Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters
So Google's recommended way of reporting a problem is to post on a forum that Google themselves don't officially read (or promise any kind of response)? Do you understand why some people might not think that's a satisfactory solution?
It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...
I'll rag on Google's poor support as much as the next guy, but only when it's warranted. ProtonMail and anyone else that gets delisted / what-have-you is not Google's client and shouldn't expect first-class support for things like this.
It is not about the right to appear in Google's search results. It is about abusing market dominance to put competing businesses at disadvantage. There are also other running/solved cases/investigations against Google.
You're strongly implying some kind of targeting by Google. Whereas the parent comments above you indicate simply a lack of caring by ProtonMail to improve its ranking or a lack of free general support by Google to any website that happens, not just ProtonMail.
Asking Google to be responsive to any website demanding special treatment for higher search rankings is unreasonable. Best practices are published and tools are available. It's hard to see monopolistic abuse there.
The only difference is that Gmail (and other Google products) are listed when you, shockingly, go to google.com. Are you saying Google can't mention Google products on google.com? Do you think gmail is somehow not as popular as it is and wouldn't rate the #1 spot for searches for email?
Promising to provide tech support and troubleshooting to every website in the world for free is a lot to ask of a search engine, even if they're the dominant market leader.
You say that, but we can't even get Internet as a utility currently. I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying something as basic as internet is being abused "for profit", search being made into a utility sounds vastly more difficult.
I like to think we are indeed slowly progressing, but at the same time it's clear that companies in power are "progressing" too. I'm unsure if humanitarian goals like this are possible if we regard them as "sooner or later it'll happen".
it only is abusing if they push their products before others, if you fail to rank highly in search results whose fault is that?
are we going to use the IE solution, but instead now force it on providers whom you have to voluntarily choose over another to provide selected results? who gets to choose who appears?
No it isn't. If you want to ensure that you're in the search results then you're supposed to buy an ad.
Edit: To everyone downvoting, can you explain why you expect to be provided guaranteed service from a business that you have no business relationship with?
>It's not like you have a right to appear in Google's search results...
It should be, though.
It's not 1776. A website like Google is more than a company, it's a public service with immense power of manipulation and influence over countless industries.
The law shouldn't be written like we live in the stone age.
So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you're gunning for.
When they, by virtue of their overwhelming market share, nuke a competitor's product off the face of the internet, whether algorithmically or intentionally, it feels reasonable to me to compel them to provide more detail than "we fixed the glitch".
Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.
Not only that, but there is an implicit contract with the public, that they provide a fair and balanced search of the web. If that's not the case then you're in anti-trust land.
It's one thing to talk about anti-trust. It's a completely different thing when you're on the same team as the government that would be bringing the case against you.
Yes, but you should address the root of the problem, not all the little symptoms. The issue isn't "Google has the power and occasional reason to remove search results"... the issue is "Google is so big/dominant that when they remove a single result it can have a huge impact".
If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. Do things that are actual anti-trust prevention. Saying that the solution is to regulate all these little edge cases is ineffective and inefficient, because you need a different regulation for each concern that are all rooted in the same sentiment: Google is too big.
>If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.
This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs.
You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.
> Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op.
In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all?
Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.
You use a different co-op, naturally. You are conflating two solutions I offered, they are distinct and incompatible. A market but with worker controlled firms OR nationalized search. In one case you pick a different firm exactly like today, in the other you vote or petition the government.
But then you're back to square one as far as de facto monopolies go: Everyone cares about that specific co-op, because everyone uses it, so you get the same feedback loop which created Google's dominance.
Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.
> If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control.
How? Because this...
> Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.
...doesn't achieve that end.
Google could have a thousand competitors and 99% of the marketshare, because just because a competitor exists doesn't compel, or even slightly persuade, anyone to use it.
I'm all for antitrust laws. I just don't see how the usual remedies would work here.
Obvious solution: quotas. If there are 10 billion searches per month, we limit each company to 25% of that. After Google performs 2.5 billion searches in one month, they have to shut down until the end of the month. Easy peasy. What could go wrong?
Regulation helps the monopolies like Ma Bell. I heard that argument this morning from the FCC chair. I'm guessing that argument is not valid around here?
It's definitely a very case-by-case argument, but I definitely think there are times when regulation has hindered progress thru capitalism without improving any lives.
There are also plenty of cases where regulations have greatly improved outcomes by curbing capitalistic eventualities.
