Google Abused Its Power By Quashing a Report Critical Of Its Service, Reporter Says (gizmodo.com)

In the wake of claims that Google got a think-tank research team sacked for criticizing the company, a respected journalist is alleging other abuses by the search giant. Kashmir Hill, a reporter at Gizmodo, is claiming that when she worked for Forbes six years ago, Google told the the magazine's staff that if publishers didn't add the "+" Google Plus social network button at the bottom of stories, those articles would come up lower in search results. From her report: I published a story headlined, "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers," that included bits of conversation from the meeting. (An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.) Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. [...] Given that I'd gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down -- a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it -- and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory -- a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google's crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly.

Comments

Poor retarded racist APK posts again

[Anonymous Coward]

I see that poor retarded racist APK posted in this thread. It must really be hard being such a retard that you have to push shitty slow bloated software that was done by other better before you. APK wrote a file aggregator and like a retard calls it a hosts file engine. So why is it slow and bloated. Well we can start with the fact that something like this is a utility that should run in the background automatically. This means it does not need a GUI which like a retard APK included. Next that retard APK decided to include some DB functionality in it. Why, I don't know, it must be because he is a retard and felt a file aggregator needed to function like a database. To further prove his software is slow and bloated he had to make it multi-threaded to get some performance out of it. How big of a retard do you have to be that you need to write a multi-threaded file aggregator. I guess APK just likes getting spanked harder than an ugly redheaded step-child.

Re:Probably true.

[LeftCoastThinker]

"All people are basically selfish and abusive underneath the hood the only thing that changes is circumstances and perspective."

This is true to an extent, but just look at all of the selfless people reaching out to help others in the wake of hurricane Harvey. People who actually adhere to Christian teachings believe their highest command is to love others as they love themselves. That creates some very clear guidelines for fairness and charity. They also believe that there will be an accounting after death where everyone is held responsible not only for their actions but their motivations behind those actions as well. While not perfect in this world, that is pretty strong motivation to act fairly and charitably.

OTOH, Atheists, hedonists and agnostics can be altruistic, but they have no motivation beyond their own self interest to feel good about themselves, which is where you get many of the cut throat business types that crush thousands of people financially to get ahead unfairly and unethically and then create a charitable foundation at 55 because they fell like the shit that they actually are and want to feel better about themselves and all the bad things they have done. Modern Satanists also fall in this category.

Muslims are only charged with fairness towards other Muslims and acts of charity towards fellow Muslims, and any charity or fairness towards the infidel is for the express purpose of conversion. Infidels who refuse to convert can justifiably be slain at any time.

Buddhism teaches detachment from the world, which if implemented makes Buddhists unable and unwilling to help those in need and removes them from productive society altogether.

Hinduism is a mixed bag regarding fairness and charity, there is some implementation of the concepts in that world view.

The bottom line is that your statement very significantly depends on the world view held by the individual. I would argue that there is significant evidence that Google has been co-opted at the upper management and C-level by alt-left radicals who tend to be in practice atheists, hedonists or agnostics. The same is true of most college campuses. This is why we are seeing the motto change from "Do no evil" to "Do the alt-left thing" and unfair and unethical examples of behavior by Google increasing dramatically in frequency.

I predict that within the next 10 years we will either see heavy regulation reign in Google's behavior, the company broken up as a monopoly, or a dystopian reality where Google rules the world by brainwashing the populace via self serving search filtering algorithms, because if you can't find it it on Google it might as well not exist at all.