Slashdot Mirror
Publisher Whining Prompts Italian Investigation of Google
Complaints about "lack of transparency" from publishers have prompted Italian competition authorities to begin an investigation of Google's search and news services. I'm sure their motives are completely altruistic. "Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising. Ad revenue on the Web is directly proportional to the size of the audience, which is heavily influenced by search or Google News rankings."
Complaints about "lack of transparency" from publishers have prompted Italian competition authorities to begin an investigation of Google's search and news services.
Good luck in getting a bunch of bureaucrats to wrap their minds around google's ranking algorithm.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Google provides a service. If you don't like their service, go use something else. Or better yet, build your own damn search and aggregation engine.
I recommend they start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
The Prime Minister of Italy owns the largest Italian publishing house
"Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising." As in, they want to change their pages to artificially inflate their page rank, regardless of relevance to what people are searching for.
Good sigs are hard to think of, bad sigs are a waste of time, that is why I invented, this lousy rhyme.
Are the newspapers going to provide similar transparency for the coverage they provide local businesses?
Can't they just throw a few bucks at the SEO scumbags and call it a day?
To relate the facts surrounding each news story in the best way possible. After a while, people will seek them out.
This is exactly the way it should be. You shouldn't write news in order to garner more ad revenue. By keeping this secret, Google is doing it's part to protect the integrity of those hacks who would alter the news -- otherwise known as Selling Out -- to be whatever paid the best. When that happens then we've all lost -- including the newspapers that will become nothing more than the new Tabloid Press.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising."
This is exactly why Google will never disclose their raking criteria. The last thing they want is for people to 'hone' their content to drive per-site revenue. It's bad enough they have to worry about SEO companies trying to game the system. Exposing the ranking system would effectively invalidate it. You go down that path and people stop trusting the neutrality of the search engine. At which point Google might as well close up shop as an untrusted search engine is an unused search engine. Just ask Microsoft.
it is a free web based service. they are not required to publish anything regarding their algorithm, let alone making it understandable by non CS folk. Google search does not ship with any OS, nor does it insert itself as the default search engine, browsers do that. If people dont like it, use Bing or whatever. The argument of * most people *choose* to use Google, they need not * therefore Google must supply all necessary informtion that we ask of them so that we can tune our product to rank higher makes no sense, and I wonder if any law can uphold this. The "Italian competition authorities" will have a tough time justifying how a free service with no coersion of any sort to force a user to use their product can be anti-competitive
Google ranks pages based on what people are searching for. The obvious way to get pagehits from Google is to, ahem, write news that people are interested in.
Anything else and you're just trying to game the system.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
" Ad revenue on the Web is directly proportional to the size of the audience"
That would only be true if every ad was the same price. Even ads that use different metrics vary inside their own class. Ads that are sold on a PPV (pay per view) vary - so do ads sold on a PPC or PPA (pay per click, pay per action) basis. Then there's the value based on the site.
Just one more example of how the dead-tree crowd still, after almost 2 decades, doesn't get it.
Not sure why I still bother reading Slashdot (less and less often), with such biased summaries. If you actually take the time to read the original article (and maybe read the story from other sources as well), you'll find out that the main complaint of the italian publishers is NOT that the PageRank algorhitm is secret.
They accuse Google of dropping them out of their search results (or at least lowering their pagerank) if they ask Google to remove their articles from Google News. So the accusation is abuse of a dominant position.
Basically they find Google News to compete with them, because it takes the news from them (for free), readers don't bother clicking the link to read the full original article, so when a reader clicks on an ad, the revenue stays with Google and not the original publisher. So far, fair enough (?). The problem (and the core of the accusation) is that the publishers suspect that when they ask Google to not include their articles in Google News, Google also removes them from their normal search results (or lowers them in PageRank). Google denies this.
The core of the problem is that Google, starting from a role of search engine, is now starting to compete with its own customers, by entering their market. And it is using its dominant position in the search market to get an advantage.
Another example is in Australia, where the two main real estate listing web sites (Domain and RealEstate) have threatened to cancel all their advertising on Google, when they heard that Google was planning to launch its own real estate listing aggregation service. The story is here: http://www.businessday.com.au/small-business/smallbiz-marketing/google-faces-property-ads-war-20090727-dy0j.html
Other countries (quoted in the same article on the NY Times) are seeing their publishers up in arms against Google.
Slashdot, get some decent editors.
>> newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.
I'm pleased Google don't publish their strategy for ordering search hits. If they did, the newspapers would just sacrifice everything to get a high Google ranking so there would be an immediate and massive drop of content quality and readability.
A big difference between Italian politics and American politics is that the corruption and self-interest is much more transparent in Italy. They aren't ashamed of it, it's part of the human condition. Only in America do a people believe that there is something akin to morality in the operation of government.
Best regards.
Google is a US company, I say they just cut off Italy all together. The lost revenue would probably be easily made up for in the easing of the regulatory hassle.
There's also an algorithm that will rank things by relevance to your search, what the tags are on the link, such and such.
For example, if you search "NEWS"
the word News is the only tag it searches for, thus whoever has the most page hits gets it. You'll notice, Google news is not #1. So they aren't cheating.
