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Search Engine Payola
QwkHyenA writes: "Seems that Ralph Nader and his Consumer Watchdog group has fired the first shot in pegging 8 search engines for reshuffling query results based on fees paid to them. Like we didn't see this happening! Nader has asked the FTC to look into this based on deceptive advertising practices..." Check out the complaint, which itself references pages like this one detailing how to pay for placement at all the major search engines.
Maybe you should, you should switch to decaff, decaff.
- jim
- jim
It comes down to what the search engine says.
You can't say "provides the best results to match your query", and then give you "whatever results we were paid to give you".
If you can find a search engine that says "search for the top sites on the web that paid us money", then that would be honest and nothing to complain about.
Actually, no, "featured" is not as clear as "sponsored". Everyone knows that sponsorship means paying money. Anyone whose IQ is at least 100 should be able to figure out that AltaVista is probably only featuring sites that pay money, but the dumber half of the population might be a little slower to catch on - and that's what Nader is trying to draw attention to.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Do you have any idea how many MILLIONS of people Microsoft has conned into "clicking the wrong button" that takes them to an MSN search page? Some versions of MSIE will redirect there any time a DNS lookup fails.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It's nice to see a company with integrety these days...in the article, they are quoted as saying that they will not compromise their editorial integrety, and thus paid ads appear as separate links, clearly ads, and not in the returned listings. Way to go Google!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Previous posters have brought up some poor analogies. Newspaper ads are clearly ads (and newspapers can get in serious trouble when this isn't the case). The yellow pages are entirely advertisement.
A better example is infomercials . These are clearly a `free service', too, as is all of broadcast television. That emphatically does not exempt them from the requirement to clearly distinguish paid ads from normal programming.
Now, you could argue about whether or not paid-for placement between `normal' links is the same as a tv commercial which is paid for in-between `normal' programming, but it's not a completely unreasonable stretch.
It seems to me that Altavista's "featured sites" are just as clearly separated from the main results as Google's "sponsored links" -- or perhaps "featured" isn't as clear as "sponsored"?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Yes, it's news. But it's never made a claim to be unbiased news. If there's commentary on an article, it's clearly stated who said it, or if it was the individual who submitted the article, it's in italics. This isn't the Associated Press where the article writer is nameless and it's supposedly unbiased news. This site has editorial comments on every story, and quite a few straight opinion articles.
Anyway, whadya mean the government? Which government? It's bad enough what your government does to you (and mine to me) without them meddling in each others stuff.
--
the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
The reason the first three links on a search for "packet sniffer" on Altavista looks like normal search results is that they are just that - normal search results. No one has bought the keywords "packet sniffer" on Altavista. Compare this with a search for "books": see the first two hits, clearly labeled "Featured sites?" Those are the payed for links Nader is complaining about, since he wants to protect people who are so stupid they shouldn't be allowed near a computer anyway from believeing those "Featured sites" are normal search results.
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Niklas Nordebo | niklas at nordebo.com
They claim accurate search results. If your
results aren't accurate but instead based on
payment without stating so, that's deceptive.
google.com is not one of the search engines
they're going after. in fact, the article
says:
"
Not all search engine companies have adopted deceptive advertising
practices. For example, Google clearly notes that its paid placements
are "Sponsored Links," and it will not put paid ads within its search
results. "We have no plans for a paid inclusion program," Google
spokesperson Cindy McCaffrey told SearchEngineWatch.com. "[O]ur search
results represent our editorial integrity, and we have no plans to
alter our automated process, which works very well in gathering
information and delivering highly relevant results,"(4) she said.
"
The difference is that lying is okay
as long as you make a buck?
-Kevin
That isn't true. Corporations are regulated in
the US in the sense that they must operate under
the law. There are all sorts of restrictions
on what corporations can do legally. I think
this is a good thing for citizens and for
fair competition.
-Kevin
The government consists of /people/, ferchrissakes.
The FDA does more good than harm in my opinion.
Wherever there are people, there will be
corruption and bad decisions sometimes. This is
no different than private corporations. There are
no perfect systems. However, I do not believe
that corporations will do what's in the best
issue of the people without intervention and
regulation - for example pollution.
A private company in my hometown dumped chemical
waste into the town river for years.
The Bells, IBM, Standard Oil, and Microsoft have
all had actions against them for antitrust
activity.
Just becase there have been bad cops
doesn't mean we should get rid of law enforcement.
-Kevin
We don't have a free market economy in the
sense you describe. The government must
intervene to keep order and enforce ethical
behavior.
What if pharmaceutical companies made fradulent
claims about their drug products? Is that
okay as long as we have the almighty "free market"? You seem to be suggesting that
it is better to have a "free market" than to
enforce ethical behavior.
Gee, I'm sorry your mom died but she shouldn't
have been so stupid and believed those pills
would actually lower her blood pressure.
I don't know how it got into your head that
honesty and decency is outweighed by profit,
but I find it very sad.
Companies are unable to ethically self-regulate
and this is why we need the FDA and other
oversight organizations, as well as pro-consumer
groups.
-Kevin
It's getting to be quite uncommon to see a topic posted on slashdot without someone railing against it with a reply along the lines of: "So? What's the big deal? It's not like I care."
The point I'm trying to make is that whether or not you care, yourself, is exactly as interesting - to you - as it is to others to have opinions of their own. Whether or not you personally mind using search engines where the content returned might have more to do with financial transactions that you remain ignorant of, or the fact that they exist at all, doesn't make it a poor story.
Running a search engine certainly isn't free, but if you want to make up for that by changing what a search engine IS, or at least what it is commonly (and perhaps naively) perceived to be, without telling anyone about it, then that most certainly is deceptive advertising.
The right of search engines to charge money for returning their result isn't in question, it's how they do it that is the issue. When you ask your teacher at school how to solve a particular problem, you expect him to answer to the best of his ability, not according to what he's paid to say, right? And if what he tells you is influenced by some form of remuneration, whether it's secret or not, wouldn't you prefer to be told about it?
It's all about playing an open game. It's what MSNBC do whenever they mention Microsoft and add a comment to the effect that MSNBC is a joint venture held by, among others, Microsoft. It's about confessing to a prejudice when you're asked for an opinion. If you don't reveal whatever motivation that might slant what you say, then you must accept that people who discover this motivation later could come to see what you said, and perhaps you yourself, in a new light.
We all agree that telling something that isn't the truth is deceptive, but to not tell something which is true seems to be more of a gray area.
Garth Algar: Here, take two of these.
Wayne Campbell: Ahh, Nuprin. Little, yellow, different.
IIRC, Altavista once sold "personal AltaVista" and "workgroup Altavista" products, but I believe they were unsuccessful and are no longer available ...
The personal version (MyAltaVista? I forget.) was briefly available for pay-no-money free. AltaVista cancelled it because it brought in no money and maintaining it was expensive - or so I was told for a friend who used to have a job maintaining it.
Imagine the absurdity: let's say you're some R&D manager covering a few groups and you want to index your intranet (which has documentation and interface descriptions for all internal-use and skunkworks projects, as well as docs for local tools and local mods to tools). What's the first thought that comes to your mind? I can bet my ass it's not "Eureka! I'll license the engine from www.dogpile.com! Failing that, I'll go for askjeeves.com or some other shill-engine!" Nope. Pay-for-rank and pay-for-inclusion have merely castrated the already-ineffectual engines backing the "web portal" sites. Even if they had any cred before they ran out of VC, they CERTAINLY don't now.
