I'm personally MUCH more worried about facebook and twitter than Google. Our current political discourse has gone off the rails in the U.S., and I think a large part of it is due to those two entities. Google I think is only a mild player in that space, which, in its extremes, is a threat to democratic society.
"Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism."
"We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018."
Would you agree that the algorithm recommended this content because people believe in, or at least are interested in, conspiracies? Even if we feel that's a mistake, who are we (or Google) to be the arbiters of truth?
Content recommendation algorithms reward engagement metrics. One of the metrics they reward is getting a user's attention, briefly. In the real world, someone can get my attention by screaming that there is a fire. Belief that there is a fire and interest in fire are not necessary for my attention to be grabbed by a warning of fire. All that is needed is a desire for self-preservation and a degree of trust in the source of the knowledge.
Compounding the problem, since engagement is improved and people make money off of videos, there is an incentive in place encouraging the proliferation of attention grabbing false information.
In a better world, this behavior would not be incentivized. In a better world, reputation metrics would allow a person to realize that the boy who cried wolf was the one who had posted the attention grabbing video. Humanity has known for a long time that there are consequences for repeated lying. We have fables about that, warning liars away from lying.
I don't think making that explicit, like it is in many real world cases of lying publicly in the most attention attracting way possible, would be unreasonable.
No one hears the lies once they're removed. That can be good, but it also might work to prevent more people from criticizing or exposing them and thus, even if only slightly, validate them in the eyes of liars. This might yield nastier lies in the future.
Google recommends that stuff to me, and I don't believe in it or watch it. Watch math videos, get flat earth recommendations. Watch a few videos about the migration of Germanic tribes in Europe during the decline of the Roman Empire, get white supremacist recommendations.
My best guess? They want you to sit and watch YouTube for hours, so they recommend stuff watched by people who sit and watch YouTube for hours.
This stuff reminds of the word "excitotoxins," which is based on a silly idea yet seems to capture the addictive effect of stimulation. People are stimulated by things that seem novel, controversial, and dangerous. People craving stimulation will prefer provocative junk over unsurprising truth.
>Watch a few videos about the migration of Germanic tribes in Europe during the decline of the Roman Empire, get white supremacist recommendations.
Ugh, that happened to me. I was halfway through a video making weird, interesting, yet really benign claims when suddenly they connected all the pieces in support of some bizarre white supremacist shit.
Just because I wanted to know about proto-indo-europeans.
I looked over to the recommended videos, and it was already like 20% armchair white supremacist videos.
I binge watch youtube in a small window while doing certain kinds of work and specifically don't want anything I'm too interested in. This leads to future "weird" recommendations.
I also have to say that there's a certain comic relief to videos by flat-earthers (no moon landing, ancient astronaut) and other conspiracy theorists. Some mix valid points with hyperbole but some are so far out there that they're comical.
A friend asked me to watch a clip of Ben Shapiro so we could sincerely talk about what the other side believes. I forgot that I was on a fresh OS install, not yet logged in. Well, right after that one video, every single recommended video to me became a "Ben Shapiro SLAMS liberal...".
I get that YouTube had no other metric to gauge me by, by there are 10 or 12 recommendations and there's no law that says YouTube can't ease into recommendations. Whether you're for or against Shapiro, this kind of behavior induces people into bubbles and radicalizing in the feedback loop.
Actually, I noticed YouTube's recommendations seems _heavily_ biased towards what you watched recently. This is likely due to how people watch videos - much like people binge watching TV serials, they are very much likely to continue watching videos from the same or similar channels.
In most cases this is harmless - play a song, and YouTube will automatically create a playlist of songs in the same genre. Watch a cooking video, and it'll give you a dozen other recipes by the same chef.
Unfortunately this doesn't work for political videos, as you've noticed. But there is absolutely no incentive for YouTube to insert videos from opposing viewpoints into the recommendations. YouTube is just giving people what they want.
YouTube is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place here.
So you watch a video about how the history of vaccines and how many lives have been saved by vaccination. Should YouTube recommend a counterpoint video about how vaccines are going to kill you and everyone you love?
If you are recommending "other sides of issues", either you start showing a lot of really crazy things to people who wouldn't otherwise see it, or you need to start taking an editorial position that some issues are "settled" and one side is just "wrong", and do a one-way gating where you'll show a breath of sanity in the follow-up recommendations to "bad" videos but not show "bad" recommendations on videos that get the subject "right".
It's funny how the problem is so _us_ this time. Turn a mirror on our souls and we lose nuance, mediums, neutrals, and common ground. "Ben Shapiro makes a good point" becomes "BEN SHAPIRO DESTROYS SUBHUMAN SCUM."
Who is that message for? It's not a discussion or debate, it's linguistic flashing lights to simulate a community around a simulated conflict. Youtube red, solving alienation in a more profitable way than the last red revolution.
The crime of social media is that they've created public solitary confinement. The internet is now a place where you go to be alone with your thoughts as simulated by companies. So boring.
> either you start showing a lot of really crazy things to people who wouldn't otherwise see it, or you need to start taking an editorial position that some issues are "settled" and one side is just "wrong"
Or you could attempt to take a neutral, quality-driven stance on recommendations: which videos do a good, _honest_ job of explaining the case for a given point of view? Plus of course any videos that present a reasonably balanced look at the pros/cons of multiple sides. You can even still factor in which ones are most engaging, as a secondary element (e.g. preferring Bill Nye over someone droning on boringly about climate change).
Maybe that has a bias toward moderate positions and away from extremes, but that doesn't seem terrible since (a) it's what compromise is built on, and (b) it seems more likely to succeed in winning over more newcomers to that viewpoint anyway (does David Brooks convince more liberals to question some of their beliefs than Alex Jones? I'd bet so).
