
The Case Against Google (2018) - dotcoma
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420004)

------
cromwellian
"Left unsaid was that Google itself generates millions of new subpages without
inbound links each day, a fresh page each time someone performs a search. And
each of those subpages is filled with text copied from other sites"

Absurd. The article is complaining that Google SERP doesn't penalize Google
SERP results. Google doesn't index its own search result pages.

~~~
laser
I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But,
to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a
clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would
penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This
seems inherently anti-competitive, no? Consumers would be overjoyed to find
that a new website existed out there that gave better results than Google for
anything they might be looking for, yet they would never find out about the
existence of such a website, as Google would suppress it in its results. This
may be purely innocent intention—based in an understanding that users want
results immediately instead of entering another engine or aggregator, but it's
not completely apparent that is indeed the case.

I was completely neutral (or as neutral as one can be, foremost concerned with
ascertaining truth) at the end of the last sentence, so I decided to
investigate a little myself. The results seem to me like Google isn't doing
anything obviously of egregiously wrong from a first pass, though obviously I
don't have the benefit of the 1.7b queries the EU had in their investigation.

I searched, "price comparison website" and was presented first with this link:
[https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-
shop...](https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shopping-
engines-to-increase-ecommerce-sales)

I then searched for the name of each of the companies I didn't recognize. As I
actually searched for Pronto first, I thought this verified Foundem's claims,
but I think that Pronto didn't come up as it's a Brazilian site, as then when
I searched for all the other sites they came up as the first result, except
Become, which was on the first page but further down (presumably because it's
such a common word).

Nextag (dead) [1]

PriceGrabber (first link on SERP)

Shopzilla (first link on SERP)

Become (bottom of first page)

Pronto (not on the first ten pages)

Bizrate (first result on SERP)

So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google
to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well
be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article
stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such
dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term. It's unclear to
what degree that's the case, though, if it is ultimately true.

[1] WSJ piece from Nextag CEO 2012
[https://outline.com/n8rW7a](https://outline.com/n8rW7a) They shutdown last
year.

~~~
cromwellian
Even if the issue were valid, the analogy itself is absurd. He could have said
that Google Search surfaces links from Maps, YouTube, Groups, etc and doesn't
penalize them using identical criteria (I don't know if it does or not). But
saying Search doesn't penalize Google Search leads to infinite regress, or
contradiction: If SERP generates a Link to a Next 10 results page, it must
then derank the next page and filter it, but then since it wouldn't generate
an internal link, it should rank in the results and be granted pagination.
It's like Godelian Incompleteness Statement for Search.

More then that, the entire argument relies on a technicality: Links as UI
buttons. Pagination uses links for UI interaction, but after Web 2.0 arrived,
it doesn't have to. Infinite scrollers, pure JS pagination + XHR that doesn't
generate links could be used.

(yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my
HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it, but if you search back
far enough before 2010 when I joined, you'll find my opinion on these matters
has not changed. I'm a copyright minimalist, I favor decentralized, mostly
unregulated web, where everyone can scrape everything, remix, reuse, and
repurpose data for permissionless innovation, and I do not favor the
government getting involved so it can artificially create categories like
'vertical search' or decide what search algorithms should do)

~~~
mercer
> yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my
> HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it

While I don't personally care too much, I suppose it could be problematic if
you remove this information from your profile at a later date, and from that
point on people reading your comments wouldn't (easily) be able to know that
you work at Google.

~~~
Filligree
Google is a big company, and most of us working for them are mainly in it for
the paycheck.

Knowing that I work for Google doesn't, by itself, tell you very much about my
opinions. It indicates I'm not strongly anti-Google, I guess.

~~~
koolba
> It indicates I'm not strongly anti-Google, I guess.

Or maybe you’re so strongly anti-Google that you realize the only way to take
them down is from the inside.

~~~
Filligree
And now you know too much.

------
burroisolator
Wow!

This is a long article but I believe it is worth a read to the end: in short,
don't dismiss this as yet another "top N evil things that Google has done"
article. It is a narrative about anti-trust regulation that happens to pick on
Google. In fact, given the paragraphs at the end, I wouldn't even classify
this as anti-Google.

The paragraphs detailing the fears of Microsoft in 2000 when they were under
public scrutiny were especially insightful - they touch upon aspects that the
Wikipedia summary of the Microsoft anti-trust cases [1] do not really
highlight.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp).

------
ilovecaching
What is it with all this tech bashing lately? Certainly they aren't perfect,
but silicon valley is far down on my list on things we need to fix. What about
ISP monopolies that have required massive amounts of regulation just to let
small ISPs ask for a bit of dark fiber? What about the gambling house that is
wall street? Or our crumbling rail infrastructure? What about our exceedingly
ineffective health care system full of insurance middle men and price gouging?

The difference between Google and those other issues, is that Google actually
has a mission, and they use their money to generally do good things. In fact,
I'd say it's a small miracle that Google isn't 10x evil. If Google was as evil
as the big TelCos or some of the other scummy businesses out there, we would
absolutely be having a bad day.

Part of that is google's culture. Not every company can afford to hire the
best, and put them in an environment where work is fun and people feel
compelled to do good. Break up Google and you get 1000x more companies all
gathering the same data, except each one of them is staffed by idiots that
leak data every day. Google is working as hard as possible and it's still a
challenge to keep nation state attackers at bay with unlimited sums of money.

Let's get real here. The journalists are mad because they work for tech
illiterate companies who gave in to shilling fear stories in the 90s. Now they
have the jester-as-king calling them out as fake news, and the irony is that
it's true. Maybe 5-10% of each story as some nugget of truth to it. The
politicians of course have to lap those stories up so they can virtue signal
to their ignorant constituents who barely understand tech any better than the
politicians too.

~~~
alecco
If you use basic encryption your ISP can't know much about you. But you can't
lie to Google. Search "red spot in my groin" \+ tracking on Android/Maps ->
Google knows you have a venereal disease and likely from who.

Not even Facebook knows you this well. On social media you present a highlight
reel and hide your ugly side.

You can't lie to your search engine and Google tracks you even when you don't
think it's doing so. Google gives hundreds of variables about a user on real-
time bidding. That's you.

~~~
ilovecaching
Absolutely false. DNS is still a huge leak of privacy, and it’s trivially easy
for an ISP to rate limit traffic going to major content providers they
directly peer with, which is most of their traffic.

------
beenBoutIT
The downside of "Google" becoming synonymous with "Internet search" is that
normal people don't understand that Google is a search engine and that it's
possible to use the Internet without Google. You don't need Google to search
the web or visit websites, Google is optional. Alternative search engines are
garbage, but it was like that back before Google.

~~~
darkpuma
> _" Alternative search engines are garbage,"_

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like that gap has been narrowing rapidly.
Partially because other search engines are getting better, but also because
google has been getting worse.

------
pmoriarty
_" If you're old enough to remember the internet before 1998, when Google was
founded, you'll recall what it was like when searching online involved
AltaVista or Lycos and consistently delivered a healthy dose of spam or
porn."_

The main things I remember were that AltaVista showed ads along with its
results, while Google was, ironically, ad-free. And Google was also much, much
faster.

------
dazc
"Each time someone used Foundem to buy something, the Raffs would receive a
small payment from the website making the sale.."

Maybe people actually prefer Google because for a lot of the results you get,
nobody is paying?

------
astuary
The scrutiny of Google is warranted, but misdirected. Remember that
advertisers are are Google's customers, not individual search users. If
drawing an analogy between Standard Oil and Google, the question to answer is:
are advertisers being harmed as a result of a Google-Facebook duopoly? I don't
have the expertise to investigate this question, but I'd love to hear from
someone who does.

(disclaimer: ex-googler)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
If we shouldn't get consideration in antitrust discussions because we're the
not the customer, we're the product being sold, perhaps adtech needs
regulations akin to animal cruelty laws. It's okay to slaughter us, you just
can't be unnecessarily cruel while doing so...

~~~
FutureSpec
Not a great analogy -- animal cruelty laws are far too lenient. For example,
they exempt farm animals. In fact, there are laws against things that would
reveal abuse of such animals - [https://www.aspca.org/animal-
protection/public-policy/what-a...](https://www.aspca.org/animal-
protection/public-policy/what-ag-gag-legislation)

------
open-source-ux
The case against Google is surely that it tracks and records online behaviour
on an industrial scale that has no equal among technology companies. Yet, of
all the many large technology companies, it mostly escapes scrutiny. Thousands
of people in the tech field happily rush to it's defence. Does a giant multi-
billion company with an army of lawyers need your defence? Google probably
knows more about you that you know about yourself.

The tracking begins at a young age - with kids who uses ChromeOS in school
(pity the poor kids who don't even get the choice of whether they get tracked,
the adults decide for them). Google doesn't build marketing profiles of
students, but they are still recording the online behaviour of students. Even
if that data is detached from individual accounts and then aggregated it still
amounts to data from millions of students. Horrible.

So normalised has online tracking become, no-one even bothers to ask why we
should be tracked to this degree in the first place. Generic catch-all phrases
like "to improve our services" are meaningless without specifics.

The case against Google is arguably also a case against the tech field that
seems complicit in supporting such unprecedented online tracking. When it
comes to privacy and online tracking, this industry is rife with hypocrisy.

~~~
debatem1
Facebook is surely at least an equal to Google in the tracking department, no?

Google is also part of the student privacy pledge:
[https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-
pledge/](https://studentprivacypledge.org/privacy-pledge/), which seems like a
reasonable document.

Edit: should have said earlier, I worked at Google many years ago.

~~~
RobertRoberts
> _Facebook is surely at least an equal to Google in the tracking department,
> no?_

Not even close, maybe 50% of the capability. Why? Because no one in my family
has Facebook, but everyone has/uses Google either our phones, or Chromebooks
(from school for our kids) all the google accounts that are _required_ to hand
in homework.

Facebook isn't even a blip on the radar by comparison.

~~~
darkpuma
Not having a Facebook account doesn't put you totally outside of Facebook's
sphere of knowledge. If any of your friends has allowed Facebook to vacuum up
their contacts list, Facebook knows you exist and have a shadow profile for
you. Piece by piece, they can compile a substantial amount of information
about you even though you've never signed up.

However I agree with your basic premise, that Google is an even worse threat.
From using uMatrix and paying attention to what 3rd party shit websites pull
in, it seems like Google's surveillance net is _far_ wider than Facebook's. If
you consider the possibility of AWS being used by Amazon for surveillance,
then Amazon seems to have more reach than Facebook too. But all of them
plainly have more reach than anybody should be comfortable with.

~~~
RobertRoberts
I use a standard set of privacy tools, so Facebook is almost universally
blocked from my life. Their shadow profile is probably pretty thin, but I
agree they are still a threat. But no-where near as bad as Google.

I hadn't considered Amazon. Maybe we should add Cloudflare to the mix now as
well? (in the same vein of thought)

