Google returns no ads even though they could. A search for "how old is barack obama" just returns the number (or Wikipedia), without ads, even though I'm sure there are advertisers out there who would pay for an ad to be shown.

So obviously it's not universally true that "the best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue." Perhaps adding some subtlety to your argument would help me understand exactly what you're saying.

All abstractions are simplified. That's what makes them both abstractions and useful.

For example Google Search might be considered a marketplace, but such an abstraction might lead a person to lump buyers and sellers into amorphous blobs and ignore the heterogeneity within each group. Ford and overstock.com are different sorts of advertisers and thus Google's business comes down to segmenting end users.

Plain and simple the most valuable end user segments are people who not just tolerate tracking and targeted advertising but who actually derive value from it. They are valuable not only because they click through and buy stuff but because they validate Google's claims that its business of tracking users and pushing ads and tailoring search results toward commercial interests and away from the long tail is objective.

Long tail results are not revenue generating and Google has simply removed bit by bit the end user's ability to specify them. Sure spelling correction is useful, until Google search refuses to respect quotation marks and simply renders some terms unreachable. Local search is useful, until a person wants to search across borders or outside their local language.

But not abstractions are factually wrong, like you original premise was. Big words and complex sentence structures don't make up for that.

Thers is also the scandal of sites that hijack government sites and charge people to receive benefits they could get for free by going direct.

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