I'm personally conflicted about this particular case, and have no idea which will result in a "better" outcome when choosing between non-regulastion and regulation.
However, I strongly believe that limiting Google's overall power is a better solution than regulating particular ways that Google could abuse their power, as I think the former is a better route if regulation is the route you choose.
Identifying a problem caused by a monopoly is not the same as having to provide a solution for it. Some sort of regulation. No-one said they had to do it free.
That would actually be okay for me. But it wouldn't be okay for google as it would directly affect their revenue model of using traffic analysis as a means to promote advertising. There's probably more money in it for them that way. But Google's right to make money doesn't trump all other rights.
Well said, making us pay them for the quality/uncensored search results basically destroys the main source of how they can create insights on data by letting people use their services for free. Google's search business is now a public utility but so far I do not see regulatory systems capable of regulating it without destroying it (catch 22 so far).
Why am I reading a lot of these argument like being a left or right debate.
I dont think Google is quite there yet to be regulated. You have alternative like bing, and you have Duck Duck Go, and the latter actually provide pretty decent results.
The discussion is more one of he principle of whether a dominant market leader is allowed to use its position of dominance in the market to influence that market or not. It’s hardly “left and right” to debate this as being right or wrong.
I am pretty sure Google derives a lot of its revenue from advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial. There can be special cases, but they should not be statistically significant. Thus it is in Google's own interest to keep providing efficient, unbiased search or at least the appearance of it. Break this and the customers will flee to other search engines and advertisers will follow. So yes, I expect Google to provide information to consumers free of charge as this is a key part of its business model.
Which, however, has nothing to do with the article's point -- disappearance of a single entry with competitive advantage over Google. No statistical significance for search, but instead wielding its enormous power to squelch a small competitor. IMO, if true, this is the case for the government to address via rulemaking, courts or some other means.
I don't think advertisers care about the impartiality of the results, so long as their ads are getting eyeballs/clicks.
An advertiser might care if there were another, more impartial search engine that was drawing those eyeballs away, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given the current ubiquity of Google as a household name and company.
Sure, DuckDuckGo or whatever might draw some of the more tech-literate or paranoid crowd if Google started aggressively filtering results (which, for the record, I don't think they are doing or are likely to do), but why would advertisers care? Those people represent a tiny fraction of their eyeballs, perhaps so small as to be lost in statistical noise. Besides, many/most of the tech-literate folks use adblockers anyway, and the paranoids probably don't want to transmit their personal information online to buy things.
> I don't think advertisers care about the impartiality of the results, so long as their ads are getting eyeballs/clicks
Agreed completely. But users will (eventually) run away if they do not perceive the search as efficient. There are now options in search. People use google exactly because they consider results good enough. If googling "photos from X" starts returning most pictures from Google-associated resorts and this gets coverage from first tier news agencies Google will see non-negligible defections.
I also do not think Google is likely to do aggressive search filtering, not because this is "not right" but for pure self preservation -- aggressive filtering would be cutting the branch they sit on.
I'm sorry, are you arguing that it is all right for Google to abuse it's monopoly position because it is a monopoly? At least, from the advertiser's position?
I'm not making an argument about the rightness of any action. GP suggested that there exist
> ...advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial.
I do not believe that is factually accurate. I think advertisers don't have a compelling reason to care whether or not searches are impartial for the reasons I expressed.
(am Googler, am amused by this idea, so let's run with it)
Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?
If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN? Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
What happens to my existing Google Account? Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset? Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
I'm very honestly curious how you would orchestrate this, or expect it to work.
>Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?
Mostly search. We'll drop the ads. People will be subsidising search already, so no need for ads.
>If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN?
No, that Alphabet can keep.
>Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
Yes.
>If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
Every piece of data will be queryable by a simple RESTful API for everybody, including everybody's else search history. We'll call it "radical transparency". This is include the data of government members.
>What happens to my existing Google Account?
It remains as is, only better.
>Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset?
Yes, all, see above.
>Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
We kill that. It never worked well anyway.
I'm partly joking, and partly imagining what a sane humanity, that could build and coordinate stuff on a global scale without letting them to the markets, in other words a "Star Trek" like government, would do.
What will be the fate of search "verticals" (Map Search, Product Search, Video Search, ...)?
Will UNGoogle have the "one box" answers (eg, music lyrics, weather) which give real information from the search results, or just ten blue links?