[1] IIRC, Altavista once sold "personal AltaVista" and "workgroup Altavista" products, but I believe they were unsuccessful and are no longer available -- I think they were discontinued shortly before AV went to pay-to-improve-rank as a business model. Mea culpa if I'm wrong.
Maybe AltaVista was worthwhile three or four years ago. Maybe five people have ever used Netscape or MSN search on purpose, but those are things one accidentally uses by clicking the wrong button in her browser. However, none of these companies has a real business strategy -- if they weren't selling placement, they'd be selling your personal data to x10.com. Selling placement is merely the third or fourth step on the road to fuckedcompany.com.
Hi Zico, long time no see. Been on vacation?
You can also do this in Netscape by clicking on the Netscape Search button, selecting a search engine and clicking "always use this search engine". Then you can just type "? search terms" in the URL box to fire off a Google (or whatever) search.
The shortcuts to various search forms are a neat idea, though. I ended up just sticking the appropriate search boxes on my startup page, but your setup sounds pretty good too.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Uh, maybe because it's not a crap engine? Anybody who says they only use Google is instantly flagging themselves as someone who doesn't know dick about web searching, because Google has some big holes in it. It munges stop words within phrases, it can't do stemming (to Google, a "rocket" has no relationship to "rockets"), no wildcard support, and no "or" support come to mind. Try using a metasearch engine like ixquick sometime and you'll see all the stuff that Google misses.
On the topic of searching, anybody who uses IE 5 or above (read: most of Slashdot) who does a lot of searching should check grab the IE Web Accessories (they work for IE6, too) and make use of the Quick Search feature. Instead of going to Google and then searching for "Hungry Hippos", just type in your URL box or Open dialog 'gg "Hungry Hippos"' (without the single quotes), and it'll shoot you to the appropriate results page. Results no good and you want to check AltaVista? Just enter 'av "Hungry Hippos"' and there you are.
It comes with a bunch of sites already programmed (AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, InfoSeek Ultra, Lycos, MetaCrawler, Magellan, OpenText, WebCrawler, and Yahoo), and you can add your own. Plus you can basically use it for any web query that's looking for a single field — you just stick in %s where the term(s) you're searching for should go. So, in addition to the search engines that I've added (Google, Northern Light, ixquick, and Raging Search), I've also set it to access UPS tracking, the W3C's CSS validator, MSN Dictionary, Google Groups, Netcraft, and the W3C's HTML validator. So, instead of going to Netcraft and entering a site in the textbox, I just do a "nc www.apple.com" and the web server that Apple's using is the next thing I see. ("nc" being my alias for Netcraft).
You can make your own, but just to get you started, here's my own list of custom queries:
css - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=% s&warning=1&profile=css2s f e=off&site=groupse b&cmd=process_search&query=%s% s&orl== %sn e
di - http://dictionary.msn.com/find/entry.asp?search=%
dj - http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%s&hl=en&lr=&sa
gg - http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
ix - http://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?cat=web&cat=w
nc - http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=%s
nl - http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?cb=0&qr=
rs - http://ragingsearch.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q
val - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=%s&doctype=Inli
(Hope I didn't mess up the cut-and-paste job — it comes from an email I wrote to some fellow workers lately — and I know this turned into a long post, but this feature really is a great time saver. It's one of those things where you get annoyed whenever you have to use somebody else's computer and they don't have it installed. So, just thought I'd point it out to anyone who might not have tried it before. Oh, and it looks like Slashdot's entering extra spaces into the URLs, so if you want to copy them, make sure to remove the spaces.)
Cheers,
And you go out of business because the customers choose not to come to your crooked horrible store
Um, no, its much worse than that.
If you are allergic to walnuts and buy a food because it says "no walnuts", but it does, and you die, you have a bigger problem than simply "oops, just don't shop there again".
When a hospital buys supplies, it expects that syringes and gauze labelled "sterile" are, in fact sterile according to the legal requirements of that word. If we can label anything "sterile" we like, a lot of folks are going to die of infections before we "punish" the vendor by taking our business elsewhere.
That "punishment" doesn't seem very useful, seeing as how they just killed a lot of people by lying and now they get to sell their same product for the same purpose to other hospitals (probably under a different company name).
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
is a non-capitalistic action
That's okay, we're a non-capitalist country (and definitely a non-laissez-faire country).
We're also not a democracy.
We have found that setting up any system at the extreme end of a scale tends to be counter-productive.
Have an economy with some regulations, minimal requirements for disclosure, and significant financial oversight, and the rest of it can be pretty free-going.
besides the fact that there is not necessarily lying taking place here
Of course. That's what "investigation" means. They want to find out if there is or isn't.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Last time I checked we lived in a free market economy
One of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is that the free market only works efficiently with accurate information.
Misrepresenting (also called "lying" by normal people) your product or business in order to decieve the public is not a right of a company (at least in our country).
Whether the search engines are misrepresenting themselves and services is what Nader is asking to investigate.
"We can say what we want to sell our stuff, and by the way did I mention this cures cancer?" is not a particularly compelling argument.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
this is insightful. somebody mod this up please!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Wait, I thought you were talking about Nader, not the people behind the deceptive advertising.
Many people believe that the purpose of a company is to make money. Actually this is not correct.
When I took Business Administration in college, one point that got hammered home in first year was that the function of business was to serve the market segment's needs and/or wants. If you can do that at a price that the market is willing to pay and that allows you to make a profit, then the business will succeed/survive.
Saying that the purpose of a business is to make money is like saying that the purpose of humans is to produce carbon dioxide. Making money is a necessity of a company's continued existence, it is not the reason that it exists.
And yes, I do believe that it is the proper function of government to protect its citizens from predatory business practices. A search engine that promises to give objective reports and then shoves in advertisements instead is lying to me. I don't mind the ads if they are labelled as ads. (This is no different from existing print standards.)
who really uses any those engines to do serious searching anyways? You really expect theres not some sort of slant on the results from MSN? What about this iWon.com crap? Do all the users think the prize money just appears at the company's doors waiting to be given away? Oh, all the revenue MUST come from banner ads...right? The bottom line is: Naive consumers will always be treated as naive consumers by companies that stand to profit from it. It's not even necessarily bad...just reality. It's like an STN ratio, you go where the signal is...not all the hype and noise. But really, how many people who use these sites as their main search engines are going to use another site now? Will they just end up moving to another site using the same strategy?
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
Yes, newspapers accept advertising... so do search engines. Newspapers will even do things like put car advertisements in the automotive section... for search engines, this would be targeted advertising. Still clearly marked.
The complaint here is the equivelant of taking an unimportand article about a company and bumping it up to the front page because the company paid to be noticed, and taking the real important news and burying it back on page 6.
The purpose of newspapers is to present news, in order of importance and relevance. The purpose of serch engines is to mine a pool of web site information against search criteria, and return results ordered by some clear criteria, usually relevance...
Not, the search engines may not do a great job of meeting their criteria, just like the newspapers don't always do, but there's a presumption of an honest effort, free of bias. Paying them to bypass their own judgement to reorder the data portrayed, contrary to their advertised purpose or methodology, is misleading illegal.
Yes, it's that simple.
Windows: The operating system built for the internet. Unix: The operating system the Internet was built for.
Well, if the free-market is so great, why the hell is a crap engine like MSN getting 6 times the searches as Google?
