
The New York Times Algorithm & Why It Needs Government Regulation - yanw
http://searchengineland.com/regulating-the-new-york-times-46521
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natmaster
<facepalm>I have a great idea guys, lets have the government run the press!
Then we can be like China! While we're at it, why not take over all other
forms of free speech - I mean why go half-way when you can go all out?
</facepalm> \- this is what I get for getting so worked up I post a response
before I finish reading the article. Mad props for employing satire.

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kingsley_20
Sorry, downvoted by mistake, without reading your entire comment.

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donohoe
A well reasoned and informative piece. Any other good responses to the NYT
OpEd piece out there?

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mattmanser
Conversely, to me, the reasoning in the piece is extremely flaky. A few
examples below:

1) The biggest and most obvious one is that the Times has a large amount of
oversight already in terms of other papers as well as law. Google has nothing
like that, search engines just don't work the same way. You don't get search
results compared all the time. That does happen to reporting.

2) People tend to consume a variety of reporting mediums, but only one search
engine. For example I read the Independent newspaper, the BBC or Guardian
websites, on TV watch Question Time, This week (both BBC again admittedly) and
Channel 4 news. And on the radio in the morning, news reports. I'm probably a
bit more of an outlier, but I would guess many people are exposed to multiple
suppliers of news without even realizing it.

And for search I use... um, Google.

3) The numbers are totally incomparable. How many people in the world rely on
the Times' as their exclusive news provider in the world? 1% would be a gross
over estimation. And Google for search? 66%.

4) Transparency. There is nothing transparent about Google's algorithm, while
everything is supposed to be transparent at a paper. A journalist not
declaring a vested interest is abnormal, they will even duck out of stories in
which the have such an interest. Again, it's about oversight. Remember that
hoo-haa a year ago about the massive argument those tech bloggers had on
screen about free gear influencing their reports? That would never happen to a
search engine.

There are many comparable intellectual bloopers in the satire just like this.

I've been of the opinion that Google needs some oversight for quite a while,
they are getting scarily powerful. While I dislike government interference,
the web is too important to leave to a company.

At the moment Google is fairly good, but there's no denying it's been
favouring its own services at the expense of others.

We have nothing to gain in trusting it to regulate itself and everything to
lose.

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nkassis
Good post but #2 is probably far from the average. A lot of people don't
read/watch the news anymore and if they do, they usually watch it on one
channel at night. I find it rare for people to do something as simple as use
google news or other aggregators. And even if you were to read multiple
papers, the Times does get reprinted a lot, so does Reuters and AP, Knight
Rider stories etc. The newspaper industry is about as consolidated as the
search business. There not that many conglomerates in news and independent
newspapers are rare.

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c1sc0
I despise MSM's talk about how 'gatekeepers' should get preferential treatment
or should be regulated, no matter who those gatekeepers are. It's all a
shallow power play: he who directs traffic, shapes minds. The NYT is losing
its power to direct traffic & complaints about Google are just misguided
survival strategies. There _is_ a problem with power centralization through
network effects (Facebook, Google) but regulation is not going to solve that.

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Ardit20
What is going to solve it?

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dieterrams
> If Google was seriously abusing its “gatekeepter” status, you’d expect to
> hear billions of complaints about anti-competitive behavior in those
> billions of searches.

Ah, because people are never duped. Google's done an incredible job creating a
do-gooder image for itself, which shuts off people's warning systems. (For
contrast, consider Microsoft's long-standing reputation for being ruthless,
especially in the 90s.) To be sure, I don't think it's all image, but you'd be
a fool to think do-gooder sentiments are the driving force behind that
company.

Since Sullivan is so interested in pointing out cute similarities, here's a
serious difference for you: Google is insanely profitable and has an extremely
effective positive feedback system for acquiring power. The Gray Lady,
meanwhile, is on the verge of collapse.

The problem is power, and there isn't nearly enough concern over how much of
it Google has. Good on The New York Times for trying to raise it, I say. I
don't know if I agree with their proposal, but this is a conversation that we
need to be having.

And by the way, it's not really about Google as such. If it were Yahoo or
Lycos or whoever else in Google's position, the same arguments would apply.

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c1sc0
Lycos? How cute! I agree that the problem is power, but I'm not convinced
regulation is going to do anything. On the one hand we have network effects at
play creating major power hubs (The Kingdom of Facebook) but on the one hand
we also have blogs run by local city-state tyrants like Techcrunch. Yes,
stupid blogs are about power too. Should government regulate major blogs like
Huffpost of Techcrunch because they have the power of shaping opinion in
respectively the field of technology and liberal thought?

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garply
I've never been convinced by the argument that opening Google's algorithms
would make it really vulnerable to spam. In the short term, I don't doubt it
would, but I suspect a million eyes on the code would find and fix the bugs
(where bugs are the easily spammable weak points), much as they do with crypto
algorithms.

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chc
But the thing is, weak points in Google's algorithm at this point in the game
are probably not bugs. The algorithm is probably doing what it was written to
do, but the problem is that Google is essentially trying to create an AI that
can pass a worldwide Turing test with highly trained professional testers
working to outsmart it.

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SapphireSun
Wouldn't having the government step in defeat half the point of a newspaper?

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joubert
How's that diff from th government deciding how we find stuff online?

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ghurlman
Harder for the government power grabbers to make the "child porn" argument
against newspapers.

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sahaj
google is doing well and forcing other companies to innovate and compete. the
folks who run or are involved in these other shitty companies are pissed and
just want to rant. so far, most everything google is doing and has done has
benefited the end consumer in one way or another. so far.

as an average user who doesn't own a company or hold a financial stake in
google or their competitors, i feel like all of this rant is bullshit.

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fmora
I agree with you on this. I remember that shortly after Google announced the
Android operating system, Apple announced that it would be releasing an SDK
for developing native applications in the iPhone.

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kingkawn
When geeks attack.

