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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it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory -- a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results.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.
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.
It's easy and painless to do without Google's search. I was skeptical that this was true myself, but I switched away (to DDG) and have found that my search results have actually improved.
Yes, my results have more "false positives" than Google, but the hits tend to much closer to what I was searching for than with Google.
My theory is that it's because Google's "personalization" absolutely ruins the quality of search results. At least, it seems that way, since Google's results started declining in quality when they started doing that, and have been getting worse every year.
It has always been "Don't, be evil".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
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,
Surprise... every last solitary time a specific action of a specific company is being criticized you will always find a fan stepping up to cry foul by means of asserting everyone is picking on their favorite company. Your all ignoring X, Y and Z who are essentially "doing it too" as if such information is somehow relevant to the topic at hand.
First your factually incorrect. Nobody else gets to "do it too". They can only game algorithms. Nobody except Google has the power to directly alter results. If Google changed their index the hard way by following the same rules applied to EVERYONE except Google that would be a different matter. This isn't what was being alleged here.
Second you seem to be quite focused on a narrow and questionable assertion of search engine manipulation when real issue is Google leveraging it's monopoly position to force the press to quash stories of Google leveraging it's monopoly position.
Is an action any less defensible because more people do it? Hey officer why yes I was speeding but I shouldn't get ticketed because the guy in front of me was going even faster.
Yes judge I stole a million dollars when I hijacked that armored car bbuutt someone else did the same thing a week ago and they didn't get caught so I shouldn't have to go to jail either.
This particular line of thought crops up quite often. Unfortunately no matter how often and passionately repeated is still completely nonsensical.
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...