I think the real problem with this approach is it's very hard to build an _automated_ recommendation engine for this. At scales that matter (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) you need it to be automated and hard to game. And ML doesn't quite seem up to the task of judging ranking things by demagoguery, let alone honesty, at this point...
Well, I'd prefer annotated recommendations with reasons, and analysis of quality as a big feeder into the recommendations (so, both opposing and supporting--and even supporting in part and opposing in part--viewpoints, especially with stronger support, would be natural recommendations, with their relationships to the thing you just viewed annotated.) OTOH, that's probably a lot harder to do (especially automatically; intuitively, it seems likely to be essentially an AI-complete problem, though I wouldn't be too surprised if someone found a way to do a "good enough" version for common classes of content without a full AI) than what typical recommendation engines do; the annotated related items thing is found some places, but they are IME always manually-curated, narrow-focus databases (e.g., commercial legal authority databases.)
Just hit this on YouTube today, had to go down past hundreds of nearly-identical garbage recommendations to get to one of interest. At least they should toss in a tiny bit of RNG.
I mean, that style of title exists accoross the political spectrum on YouTube and it's beyond stupid. Whenever I see "X DESTROYS Y" titles I assume the video will be a waste of 3-10 minutes with no particular moment of linguistic destruction on either side and is in fact just two people bickering.
Just clickbait titles is all it is.
Regardless, I don't see how any of that can really count as "extremist" or "conspiratorial" content.
The crux seems to be that Google's algorithms are designed to maximize time spent watching. It's frankly absurd how successful they have been at this, especially in younger generations.
It's one thing when their team of PhD's extract attention into cat videos, and another thing to extract it into potentially unhealthy amounts of extremist material and conspiracies.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do miss the days before infinite scroll and autoplay.
One of my friends is the music director of a US freeform radio station. He’s a legend in the industry known for his encyclopedic knowledge of cool but highly obscure artists over the past 40 years. Over the past year, he has often been left mouth open when YouTube’s algorithm starts picking what’s next after we pick a starting point. “How the hell does it know about these guys?” That’s how good the robots have become.
Opposite here. Google, going forward, is more dangerous with it's censorship imho. There is still a lot of trust in google by the average people who think that it's verifiably right XX% of the time, so it can be trusted.. for many reasons..
however there is no transparency in how results are ranked. With Matt Cutts gone there is even less discussed about things. Broad confusing terms like "we changed a couple things and it's only affecting 3% of results, so no worry, carry on.." - and then the things that are changed and not discussed. People don't know.
At least with fbook and twitter, people are figuring out that much can not be trusted, and that some "friends" are easily duped into sharing things that are not 100% right. I agree we still need to deal with repeated things affecting the subconscious as everyone scrolls past things, and we need methods to screen capture and research other viewpoints on things that come into a feed..
You can mute people view these other networks, with google you can't mute individuals, or tell it stop prioritizing "xx group thinks".
It's not a mild player by any means, it's used like most use wikipedia, but it's used much more. That is a threat to many minds and the future, not just democratic whatever.
Sometimes I wonder how much their impact is overblown though. It seems like it's a very loud presence in people's lives, and a lot of very loud people on it who think they are making some kind of impact. When is the last time you were swayed by lefty or righty radical? I'm not even convinced it really pushes people further down an idealogy. But then again I'm genX. I just don't take tweets that seriously, even when they come from Trump or Obama.
> When is the last time you were swayed by lefty or righty radical? I'm not even convinced it really pushes people further down an idealogy.
I haven't been swayed by such radicals, but I have been turned off and disgusted by them, feelings which bleed over to people who I associate with them. I can see that effect as one that re-enforces political polarization.
Sounds like they're saying stifling new or fringe ideas is a worse problem than stifling new businesses. I'm not 100% sure I agree - I would actually say they're about the same: Equally important (contrary to Upvoter333's opinion), and intimately related (contrary to yours). There's a parallel between established, popular, dominant ideas on the one hand, and established, popular, dominant businesses on the other.
Sure I can agree with that. OP's comment seemed pretty out of place though, almost like a google-whataboutism. What about Facebook? Well, yeah, if that is the kind of counterargument, then we can ask "What about...?" a million different things. It doesn't take away from what the article is about.
Is it just me or this kind of rant-like writeups make it difficult to go through the content? While I held on to the romanticized story about the dating site, I gave up when it segued into multi-para story about Rockfeller and SC.
But I get the point and I think there is some value in Google making everyone dance every time they change their algorithm. Things might have been better if they have some kind of review board. Apparently having zero or negligible customer facing teams seems to be the norm.
I was totally riveted. Without the storytelling I would not have learned, for instance, of this gem:
"In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory [regarding the federal antitrust lawsuit], but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor."
I feel like media has become more monopolistic than tech and needs to be dealt with first.
I'm personally worried about the dominance of big newspapers. It seems that the field of "trusted online newspapers" has narrowed down to only the New York Times and Washington Post. Most non-Tech Hackernews submissions come from either Nytimes or WaPo.
I worry because these newspapers seem to increasingly be setting the political and social narrative for the entire country. That's a lot of power to give Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim.
Most local newspapers in the US are slowly dying due to their advertising revenue being killed off in favor of digital ads. I contracted at the Mercury News about five years ago and the vast majority of their income came from a single advertiser and their classified/ads had declined from a section that was larger by itself than the entire newspaper is today. Not enough people want to pay for news to make it worthwhile for smaller players to thrive in the current environment. Also newspapers don't set the political and social narrative for the country - only three printed publications backed Donald Trump and he won the election. That shows the Rupert Murdoch/Fox News TV crowd was more effective, at least with the electoral count if not the popular vote.