Will the employment contracts of existing staff (SWEs, SREs, PMs, lawyercats) be transferred to the UN as well? Will employment be maintained on the current terms?
Will the UN employ more "customer service representatives"? What would staffing levels look like, across the UNGoogle?
Will UNGoogle maintain the existing data relationships as Google? Will UNGoogle purchase eg, Geo data from third-parties, or will it just be their privilege to submit their data to UNGoogle?
What will the process look like at UNGoogle for making changes to the ranking algorithms? Will there be an appeals process if a ranking change is detrimental to your business or national interests?
Ungoogle, that's a very inspiring verb. I'll use that to describe the act of getting out of the Google bubble (ie. stop using Google products). Thank you for the inspiration.
admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
So what happens when another company makes a search engine that's better than UN Search and users switch to that? Does the UN just eat them up too? Round and round? Or do we make everybody sign a Search Antiproliferation Treaty that bans private search engines?
Strawman garbage aside, Google is a private company (in the sense that it is not owned by the government), and you objectively do not have any right to appear in their search results.
If you can make an argument to the contrary that doesn't revolve around "it's not 1776!" I'd love to hear it, but I seriously doubt that it would be in line with any US law. I don't think there's anything "stone age" about not requiring private companies to do things to help other private companies without compensation.
While your misunderstanding of the comment may be a genuine mistake, your comment could be considered "straw man garbage" itself. Your tone is condescending and you might want to consider re-phrasing.
The post you're replying to is suggesting that removal from Google results _should_ be part of US law. Perhaps the impact of Google is such that there should be legislation regulating Google's behaviour.
In the UK we have a public phone book maintained by British Telecom. I can opt out of the phone book but BT cannot choose not to include me if I've opted IN. BT is a private company but this one aspect of their output is regulated by law.
The difference between a private company selling a service and something considered an essential utility is legislation, presumably?
BT doesn't need to decide which people are important enough to appear on page one. Google earned their position by doing just that—by being dramatically better than an unordered list of all web pages containing your substring.
It seems that every discussion about Google, Facebook and the like doing something that is not good always ends with the “it’s a private company” wildcard.
As if this excuses any kind of behavior.
Specifically, in this case there are in many countries antitrust laws, which target public and private companies alike.
We are not talking about "any kind of behavior". We are talking about whether a private company whose business model is to provide internet search results should have the right to decide whether to exclude certain content from those results. You can make an argument that entities like Google and Facebook have too much power, but I don't see the argument that compels such companies to include X in their service based on whether its "fair" or not.
> I don't see the argument that compels such companies to include X in their service based on whether its "fair" or not.
If our system worked, Google would almost certainly broken up and most of their databases (full of people's private information) couldn't exist legally.
It's not a "private company" thought is it? Not only is it "Publicly Held", but it's also a "Corporation" which historically meant it has certain rules it has to operate by. Not withstanding, of course, that such rules have been relaxed a lot in the last 40 years to appease big businesses, like Google.
Google holds the power to influence en masse. If not policed, Google has the power, if so it was to choose, to remove critical human knowledge from results. Perhaps the moonlanding never happened, or perhaps chemical weapons were faked. etc...
Their results can influence a great number of people, it can make or break a business, and it can (probably) cause or at least greatly contribute to a revolution in some countries.
You know, hence why countries like China want to control such power.
Internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T are private companies as well, and recent events make clear just how comfortable we are asserting a "right" to fair treatment of all traffic through their service (as we should).
Google indexing fairly is every bit as essential to the maintaining equal opportunity for websites and businesses on the internet as net neutrality is.
This is not a matter of support, although I understand why it is convenient for Google to consider the issue from this point of view. $$$
The problem is that when a search engine has the overwhelming majority of the online search market, freedom of information has a strict dependence on the QoS of that engine.
Since people (at least in Europe) have a legal right to freedom of information, if Google is not providing support in this regard, then it's responsible for not respecting rights of European citizens.
edit:
Freedom of information is part of the Swiss constitution too.
> Every person has the right to receive information freely, to obtain it from generally accessible sources and to disseminate it [16.3]
That's insanity. So because Google is an information company and governments have granted a "right to information [x]" Google has to provide any information a consumer could possibly want, for free, regardless of the cost to them?
