In the late 1990's when they started, around the same time as Metafilter, maybe Google was honestly trying to rank websites based on href's, as some perceived indicator of website popularity.
But over time how much has Google itself influenced the product of its own "Pagerank" algorithm?
If Google places a website as a first search result for some frequently searched term(s), even if by accident, then that website is going to become very popular, very quickly.
Opinion: Google determines the popularity of a website.
In the early days we believed they were presenting results based on the relative popularity of websites. At some stage Google itself became the determinant for the popularity of websites.
Stories like this one support this idea.
One could argue Google is running what amounts to an online version of the Yellow Pages where the ads can be changed or rearranged hourly, daily, weekly, etc. Instead of calling a telephone number to place an ad in the Yellow Pages, one has to enter an opaque Adwords auction for words instead of ads.
But for the small business, especially those who do not bid on words, it gets worse. A business listing in the search results will likely never been seen if it is not in the top 10, i.e., on page 1.
Imagine if this were true for the Yellow Pages, which is organized alphabetically. Businesses with names beginning with numbers or the letter "A" would receive a grossly disproportionate share of calls, because no one would ever get past the first page of listings.
As crazy as it sounds, I think there's an argument Google and not the user is effectively doing the choosing. Whether it's intentional or not is irrelevant. The way the system is implemented and used, this is the effect. And this only benefits Google.
But don't Google also analyze how long you spent at a site when you click results. So you click into a site, it's not what you wanted so you back out and click another result. Google records that and sees that site wasn't useful to you at that time for that search word. So it drops in popularity.
Contestants vie for first, second, third, so on. Over the past few years by the inherent nature of competition tips and tricks get shared and things normalize. Meaning, everyone starts to look the same.
Oh, you can also just cheat the contest to be ahead of first place by paying more than the next person.
Yes they are (under the well-intended banner of "quality"), and I'm no fanboy for google, but the real theme is monocultures:
It seems so great to have one-size-fits-all solutions - penicillin, Hollywood, iTunes, U.S. Government, "just google it," Microsoft Word, single strain of bananas. But, flexibility and divserity are needed to endure and survive the long-term.
I love the single strain of bananas inclusion. It is a giant problem. They are one of the worst strains according to friends who work in produce sourcing. We need to find a way to popularize consumption of saline/sea vegetables. And I agree with what you say, also.
As a result of advances in technology, news, scholarly research, books, music, film, etc. can all be created and distributed by _anyone_, because it can be done at lower cost. This is bad news for some old school money-making schemes, but good news for consumers.
Perhaps consumers on the web are getting accustomed to "free" without any focus on quality. The classic arguments that lower cost means lower quality may be weakening.
Poor analogy: The computers we use today are less expensive than the ones we used in the 1980's. But who argues that they are lower quality? (I am not suggesting whether they are or not, just pointing out the arguments that people make.)
The way they word these releases certainly makes it sound like they have users' best interests in mind.
But honestly, as you have highlighted, these announcements should be insulting to users' intelligence.
"Dear Users: Please allow us to store copies of all your sensitive data, including every email ever sent or received, in perpetuity. In return, to the extent the law permits us to do so, we'll let you know (_ex post facto_) when some other third party is having a look at it."
The solution to the problem if indeed there is a problem here is not going to come from Google.
The problem _is_ Google.
The only parties who need a copy of an email are the sender and the recipient. If you really care about privacy, security, whatever, then "store and forward" and "POP" via some third party (Google, etc.) is not the proper way to implement email.
Hypothesis: Google does not charge for Gmail because, quite simply, no one would pay.
> The only parties who need a copy of an email are the sender and the recipient.
Emphasis on "need". Most recipients also like to have a third-party anti-spam service also have a copy of their email.
Assuming the encryption costs are low enough, spammers and virus senders would like nothing better than to cripple anti-spam learning tools by having each recipient recieve a cryptographically unique opaque blob. This would force users to develop their own training corpus and react to new spam and virus outbreaks individually.
You may argue that you could still use anti-spam locally, but it wouldn't be as good. While I wouldn't mind sending decrypted spam out to a server and getting updates to my local anti-spam program, no one would want to send legitimate mail, so the service would have no "ham" to train against.
I suppose encryption could help in the fight against spam by requiring CPU time to encrypt the email. 10 seconds per email would be hard to notice for a real human responding to messages, but might make spam unprofitable.
Do you think there could be any bias when the newspapers, or for-profit search engine projects, who rely on selling advertising "space" as their "business", report on the practice of filtering out advertising? Not me. These folks epitomize the highest standards of integrity.
If www search engines and "journalists" are being paid primarily by advertisers, and not readers, then we have the best system for "news" that has ever been created. And we can be proud of their achievement, and how they are using the latest communications technology and the public resource of internet bandwidth for its highest and best purpose. Everyone in the ad sales industry should pat each other on the back. You have provided readers with so much greatness. You have earned your success.
As readers, we should be thankful for these heros for making the internet and mobile carrier networks work so smoothly and keeping us so well informed, at such low cost to readers. Everbody wins. Brilliant.