I am just pointing that out because your comment doesn't make sense as it reads like these newspapers are becoming 'increasingly' dominant or narrative setting.
First, Carlos Slim is a minority shareholder in the NY Times (and he actually sold off most of his stake last December), not an editorial board member.
Second, the old-school newspapers still have a very strong culture of research and reporting interwoven deeply within their walls. Sure, they make mistakes, but they have a much greater stake in the accuracy and importance-weighting of their news reporting than a user-driven content company like Facebook or Twitter.
> down to only the New York Times and Washington Post
You missed numbers 1 (the Wall Street Journal), 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in America’s top eight by circulation [1]. Not to mention the proliferation of specialist papers (e.g. Axios, POLITICO, the Information, et cetera) and foreign papers (e.g. the BBC, Economist, FT, et cetera) and wire services (e.g. Reuters, AFP, the AP, et cetera).
I think part of the problem when it comes to Google, is the massive name recognition. I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist.
If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it.
I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non-technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam emails.
As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know and they'd be lost without it.
If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use Google?
I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also can't handle that google returns different results on different computers.
I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the address because it's consistent and faster.
> I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist.
I have seen my father type a web address into a google search page because he doesn’t understand that he can use the location field to go directly to that address. I corrected this behavior the first time I saw it. He was doing it again the next time I visited.
This is a man with a high level of education and a healthy mind. He’s utterly lost on many of the basic concepts of his computer. The thing is, it works for him and I would never know he was making this mistake without watching him because he still gets the desired result in a roundabout way.
I'm not sure it's a mistake. Doing a search seems better for non-technical users since you get spelling correction, and you're more likely to get a decent result if you mis-remember the domain name.
It's not better. Because often the top result is a paid ad for that result. This is bad for a couple reasons:
- It's a tax on the services you use who have to pay to be the top result, you burden companies you patronize when you do this. When you search for Dell.com in search and click the top link for Dell, Dell just had to pay a couple quarters to not have you redirected to a seedy scam site instead. Times millions for every other person who does this.
- Google Ads allow advertisers to spoof addresses, and display a different destination address than where clicking the link actually takes you. I've seen amazon.com, bestbuy.com, and even, hilariously, youtube.com hijacked in very authentic-looking malicious Google Ads at the top of Google Search. For security reasons, you should never, ever click on a Google Ad.
This seems like a good argument in favor of understanding the difference between ads and search results. (Unfortunately it's more subtle than it should be.) Or maybe installing an ad blocker.
Although I would like a button to occasionally turn off "smart searching" that was using my personal info, in general searches that take into account your history and location produce better results. You can also do this manually by just opening a private tab.
I also just searched "Best Museums in Las Vegas" on Google and Duck Duck go, and DDG does not produce as many quality results in the top 10 as Google. They do make up for it, if you are doing a really micro search, because they list soooooo many more results on the first page. But they are definitely still vulnerable to Groupon spam in a way Google searches are not.
Your wager is correct. The average user is pathetically ignorant of how computers or the internet work. I'll never understand why people eagerly try to understand how their cars work, but when it comes to computers they'll just throw their hands up and be proud of their ignorance, always relying on others to help them with extremely basic tasks. You don't ask a friend to put your windshield wipers on for you.
Read The Inmates are Running the Asylum, and you might understand that better. It helped me to see how pathetically unhelpful and badly designed interfaces are everywhere, something I accepted and took for granted before.
A couple of metaphors he uses, there or in About Face: Programmers are like those into extreme sports, revelling in the difficulties of working with computers, but most people aren't like that. When they board an aeroplane, they want to sit down and get where they're going without concerning themselves with the details. Programmers head for the cockpit.
Yesterday I was trying to find organizations registered to the address 1011 1st Ave, which primarily belongs to the Archdiocese of New York. So I gave Google this query:
"1011 1st ave" "new york" -archdiocese
Many of the results do not include both of these quoted strings. So Google went from discarding your search terms and requiring quotes, to even discarding your quoted terms. I had to fire up duckduckgo to complete my search, which is something I never use but I had no choice.
The New York times is participating in a campaign against Americas top tech companies. I don't know what their goal is, but no good will come off it. Google is one of our strengths, not one of our weaknesses.
The article takes great pain to point out the importance and value of Google.
Genghis Khan was one of Mongolia's strengths. Standard Oil was one of 19th century America's strengths. An empire can be great and still stifle good things. It's hard to know what we're missing.
>They basically shut down Foundem, creating more time for them to give advice to other companies and regulators fighting Google. This consulting work, some of which was funded by Google’s competitors, has helped to keep the Raffs afloat.
The media has been attacking tech for years. First they attacked startups and their valuations, later the "tech bros," and now Google/Amazon/Facebook. This Scott Galloway fellow seems to be leading the charge.
Two factors that seem to be on the mind of the NYTimes:
* Tech companies' role in 2016 election interference (agents buying ads, trolls)
* Tech companies' impact on journalism (Google News, decline in subscriptions, shift in advertising)
The first one is explicit, and they have every right and responsibility to hold it up to the light, given its seriousness.
The second one is a more of a speculation about their motivations. Newspapers are clearly frustrated -- how much does it factor into NYT's recent trend of aggressive coverage of tech & social media?
I think something that's maybe being exposed here is that it isn't clear how to make digital products work together and that the incentives are to keep it that way. Walled gardens are being built inside basically every major tech company. Most aren't even illegal.