[x] - which is an absurdity in itself - what information? how? when? where? This "right" is just another overreach by the EU et. al. wanting everything to be a "human right" even if it's nonsense. A right to whose information? If I have a unilateral right to information, does that mean I have a right to your medical records? Where do you draw the line? If it's just a right to my own information, which I think is reasonable, Google search results don't qualify.
Personally, I continue to believe in free market principles.
That's why I believe a decrease in the investment in "traffic acquisition costs" may be in the best interest of Google itself.
Everyone is responsible for the consequences of his own actions. What did we expect?
It would certainly be an improvement and it would give more leverage in avoiding regulatory impositions that in the long term are certainly deleterious (for all).
Perhaps I'm naïve, but I see two possibilities: the acceptance of the overreach in regulations/fines/.., or a self-limitation of the monopoly.
But I'm certainly not in the position to answer the question.
It's not really a big deal that different sets of laws conflict with one another. It's fairly common in fact. For instance Freedom of Speech vs Defamation laws.
Good legislation like good code, accounts for these corner cases. Where it doesn't you have the lawyers and the courts to work it out.
If a company gets a big enough marketshare it's not that simple. If Google would have de-listed Protonmail just because "they could" that would be a problem (legal wise) in the EU. Since they also specifically target EU countries (google.nl) they also can't simply say they don't have to comply because they are based in the US.
If this is an anti-trust matter in a certain jurisdiction then it's an anti-trust matter in a certain jurisdiction, and governments have ways to address that.
If Google has a monopoly on search then break up their monopoly on search in your country.
BUT.
Saying that Google needs to bend over backwards to accommodate every possible edge case of EU human rights (of which there are far too many that are overly broad) as a response to anti-trust concerns is absurd.
In the end, you're just going to end up solidifying Google's monopoly, because Google actually does have the funds to build out such platforms, even if they don't want to. Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources to do the same. If then you governments say "well actually only Google needs to do this", you've found yourself in a position where governments are playing favorites, and that is never a good thing.
It kind of sounds like you're making an argument akin to "auto manufacturers should not be obliged to provide seatbelts, because that increases entry costs for smaller auto manufacturers".
If anything, I'd propose the counter-argument that startups can more nimbly respond to these edge-cases, whereas the cost of change for a large hulking conglomerate is where the problems lie.
> Startup search engines that could help lessen the stranglehold Google has will not have the resources.
Until Alphabet buys out that startup for a couple of millions. Imho that's a factor barely mentioned on the issue of "Google monopoly".
If anything pops up that looks like it could disrupt the Google dominance, long or short-term, it's quickly acquired and welcomed to the flock.
On one hand that's good because puts the immense resources of Alphabet behind interesting and sometimes important ideas, on the other hand, it leads to a situation where meaningful competition can't grow to a size where it could actually oppose Google's dominance, at least not independently.
My point is that if you believe Google's "monopoly" to be detrimental to the populace, you should address that head-on, instead of dancing around it and applying lots of little regulations which, though they do "address the problem" and help make Google less anti-trust, they could also (are likely to?) hurt other companies that are not monopolistic down the line.
Attack anti-trust at it's source. If you find this story worrying, your worry should not be "Google is removing search results", but rather "Google has so much dominance, them removing results is a serious concern".
This addresses your first point: don't force Google to do certain things and then let them buy any and all competitors, instead don't let them buyout all competitors in the first place. It's a much more elegant solution, in my opinion.
Does Google care about the quality of its search results? You don't need to bring rights into the discussion to see why "post on this forum and maybe somebody will read it" is a poor solution.
google can destroy businesses in an instant, and they are too large to not offer proper support, and their damages are too great to not face legal liability to any damages they inflict upon companies at their whim.
this is quite baffling. tech companies are making money hand over fist, they have massive margins, a company like google can afford real support and if they dont think so they should pay in court
"Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines"
Or, Google can get around that by repeatedly tweaking the algorithm on purpose to demote specific types of sites. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/. (long read, but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines)
There's also the issue of false positives. Machine learning algorithms that demote sites (panda/penguin/vince) certainly have some amount of unintended victims.
> but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines
most comparsion shopping sites were anoying and did get ranked for everything I wanted to buy.
I.e. "buy television" gave you 1. amazon, 2-6. comparsion sites.
If I wanted to compare televisions I would've entered "compare televisions pricing", etc.
You mean violate the political stance of Google or any other arbitrary properties they got. You can go and compare search results across Duckduckgo, Bing and Google to get a full picture how much the search results are censored. When people talk about "net neutrality" I always wonder why isn't there outrage against this, because it is definitely not neutral. Same goes to many Google services, most notably Youtube.
No, this is an entirely separate process. The wikipedia link you shared relates to content that is illegal in a country, so consequently Google does not show it. E.g. in my home country (Germany), this includes some types of Nazi propaganda. I would assume all other search engines follow the same rules.
So in your country can you look stuff up about China and Tiananmen Square? Well you can't in China. This is censorship coming from the state. Now go on Youtube and look for PagerU videos. I understand that conservative views are not popular in Google but filtering legitimate content is just bad.
What about Dave Rubin? Does he fall into the same category as nazi propaganda according to you? What about Christina Hoff Sommers? Same question. And the list goes on an on. I do not necessarily agree with these viewpoint but I strongly against censoring them just because it does not fall inline with Google's political agenda.
Defining what a "hate video" and is "extremist" can be vague, so it's not surprising that some strong political channels are caught in the crosswinds, even if they are not necessarily "hate speech" or "extreme". (After all, Youtube is probably relying heavily on user feedback to determine what to flag). It's also not surprising that other things are caught in the crosswind (as the Ars Technica article mentions, LGBT content was also caught in the crosswinds.)
Basically, I feel like strong advertiser presence in the future is going to heavily focus Youtube towards more "mainstream" oriented material in the future, especially on what can be monetized.
Is it censorship? Not really -- no one is going to force companies to spend money to advertise where they don't want to. Feel free to start your own video platform that doesn't have Youtube's current corporate advertisement pressure.
At this point, in my opinion, the energy some are spending in fighting Youtube's monetization policy ("1st Amendment" lawsuits against Youtube are going to fail, in my opinion) would be better spent in making sure the web remains open. So that any Youtube competitors, some of which might focus on hosting "non-mainstream" content that Youtube might ignore in the future, actually have a chance.
I disagree. You are mixing together two categories: legitimately bad content (like the scary kid videos) and content does not fall in line with Google's political stance. As an advertiser you are targeting a very specific narrow population anyways and it is super easy to exclude your ads showing up in videos that you do not approve. And just a counter example to your point:
Why is the argument silly? Any "solution" to this that I can think of would be awful.
Let's throw a counter example on another platform. Most American talk radio is conservative. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2015/07/13/why-all-t...) IMHO the reasons for this are largely demographic oriented as specified in the Forbes article -- consequently, liberal specific talk radio has not done as well as a business model since, say, the 1980s. Conservative specific talk radio has.
It's pretty easy to Google grumbling from liberals about Clear Channel being conservative and crowding out liberal talk and whatnot. These arguments seem as silly to me as the arguments about the political stance of Google (which I also think is more driven by business dollars and cents, not explicit political lean).
At any rate, what's the solution here? Force Clear Channel to host liberal political talk via government decree? That would be about as awful as forcing Youtube to monetize conservative videos via government decree.
The only arguments that make sense in this direction to me is that American radio, in effect, is a monopoly. It might be difficult to start a "liberal specific talk radio" format even if there was a solid business case for it, because the airwaves are dominated by only a few corporations. (I would argue that this actually played itself out more in the world of music -- a lot of music never crossed into the playlists of corporate radio or MTV, because of various reasons. Which is why Napster was so heavily embraced by many once it showed up.)
Likewise with Google / Youtube: I would be much more receptive to arguments along these lines. If they became a defacto monopoly (I don't think they are there yet, but this is a danger these days), only one "content policy" would exist. And that definitely would be a problem.
Hence why I think the real issue here is keeping the web open and competitive.
It's important to realize that Google censorship to appease a foreign government sometimes affects search results in all countries, including the U.S. For example, search results worldwide are partly determined by Google's decision to avoid offending the government of Pakistan with content that may be critical of some aspects of Islam:
https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/
This isn't reserved to Pakistan, the US, Islam or Google. [0]
Tbh if I had a choice between nudity being censored and bigotry being somewhat buried, I'd always go with the later. But for whatever reason a certain demographic, from a certain country, takes quite a lot of offense at the sight of something as silly as a female nipple.
Usual response I get is that its easier to switch search engines so its not necessary[1]. Neutrality seems to be a function of availability of choice and ease of switching.
