
Google+ is hurting the Internet. Europeans have the power to stop it - hiby007
http://focusontheuser.eu/
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LeoPanthera
I'm not sure I understand this. If you don't like Google's search results...
don't use Google. That's how the free market works.

Personally I have been extremely happy with DuckDuckGo's results recently. I
switched my default search on my Mac and iPhone to it, and very rarely have to
go back to Google for anything. (Occasionally when searching for extremely
recent pages.)

(Though I wish that DuckDuckGo would consider renaming themselves to something
less... silly. Not that "Google" is much better, I suppose.)

~~~
diydsp
I, too, have been using DDG as much as possible. My own problem is that I get
"paranoia" that I'm not getting the most results, so I end up searching both.
And all too often end up leaving my browser config'd for Google.

Anyone know of a plug-in to periodically reset my search tool back to DDG?

Also, FWIW you mentioned the free market, but notice that this is a European
project, where laws appear (IANAEL) subtly different. The site makes this
claim: "European competition laws prohibit companies with a dominant market
position from engaging in anti-competitive conduct that excludes competitors
from the market (conduct that reduces consumer welfare)."

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dchest
Why not set it to DDG and then use "!g" to search Google?

~~~
diydsp
Excellent! I never knew about that! Thank you.

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dchest
tl;dr "A few engineers at Yelp and TripAdvisor" want to tell Google what to
put on their SERP via law enforcement, because of "Google’s anti-competitive
conduct".

~~~
CatsoCatsoCatso
It looks more like Genius.com is behind this. See the link at the bottom of
the homepage.

~~~
dchest
At the very bottom: "Yelp Ireland Ltd. ..."

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seren
Somehow I read "what the users want" as "what location based rating companies
wants". From all the faults you can blame on Google+ (real name policy,
tighter integration, etc), this is probably the one users are most unconcerned
with.

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VikingCoder
If I understand their argument correctly, when Google+ allowed you to specify
who you Follow, and then Google Search started showing you results informed by
the things those people had +1'd, that's an example of Google "cheating their
algorithm."

So, instead, Google shouldn't let you search based on the recommendations from
your friends and other people you trust...?

I'm sorry, but this movement is wrong-headed.

I _like_ to see reviews based on my friends. The restaurants, movies, apps,
products that they like and recommend.

If there were an open and federated way for all users to express their
recommendations, sure, we could yell at Google for not using THAT instead.

But yelling at them they can't INVENT a system of recommendations, or use it
in their search results, is a bad argument for me.

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rbinv
Considering the explicit mention of "privacy-friendly" Piwik in the footer,
it's pretty ironic that the embedded genius.com scripts actually load Google
Analytics and fire a tracking pixel.

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VinnyFonseca
"Google is hurting the internet!"

Uses youtube for all the videos.

~~~
ainiriand
Not Google, Google+. In fact those videos are about how good Google is in
terms of searching.

~~~
mcv
But Google+ is not the problem here. The problem is how Google is ruining
Google Search with stuff that doesn't belong there. But Google was ruining
Google Search long before Google+; they've long tried to personalize search
results, to the point that two different people googling for Egypt during the
Egyptian revolution, one would mainly find news on protests on the big quare,
while the other would primarily find luxury resorts.

Google should let their users control how much they want their search results
polluted.

~~~
VikingCoder
In Chrome: Control-Shift-N

In FF: Control-Shift-P

In IE: Download Chrome or FF

If you don't want personalized results, then don't be logged in to Google when
you Search.

~~~
mcv
Thanks! Although...

> If you don't want personalized results, then don't be logged in to Google
> when you Search.

That basically means I can't use Google Search on any browser that I also use
for GMail, G+ or Google Drive. So I think that means Safari.

~~~
VikingCoder
...on any browser?

I just explained (somewhat jokingly) how to open a New Incognito Window.

When you do that, you won't be logged in when you search.

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jsnell
It's not bad rhetoric, but there are a few problems:

First, the ranking algorithm for a local search is not necessarily the same as
that for a web search (even a web search with possibly local intent). In fact,
the results from this tool were total garbage for the last local search I'd
done (zurich augenarzt). It gave me results in Germany, results where the
address and map pins were wrong, a link to the front page of some local search
company I'd never heard of, etc.

To go back to my previous example, in fact the _most_ appropriate result that
this extension was able to give was pointing to the Facebook page of a eye
care center in Zurich (hey, at least it was the right city) showing content
that had basically nothing to do with their business. The only valuable
content from the point of view of a potential customer was the link to their
actual website. Which brings me to the next point.

Second, the supposed Google+ results are not actually Google+ results. The
link is generally pointing to the website of the business itself. At least for
me that's generally the result I want. The Google+ page is only used as a
fallback when Google doesn't know which website is associated with the
business. Of course a local search company's goal is for as many users as
possible to be funneled to their web site. It's not a goal I'm very
sympathetic to.

Would the "few engineers from different local search companies doing this
purely as a side project" still be happy if the link to their site was treated
the same way the G+ pages are treated in the results right now? That is, as an
auxilliary link rather than as the main result?

Third, companies like Yelp have made it abundantly clear that they don't want
"their" data aggregated by Google. While an actual production version of this
would depend on that. You can't have it both ways.

As a final note, you guys really need to redo that video with a real human
doing the talk. It's hard to get the viewer to sympathize with a bad voice
synthesizer, and it comes across almost as cowardly. And worst of all it's
pretty hard to understand. It took me almost the whole movie to figure out
that the word I was hearing as "parrot" was probably "powered".

~~~
Houshalter
Unless they changed it since you made that comment, that is definitely a real
human talking.

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tn13
I would rather let google show me results that it wants than giving power some
government authority to "fix things".

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thecopy
Google is not a human right, it is a company and should be allowed to do what
it wants, without governmental interference.

/European

~~~
gonvaled
Capitalism is the recognition by consumers that human nature is flawed, and
that the profit motive is king, and that free enterprise has the potential of
benefiting society.

The empowerment of a government to interfere in the market is the recognition
by the voters that human nature is flawed, and that unless we act together
(via legislation) against market forces, sometimes they are simply too strong,
and are able to negatively influence society. In those cases, even though we
as individuals are theoretically free, the complexity of society and the
(flawed) essence of human nature leads us in practice to be at the mercy of
the market forces.

The point of balance, in a modern democracy, must be set by the voters.

~~~
fwn
"We" don't "act together (via legislation)".

Legislation finds it's cause in parliamentarian incentives, cooperation and
probably a lot of coincidence.

"Market forces" are basically the sum of individual choices and if someone
wants to declare them to be necessarily against society, then this peculiar
"society" needs to be defined.

The point of balance, in every organisational structure, will be set by the
humans who build, affect and reproduce it. Not by some idealistic ballot box.

~~~
gonvaled
Is the system corrupt? Probably! But the government is there to protect the
interest of the voters. Democracy is flawed, as is human nature, as is
capitalism. There is no pure system. We need a combination of all of them.
And, sometimes, we need legislation: very often, to defend us against
ourselves (our flawed nature, our procastrination, our inability to understand
the complexity around us).

Some (maybe those who are not so flawed), will consider that a limitation of
their freedom. But they live in this society, and must accept the rules chosen
by the majority. They still have the right of arguing for different laws, and
convince the majority that those rules are against their own interest. Or they
can leave this society and build a country in the middle of the Atlantic (from
scratch, not taking anything from our society with them: you can not have it
both ways!)

The sum of individual forces does not necessarily lead to a system which
optimises the well-being of each individual (tragedy of the commons).

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J_Darnley
Javascript is hurting the "Internet" (the web really) by encouraging people to
write websites like this. No content is loaded. The links at the top don't
work because the anchors in the page don't exist. I would much rather the EU
outlaw javascript than g+, because that is dying all on its own.

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arjie
A little off-topic, but I can't help but remark. Rap Genius is now Genius and
provides a service with annotations? I think it looks pretty slick, at least
on a laptop. Definitely adds to the experience since it leads to less
parenthesized text and allows one to provide context without distracting.

EDIT: Yeah, I guess I did deserve the downvote. Still, I haven't seen it
before and found it interesting.