Here's a simple example I ran into recently:
I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible.
I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it.
Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.
Yep. Almost mentioned that here. My original plan was just to do that in a more open way, but I realized it had a bad combination of being hard and not that cool.
Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.
This is so inane.
I use bing all the time (accidentally) and I always go - wait, what's wrong with google? why are these search results so awful?
oh riiiight.
(switch to google).
Google is being attacked hard by Apple (blocking ads), amazon&azure (cloud)
and ads (facebook).
What Government really needs to do isn't break up Google per se, but generally give more natural advantages to smaller startups versus larger corps. One example would be corporate tax.
Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.
In fact, if I were the democratic party this would be my rallying cry. Time to really re-invigorate the american dream.
That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years?
Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.
For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well?
If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players.
For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on.
For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc.
For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian, FreeBSD, etc.
For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS, Replicant, etc.
(For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps, which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware Android.)
My relationship with DDG for the last few years has been the following:
- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.
- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.
- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.
- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.
Yep, this has happened to me. DDG simply doesn't give me the results I want and expect I would get on Google, I can only stand a few days of using it before I go back.
I'm guessing it has to be the (what I once thought was subtle, but apparently is not) positive effect that Google promises it will deliver due to building a profile of me personally and returning different results based on what it knows about me.
> and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.
For local results, DDG sucks by default. Google, when I enter something local or German, has great results, DDG only if I flip the local switch to "Germany". But besides that I prefer their results for most things besides rare searches (if there are under 100 results, DDG is almost useless). But bangs make it preferable to me even then.
I had a similar experience, and it took me a while to realize how much of my "this feels off" feeling was correlated to the appearance of the search results. I changed the DDG theme to match Google's appearance, and that feeling of "this feels off" evaporated.
(After spending a while with "Basic" to convince myself the results were just as good and I just had a trained reaction to the visual style, I went back to Default. And after a while, now Google results seem subtly off.)
You probably know about but with DDG you can add a !g to the search query to get results from Google. So I keep DDG as default and then sometimes I retry with a !g query.
Sometimes for programming related questions DDG does a better job I noticed.
I wonder what the easiest method would be for all of us to share screen shots of these results that we say are good at engine X and bad at Engine Y.
I see many people say results from [whatever] are bad - but not enough info to know if they are tech people who 99% search for debian docs and uber eats... and or other people who say [other] are good / bad.. we need to start posting examples.
If there were some way to use the firefox screen capture and share tool for example, to upload good / bad searches, i'd love to see how others see things.
I really want to make new search engine options, and want to show examples of the others and how they could be done better. Crowd sources examples of good and bad would be a benefit to many.
I tend to find DDG to be comparable for most day-to-day searches. "Electricians in <home town>" or "Restaurants near <sports arena>" work great and is where they'd want to focus to attract market share. I have no problems with it being the default on my phone because of this.
Where I run into trouble is on anything technical. Trying to find research or technical references is a hopeless cause and Google is still my work computer default.
Same thing. I think the information Google has about me ends up leading to better search results. I want DDG to work, but the results are never as good.
The key to switching from Google to DDG is memorizing a few shortcuts for fallbacks, like "!g" (Google), "!gi" (Google images), and "!gn" (Google news). It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, but over time you'll find yourself using them less and less. They will never completely disappear, but one day you'll realize you're only using them in a few percent of your searches. In most cases, you will know in advance that you specifically want "Google results" instead of "search results," and can add them on the first query.
From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you.
Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese food near ZIP code" or "Chinese translation" instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.
Better idea: place a "Google" button after the (say) third search result.
If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.
I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing <BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.
I just came up with the idea to make a bookmarklet, which converts the current DDG search into Google:
javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();
It's not perfect, but it's a start :)
To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.
Nice idea! However, I still struggle to see the advantage over "!g".
The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query (which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how fast you type).
If you want to stay in your bubble, Google is probably better (getting local results or results that are related to your search history), but personally, I don't like that, most of the time.
If the results aren't good enough on DDG, I just use the "g!" to search on google via DDG. I'm guessing a good 40% of what I'm looking for ends up on a Google search - mainly because I suck at using the right keywords.
> Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back.
Well, the quality of the search results is not always as good as with Google. I do look back. But DuckDuckGo improved a lot over the last couple of years. Nowadays, DDG is my go-to search engine, and Google is the fallback when I hit a really hard problem; the more obscure the question, the more like it is in my experience that Google will yield more helpful results than DuckDuckGo.
In some way, DuckDuckGo is even better than Google. For specific questions, it often replies with a short snippet from stackoverflow or some other site that answers my question before I ever click on a link. That is just brilliant!
Google does that, too, sometimes, but for coding questions, DuckDuckGo seems to be better at it.
I actually forgot about google until this thread came up. I basically never have to use !g anymore, bc DDG does everything I need so well!
I've done a few googles over the last year, like on my girlfriend's computer, but I really find their results are so commercially-oriented that when looking for information it all gets in the way.
I envy you. A little at least. I had to make a conscious effort, and eventually I just switched my default search engine from Wikipedia to DDG and forcefully acquired the habit of just typing my search in the adress bar instead of calling up my search engine of choice. And still I find myself typing goog^H^H^H^Hddg.gg on a regular basis. The habit is just so deeply ingrained. ;-)
For a long time I was in the habit to explicity open a search engine, i.e. type "google.de", or these days "ddg.gg", and then enter my search terms into their input field.
But at home I tend to look up stuff on Wikipedia more often than I search things on Google/DuckDuckGo. At work, I have used Google until I made an effort to switch to DDG.
