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've tried this before with GRUB, but it didn't really take off for a multitude of reasons.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
We're more likely to lose public libraries than gain a public search engine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I agree that we need a public people-controlled search-engine, and http://yacy.de/ is sadly the best P2P search engine there is right now. It is, sadly, a major fail as it is written in Java and brings the average desktop computer to it's knees just by doing whatever in the background. A good P2P engine would make a good alternative to the commercial search-engines. There really is no alternative to Google as of now, I've tried the alternatives and they are all epic failz & pure jokes.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
... 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?
You want a public search engine? Just make one and stop whining.
Also he complains about cencorship?
Let's see how bad cencorship gets on a nationally owned search engine. I bet all kinds of unfavorable facts begin to disappear rather quickly.
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.
Just how are we to create incentives for an organization to do this? Commercial companies will want to make money off of it, advertising is one way to monetize this service, charging an access fee would be another. I wouldn't really trust a government to do this, not because they have agendas/etc. but because they simply are not technically competent enough to do this. Any non-profit/etc. organization would have to be insanely well funded to accomplish this task, so that's unlikely.
For better or worse it looks like we are stuck with Google. We could definitely do worse, but we could also do better I suspect (I just have no idea how it would be paid for).
...where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising..
But those are the same people who never could tell the difference.
Although admittedly there is a problem with search results being full of pages that, once you get there, turn out to be advertising with phrases added to get themselves into the search results, it's prefectly obvious to me when I actually load the page that it's advertising, almost always for something in which I have no interest, but I'm certainly not going to rewarded them by going to them even if it's something I do want.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
In the beginning, we had a variety of search engines out there. It wasn't necessarily obvious at the time that a company like google would get a near monopoly.
I think the meta question here:
what are the range of services that really ought to be public vs. private/corporate?
The net simply would not exist if it hadn't been for DoD participation. I think we are still missing basic pieces of infrastructure. Some of these simply will not exist without public input.
My sense is that 99% of the time, google works fine-but that 1% of the time it doesn't work is critical.I think clearly identifying that 1% is a good idea and a site that could do that well might be important in its own right.
If the Library of Congress can be catalogued, then surely the internet can be as well. With the majority of it falling into the 'pop trash' category, of course.
That would defeat the purpose of cataloging the internet. It also ignores that cataloging the internet isn't a useful (or low effort) activity. Google has a far better system.
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.
What we need is "researchers" who are a bit more intelligent. This person claims users "can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising". Based on what? HIs own experience?
Personally, I don't know anyone who has any difficulty in telling the difference.
No, you're just a leech.
'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 is a business and they're doing all the indexing work, so *no* their index ought *not* be owned by us all. Further, they can advertise on their own system all they like, since it's their own product and the result of their own work. If some group of people wants to produce a wikipedia-esque version of the same thing, they're more than welcome to do so. Of course, they won't have the resources of a Google, so . . . good luck with that.
Of course, isn't that what the Mozilla Open Directory was?
Also, the entire internet is spammed with endless fucking advertising, right down to every jackhole and his blog read only by himself. What is more representative of humanity and the internet than a search index that is also filled with advertising on every square inch? Not to mention, the ads are being served in real time. They're not part of some "archive" somewhere. And even if they were, stripping them out would be very simple (hell, I can do it in real time with Adblock Plus . . . which everyone should be using so they won't have to deal with these ads to begin with).
Google should have strong competition, true, but they shouldn't be forced to open everything to the world out of some sort of altruistic goal. I also shouldn't be forced to foot the bill, as a tax payer, for your little pet project to "reproduce google, but without ads". Again, you can already get google without ads. It's called an adblocker.
"where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising, and the omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought" who cannot tell tell the difference between content and advertising?? its pretty obvious most of the time. and how exactly does "the omnipresence of internet advertising constrain the horizon of our thought"
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.
What "privacy" do you think you have while you're out on the street?
Now that's what I call polluting the internet!
Well, not completely. But there is absolutely no other agency I trust the way I trust Google. I trust that the only bias Google intentionally applies to their results has the best interests of everybody at heart. I most certainly do NOT trust Bing to do this. They would in a heartbeat and tell me they were completely justified in doing so, and most of you here would agree with them and tell me that corporations aren't even supposed to have a moral compass.
