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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it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory -- a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.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.
Power is most easily apparent when it's being abused.
Oh the irony.
News a 11.
" I Criticized Google. It Got Me Fired. That's Corporate Power" Barry Lynn.. here is the story
http://m.ndtv.com/opinion/i-criticized-google-it-got-me-fired-thats-corporate-power-1744793
As a disclaimer, I happen to think that Google is no different than most other multinational corporations -- that is, they are as evil as it is profitable to be.
But so many of the criticisms I read of Google seem to be oblique -- that is, instances of Google playing hardball, but with little indication of actual malice or illegal behavior.
This story is very different from that. This behavior is indefensible and unambiguously abuse of monopoly.
While everyone is up in arms about Google being evil I am a little on the wary side of this. Not because the story is untrue, but rather the implication that only Google is involved with attempting to influence rankings for search results. Everyone has been looking at gaming the system, companies regularly hired people to do just this. I admit that this is blatant but it is not like only Forbes could put the Google button on their page. They appeared to do it with anyone that was willing to participate.
The other issue I have with this piece is that from a story she did 6 years ago, did they change during this time or is still true? In this case I would like to see a little less complaining and a few more facts about the current state of the problem rather than a rehash of an old article.
...yeah, about that....
Why wait 6 years to come out with this stuff?
Got an axe to grind with Google?
While the story doesn't seem very far fetched, the delay is highly suspect.
Like a public utility. It's simply too powerful and has way too much control over our decisions, to the point that we don't even realize it. They push their own products in search and then say it's organic search results, and they do the same with politicians or issues they like (burying right wing sites while pushing up left wing ones as well as promoting Hillary and the Democrats)
And for those who say there's competition, Bing and yahoo are absolutely jokes compared to Google, and Google has such a large database of information that creating a real competitor is impossible. I'm not generally one for government interfering with businesses, but Google has simply become too powerful and damaging to the flow of freedom of speech and information that a democracy depends on.
Generally the first step to "lawyer/judge/court" is "reporter"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
ANY organization becomes more evil, (from the standpoint of the average citizen), when it becomes bigger and/or more powerful. That 'and/or' qualifier I put there was intentional. Mozilla didn't have the kind of power that Google has, but after they reached a certain size their own internal power struggles, empire-building tendencies, and sheer hubris led to ignoring their users' needs and desires. As for Google, they are both very big and very powerful. "Might makes right" became a cliché for a very good reason, and Google is a fine example of this.
I've long argued that laissez-faire ought to apply to small businesses, with a sliding scale of progressively more government interference as a company gets larger. The catch-22 here is that government will become bigger and more powerful as a result, with the same consequences. So what we really need is an educated, thoughtful, politically engaged populace. But governments and corporations have that covered: schooling that teaches knee-jerk obedience to authority and frowns upon truly critical thinking, combined with bread and circuses and copious advertising, ensure that most people will take what they're given and do as they're told, even as they imagine themselves to be rebels.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
They had to somehow "push" Google Plus down our throats. I would give some advice to Google if they want some traction.
Improve its interface. Have consumers continue to consume video content on the screen even while scrolling and consuming other material.
In other words, borrow a leaf from Facebook. They seem to be doing pretty well. Emulate the successful.
anyone still using the internet in 2017 is willfully giving their data directly to the NSA
Fixed that for you.
does it work on ipad?
I dunno. By my reading, A and B are saying precisely the same thing.
Hear me out because i'm trying to be objective about this.
Google has +1 buttons on a fuckload of pages and it indexes them all. The question is, how much additional computational power would it require to identify the few pages that are not fond of Google? Given all that power used, how much money would they be paying just to suppress a negative articles?
I don't know the numbers but it seems to me that it would be rather costly to correctly identify which pages to avoid putting a +1 button on. I get the creeping feeling it's more likely that they left an html tag open or something which resulted in eating the button and thus not being displayed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I knew from day one when they tried to push thier "Do No Evil" mantra really meant Don't Get Caught.
Now they are (or perhaps always have been) an echo chamber of contemptible ideologies, distilled cancer.
I think they are about due for an antitrust breakup.
Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant and New Think Tank Emails show "How Google Wields its Power" in Washington
Quashing reports, manipulating search results, and throwing its weight around seem par for the course for Google. After all, they want some return on their investment in politicians, the media, and intellectuals.
