I am conflicted.
I think that Daily Mail deserves it all. At the same time I don’t think it should be Google’s duty to limit the reach of a bad publication by means of algorithmic changes to its opaque Search product.
Except the whole reason Google rose to be the best search engine is because they created a better search. More context awareness and better algorithms to find quality/relevant posts. As the SEO meta game changes, so must they, to stay ahead of those who want to game the system.
once they decided to get into the game of determining what is and what is not the truth is where they step over the line. if I search for something I want what is popular to come up, not was is approved.
daily mail isn't gaming the system, people know it is a tabloid. the real issue is that many supposed respectable news agencies have been shown to have more than their fair share of misinformation.
> if I search for something I want what is popular to come up
I am in a different camp. I want something useful to come up. Once upon a time popularity (in the pagerank sense) and usefulness were better correlated. Today the signal-to-noise ratio is worse and those trying to game the system are more sophisticated.
The issue if you will, is that Google is moving from publishing a variety of perspectives to a single "true" one.
And furthermore the perspective that is crowned the true one, is based on whatever is politically convenient for Google.
If people loudly and angrily demand that Google show a lie as truth, then you will now be in position where Google will only show the lie without any questioning or contrary perspectives.
As the lie becomes established, so policy will made based on it. And it will be very deficient policy. And it will lead to disaster. Afterwards, people will ask? How come no one saw this coming? How come no one raised any objections?
Did you know that during the communist mass starvation, there was a lot of false propaganda about how well big the harvests were. People looking to ingratiate themselves with the elite lied about how well everything was going and flattered the elite with how great their their wisdom was.
They were surrounded by yes men who created a filter bubble. The distorted vision of that was catastrophical. Tens of millions dead.
Eh; their site is the top hit on Google for “The Daily Mail”
I suspect most people searching using Google’s news features want news, not tabloids.
Slurping a bunch of searches for news into your tabloid site sounds like an obvious case of “gaming the system”.
I didn’t know it was a tabloid until just now, because I’ve never heard of them. I’d have been upset with the news aggregators I use if they accidentally bubbled unreliable sources to the top of my feed.
> if I search for something I want what is popular to come up, not was is approved.
There is no objective, Platonic measure of "popularity", and Google always has to temper it with "correctness".
When someone searches for "california governor", Google needs to show results for "Gavin Newsom" instead of "Arnold Schwarzenegger", even though the latter is immensely more popular by any reasonable metric.
So yes, Google's engineers will keep tweaking the algorithm until it stops showing Arnold Schwarzenegger entirely. In search of correctness. Otherwise it will become unusable very quickly.
But there is no single right answer! Even a given person may want one answer in one context and another one in a different context. Popularity is not the answer, but neither is currency.
A problem I run into repeatedly with Google is that I enter search terms and when it gives me the wrong thing, sometimes the opposite of what I want, it strongly resists my refining it. For instance, if I search for "turning off feature X" and everybody else searches for "turning on feature X", Google will "correct" me implacably. You're not allowed to turn "X" off. Back in the old days when it wasn't as intelligent, you could add words that would divert it from the popular cluster of hits. This isn't just an annoyance, I believe it's shaping society by determining which ideas and information thrive and which wither.
If you want what's popular in a very raw sense, you'll get bots linking to each other. Otherwise, you need some other sense of popular that takes bits and pieces of usefulness and trustworthiness and more.
> once they decided to get into the game of determining what is and what is not the truth is where they step over the line.
Why shouldn't they? If I search for information about the Earth, I don't want to see a bunch of flat Earth crap. If I search for information on vaccines, I don't want to have to sift through anti-vax results, no matter how popular they are.
People use Google because they think the results are good. Google's bet is that one reason people for this is that they surface true information. Therefore, they penalize information they assess likely to be false. If users disagree with Google's assessment — i.e. it buries valuable information or surfaces worthless information — they'll use another search engine.
While I agree with you, the results you seek are still subjective results.
As a flat earther (I'm not a flat earther), the emphasis I wuold be looking for would be on returning results proving the earth is flat when I search for information about the Earth.
You'll never get an answer to this question from people who question google's ordering. Google has to order the content somehow. I don't think people bitching about their changes realize it is always a trade off. Some people win and some people loose.
The publisher/platform thing is also a false dilemma that keeps getting repeated even though it has no basis in the reality of the law. U.S.C 230 explicitly states:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The same law also states:
> any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
So this idea that these platforms are de-facto publishers because they decided to curate their platform is explicitly incorrect as stated by the law.
I am not conflicted at all, Daily Mail clearly gamed the system in order to inflate their clickrate.
System was updated to make it harder to be gamed, inflated clicks are back to what it suppose to be.
Maybe instead of trying to sell drama and rage headlines they could focus on actually producing worthwhile content... but then again its Daily Mail.
What would be interesting is to see how other papers were affected by this.
Where do you see it was they were gaming the system? Their site was clearly popular. From what I see they were targeted based on the perception of that content’s value.
The gaming part could actually be natural product, not necessarily ill-willed intent.
The headline creation and news selection promote clickbait within organization. The most outlandish and catchy stuff gets most revenue, why spend days/week/months on quality article that will be surpassed in terms of ROI by gossip drop?
Over time ppl working in Daily Mail would naturally write stuff that trends on google.
And I wager that what was trending on google had a good chance to trend amongst their target audience too (stuff that triggers emotional responses).
It's impossible not to avoid "limiting the reach" somehow because a search engine cannot simply deliver to the user the list of all pages that it has crawled which contain the search words, in an arbitrary order.
Google is just responding to what people want; the search engine has taken a lot of flak over the years for being spammed, and alternatives have been cropping up. Though "to google" has become a household word, Google cannot rest on their laurels and take that entrenchment for granted.
Much more likely that they made some global changes, and dailymail happened to be one of the hardest-hit high profile sites, because the amount of click-baity untrue stuff they publish.
Google has to do some sort of curation, or we're left back in the early 2000's where people are just throwing keywords up for the google crawler to find. Is there a difference between those sites and the daily mail? Oh yeah, but I don't know where it sits on the spectrum when compared to those old sites and more reputable news agencies.
Yeah but if they don't do that, sites eventually figure out how to game the system/algorithm and we're back and square one. Google has to constantly make changes to stay ahead of SEO. It's like an arms race.
