First Amendment Protection For Search Results? 76
An anonymous reader writes "A legal paper (PDF), commissioned by Google and written by Eugene Volokh and Donald Falk, makes the case that search results should be protected under the First Amendment, thereby making regulation of search results illegal. The authors say a search engine 'uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers' judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries.' Cory Doctorow's reaction: 'I think that the editorial right to exercise judgment is much more widely understood than the sacred infallibility of robotic sorting. I certainly support it more. But I wonder if Google appreciates that it will now have to confront people who are angry about their search rankings by saying, "I'm sorry, we just don't like you very much" instead of "I'm sorry, our equations put you where you belong." And oy, the libel headaches they're going to face.'"
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Right.
Google is only a corporation because the government GAVE them a license to incorporate. With any license comes restrictions on what can or can not be done (just as a drivers license in most states doesn't let you drive without a seat belt, or while texting on a cellphone). If google doesn't like those license restrictions, let it hand back the license and became a directly-owned company by a person.
Re:Google: "Corporation is a person"? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I disagree with the "corporation is a person" argument, I do recognize that a corporation is an assembly of persons who should not be stripped of their consitutional rights simply because they get organized. In fact the US Constitution explicitly guarantees the right to assemble to petition the government.
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Yes, but it also guarantees the rights of everyone else. I remember in my 7th grade civics class learning that my rights end where another persons start.
When a corporation consolidates too much power, it can abuse others rights. We have every right to defend ours and if that means ripping that corporation apart, so be it. It is protecting the rights of those individuals that work there as well. Not everyone will work for Google, Apple and the other big dogs forever.
We need to protect individual rights of ev
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Only the government can do these things, and it is you who is proposing to use the government to do these things to the people who form the corporat
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While I disagree with the "corporation is a person" argument, I do recognize that a corporation is an assembly of persons who should not be stripped of their consitutional rights simply because they get organized. In fact the US Constitution explicitly guarantees the right to assemble to petition the government.
A big part of the corporate personhood debate is whether a corporation has a right to anonymous speech. The 1st Amendment doesn't specifically cover anonymity, so the courts have to weigh the pros an
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>>>a corporation is an assembly of persons who should not be stripped of their consitutional rights simply because they get organized
False.
Just because you take-away Google's ability to speak, or limit its special under "commercial speech" laws, does not affect the google employees inside the building. They are still free to go to their facebooks or web forums and speak all they desire. The human beings do not lose any of their rights.
Re:Google: "Corporation is a person"? (Score:5, Informative)
The notion that an elected set of representatives would create a baseline secret test to check google's results is an excellent and needed one. a light weight check process could be easily designed and periodically launched to *measure* the results.
Really? ...
Gadaffi was elected, as was Mubarak, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Kim Jong-il,
If you don't like Google search results go use Bing or Baidu.
In the mean time, I prefer results that are algorithmically determined based on the words I enter rather than some politicians idea of what I should be searching for.
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Re:Google: "Corporation is a person"? (Score:4, Informative)
Google results are algorithmically determined.
Only after their algorithms detect spammers gaming the system are some tiny fraction flagged for human review. This work is farmed out to Leapforce. They have lately been crowd sourcing the spam nomination process by algorithmically mining personal block lists. This has done wonders for filtering out the content scraper sites that provide zero original information, and simply hang ads all over other people's pages.
Sites that do not employ Spammer tricks or page rank manipulation techniques never get selected for human review. The engineers have nothing to do with it. Political agenda? Please. What political topic does not appear in search results?
Further, Much of this is dictated by law. Are you suggesting Google should violate the law serve up child porn to you? Wouldn't you be one of the first in line screaming if Google ignored the laws that force them to restrict some results? You know you would.
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Google results are algorithmically determined.
...for everyone who's not Google. Google boosts their own services to the top and provides links and HTML5 implementations of services for search results that encourage the users to stay with Google instead of going to one of the sites that Google has indexed.
Besides, "algorithmically determined" doesn't mean unbiased. That's like saying "we used science so we're impartial!"
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so of course they are going to encourage you to use there service instead of their competitor.
lets say you run a used Toyota lot would and people come to you wanting to buy a pickup are you going to recommend that they go talk to the Ford dealership down the road because they have a better pickup? hell no. you are going to recommend your truck and display all of its good points, why because you are trying to make a profit. that is what businesses do. If you as the costumer are trying to ask the dealership h
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Google's results aren't algorithmically determined, they handpick them too. Algorithms themselves are also based on Google's and their engineers political agenda.
I can plainly see that your hatred for Google is strong.
You are correct though. Google should make sure that their search results are approved by governmental regulators in each of the countries in which they are presented. Only through careful governmental committee approval can we ever find real truth.
P.S.
You are an idiot.
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Hi Bonch. New sockpuppet already?
You're correct, the algorithms are handpicked by engineers. So you think you'd rather have politician's pick the algorithm, than engineers who spent years researching the problem? And where there is a very straight-forward check on how much bias they can inject (any other search engine)?
As someone else already said: "You're a moron." And that's a statement of fact.
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There is no need for the Government to do any such testing. People do this for free and much better. Remember when Bing came out and the huge amount of press it generated when you searched for "Microsoft Sucks" and Google showed at the top of the list? That was nothing to do with some secret Government group, that was a bunch of normal people testing the search engine's capabilities.
Look, I'm no fan of politicians, massive corporations, lobbyists, etc... Capitalism in this case is something that works v
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There is no need for the Government to do any such testing.
Exactly.
Google is already crowd sourcing this filtration of the algorithmically selected results. They are doing this in response to spammers and page rank manipulators that scrape content or links, drape it with ads and foist it into google search results via a monstrous network of links pointing to it.
Google added the Blocked Site Feature [google.com] which lets you add these sites to your personal block list. You can remove blocks either permanantly or turn off blocking temporarily for specific search sessions.
Then
Re:Google: "Corporation is a person"? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... where, oh shill-who-just-made-an-account-to-post-this-the-second-the-story-came-up (hi bonch!), does Google say they are entitled to 1st amendment protections because they are a person? Hint: they don't, because the 1st amendment doesn't just apply to people, it applies to, well, everything, including corporations. It has nothing whatsoever to do with corporations being "people." Please, there is enough to bash Google on without having to drag in completely irrelevant stuff.
And if that person was "blocked" from publishing, clearly he made an agreement with Google that required their permission to publish: otherwise, they wouldn't be able to block it. Clearly, he shouldn't have, and I don't know why you would.
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He may not be bonch this time, remember there are MS shills operating on here too.
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I propose that here at /. we equate "bonch" with "shill" as new slang.
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LOL
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Its not like the entire fing country is livid about the Supreme Court holding that corporations are people - which makes zero sense.
The overwhelming majority of the country couldn't care less. Corporate personhood is a simple concept, and it's been used for almost 200 years.
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Its not like the entire fing country is livid about the Supreme Court holding that corporations are people - which makes zero sense.
The overwhelming majority of the country couldn't care less. Corporate personhood is a simple concept, and it's been used for almost 200 years.
200 years?
Way too conservative.
Its been around at least since Roman times [wikipedia.org]. The very word corporation essentially means "embodiment" and the concept has ancient long before the advent of the US Constitution or the Supreme Court.
Originally, corporations were granted protection only for the purposes of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment (Equal protection clause so that they could own property). Only minor tweaks have occurred over time, corporations have no 5th amendment rights, can't vote, hold office.
No, but commercial speech is protected (Score:3)
It is well-established that commercial speech is protected under the first amendment. There are limits to that protection--it is not as protected as core political speech by individuals--but it is protected.
Look up the Virginia Pharmacy Board case.
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have you ever considered that maybe multiple people happen to share the same opinion? and that just maybe those people could disagree with you
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I don't have any problem with Google filtering out information that they think I was looking for. At worst I can refine my search to fix that. Very few persons do look for spam and search-stuffed sites that effectively are useless.
What I do have a problem with is if there are filters that denies me information since something is deemed indecent or not matching what the government think is good for me.
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Dear Slashdotters with mod points: first, check when the OP posted compared to when the story was posted (the exact same freaking time, quite an accomplishment for such a lengthy post), and second check his post history (all of, at this time, 2 posts). He is a shill, same as the poster right above him.
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How do you think you train a search algorithm? Ask magic fairies to do it for you?
Hint: You hire people to do editorial review of searches and train on that.
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I'm not sure it weakens it at all, it more less says that it's not relevant for people to try and regulate results. If you don't like Google's answer, you are free to use a different search engine. The power of the consumer in this case ensures that Google's developers are doing the right thing. If they don't, or skew results then 'Ask', or 'Bing' would gain usage and Google would lose market share.
You can't tell me that dozens of people a day are not doing search comparisons and reporting results to see
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Wrong person, try checking the history of the person that posts before being a troll AC
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He has many accounts. He created five today.
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He wasn't responding to you. There's a bonch sockpuppet post at -1 between your posts.
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Oh shit, never showed until just now and I've been spamming refresh on this thread. Apologies to those offended (except for Bonch).
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What's even more pathetic is when bonch tries to smear you [slashdot.org] by claiming you support pedo porn after pointing out his Google bashing is wrong.
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I would call your delusional, but you appear to be paid to write the bullshit you do.
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Paid for writing on /.? Hardly, as with the AC why not check the history of the person posting before being an ass? Oh wait, that may take thought and it's much easier to troll right?
