
Google Posts - axg
https://www.google.com/posts/
======
benjaminjosephw
It is scary how much power and influence Google now have in setting the agenda
for public discourse. When this opens up to other "prominent figures and
organizations", it will be at Google's discretion who is worthy of the
public's attention and which issues and areas will get this treatment.

This seems a step beyond simply organising the world’s information. Even if
it's with the best intentions, the fact is that they will have a significantly
influence on the discourse itself.

~~~
gtf21
The potential for Google to therefore decide who gets to speak, and therefore
who doesn't, is terrifying.

~~~
leppr
Terrifying? I assume you're living in a constant state of fear then, because
television networks already have and use that power.

On the contrary I'd say that in this field the more players there are, the
better.

~~~
k-mcgrady
There are thousands of television channels. As far as most people are
concerned, when it comes to search, there is only Google.

~~~
adventured
There are not thousands of television channels in the US that will broadcast
political content such that presidential candidates can push their message
across them.

The average American household has access to just 150-200 TV channels, total.
Most of those would never carry anything related to the election. The vast
majority of those are specific content carriers: movies, music, on-demand,
sports. You're down to having a few dozens channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNBC,
MSNBC, local affiliates etc) that a candidate can push through.

There are 2,200x tv stations in the US. Most of those are small, local
stations with zero national or regional reach.

There are thousands of online sites and platforms that _at least_ have as
large of an audience as those stations. All of those sites can be reached by
almost anyone in the US, which is not true of the local TV stations.

Further, there is nothing even remotely like: Reddit, Twitter, Wordpress,
Tumblr, Facebook, et al. in the television realm, where just about anyone can
reach a national audience if their message resonates (and do so for free).
There is also nothing like the app options that are available online, whether
Snapchat, Instagram, or voter reach apps like NationBuilder.

~~~
VLM
More importantly those 150-200 channels or few dozen political content
channels are owned by a VERY small number of very large corporations. Five or
so.

------
chishaku
I wonder if this is open to all 1,649 presidential candidates, or just 2 or 5?

[http://www.fec.gov/data/Form2Filer.do?format=html](http://www.fec.gov/data/Form2Filer.do?format=html)

On another note, I wonder if this has anything to do with Medium who has been
positioning itself in Washington and C-suites as the "default place for people
to go when they have ideas of consequence."

[http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/how-medium-is-
breaking...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/how-medium-is-breaking-
washingtons-op-ed-habit-217230#ixzz421zzVeTc)

~~~
hasenj
There's something comical about that list of candidates.

Why haven't heard of these guys before?

Does this happen every year?

~~~
jerf
As far as I know, yes.

For that matter, read your ballot carefully. There's more than just Republican
and Democrat that make it to the final ballot. If nothing else you can pick up
some terms to Google and learn about. Mostly for your intellectual curiosity,
since generally the other parties manage to pick up little more than low-
dozens of County Dogcatcher-level positions per election in the entire nation.

------
ppod
It could be that this is massive, and has little or nothing to do with the US
presidential election. They're going to try to force their way into social by
grafting social media posts onto the one thing basically everyone uses - the
search page.

~~~
dgacmu
Or it could be a desire to provide maximally relevant search results.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Dr. Freud.

Not-a-disclaimer: I'm spending the year at Google (as a visiting scientist; I
don't own stock and have no financial interest in its success). You might be
surprised by how strong the desire is to do the right thing by users and make
it easy for them to find what they're looking for. There's not always an
ulterior motive -- happy searchers made Google what it is today.

~~~
franze
"Gut gemeint ist das Gegenteil von gut!" German saying! Even with the right
motive, you can make - in Googles case: systematic - wrong decisions.

~~~
TillE
The literal translation is much stronger: "good-intentioned is the opposite of
good".

------
Lambent_Cactus
This is the Google version of Twitter's little 'verified' checkmarks, just for
whole web pages instead of tweets. The presidential election is actually a
great place to roll out that kind of service given him much domain squatting
goes on (e.g. [http://www.tedcruz.com](http://www.tedcruz.com)), but it's
clearly of general applicability. If it takes off, it makes Google the place
to go to for establishing a page as the 'official' version.

------
lukegb
Some examples of these seem to be:

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hillary+issues](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hillary+issues)

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bernie+issues](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bernie+issues)

I'm referring to the postings with the photo and the checkmark and the "On
Google" text, not the ones pulled from news sources, like the ones for "trump
issues"

~~~
dublinben
I'm thrilled to report that uBlock Origin completely strips out this spam on
the search results page. I was worried that it might take some time to filter
out this noise from the search results page, but apparently not!

~~~
Kiro
So uBlock is actually blocking a site's own content? I've heard a lot about
false positives but this takes the price.

~~~
gorhill
No content is hidden from my side[1] -- I am using default filter lists.
Poster must have some custom filters, or using some other 3rd-party filter
list which causes this. The logger would tell why content is blocked on his
side.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/2M1D6Uj.png](http://i.imgur.com/2M1D6Uj.png)

------
rrggrr
This infuriates me as a Twitter stockholder and user. Has everyone at Twitter
fallen asleep? How could they not have the jump on Google on this.

~~~
axg
I think part of it is due to the fact that Google has greater access to a
broader audience. Not everyone will search Twitter for "Donald Trump" but they
will certainly search Google - so Google is providing a way for the candidates
to take advantage of what is already happening probably millions of times
every day.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Agreed.

I'd argue further that Twitter has done close to nothing to make their search
a useful feature in the first place, which is why people aren't searching
Twitter with "Donald Trump". If I was Twitter, this would be very worrying.
All they've managed to do so far is "firehose search", which is only useful
for realtime events unfolding. They probably should have been thinking about
"topic search" and "person search" for a while now...

~~~
rjurney
Yeah, the inability to search your Twitter feed is simply infuriating. This is
an embarrassingly parallel problem, so the issue isn't scale slowing the
development of Search down. Twitter just doesn't give a shit.

~~~
calinet6
*twitter does not have the systems in place to be able to give a shit.

------
timmyd
I do find it amusing that all comments are focused on the US. There are
hundreds of countries around the world were TV stations are black boxes and
presidential / prime ministerial hopefuls have no platform to express
themselves. Having access to a platform that can promote and answer content as
users are searching for answers on them (at least how it reads on face value)
seems incredibly important. I do however agree that transparency around who
gets access to the platform is critical for user trust.

------
drubenstein
This seems like a bad idea in that it allows the powerful to completely
control the messages that are affiliated with them. Suppose celebrity x does
wrong to a regular citizen, and they have Google posts at their disposal while
Jane Smith does not.

On the other hand, this seems like something Rick Santorum might have been
grateful for.

~~~
chippy
I can imagine the popular, rich and powerful to love it. Imagine avoiding all
the abuse, threats, snide remarks, witty rebuttals, imaginative memes and
uncomfortable truths that Twitter gives them as a platform. People want
something more sanitized as a platform. It's quite an interesting development.

~~~
TillE
Isn't that what ads are for? If you want to speak and not listen, just use a
traditional broadcast medium like TV.

~~~
rayuela
I think the intended purpose is to blurr that line.

------
md224
Could be an interesting way for candidates to get in front of third-party
spin. When you Google "Bernie Sanders" you could be greeted with rich content
from the Sanders campaign explaining his positions, rather than links to hit
pieces and other info-detritus.

Of course, either way you're getting somebody's propaganda.

~~~
plcancel
My concern is then the composition of the rich content when Google offers
itself as the platform. "Welcome, to our podium, Canditate A. We've already
constructed the stage and backdrop, too, with these accompanying articles,
images, and layout."

It sounds, initially, like Google's role is very passive, but I think control
over what surrounds the podium has the potential to be very active. "Hey,
Candidate B has better lighting!"

Google as active medium becomes the active message? Thoughts?

------
obelix150
I can imagine the development of the use case for this story:

"As a presidential candidate I want a platform that every one of my
constituents can use to follow my ramblings..."

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elcapitan
"I am Hillary Clinton, and I approve this search result."

------
ebbv
Wow, when Google makes this available to businesses they're going to be able
to charge whatever they want and every business is going to have to use it.
This is not good.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
Is that so different than the advertising space that they currently sell?
Everyone that has posted screenshots of the new feature is using ad-blocking,
so maybe we just don't even think about the ads any more?

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/mkTaMJo.png](http://i.imgur.com/mkTaMJo.png)

------
Touche
Can I get the opposite of this; where the latest political circus news is
excluded from Google?

~~~
johansch
You could avoid searching for those topics. Just a thought...

------
ptrincr
Google already does something a little like this with Google plus pages. Let's
say someone google's for my website name, and I have a Google plus page
associated with it. If I have recently posted new content on my Google plus
page, this post is displayed in the top right hand side of the Google search
results.

I wonder if these new posts will appear in the same place or actually embedded
in the main results.

------
jryan49
Too bad no candidate is worth listening to. :P

~~~
chipperyman573
Like it or not, one of them is going to lead one of the world's most powerful
nation. Educating yourself on their policies is worth it imo.

------
igravious
Ars Technica analysis: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/google-posts-
embeds-a...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/google-posts-embeds-a-one-
way-social-network-directly-into-search-results/)

(Found via a Google search sadly enough.)

------
passionfruit
This could be even more dangerous than Facebook's walled garden in that it
further defines Google as "The Internet."

Why is this necessary if Google Plus already exists? Couldn't they just add
the features to Google Plus and include them in the search results?

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msoad
Is Google building a version of Facebook news feed in Google Now?! For many
people Facebook is for getting updates from their news source and use less
social material

------
arihant
While there would be a lot of fear of Google interfering with public
discourse, it is key to point out that there are over 1,600 presidential
candidates. How many of them do you even recognize? How does the country know
that there isn't another great president who just didn't make enough to have
public impact?

This can actually decouple correlations between spending and winning. Maybe
then we would have a government by the people, not by the big corp.

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my5thaccount
"Join the waitlist" Really? There are only, what, 10 candidates?? Srsly
Google?

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BinaryIdiot
This seems like a terrible idea. If given access you can now completely
control the primary message regarding search terms of yourself. Kinda defeats
the purpose of using search as discovery, no?

------
jaunkst
No problem here.

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hyperion2010
Wow. This is terrifying.

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hobarrera
So... Twitter?

~~~
chippy
without the opposing views, trolls, abuse, other points of view, memes, snide
remarks, outrage, support and morsels of truth and without a Safety Council,
perhaps, yes like Twitter.

~~~
fwn
And with the clever twist that behind the "Tweet", there is an actual article.
With actual information.

So yes, like Twitter. ..if you only use it to share Medium posts.

------
grimmdude
Twitter?

------
rjurney
Just like Google. Give people no reason to use something, just put it out
there, and hey "We're Google!" and they will come.

Except no, they don't.

~~~
w1ntermute
It's worked multiple times for them in the past, most notably with search.

~~~
jonesb6
Yeah Yahoo clearly saturated the market..

~~~
rjurney
Obviously I'm talking about social networks.

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dbcurtis
how did The Onion hijack a Google URL?

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em3rgent0rdr
How long until Google deprecates this feature?

~~~
calinet6
In a big way, it's extremely beneficial that they remove features.
Organizations that don't die of bloat.

------
Dowwie
this is like having a real time stream of every psychological profile in the
DSM

Thanks, Google, but I need more space, not less, from this madness

~~~
chippy
I believe it's a voluntary service, not mandatory.... currently.

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wcdolphin
Is this really an intentional product launch? Being late on a Friday evening
seems quite strange.

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Animats
Does anybody go directly to "google.com" any more? Most search is through the
browser's search box.

~~~
dredmorbius
Mine is through my browser's search box ... which has defaulted to DDG for
years.

------
lowglow
Is this like twitter meets google ads in my search? I've moved to Duck Duck Go
already, It's about 90% effective, but worth it.

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troymc
Doesn't Google already have Blogger.com? Is this an April Fools joke posted
early by accident?

------
asdfologist
Maybe I'm being nitpicky here, but perhaps blue is not the best choice for
this page, if they want to stay neutral (or perhaps they dont?).

