Twitter Comes Out Swinging Against Google's Personalized Search 186
Meshach writes "Google's release of the new 'Search Plus Your World' feature has elicited harsh words from Twitter's general counsel (who used to work with Google). He claims that the changes will make information harder to find for users and be bad news for news publishers. Some analysts are wondering if this is a prelude to a legal battle similar to Microsoft's bundling of IE."
I'm a boiled frog (Score:2, Interesting)
These stories made me realise just how crappy google has become; the poor quality search results and unresponsive Javascript interface.
In the market for a new search engine.
Buggy whip makers.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is becoming annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
My problem with Google is that it's never really possible to opt out of their options: for some reason they can't stick to their effing cookies!
I've recently had a lot of trouble with Google Instant and autocompletion: these are features I do *not* want, and yet, it doesn't matter how many times I deactivate them in the search settings, there's always some caveat where it can turn back on - "google instant will be reactivated if you blink the left eye while typing with your left finger on any google page" (or will be reactivated on all incoming searches from Chrome).
Very often, the only solution is to manually game the search parameters: figure what (if anything) can turn all these extraneous additions off, and then turn them off. I'm pretty sure I'm going to face the same annoyance with this: I already see the switch "show personal results"/"hide personal results", and I'm sort of definite about the fact that no matter how I set it, it will tend to get switched back to "show personal results".
(BTW, since I've started ranting, I might add this unrelated tidbit: how many times do I have to "revert to the old look" in Gmail for them to understand that I *can't* stand their new look for Gmail, and will hold out until the VERY END???!
Re:Google search is useless (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see a problem with personalised search.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The one leaning slightly right will see more and more search results showing that low tax is good, social provision bad, Obama wanting to make America a country like Europe or Scandinavia. This may move their opinion to the right slightly, so they will click on further right wing sites where they will start to see stories about "death panels" in Europe, global warming being fictitious and Obama wanting to make America a Muslim country, etc.
The one with centre-left tendencies will see stories about corporations putting out false information on global warming, how European countries have higher levels of health at a lower cost, etc. but hardly any right-wing rebuttals. He may move slightly further left, and then see searches saying that democracy doesn't work because all parties are the same, how republicans want non-Christians barred from official positions (without the context that it is one or two extremists), and so on
You end up with two centre-moderates moving to opposite extremes.
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kind of an anti trust issue here...
Why? People keep saying this, but I really don't see the key things that are needed for Google to have real Anti trust issues.
A) I haven't seen any evidence that Google's monopoly is illegally acquired. People keep forgetting this, when they compare Google with Microsoft. Microsoft is a fundamentally immoral organisation. They acquired their monopoly by using illegal tactics to block other competitors (to understand the basics, have a look at Judge Jackson's findings of facts [justice.gov]). Many of the restrictions which should be imposed on Microsoft come not simply because they have a monopoly, but because they broke the law to get that monopoly. If it were anyone but Microsoft people would say "if you can't take the time then don't do the crime"; because it's Microsoft and they are rich somehow a whole bunch of apologists appear acting as if they did nothing wrong.
B) Google is easily substitutable; it's not like a computer where you need to pay money or even an operating system where you need to know how to reinstall. You just go to a different web page, or you even just type "Bing" into Google. There is only one thing which keeps people on Google's results rather than Bings. It's not even the quality as such, which, IMHO has been going downhill since they stopped treating keywords as having to be in the page. The thing is that people trust Google not to trick them. The results are honest and clear. This is Google's biggest competitive advantage, and if it turns out that Google is wrongly ignoring twitter, that will be an opening for another search engine that is more honest. Fortunately for Google, their competitor at present is Microsoft which is congenitally incapable of honesty. The stupidity of a company which gets caught copying it's results from Google and doctoring results in favour of it's own products in the first few months after launching a new search engine is astounding.
So; what is a search engine? A system which gives an opinion about which pages they would like to recommend based on your query string. If Google's opinion is that you are better with their data than Twitters that's fine for them to say. More importantly; if Google doesn't want to pay for access to Twitter's data. Or any other bunch of factors at Google's discretion then that is Google's decision. In order to change that you would need real evidence that Google broke the law in ways which greatly benefitted their search engine "monopoly".
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem lies not just with the monopolist, but with the way the economy works. It allows for only a handful of influential companies in any market segment (including web-search, electronics, etc.) We expect those companies to behave well (following human ethical rules), but we forget that they have to live up to the shareholders' expectations, and thus are greedy by design.
A) Like someone else said, it does not matter HOW a company gets into a monopoly, but more how it behaves once it acquired its dominant position. How we can expect it to behave in the future is not even important because things may radically change with the change of a board.
Bundling of products is anti-competitive, and should not be accepted from either MS or Google. Example: assume you are a game developer, and Google suddenly starts promoting a game that is very much like your game on their homepage (bundling), and starts giving it away for free (dumping), then you are basically out of business.
B) Monopolists or near-monopolists are not easily replaceable, almost by definition. Further, you make it seem like companies can compete in "honesty". Well, unfortunately, that is just not how the market works. In fact, perhaps a more realistic view is that companies compete in "deception". Google is an advertisement company, and thus may be considered masters in this art.
What we need is ways to break up large companies into smaller ones. Ways to commoditize their products. Like many programmers know, it makes more sense to build a system out of small modules which are open and easy to replace, than to build a large monolithic closed-source system. This is where economists and lawmakers can actually learn something from programmers.