The best I can paint are stick figures. ;-) I came across that word long before I had any idea what it meant. I remember being very confused, though, when somebody showed me a picture of some rapper wearing a T-shirt that said Krylon. (As so often in life, it was a lot less funny when I was told what it meant... :-/ )
I have tried to use Google alternatives a few times and always go back. Now I also been using Google for a long time and so they have my data and I probably have learned how to use Google efficiently.
One of the biggest difference is something that happened very recently. Google is much faster at updating then the alternatives for some reason.
I suspect it is about event driven versus polling. That Google is given update when things happen from trusted news sites instead of having to poll or crawl for new things. Would not be surprised Google just has a lot more of these connections than MS has.
But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.
A big one is my ISP is allowed to sell my data without even me knowing. So I use Google DNS instead of my ISP and also use YouTube TV. All to try to keep my data away from my ISP.
My biggest issue is companies being hacked and people getting my data like what happened to Yahoo. I just trust Google better able to protect.
> But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.
I made just the opposite choice, instead trying to offer different parts of my data to different companies. That way, when one company gets hacked, changes its terms of service, gets bought, etc., my losses are limited.
This is key. You can't keep all of your data off the Internet, but you can guarantee nobody can see all of it by trying to prevent your various internet identities from being linked or associated, and keeping data siloed in different, disconnected services.
There's a couple things I do still use Google for, like YouTube. But since they no longer have 95% of my personal data, the impact of them having my YouTube history is drastically reduced.
Firstly, it is quite difficult to manage so many usernames and passwords, for non-tech-savvy people such as my parents.
Secondly, don't you think that actually maintaining it is very difficult? One inadvertant click could expose one of those accounts to another with a different service provider, etc. Arguably, it can work should you define a different browser profile for each of those accounts!? Nonetheless, it is neither easy nor smooth, in my opinion.
If you are that worried about your ISP selling your data sign up for a $5 a month DO/Linode instance and look at a VPN (or it's slightly easier to setup cousin, sshuttle if you are a linux user).
Google might have just lumped you into the idiot bin, there are people who WANT their searches to look like spam. Google will happily show people what it thinks they want based on how they've interacted with the service (or sometimes, how the people on that IP address/machine have interacted with the service).
I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me.
> Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years
I don't currently have any issues with Google search result but I won't be surprised if underlying PageRank is slowly crumbling away. After all forums died off, blogs popularity has drastically dropped and most links between users are exchanged on closed platforms (FB) / communicators. Wisdom of the crowd might no longer be available in open web.
>For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well?
I gotta be honest, from my perspective, that feels like a weird thing to say. It's totally different from what I've seen.
I always get sites like MDN/W3C when I search for HTML/JS stuff, usually there isn't any blogspam at all on the first page of results. I always get Wikipedia articles and main company websites when I search for a company's name.
I have a lot of problems with Google, but I almost never see 'spammy' search results. It's weird that our experiences are so different.
Fwiw, I switched to DDG a ~year ago (can't remember honestly lol), and I've been quite happy. With that said, not a week goes by where I don't use the !g bang to run my search on Google. DDG just has terrible results. It's good enough a lot, maybe even most of the time, but frequently it's too terrible.
I'm still happy I switched, the "good enough" results are heavily reinforced by privacy, and not giving Google everything. The fact remains though, DDG misses the mark for me frequently.
No, GP post is inaccurate. As sources below state, DDG
"generates those results from over 400 individual sources, including key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Yummly.[6][7]" as well as DuckDuckBot.
Also, more importantly, Bing, like google and facebook is building personal dossiers on everyone, while DDG is not.
From what I understand, it's mostly Bing + Yandex (for Russian pages) these days - the additional sources are websites that submit their own custom indexing of their pages.
I suspect the nature of things just leads to that even if they have multiple big upstreams.
If bing offers up the best results most of the time DDG will, as a result, offer up bing results most of the time. "Best results" easily determinable even with DDG privacy constraints.
They're definitely doing some cool stuff at DDG and its certainly a hell of a lot more than "a wrapper around bing." I just don't think expanding their own index infrastructure is something feasible for them right now.
Sure, but I don't think it's fair to compare DDG to other search engines that crawl and index the entire web themselves. It's a different user experience for sure but the indexing is (for the most part) the same as Bing.
I agree, I always get w3schools at the top of html/js results. I actually installed a Chrome extension to allow me to manually block google results from certain domains, to prevent me ever clicking on a w3schools link. It just hides the result as soon as the page loads.
Another annoying one is Postgres ('postgres add primary key'), which always has an ancient version as the first result, sometimes as far back as 7.x.
> For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites?
Probably because you either haven’t searched often enough, or because you’ve been clicking on too many irrelevant links when presented with results.
I consistently get MDN and StackOverflow results in the top when I search because those are the links I click the most so Google has learned that I prefer those sites.
Speaking of W3C, in case you are not aware the site W3Schools has nothing to do with W3C, and W3Schools used to be filled with a lot of outdated information. I’ve heard they’ve gotten better but I still never intentionally click on W3Schools links and when I do by accident I immediately navigate away. Even though they’ve allegedly gotten better I don’t like them and I urge others not to use W3Schools. Use MDN, StackOverflow and the real W3C resources instead.
You can use devdocs.io for MDN searches. It just parses and scrapes MDN among many other authoritative doc sites into an easy, searchable reference manual
I'd actually prefer the 3rd party searches on google over duckduckgos, because I could easily refine the search on google by appending "MDN" in search and get the result. Not only that, I know I can find the MDN and W3C doc easily, so I want to broaden my search horizon normally when doing a google search anyhow
DDG doesn't give you as much of an oppurtunity to see the 3rd party sites though, so its more limited
Finally, biased searches. I actually prefer biased searches the vast majority of time, partially because I'm too lazy to bookmark sites I visit a lot. If I wanted an unbiased search result DDG is my go to tool
DDG is a godsend. It’s painful when you first switch and realize just how skewed and weird Google’s results have been though. Sort of like waking up from a particularly disorienting dream.