Same reason the lemmings are all using Windows 9x and not OS/2. Marketing, hype and FUD.
People don't go to what's best, they go to what corporations lead them to because it makes them money.
Beta, VHS etc. etc. Everyone says, stop crying that the better stuff lost, it couldn't survive in the marketplace. As if this was the objective. Product development is all about LCD. Joe Sixpack rules and since he don't spell so good and he don't think so good, our products damn well better not be too good. We might alienate him.
You should look realistically at your free-market mantra and see it for what's its worth: a load of crap. The free market is free only to those who have the power to control it.
Eventually, we'll end up with a world of thirds. One third will be the ruthless, greedy ones who foist off inferior products on one of the other thirds, the clueless consumers. The last third will be the ones who make the world work. The techs, the engineers, the thinkers and tinkers. Which third do you want to be in? Right now it appears that the first third is in charge. The second third could care less as long as the ball games on the tube and the beer is cold. I guess that leaves progress up to the last third.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
funny when i read your post i thought you ment that google took information from an objective database selected by an objecctive algorithm. so, there is one person out there on the net that agrees with you-at least on this issue.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Who here uses anything but Google? Hey you, you in the back, what the hell are you doing with Excite? Just put AltaVista down, and nobody will get hurt. Come on, Nader. Anybody who's not a newbie or a moron uses Google, and Google clearly marks their ads. I'm amazed the other search engines are still in business. Maybe they won't be much longer (CMGI is AltaVista's parent corp.).
This is the free market taking care of things without government intervention. There's a prefectly good alternative (Google), it's free, and it's honest. Why complain to the FTC when you could just use Google? Caveat emptor, and all.
Who cares if lusers use MSN? Google does a good business, it's free, and it works really well. If lusers want to use MSN, then that's their punishment. Eventually, they'll figure things out and switch to google. There's nothing stopping them. On the other hand, maybe some people use MSN because it's actually the best thing out there for their needs. Maybe they like the integrated content on the MSN site (something google doesn't have). Who are you to take away their choice?
In all likelyhood, if the FTC steps in to regulate search engines, it will make things terribly complicated and fuck up good search engines like Google. Why do that when it's unnecessary? Giving people easy choices is good enough. It's not the government's responsibility to protect stupid people from making bad choices. You can lead a horse to water...
Disclaimer: I've never used MSN. I have no idea if it sucks or is better than Google. I'm debating under the assumption that nysus is correct in calling MSN a "crap engine".
as in: we're going to force these search engines to change, whether it is good for their business or not, whether or not what they're doing is illegal, whether or not it is actually hurting their non-paying customers.
at what point did these businesses come under government control? oh wait, that's right, under the socialist system which everyone believes the united states should be, all businesses are controlled by the government.
you can't argue, or at least i couldn't, that these businesses have some sort of principles to uphold in which they forsake those people who sponsor them and raise up those people who are simply riding on their coattails.
furthermore, it is not as if those offending search engines are excluding any sites - they are merely giving some sites precedence over others. "barrier to entry" indeed.
finally, speaking of that good which you call the fcc - they have taken a public resource in the form of radio waves and, ludicrously, decided to put it under their control. this is socialism - government control of the propaganda machine. this is not your touted democracy. democracy produces businesses that look out for their own interests, as the search engines are doing, and not businesses which seek to appease the fcc.
yes, the wonderful free-market economy. also called laissez-faire, meaning "hands off".
as in, there is no government intervention in a free market economy. this means that nader's actions of trying to punish those search engines is a non-capitalistic action.
besides the fact that there is not necessarily lying taking place here. simply because a link is placed higher in a list does not mean that someone is lying; it simply means that someone is getting a preference by the searching company.
If this page was any more slanted, Nader and his consumer watchdogs could go after its authors for kinking people's necks. "Paid placement"? In a "sponsored links" box? How deceitful!
You know what else I head, you can advertise cars... in the newspaper's "Wheels" section! For money! Therefore, all journalists are whores.
They list five ways to buy your way into a search engine. The first three all refer to clearly-marked advertiser content (their vague descriptions make the practices sound more underhanded than they actually are).
The fourth is a semi-legitimate beef, but the only perpetrator is Inktomi/Linksmart (whom they list a total of eight times in a goofy effort to inflate the severity of the 'problem').
The fifth (paying for editorials) is a gray area, since editorials (unlike correctly ordered search results) aren't free, and someone has to pay the electric bill. As long as you can't pay for a good editorial, who cares? Reviewers have been getting freebies since forever -- the will to honestly criticize a benefactor's product is what separates good reviewers from bad.
There are kernels of truth in the article, but they are fully obscured by the stool.
cheers,
mike
That's "their right" as in "their right to charge for space." It is not their right to pretend otherwise, which is misleading marketing, and that is what they are attempting to investigate.
Come on now ... no one's saying this isn't their right. The question is whether it ethical to do so without informing users, and I think most would agree that it isn't. I certainly wouldn't want to use such a search engine.
... good for them.
Incidentally, Google was not mentioned
Given the subject of the article (a Nader operation), is it really necessary to read the article? Considering the source, it's practically a given that it's more than likely much ado about nothing. After all, if a search engine gives you bad links, are you going to continue using it? (I've been using Google more and AltaVista less in the past few months; Google has fewer dead links, and even if a link is dead, you can bring up the page copy that was cached.)
About the only good thing Ralph Nader has ever done is siphon enough votes away from Algore to practically hand the election to Dubya. Beyond that, he's a whiner and a loser who should've dropped off the scene eons ago.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The problem with this logic is that The Onion is blatant satire. The search engines are advertising in a manner that leads the consumer to believe in the falsity that the sites listed first are the best results. It's a matter of deception, not factual correctness.
Perhaps the solution is for the search engines to offer a setting that will allow Joe User to view 'pure' and commercialized links seperately
Yet another case of "I want something for nuthin' ". Just how do you propose the search engine operators cover expenses?
If you don't like it, I've got a solution. Set up your own spider and maintain it.
Dave
Hmm...here's some example:
Search: lung cancer
Results:
* Phillip Morris page claiming there is no relation to cigarettes and lung cancer
* Phillip Morris page announcing that YOU are the lucky winner of $2.00 off your next carton!
...
Search: open source
* Microsoft page spreading FUD
* Microsoft page unveiling their new "Shared Source" program
...
Search: Emacs
Results:
* vi
* vi
* vi
* vi
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Slashdot is already slammed as an Open Source mouthpiece, and is blatently, obviously, unashamedly pro-Open Source. On the other hand, newspapers like the New York times are trusted, and religiously read by people all over for general news, and claim to be neutral. I sure would be pissed off if the New York times masqueraded pieces paid by other companies as "news" (and NOT tell me about it). This is exactly what's going on with the search engines. They should at least say something like: "We sneak paid advertisements into search results, so don't really trust our results". Of course they are not going to do that.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Did you notice how rare those "sponsored links" are on Google?
I searched for "bookstores", and "books" and got exactly one sponsored link each (and neither was Amazon.com).
When I searched for "linux" I got none.
According to goto.com's listing, the page owner pays $0.48 per click-through.
google does show paid search results.
google adwords. when you do a search it shows you ads on the search results page depending on what you searched.
why? because people need to make money. it's no big surprise.
And what, may I ask, is wrong with that? I fail to see how higher placement without a big red line that says "this placement was paid for" (which would most certainly result in the search engines' fees being lowered due to reduced demand) constitutes "deceptive advertising". Come on, people, they're not claiming that a paid ad that pops up on "britney spears n00d" can cure cancer!
Why does it matter if someone paid for higher placement or not? If the higher placement results in items that the user of the earch engine finds useful, then no harm done. If it results in complete hogwash being promoted to the top, then the search engine loses credibility (ergo revenue), which no search engine is interested in doing.
Nader is just doing what he's done all his life -- making sure that business in general will collapse under the weight of a ten-foot-high stack of regulations. Why he is doing this is really not something I care to speculate on.
And where does google do this? I've seen the clearly labled "sponsored link" but nothing that seems deceptive in sneaking links higher then what appears legit. Heck, my packet sniffer on google comes up as #13 if you search for "packet sniffer" and I know I didn't pay a dime.
Wheeeee
Ok, I am aware of the ideas put for in the article, so I will comment to your post rather than the outer realm. I disagree with the thing just based on my personal experience, not some initial responce of "nah, is isn't that way since I didn't think before I posted."
Am I saying I have a mathematical proof that what the article says is wrong: no. Do I think it could still be hapening: yes.
However, I wrote a packet sniffer for a class and posted it on my own little corner of the world (not on the school's site so don't think that helped me). Near as I can see no one links to me about it, yet I'm #13 on google's search if you look for "packet sniffer." I know I never paid a dime, and I don't see anyone linking to me (juding by server logs and the refer url) and I think I've reached a kinda high placement for just being a kid and posting a sniffer.
I come in ahead of snort and many other sniffers I played with in creating mine. So don't you think corporate america would snuff out a little sniffer like me?
Wheeeee
Are you kidding me? They are searching and indexing the web, letting YOU use it for free!
Now you're complaining that your dorky little web site with pictures of your cats is being put further down in the rankings just because there are legitimate business with MONEY who pay for a search result to display them higher on the list.
Do you really believe the typical internet half-wit is looking for, or would even visit, your site in the first place? This is probably helping the internet more than anything else, by directing users to USEFULL information on the internet.
And isn't that what the damn thing is for in the first place? I thought we were all techs here who had open minds and could see things from different view points. That's supposed to be the strengh of this place. Apparently, you guys need to visit some non-PC/Linux/Science sites once in a while.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Oh no, they're not swayed or biased in any way. They post the truth, no matter how it affects the parent company. No reporter is ever told that a story should be buried..
2) It's kinda funny to me how many people respond to this strictly in terms of capitalism. What ever happened to democracy? I realize that the original promise of the 'Net is drying up faster than liquid nitrogen, but still, someone needs to say it.
There is no democracy in business. The CEO is god, and you do what s/he says.
Let's imagine that Google goes out of business. Poof -- suddenly you can't do a search without having to turn to a paid search engine. Yeah, yeah, search engines suck anyway, but... unless I am running linuxisbitchin.org, they are a good way to get people to come to my site (I run a humor site and do not blanch at appearances of .aol in my logs). However, if $$$ is causing me to be marginalized, that ceases to be a tool for me.
Are you trying to make money on your site? Or is it just 'for fun'? If it's for fun, and it's a good site, you will be just fine with the internet version of 'word of mouth'. If you're trying to make money on it, how the hell do you think business work without investment capital? There are only so many commercial spots, you pay for the top spot. The cost of the top spot is determined by the demand generated for that spot. It's called supply and demand. You are getting free advertising anyways, and your whining about not being first in the list?
Ultimately, it seems to me the barrier to entry is being raised here. I understand quite well that search engines are not the only way to promote a site, but from a strictly democratic point of view, this leaves one in a situation that's like running for President with nothing but a bunch of bumper stickers, while your competition has access to the airwaves.
A barrier to entry? Do you show up in the search? Yes. Then who cares. You just got FREE ADVERTISIING. A search engine IS ALL ADVERTISING. If you're not willing to pay for GOOD advertising, then yes, you are running for president using a refirgerator box and a sharpie. Only a moron would do that, then whine when he gets no votes.
3) A philosophical question, really. The airwaves are supposed to be a public resource, according to the FCC charter. Since the airwaves are regularly sold lock, stock, and barrel to companies that couldn't possibly give a shit about the public good despite this, what protects the Internet, given that the infrastructure is owned by a zillion institutions and there is no charter to speak of?
The Internet is NOT airwaves. You can put up any site you want, at any time you want, and have EVERYONE in the world visit your site for a meager $5/mo at a hosting company. No restrictions. At least, nothing like the 'real' airwaves. Now you're whining that your advertisting (serch engine = The WORLD's YellowPages) should be free? Hell. Why should I have to pay $5/mo for someone to 'store' my message? That should be free too. And my Internet Access should be free, because I already bought a PC, and I have a radio, and the radio is free, so why not the internet?
*Havokmon slaps all of Slashdot with a Tuna.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Erm, don't many search engines (go.com comes to mind) that sell ranking space clearly state this? Then again, they shouldn't really be calling themselves "search engines" . . . Maybe "big-bucks corporation search engines" or something that sounds a little better than that.
How dare Ralph and co. complain? This is a capitalist society--if you don't like it, leave it! Money makes the world goes round--that's just how it is! How can someone complain about search engines skewing results to benefit paying advertisers, that's how search engines work!
Keep the circular arguments coming, slashdotters! And don't rest until the Internet is as bland, homogenous, crass, and stultifying as network television and Top 40 radio! One day everyday life and just plain everything will be more boring than our wildest imaginings! Keep fighting until that dream of a money-driven monoculture is a reality--we're almost there!
Yee haw! Are we dead yet?
essentially, they're trying to masquerade the paid links as normal, objective search data, to make it seem like the paid links are somehow more "relevant" to a search.
Unfortunately for your argument, there's no such thing as an "objective" search. Search engines use a variety of fuzzy, human constructed metrics to return their results: e.g. page rank, the number of times the search phrase appears, etc. It's not difficult to argue that a site which can afford to pay is likely to be more important than a site which can't.
If search engines want to use payment as a criteria, more power to them. It's ultimately up to the consumer to decide whether to use the search engine based on his perception of whether the search engine gives him the relevant search results.
Why should they? Search Engines are dot coms. They are companies. Their one and only purpose in existing is to make money, not to help you find "+hot +xxx +monkeys" with the utmost efficiency. They do a pretty good job, even if they do tweak the output a bit.
What nobody seems to understand is that nobody has an intrinsic "right" to receive pure search results. If you want them, write your own search engine.
Got Rhinos?
Clear Chanel and the other three radio companies get paid to play what the RIAA wants you to hear. Why does top 40 suck? Because its profitable. If you hear a song over and over hour after hour you are more likely to buy it. Or at least some morons are. When the record companies began paying radio stations there was a big scandle called "Payola". Congress declared payola illegal and made the companies setup a network of middlemen that would pass the money from the major labels to the radio producers all legal like. And thats why commercial radio sucks.
If you are lucky enough to live in Madison, WI I sugest you tune to one of the few community radio stations left: wort 89.9
Salon did a nice piece if you care to know more.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla said MSN is delivering "compelling search results that people want."
Too bad the people they reference are advertisinge execs.
and I saw they weren't listed as one of the companies they wanted the FTC to investigate.
It's lying. Read the freaking article--it isn't a complaint that they accept paid advertisements. The complaint is about search sites that mix the paid advertisements in with the ACTUAL results, providing no way for a viewer to know whether a site is actually relevant to your query, or just a site that paid the search engine some money.