Can you explain how A does not imply B? It seems to me that if pages are upranked based on Google+ likes then pages without Google+ buttons would obviously get their rankings lowered.
I had to sign in to see if I had any mod points for you. Sadly I did not and it's a damned shame since yours is the boring sort of mundane truthful reality that never gets the attention it deserves.
Not at all.
I think it's funny that this has been modded to -1, though it was sadly predictable. To the people modding this to oblivion, I've heard you justify your position because it's what's "right". An old saying that a lot of people seem to have forgotten.
"The road to hell is paved in good intentions".
This silencing anything you disagree with because "it's bad and wrong" may make you feel good, but stop and think about the larger ramifications of your actions would you?
I am very glad that Bing has become so very friendly to Tor in the guise of Duck Duck Go.
Many searches that I test between Bing and Duck Duck Go are identical, and Bing is listed as a search provider for Duck Duck Go. I do not know if Microsoft is an investor in Duck Duck Go, but it would not surprise me.
Many harsh things could and have been said about Microsoft, but at this point they are the champions of anonymous search, and a far better corporate citizen in this regard than Google.
In related news, Google abuses it's power in advertising. And Google abuses it's power in video. And Google bullies a leftist think tank.
Read the links now, while you still can. If you have Google Fiber, maybe read them on your phone. (Of course you can't read one of the articles in question -- Google made sure of that.)
...is the tool that I use for Google search. I see no reason for Google to associate my account with my search history, nor should they retain my activities beyond what I explicitly permit. It is prudent to take steps to blind them.
It has always been "Don't, be evil".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So Google essentially tried to extort Forbes and you are saying Forbes is evil for exposing that....uh... you work for google or soemthing?
The other interesting part is the article being in Google's search until it was taken down. Then, suspiciously, it disappeared from Google's cache very quickly.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Orwell's 1984. If there were ever a more prescient book I can't identify it.
1984 should be required reading for our children. But soon, just like "Gone With the Wind", "1984" will be more and more banned in the public sphere.
Thought, initially not banned by your government, but by the Wizards of Silicon Valley. The ones who hide behind a digital curtain, leading you down a yellow brick road, and adorning you with stories of how you too can have a heart.
But as the curtain of "Do No Evil" devolves into "We Tell You What is Evil" even the most dense among us realize they live in chains.
Chains not denoted by iron and steel, but by plastic, silicon, and lithium.
It is incumbent upon good women and men, who believe in freedom of thought, to take a stand. For if they don't children who never read 1984 will live in 1984.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Why was it a reasonable presumption that the meeting was confidential? Did they say in the meeting that the content of the meeting would be confidential? Did Google ask Forbes to sign an NDA that purported to prevent either party from disclosing the illegal activities of the other party? (It's illegal to abuse your market position in one area to gain an advantage in another market.)
(A) implies something like that going into a hospital puts you in an environment where there are sick people, and so you might get sick. It's just what happens because you're breathing in air that they're trying to keep sterile because people are filling it with virulent pathogens.
(B) implies something like that the hospital despots are twirling their moustaches as they watch you sit in the waiting room, slowly leaning closer to the monitor. The smell of insurance money. They push the big red button, and the vent above you starts to cough out a combination of tuberculosis and influenza.
You use tone and specific words to manipulate emotional context. Use negative tones to convey that someone is being malicious, and positive tones to convey that someone has provided a helpful tool. (A) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and adding a Google+ share button raises you above baseline." (B) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and not adding a Google+ button pushes you below baseline." What the journalist wrote says Google penalizes you for not doing a thing, rather than that doing a thing allows Google to provide better results with better data gathering.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
A) Google to web site person: "By putting these +1 buttons on articles, we get to know what articles are liked better so the search algorithms work better".
B) Web site person to Google: "Surprise! I'm a journalist. Here's my headline: 'Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers' ".
The first is a natural consequence of how computers work. They are stupid and need data to help them.
The second is an accusation of abuse of power. These are not the same things. The first is true, the second is a twisting of the truth by a journalist to create a false perception.
Here's how I imagine it went down...
Engineer: I have a good idea! Let's use +1 indications from Google Plus so we can improve the quality of search results by knowing what articles are liked.
