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Twitter Comes Out Swinging Against Google's Personalized Search
Meshach writes "Google's release of the new 'Search Plus Your World' feature has elicited harsh words from Twitter's general counsel (who used to work with Google). He claims that the changes will make information harder to find for users and be bad news for news publishers. Some analysts are wondering if this is a prelude to a legal battle similar to Microsoft's bundling of IE."
twitter sells the right to mine their data, google stopped paying so twitter locked them out. twitter still does business with bing, bing also has a deal with facebook. google is allowing themselves to their own data and also bing sucks
I'm all for the big brother fear posts about Google getting evil, but this isn't the time. Twitter ended their agreement with Google for a real time feed; other realtime/news sites have been threatening blocking Google; then they get upset when Google says fuck it, introduces their own service, and integrates it.
What's next? NYT blocks Google indexers and then complains when they don't show up in the top of the search results?
The social sites have had users data locked up long enough. It's due time they provide API's to users, aggregators, and others. Google seems to want to include as much of this other stuff as it can in its search results... they're not the bottleneck, nor the slippery slope here.
Also complained that that new fangled automobile would cause various societal ills. In reality, they were just pissed off that they were being obsoleted.
I don't think it is possible to elucidate. Had to read the article because I was so confused.
Twitter:
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
Article:
The new Google service, which is rolling out today, lets search users toggle between personalized and "global" results, with the former including information gleaned from its Google+ social network and its Picasa image-storage service. Twitter reasonably enough sees that move as a threat, since it could well encourage people to share breaking news on Google+ rather than Twitter.
Ummmm. Huh?
So.... Google is rolling out a service that you have to opt in for that will personalize search results according to data they collected on you.
Twitter has already told Google not to index its tweets apparently. Twitter feels that news comes from them first somehow. I can see that being the case in some tumultuous countries, but as a generality? Come on. That's pushing it. Relevant? Really? What about the signal to noise ratio? Verification?
News publishers might be affected by personalization, but only in so far as their articles that get included would have to match the user profile. Anything else just gets weighted down in the rankings.
Saying the Justice Department should look into this sounds like Whiny Bitch syndrome coupled with some form of cognitive dissonance.
If Google is guilty of anything with the personalized search results, which would be less guilty in my mind, they should already be guilty just by doing what they are doing now without personalized results. Their own algorithms should make them guilty by that logic.
Sounds like Twitter feels intimidated by Google+ and is talking out of its ass.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember (not fondly) the time when entering *anything* into a search engine yielded pages of "Sexy nude girls" results. I don't miss that "unbroken" internet at all.
The one leaning slightly right will see more and more search results showing that low tax is good, social provision bad, Obama wanting to make America a country like Europe or Scandinavia. This may move their opinion to the right slightly, so they will click on further right wing sites where they will start to see stories about "death panels" in Europe, global warming being fictitious and Obama wanting to make America a Muslim country, etc.
The one with centre-left tendencies will see stories about corporations putting out false information on global warming, how European countries have higher levels of health at a lower cost, etc. but hardly any right-wing rebuttals. He may move slightly further left, and then see searches saying that democracy doesn't work because all parties are the same, how republicans want non-Christians barred from official positions (without the context that it is one or two extremists), and so on
You end up with two centre-moderates moving to opposite extremes.
Kind of an anti trust issue here...
Why? People keep saying this, but I really don't see the key things that are needed for Google to have real Anti trust issues.
A) I haven't seen any evidence that Google's monopoly is illegally acquired. People keep forgetting this, when they compare Google with Microsoft. Microsoft is a fundamentally immoral organisation. They acquired their monopoly by using illegal tactics to block other competitors (to understand the basics, have a look at Judge Jackson's findings of facts). Many of the restrictions which should be imposed on Microsoft come not simply because they have a monopoly, but because they broke the law to get that monopoly. If it were anyone but Microsoft people would say "if you can't take the time then don't do the crime"; because it's Microsoft and they are rich somehow a whole bunch of apologists appear acting as if they did nothing wrong.
B) Google is easily substitutable; it's not like a computer where you need to pay money or even an operating system where you need to know how to reinstall. You just go to a different web page, or you even just type "Bing" into Google. There is only one thing which keeps people on Google's results rather than Bings. It's not even the quality as such, which, IMHO has been going downhill since they stopped treating keywords as having to be in the page. The thing is that people trust Google not to trick them. The results are honest and clear. This is Google's biggest competitive advantage, and if it turns out that Google is wrongly ignoring twitter, that will be an opening for another search engine that is more honest. Fortunately for Google, their competitor at present is Microsoft which is congenitally incapable of honesty. The stupidity of a company which gets caught copying it's results from Google and doctoring results in favour of it's own products in the first few months after launching a new search engine is astounding.
So; what is a search engine? A system which gives an opinion about which pages they would like to recommend based on your query string. If Google's opinion is that you are better with their data than Twitters that's fine for them to say. More importantly; if Google doesn't want to pay for access to Twitter's data. Or any other bunch of factors at Google's discretion then that is Google's decision. In order to change that you would need real evidence that Google broke the law in ways which greatly benefitted their search engine "monopoly".
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
bundling of personalized search into a conventional search engine could be construed as anti-competitive in the personalized search market.
twitter and facebook would probably consider themselves players in the personalized search market, so the assumption is that they may challenge google for monopolizing personal search that users might otherwise currently use twitter and facebook for.
i don't see the point in telling people how many bits of toast i'm making for breakfast on twatter, facecrap is a crock of shit for obvious reasons, and spoogel results are getting less relevant with each passing day. i can only hope they all implode into each other in an epic court battle.
[Personalized search just doesn't work!] Well, it worked for some time, but lately even when looking for some completely innocent words, like e.g. "frog" I tend to get only kinky results.
I'd recommend pron browsing mode to bypass Google picking up your kinky preferences for your personalized search!
If you have a google account, you already have personalized search.
That's why I always make sure I'm not logged into Google when searching. Frankly speaking, 'personalized search' is not a very good idea. It has the potential to boost your cognitive biases until you have a completely distorted view of reality. Hopefully not too many people fall into this trap.
There is an interesting TED talk about this: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk
Duck Duck Go made this website to reaise awareness of bubbling: http://dontbubble.us/
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The problem lies not just with the monopolist, but with the way the economy works. It allows for only a handful of influential companies in any market segment (including web-search, electronics, etc.) We expect those companies to behave well (following human ethical rules), but we forget that they have to live up to the shareholders' expectations, and thus are greedy by design.
A) Like someone else said, it does not matter HOW a company gets into a monopoly, but more how it behaves once it acquired its dominant position. How we can expect it to behave in the future is not even important because things may radically change with the change of a board.
Bundling of products is anti-competitive, and should not be accepted from either MS or Google. Example: assume you are a game developer, and Google suddenly starts promoting a game that is very much like your game on their homepage (bundling), and starts giving it away for free (dumping), then you are basically out of business.
B) Monopolists or near-monopolists are not easily replaceable, almost by definition. Further, you make it seem like companies can compete in "honesty". Well, unfortunately, that is just not how the market works. In fact, perhaps a more realistic view is that companies compete in "deception". Google is an advertisement company, and thus may be considered masters in this art.
What we need is ways to break up large companies into smaller ones. Ways to commoditize their products. Like many programmers know, it makes more sense to build a system out of small modules which are open and easy to replace, than to build a large monolithic closed-source system. This is where economists and lawmakers can actually learn something from programmers.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
This seems to me to be a misunderstanding. Google will index anything they can get their hands on. They aren't indexing Twitter because Twitter told them not to. They can't index parts of Facebook that are relevant to me (ie stuff that I can see because my friends have told Facebook to share it with their friends) because they don't have access to that information (and Facebook have no real right to give it to them).
The only way Google can get their hands on non-public data shared between friends is if they are the provider those friends have chosen broker that information.
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Not everyone searches "who is better republicans or democrats" on Google. :-) (BTW, the first result for me suggests that the "Democrats are better for the economy").
When I search for "cookies" I very much appreciate that the first result is the Wikipedia page for HTTP cookies and the second one is the documentation for the cookielib module in the Python standard library. Both are very relevant results for me.
My grandmother, on the other hand, is probably happier to get a website with recipes.
People in the US searching for "United" probably want an airline website, in the UK some people might be more interested in a soccer team.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()