This is nothing more than lying.
See how it specifically points out Google, which has clearly marked "SPONSORED LINKS" at the top of your query results, with the actual relevant results below that? That is perfectly fine.
Read first, then post.
(karma whore)
Isn't this exactly what the phone company does when they publish the Yellow Pages? Certain companies have simple listings with only their name, phone number and address. Others have quarter-page three-color ads that pop out at you when browsing a particular catergory. Maybe the yellow pages are more like Yahoo than a conventional search engine, but the idea is still the same (looking for listings based on key words).
I have no idea what I did to get placement like that. And I'm not even selling anything.
Um, I know you're just trying to be funny like, but thats the dumbest comment made on this thread so far. Nader isn't just last year's spoiler, he's been a consumer advocate likely since you were in your flamable kiddie PJs. His group is looking at whether consumers are being lied to cause that's what he does. Of course this being /. being concerned with the rights of consumers is beyond comprehension, (ok, for most /.ers being concerned with anyone besides yourself is beyond comprehension, but I'm looking at the topic at hand) but you don't need to make dumb comments trying to drag him down to your level. You may not agree, you may not comprehend, but he's not doing this for himself, his ego, petty jealousy, petty revenge or any of the other reasons you might try to ascribe to him. He's doing it because he's made it his job to try to help consumers and this is the new consumer area that's trying the same old shit and claiming the rules don't apply to them.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
....seems to be more of an advertisment for Commercial Alert's website and what they do.
"This is just the latest example of how advertising is creeping into every nook and cranny of our lives and culture," Ruskin said. "Americans are tired of it, and the backlash is growing."
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
Blue Neon Head: "Come on now
Text of the complaint:
Bendude:Oh, I see now, the question is whether it's ethical to jump into a discussion half cocked. I know I certainly wouldn't want to get caught doing that.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
Stop all this whining about whether we'll be able to search the web in the future. History has shown us that once the product lifecycle of a search engine starts to wain, they pretty much start selling space to keep the income up.
One day, someone will not do this. Their "newest thing"TM status will die off and they will plataeu out at what will become their average hitrate. Remaining on course with the reputable results will stop reputable results from being seen as a faddy "newest thing"TM and evolve them into a marketable commodity.
There will definately be a place for relevant, concise information in the information economy.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
1st - see above.
2nd - Who pretends otherwise. You would have to be pretty simple to think that a profit making corperation, in this day and age, is primarily concerned with the individual's needs. They tell you their version of things. Just like when relating your own life story, you don't go too far into things you find uncomfortable to talk about or have in the public domain.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
..."look like information from an objective database selected by an objective algorithm. But really they are paid ads in disguise."
Where is this magical search engine that looks like the description above. I've never come across anything like it whilst searching the web.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
Maybe slashdot should let us pay for karma :)
- cathy
As we all know google puts those sites that are linked to the most at the top of the search results. I don't know of any others that claim to do this.
,AKA 50% of your voters,.
I automatically assume on sites like AOL that search results where prioritized by amount of money paid to AOL by a site, using their search engine this becomes self evident in a matter of seconds. AOL Keyword: _sponsors_name_here_
Now all we need is for the rest of the search engines is a "How we get results" link somewhere on the page and that link takes you to a place that says, "you see what others pay you to see". Then no one can be hunted down by Nader, who should have better things to go after like kiddy porn and doggy/donkey style sites.
Nader if you are listening: people don't care how listings are compiled. If they did then Yahoo would be a search engine and not a "Portal". They would be much more grateful to you if you found a way to stop spam and check on those privacy policies that say "we will not give your name to anyone, except our partners" which is contradicktive and misleading to anyone with an IQ under 100
Ascii artist &
It is indeed your right to do as you like, but without any warning, this practice potentially borders on infringing free speech. Look at it this way. If a hate mongering group chose, they could stack searches for "Judaism" for example, with anti-semetic, hate sites. And if this were to go on with the average user unaware, it really does infringe on others' rights.
Search engines are not a free service, they are a business, even if their main revenue is from advertising. This is one of the main reasons why Deja News sold the newsgroup search engine to Google. They couldn't make money from indexing Usenet so they went to the ill-received ratings service. Not that many people are going to pay Google to promote their old posts.
I'd rather have a search engine that can afford to maintain its links and continually update their content. I'd rather have a working search engine that can provide useful relative links than garbage links that have been broken since 1996.
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
Make them relevant, and I don't care what kind of ads you serve up. Problem is I almost never get ads I would ever even click on, let alone buy something from. Google just gave me a sponsored link (autoweb.com) which seems to be what I was actually looking for, though.
...you get just what I suspected: a Houston Rockets links. "Go to a Houston Rockets Game". WTF? I live in Massachusetts. And Compaq computer is number 4 on the list? Come on! Microsoft isn't interested in serving consumers. They're interested in making a buck. But you already knew that. Just face it all you free-market capitalist freaks, an unchecked, uncontrolled marketplace just doesn't work. Look at how much traffic the MSN search engine gets and it totally SUCKS...a worthless piece of garbage yet it thrives!
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
>> whether it ethical to do so without informing users,
Well, just because Ralph Nader was the last one to figure what's going doesn't make it unethical. This guy apparently thinks consumers are a bunch of idiots and has named himself their spokesman. What does that tell you?
It is much better coke to create content. Readers will be greatly refreshed by the original coke content provided. Just retrieving regurgitated old pepsi postings is boring in a rather subliminal fashion.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Misrepresenting information is wrong, whether it's on a website, in a magazine, on the radio, on the tv, or anywhere else. Banner ads are bad enough without having that sort of cruft invade the actual content.
The signal to noise ratio of the web has been declining steadily over the past 8 years. Search engines allow us to sift through it all. Allowing them to multiplex relevant and irrelevant (paid) advertisements disguised as valid content is extremely unethical and will furthermore compound the problem of the declining signal/noise ratio of the web.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Not only does google distinguish 'sponsored' hits from normal ones, it displays them in a way that makes the sponsored hits easy to disregard - at the top, tucked under the instrumentation, and coloured with the <SEP> HTML tag.
Blancmange
Yes, and the Yellow Pages are up front about what is a paid placement and what isn't. All this group wants is for the search engines to have the same policy.
The only problem I have with it is if they CLAIMED to be impartial, but were not. It's obvious to me that most, if not all search engines are selling results. Usually they disclose it in an obvious manner.
I'd rather have googlecom sell results than have there be no more google at all.
and above all do NOT moderate!!!!
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
all those annoying fake PC window ads... they screw up my pretty Mac view ;o)
well okay, I really want em to get rid of em cos they're one of the reasons why a lot of elderly folks are scared of the internet, it lies to them all the time, and then they feel stupid and are afraid of it...
FUD all over again... but maybe this time the D stands for Distrust... not just Doubt
Surfing slowly, in the Bandwidth Ghetto
Deceptive business practices will always be illegal. Capitalism breaks down when we don't have accurate information, and even most Republicans agree that preserving the integrity of information flow is a valid role for the government. Would you say that it was ok to sell a car that would kill the owner? Maybe you would say that if the car was bad, nobody would buy it. How do we find out it is bad? By the time we buy it, it's too late. That's where the FTC comes in.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Yes. It's morally objectionable to make money. Especially when people are forced to use your search engine. After all, it's not like the money earned by those search engine CEOs goes back into the economy to provide jobs.
/sarcasm
"Saddam Hussein cavorts with terrorists."