-- EITHER --
DataScientist: I share your goal of higher quality search results, but tying it to Google Plus is a poor way to achieve it. That's because Google Plus isn't widely adopted. First we will get a signal of "which articles are liked by the biased subgroup that are Google Plus enthusiasts" rather than what articles are more generally liked. Second, the system will offer perverse incentives for websites to game the system by overly promoting the +1 button in detriment to their actual natural organic use. We need to build more accurate measures of which articles are liked.
-- OR --
BusinessManager: That's great! Not only will it improve the quality of search, but it'll do so by leveraging third parties to promote the Google Plus service on our behalf! Ship it!
I really wish I could understand a word of what you just said.
Caution: Contents under pressure
I dunno. By my reading, A and B are saying precisely the same thing.
If you squint hard enough. The main difference is that B claims that not adding the buttons will hurt traffic, but the correct interpretation of A is that adding the buttons might help or hurt traffic, and that the effect of not adding them when everyone else does is unpredictable.
Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content. Without the buttons, the only signal you have is whether or not users click the link to go to the page based on the title and snippet. That's a useful signal, but it's really a signal about how interested people are in the title and snippet. It doesn't say much about the content. You can try to infer more about the content quality based on whether or not people come back to the search page and click other links after looking at it, but that inference is weak for many reasons.
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
So, sites with buttons wouldn't get any sort of automatic boost -- or demotion. They'd just provide more information for Google to uprank or downrank their content based on user feedback. Sites without the button simply don't provide any signal other than the pre-existing one, so nothing can be inferred about user satisfaction of the content, only of the title & snippet.
This means that sites with buttons that get lots of +1s may rise above those without buttons. But it also means that sites with buttons that get few +1s may fall below those without buttons. Whether this hurts or helps sites without buttons is unclear.
What is clear is that (as always), the very best way to get your site upranked is to provide good content, with a good title & snippet.
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Not News: Big, powerful corporation uses influence to remove criticism from its records.
News: Google re-adopts the motto "Don't Be Evil" and lives by it.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I'm sorry, but a "Google +" button does not add one single solitary piece of information to search results.
It merely provides a sort order.
Caution: Contents under pressure
The amended version, after their plant on the apple board stole the iphone idea
Another person clueless about history,
IBM did the first smartphone (touch screen phone with applications) in 1992, the 'multitouch' features of the iPhone were from the acquisition of FingerWorks in 2005 - a company that a variety of phone companies had been interested in.
The LG Prada had been released the year before to wide applause by industrial designers for its capacitive touch screen.
Samsung and Nokia both had touch screen smart phones, but were worried about cost, so hadn't released them yet, because they didn't think people would pay 'that much' for a phone.
So the 'iPhone idea' wasn't Apples idea at all and being on Apples board almost certainly didn't impact androids development. Apple simply provided the most refined version of the smartphone idea, one that was being simultaneously pursued by all major phone companies.
http://mashable.com/2012/11/09...
Do Know Evil
Use Bing
Most of my search results were lacking in relevance vs what I could find in Google. Sure I could probably refine them but its not 1999 and Google as much as I hate them and think they are not good for the internet does give me the results that I need up the top of the search listing.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yes, I agree with most of this. I have a little quibble, though...
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
If the goal is to find the highest quality content, the +1 button seems dubious. It's not measuring quality, it's measuring popularity. And it's a poor measure of popularity at that because of the heavy selection bias involved (most people aren't going to click it no matter how they feel about it.)
In other words, it's not really telling you much more than tracking who clicks on what links tells you. That this stuff figures so much in search rankings at all is probably part of why Google's search results have been getting worse.
Not
You're correct that all the technology was already in place - but I'm pretty sure I remember reading that Google basically scrapped their existing Android interface and redesigned it from scratch after the iPhone came out.
Apple has never been anything close to a technological innovator, but it's dishonest not to give them credit for producing streamlined user-friendly interfaces that become the standard against which all others are measured. They never do anything new, but they do do user interfaces *right* - at least for the non-techy masses. And even as a techy that avoids Apple products, I appreciate the influence they've had on more capable interfaces.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's all the same totalitarianism.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Why would any meeting with a marketing department reasonably be assumed to be confidential?
#DeleteChrome
It's well known that Marissa Mayer came up with the slogan "Don't Be Evil".