DDG results are great, but it still pains me that it's (relatively) slow compared to Google + Chrome, which is as close to instantaneous as far as I perceive.
I’m suggesting that if the top result works it doesn’t matter. More, I’m suggesting that the next time you want to suggest a challenge you should run it yourself, first.
Don’t know what to tell you except that one of them is known to filter and personalize results, definitely leverages your IP address and other identifiers, and the other claims not to.
> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.
Rather than this (which would be complex and unenforceable), just remove the loopholes (double Irish etc.) that allow those large corps to avoid taxes while smaller competitors can't.
The argument, "Google is better than its competitors, so there's no problem," misses the point of antitrust regulation. We don't know what better technologies might exist if a monopolist had not been crushing them.
What about academia? You mean new algorithms can’t be invented unless they can be immediately commercialized and profitable?
Also the Foundem guys tell a good story, but where’s the Hustle? If they had such good technology, why didn’t they pivot? Why didn’t they try to sell to Amazon or NextTag? In 1998 I met people that created a price comparison website scraping engine at a conference, they failed to get significant traction and sold for a ton of money to Amazon. The technology they created VDB or treating the internet as a virtual sql database, turned out to be backed by none other than Anand Rajaraman and someone most people will be familiar with Peter Norvig.
I mean, honestly, if these guys had something truly innovative, I’m pretty sure they could have arranged an acquisition.
Is there any scientific evidence at all that innovation is being crushed? This seems like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence beyond a few anecdotes from losing startups. 95% of businesses fail to be viable for a host of reasons.
If you’re doing product search your main competitor these days is Amazon anyway.
Maybe Foundem held onto the technology stupidly when they shouldn't have. I don't think that's relevant to the question of whether regulators should be concerned about the shape of Google's search results.
New algorithms can certainly be invented. The question is whether they catch on, which is the only way they do any good.
> What about academia? You mean new algorithms can’t be invented unless they can be immediately commercialized and profitable?
We may have reached a point that a single improved algorithm, by itself, cannot provide a better search experience without a lot of expensive operationalization.
How is Google "crushing" them? They just aren't getting as much exposure from Google as they'd like to. There's always going to be people unhappy with where their product shows up in search. Without a search engine, they'd have no chance at all in the first place. I agree that it's unfair for Google to prioritize their own products in Google search, but they aren't doing anything malicious.
Questions of malice, or of intent more generally, are irrelevant. Antitrust law is intended to promote consumer welfare. If consumers would be better off knowing about a service than not, and because it threatens Google, Google is relegating it to page 70 of their search results, that's bad for consumers. Even if Google is trying to make everyone happy, regulators can help society by stepping in.
The way large multinational corporations pay tax in the UK seems to be that the government names a figure, the company says "ha, no" then they negotiate down until the company is happy.
I don't think raising that starting figure is going achieve much but maybe it works differently in other countries.
Came to post this, blindly raising the corporate tax rate will not work as intended and is an extremely naive suggestion to make
Corporations, like many other organisms, will do what is best for them at any given moment, including deciding whether or not behaving ethically is in their best interests
The US' last two presidents were complete dark horses who promised radical change to the way that the government works. They both ended up working pretty neatly within the system, unfortunately.
The US could elect some Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn like figure who is actually tough on corporations. It could happen! Some measure similar to what the Fed did to Wells Fargo would be unthinkable to people used to this pessimistic political climate, but it's happening now. It wouldn't be hard to get elected on a message of raising corporate taxes and bend the rules however necessary to get them to actually pay.
The President can't change corporate tax rates or loopholes. It's far less likely that we'll elect a majority of Congress who aren't beholden to corporate interests.
I think that's OK. Another thing we need to do is bring criminal liability for the board and the CEO for corporations. Probably not civil but definitely criminal.
Presuming the company fully owned (or with some sort of pro-rata split) you could tax the parent company for the total of their holdings. If they truly were separate companies, well, that satisfies the OP's objective too, no?
(Note I'm not a big fan of corporate taxes in general, I'd rather we not tax corporations and tax individuals more aggressively. Get rid of special rates for capital gains and have a much more progressive individual tax system.)
That sounds good. Then, as long as control becomes more diffuse through the public markets, the incentives are in place for them to start working with everyone else in the market, not just their corporate parent.
Not trivial in practice, but sounds like it would be much better if we could figure out a way to make it happen. The first step towards more federated standards and interoperability is to have a larger number of players in the market.
> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.
Heck, I'd settle for tax reforms that didn't give large corporations that can afford an army of tax accountants/lawyers and a host of offshore shell corporations an advantage over small corporations that can't afford those things. You don't even need to get into giving advantages to startups to begin with, just stop hamstringing them by making them compete against folks that can sidestep the tax code.
> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones.
Financially, I believe startups would actually want to see higher taxes instead of lower ones due to their ability to take advantage of net operating losses, which is a carry-forward that allows them to write off taxes for the future.
" If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings."
That's the dilemma inherent in innovating a market you are an indisputed leader in: why rock the boat, and reset all your incumbent advantages to zero, when you can just sit pretty with what you've got?