I would like some diversity here. I would like a distributed solution to this problem. Unfortunately one doesn't exist, I can't think of a good way to make one right now. But Google's centralized nature and the amount of trust I'm required to have for them is very worrisome to me.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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!
causing every website that uses Google Analytics and YouTube to take a horrendous time to load. It didn't used to be this way, but within the past year Google's non-search infrastructure has really not scaled very well.
Don't mix Google the search engine (probably the biggest one in internet, that have their own small ads in the results), with Google the ad network with a lot of big and small competitors, where webmasters decide to put their ads, and how. If you complain about internet pollution because a site is having too much ads, is probably webmaster/designer fault, not Google.
where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising
These are the same people who need warning labels to tell them to put the jelly on their toast after it comes out of the toaster. While I'm definitely sympathetic to the arguments in TFA, there's a limit to how much a search engine can compensate for the cognitive deficits of its users.
In any case, honesty in advertising is not a technological issue, it's a question of legislation and law enforcement. And if we lack the will to rein in abuses in a single country, good luck with the internet.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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?
The day search engines become public is the day that they stop improving. I'm not saying there couldn't be a public search engine, but nobody would use it because Google (and bing, ect.) would be so much better.
Very true, with the exception of problems that could not be found by any search engine.
That said the results when customized search is disabled is not quite as good as it was when I started using Google. The popularization of Blogs and other self-publishing methods, and especially the spam that went with them, initially caused substantial deterioration of the search results (despite also sometimes having the best answer out there). After a year or so, the quality had recovered most of the way, but has never seemed quite as good as it once was. However, with the customized results, the results are better than they initially were, so I'm not complaining.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Just like TV has been for decades.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We need some kind of alternative search engine. If I engineered one, I'd call it "Bing", or "Yahoo", or something like that.
I'm not sure. . . when I first read that, the guy's rather poor choice of words sounded like something right out of a marxist speech (in the literal, historical sense of marxism), but if you finish reading the quote, I don't think he's actually advocating a marxist-style nationalization of Google, but rather starting another project to create an index which isn't owned by Google.
My question, however, is who is going to provide all the servers and storage space? Yeah, Microsoft, Google, a few other companies can build the infrastructure to do something like indexing the Internet, but I don't think it'd work well as an 'open-source' type project (the *code* to run it all might all be open source, but at some point, you need some really big datacenters; I mean, maybe you could do some sort of peer-2-peer approach, but what with NAT everywhere (and soon to be at the ISP level), the peer-to-peer model is somewhat hobbled. I just don't think a peer-to-peer solution would be both reliable enough and fast enough (e.g. parts of the index would go 'missing' temporarily from time to time, or just have very high latency).
The guy's comment about "Public Libraries" would seem to indicate he thinks having a government controlled search engine is the answer. Does anyone *really* think a search engine completely controlled by the government (any government), is a good idea?
Gee, I have no problem whatsoever telling the difference between ads and content on Google (or almost anywhere, for that matter.) Even if this clown can't tell the difference, I can't say it's a universal problem. As far as the search index goes; Google seems to have been a decent steward so far. For what I search for, it produces good results, and they clearly delineate between ads and search results (unlike some other engines) and they have always done so.
Because I do and I definitively prefer this.
And if you don't, stop whining about the Big Bad Wolf and offer something new.
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
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.
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 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.
One could argue your neo-conservative perspective is not only failed, but the cause of much misery in the world today. The facts do not lie. The middle class in America is on the retreat and it is questionable whether it will rebound in the near future or not. Meanwhile, socialist/communist China are making tremendous societal gains. Methinks you're the Hack. ;)
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Google is not immune. /.ers have seen it time and time again over the years. Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Apple and now, it appears, Google. They've all succumbed to their successes with excesses.
It truly is very difficult to resist using one's power if one is good enough and lucky enough to get some. Most of us never get to experience this heady state of mind (which is probably a good thing). If we were running Google, we'd already be working on our rationalization speech: "But, we're Google. A company that has pledged to Do No Evil. Be honest: would you rather be spammed by a company like ours or some shadowy, suit-populated advertising broker who is only in it for the money?" Uh, wait a minute. Strike the part about the money...
Nothing really new here.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
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.
Then do it.
If it's better than Google, users will use it.
If it's worse, they won't.