After all, it goes from the top "We're not arguing for censorship, we're arguing just take it off the page. Put it somewhere else. Make it harder to find." - Eric Schmidt
I don't think google is to blame for this. This is being driven by what google (rightly) thinks advertisers want and advertisers are worried about their brands being associated with this content. Google is just reflecting the values that a lot of people in society hold. Most people aren't comfortable with people expressing opinions different from what they hold and so this is where we end up.
No need to delist it for advertisers benefit. Demonetising it would have worked fine. If you can’t show ads on it what have advertisers got to complain about?
I was pointing out that I am very well aware of the difference between government initiated censorship vs. Google just randomly filtering something that it disagrees with.
It's interesting, but this is probably one of the reasons google has become so terrible. It's treating searches as a game, not something it needs to improve. Resulting in a steady decline year after year.
For any given search many websites have an economic incentive to be at the top and are willing to understand the process and jump though some hoops. However, jumping though hoops has zero correlation with quality and only minimal correlation with relevancy.
It's not an easy job to find a useful mattress review website or whatever, but Google's users don't care about easy they care about how useful something is. Even worse Google's actions end up changing the websites they are linking to. It's a slow but vicious cycle that I don't have a solution to, I just finally realized what the problem was.
> which is frequented both by smart and helpful users
... as well as loud and obnoxious know-it-alls that tag team, upvote their own answers and drown any discussion in irrelevant bickering and deferrals to their own wisdom.
Wasn't this at the same time when ProtonMail migrated their site from a .ch to a .com? I would be thankful if I would be able to get such a special treatment from Google for a borked migration. For most of us it is a death sentence when we bork a migration, protonmail gets help and then they whine about it.
That doesn't really fit the way web-crawler-based search engines work.
If the search engine is working properly then if the new site looks the same to users it ought to look the same to the search engine. If Google's crawler didn't find the new site at all then they need a better crawler.
Maybe this was incompetence rather than malice on Google's part, but it was one of the two.
(An exception would be if you migrate a site and mess up your robots.txt or similar to forbid the search engine doing its job. But evidently that didn't happen here because the fix was at Google's end.)
Without knowing their migration strategy it is hard to say.
A few things I notice that get borked often with migrations are not handling redirects & internal links properly, not updating sitemaps & canonical tags, and not checking Google Search Console & robots.txt
There are many major actors, both corporate and governmental, that don’t like privacy enhancing services like ProtonMail. No conspiracy theory, just large actors acting ruthlessly in their own self interest.
This year old article is a bit bogus though. As other pointed out, the hit on SEO came from changing from .ch to .com
ProtonMail, and other similar services, deserve to be supported in my opinion. I have recommended ProtonMail to friends and family. I use them out of personal choice, and I also rely on Fastmail.
Is ProtonMail still free? If so, I dislike that greatly.
I switched to FastMail a while back and while reviewing options, I wanted to use ProtonMail.. but a free option seems far too unreliable for something as important as email. I need to know how they're paying the bills, basically. I prefer their incentives to be perfectly inline with mine, because I am paying their bills for my portion of usage.
Protonmail's terms of service are better than Fastmail', IMHO. Fastmail TOS says that your service can be terminated anytime whatsoever on the whims of fastmail, whereas from what I remember, protonmail's TOS atleast laid out conditions under which your service could be terminated, like doing something illegal.
I think you could spell it out more clearly that the various three-letter agencies in the USA are quite interested in suppressing information about getting-popular systems that thwart their snooping.
This year old article is a bit bogus though. As other pointed out, the hit on SEO came from changing from .ch to .com
Could you point to a source for this? I'm curious, because the article says:
"After that public exchange, ProtonMail was apparently informed within a few days that Google had 'fixed something' — and after that it was able to see immediately positive results"
Switching to a different domain shouldn't _delist_ a site from Google's SERPs as long as the switch is done properly...
Search is now as vital to the Internet as DNS. As such, having it be run by an unregulated, for-profit monopoly is looking less and less acceptable. As a minimum remedy, Google should probably establish a defined email address or web site where complaints like this are answered within 24 hours by a human. It's not like they can't afford it, and it might hold off full-on regulation of their activities a while longer.
Such a help line, if actually known to regularly be helpful changing the ranking position of websites in search results, would be constantly spammed by "SEO Experts" looking to get result-bumps for their sites. This has three possible outcomes, none of them good:
- The spam-support-call volume is too high and the hotline becomes so clogged that users with legitimate complaints don't even bother. As in, a ratio of 1000 SEO assholes to 1 user, 10 hour hold times, etc.