If you type, "Canada News" ..." in that order will come up first.
Now it searches for something with Canada as a High Relevance point, with slightly less on the News Point, but both. Those Web sites whose tags are "Canada, News,
If you type "News Canada"
It reverses their relevancy, and some different results come up, mostly just different orders.
How Relevancy is derived for both the Search String and the Tags is unreleased - thus News Sites don't know how to Tag their sites for maximum relevancy.
i propose that google release the information in a more document, paper in envelope, by courier, wax sealed way to compel these jerks that searching google for "how google searches" is not above them
Through the window.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
How Relevancy is derived for both the Search String and the Tags is unreleased - thus News Sites don't know how to Tag their sites for maximum relevancy.
Logically.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
$NEWSPAPER has asked the Government to examine Google News and other content aggregators, claiming they contribute insufficiently to their income.
"The newspapers put their content up on the web for free and then Google, the freeloading bastards, tell people where to find it. We told them to pay up or stop using our stuff, and they said OK, they'd stop using our stuff!
"We need the Government to bring back balance, 'balance' defined as being able to make them give us money because we want it. You'd think the Internet wasn't invented to give newspapers and record companies free money!"
$NEWSPAPER argues that traffic from search engines doesn't make up the cost of producing the content. "Ad revenue has collapsed, so search engine traffic doesn't bring in enough views to pay for itself. Our inability to sell ads is clearly Google's problem."
$NEWSPAPER suggests the exploration of new models that "require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site through advertising and 'at the edges' in the world of search and aggregation. Basically, they should just give us money because we want it. And the music industry too. How about a bailout? Go on, gi's it."
Illustration: "My preciousssss!"
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They accuse Google of dropping them out of their search results (or at least lowering their pagerank) if they ask Google to remove their articles from Google News.
I *wish* Google would do this when the record companies try to squeeze them for more money. Just blocking all the videos on Youtube in unlicenced territories was not strong enough. They should have completely deindexed all the artist's webpages too.
Maybe it would be abuse, but the publishers were abusing their monopoly first, and turnabout is fair play.
I guess "Honing Content" is doublespeak for "gaming the system" which means it just raises the bar so that smaller publishers won't be as visible. I guess these publishers are upset because they're on equal footing. What customers want is a product without all the marketing, but what these greedy entities are trying to do is make a lot of marketing with no product.
What is the compromise? Do we come up with a standard way of ranking that can be exploited much faster than we can update the standard to prevent this? I think here, the product that Google is giving customers is the method that they are aggregating content. Perhaps these publishers would be better off going to a competitor, but if customers don't prefer the competitor's method of aggregating content, they will come back to Google, which is a sign that Google is doing things right.
I don't think publishers should have a say on the method that Google presents its index, because Google does not have a monopoly on indexes. I think they are just targeting Google because it is popular (and not by any anti-competitive practices, correct me if I'm wrong), and they are not able to increase their ROI without unfairly gaining an advantage. These publishers really do seem to be whining.
Twinstiq, game news
In other words, "We're not able to exploit your algorithms to manipulate our search ranking in ways that don't relate to the actual content of our news articles. We want to appear higher on the rankings even though our articles have no content. Therefore we demand you release the details of your proprietary algorithms so that we can more easily manipulate them to gain an unfair advantage." Does that about sum it up?
Stop using fancy eye catching titles to your articles if they aren't relevant. Stick to the facts & key words.
Among other things, the Google's search algorithm is based on the text within the links to a page, the title of a page, the header text near the top of a page... News sites like to use titles that make you think "What is that article about". That is a horrible way to have Google link to your page with a high page rank.
For example, one of the top articles on CNN.com about Kennedy's death is titled "What if Chappaquiddick happened today?" No search engine will link to that article. The only key word there is Chappaquiddick.
Although Google doesn't directly provide information on how their algorithm works, there are many SEO sites that provide good enough information to tell them that they are doing a horrible job. The low level specifics are meaningless when you can't even get the basics right.
Just incorporate the word 'boobies' into the title of all articles.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Just a couple weeks ago I saw a report stating that despite Google's search supremacy, Yahoo was still the biggest "portal" on the web, followed oddly enough by AOL, I believe. I think that Italy's questionable complaint is barking up the wrong tree. I suppose they know that Google's got the big bucks, and remember that Italy is run by a megalomaniacal media tycoon.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The system is already well and truly gamed. The best way at the moment is not to write the best news but to hire professional web companies that specialise in ensuring your pages are in the top hits. I could understand if google were actually making a good effort at preventing such gaming but they aren't.
Who the fuck is he??? Great /. journalism in the summary, it once again really sucks ass. Hire an editor, douches!
The lack of knowledge of Google ranking doesn't seem to affect the ability of malware distributors to 'focus' their efforts on their audience."
And I'm sure that they would be willing to assit the news people--for a price...in fact, they could purchase software on the black/gray market to perform such optimizations.
And, of course, the demographic any online merchant needs to hit is "everyone" since advertising revenue depends upon traffic.
For those who don't remember: Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns Mediaset, the biggest broadcast and media company in Italy, and as prime minister, he also controls the government broadcaster. More of Berlusconi's "insightful" ideas on Slashdot here: