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've been waiting for personalized search forever! (Score:3)
I am totally perplexed (Score:4, Informative)
What has Google's offer of "'Search Plus Your World" got to do with Microsoft's bundling of IE ?
Can someone educate me, please ??
Re:I am totally perplexed (Score:5, Informative)
twitter and facebook would probably consider themselves players in the personalized search market, so the assumption is that they may challenge google for monopolizing personal search that users might otherwise currently use twitter and facebook for.
i don't see the point in telling people how many bits of toast i'm making for breakfast on twatter, facecrap is a crock of shit for obvious reasons, and spoogel results are getting less relevant with each passing day. i can only hope they all implode into each other in an epic court battle.
It's not bundling though (Score:2)
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Actually, it did, before the browser selection window was introduced - what, were you going to download alternative browser with telnet?
Anyways, preinstalled IE was only part of antitrust investigation, there were also questions of undocumented APIs use in IE and Office for competetive advantage (and if as they say Google doesn't give same API results from YouTube to other search engines, it might be bad for them) and lots of others, like shady OEM licensing and so on.
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Use and acquision are two different thing. Bundling is about acquisition, not use. Microsoft did force you to acquire Internet Explorer when getting Windows. You are in no way forced to acquire Google+ with Google Search.
Not only that, it ignores what bundling is all about. The concern with bundling is that, for example, if you're Intel and you have market power in the market for x86 CPUs, you might say that you'll only sell a CPU if the customer also buys an Intel motherboard. No customer is going to pay Intel for a motherboard and then turn around and pay again for a second motherboard from a third party, so all the third party motherboard makers would be out of business.
The problem with applying this to Google is that yo
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ROFLMAO - I remember the first years seeing those ads. I actually clicked on them. Looked up a couple of high school buddies, and found that I could contact them for - oh, I can't remember - maybe sixty dollars. Thought about that for a couple minutes. Concluded that if those buddies were really worth sixty bucks to me, I would have kept track of them all along!
Shipmates, now - that's another story. Whole different ballgame. I might pay to track some of them down. But, dammit - seems that more than h
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It has nothing really to do with it, and twitter is upset because Google is giving users a choice that may exclude twitter, and Google wont' pay twitter for access to their information. So twitter will need to survive completely in their own space; which scares them.
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yes, exactly, and this looks more like Twitter being scared of competition to me
Re:I've been waiting for personalized search forev (Score:4, Informative)
If I recall correctly, Google no longer provides search of Twitter posts due to Twitter's deal to support Google's real-time search expired [cnn.com] (presumably because Google didn't want to pay as much as Twitter wanted.)
Apparently, Google currently can't index Twitter's own real-time activity due to lack of an agreement, and now Twitter is incensed that Google has the audacity to index Google's own real-time activity. Outrageous!
Re:I've been waiting for personalized search forev (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a google account, you already have personalized search.
That's why I always make sure I'm not logged into Google when searching. Frankly speaking, 'personalized search' is not a very good idea. It has the potential to boost your cognitive biases until you have a completely distorted view of reality. Hopefully not too many people fall into this trap.
Search and Social Network Bubbling (Score:5, Insightful)
There is an interesting TED talk about this: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk [thefilterbubble.com]
Duck Duck Go made this website to reaise awareness of bubbling: http://dontbubble.us/ [dontbubble.us]
Re:Search and Social Network Bubbling (Score:5, Informative)
So "disable" it ... In chrome : ctrl-shift-n + start typing your google search.
done/done
Most of the times it's very useful, IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone searches "who is better republicans or democrats" on Google. :-) (BTW, the first result for me suggests that the "Democrats are better for the economy").
When I search for "cookies" I very much appreciate that the first result is the Wikipedia page for HTTP cookies and the second one is the documentation for the cookielib module in the Python standard library. Both are very relevant results for me.
My grandmother, on the other hand, is probably happier to get a website with recipes.
People in the US searching for "United" probably want an airline website, in the UK some people might be more interested in a soccer team.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.
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Useful sometimes, but not others. I'd much rather have it as an optional feature. I'm just wondering if there's any way to "turn it off" without the hassle of logging out.
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Thanks. That's a bit overkill, but good to know about. I don't want to turn off spell-check, synonyms, or word-stem matching, just the "personalized" stuff. Those other things are actually quite useful. I would just rather not have them skew the results based on presumptions about what I want. For example, what if I'm borrowing a friend's machine for a quick search? I wouldn't want my results tailored to their habits of usage. (Or if my mom borrows my machine to search for anything with the word "Asian"...
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If adding a "personalized search" option means they will stop changing my search results (when it is turned off) based on my IP address, I'm all for it.
Because I will turn that crap off and never look back.
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So.....turn it off? Not only that, but it's clearly separated from their regular search results.
Gear -> Search Settings -> Do not use personal results -> Save
Re:I've been waiting for personalized search forev (Score:4, Informative)
You can disable the indexing of your web history [google.com], effectively disabling "personalized search" at the same time.
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You can disable the indexing of your web history [google.com], effectively disabling "personalized search" at the same time.
Is it really disabled, or do they just stop showing it to you?
I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the linked article:
I'm not saying that the Justice Department should look into this. I' m just saying that I think they will. I' m far from an expert on this, but I think anyone should be able to see how this is a very slippery slope for Google.
Where exactly is the [potential] problem? I hope someone can elucidate.
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mis-typed perhaps, but I understand it to be that Google's looking after their own data. They've got their own social network, and are, obviously, pushing that first!
"hey, should we search our own data?" "hmm... lemme think about that for a second.... yeah, go on then"
Twitter broke away, now moans that google's not paying them/using their data? sheesh.
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, Insightful)
I'm not sure it matters how you get the monopoly -- I think the problems start if you abuse the power once you have it. Google will have to be really careful (but they know that, and I'm sure they are doing all they can to play fair), but if they use their dominance in search to (artificially) dominate other markets, it's kind of what Microsoft did with IE and it got them in to trouble. Of course, Microsoft also used some very dirty, very immoral tactics time and time again, so it's hard to compare them with Google.
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It matters becuase you can violate anti-competition clauses even if you are not a monopoly, or not yet a monopoly.
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Google will have to be really careful (but they know that, and I'm sure they are doing all they can to play fair),
No, they aren't. Examples below.
but if they use their dominance in search to (artificially) dominate other markets, it's kind of what Microsoft did with IE and it got them in to trouble.
Like how they display a big fat ad to install Chrome when I visit their home page with IE? Or how they used Android to get themselves on mobile? Or how they aggressively scanned copyrighted books without payment, and then tried to get an exclusive deal to do this in a court settlement? Or how they keep on buying Internet companies like YouTube, which serve content, but Google originally claimed they were just going to be a search company?
I think it's pretty obvious they are e
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Like how they display a big fat ad to install Chrome when I visit their home page with IE?
To be fair, MS shows me a big ad for IE when I visit their site with a non-IE browser. They even offer me a newer version of IE if I'm not using the latest one.
Or how they used Android to get themselves on mobile?
MS installs Bing as the default search engine for IE. Hell, MS even allows MS sites to be accessed from a PC behind ISA server even if the proxy settings aren't set (but only MS sites).
Every company tries to leverage their strengths into more market share. MS allows their users to install other browsers or search providers rather than using IE and/
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Every company tries to leverage their strengths into more market share.
Of course. The question is at what point do regulators start having a problem with it. Microsoft got burned several times by the EU for such practices. One example is how they forced Microsoft to offer users a choice of which browser to install instead of defaulting to IE.
So my only argument is that Google wasn't "doing all they can to play fair", not that Microsoft is playing "fair" (by regulatory standards).
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Google has said that they're open to adding more services to Search Plus the World. If twitter and facebook work with them, they can get their posts prioritized as well.
The EU couldn't demand that Microsoft include options for other browsers if no one else had written browsers that worked on Windows.
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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.
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The real issue is if they are prioritizing thier data ahead of thier competitors...that would lead to more clicks to thier own pages which is more ad revenue. Kind of an anti trust issue here...
In the case of twitter, they had been asked to not use their (twitters) data, so are not using it (and therefore would be unable to involve it in some kind of prioritizing list). From Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
https://plus.google.com/116899029375914044550/posts/24uqWqvALud [google.com]
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It means that google is basing it's data from G+ it's own social network now. In fact google is kind of trying to lock all other social networks out lately. Not in some unfair way but I have to admit that I see google+ much more often on google related pages than on the free internet.
Example: google analytics shows social data from G+ for your sites now but I have no idea if there is a way to include social data from Facebook or Twitter aswell. Google search results give you options for G+ sharing but not f
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to me to be a misunderstanding. Google will index anything they can get their hands on. They aren't indexing Twitter because Twitter told them not to. They can't index parts of Facebook that are relevant to me (ie stuff that I can see because my friends have told Facebook to share it with their friends) because they don't have access to that information (and Facebook have no real right to give it to them).
The only way Google can get their hands on non-public data shared between friends is if they are the provider those friends have chosen broker that information.
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Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it is possible to elucidate. Had to read the article because I was so confused.
Twitter:
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
Article:
The new Google service, which is rolling out today, lets search users toggle between personalized and "global" results, with the former including information gleaned from its Google+ social network and its Picasa image-storage service. Twitter reasonably enough sees that move as a threat, since it could well encourage people to share breaking news on Google+ rather than Twitter.
Ummmm. Huh?
So.... Google is rolling out a service that you have to opt in for that will personalize search results according to data they collected on you.
Twitter has already told Google not to index its tweets apparently. Twitter feels that news comes from them first somehow. I can see that being the case in some tumultuous countries, but as a generality? Come on. That's pushing it. Relevant? Really? What about the signal to noise ratio? Verification?
News publishers might be affected by personalization, but only in so far as their articles that get included would have to match the user profile. Anything else just gets weighted down in the rankings.
Saying the Justice Department should look into this sounds like Whiny Bitch syndrome coupled with some form of cognitive dissonance.
If Google is guilty of anything with the personalized search results, which would be less guilty in my mind, they should already be guilty just by doing what they are doing now without personalized results. Their own algorithms should make them guilty by that logic.
Sounds like Twitter feels intimidated by Google+ and is talking out of its ass.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The irony of course being they had nothing to do with Arab Spring, when net access was actually available in the countries under revolt Facebook was the site of choice.
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually pretty irrelevant anyway - Twitter has never had a business model. They just have no clue how to make money.
The only reason they are bitching is that they are worried investors will figure this out before they IPO and the employees cash out before they go down the drain...
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It's actually pretty irrelevant anyway - Twitter has never had a business model. They just have no clue how to make money.
The only reason they are bitching is that they are worried investors will figure this out before they IPO and the employees cash out before they go down the drain...
Google used to give them money to access their data. Microsoft give them money $30 million a year for their data now. Thats not chump change.
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...
Google used to give them money to access their data. Microsoft give them money $30 million a year for their data now. Thats not chump change.
It is if it costs them more than that to operate. Maybe they are starting to worry about their balance sheet as they get closer to an IPO. They may be able to get funding through VC when operating at a loss but it isn't as easy when you are looking to the stock market for investors.
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Their back-end is quite technically outstanding. Those Twitter clones couldn't handle such load. Apart from that, what sites on the internet actually are that technically outstanding? Pretty much none. The most valued asset of websites is their users and community.
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Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the part I don't quite get. Google respects their nofollow instructions and that's supposed to make them the bad guys???
Seems more like they're bitching because they no longer receive money from Google on top of them sending visitors their way
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More to the point: What the hell is "Personalized Search"?
I've used search engines for years, I know how to wield a keyword group. What more would you want it to do?
Sounds suspiciously like marketing-department speak to me: invented buzzwords and phrases devoid of actual meaning.
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If you have a Google Plus account, Google Search will show you results from your friends' feeds, pictures, etc on top of the normal search.
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- GOOGLE, DON'T FUCKING INDEX US!
- OK, we won't.
*time passes*
- GOOGLE, WHERE THE FUCK IS MY TRAFFIC?
It's not like this is first time it happens.
Re:I don't see the problem at all! Am I just dumb? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Sadly, I am working on it.
I am half tempted to call it "Google Classic," so I can make believe that they gave their users a choice.
See, it probably won't be an improvement over the older Google (the one we remember from years ago). It'll just be a restoration of original level of service.
Well, for the first incarnation, at least.
Re:I'm a boiled frog (Score:4, Funny)
That be Google Classic Beta.:)
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I am half tempted to call it "Google Classic,"
And ye shall be smitten with a mighty trademark lawsuit.
In any case, what will you use for the index? It takes a damn server farm nowadays to crawl effectively, particularly if you want any kind of decent refresh rate.
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We will drive under that bridge when we come to it, as Ted Kennedy might say.
For the first 30,000 websites (I'm going to maintain a white-list), I plan to index the more important columns in the database. After that point, assuming I still find the project worthwhile, I'll devise something new that won't run afoul of any Google patents. Again, this project falls under a personal project that will make my life easier, not my day job. Why? Because Google's search results, as of late, are so disastrous for the
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Have you thought about using a DHT network to cache the data like Yacy does, but coupled with digital signatures to make sure people don't tamper with it? You'd still have control over the results without having to run as many servers, just the crawlers. And if your funds run out, people would still be able to get the results, just not new pages into the index.
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I'll look into it. ^_^
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Yeah, I've decided the search engine will not make use of any javascript. It will offer useful search results, and that will be all. No spelling auto-correct either. Just 100% ad-free, useful, non-natural language search results. I might offer a checkbox to allow for spelling variations...maybe.
It will look for webpages containing all your search terms, by default. And it will only locate phrases / strings if they are clearly placed within quotes.
"I'm a man of the internet, I'm into discipline. Got a router
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Good luck with that. I still get better results with Google than with Bing when searching microsoft.com. Complain all you want but I still find Google to have the best results. Try using google while not logged into their services and see if their current level of personalization is causing your issues. Running your browser in 'private' may even be the best test.
people block google; google integrates own service (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for the big brother fear posts about Google getting evil, but this isn't the time. Twitter ended their agreement with Google for a real time feed; other realtime/news sites have been threatening blocking Google; then they get upset when Google says fuck it, introduces their own service, and integrates it.
What's next? NYT blocks Google indexers and then complains when they don't show up in the top of the search results?
The social sites have had users data locked up long enough. It's due time they provide API's to users, aggregators, and others. Google seems to want to include as much of this other stuff as it can in its search results... they're not the bottleneck, nor the slippery slope here.
Excuse me, but you just don't make sense ! (Score:3)
To use the service, people have to OPT IN --- which means, they have to
CONSCIOUSLY MAKE THE DECISION,
KEY IN THE CORRECT INFO AND
CLICK THE RIGHT BUTTON,
before they are allowed to use the service.
All Google does - and I am not employed by Google or any of its associates - in this case, is to offer a service.
To say that Google is "evil" in this case is like saying the late Mother Teresa did what she did for the sake of publicity.
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Well google instant used to be opt-in too, now its on by default... You need to remain signed in with an opt-out setting enabled to keep it turned off permanently.
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If you don't want Javascript, why don't you block it [noscript.net]?
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I actually prefer to use w3m as my browser, because it launches an instance of Emacs for comment boxes. I find the graphical UI text boxes in Gnome/KDE/firefox/etc way too limited
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Firefox with Pentadactyl can use any text editor you want by simply pressing Ctrl+I. Then saving and closing the editor automatically puts the text back in the box.
There's also It'sAllText, for people who don't want Pentadactyl.
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Just cookie-block and noscript the shit out of google, that's what I do.
The only problem that has caused for me was to make it hard turn off safe-search until I found out you could add &safe=off to the end of any google search URL to turn off safe-search. I even added it to the google search-box in my firefox install,
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To say that Google is "evil" in this case is like saying the late Mother Teresa did what she did for the sake of publicity.
Well.... Then Google is definitely evil.
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STOCK MARKET (Score:2)
Shareholders demand not that it always increases even if it is huge and successful.
Anybody who does well has to exploit their market position to the hilt to maintain constant growth or lose stock value. Scratch that, I mean the fastest growth possible of the share price -- faster growth than others.
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The irony of this is, when Twitter was included on Google's Realtime Search, I preferred Google's search over Twitter's.
Buggy whip makers.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Gah! How wrong can you be! Some buggy whip makers actually liked the air freshening scent of Eau de Cheval, you insensitive clod!
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Yeah, those stupid horses cause all the stupid pollution anyway, and they keep using up all the oil that fuels geo-political instability in the middle-east :-P
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Exactly. I'm surprised Twitter was up long enough for the message to be posted.
Twit Fail (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a distraction to get media focus back on Twitter because of the Google search plus [blogspot.com] announcement. Honestly Twitter shows me the Fail Whale about once a week and their service record [twitter.com] is poor for such a large site - so what will they be complaining about next?
Google has been amassing tons of data and is now planning to use that to have personalized search - that is the story. I don't see how they will get around the filter bubble [wired.com] issue. (Never mind personal data protection and other issues [battellemedia.com].)
As a side I am still trying to wrap my head around Wolfram's blog today about using a TLD .data [stephenwolfram.com] in relation to the Google announcement.
Bad day for the internet?
I am surprised it didn't hit Twitfail [twitfail.com]
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???!
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I live in Portugal and I don't keep getting redirected to google.pt, I use google.com just fine. Maybe you have your browser wrongly configured?
Swinging? More like whining! (Score:4, Insightful)
Coming out "swinging" would have been more like "that's nothing, we have an answer to this that you will like even more!". This is more like a kid in the playground saying "no fair, I wasn't ready, do over!"
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.
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Depends how Google plays this. If the search result focus on a position somewhere between the global average and the current position of the searcher, the opposite development might be possible as well (picking up extremists and slowly leading them to global average). Of course they could also just make up their mind what they want people to believe and lead them to that point, or they might consider to sell the target point to the highest bidder.
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I can't really see how this is much different from the previous norm of people buying left/right-leaning newspapers to suit their preferences. Not that I'm saying that this wasn't a problem either.
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There's a TED talk about this: Beware online filter bubbles! [ted.com]
Personalized search just doesn't work! (Score:3)
Well, it worked for some time, but lately even when looking for some completely innocent words, like e.g. "frog" I tend to get only kinky results. (Don't ask, you don't want to see...) I could not remotely guess how this should in any way reflect my personal interest. (And I did delete my browser history in forehand, also I by no means did not look at any kinky stuff, off course.)
Re:Personalized search just doesn't work! (Score:5, Funny)
[Personalized search just doesn't work!] Well, it worked for some time, but lately even when looking for some completely innocent words, like e.g. "frog" I tend to get only kinky results.
I'd recommend pron browsing mode to bypass Google picking up your kinky preferences for your personalized search!
OH NO!!!! (Score:2)
MG Siegler is now an analyst? (Score:2)
When I hear analyst, I don't think blogger, journalist, or even pundit. Maybe I'm thinking too financial about the word.
I'll trust Google (Score:3)
I'll trust Google to figure out how to make information easier to find. That's their job and so far they've been pretty damn good at it. Twitter sucks at search.
Re:Google search is useless (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Excellent reason to move on to engines like DuckDuckGo ( http://ddg.gg [ddg.gg])...
I have DDG set as a default on some computers. I really like the privacy. The first few results are very often useful and interesting; especially the nice way the structure different results so you know which are official sites etc. This really shows there is space for and a need for a new search engine competitor. The fact is though that if it's something where you have to look a little further (e.g. a local business with a somewhat common name) it just doesn't cope. If you know that you can also feed