When she left Google, she unfortunately only took the "Don't" with her. So Google was left with "Be Evil"; while "Don't" neatly summarizes her tenure at Yahoo.
#DeleteChrome
It's like saying that if you insure your restaurant with Big Vinnie Protection & Security Inc it's less likely to burn down.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't see what's "false" about the perception. It's reasonable for Google to claim that adding G+ buttons will improve search results, while at the same time viewing it as an abuse of Google's search predominance to push an otherwise bad product.
Well, that concept has legs. Let's try some more of this.
"Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content: if you don't spend half an hour giving them detailed feedback on the pages you visit, they can't uprank the best content; it is therefore perfectly legitimate to give you the choice of either complying or doxxing you and releasing your porn browsing habits."
The author called Google's PR team to verify the facts in the article. If Google wanted to keep those things secret, they should have mentioned it to the PR team.
Also, Google shouldn't penalize site's search results for not putting "+1" on their site. That alone is a huge abuse of their power, whether they kept it secret or not.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That post was just APK going full retard. He does that a lot. That post frequently shows up in threads APK posts in. He rarely claims it but he has a few times. Other times like today he professes full support and he has in the past openly stated that he believes it to be true. What he fails to realize is that the style of that post matches his too much so he thinks he can get away with posting garbage like that and no one will know it was him. It is one of his many tactics when he looses a discussion which he does all the time. Other things he does is change the subject, move the goal posts (he does this less as he looses there too), try to deflect, blame others, post support from himself without signing it to make it look like someone supports him, or declare he won by fiat.
Reposting the ACs comment. If you want it to disappear you will have to work harder.
Both posts were throwing mud at each other. And both posts were pretty accurate descriptions. But let's see if this gets modded down.
"and the right will come at you saying what is good for business is good for everyone.
And everything will continue as normal.
Almost like it was designed that way."
You have less evidence of what really happened than the reporter. You talk about biases and then proceed to describe how your past experience with an unrelated reporter on an unrelated subject caused you to decide this piece is false. Are you retarded?
It is one of four times where I have direct knowledge of facts showing the reporter twisting facts to a false narrative. That is every single time I've had direct, first hand knowledge of something reported in the press. So that strongly suggests a lot of press reports are twisting facts.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Did they say in the meeting that the content of the meeting would be confidential?
According to Google, yes, they did. The journalist's defense is that she didn't personally sign the NDA.
Ok, I'll give you that. Have a great day!
Caution: Contents under pressure
In the article she mentions that a Google spokesperson said that there was a NDA for the meeting... but nobody else seems to have heard anything about it. You'd think that if there really was a NDA, somebody other than an anonymous "google spokesperson" would know about it. (In the article, she refers to it as "the claim that the meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement." The wording is interesting here: if she had any good evidence that a NDA existed, she would have phrased this as "the fact that the meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement.")
A couple of people wrote articles commenting on her article before it got deleted: https://www.mediapost.com/publ... https://raventools.com/blog/fo...
The difference is that the Left says, "surrender to us and we will provide". And the never provide.
The Right says, "here is a tool called capitalism. Employ it and you can succeed." And it usually does.
There is at least one part of her claims that is factually untrue.
This would be interesting if it were true. But apparently you can't read, since you assert facts that aren't in the article.
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.)
I know for a fact Forbes has an employee handbook, a legal contract, that must be agreed to and signed in front of an HR representative before your employment start-date is even chosen. That contract explicitly states an employee is also agreeing to uphold all other Forbes contracts and agreements. So she did sign such an agreement (or optionally is lying about ever working at Forbes, but the former seems much more likely)
No. First, you haven't given me the text of the agreement you "know for a fact" she signed. Second, the statement we're talking about is about the purported NDA, which you haven't shown even exists.
Additionally, when she states she "hadn't been told the meeting was confidential", that may have been true while she was speaking to Google PR, but isn't true in the long run. She even admits it:
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
Right there she was informed by her boss of the internal Google agreement.
This is the part where you are showing that you are unable to read or comprehend English. This statement is very interesting: the boss does not mention a NDA (!)
This is actually the strongest evidence that no such NDA exists: if there had been a NDA which, by some oversight, she hadn't been asked to sign-- an actual legal agreement that Forbes wasn't allowed to publish anything said in the meeting-- her boss would absolutely have mentioned it at this point. The fact that he doesn't bring it up is damning.