Kodak invented digital photography way back in the 1970s, patented it, and did nothing with it. It was only when the patents expired that digital cameras came to the fore (likely also because of intervening decades’ worth of technological improvement), and it killed them off. Until the beginning of the 20th Century the Royal Navy had an unassailable advantage in terms of ships and then Admiral Fisher designed the HMS Dreadnought which instantly obsoleted everything afloat and dialled back the UK's advantage to a single ship, and the Germans instantly took advantage of it and started building their own new dreadnoughts.
That's the crazy thing: Antitrust is the best path for everyone who isn't a billionaire corporation. Because not only will those of us who don't want to deal with them have options, but the former trust will be forced to compete again on merit, which means they'll have to step up their game. A lot of Google products coast by on their monopoly status alone, but if they get broken up or even just their behavior heavily restricted, they're going to have to get back to doing what originally made them great: Making the best web apps and services, like they used to.
Better webmail and calendars exist (I use one of them), but because of Google's control of the entire market, two thirds of users are still on Gmail. That's the monopoly effect: Better products don't win out when one company controls the playing field. And now Google's out to introduce their own proprietary email format to hurt other parties even more.
Interesting. Their control of the market didn't seem to stop me from moving all of my Email out of Gmail recently. I just went and did it. I must have missed that screen where they say, "You can no longer continue exporting your E-mail. We control the playing field, so other services cannot win out!"
Yeah, I think you addressed your own concern there. Why would a consumer who doesn't know how to export mail need something better than Gmail? I'm a power user, and I don't need anything but Gmail, so I can't fathom that there's some unserved email opportunity that consumers would love fulfilled if only they knew about Gmail competitors.
I'm using FastMail, which isn't selfhosted. I have some high hopes for Mailpile though. FastMail's working on an open source standard called JMAP, which has seen some interest from a couple of open source mail projects, and would move labels from being a Gmail-proprietary thing to something openly supported and standardized. Sandstorm.io, where I host my documents, just stated a goal to bring their email support up to par: https://sandstorm.io/news/2018-02-19-http-rewrite-and-more
Email-based startups and open source projects don't seem to move very fast though, likely because due to the Gmail monopoly, they don't get a lot of support.
You can definitely automatically filter email into different folders as it comes in, and they support complex rules. You are specifically asking for weird nonstandard behaviors which cause more problems than they fix.
(For example, when I used Gmail, the "multiple inboxes" feature didn't work well with third party mail apps, because it isn't really multiple inboxes, it's just Gmail sorting the inbox on the fly. I ended up disabling them and adding custom rules into Gmail to sort them into proper folders.)
As the case is FastMail does actually have that feature, I just prefer to use actual rules and folders. ;)
Snooze is, from my understanding, an Inbox feature, not a Gmail feature, and I still fail to see any value. (But maybe as a non-Inbox user I just don't know?) You have read, unread, and pinned/starred functionality, how and why one would hide one's emails from oneself until a later point, I have no idea.
Extracting data from emails automatically is an antifeature, since it's privacy-invasive. I specifically pay FastMail for it not to do things like that to my mail!
But on the opposite end:
* FastMail's interface is faster and cleaner than Gmail's and contains no advertising.
* FastMail's email/calendar service is fully standards compliant, unlike the number of hacks required to interoperate with Gmail's proprietary nonsense. Just yesterday I was reading about this: http://blog.fruux.com/2014/10/16/google-carddav/
* FastMail gives me incredibly fine-grained control over how my mail is handled, including it's spam filtering.
* When I have an issue with FastMail, I can ask for help, and a real human (and one random time, literally the CEO) will respond, and assist me with my problem.
----
FWIW, Outlook.com has a pretty nice email client too, and their account management is a lot more mature than Google's (I can change my Microsoft account's email address, something Google remains incapable of to this day, somehow).
Gmail has been around for over a decade, it's the least common denominator now, most email services are at least as good as Gmail.
Mailpile is great. I use it as sort of a webmail for my private email server. But it's not even close to Gmail, and has no calendar, or note taking app (yes, I actually do use Keep).
I don't think FastMail can really compete with G Suite on anything except "not being the leviathan." Which is not nothing! But as a tool, it's just not as good. And Outlook which you mention in the comment below doesn't even have this.
Let's not underestimate Google here. They offer a full productivity suite, an excellent, tight integration with Android, plus Chrome sync for multiple profiles. They're tough competition.
I went looking for a replacement to escape Google, but I'd definitely disagree FastMail is "just not as good". On the contrary, it makes Gmail feel old and poorly maintained in comparison. It's better written software, before you get into the fact that you can get real human support for it.
> Email-based startups and open source
> projects don't seem to move very fast
> though, likely because due to the
> Gmail monopoly, they don't get a
> lot of support.
A great big {{citation needed}} as to your claim of a cause-and-effect relationship between these two statements.
A bit off-topic, but what proper calendar alternatives exist? Although I don't really believe any competition for email exists (though I'd love to be proven wrong with an alternative that can do snoozing), I can't really believe that no such alternative for calendar exists.
It's a lot harder to offer your service for free (80% of "better" here) when you don't run a highly vertically integrated and dominant advertising system.
Which options aren't better than G Suite? Many of Google's antiprivacy features are enabled even if you're paying for their product, and in addition to that, you get an outdated version of Google services that can take months or years before Google supports. Almost everything Google launches won't work with GApps accounts until some point in the future.
I have regularly seen people moving from Google Apps to personal Gmail accounts just because the integration with other Google services is so bad.
It's understandable Google wants it's business customers to have well-tested robust software, but more often then not, the support cycle can leave them excluded for years, with no way to opt in.
Everything else I've tried. Office 365 isn't better. What I could stitch together with OwnCloud wasn't better.