RMS is advocating for a free OS since forever, but the year of "Linux on desktop" hasn't come yet.
Anyone wonders why people choose functionality over freedom when they actually need a tool to do something?
We have an open source search engine : http://nutch.apache.org./ But we need a distributed index storage system that is uncensorable and/or trackable. Do we have that?
Why doesn't Microsoft come out with some sort of search engine? I'm sure they've got plenty of sharp coders that could make that work.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, Google do a huge amount of statistical reasoning to give users what they want. On one hand, this allows a system to scale and seem magically quick, because individual users forget how they are not really so unique, posing the same queries that hundreds or thousands of other users have been querying in the same days, hours, or minutes. On the other hand, it presents a tyranny of the majority, where the "best" result is the result most users wanted for that query.
If you really want to do better than this, you need to add your mood or intent to the search query. Don't search for widget, but search for "how to frob widget" or "widget frobbing reviews" etc. Similarly, if you really do want to purchase something uncommon, it helps to search for "widget price" or "widget sale" instead of just "widget" which might take you to the encyclopedic information if that's what people most commonly want.
The newer AJAX features of Google really make it more obvious how the system is indexing and reusing searches. Type widget and see the many different search suggestions that show up. Type a few more keywords and see how the suggestions change, before you even submit the query. It's a bit like crowd-sourcing of a Yahoo-style directory: you can see how different sets of keywords are creating a taxonomy of search results.
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.
Exactly. There are 2 motivators for people :
a. money
b. power
I'm sorry, but you have an awfully insulting view of human nature. Greed is a quality that is encouraged by the type of thinking displayed in your comment. And while humans tend to be greedy if we are encouraged to do so, we are also capable of great and noble altruism. To say that self-interest and greed are the core motivators in human nature is to encourage us to wallow in our most negative characteristics instead of pushing us to better ourselves.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I block ads for things I know I will never purchase.
The company does not lose any sales, as they are things I will never purchase.
The company saves money, as they do not have to spend money for the bandwidth to give me an advertisement for something that I am not going to purchase.
First, Google rates sites by "popularity", that is, the number of links to them. Unfortunately, this means the same kind of "rating" that has given us reality TV - popularity has never been much of a measure for anything but the mediocre, gossipy, and easily digested. The very algorithm that Google uses pushes the most worthwhile sites to the back pages, if indeed they show up at all.
Second, Google's recent push to require fast response in order to be high ranked again skews the results, this time towards deep pockets and away from the smaller websites, which indirectly (but dependably) silences minority views, esoteric subject matter, and the "little fellow's" blogs, etc.
Google's algorithms cannot actually evaluate content. Now, a searcher can get around this to some extent by clever / directed use of the extended search facilities, but this, too, tends to isolate high quality results to the subset of searchers that know how to, for want of a better phrase, "look deeply", and that certainly doesn't include your average Google client, who is unaware that a great deal of the Internet's deeper and more worthwhile content is being hidden from them.
We can point the finger at the average searcher's habit of only considering the first few results, or the first page, but it is not the searcher's fault that page is built with a mediocre bias. That responsibility is Google's.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's not really what happened at all. They shot themselves in the foot.
Yahoo should have stuck with their tree of reviewed, classed, verified sites. When they were actually putting some effort into it, it was extremely useful. Then they started with months long delays before sites would get listed (if they got listed), then they started charging for listings... it's entirely their own fault that they turned a golden goose, where tons of people would come to look for things, into a worthless, out of date pile of noise. And then they tried to replace it with search - which isn't the same thing at all, and doesn't provide the same utility unless used in an expert manner.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Do Larry and Sergey really feel this way? It'd certainly be interesting if they did and to hear them describe those opinions. However, it seems like White's article is making uninformed suppositions simply for the purpose of being provocative. In particular, the underlying article states:
With a link to a Google Answers page which indicates:
This is a practice that has existed on Google pages since the very beginning. Nobody's selling the top search result here. Anyone who's used Google before would see that all the ads are separated from search results and clearly labeled as ads.
Your argument is built on the implied supposition that you have some sort of right to access the content. Care to explain how you became the recipient of such an entitlement?
Hurry up and buy!
Let us now take all successful business and demean their successes! Redistribute the wealth and have the government absolve all power belonging to any established (successful) businesses! We need to empower our governants to be our proverbial mothers and fathers. They will care for us whilest we tend the green pastures! Let us pray to whatever God you pray to now..... It's in our governments hands now.
