It doesn't bias the results. If you look at any of the searches mentioned in the article yes the Google thing appears at the top, but it is fairly obvious it's not a web search result.
What exactly makes it "fairly obvious?" I guarantee the majority of the public isn't aware that it's a hard-coded result and not algorithmic. They just see a link that is in the #1 spot and click it. That is changing the search results.
Don't you understand that Google claims their search results page is unbiased, and that it therefore requires no scrutiny? If Google is manually placing its services in the #1 spot over other results that are objectively more popular and relevant, that is not an unbiased search results page.
You can claim that Google is simply trying to be helpful, and that would be a legitimate argument except that they don't clearly denote those links as special the way they do for Sponsored Links. The links also shouldn't be at the top of the page where it appears as if they're the top results.
Other companies have gotten into trouble for this kind of sneaky, self-serving behavior. To mention that Microsoft faced antitrust scrutiny for shipping a free web browser. A company forcing its services to the top of the page over competing services that are more popular is Microsoft-like behavior.
As expected, the Google defenders are out in full force, trying to make everyone forget that:
1.) Google claims its search results are totally algorithmic and unbiased, and therefore, no antitrust scrutiny is needed. 2.) Companies in the past have gotten in trouble for this kind of self-serving behavior in which the customer is fooled into thinking the results they got were legitimate, even though they happen to link to the company's own services.
If Microsoft was doing this with Bing, I bet your post would have been entirely different.
The problem is that Google describes its search engine as unbiased and objective, yet hard-coded queries place Google services at the top of the search results page. This is not algorithmic whatsoever--hard-coding "sore throat" to display a link to Google Health is not algorithmic. According to other site ranking services, Google Finance is much less popular than Yahoo Finance, yet it's Google Finance that appears at the top.
These are the very kinds of behaviors that people around here bash Microsoft for. In fact, if it had been a story about Bing hard-coding queries to return links to Microsoft services over more popular results, I wouldn't be surprised if your position would be entirely different.
Slashdot was in favor of net neutrality, but it's against COICA? Both involve the government regulating internet traffic. The only thing I can see that makes Slashdotters against COICA is that it specifically targets piracy.
Because personal responsibility has been thrown out the window by a cabal of power-hungry politicians who use government to make citizens dependent on them. They want everything to be like Western Europe, with tons of regulation and a gigantic state that can force everyone to behave the way they want them to behave.
But don't worry. The anti-government wave of the 2010 midterms woke some people up. The GOP finally adopted a secular, economy-focused message and was very successful with it, and if that means this country shifts back toward libertarianism (you know, how it originally started), that's fine with me.
You can't "police" terrorism, and we didn't declare war on everyone who disagreed with us. I get the point you're trying to make, but talk about hyperbole.
It is better to be abused by a corporation than a government. Outraged citizens can punish a corporation through their wallets and through public outcry. The government makes the laws and therefore is above the law, and they can't be punished with your wallet because you're required by law to pay taxes or go to jail. It's a lot harder to punish a government than a corporation, and it's even harder to change governments completely.
You mean there are people who actually think otherwise?
some person's private information is NOT the resource of the site that stores it.
Your post is a little vague, but it appears that you're arguing that social networking sites shouldn't be allowed to "wall off." Signing up for a service on someone else's server and then demanding that they open up all their data to everyone else is silly. If you don't like their service, don't use the service. They're under no obligation to make sure everybody can read what you're submitting to their site. You act as if people are forced to use Facebook.
Oh, for crying out loud. It can have greater marketshare and still be crappy. It was a point about quantity versus quality, and he said it with Windows in mind.
It says right in the summary, in a direct quote from Woz, that he wasn't putting down Android. He simply said that something can have greater marketshare and still be crappy. Don't act like such a reactionary fanboy.
Why should a user have to bother doing this in the first place just to have a responsive desktop system? Does anyone else see the absurdity of this? Why did it take so long for it to be addressed in the first place?
Just think, so many Slashdotters were in favor of net neutrality. I bet the MPAA was ecstatic over the idea of lobbying friendly politicians to "regulate" torrent traffic.
Hacker news has evidence that it is cheating, actually. One might initially assume that IE9 is doing dead code analysis, but the behavior doesn't occur when run on trivial variations of the SunSpider test (diffs provided in the link), which is at least suspicious.
And, frankly, I think you're wrong about the music thing: if someone was downloading rips of songs, burning them to CD, and selling them on the street or giving them away free and being paid by advertisers, most of Slashdot would agree that's wrong.
It's interesting that people here are bashing the TSA for saving body scan images, but in articles about Google "accidentally" saving emails, passwords, and other personal information, people spend their time defending Google.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Linux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Mozilla will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Linux machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Linux box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the Linux machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Linux is a "superior" machine.
Linux addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Linux over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
It also says a lot about the security design of the operating system. Many of the scareware programs mimic Windows security alerts, so users who believe they are being security-minded by going along with the prompts are actually infecting themselves.
We did that about 10 years ago when this story was fresh.
Oh, shit, we talked about it on Slashdot 10 years ago? Well, that settles it, there's simply no excuse for the public not reading Slashdot 10 years ago. Stupid people!
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly makes it "fairly obvious?" I guarantee the majority of the public isn't aware that it's a hard-coded result and not algorithmic. They just see a link that is in the #1 spot and click it. That is changing the search results.
