Slashdot Mirror
Is Google Polluting the Internet?
Pickens writes "In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: 'We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.' Now, Micah White writes in the Guardian that the vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact, where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. And at the center of it all, with ad space on 85% of all internet sites, is Google. In the gleeful words of CEO Eric Schmidt, 'We are an advertising company.' The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore, writes White. 'The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatize the index, commercialize the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder.' Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. 'Now it is up to us to realize the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet. ... We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.'"
Please. Not another sink hole.
It's true but at the same time the only organization capable of pulling off a search engine with the power, scope, and ease of use of Google would be a government. Now how do you feel about the government controlling, censoring or whatever the wealth of human knowledge?
You pay for the servers, the bandwidth, and the developers, not to mention the managerial and legal overhead, and make it public without making a profit, and nobody will complain.
For those of us living in the real world, Google's a pretty decent option.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I am amazed that people think google is (a) a good search engine, rather then soemthing to generate profit for google, and (b) that as alarge corporation, google can be trusted to do anything other then max profits.
The idea that a large public company like google will do anything other then maximize profits is silly beyond belief;
There is one small exception: if a company is a quasi monopoly, as google is, then it can indulge in some luxuries, like sponsering summer of code; the epitome of this was the old Bell Labs research center in Murray HIll NJ (at least one Nobel Prize for fundamental science, microwave background).
PS google is willing to invade my privacy and yours with street view; can you do streetview for the personal residences of Page and Brin and the directors and senior executives of Google ? why doesn't someone start a site, www.seehowitfeels.net, that is just devoted to giving Page and Brin the same privacy that ordinary people have. Bet the lawsuits come soon and often
Google didn't make their index of human knowledge for free you know. If you don't like it, make your own. It will cost you billions of dollars, not just to create, but to keep up to date, up to the second.
We're more likely to lose public libraries than gain a public search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... controlled by the US government (who else would have the means and would volunteer?), the same which will soon have an Internet kill switch and is almost completely submerged by lobbyists? Is it really that much better?
Just what we need--a public search engine, paid for by taxpayers and managed by "public servants" who get to choose what's indexed and to censor whatever's not politically correct.
Welcome to the Disney Internet.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
In connection with spam marketers and clients, it is.
Here is an observation. I have a bunch of news filters for my sites and client site. 5 years ago, these would mostly return real hits (mentions in blogs, or the press, or a link, whatever). Today, they mostly return spam sites (sites that have a bunch of links to real businesses, but no real information and, of course, a bunch of ads). I presume that these sites are mostly put up to get hits from Google searches, and that it must be working (as there are so many of them).
If that's not pollution, I don't know what is.
Traditional ads, no. Astroturfing, I'm sure I've been fooled at some point. But it's hardly fair to blame search engines for that.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
This opinion piece is quite the hodgepodge of thoughts. The author brings in Sir Francis Bacon (division of knowledge), then spins off into Jonathan Swift's criticism of indexing knowledge. Apparently, indexes make us "lazy as thinkers." Running through the same discourse is the idea that Google provides an easy way to include advertising which pollutes the internet. And since Google is so omnipresent, it poses a danger. Then, he brings up the idea that since Google is an "advertising company" it cannot be trusted with the knowledge of humanity.
Finally, we come to the (logical?) conclusion that we need an index that is akin to the "public library" so humanity can control "the shared heritage of humanity."
Lazy thinking indeed.
If this is TL;DR, here's the slashdot version:
1. Quote prominent philosophers loosely related to subject matter
2. Make bold claims about high profile company/person
3. Make even bolder claim about "shared heritage of humanity"
...
Profit! from page views.
Now that's what I call polluting the internet!
No, you're just a leech.
If I ever dare disabling AdBlock+ in my browser, I'll have problems with page load times (=my time) + it will be much harder to concentrate on the content in a presence of distracting animations and other crap (=my productivity). On the road it will also lead to increased bandwidth bill (=my money) and shorter battery life (=productivity)
Who is the leech now?
Ah.... but what if the path is merely a maze going nowhere? A ship in a bottle floating in an endless sea of replicating bots who tirelessly analyze our essence and present false choices in an endless stream of nothingness only with the intent to gain our credit card number...
Suppose for a moment, that we are not just entertaining ourselves to death, but are still empowered by our desires to know the truth, to synthesize information in a free society and hold our ideas as our own, and are not just a copy-write infringed info byte of a subsidiary of a monolithic corporation.