You think that the market does not propagate losers when it comes to spewing monopoly propaganda? What got Google off the ground was the mass of proprietary search engines from the prodigy days that said "our way or screw you". Google was faster, and returned relevant results. They also did it for much less money.
Now is yo
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I take it you do not browse at -1?
This is whom I was responding to.
http://slashdot.org/~StarcraftWin [slashdot.org]
This post is what I was responding to.
http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2844371&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=39970831#39970917 [slashdot.org]
That's mostly beside the point. Google's customers aren't those who use it to search, they are their advertisers. Google has largely abused this position to shut down their competitors. On top of that they have abused their position to place their other services on better places than their competitors. This is the relevant part about Google's antitrust issues, not how easy it is for users to switch services. Google isn't a traditional consumer-seller business.
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Thanks, and apologies! I killed the browser and now things show as replies to that post instead of me. Very odd
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Did you look at their history? It's a shill account whose only posts have been in this thread to troll. Their very long first post shares the timestamp of the post hitting the front page. This is bonch's M.O.
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I don't browse at -1, but with that said generally replies to the -1 are normally hidden also. Not sure why, but their posts show a reply to me. I'll clear disk cache and reload the browser.
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It's cool. :-)
Stupid (Score:2)
Once a search engine becomes any more advanced than the grep tool, there are algorithms involved to quantify relevance that make the results subjective.
It's also worth considering that the primary cause of censored search results in the world is DMCA takedown notices.
Googled (Score:3, Funny)
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Probably not, the light from your iPhone is going to piss someone off. You might go home bloodied.
What did you expect from Volokh? (Score:3)
He seems to think that pretty much all expression should have First Amendment protection. It's almost as if he takes that "inalienable rights" and "Congress shall make no law" stuff seriously.
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You should ignore him then. He's probably one of those Tea Party whackos.
(almost forgot to mention, that was sarcasm)
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That language was so ambiguous (Score:2)
"Congress shall make no law"
"Shall not be infringed"
"The accused shall enjoy the right"
Mere suggestions, to be ignored at the convencience of the state.
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The problem with this, as I see it, is that it cuts both ways. If search results imply that Glen Beck did something unsavory to a young girl in 1990, Google could find that they have to clean up those results as soon as someone complains about it. Even more so for autocomplete suggestions. This is an awkward and dangerous path for Google to try and walk. I really think they're better off by washing their hands of any editiorial culpability and hiding behind the shield of "proceedurally generated content
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He seems to think that pretty much all expression should have First Amendment protection. It's almost as if he takes that "inalienable rights" and "Congress shall make no law" stuff seriously.
Please correct me if I am wrong but my understanding is that it was never the case where "pretty much all expression" had First Amendment protection.
Several of examples off the top of my head are:
- Soliciting a crime
- Death threats and other forms of coercion
- Perjury
- Slander and libel
They get it both ways (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they get it both ways.
If it is protected speech, then the gov't can't shut them down.
But when someone sues them for libel (or the like), they can equally claim that their search results are their opinion, which they are entitled to express, and not facts, which could be subject to dispute. As it happens, there has already been a case just like that. In their response, Google said something along the lines of
In that case, Google prevailed.
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From the perspective of the article, the only facts that Google is reporting are that the web page exists, and some content of the page. The "opinion" is the page rank, the choice in which content from the page is displayed, and the association of the page to certain keywords.
Libel is a written defamatory statement, expressly stated or implied to be factual. Truth and opinions are not actionable. One possible catch for Google is a court finding that Google implies that the pages in the results are factu
Google Suggest (Score:3)
This piece may be a reaction to the "Google Suggest" lawsuits in France.
Google has been sued several times in France because of Google Suggest.
1. Google your name. If you're actually a crook, Google Suggest results will expose you as such.
2. Sue Google for defamation.
3. Profit!
French courts have repeatedly sided against Google and with the crooks, err victims.
Which shows how much such a provision is needed.
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Latest case: Google sued (successfully) for having the gall to report a few celebrities of Jewish origin to be actually Jewish!
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/french-group-sues-because-google-suggest-thinks-jon-hamm-is-jewish/
It's a product review ranking system (Score:2)
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Please do not associate Consumer Reports/Consumers Union with JD Powers. The former is a non-profit organization which doesn't even take freebies for the products they review. They go buy it themselves anonymously.
And the latter, JD Powers & Associates, is a for-profit company and a paid shill, that will design survey questions/results in a such a way that the company paying them will always be coming out on top. And of course, their revenues comes mostly from the actual companies of the products they'v
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OT: Sadly in the tech world there are very few honest reviewers any more. Tom's hardware used to be, but fell prey to loads of cash from Intel and MS. Now you can pay them and gift them to tell you turds are the next great quantum computer.
Tag (Score:2)