Don't you understand that Google claims their search results page is unbiased, and that it therefore requires no scrutiny? If Google is manually placing its services in the #1 spot over other results that are objectively more popular and relevant, that is not an unbiased search results page.
You can claim that Google is simply trying to be helpful, and that would be a legitimate argument except that they don't clearly denote those links as special the way they do for Sponsored Links. The links also shouldn't be at the top of the page where it appears as if they're the top results.
Other companies have gotten into trouble for this kind of sneaky, self-serving behavior. To mention that Microsoft faced antitrust scrutiny for shipping a free web browser. A company forcing its services to the top of the page over competing services that are more popular is Microsoft-like behavior.
As expected, the Google defenders are out in full force, trying to make everyone forget that:
1.) Google claims its search results are totally algorithmic and unbiased, and therefore, no antitrust scrutiny is needed.
2.) Companies in the past have gotten in trouble for this kind of self-serving behavior in which the customer is fooled into thinking the results they got were legitimate, even though they happen to link to the company's own services.
If Microsoft was doing this with Bing, I bet your post would have been entirely different.
The problem is that Google describes its search engine as unbiased and objective, yet hard-coded queries place Google services at the top of the search results page. This is not algorithmic whatsoever--hard-coding "sore throat" to display a link to Google Health is not algorithmic. According to other site ranking services, Google Finance is much less popular than Yahoo Finance, yet it's Google Finance that appears at the top.
These are the very kinds of behaviors that people around here bash Microsoft for. In fact, if it had been a story about Bing hard-coding queries to return links to Microsoft services over more popular results, I wouldn't be surprised if your position would be entirely different.
P.S. Your overuse of quotation marks is cute.
Yay, another victory for pirates! Right, Slashdotters?
When did this place become a pro-piracy advocacy site?
Slashdot was in favor of net neutrality, but it's against COICA? Both involve the government regulating internet traffic. The only thing I can see that makes Slashdotters against COICA is that it specifically targets piracy.
Because personal responsibility has been thrown out the window by a cabal of power-hungry politicians who use government to make citizens dependent on them. They want everything to be like Western Europe, with tons of regulation and a gigantic state that can force everyone to behave the way they want them to behave.
But don't worry. The anti-government wave of the 2010 midterms woke some people up. The GOP finally adopted a secular, economy-focused message and was very successful with it, and if that means this country shifts back toward libertarianism (you know, how it originally started), that's fine with me.
You can't "police" terrorism, and we didn't declare war on everyone who disagreed with us. I get the point you're trying to make, but talk about hyperbole.
It is better to be abused by a corporation than a government. Outraged citizens can punish a corporation through their wallets and through public outcry. The government makes the laws and therefore is above the law, and they can't be punished with your wallet because you're required by law to pay taxes or go to jail. It's a lot harder to punish a government than a corporation, and it's even harder to change governments completely.
You mean there are people who actually think otherwise?
Your post is a little vague, but it appears that you're arguing that social networking sites shouldn't be allowed to "wall off." Signing up for a service on someone else's server and then demanding that they open up all their data to everyone else is silly. If you don't like their service, don't use the service. They're under no obligation to make sure everybody can read what you're submitting to their site. You act as if people are forced to use Facebook.
Oh, for crying out loud. It can have greater marketshare and still be crappy. It was a point about quantity versus quality, and he said it with Windows in mind.
It says right in the summary, in a direct quote from Woz, that he wasn't putting down Android. He simply said that something can have greater marketshare and still be crappy. Don't act like such a reactionary fanboy.
Why should a user have to bother doing this in the first place just to have a responsive desktop system? Does anyone else see the absurdity of this? Why did it take so long for it to be addressed in the first place?
Just curious what others think.
Just think, so many Slashdotters were in favor of net neutrality. I bet the MPAA was ecstatic over the idea of lobbying friendly politicians to "regulate" torrent traffic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913315
Here you go.
Hacker news has evidence that it is cheating, actually. One might initially assume that IE9 is doing dead code analysis, but the behavior doesn't occur when run on trivial variations of the SunSpider test (diffs provided in the link), which is at least suspicious.
Actually, it was probably the original article's headline:
You mean like The Pirate Bay and its banner ads?
Hell, if you think that's self-serving, consider how Slashdot behaves toward "stolen GPL code." The GPL is a copyright license...
Slashdot on piracy: "Information wants to be free! Copyrights are obsolete. Anyone trying to protect their content is just living in the past."
Slashdot on recipe plagiarism: "Hooray! Victory for the content creator whose copyright protected material was infringed upon."
It's interesting that people here are bashing the TSA for saving body scan images, but in articles about Google "accidentally" saving emails, passwords, and other personal information, people spend their time defending Google.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Linux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Mozilla will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Linux machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Linux box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the Linux machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Linux is a "superior" machine.
Linux addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Linux over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
It was inevitable that Facebook would decide to become its own little internet. Good luck with that, Facebook.
It also says a lot about the security design of the operating system. Many of the scareware programs mimic Windows security alerts, so users who believe they are being security-minded by going along with the prompts are actually infecting themselves.
Oh, shit, we talked about it on Slashdot 10 years ago? Well, that settles it, there's simply no excuse for the public not reading Slashdot 10 years ago. Stupid people!