Is Google Playing Fair With Groupon, et al?

An anonymous reader writes with the claim (illustrated with what seems like damning screen-shot evidence) that "Google is using Gmail's priority inbox to give special treatment to its own daily deal emails over all the rest."

Comments

wow

[Osgeld]

who would have thought a for profit company would ever try to push its products and services before the competition?

Re:wow

[AlexBirch]

or slashdot / blog presenting bad evidence in order to get more views?
Groupon is still marked as important for my gmail account.

Re:wow

[man_of_mr_e]

You know, it seems like Slashdot has become the place to go to enrage the geeks. Oh no! Google slaughters puppies and enslaves kittens. Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the Nerds of war!

so what

[acvh]

google gives you a free email account, then uses it to market stuff to you. why would anyone be surprised, or upset? there are many free email options out there, use another one if you don't like how this one works.

Re:so what

[antifoidulus]

You also have to keep in mind there are 2 perspectives here, the perspective of the email user and the perspective of the advertiser. If someone pays to put an ad on Google, they expect Google to place that ad in accordance with whatever contract they signed. If Google is taking their money and then still advertising it's own products over theirs, then that is definitely a conflict of interest.

Re:Excellent timing

[Osgeld]

I dont see how, google is not the only email web client solution on the net and no one is forced to use it (and honestly I dont see the appeal, its clunky IMO)

Just a thought

[liquidweaver]

So, some random blogger posts a screenshot and we implicitly trust it's contents? I could do this with Greasemonkey to GIMP. I am no Google apologist, but my spidey sense it tingling like when I get an email full of "Amazing Pictures" from my grandma.

Re:Just a thought

[liquidweaver]

FYI, he is censoring his blog. I asked the same question there, and it's been magically erased.

Re:Just a thought

[edumacator]

He also has a grand total of one blog post.

Re:Just a thought

[Anarchduke]

Oh no, its a real screen shot. The blogger signed up a new google account with google priority inbox which automatically places messages from google as part of the important stuff. so all the other spamvertisements in the inbox Google doesn't see as important, seeing as how there is no history of that google account ever opening any of those mails.
To sum up
1. new account w/ no history
2. mail from google is considered important by default
3. there are no other email addresses considered important by the algorithm because there is no history on the account.

Result: The google mail is the only email the algorithm treated as important!

Obviously, it must be an act of evil by Google.

Because you already read messages from Google?

[Meshach]

I wonder if that message is marked as important because you read the other message from Google (the Welcome message)? I can only assume that messages are marked important / non-important based on your reading habits and with so little to go on maybe that is all it takes for GMail to consider the message "Important"?

Re:Because you already read messages from Google?

[black3d]

Interesting.. I posted a comment pointing out that the service agreement says he'll get Google mails as priority messages and that he can opt-out of them, and after it was up for a few minutes, he deleted the comment.

So pretty much, it is as above. He signed up for a service which says he'll get priority Google emails by default when activated, and then starts complaining that exactly that is happening. What a douche.

Re:Excellent timing

[Meshach]

I dont see how, google is not the only email web client solution on the net and no one is forced to use it (and honestly I dont see the appeal, its clunky IMO)

No one was forced to use Microsoft but their product was so common that the judge determined that them encouraging customers to use another one of their products was illegal. I guess the call here is determining if Google is a monopoly on the search business.

Re:Excellent timing

[swillden]

...just in time for an antitrust investigation. Who at Google thought this was a good idea, anyway?

Most likely, no one, because mostly likely no one thought of it at all.

My bet is that this the result of a generic rule that boosts the importance of e-mails from Google, you know so that you're sure to see announcements of new gmail features, or Google account-related messages, etc., but no one thought to make an exception for Offers.

Given that Offers and gmail come from different groups within Google, and I'd expect that no one on the Offers team knows much about how priority inbox is implemented and no one on the gmail team was thinking much about Offers other than to note there was a launch party, I can see exactly how this would happen. Or maybe it is intentional... but I doubt it.

What will happen next is that the Priority Inbox rules will be modified to avoid giving any undue precedence to Google Offers, and lots of slashdotters will believe that Google was being Evil and only stopped when caught, regardless of the facts of the situation.

(Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Google, but I don't work on Offers or gmail.)

Non-story

[exomondo]

who would have thought a for profit company would ever try to push its products and services before the competition?

send yourself an email marked with 'high importance' and it ends up in your priority inbox...so google is sending their offer emails with 'high importance' where other companies aren't, how is this a story at all?

Re:Non-story

[sortius_nod]

It's not, looking at where the article is hosted, well, it's the ONLY post on a blog.

Seems like a bunch of FUD to me. It seems "Kasey Moffat" (I suspect an invented character) created both a blog & twitter account just to do this.

Alarm bells anyone?

Re:Non-story

[Skuld-Chan]

I'd say it raises alarms because google offers doesn't do that on my email inbox...

Re:Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you can tell 5 comments into a story that slashdot is pulling the bullshit wool over everyone's eyes.

Re:Non-story

[Mistlefoot]

Definitly.

A reply on the original article is

"Isaac said...

        Google knows that you signed up for Google Offers because it's your own account.

        They don't know the same thing about other daily offer emails because they do not have access to those other site's subscription information, and all these emails look like spam. So without that additional information available, how can Google tell the difference between spam/semi-spam and things that you sign up for? It can't, until you tell it they are important."

Re:Non-story

[AmiMoJo]

Priority inbox doesn't work like that. It looks at what emails have been read immediately and responded to quickly in the past to try and predict how important new emails are. If you immediately open Google's mails it will think they are important to you and put them in the priority category. If you do the same with Groupon they will end up in there too.

It is the opposite of spam filtering and uses the same techniques. Instead of deciding what is crap it decides what is important.

Re:Non-story

[Stupendoussteve]

Vell, Kasey's just zis guy, you know?

Re:Excellent timing

[The Dawn Of Time]

The Slashdot definition of monopoly seems to be "making more money than I think they should have."

Re:Excellent timing

[SuperMog2002]

The antitrust inquiry is for their search product, where they have an overwhelming percent of the market (to the point where Googling is a common verb, even among non-techies). Priority Inbox is a feature of their largely unrelated email product. While Gmail has a nice chunk of the market, it's hardly overwhelming. Hotmail and Yahoo both have nice chunks of market share as well.