Not just cool, but useful. "UEFI" should have been a Forth-like REPL like Sun, FreeBSD, OLPC, etc.
The output of rappel reminds me of an "assembly level debugger" I used for many years called "ald". Maybe I am just stupid, but when I'm writing assembly I like to verify the contents of registers as a program executes.
From user.h:
"Fuck computers, multiarch is bullshit."
Agreed.
I need something that compiles easily on NetFreeOpenBSD x86. Mo multiarch bullshit. Meanwhile I will stick with as, objcopy and ald.
Keep in mind that in the 1990's it was rare for Windows uptime to exceed 24hrs and Microsoft demos of new features barely worked if at all. Not to mention that "security" was not yet on the PR agenda.
Gates' home, replete with low quality software a la Microsoft, sounded silly if not scary back then. But what do I know? Maybe it was all very stable and reliable.
On the other hand, placing evergreen confidence in "TLS", believing that it is "good enough" or concluding "it's all we've got" are lines of thinking that not make sense to me. The vulnerabilities just keep coming, one after another.
High speed crypto not part of TLS that, as another commenter put it, is "considered safe". Does it exist?
Useful software that is written from the start with such care that it does not need to be continously patched ad inifitum. Nonexistant? (No need to answer. I know the truth.)
Getting something added to TLS seems difficult enough, but getting something removed seems impossible. Like all bad software, TLS has numerous "features" I do not need and will never use. OpenSSL is like a museum of cryptography, preserving the obsolete for posterity.
Long live TLS. May it forever waste my time and energy.
Is there an assumption hidden in this statement? That the cost of map data _must_ be sending personal information to Google? Why can't the cost be a dollar value? What if it was? How much do you estimate it would be? Would you pay it?
Could there be a company that could create maps and directions of the same or better quality than the enormous, well-known one you mentioned? And could that company charge actual currency for licensing the data? In fact I believe there was such a company, until Google acquired them and their work became "Maps".
I also remember in the earlier days of the www getting directions without sending personal information to Google, via sites like MapQuest. I also remember map software that did not require internet connectivity.
"As much as [what Google chooses to do] is infuriating, I'm not likely to give up my pocket computer..."
Is there another hidden assumption in this statement? That it would be _impossible_ to build a pocket computer that can serve maps and directions from a local data store, without an internet connection?
"...but it is what it is right now."
Right now, and forever more. Because there is only one "proper" way to do things, and that's how they're being done now. Those are safe assumptions, yes?
> Why can't the cost be a dollar value? What if it was? How much do you estimate it would be? Would you pay it?
I live out this sentiment in my donations to Wikimedia whenever they start bugging us for donations.
I do have a tangible "value added" from going to their site and using Wikis, and thus I'm more than happy to shell out some sheckels for what they offer.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are simply not aware of the implications of these "free" services they use (picture me doing the double quote hand gesture when I say "free" here). I don't want to call them ignorant, as many have a general understanding that they are being data mined, but they are unaware of the _implications_ of such, compared to your average HN reader who often has been around big data, or handled it themselves. (Read: "Nothing to hide" argument)
> Right now, and forever more. Because there is only one "proper" way to do things, and that's how they're being done now. Those are safe assumptions, yes?
THe bright side is that they are safe assumptions until people start waking up and learning of ways to minimize (not completely remove) their "data footprint" - NoScript, Ghostery, uBlock, Disconnect, etc. etc.
Businesses will have to react, whether that's getting into the trenches (ie: FuckAdBlock.js, force javascript), or considering a different monetization approach.
And perhaps there is a niche market for a Non-Internet-Required "MapQuest" style iOS/Android App, waiting to be struck ;).
Opinion: If interfaces is the most important software engineering concept, then the most important interface is the one used to control I/O. Different approaches. Fun to think about.
But over time how much has Google itself influenced the product of its own "Pagerank" algorithm?
If Google places a website as a first search result for some frequently searched term(s), even if by accident, then that website is going to become very popular, very quickly.
Opinion: Google determines the popularity of a website.
In the early days we believed they were presenting results based on the relative popularity of websites. At some stage Google itself became the determinant for the popularity of websites.
Stories like this one support this idea.
One could argue Google is running what amounts to an online version of the Yellow Pages where the ads can be changed or rearranged hourly, daily, weekly, etc. Instead of calling a telephone number to place an ad in the Yellow Pages, one has to enter an opaque Adwords auction for words instead of ads.
But for the small business, especially those who do not bid on words, it gets worse. A business listing in the search results will likely never been seen if it is not in the top 10, i.e., on page 1.
Imagine if this were true for the Yellow Pages, which is organized alphabetically. Businesses with names beginning with numbers or the letter "A" would receive a grossly disproportionate share of calls, because no one would ever get past the first page of listings.
As crazy as it sounds, I think there's an argument Google and not the user is effectively doing the choosing. Whether it's intentional or not is irrelevant. The way the system is implemented and used, this is the effect. And this only benefits Google.