I clicked:
Got friends?
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe they should be. Imagine you search your telephone directory for the number of a friend. But instead of your friend's number (or maybe the first 10 hits before his one) you would get a few telephone sex hotlines. They wouldn't be marked as such so you have to dial through all these lines. Even if they were for free (as it is with sponsored links) I would not accept this on a telephone directory, and I will not accept this sort of behavior on a search engine.
This is only one reason why I prefer Google. At least they mark the sponsored links. I just don't like the two o's in the name... reminds me of something bad *cough*yahoo*cough*.
--
michael at slashdot.org: The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick.
I hate to break it to you, but consumers are a bunch of idiots. Every month, if not every week, you can read about someone doing something utterly stupid, so stupid that warning labels are now affixed to everything.
Do not lift push mower while it is running.
"Not for use as a flotation device" labeled on an inflatable bird smaller than my hand.
And don't even mention the Darwin awards...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Do you look at stuff on Slashdot as 'news', or chauvinism ? Slashdot certainly bills itself as presenting news, but if another website constantly lathered itself in the same myopic tunnel-visioned puppy-love way over Microsoft or Sun products (or if it nearly exclusively ripped the many real shortcomings of Linux) it would get slammed as nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece.
They claim that non-business content (for which, the Looksmart network, for example says it will index without you forking over the green) will eventually be indexed (I think the estimate at excite was 8 weeks to index new non-business content) but I havn't seen it happen for my site...
Consider, for a moment, that the internet is a vary large library of information (techies excude the simplistic metaphor). We have ecentially turned over the library card catalogs (usually managed by libraries which are non-profit institutions) over to corporations who's goal is to make a proffit. This is an interesting choice to say the least. These companies make no commitment to index any particular content, or to index new content within a particular period... (with a few exceptions) introducing the potential to have valuable scolarly work lost amidst the noise of the internet. It's nice to have more information, but it introduces the possibility that truly valuable information is lost in the frey.
This brings into question the use of the internet as an information resource, is couneter-intuitive since this is one of it's primary and highly touted uses.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Now, before the flames start-a-rollin', consider that all these search engines need massive storage space and processing power in order to return an accurate result. Now, we have a couple of legitimate concerns:
- Hardware costs money.
- Power for the hardware costs money.
- Software costs money...even the free stuff needs to be supported by someone.
- Power and facilities for the hardware/software/staff costs money.
Let's also consider that a lot search engines suck, and that their data is not exactly accurate.If a company or entity has the resources to pay for top inclusion into a search engine, then all the more power to them. In fact, if the site has a legitimate and verified page of information, then it _should_ preceed all the junk and garbage from an unverifiable source. I certainly don't expect an entity that can actually pay for search inclusion to waste their hard earned cash (or investors' cash if you will) on a pitiful entry. Yes, payment for service is certainly more verifiable than keywords from Joe Schmoe's random website that got crawled last year.
I'm assuming that evil marketing staff isn't involved in this yet...hence my point of view.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
All in all, I'm not liking the commoditizing of the net. I don't know how things got paid for before the eBusiness era, but things are looking much worse now, with everybody and everything looking out for the allmighty dollar. I wonder if hosting costs went up because of demand for bandwidth, or down because of the increasing supply...
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Seach engines are not the basis for a democracy.
The "internet" and for-profit sites on the internet should not be confused with a public trust like RF spectrum. RF spectrum is a limited resource and therefore regulated by federal agencies (infomercials? don't get me started...).
That is if you define a "kook" as someone who goes against the government and corporate power structures for the benefit of everyone -- or in other words, someone who ignores the "you can't fight city hall" mentality that the vast majority of people seem to have.
He is a "kook", but he's our "kook". I wish more people were "kooks".
-jhon
Just the same, if search engines return irrelevant results, nobody's going to use them.
Can you imagine the nightmare if the government ran search engines? First of all, it would take six months to get anything indexed, but the number of lawsuits and amount of taxpayer money wasted addressing complaints submitted by people feeling entitled to top biling?
We'd have a whole new grass-roots organization... something like the "National Organization to Supervise Engines and Require Consumersafe Hits" at least NOSEARCH is a good acronym.
This is one of those times I think the phrase "Company X makes no guarantees about the usability of Product Y."
So what if they re-prioritize results based on paid submissions? It's a free service. Are these "consumer watchdog" groups actually implying that site contents have to be accurate, useful, or impartial?
While they're at it, maybe they should go after The Onion for offering free Israeli homelands for all non-arab refugees.
How about shutting down /. for dispensing legal advice from a bunch of unlicenced crackpots.
What's the big deal even if people don't know what they are getting? If I run a web site and put a search engine on it, I should be able to return anything I want? What obliges me to tell a visitor if (and let's hope it never comes to this) I'm going to return goatse.cx links as the top entry for every search?
Search engines aren't a public service. Your tax dollars don't fund them. The only ones who have a beef here is companies who have paid and led to believe they're going to get top billing and then don't, but that's not what the complaint is about.
Don't use search engines
Use your brain, and the search engine
Don't use your brain
Now, what would you prefer to do?
Well I thought your post was perfectly clear
As to the complaint to the FTC - I think this is the relevant part:
Not all search engine companies have adopted deceptive advertising practices. For example, Google clearly notes that its paid placements are "Sponsored Links," and it will not put paid ads within its search results. "We have no plans for a paid inclusion program," Google spokesperson Cindy McCaffrey told SearchEngineWatch.com. "[O]ur search results represent our editorial integrity, and we have no plans to alter our automated process, which works very well in gathering information and delivering highly relevant results,"(4) she said.
from here
Ralph Nader - Skeleton Closet http://www.realchange.org/nader.htm Wake up and smell the Corporate Monarchy.
You are just a disposable commodity.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
I couldn't agree more.
The Free desktop that Just Works
The complaint is not that search engines are accepting money to have certain links pop up towards the top of a search, it's that they're doing it without LABELING it as such - essentially, they're trying to masquerade the paid links as normal, objective search data, to make it seem like the paid links are somehow more "relevant" to a search.
But god forbid anyone actually read the tiny article... that'd be far harder than just spouting your mouth off to look clever.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Simply disguising advertising as content is bad enough, but there is something more sinister at work...
d ick_doctor1.html
/~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 200 14950 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 200 14950 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)" /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 200 14950 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" /~bhuston/government/dick_doctor1.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"
The big search engines are responsible for generating a view of how the web appears, and being Corporations, they are charted to operate in the public interest. So what about dissident information? Information police brutality, drug legalization, real abuses of corporate and government power,... etc. How do we know that these search engines (really just extensions of the corporo-capitilst state) are not intentionally CENSORING dissident information?
In fact, I have proof that they do. I maintain several dissident web sites (containing marijuana legalization advocacy, discussion about my personal encoutners being assaulted by police and by jail, etc). Here is one such page: http://mu.clarityconnect.net/~bhuston/government/
Here are recent visits by the Google and Inktomi spiders crawling my site:
216.239.46.90 - - [04/Jun/2001:08:04:02 -0400] "GET
216.35.116.52 - - [15/Jun/2001:06:32:25 -0400] "GET
216.239.46.12 - - [01/Jul/2001:08:14:01 -0400] "GET
216.35.116.52 - - [19/Jul/2001:05:33:08 -0400] "GET
Both of these spiders feed data to most major search engines, yet no search engine I can find actually finds this page. I used a uniquely spelled keyword: Disslehorst (probably a mispelling).