Also, good advertising is content (popular commercials are passed around often), and some content is advertising. This is OK, and doesn't in any way constitute "pollution".
I got the entitlement by the site owner publishing the site in public.
Your argument is built on the implied supposition that if the published content includes a link to an advertising banner, you have some sort of right to control if the banner is looked at or shown on the user's screen. Care to explain how you became the recipient of such an entitlement?
Have they not heard of Firefox and Adblock Plus?
What advertising, I can't see it.
Let's see. If been on this internet thing since the early 90's.
Yes, it was sweet back then. No adds, no big commerical interested trying to control everything.
Telnet was the common connection, though cslip and ppp started coming out.
IRC was just starting, so we had some chat communication.
the www was starting up, and you had lynx to browse it.
Then the internet started getting popular, people started getting their connections through companies, not thru the universities. The connections & WWW got better.
and where the people go, soon the advertising will appear, as that is the way or corporations.
And some of these corporations looked at the internet as a way to make money off people. The stupid ones tried to get you to pay top dollar for their services. Some of the smarter companies realized that people don't want to pay more money, so they started doing ad services to help webmasters make money on websites. Of course, they were helping themselves, mainly if you remember some of the things, like the chat logs of one of the big ad services getting leaked.
Since corporations are ONLY about GREED, they keep pushing and pushing what they can to get money.
This is why the internet is like it is today. It became popular, and the corps are taking advantage of that. So is it bad that google does 85% of advertising? I don't know, because it's not usually their ads I find so fucking annoying.
But I will say this. I don't expect any privacy when i'm online, and I find the services google provides a fair trade for the info they get out of me.
People need to understand, there is NO PRIVACY on the internet. None. It's not made for privacy, it can't be made for privacy.
And if you find you can't tell the ads from the content on the site, then you bitch at the site's owner, and get them to change it.
Personally, I'm a big fan of adblock plus & no script, but to each his own.
Be seeing you...
No one's mentioned content farms yet? That is, websites that are 100% made using bots, presumably their algorithm is: they see what terms are trending in Google News or Google Trends, they google for hundreds of articles with those keywords, and they create a static "article" page with real sentences, but each copied and pasted from who knows where so that the "article" doesn't make any sense. The only important criteria for each sentence is that the sentence must contain the keyword. And they fill up the rest of the page with AdSense ads...
An example, from this real article about content farms:
It's so fucking excruciating to have to use my brain to filter this shit, because apparently Google fails at it. Then again I've not seen them lately, but maybe that's because I've used a bit of JavaScript hackery to remove the "News" link from Google's homepage, since every Google search I made my mouse wanders to that link wondering if there's anything new in the world...
On the other hand, this repeating of keyword disease has affected real articles as well, those whose authors are desperate for some search engine hits (freaking SEO-whores...), so the recent article covered here on /. about Facebook's data centers contained the words, "Facebook's data center" in each goddamnfreaking paragraph.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Actually, I would like to see all websites establishing SSL connections with their observers. That action should block trolling, reduce spam attacks, and put an end to googles business of filtering everything that their crawler sees on the web that is recordable.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Do you buy products from every company that you see advertisements for? If not, then you too are a leech. Those companies spend their hard earned money on those ads with the expectation that they'll get a return on their investment in the form of increased sales. If you aren't buying more after viewing those ads, you might as well have not viewed them in the first place.
People like to get paid.
Google will pay them to put advertising on their web pages.
Therefore, people put advertising on their web pages.
A libre search engine isn't going to change that.
Maybe Google is responsible for pages that are designed to get a high page rank.
Maybe.
But yet another alternative to Google wouldn't make those pages go away.
If it had any effect at all, it would be to create even more useless pages designed to get a high "page rank" on that search engine.
Advertising certainly is pollution. I no longer watch television shows on television - only shows that can be downloaded. I also use ad blocking software on my browser, use an email app instead of webmail, and listen only to non-commercial radio. You don't have to look at this garbage if you don't want to. As for those who'll say they need advertising to keep their content online: I really wouldn't care much if your content disappeared. I wouldn't mind a bit if we went back to the kind of web we had before all these commercial interests jumped online.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped