Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the event, before you actually find the original video. They artificially promote "authoritative sources" which are anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original videos that get buried in search results.
Google's results are not only manipulated by clever SEO people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar Pichai's sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But there's zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that most people aren't aware that search results are manipulated, Google Search is the web. Websites that get delisted are presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox) is good, but no longer enough.
That's why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I trust, and there's tons more.
[0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine's user manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow "found" a webpage with the manual for a product that didn't exist? and then modified the model number further and found more results from the same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect model number? My understanding of SEO isn't good enough to know how they do that. I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to show up for so many typoed search queries.
[1]: https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-interventions-...
Indeed, they co-opt every search now. Anything related to local businesses or directions, flights and hotels, etc. And everything I try to find about pop culture or new tech or video games seems to be a page full of YouTube links. I want to grab the appropriate people at Google by the ear, and scream, "I DO NOT WANT TO SIT THROUGH A VIDEO ABOUT THIS." I guess I'm just old or something, but video seems like SUCH an inefficient way to impart information that could just be typed out, and then read. It's not even like it would be more work for these video producers. They're typing out the script to read over some generic video loops. JUST PUT THE COPY ON A PAGE! GAH!
For reference: https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html
Certainly, there is still a lot of text in the world, but the reason things are moving towards videos is exactly because C-f doesn't work. You'll click a video hoping it will help, it won't, but the advertiser will still pay the content creator. If you visit a text-based website, search for what you're looking for, and don't find it, you'll be gone before the ads even load. And that was in a world where advertisers paid for text ads, which isn't the current world.
I'd argue that Google these days fall in line more of a publisher than a search engine. More often than not I'm feeling that the search engine is trying to sell me something rather than do the work requested and I don't mean ads (which I think are good monetization balance).
Same goes for algorithm social networks.
Fwiw, my teenage son prefers video content over written content. Even if you hate it, there are other people that love it.
Though that's in very large part an inevitable and widely-foreseen consequence of Google's other arm: advertising.
The monetisation of content is the root of great evil:
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
It is because people badly want to and enjoy writing that we have vast quantities of books. If people looked at writing as a commercial endeavour, most of us would never, ever consider writing a novel - it's a crazily oversaturated market, to the point that writing a novel to make money is much like playing the lottery: You invest far more time that you could have spent on other things, and the potential payout for the vast majority of authors is below minimum wage most places.
We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that their income might cause them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead of writing the best they could. Maybe. I'm not convinced.
That said, outside of writing novels, things are different. You can probably earn more writing for a sketchy content farm than most of us will ever earn from writing novels, so the point is not entirely invalid, but it is not a good fit for literature.
EDIT: Changed second to last paragraph for clarity, see response for mangled original.
> we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Then we can turn it into a verb. "Go Duck <term>"
They could even capitalize on the famous autocorrect substitutions: "Need an answer? Duck it!"
Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird + clunky + needs to disrupt massive established players... what are they thinking?
At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.
Maybe I'm wrong and someone has a list of somewhat successful general search engine with a somewhat serious names besides Alta Vista (and I never thought about that before) and Fast?
I'm sure the irony is lost on the Freedom-Democracy-landers.
I compared it with brave search and the latter remains unfiltered for the time being.
And the fact that the our societies have been rushing towards totalitarianism doesn't make Putin Mr. Nice Guy all of a sudden. It is not that simple.
This feels important to me, and at this point it actually feels like we have more choice than we have had in 15 years and we have a chance to change history.
If you are one of the many who have noticed that Google has declined in recent years you can start by just changing to DDG, or even Bing as default. (Use Google as fallback if you want and see if you realize the same as me: their results are just as broken. If you don't, you can consider yourself lucky for now and go back to Google, but at least keep this in mind as they start heating your frog pot as well ;-).
Do experiment with alternative engines: Kagi seems close to production ready now and search.marginalia.nu is just a delightful tour de force as to what can be done by a determined person!
FWIW, people still often react weirdly when I tell them to 'bing' something. "When was that movie released?" "I dunno, just bing it". Reactions are usually confusion, mild amusement, but sometimes I've had some weird aggressive/anger issues emerge when I've suggested someone use bing. Strange...
There no real alternative to the big players. It's google or bing, basically.
it should work - it's up to society to make this work by passing laws to that effect.
As soon as they introduce their own bias(curating content, recommendations, emergence of so called "walled gardens") it opens the floodgates.
I don't believe that. I came from a time when Yahoo and Altavista were used. Google took over that market very fast (personal experience, not data ;)). So I'm sure that also now, people could shift very fast when the results are better somewhere else.
Although I can agree on YouTube, because that's a different beast. They actually host almost all the web video content. So there is no 2nd party to easily switch to.
Google could plainly say we blackhole this and that content and ignore these keywords and don’t autocomplete on these others, etc. same for Bing and any other. Just be open and transparent about the purposeful bias then the user can find and use the one that most matches what they’re looking to use.
Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself. Google will show you that the majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American. You may be skeptical of Google's claim (disguised as search results), but the next generation, working on their school reports, will see the world as Google wants them to see it. Now imagine how much of what we learn about the reality of current events is coming from the same source with the same agenda and policies regarding narrative vs. reality.
But in case you are thinking of contradicting Google's claims, remember: that's what their campaign against "misinformation" is intended to silence. They are indeed serious about misinformation.
A couple of years ago, when they were testifying to Congress that they did not deliberately distort search results. At the same time, someone else in the organization explained why they deliberately bias results. Oops. I can only guess that it was some underling who, in a sea of leftists back in the office (and probably a few non-leftists who know what would happen if they were outed) took for granted that biasing search results for political objectives was something to be proud of. They didn't realize what their execs knew, that if you're going to distort the truth for a higher objective, you don't admit doing so.
On a Google web page that I can no longer find, they publicly explained (it was public, not an internal page) that search results that improved society were sometimes more important than simply reporting the facts. That must have sounded good to an internal audience, but apparently it had to be reworked into externally calling it a fight against misinformation.
Whatever cool/hilarious/human reason they have for it (I don't care), I wish they also added another alias that is easy to remember and type.
I think Google was a harder name to remember for non-nerds who weren't familiar with the rather obscure word.
There is a short alias: As someone else mentioned, duck.com redirects to duckduckgo.com
One way to do it is to have some path through the site that lists relevant data, but also includes links at the bottom to typoed versions of the data. The web crawler will chase those links, and if each page that you retrieve generates more such typo links, you can feed the crawler an infinite stream of typos.
Google will consume quite a large chunk of an infinite stream before it trips any kind of "circuit breaker" to cut off how much crawling they'll do on one site. They have a lot of storage.
I find this problem extremely frustrating. Does anyone have suggestions for how to easily find primary video sources, instead of the massive heap of commentary that a youtube search yields?
Google search seems to be something of a feedback loop at this point.
Which is fine as 1) it's good for searching Google properties and 2) it opens the door for web search engines that search the web.
I understand Google's utter dominance in search, but Google is not "the open web".
Basically, search engines are used to find things publicly available on the internet, policing should be done on the actual hosts of the content.
Same goes for ISPs, they are here to provide access to publicly available computers, without interfering with the content or accessibility.
Second, if I search for “the Pirate Bay website” I’m pretty sure there’s an objective result that should be there at the top.
I think it's easy to take an absolutist approach when it's somebody else who faces the consequences. In some ways it's a rehash of the arguments when the Navalny app was delisted.
In a vacuum, "should someone follow politically motivated requests to take down content?" is an easy question to answer. But when you have to worry about consequences like giving up your freedom, I can't say that I'd have the courage to follow through. The Dutch prisons might be nicer than Russia's, but asking someone else to give up their freedom for ideals is still a tall order.
For example, leave a gap in the search results where the missing one would have been, perhaps with some details of the result which do not fall under the removal request (for example, the title of the page, even if the URL must be removed).
This used to be the case. As the internet grew in size search providers felt it was in best interest in general user to cull these results and present their definition of best at the top. They wanted to solve the needle in the hay-stack problem by taking all the noise out and funneling the best result to the top.
Best is a subjective term and I don't think I agree with it. However, your definition is not the same as Googles. Search providers can define what their search engine does the same way a restaurant gets to decide what's on its menu even though all restaurants serve food.
I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet libertarian ideal, but there's plenty of examples out there what that looks like - 4chan, 'old' reddit, parler & co (which ironically censor a lot of stuff), all of the dark web, etc.
You state "policing should be done on the actual hosts of the content", but what if the host says "lol no"? That's what's happening here; BREIN demanded (and has done so for at least the past 10 years, probably longer) that since the hosts are untouchable and not legally required to comply (these things get complicated once you go abroad), they went for the ISP's and search engines instead.
If something is deemed illegal, and the source is untouchable, you have to go for whatever passes it on. I mean hard drugs are illegal, they are shipped across the world, and only when they arrive at a port is there something that can be done to stop it.
Should Google de-list Pirate Bay? In my opinion no.
Should Google de-list some things? No doubt yes. That is how society works - your rights end where somebody else's start.
As the down-voting of parent shows, HN gets defensive when this is pointed out.
There are clear laws and court decisions which Google must obey. The title says "voluntarily", which is the actual problem in this case.
You could post whatever you wanted to Usenet. You could email whatever you wanted to anyone, and they would see it in their inbox. Heck you could “finger” to see who was online in remote networks, and “talk” to open a live chat with anyone, totally unmediated by any commercial product. You could log in to open FTPs and trade files.
We’ve been to that particular heaven, and most people didn’t like it.
Why? While trafficking in CSM was an important and awful consequence, the negative that dominated most people’s experience was spam. That’s why web forums beat Usenet; that’s why centralized webmail beat a forest of naked email servers. Etc.
People don’t actually want unmoderated search; it would be choked with spam.
What people actually want is whatever they want, as easily and cheaply as they can get it. The Pirate Bay and other file sharing services are popular not because they represent some sort of libertarian ideal, but simply because they shovel a lot of great content to people for free.
Of course they’re popular! A person handing out $10 bills on the street corner will be popular too. But it kind of matters where he or she got those $10 bills. There are societal side effects we might want to manage.
There is a couple of problem with this, first I see no problems at all with 4chan, old reddit, or parler. So using them as an example of something bad that should be banned is ridiculous, parler in peculiar was gaslite into a false narrative around 1/6 protests when in reality most of the communication, as stated by the FBI, where done via Facebook and other larger platforms not parler. Parler was the scape goat. Parler should fail for any number of reasons but not because of censorship, it is a terrible platform technoligically, it is terrible security posture, and various other usablity issue.
Then there is the unintended blowback this type of censorships leads to. Such as increased levels of echo chambers and extremism. Take for example the fall out from Backpage removal. Did it end trafficking, and prostitution. No, not by a long shot, it just make the criminals harder to catch, the victims harder to find, and made things more dangerous for legal age sex workers.. Good Job Government.
I like the Freenet's author take on this. He says that porn, terrorists, drug dealers and all kinds of "abhorrent" content are a price you pay for the lives of whistleblowers and people fleeing from their dictatorship states, sects, and terrorists; and for preservation of valuable, but controversial, content.
Well, it makes sense in case of Freenet, which offers full anonymity and resilient storage (you can upload content, and as long as there are people viewing it, it will propagate itself along the node connections path, and it's impossible to take the content down). Torrents, Reddit, and 4chan are different, so maybe here the trade-off will be different too.
It's a myth that there was zero moderation. What the libertarian ideal was privacy and anonymity. Where a user could say something like sharing a link to the pirate bay and not worry about it too much when it got moderated. Websites would respect a users privacy. Moderation was about cleaning the site, not sharing a users personal data with authorities. It wasn't about free speech so much as a kind of place for users on the internet with no real world consequences for sharing, for example, a link to the pirate bay.
They all moderated.
If a host doesnt comply, they get denied by the firewall.
4chan has rules that are enforced, especially since the split between 4chan and 4channel. What might give the impression that it's "some kind of internet libertarian ideal" is that people often not report posts. But when they do, the janitors usually do their jobs. These days even troll posts are deleted!
That is unlikely. Google breaks many privacy-related laws across the globe and deals with billions of euros of fines regularly. They have an unlimited wallet and couldn't care less about spending a few billions to extend their dominance over the Internet.
Is default but optional moderation a bad thing?
(Submitted title was "Google voluntarily de-lists The Pirate Bay")
> The order targets ISPs and doesn't name Google but the company chose to voluntarily comply. does allow changing the title sometimes:
HN guidelines do allow changing the title on one condition:
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
The original title is misleading, leading one to believe Google was ordered.
If there's a misleading aspect, it's that they only removed the search results in the Netherlands while the headline doesn't really make that clear. I think it's borderline though.
SO we have the case against that DNS provider, one against adult sites and one from the Netherlands against Pirate Bay.
Two thoughts: What the fuck happened to the free internet? It seems that the EU is slowly, intentionally or not, building a Chinese wall around European internet. And secondly, apparently those courts didn't realize that VPNs are a thing. My son used VPNs on his phone before I even thought about it. And he didn't pick the worst ones. He is 13.
If anything, I think your title is more editorialized, since Google is clearly doing this for legal reasons, not exactly "voluntarily".
Happy to compromise on that both titles are not ideal :)
Yes, Pinterest does SEO like anyone else, but their ranking seems just outrageously overvalued.
Also, streaming from a big multinational corporation works fine in well-connected areas but is a terrible experience on the country side and in the Global South. Where your connection to AWS/Google/Netlify is measured in Kb/s, torrents are a blessing because it spreads the load across several routes (including more local ones, because cloud providers are really slow from eg. Africa) and you can leave the downloads running all night.
Torrents and other content-addressed systems are by far technically superior to centralized location-addressed systems like HTTP.
Would be nice to know the alternative. Downloading everything and then deleting things that you realize you didn't actually want (after looking at the full contents) was a quite convenient UX.
In the meantime, TPB is never hard to find. I haven't used it for a while and easily found https://thepiratebay10.org/ which still works here in .NL.
Which makes it easy to find new Piracy websites [2].
It only mentions the TLD not the URL
https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview
https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/request/1280...
yandex.com is seriously awesome for infosec related searches and I guess (it's been a few years since I had to pirate something) that it's equally great for pirated content.
That seems so naive now. It's become painfully obvious that Google's mission is to manipulate access to information for profit.
If you can't find the torrent site, you Google enough to find a community that will link to it. If you can't, you ask on Twitter. Etc. Etc. It's never going to stop someone determined. Credible threats of jail-time may, but these minor changes by Google and others aren't going to change anything important.
Google is a private company can do what they want, but this is still a pretty poor decision.
So this raises so many questions. Has _no party_ requested to delist TPB under DMCA?!
That sounds incredible if true. But the only explanation I have for Google feeling like they need to go this far, delisting on their own initiative! It's like a scenario that should never have to happen, and something they should never do either.
So what's going on here?
Update: Ugh, editorialization... Apparently court has been involved here and while Google may not be individually targetted and forced YET, so "voluntary", it's easy to see how Google see the writing on the wall and choose to comply. No point in fighting this with such a clear cut DMCA violation. But in this case I'm still surprised it took this long!
I'd like for search engines to be highly and independently responsive to CP, spam, SEO gaming, fraud, malware, cyberstalking, cyberbullying, revenge pr0n,and similar threats. Relying on court orders would simply be too slow.
I'd also like for search engines to be responsive to propaganda and disinformation. This calls for a much more nuanced response than the first category, and is inherently political rather than merely criminal.
In the case of general copyright claims, specific targeted removals if executed reasonably and fairly, which quite arguably YouTube's ContentID is not, as an example, should be possible with a fairly minimal degree of legal mechanism (e.g., DMCA 512 takedowns under US law). Though that process should be amended to reduce abusive exploitation of such measures.
Delisting entire domains for copyright infringement absent a specific legal action ... moves into much stickier waters. Ultimately, torrent sites will likely have to provide their own well-known search alternative which is resistant to such threats. I'd like to see that possibility further developed.
(I'm aware that many such sites already claim the legal shield of serving as directories to content, not as hosters of that content themselves, which would inlcude The Pirate Bay itself.)
Widespread global civil disobedience in the face of overwhelmingly asymmetric and self-serving copyright legislation and case law is among the very few avenues the average citizenry have of voicing opposition to such laws. And that fact alone should carry great weight.
I'd like for search engines to be strongly resistant to removals based on overly-broad copyright claims,
The problem is that the indexes (google, bing, yandex) won't let you freely aggregate them anymore. DDG is a client of Microsoft just like startpage is a client of google.
It will still show results if you explicitly use `site:bluelight.org`, otherwise it never appears in search results - prior to Google delisted it, it always ranked very highly (top 5).
I can't help but wonder about the harm that decision had made - people may well have literally died because of it.
site:[famous non western tracker].com [insert music here]
zero results.
Same query, on duckduckgo: Everything there.
Another query:
[famous ebook sharing sites] on google.
Non-related results
Same query on duckduckgo: First hit is the correct website.
<anything> filetype:torrent
I wonder if they'd say the same if they were the ones who would be fined/prisoned for breaking those laws.
The fix is to change the law, not asking companies to break them
Five years ago I would still google pretty much any error message or problem.
Nowadays I typically go to directly to the project's GitHub and search through issues there, go directly to their documentation, or just browse the code from my editor and figure stuff out myself. I have like 15 tabs just corresponding to the stuff I'm working on right now. It is pathetic Google managed to become so awful they managed to undo a decade of conditioning.
Crippling their search intentionally even more won't help.
One example is i like chill hop radio. whenever i search on DDG might get results, but google will usually send me directly to their bandcamp page which the the ideal result