They USED to serve up this page! Just not recently, indicating some newly installed filters. I will prepare a page detailing the sharp drop off on hits on this page and put it here: http://mu.clarityconnect.net/~bhuston/censorship
It's ok not to read the article, but if you don't, then don't post!
That's fairly short-sighted. You assume that customers who are being lied to will somehow figure it out, and that without regulations and legal action they'll be able to prevent the same deception in the future. The government *is* the means through which customers fight back. Corporations are licensed (employed) *by* the government to serve the public, and when they abuse this privilege the people use the government to 'fire' or (more likely) penalize them. What's at issue here I think, is that there's many a capitalist posing as a libertarian, who would love to tell you about how the horrible government wants to push communistic restrictions on poor Corporate America. Nevermind giving consumers a mechanism to fight greed and deception when they threaten the rights and freedoms of all people, from a CEO to a garbage man. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why a business entity, that has to abide by the constitutional rights of it's customers, would set out to destroy the entity that enforces those rights, all in the name of profit. (Serving customers who have rights, and the means to enforce those rights, doesn't maximize profits). It's as if the government is simply competition to be defeated. Let's just hope the government doesn't become the victim of a hostile takeover.
Anyway, I'm repeating myself. Let me point you to my other comment.
And somehow you did not identify the sub-journalists here? AOLSearch and iNBC are real type search engines?
Get me awa from such idiots as fast as posssible...
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I'd have to say I disagree with any attempt to regulate the practice of bogus money-driven ranking systems.
I say this because of the abunance of sites on the internet whose webmasters have found that happy medium between the number of keywords that get your site degraded as the engine automatically dismisses it as bunk, and the number of keywords guaranteed to get that coveted number one spot without having to go to the trouble of actually creating a site with content.
The practice of keyword-stuffing has traditionally been employed only my the most unscrupulous (read: broke) of webmasters, but what occur when the wealthy are forced to engage in this unsavory act? For me, the consumer, this means I'll be seeing more key word trash in reputable (read: wealthy) sites.
This is what we can look forward to seeing:
______________________________________________
|Welcome to general Motors official homepage!|
______________________________________________
Cars Trucks Vans. Cars Quality Reliable Vans. Convertable Vans Trucks Cars Vans, but Used Cars Pre-Owned Automobiles. Therefore, New Car Smell, Trucks Cars Vans Cars Vans. Moreover, Vans Trucks Discount Sale Happy Pretty Beauty Trucks. Rock. Like a Rock. Rock and Roll. Badboy Image, Trucks Cars New and Used. Big Ticket Items, economy, Trucks Cars Vans Cars Trucks. Gasoline Fuel Engine. Brakes, Steering Wheel Cars Vans Trucks. Headlights Aguilera. Fast Custom Vans. Mr. T. Cars Trucks Vans Vehicles. Because engine purr fast Sexy Sport Leather Interior. Luxury Stereo Backseat Trunk Tires. Rock ans Roll Lifestyle. Safety Cars Trucks Vans and Trucks. Cars Trucks Vans. Cars Quality Reliable Vans. Convertable Vans Trucks Cars Vans, but Used Cars Pre-Owned Automobiles.
______________________________
We're in a sad state of affairs when the wealthy may no longer buy power. The mess in Florida was certainly bad enough, but now those liberals (read: communists) raising a row on the internet.
PS: Don't forget to Google: "slashdot vans" tomorrow!
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
So you lie... You Mis-Represent your product to the public... You give a bad and skewed service to your customers...
And you go out of business because the customers choose not to come to your crooked horrible store... That's what happens in a free market enconomy...
No one should have to regulate or control these people... They will put themselves out of business.
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Please refer to my post commenting on NMerriam's comments to aviod being repeatatitive telling the same thing to everyone...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Even though it's by a coward... Mod it up...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Remember it's the FDA (A government agency designed to protect the people)
..... That allowed (read: lobbied into) a loophole that allow herbal medicines with no testing to be advertised claiming to help "symptoms" of cancer, heart diease, weight problems, hair lose, etc..
...... That denied the existence of organized crime for 20 years..
Remember it's the FBI (A government agency designed to protect the people)
It took the people to bring these facts to light... Not government..
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Moderation Totals:Troll=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=5
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
without intervention and regulation - for example pollution.
A private company in my hometown dumped chemical waste into the town river for years.
This is where the power of the citizen comes in.
We as Americans have the right to SUE and take legal action. There are many examples of citizens suing large corporations for reperations in damages incurred. I believe this is a far better solution than regulations and legislation...
Current there are 37,000 lines of written US law that regulate the sale of cabbage in the US...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
Last time I checked we lived in a free market economy...
:-) )
If I run a search engine and Ford Motor Compnay pays me $x dollars a year to make it the only thing that shows up in a search of "ford", "mustang", "f-150", etc... who cares...
It's my business, my company, my website, my search engine.... Can't I do whatever the hell I want??...
Yeah... But, if I were a nice and reasonable business man I would add a notice to my site that said I take money for preffered search engine results... (But, it'd be in really small print somewhere...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
I really don't see what the big deal about it is, as long as people know what they are getting. After all, you can't expect places like Google to maintain their 8000 node cluster for free, can you? It's not like the real world works on the principles of Free Software.
Is your company running tools written by ma
I have noticed a bias on /. for linux over other OS's, even though many of the news items are on M$.
Do we know the posters are real, or could Cowboy Neal be taking payola from Linus? Ralph Nader should be told.
<-- You are here.
OK, I can understand how the search engine guys could want to make a few $$ by putting paid links at the top of every search. I'm sure that those guys have kids to feed and mortgages to pay.
But for a guy like me, looking for real stuff, to answer real questions, it just plain sucks.... It's bad enough that we have to sort through pages of slush before we (maybe) find something useful. But to have to sort through what amount to commercials first?? WTF?
Admittedly, I've known this for a long time... but I get a little steamed when I'm reminded about it.
Perhaps the solution is for the search engines to offer a setting that will allow Joe User to view 'pure' and commercialized links seperately. Not that they'll do this of course....most folks will probably pick the pure links. But it would be a nice thing to do.
pressure/grep
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Microsoft Fucking Sucks!! Up The Penguins!!
... And Florida's supreme court decided to stop the recounts even though it is specifically prohibited by the constitution for a court to resolve an electoral dispute. The independant studies also showed that invalid absentee votes were over 4x more likely to be counted if they were for Bush, and election officials admitted that they had been given different instructions/standards for counting votes based on whether or not Bush was likely to carry the county.
...
string* plamenessFilter =
...
string* plamenessFilter =
*plamenessFilter = "Flaming Death!!";
While the former is fine. And should be completely supported as grass roots movements, do we really want to see the FTC get involved in this?
I for one would like government regulation of the Net to be kept to a minimum. The red tape is irksome enough as it is.
And a lot of this is about principle... we *want* to have our privacy, and our freedom. But when a company wants their freedom as well, even if it is to be an ass by giving us skewed results on a search, we suddenly get all self-righteous saying "you can't do that!".
Tell me, would people be so upset about this if they were biasing search results based on which was the most l337, or is it just that they're trying to make a buck that offends you?
We can police ourselves. If a company is selling out placements, then spread the word. And if people have a mind to they'll avoid that site... but don't go crying to big brother to make them play by what you think is *fair*
Ah yes... hypocrisy... the eternal art form.
I'm shocked! SHOCKED!
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Oh no, they're not swayed or biased in any way. They post the truth, no matter how it affects the parent company. No reporter is ever told that a story should be buried..
Just because journalistic integrity is frequently ignored doesn't mean that it simply doesn't exist. The fact is that journalism grew up with such a concept -- a concept which is still dear to many journalists and editors despite the growing influence of money. Don't be such a cynic -- it's boring.
Search engines grew up with principles too -- egalitarianism used to be among them, but money drove that out pretty quickly, didn't it? Am I saying that that should not be the case? Not really. Am I saying it is a drag? Most certainly.
There is no democracy in business. The CEO is god, and you do what s/he says.
Huh. I'm looking at my copy of the Constitution, and I don't see that clause.
A barrier to entry? Do you show up in the search? Yes. Then who cares. You just got FREE ADVERTISIING. A search engine IS ALL ADVERTISING.
If you look at it through the lens of capitalism then yes, it is advertising. My larger point is that it is sad that we don't seem to have any other lenses in the box anymore.
The Internet is NOT airwaves.
Gee, thanks for the insight, but I think I more or less pointed that out already myself.
You can put up any site you want, at any time you want, and have EVERYONE in the world visit your site for a meager $5/mo at a hosting company. No restrictions.
None for the moment anyway, but things may change. Who's preventing it? The CEO is god, remember?
Now you're whining that your advertisting (serch engine = The WORLD's YellowPages) should be free? Hell. Why should I have to pay $5/mo for someone to 'store' my message? That should be free too. And my Internet Access should be free, because I already bought a PC, and I have a radio, and the radio is free, so why not the internet?
Well, my point seems to have whizzed past you like some sort of super hero. The question I posed had nothing to do with not paying for goods and services at all. I simply wonder if anyone else cares that a resource which was once open (open != free necessarily) and largely public is becoming increasingly closed and private.
Beyond that, to address this and most of the responses to my reply to the original post, I say once again, I think it is amazing how many people here respond to issues like this soley in economic terms, as though there are simply no valid viewpoints. It reminds me very much of people's fascination with sports stars' salaries...
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Democracy is being voted off the island.
Democracy is a farce. Wake up.
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power." -FDR
I usually try to avoid the phrase "people like you," but if democracy ((is) | (is becoming)) a farce, it's because of ... [you finish the sentence].
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ROTFLMAO... no, they change a few words and then print them as news.
Your cynical notions to the contrary, newspapers that do that lose the respect of the journalistic establishment very quickly. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but journalism is nevertheless built on a code of ethics that the search engine companies wouldn't touch with a remote-controlled robot.
p.s. Cynicism is so 1992. Get with it.
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A few points:
1) To those who say, "Hey, AltaVista is a business. Can you blame them?" Yes, we can blame them. Newspapers are a business, but you don't (well, you didn't once upon a time) see them printing corporate press releases as news.
2) It's kinda funny to me how many people respond to this strictly in terms of capitalism. What ever happened to democracy? I realize that the original promise of the 'Net is drying up faster than liquid nitrogen, but still, someone needs to say it.
Let's imagine that Google goes out of business. Poof -- suddenly you can't do a search without having to turn to a paid search engine. Yeah, yeah, search engines suck anyway, but... unless I am running linuxisbitchin.org, they are a good way to get people to come to my site (I run a humor site and do not blanch at appearances of .aol in my logs). However, if $$$ is causing me to be marginalized, that ceases to be a tool for me.
Ultimately, it seems to me the barrier to entry is being raised here. I understand quite well that search engines are not the only way to promote a site, but from a strictly democratic point of view, this leaves one in a situation that's like running for President with nothing but a bunch of bumper stickers, while your competition has access to the airwaves.
3) A philosophical question, really. The airwaves are supposed to be a public resource, according to the FCC charter. Since the airwaves are regularly sold lock, stock, and barrel to companies that couldn't possibly give a shit about the public good despite this, what protects the Internet, given that the infrastructure is owned by a zillion institutions and there is no charter to speak of?
G'nite.
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"The right of search engines to charge money for returning their result isn't in question, it's how they do it that is the issue. When you ask your teacher at school how to solve a particular problem, you expect him to answer to the best of his ability, not according to what he's paid to say, right? And if what he tells you is influenced by some form of remuneration, whether it's secret or not, wouldn't you prefer to be told about it?"
The thing is, teachers are paid to answer questions and therefore teach us. Search Engines do not make money by being a search engine. They have to find other income. Banner-ads do not bring in much income any more so what is left in providing a free search engine?
What did you expect? The whole world's full of corrupt SOBs. Just use a different search engine if you don't like it.
Google: every geek's favorite search engine
Repeal the DMCA!
A search engine either does a good job finding links to the information you inquire about, or it gives you a bunch of crap. I used to use AltaVista because it was a good search engine. For whatever reason, AV now returns mostly crap. So I don't use it anymore.
I'm sure Nader has enough to retire on, he should move to the f-ing Caribbean and mind his own affairs.
Gooogle on, Wayne.
Am I the only one who thinks that searches for "Ralph Nader" might now direct you to the Republican Party's campaign site... Yahoo: "Well screw you Ralph!" :)
...when I do a search for, say, "Family Tree Information" the results that get returned are:
Hardcore animal pr0n
?
:)
...not enough people are making it to his paysite!
Would you like to see Ralphy doing more than just posing? Click HERE!
"What! No hits?"
"Nader-sense tingling! Corruption is afoot in the search engine business"
:)
Oh and i forgot - The alternative to this (which is what the Search Engine companies will claim) is to charge for use of search engines or move to a subscription model - they are after all offering a free service
My question is did they try and charge Nader too much money for a listing ?
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
The fact that this is happening should come as no surprise. And the rub is i cant see anyway Ralph Nader or anybody else can claim this is illegal. Users dont sign and particluar agreement and most search engines make no claim of impartiality (i mean look at Yahoo for gods sake) you have a right of choice and they have as far as i know no legal right to disclose this sort of information.
Taking money for listing improvment is something companies do all the time - its how a yellow pages works - the biggest placements cost the most money. This has been going on for time and based on what the complaint and comment says they are cleary seen as 'special' links.
Altavista and other companies have been doing this for years.
I would be interested in the FCC comment on this and their response - as the usage of a search engine and choice of which one is a choice made by the consumer then one would assume that this would negate some of the arguments about uninformed consumers - the banner ads and sponsored links would convince you they were taking advertising anyway.
Most people looking for information have a rough idea what they want so advertising wont have much of an effect on them - IE if you are looking for info on Open Source then you may only want general info - so you go there; if you are shopping then you may be led to a page reanked site, but bear in mind the engines return choices and thus you are not locked into only going to one place, and if the site you go to has what you want at a good price and quick service then all good and well, if not then thats what consumer laws are for, you dont sue a search engine if an online store rips you off, regardless of where you found the link.
IMHO if you follow the line that this practice is unusual then you are gullible - Radio stations dont get paid in cash for play anymore, they just get free food, gifts, invites to parties and junkets (but NO cash !)
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
We run a small online store that has to compete with the likes of .. well, some larger folks. (All names hidden to protect the guilty) And we've found that, right now, the best 'advertising' we get is by purchasing certain keywords. We have monitored a definite correlation between renewing our purchase, and new orders.
The search engines are run by private companies as FREE services, and be damned if the government or Ralph Nader is going to tell them how to run their business.
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"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky