
Google CEO Appeases Publishers with Subscriptions - uladzislau
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/-news-geek-google-ceo-appeases-publishers-with-subscriptions
======
B1FF_PSUVM
_" Google is now pledging to index all subscription news outlets in search,
let publishers determine how many articles to provide free through the search
engine, and will not demote them in results if they have little or no free
content."_

Very useful, indexing inaccessible content.

~~~
veidr
I almost agreed with your comment, then I re-read it and decided you are being
sarcastic.

But it _is_ very useful, in contexts in which you are searching for things
that are important to you and in which you want to have a fuller sense of what
information is available, even if it may cost money.

It might not improve the casual news-reading experience, but if it's something
important like learning about your child's illness, researching a prospective
new employer, or something like that... it's a lot better to know what
articles and stories exist on the topic, even if they might cost money to
read, rather than having no idea those pieces relevant to your search even
exist.

~~~
arkades
These aren't mutually exclusive. PubMed solved this ages ago: if it was freely
available, it was tagged accordingly, and you could filter your search results
that way.

If this were meant to benefit users, it would be an optional filter at the
discretion of the user, not a built-in "feature" of the algo.

~~~
veidr
I agree. That would be awesome, but probably beyond what we can expect an ad
company to do as part of its mission to sell ads.

But they _might_ do it if they thought doing so would cause more people to use
their their search engine more, thereby generating more ad clicks. I know I
probably would, but otoh I’m probably not their target demo (since I only
click about 7 ads per year, usually after coming home drunk from some event).

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
_" Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful."_

([https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/](https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/)
according to Google search today, although I can't see that text in the throng
of large images.)

Needs tweaked, that 'universally' is now melting away. Must be the water
heating up, as the frog didn't say.

Croak.

------
ComodoHacker
This solution is far from ideal. In the majority of cases, publishers would be
selling access to a single article for a price of subscription. What we need
for a healthy content market, is perhaps a micropayment system.

~~~
chmars
I think we need more flat rates, Readly is a great example IMHO:

[https://global.readly.com/en](https://global.readly.com/en)

For 10 € / month, you get a virtual newsstand with magazines from all over the
world.

~~~
mrmondo
Sounded interesting but it looks like they’ve disallowed Australians from
signing up.

~~~
reacweb
geolocalisation is censure. It should never be accepted as a good practice.

~~~
mrmondo
Indeed, it’d be nice if there was a way to spoof your location without
connecting to an offshore VPN (or a DNS proxy in some cases) but we just don’t
seem to be there yet.

------
SquareWheel
Original source: [https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/driving-
futur...](https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/driving-future-
digital-subscriptions/)

------
Pyxl101
This is a disappointing decision. As a user, I don't want Google to rank page
content for me based on something other than what I'll see when I visit the
page. With this system, presumably, Google sees one thing (the actual article)
while I will see something else (a useless paywall): bait and switch. When I
search the World Wide Web, I'm not trying to find content within private
walled gardens.

It's fine if Google wants to add support for ranking paywall-restricted pages,
but _those results should only show up for people who have a subscription at
the website_ , and not for everyone else who doesn't. This would be easy to
implement: the publisher sets a cookie with Google on each user who has
access. Only users with a cookie will see restricted articles in their search
results by default.

You could further improve the search experience by allowing users to set a
preference determining whether they want to see restricted content in their
search results for which they don't have a subscription.

To be fair, the previous policy requiring three free articles per day was
probably excessively deleterious for subscription websites. That's probably
more than 95% of casual users will ever read. I think there's a better middle
ground in here somewhere. Most of the time, I want to filter websites out of
my search results if I don't have the ability to read the article right now.

~~~
xbmcuser
Google should give the user the option to hide paywall articles

~~~
NavekM
Google should give the user the option to include paywalled articles.

~~~
smegel
Can't have one without the other.

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tryingagainbro
_More than 42 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue in 2017 will go to Google_

The rest is arranging chairs on Titanic... My guess is that number will only
go up, making things much worst.

~~~
blauditore
I guess other big domain-specific players, such as Facebook or Twitter, are
not in huge danger. But direct competitors are probably fighting a losing
battle.

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chatmasta
The AMP end game begins to materialize.

~~~
arkades
How does this relate to AMP?

~~~
chatmasta
AMP onboards the publishers onto Google's platform and effectively holds their
content for ransom. Makes it easy to implement revenue sharing on
advertisements or subscriptions, especially when all AMP ads must be
"approved" and "compatible." Watch, the next move from Google will be a
paywall subscription service for publishers with 30% revshare to Google and
some kind of unified subscription management and/or bundling for users. Or
before that maybe we'll even see "AMP for desktop".

~~~
nolok
The only way I can consider that you're not vastly over exaggerating for no
reason is if you do not understand what ransom means.

~~~
chatmasta
You're a publisher. Google takes your content. They host it on their server,
behind their domain name. If you want it back, you can forego implementing
AMP. But good luck with that, because your content will rank behind the dozens
of other publishers who do comply.

------
Pyxl101
I wonder if this will have an impact on combating fake news. I would suspect
that few people would pay subscriptions for fake news, so there probably isn't
a lot of that out there. On the other hand, legitimate journalistic content is
far more likely to require a subscription.

Perhaps this policy change is, in addition to appeasing publishers, part of
Google's broader initiatives to promote journalistic reporting and combat fake
news.

~~~
astura
Fake news is spread through social media, not Googled.

~~~
Pyxl101
I'd probably agree that seems to be how it's most widely shared. But note that
Google did announce in Feb 2017 that they're changed their algorithm to combat
fake news:

> Google announced changes to its search algorithm Tuesday that will combat
> the dissemination of "fake news" and conspiracy theories through new ways to
> report inaccurate information.

> The technology giant will change its search rankings to "help surface more
> authoritative pages and demote low-quality content," a company executive
> said in a blog post. This feature aims to prevent issues like the Holocaust
> denial results that Google saw in December — which placed an article from a
> neo-Nazi white supremacist website at the top of search results.

[http://fortune.com/2017/04/25/google-search-algorithm-
fake-n...](http://fortune.com/2017/04/25/google-search-algorithm-fake-news/)

Original source: [https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-
quality-i...](https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-
improvements-search/)

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throw2016
It's suprising anti-monopoly laws have not kicked in yet. The is no point in
having laws if they are not going to be applied.

Maybe it's in the governments immediate interest to not rein in a global
stalker vacuuming up the world's personal information to have access but
paying lip service fundamentally undermines and discredits your own principles
and governance systems.

Giving in to temporary expedience is a losing end game as other governments
will inevitably take action to protect their citizens data. Democracy and
capitalism only work if you do what it says on the tin, or you will have to
resort to increasingly undemocratic methods to hold on ie bullying, bribing
and doing deals with other countries not to take action. Ultimately citizens
everywhere lose.

Absolute power corrupts helping build more monopolies and its in Google's and
its own employees interests that they are split up. Search, Youtube, Maps and
Android come to mind.

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noncoml
We need more good search engines.

~~~
Haydos585x2
I've recently made the switch to DuckDuckGo and have been pretty happy.
Anything I'm missing I just use !g but DDG is only going to get better!

~~~
clydethefrog
!s is the better option, Searchpage is Google results without tracking.

~~~
tortasaur
It's startpage, not searchpage.

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andy_ppp
There would be no way this would fly if Google wasn’t a monopoly. If I was the
government I’d spit them into two competitors and we’d all benefit from and
expansion of possible ideas. It’d be good for Google too.

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mcintyre1994
Are there any public lists of who has all their articles locked behind
paywalls? It'd be good to have an addon to mark all these links if there's no
way to read any I'm not paying for any more.

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libeclipse
Well fuck.

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muse900
Google, facebook etc are not services anymore. They are necessities to
everyday life. They should have been regulated already to the point where
they'd turn non-profit. (Like wikipedia)

We are not talking about businesses anymore, we are talking about necessities
in life that have the monopoly to do whatever they want and change people's
lives around.

Btw I am using duckduckgo, its results are quite good compared to what it was
2 years go. I don't miss google and its 2-5 ad's per search. Thing is I don't
see duckduckgo overcoming google at any point, as for the normal everyday
person google is just a searchgod and thats it. An everyday normal guy can't
understand the implications to his privacy by google,fb etc getting data off
him/her. So he/she won't change to something else, until is forced to.

~~~
gbacon
So is Google a necessity, as you assert in your first paragraph, or isn’t it,
as you demonstrate in the last?

~~~
kuschku
Google is something you choose to use for a user.

But Google is a necessary infrastructure for businesses and developers, as
they can't not use Google, due to the market share it has.

Google also uses their power in one market to affect other markets, and grow
further.

This, again, is monopolistic action.

Try going a week without using Google, fine.

Try running a major website a week without being listed on Google?

