Google+ is hurting the Internet. Europeans have the power to stop it | Hacker News Reader

Google+ is hurting the Internet. Europeans have the power to stop it

focusontheuser.eu

22 pointshiby00733 comments

I'm not sure I understand this. If you don't like Google's search results... don't use Google. That's how the free market works.

Personally I have been extremely happy with DuckDuckGo's results recently. I switched my default search on my Mac and iPhone to it, and very rarely have to go back to Google for anything. (Occasionally when searching for extremely recent pages.)

(Though I wish that DuckDuckGo would consider renaming themselves to something less... silly. Not that "Google" is much better, I suppose.)

I, too, have been using DDG as much as possible. My own problem is that I get "paranoia" that I'm not getting the most results, so I end up searching both. And all too often end up leaving my browser config'd for Google.

Anyone know of a plug-in to periodically reset my search tool back to DDG?

Also, FWIW you mentioned the free market, but notice that this is a European project, where laws appear (IANAEL) subtly different. The site makes this claim: "European competition laws prohibit companies with a dominant market position from engaging in anti-competitive conduct that excludes competitors from the market (conduct that reduces consumer welfare)."

Why not set it to DDG and then use "!g" to search Google?

Excellent! I never knew about that! Thank you.

You can't choose what your potential customers will use to find you.

If your business model relies on Google, it's a bad business model.

That was my thought as well. It's Google's product, and there are alternatives. Why should they have to change it? If people keep using it, they are probably getting the results they want. If not, those people are free to pursue the alternatives.

I like Google+ for Google+, but I hate pretty much everything else Google tries to bind it to, including search results. Fortunately I was already using DuckDuckGo because even before G+, Google's search simply couldn't be trusted anymore.

Actually, Google search is still useful for searching in my G+ feed, because G+'s builtin search seems to search primarily outside my feed. It does make you wonder what Google is thinking.

How about just letting me control how I want my search to work?

tl;dr "A few engineers at Yelp and TripAdvisor" want to tell Google what to put on their SERP via law enforcement, because of "Google’s anti-competitive conduct".

It looks more like Genius.com is behind this. See the link at the bottom of the homepage.

At the very bottom: "Yelp Ireland Ltd. ..."

Exactly. This seems pretty desperate.

Besides, many of the companies listed in the footer enjoy significant exposure in the SERPs. For instance, Holiday Check is placed 8 of all domains when it comes to Google Germany SERP visibility (according to SISTRIX), with Trip Advisor coming in at #18.

Somehow I read "what the users want" as "what location based rating companies wants". From all the faults you can blame on Google+ (real name policy, tighter integration, etc), this is probably the one users are most unconcerned with.

If I understand their argument correctly, when Google+ allowed you to specify who you Follow, and then Google Search started showing you results informed by the things those people had +1'd, that's an example of Google "cheating their algorithm."

So, instead, Google shouldn't let you search based on the recommendations from your friends and other people you trust...?

I'm sorry, but this movement is wrong-headed.

I like to see reviews based on my friends. The restaurants, movies, apps, products that they like and recommend.

If there were an open and federated way for all users to express their recommendations, sure, we could yell at Google for not using THAT instead.

But yelling at them they can't INVENT a system of recommendations, or use it in their search results, is a bad argument for me.

Considering the explicit mention of "privacy-friendly" Piwik in the footer, it's pretty ironic that the embedded genius.com scripts actually load Google Analytics and fire a tracking pixel.

"Google is hurting the internet!"

Uses youtube for all the videos.

Not Google, Google+. In fact those videos are about how good Google is in terms of searching.

But Google+ is not the problem here. The problem is how Google is ruining Google Search with stuff that doesn't belong there. But Google was ruining Google Search long before Google+; they've long tried to personalize search results, to the point that two different people googling for Egypt during the Egyptian revolution, one would mainly find news on protests on the big quare, while the other would primarily find luxury resorts.

Google should let their users control how much they want their search results polluted.

In Chrome: Control-Shift-N

In FF: Control-Shift-P

In IE: Download Chrome or FF

If you don't want personalized results, then don't be logged in to Google when you Search.

> In IE: Download Chrome or FF

Brilliant. Good chuckle.

Thanks! Although...

> If you don't want personalized results, then don't be logged in to Google when you Search.

That basically means I can't use Google Search on any browser that I also use for GMail, G+ or Google Drive. So I think that means Safari.

...on any browser?

I just explained (somewhat jokingly) how to open a New Incognito Window.

When you do that, you won't be logged in when you search.

It's not bad rhetoric, but there are a few problems:

First, the ranking algorithm for a local search is not necessarily the same as that for a web search (even a web search with possibly local intent). In fact, the results from this tool were total garbage for the last local search I'd done (zurich augenarzt). It gave me results in Germany, results where the address and map pins were wrong, a link to the front page of some local search company I'd never heard of, etc.

To go back to my previous example, in fact the most appropriate result that this extension was able to give was pointing to the Facebook page of a eye care center in Zurich (hey, at least it was the right city) showing content that had basically nothing to do with their business. The only valuable content from the point of view of a potential customer was the link to their actual website. Which brings me to the next point.

Second, the supposed Google+ results are not actually Google+ results. The link is generally pointing to the website of the business itself. At least for me that's generally the result I want. The Google+ page is only used as a fallback when Google doesn't know which website is associated with the business. Of course a local search company's goal is for as many users as possible to be funneled to their web site. It's not a goal I'm very sympathetic to.

Would the "few engineers from different local search companies doing this purely as a side project" still be happy if the link to their site was treated the same way the G+ pages are treated in the results right now? That is, as an auxilliary link rather than as the main result?

Third, companies like Yelp have made it abundantly clear that they don't want "their" data aggregated by Google. While an actual production version of this would depend on that. You can't have it both ways.

As a final note, you guys really need to redo that video with a real human doing the talk. It's hard to get the viewer to sympathize with a bad voice synthesizer, and it comes across almost as cowardly. And worst of all it's pretty hard to understand. It took me almost the whole movie to figure out that the word I was hearing as "parrot" was probably "powered".

Unless they changed it since you made that comment, that is definitely a real human talking.

I would rather let google show me results that it wants than giving power some government authority to "fix things".

Google is not a human right, it is a company and should be allowed to do what it wants, without governmental interference.

/European

Yet it's good to acknowledge that a small number of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are in practice controlling the media consumption of a large (growing) amount of people. They have the power to make fine tuned adjustements in how people perceive the world.

It's fully voluntary and people gladly do it because it's so convenient. I don't think that the majority of people will ever perform their searches on multiple search engines to compare their results, in the same way they might buy two different newspapers or watch two different TV news broadcasts.

So I think it's a completely new kind of monopoly on worldview, and that the old rules and approaches on dealing with anticompetitive behaviour won't work.

Capitalism is the recognition by consumers that human nature is flawed, and that the profit motive is king, and that free enterprise has the potential of benefiting society.

The empowerment of a government to interfere in the market is the recognition by the voters that human nature is flawed, and that unless we act together (via legislation) against market forces, sometimes they are simply too strong, and are able to negatively influence society. In those cases, even though we as individuals are theoretically free, the complexity of society and the (flawed) essence of human nature leads us in practice to be at the mercy of the market forces.

The point of balance, in a modern democracy, must be set by the voters.

"We" don't "act together (via legislation)".

Legislation finds it's cause in parliamentarian incentives, cooperation and probably a lot of coincidence.

"Market forces" are basically the sum of individual choices and if someone wants to declare them to be necessarily against society, then this peculiar "society" needs to be defined.

The point of balance, in every organisational structure, will be set by the humans who build, affect and reproduce it. Not by some idealistic ballot box.

Is the system corrupt? Probably! But the government is there to protect the interest of the voters. Democracy is flawed, as is human nature, as is capitalism. There is no pure system. We need a combination of all of them. And, sometimes, we need legislation: very often, to defend us against ourselves (our flawed nature, our procastrination, our inability to understand the complexity around us).

Some (maybe those who are not so flawed), will consider that a limitation of their freedom. But they live in this society, and must accept the rules chosen by the majority. They still have the right of arguing for different laws, and convince the majority that those rules are against their own interest. Or they can leave this society and build a country in the middle of the Atlantic (from scratch, not taking anything from our society with them: you can not have it both ways!)

The sum of individual forces does not necessarily lead to a system which optimises the well-being of each individual (tragedy of the commons).

When a company hast a 'de-facto' monopoly, that can alter the normal behavior of the society and other companies, you cant let them do what they want, you have to put limits. Doing what you say is what has caused the big crisis in 2008 that we are still recovering from. Keep in mind that companies do not want to do what is best for the people, just what gives them more money. That, 'as is', is not a problem, but if the company is powerful enough its just unbearable.

Javascript is hurting the "Internet" (the web really) by encouraging people to write websites like this. No content is loaded. The links at the top don't work because the anchors in the page don't exist. I would much rather the EU outlaw javascript than g+, because that is dying all on its own.

A little off-topic, but I can't help but remark. Rap Genius is now Genius and provides a service with annotations? I think it looks pretty slick, at least on a laptop. Definitely adds to the experience since it leads to less parenthesized text and allows one to provide context without distracting.

EDIT: Yeah, I guess I did deserve the downvote. Still, I haven't seen it before and found it interesting.

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