The lesson perhaps? Nothing is free. Everything has a price. Search is free, but the road has a toll...for our soul, our individuality.
This is the 21st century, we gotta get with the program. Block the ads. Pay for your hosting, own your domain... pay your dues. Own your identity. Don't sell yourself for nothing. And remember, always make a backup.
The Library of Congress doesn't use the Dewey Decimal System. They use (surprise) the Library of Congress Classification system.
But on topic, they did the categorical classification thing back in the 90s. Yahoo, Dmoz, etc. They still exist, but search engines are more efficient. Entering a single query is easier than clicking through a hierarchy that may be half a dozen levels each. And they'd be even bigger if they tried to categorize any significant portion of the internet.
Directories are still useful if you want to see the most important sites for a subject, but when you want that specific piece of information you can't beat a search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
$5 to $10 monthly?? I'll stick with the adverts thank you very much. Even $0.01 a month would be too much because that means I have to pay $1 every nine years. And since the ads on Google don't bother me at all (and very occasionally even help me), I get no benefit from paying that money.
The article says:
"Google was originally conceived to be a commercial-free search engine. Twelve years ago, in the first public documentation of their technology, the inventors of Google warned that advertising corrupts search engines... And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now champions."
The misunderstanding is obvious. Google's ads are clearly separated from the search result - different style, different background colour. And yet the writer seems to think they are one and the same. It seems he has based an entire article on his own inability to distinguish between ads and search results.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
So if a resource owner fails to monetize the traffic he generated - it's a fault of a customer now? Next step - you're blaming shop visitors for not buying anything, soiling your floor and just leeching you of money you paid to cleaners.
Monetizing traffic is a hard job. If you fail at it - it probably means you should go find another one
Really, why?
The modern world is, whether we like it or not, run by corporations. So, we have corporations like Lockheed Martin developing more weapons to pollute the earth and murder innocent children overseas. Others, like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are actively trying to remove our personal freedoms, to control our every thought with DRM, to destroy free software, to be the real owners of our computers, cellphones, servers, and other gadgets.
On the other hand, we have companies like Google. Don't get me wrong, I'm not buying into the do no evil bullshit, but I can see what they do on my own: They help Free Software projects get where they are going to, they defend free standards, they donate code to the community, they provide valuable services that we use everyday at no cost. And they keep their ads to a minimum, Google is the only company that run ads that don't make you want to tear your eyeballs off. And all it takes to get rid of them is 30 seconds to install adblock.
Really, I have NOTHING bad to say about google. I use their search engine, their email service for both my personal and my company's email, I use google talk, google trends, Android, I am writing this on Chrome, I use google desktop, google maps, Picasa, Youtube, and countless other services and products from Google. And I haven't ever paid a single buck to them. And I block the fucking ads. They are managing to provide countless awesome services, do shitloads of research, and contribute more than anyone else to the Free Software community and to the world. And they are doing that on ads.
People is worried about user privacy, but Google has the best privacy record ever. Mention one single event in which google misused users data? The kind of thing google is doing can't be done without access to user's information. You want your email on the cloud (and you don't want to pay for a dedicated server + bandwidth?). Your data will need to be in somebody's server. Sorry, there's no other way.
And regarding that stupid comment saying that users can't tell the difference between content and advertising? Come on. Adblock can easily tell the difference, and it's a stupid script. My fucking bayesian filter can differentiate content from Spam. If your users can't tell the difference, your users are too fucking stupid.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I think the larger issue being hinted at is that if you search for 'widgets', the first few organic results will be someone who wants to sell you a widget. Further down the page will be a blogger who shares his knowledge about how to fix the widget, for example. Or some other cool widget use. It's amazingly common and the trend has become more apparent over the last couple years.
So yes, there is a clear delineation between paid ads and organic results. But under the covers it certainly appears there's something major going on. Note the number of Amazon ads that appear in the first 4 results where approximately 80% of the clicks happen.
OTOH, if I really want to find a good page on someone's experience fixing the widget, I personally have no problem going 4 or 5 pages deep to get there. Or tightening the query via long-tail. And imho Google is still the best SE to do that; it's a delicate balance.
So you want the internet to be shut down, is that what you're arguing for? Or are you not aware that 99.99999999% of the horribly embarrassing photos on the internet had in no way originated with google street view.
In fact the chance of the google van being in front of you when you do something stupid is infinitesimal compared to some asshole with a cell phone being there and instantly uploading your photo to the internet.
Got nothing to do with the internet, even. Newspapers have been on that wagon for a long time in the US and probably in some other places too. E.g. I once saw an ad for Amish electric radiators (sic) that was a full page ad written as to be indistinguishable from the other pages in the newspaper. The only clue was a discreet banner saying "advertisement". I read through the whole page before seeing the banner, and I was dumbfounded by how stupid the newspaper guys were being for being taken in by the "miracle of Amish craftsmanship", in that it would make your heating bill greatly decrease (true, since it was running on electricity), but they never pointed out the part about your electricity bill increasing.
Morals only apply to those who can afford them.
In our society, for centuries, thievery has been considered immoral. But we all recognize that when you are starving, in order to feed your family you will steal if necessary. In days past you would be hanged if caught. The interesting thing is that to the person stealing, it is/was moral to do what you can/could to feed your family; while to the well fed, it was moral to hang the thief. The soccer team stranded by plane crash in the Andes Mountains ate their dead compatriots. In poor regions of the world, life is sometimes very cheap when the difference between life and death is thin. In the end, if life is good and you can afford morals, you will have them. It all amounts to how much power you have over your own life. Money is just another way to measure power.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
People quickly become remarkably good at spotting the obvious sponsored results from the genuine ones. The basic idea behind this story is that we're all bloody idiots. Well ok, many of us are, but we're also a suspicious lot; so I don't really think this is an issue. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate: an international body (such as the UN), subject to political pressures, controlling search. I would trust a corporation that cares about its share price more than a bunch of faceless bureaucrats dependent on Government for their funding any day.
He apparently doesn't know how search engines worked before Google.
Used to be, you paid for a search ranking. Whoever paid the most got the top spot, no if's, and's, or but's about it. These were completely indistinguishable from non-paid search results! For a popular subject, you could pretty much guarantee the first 10, 20, even 100 pages of search results were paid results. I remember constantly digging into the back of a set of search results to get past the bullshit irrelevant results.
In comes Google. All search results are now 100% determined by their algorithm (which can still be gamed, but it's a million times better than the old way). In addition to the search results are a handful of fairly obvious advertisements at the top and side of the page. These are similar to the old "pay per click per keyword" ads, except these are also ranked in a similar algorithm in order to make the advertisements as relevant as possible to the search. You can spend $10 per click on the keyword "Buggy Whip", but if your website is all about deep sea diving supplies your advertisement is probably not going to show up in a search for buggy whips.
Because of this it's entirely possible that the advertisement is exactly what the searcher was looking for, and they will find it legitimately.
Yeah, Google isn't perfect - for one thing they are constantly fighting people gaming their search algorithm - but to think their system is anywhere even remotely similar to the 90's way of doing internet search is absolutely idiotic. The only way you can say that with a straight face is if you have absolutely no idea how bad it was in the 90's.
If you want to find out, go hit up Excite, LookSmart, Altavista (one of the better ones), 7search, or any of the other pay-per-click engines out there to see how it used to be. They're still around, and they still suck balls compared to Google. Bing is the only thing that comes close, and is even better in some respects.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You're still the leech. They are providing a service, which is being paid for by advertising. If it bothers you so much, don't use the service.
You display a typical arrogant attitude of many webmasters, who fail to realize that they deal not with some "traffic" or "hits". You deal with human beings. An offline business has very strict rules about being polite to customers - but webmasters still have a weird idea that screaming at your customers "LOOK! you've GOT to watch HERE! and now HERE!" constantly while they are at your territory is the best business plan ever. Who the hell would behave like that in their shop?
You don't get to say "oh stopping to buy a ticket slows me down and get in the say so I'm just going to jump over the turnstile" when you're getting in the subway. The same thing applies to ad supported websites.
Wait... you're not asking them to buy tickets before they enter - no, that would be too honest. You're actively pursuing them. You're doing you best to attract them to your site. You probably deprive other sites of search engine ranks in the process. And then you throw at your readers a bunch of flashy banners, tons of distracting underlined text in different colors (because they look like links and draw attention) and wonder why they protect their sanity and peace of mind? Try communicating to them and be polite - for a start.