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New Study Accuses Google of Anti-competitive Search Behavior
An anonymous reader writes: Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu — the man who coined the term "network neutrality" — has published a new study suggesting that Google's new method of putting answers to simple search queries at the top of the results page is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers. For subjective search queries — e.g. "What's the best [profession] in [city]?" — Google frequently figures out a best-guess answer to display first, favoring its own results to do so. The study did some A/B testing with a group of 2,690 internet users and found they were 45% more likely to click on merit-based results than on Google's listings. Wu writes, "Search engines are widely understood as key mediators of the web's speech environment, given that they have a powerful impact on who gets heard, what speech is neglected, and what information generally is reached. ... The more that Google directs users to its own content and its own properties, the more that speakers who write reviews, blogs and other materials become invisible to their desired audiences."
Who knew?
Seriously, I personally know the difference between sponsored and unsponsored links. I use the short-cut links in the sponsored section when the same place shows up near the top of the unsponsored section. Otherwise, I take those links with a big block of salt.
Folks, Google is about as good as we can expect to get for a company that makes its money off of advertising-supported services. They need to be watched and called out when they do marginal things, but they aren't deliberately evil as corporate policy goes.
Facebook, on the other hand...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It's extremely important to have useful results in a search engine, quickly. Some of the worst offenders are when you try to define a word- the page is literred with shit links being like:
Definition of “frangible” | Collins English Dictionary ...
www.collinsdictionary.com English Dictionary
Definition of “frangible” | The official Collins English Dictionary online. Comprehensive and authoritative, rely on Collins for up-to-date English with insights into
Meanwhile, at the top of the page, Google has the actual answer (not every dictionary is shit, many have it in their summary text).
So overall the fast results are what we want out of a search engine- the answer.
The more that Google directs users to its own content and its own properties, the more that speakers who write reviews, blogs and other materials become invisible to their desired audiences.
First of all, the notion that Google is directing people to their own services should surprise no one. Anyone who honestly expects them to be an unbiased party is delusional. Google is an advertising company (well over 90% of their revenue is advertising based) so everything they do should be viewed with that in mind. Providing unbiased search results is a second order consideration at best for them no matter what motto they claim to follow.
Second, is this really a problem? There are other search engines out there so if someone is unhappy with the answers they get then use a different one. Google has gotten to where they are mostly because they've provided a better service than their competitors. But there is very little keeping people using Google if there is reason to believe that has changed. Other search engines are only a URL away after all. I see potential for a problem but its a very small problem even in the worst case.
Wu writes, "Search engines are widely understood as key mediators of the web's speech environment, given that they have a powerful impact on who gets heard, what speech is neglected, and what information generally is reached. ... The more that Google directs users to its own content and its own properties, the more that speakers who write reviews, blogs and other materials become invisible to their desired audiences."
Then users will slowly realize that the Google's search results are not trustworthy and they will move away from Google as the search engine. The market will correct itself.
Greatest asset Google has is the trust it has earned over the years. If it misuses it it will lose the trust and the company will lose. I am not saying Google will not engage in such behavior. All I am saying is, there are natural constraints and market feedback against abuse. So we do not need any serious government action to correct it. All that government sanction and fines and browser selection dialog did not cut Microsoft down to size. A competitor did. Google has good competition from Facebook, Twitter and other social media muscling into the internet ad business and search business. That will keep Google in check more than any remedy proposed by a professor, or a lobbyist, or a judge or a legislator.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Don't like google?
Bing it.
AHHHH! Please, government! Protect us from Big Search!
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
A free service that no one is forced to use is being whined about?
Slow news day, huh?
Start your own search engine. How hard could it be? :)
... search engine.
It was really painful initially because bing used to be garbage. I would try searches on bing first and if it was failing which was frequent in the early days then I'd switch back to google for that search and then go right back to bing.
These days bing and google do a equally good job so far as I can tell.
All that said, I miss Altavista. :)
I felt they were just as good as google in the old days. I don't know why google ultimately dominated altavista. They talk about their magical algorithms but every time they're explained in detail it turns out they're neither mysterious nor especially different from what anyone else was doing.
Maybe I'm missing something. I haven't researched it extensively. I've just looked a few in depth explanations of the system as well as years of anecdotal experience with the various engines. Google became better than everyone else but that only happened AFTER they became popular. Altavista was initially as good or better. I think one of the funnier things to go down was the whole war over the google bar versus bing bar. Most people don't know this but the top search engines rely heavily on what amounts to spyware which is used to determine what sort of page you actually wanted to see when you typed in whatever into the engine.
Google got upset with MS because they were supposedly copying google's results. But what had happened was that people with the bing bar were using google and so the bing bar learning from that and inputing the results into the bing system. Google accused MS of intentionally copying them. But it was just the stupid bing bar.
Google of course does the same thing with Chrome etc... and of course the f'ing tracking cookies and javascript are ridiculous these days.
No script and cookie monster for the win.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
All I have to say is use another search engine if you don't like it. No one is forcing you to use Google.
Googe is a Basic Human Right. The US was founded on the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- do really expect people can pursue happiness with Bing?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
I think you're generally safest accessing Bing search through duckduckgo (aka, just use duckduckgo- they pay Microsoft to use the Bing engine, but it isn't wrapped as lamely). The underlying Bing engine is definitely good.
Google can never be a traditional monopoly. If they abuse their status people will simply use different search engines. There is exactly zero cost to use a different search engine. This idea that we need to treat Google like ATT (who is a actual gateway to people they serve) is absurd on every level.
The problem for these people is that they haven't been able to convince others to use different search or haven't even bother trying. There should be no case for anti-trust actions against an actor that has zero cost to switch.
Google is still the best, but Bing is very good. Altavista lost (at least for me), because it was filled with corrupt results. There's plenty of malicious websites who only want to create spam, and if you make a search engine, they want you to deliver spam for them. Altavista couldn't get that shit out of there enough. The core initial assumption on search engines is that people would write a page with product, a message, people debating, or something factual, and this became "race to the top of the search engine". That was the #1 driver for me with Google- they immediately and aggressively fought that shit. The fact that they are losing ground on this today is sad, but I doubt they're anywhere close to done.
If Altavista could have just filtered those sites, they'd still be a solid engine, IMO.
I don't know why google ultimately dominated altavista.
Simple white page, not covered in *blink> and other crap. That's all there is to it. Kinda like the old /.
It's really very simple, sometimes good enough can be the best, but people don't often see this and must improve.
Google can do what it wants.
In legalese, that would be: Google is not an arm of the government, is a corporation, and is free to do as its company governance determines is in the best interests of its shareholders.
Simply put, nobody forces users to choose to use google. There are plenty of search engines, some good, some bing, etc. Some don't protect your privacy, some duckduckgo. In the end if the choice is to use google there are advantages (they'll try to give you an answer they think you'll find useful) and disadvantages (Tim Wu might jump out from behind a bush and yell "aha!" at you).
Google's search algorithms have made this world a better place.
I'm glad they don't have to appease anyone to keep offering that superior product.
E
Our taxes shouldn't be paying for a search that isn't fairly displaying results. Oh wait, they are providing this service for free, and we are free to use whatever search we want. What's the problem?
I switched to Google because they had a very simple front page. No massive background image, not covered in ads and news stories, no streaming text across the top. Just the Google name, and various doodles for special days. When on dialup or dsl, that matters a lot.
Now, even though I have a high speed internet connection, I still use them for the same feature. It isn't a speed issue anymore, just the fact that when I want to do a search, I don't want anything but the text box on the screen.
For this article, I just did a search on Google, Duckduckgo, and Bing, and all three returned very similar results for "best hairdresser in dallas".
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I thought the whole point of a search engine was to use its own results first.
It was an engineer who invented their motto. It was not the CEO nor founders!
Since there is nothing tying your OS to your browser to your search engine the old retort is still a valid one. ANYONE can get in the game. If Google is dominant, it's more like McDonalds than Microsoft.
Browsers can even send you to a different default search engine if you're too lazy to try something else on your own.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I use a script blocking program to block the background. Also, I do the search through the firefox search bar so I don't even see the main site. I just see the results page.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
google had that stuff as well at the time as I remember.
Link farms were actually quite common on the search engines until quite recently.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Nobody noticed the so-called study was sponsored by Yelp, who is suing Google in Europe? So many news web sites reported Google screwing your search result, but so little mentioned who sponsored this.
I'm sure glad we have law professors to save us from ourselves!
-- do really expect people can pursue happiness with Bing?
Actually, Yelp paid for this study and staffed it as well...
See the footnotes of the first page in the first link in TFS
http://www.slideshare.net/lutherlowe/wu-l
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Yes, it is the most ubiquitous and 'easy default' for those that don't trust M$ either. Users are free to choose their own search engine. On M$ machines BING is put up front unless overt action is taken to force google or some other engine to be the default. Most desktops are still owned by M$/Winders. I have no clue what Apple does... They probably don't care if they can't make a buck off it or it doesn't sway public opinion toward them. Android uses either Google and Chrome or Opera as the browser (chrome is the default I believe, so Google would be the default). But Android does allow the users to choose their poison. I am sure that some chinese black hat would love you to use their preferred service machine, and it will be tooootalllyyy secure (best sarcastic voice) that someone would rather use than Google or M$!
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Google frequently figures out a best-guess answer to display first, favoring its own results to do so.
What else would it display first, other than the its own results?
From what I recall at the time, Google was initially a good quality engine, but Altavista had a huge lead in the size of their index. At the time, the size of your web page index was considered the biggest factor in search quality and ranking algorithms were... important, but considered secondary. Once Google's bots reached a critical mass, their algorithms won.
Log in or piss off.
I felt they were just as good as google in the old days. I don't know why google ultimately dominated altavista. They talk about their magical algorithms but every time they're explained in detail it turns out they're neither mysterious nor especially different from what anyone else was doing.
No they were not as good as google in the old days.
It is not mysterious once the algorithm has been explained.
It was significantly different from what others were doing.
If you searched for "battle of midway" in all other engines, they would count how many times the phrase "battle of midway" appears in a web page and rank it based on that number. Google would search all the links in all the web pages that have the phrase "battle of midway" and find the most referred to site for that phrase. That is how it ranked a site. This was radically different. It earned Ph Ds for the founders. That was why Google's "I am feeling lucky" hit was better than first 100 results returned by Altavista.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
-- do really expect people can pursue happiness with Bing?
Actually, Yelp paid for this study and staffed it as well... See the footnotes of the first page in the first link in TFS http://www.slideshare.net/lutherlowe/wu-l
Ha ha...Yelp involved in accusing others of unfair practices? Oh, the blessed irony.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
It comes and goes. I consider it pretty rough right now, but I'm sure it depends on your searches. The value subtractors just have to mangle enough search to be profitable, but google (and others) has to handle all of their scramblings to be a good search engine.
At the start, Google was crap-free, because no one had figured out how to target them and the low-fruit approach didn't work on them. Obviously, there's always folks trying to break the system.
You are greatly simplifying the search process used by the other guys, but I think your overall gist is correct.
Though the study was co-authored by Michael Luca of Harvard Business School and Tim Wu of Columbia Law School, it was financed by online reviews company Yelp
Yelp is mad.
We're done here.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
First thing I do with a new browser is change my default search to DuckDuckGo. I wish I could say I was entirely living a Google-free life, but I do watch YouTube. Is there some way to do that without any Google/DoubleClick tracking cookies - anyone know? I'd be far happier with no Google account of any kind to tie anything to.
But, sadly, most people still give their personal details to Google in particular to sell, and that means if you're trying to launch a new product, you have to care about Google search results.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu .. has published a new study suggesting that Google's new method of putting answers to simple search queries at the top of the results page is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers."
Have you considered using another search engine, perhaps one of ixquick.com or yandex.com. Oh wait, they don't come as default on Windows and Windows sets it back to Bing on every update.
Obligatory "I'm shocked!" post.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
old school altavista was pretty simple.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
When you condense a couple of PhD theses into four lines ... something will be lost. As others pointed out simple design, not loading it up crap, aggressively fighting link spammers, typo squatters, etc kept it up.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't know. Malware authors tend to have ads that link to non-malware sites at first, and change to malware after the ads have been vetted. They know how to detect when Google/Microsoft/etc checks up on them and serve innocent data at those times.
There are ways to detect this, and ways to avoid the detection; it's an arms race. Google is better at this than Microsoft, so studies have shown that you are safer on Google than on Bing. But nothing is 100%, and sometimes people slip malware past Google too.
So it's not malice on Microsoft's part, as you seem to imply. Less competence maybe, or a lack of resources thrown at the problem, or a lack of corporate will; I don't know.
I really hope that your post is meant to be satire. We have enough laws. Seriously, we do. In fact, I think we could stand to lose a number of them and then enforce the ones we have. Nobody, with any ability to influence, is suggesting that Google is obligated to display anything other than what they want to display. That is good. Let's keep it that way. You can, of course, have unweighted search results when you create your own search engine.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Add-ons: Disconnect and Ghostery come to mind. Disconnect is actually suing Google for anti-competitive behavior according to a blurb that popped up when it updated earlier this evening. I did not read more about it. Anyhow, those are two pretty decent choices.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I miss Mosaic's gopher search functionality. There is little left to the gopher space. I have checked. Bastards...You are all bastards for killing the gopher.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And not riddled with SEO garbage, intrusive user tracking scripts, obnoxious ads, and other unsavory shit.
WTF? Have you BEEN to any Google-owned pages and, you know, actually looked at the things they contain? They may not contain links to OTHER tracking or unsavory shit sites but they certainly have tracking scripts and tracking cookies. They are not better simply because they are Google. In fact they are probably worse because they are, you know, Google and those same scripts and tracking cookies are on a very large number of other sites which enables them to do those same things you are complaining about as if they are not done by Google. Hell, they are engineered by Google!
Go get Opera and then get Disconnect and NoScript Suite Lite. Grab Ghostery too. You can run all three together just fine. Then poke away at Google. Notice all the blurbs? Pick a random Google page - almost any page will do, from what I have noticed, except the Search page and GMail pages. Hell, if you want a very GOOD example of the sad state of affairs - grab Ghostery and click on the fucking PRIVACY page at Google. Seriously... Google tracking... On their privacy policy page. AdBlock happily announces that it is blocking all sorts of stuff when I do a search at Google. Who knows what else it is blocking - it may be blocking scripts that are now not recognized as being blocked by the other apps.
So, no... Google is just as awful with the tracking scripts (on their PRIVACY POLICY PAGE no less), obnoxious ads (at least they are not blinking and moving ads so I give them credit for that), and other unsavory shit (such as tracking cookies and, I imagine, web beacons). What would have made you think that they were somehow not guilty of these behaviors? They are riddled with these things. I guess you could have said, "Not as riddled." You could have then tried to argue it. You did not say that though so I am using your own verbiage as my source of information and, well, I fail to see how you came to the conclusions you have reached.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I understand all that. What got me is that I thought I was clicking on the top search result for an official site, but it was an advertisement. I simply couldn't tell the top search result from the advertisements. Bing didn't do enough to categorize it as an ad. I think they want you to misclick ads thinking they're legit sites to gain more money.
God spoke to me
Thanks! I hadn't heard of Disconnect - I'll have to check it out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It is kind of interesting but not as refined as I would like. You do not have a lot of room to truly dial in your blocking - at least as far as I have found and I have clicked all the buttons I can find in it - so it is more a site-wide blocking. When you find a site that is not functioning you can disable it, go through a strange visualization and block/unblock some things, or you can whitelist the site. I find it does a fine job and the need to dial in is much less than I expected. The visualization mode is rather neat though may take a second to find as it really is not located in a very intuitive place nor does it really indicate that you can click on it. After you find it, it is called Visualize Page, then it is recognizable but I still think the UI could be improved.
Now, as APK has also mentioned, there are other ways to do this. You can find the domain name and add it to your hosts file. That method is less resource intensive and requires only you. You get to make your list match your needs. That requires maintaining it and building it but that work lessens over time. This application serves an additional function that I have not seen anyone tie in with the hosts file yet. It allows you to actually visualize how poorly these companies treat your privacy by giving you a nice handy number and you can see how many things it has blocked. This site, even with being filtered by NoScript, AdBlock, and Ghostery shows that Disconnect is still blocking an additional 13 elements. It is worth it, I feel, to install it and use it if even for only a little while. I believe it is also available on Chrome and if it is not then you can just install an additional extension which will enable you to install Opera extensions. I have no idea if there is a version for Firefox.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."