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."
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.
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."
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.
This sure is a nice search engine you got here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it. You know, I gots an idea, how's about you pay my boy Vinnie here 8.4 Billion Euros, and he makes sure nothin' happens to your little website. Ain't that right, Vinnie?
I don't think that's true in either direction. First, a great deal of Americans don't believe there is anything akin to morality in the operation of government, whether they're left-wingers who think the government is the tool of imperialist-capitalist interests, conservatives who think the government is spreading hedonism and immorality via the public schools, or libertarians who don't like any operation of government at all.
And on the flip side, a good many Europeans expect there to be something akin to morality in the operation of government. Italy is not representative of most of Europe, and places like Sweden have very different expectations from their government, which are more positive on the whole, even if there is still plenty of cynicism about politicians.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10