All the important Google tools are in the G Suite. There's Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Photos, and the whole web office suite: Drive, Docs, Sheets. It also works and syncs with Android.
No, they won't. There's people who don't even know that there's something else than GMail. They can't do one click and be at a competitor's site, if they don't know about it. And it doesn't help that their only way of finding out about competitors is through google.com.
These bizarre roundabout ways the NYT finds to worship corporations are starting to get creepy. Calling their work wondrous and speaking directly to people who "love" Google is just absurd. Just stop, don't worship an organization.
I'm starting to despair that there's so much demand for reading/publishing 'the case against' X or Y company pieces, i.e. this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950. Everybody who is for these companies is not like, passionate about them, we just use their products and pay (collectively) a lot of money to do so.
With Google in particular, if their dominance was so unassailable, we wouldn't have slack or zoom, which exist essentially because gchat and google hangouts were so half-assed.
Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a target. There is also the issue of data privacy as it relates to sharing the data with the US Government. If they start to share more data with the US Government, the risk losing users and ad revenue. On the other hand many argue that their refusal to share data is bad for society as a whole. For example, some argue that more sharing of data would have helped catch the Florida school shooter before it happened.
No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.
This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now there is this PR campaign against them.
Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides.
Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC.
I heard Peter Thiel make an interesting comment on this recently: that banks avoid political scrutiny because they fund both political parties, whereas Google is overtly biased towards one side (the blue side). This makes the red side hate them, and the blue side neglect them because they think of them as easy money.
The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.
A trifecta of failures: failure of capitalism to innovate its own self moderation from being inherently anti-competitive; failure of democracy which engages after the fact based on emotion and is reactionary; failure of meritocracy where elites hand out favors to "friendlies", lower the ladder of regulatory avoidance to some and not others, ergo the opposite of merit.
This is why we need more ethics, logic, rationality, and the promotion of epistemology as moderators. Capitalism, democracy, and meritocracy all in their own way are prone to people gaming the system, might making right.
> People loved Standard Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as they love Google today.
Which people are those? One of Microsoft's defining features has always been the juxtaposition of software iterations that consumers truly despise with those that they're sort of ok with.
"Many of the most important antitrust lawsuits in American history — against IBM, Alcoa, Kodak and others — were rooted in claims that one company had made technological discoveries that allowed it to outpace competitors."
Does that say more about the success of antitrust at spurring competitors to catch up or that "technological dominance" is only good as long as long as the paradigm doesn't shift (i.e. Kodak is now pretending to be a crypto company as a last resort)?
>"“Google’s built around horizontal search, which means if you type in ‘What’s the population of Myanmar,’ then Google finds websites that include the words ‘Myanmar’ and ‘population,’ and figures out which ones are most likely to answer your question,” says Neha Narula, who was a software engineer at Google before joining the M.I.T. Media Lab"
I'm not sure if it's relevant but I get an exact result when I do this search. Not sure if that is horizontal search...
This was a fantastically written article. I've learned and been able to explore so much from it.
I still love Google and wouldn't be where I am today without it but it makes a fair point when camparing this time to the early oil industry. It's not like there's no competition against Google, it's just been a fantastic tool and why use anything else.
Never expected that something could be blamed for being too useful.
Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an awful lot of logic in the way internet works. Seems like the real world is catching on, trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)
It's pretty easy to measure how addictive YouTube is. Let a toddler use it. Now is it all bad? Maybe. I found my kids build into their genuine play things they saw on youtube. Is it worse than cartoons/tv? Maybe.. Should it be rationed, definitely.
> And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...
Comments like yours are stupid and add nothing for these reasons:
1) A journalist or writer likely does not have technical control over their paper's website design. This is certainly true for someone writing for the NYT. They're not going to hold back their article because someone on the website team chose to use a product from the company they're critiquing.
2) Google, Facebook, etc. are so dominant that it's often not really possible to avoid them and their technology and still have a functioning business.
Foundem sounds like a spam site to me. By definition if I’m finding Foundem results in Google, then Foundem would not be the one who is solving my search, Google is. I actually think one of the issues with Google over the last decade has been a failure to clean up the results. Google used to be merciless in hammering spam sites into oblivion. I miss those days.
Meta: It's unfortunate this, like most tech behemoth critiques, got flagged off the front page so quickly. There are, of course exceptions to this rule, so perhaps those are simply enough to saturate people's desire for such articles.
More on point: what choices does a startup have when wanting to operate in a vertical that Google/Facebook et.al. also want to infiltrate? Find a smaller niche that doesn't hold enough interest (or money) to interest them? It's funny, I wouldn't have thought the RSS reader niche would have appealed to them originally, and yet here we are today where RSS reader startups still find themselves competing on price against a product that no longer exists.
It really does seem like its not enough to just be better; the "worse is better" paradox in action.
I love how difficult it's becoming to actually ever visit a website from a google result, especially on mobile. And even when you do you're usually still stuck with their tracking and spyware. Reminds me a lot of AOL's strategy back in the day.
I find this to be extremely annoying as well as it obscures the site link as well as it makes it very difficult to copy the source link if I want to share it. I think the comparison to AOL's strategy in 2000 is very warranted.
Exactly! I hope the EU looks into the whole AMP (both web and the recently announced and universally panned email) program for antitrust violations.
I bet if they subpoena Google, they WILL find A/B tests and experiments on increasing engagement & time spent on google.com through AMP changes. How that fits into the antitrust framework is not my subject area, but Google needs to be reigned in.
But you do have to wonder what Soros motives are. He is really not someone that looks for the greater good.
There is going to be some financial aspect that makes him money. Not saying he is not accidentally aligned with the greater good but most certainty not the driver.