That's how it is supposed to work, her boss is supposed to be the one to make sure she is aware of such an agreement, not Google PR or anyone else.
Right. And the fact that he didn't is very strong evidence that the purported NDA did not exist. What he said was that the article was "problematic". What he didn't say was "we can't publish that because it is covered by a NDA."
Well, there's this - showing a 2007 Android phone's interface versus that of a post-iPhone Android G1:
https://www.technobuffalo.com/...
#DeleteChrome
Yes, I agree with most of this. I have a little quibble, though...
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
If the goal is to find the highest quality content, the +1 button seems dubious. It's not measuring quality, it's measuring popularity. And it's a poor measure of popularity at that because of the heavy selection bias involved (most people aren't going to click it no matter how they feel about it.)
I'd say it's actually less biased towards measuring popularity than it is toward measuring agreement. Neither of those is exactly what you want, but it's still additional data about users' opinions of the articles. And it actually does contain an implicit measure of relevance and utility (which are the primary qualities sought): Most people who find it irrelevant or useless won't even get to the bottom, and so will never see the +1 button.
In other words, it's not really telling you much more than tracking who clicks on what links tells you.
This is wrong. It's an entirely separate decision based on entirely different actions. it may take some effort to figure out what it actually does and does not tell you, but it's definitely not the same thing.
That this stuff figures so much in search rankings at all is probably part of why Google's search results have been getting worse.
There's no way to respond to this. Your assessment is anecdotal and subjective. I'm aware of objective data regarding search quality, but can't share it.
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Well, that concept has legs. Let's try some more of this.
"Look at this from the perspective of a search engine trying to uprank the best content: if you don't spend half an hour giving them detailed feedback on the pages you visit, they can't uprank the best content; it is therefore perfectly legitimate to give you the choice of either complying or doxxing you and releasing your porn browsing habits."
Those words. I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
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Your assessment is anecdotal and subjective.
Absolutely true. I have no data beyond my own experience. (And truthfully, my own experience is the only thing that matters to me on this count.) But I do know, even if I'm in the minority, that I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
It irritates me because I remember when it wasn't true and I long for a search engine that is as good as Google's used to be. But, as near as I can tell, it doesn't exist.
Well, there's this - showing a 2007 Android phone's interface versus that of a post-iPhone Android G1:
You simply can't give Apple all the credit. As much as I hate to admit it (I can't abide their hardware) you have to hand it to LG as well, if not moreso.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Moot point. The idea that a multi-billion dollar multi national corp can be completely controlled by a small group of leaders is just silly. Sure the CEO and board can steer the company in a given direction, but if some middle manager 10 steps removed from the c-levels decides to do something 'evil' (whatever that means) or at least morally questionable, they aren't going to find out until it hits the front page and lawyers are filing subpoenas.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Regulate as a common carrier.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Well, there's this - showing a 2007 Android phone's interface versus that of a post-iPhone Android G1:
https://www.technobuffalo.com/...
That post-iPhone photo reminds me a lot more of other then existing PDAs than the iPhone, especially looking at the row of buttons at the bottom.
Then again, the corners are more rounded, so maybe there is something to this copying idea ...
Can you quote someone from Google claiming that a valid NDA covered that meeting? More particularly, can you actually answer the question I asked by pointing to language in the NDA that purports to silence Forbes (or its employees) if they chose to report on Google's attempted abuse of market position and attempted restraint of trade?
Also, the journalist's defense is actually that nobody told her there was an NDA until it became convenient for Google to claim there was one. You are being quite sloppy in your retelling of the journalist's account.
yes, heaven forbid someone should talk about politics on a news item about censorship and antitrust. obviously politics has nothing to do with it. the solution is clearly more xml.
If Reservoir Dogs counts as a gangster movie I've watched two. The other is the one with "I read a lot about history ... Sicilians are actually N1ggers".
You can see I'm a total movieholic, can't you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
See the quotes? Do you understand the concept of "sarcasm"?
What's your IQ? 85?
How much does Google's PR firm pay you to post this idiotic racist crap?
I wish we could give up on this left/right bullshit. The terms are so vague and contradictory as to be useless for political discussion.
Ponder for a moment that V.I. Lenin, leader of a successful Communist revolution and founder of the Soviet Union, wrote a book *against* leftism. https://archive.org/details/Le...
See what I mean? Making left/right arguments just adds confusion to whatever is being discussed.
How about we all just discuss the actual policy issues we find interesting? Instead of saying "fuck you leftists", say "fuck you authoritarian social elitists". Instead of "fuck you rightists", say "fuck you greedy big business fat cats".
But maybe that's too much to hope.
Pretty sure many marketting meetings are confidential.
e.g.
new product launches.
character assasinations
attack ads
blackmailing your clients
anything that might come under the title of bad press.
Only official corporate propoganda is allowed since Peter Thiel nuked gawker for telling everyone he's a raging faggot with aids.
USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
USSA - United Surveillance States of America
One problem: lawyers, judges, and courts are among the most evil, least trustworthy groups in our society.
It's just forum pollution. Post an idiotic racist wallotext over and over again, to disrupt a forum discussing something "inconvenient". It's likely this pollution is paid for by Google's PR firm.
And more to the point: Can a contract legally be used to force someone to not divulge knowledge of illegal activity?
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
See the quotes? Do you understand the concept of "sarcasm"?
Sorry, I thought you were making an argument. After re-reading your message in the tone of my 16 year-old daughter, complete with eyeroll, I can now respond appropriately: By ignoring it.
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Question: Do you still do keyword queries with Google? If so, that may be your problem. Try using natural language instead; the engine has evolved in that direction because that's what non-technical people ("all users", to a first approximation) do; they type in questions.
I find, subjectively, that Google's results are as good as they've ever been, or better, but only after I changed the way I write my queries. 20 years ago, what worked well was to find the right set of keywords, possibly making use of the tools to narrow the results in particular ways. That no longer works very well... but what does work quite well is typing questions in English. The combination of NLP, the knowledge graph, search personalization, etc. makes it work quite well.
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Wow. A troll mod for stating facts. It's a harsh crowd today.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
And if you're lucky, you may yet grow up to be more mature than your 16 year old daughter.
I'm thinking false because they certainly don't have a monopoly in search. They might have had in the past, but not when the Forbes business was going on and not now. As we've seen, there are plenty of other buttons attached to articles on web pages (twitter, facebook, etc). If they were saying your search results will suffer if you put on other vendor's buttons, then yes, that would clearly have been an abuse
It's like saying Seagate are abusing their monopoly in storage because they told someone their data integrity will suffer if they don't buy drives for backups.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It provides exactly 1 bit of information per reader - has it been pressed or not.
Of course, since the odds of it being pressed are minuscule, the min entropy is much less than 1 bit per press. It's:
-log_2(max( P(G+ button pressed), 1-P(G+ button pressed))) bits.
It's bigger than zero though, so I can't agree with your statement.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I didn't say they had a "monopoly" in search, I said "dominance". Nor did I allege that they are doing anything illegal.
It's more like Microsoft's tying, bundling, and exclusive contracts.
Again, I think Google should be legally fine to try to prop up their awful social network with their popular search engine. But it's also legitimate for journalists to criticize them over it.
Fair enough. It's also fair enough to call out the journalists when they fail to present information in a highly distorted way.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
yes, heaven forbid someone should talk about politics on a news item about censorship and antitrust. obviously politics has nothing to do with it. the solution is clearly more xml.
This one was just a snark. "look, a chance to bash the left! I'll take it."
-1 flamebait, -1 off target, -1 please go away.
perhaps if a little political discourse made it into general conversation people could get away from the intentionally divisive and meaningless left/right garbage and actually affect change for the better.
Pretty sure that would beat letting the likes of Peter Theil, George Soros and Larrey Page decide what we can and cant talk about.
In a word, "no"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
And if you're lucky, you may yet grow up to be more mature than your 16 year old daughter.
Even she could do better than that, when she was 16. Look, if you'd like to have an adult discussion, don't throw out ludicrous arguments then try to claim they were sarcasm.
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If I want to have an adult discussion, I have it with adults.
If I want to have an adult discussion, I have it with adults.
Really? That response is one (small) step above "I know you are but what am I?". Very adult.
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Look, I made a quick sarcastic comment about Google that you obviously didn't quite get. You are a Google manager whose response was a series of ad hominems. Well, congratulations, your response is consistent with the article and the increasingly negative image that Google is getting.
Very professional and adult of you!