- The hotline is so thoroughly staffed that this becomes the "new SEO" technique (think: robocalls to improve rankings, or contracting firms of humans in $cheap_location to make calls on the SEO person's behalf). Even if legitimate complaints are addressed in the process, the rest of the search results become even more spammy.
- The hotline operators develop an intensely high suspicion threshold for any requests to change a site's appearance in rankings. It becomes known by users with legitimate complaints as a near-impossible uphill battle to get their position back, and is not used by many.
By saying "full-on regulation of their activities" do you suggest that it's some (which exactly?) government or committee is who would decide on search ranking algorithms and what shows up in the results and what doesn't? Or is it something else?
I'm suggesting that, in an effort to ensure fairness of opportunity and no anticompetitive practices are taking place, governments might begin to see Google as the public utility monopoly that it has de facto become, and start treating it like one. Google might want to get out in front of this by being a bit more transparent and responsive to its users.
I got it that you suggest the governments (all of them, authoritarian ones included?) to interfere by making some legislative decisions. But what exactly should the government(s) decide upon?
Just saying that $company_name has to be "transparent" and "responsive" doesn't mean anything on its own. I was interested in how you suggest to achieve those feats (read: enforce them)
So here's the problem I see: for the the accountability and transparency you suggest, to decide if Google (Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DDG... is it really a monopoly?) does things right or wrong governing bodies must invent some rules how search engines should work. Surely not a full set of algorithms (that would be an unprecedented disaster) but a set of constraints on those algorithm outputs.
And it has to be an extensive ruleset. I'm sure it's not enough to require that e.g. a registered trademarks must be the first result on exact query, or that querying for Tiananmen Square gets no results. It has to decide for what happens on the intermediate positions, what has more priority and what's legally irrelevant and mustn't show up any high. I think that would be just bad - too many ways to abuse this system.
I thought of also not writing any legislatures but doing some ad hoc rulings, when judges decide what's fair and what's not on the case-per-case basis (basically, civil vs common law), but I'm not sure if that would work any well. In such theoretical scenario I just foresee the insane amount "sue because my site is 5th result and I feel it's unfair to be anything less than 3rd place" cases. That would quickly escalate, judges would end up inventing some common criteria, and we're back to the abovementioned scenario, just sourced differently.
This is extremely disturbing. I'm a recent convert to ProtonMail and I am not going back to the free, ad-based email world. Google and Facebook are not companies I trust any longer. DuckDuckGo, ProtonMail, Signal are.
Relatedly, Google refuses to list my personal site (spinda.net) for reasons I can't discern. It only shows up if one searches for the exact domain itself, and even then as a bare entry with no description. I've tried submitting the URL through every avenue Google offers for recrawling—no dice.
I'm assuming you set up your site in webmaster tools[0]? If there is a problem, it should report it to you.
Besides that, there is not much on your site that is of value as to why Google would link to it. It just links to your other projects other sites that you are on. If I do a google search for your name + "spinda", your Github, Twitter, and Keybase entries come up. Then search result #12 or so is your website. I'd say Google is actually doing this right, as it's giving users a direct link to the sites of "value", while your meta-link site may not be as much value to people. Google would rather have people get directly to useful, than having to click through to other sites first.
Now, if you had something on your site that was changing (a blog or something), it may be ranked higher. But as of now, I don't see why Google would put it high up in the rankings.
Oh, that's new. Previously it didn't appear at all in the results, even for specific, targeted queries matching the site content. And I see it's now showing a title and cache link (but no blurb), whereas before it appeared as:
spinda.net
https://spinda.net
and only for the query "spinda.net", in a special position up at the top.
For this not to be a PR shield (i.e. for Israel to really be able to read protonmail) the link would have to be an outright lie, or protonmail would have to have shared key data.
Heck, even if somehow radware (the BGP-based DDoS proxy they use) had access to protonmails private key or had minted their own SSL cert for protonmail, you'd still be protected by PGP.
For outgoing mail, they don't use radware so even if you were to send plaintext emails to a mailserver that doesn't support SSL encryption, radware still wouldn't be able to read that.
Unless the linked statement is just a lie, their DDoS protection service is not able to MitM them. Your proposed scheme seems a lot more convoluted than protonmail just giving access to the Israeli government. Similarly, it seems a lot more conspicuous.
If you don't want to use them because it indirectly supports an Israeli company, that makes sense, but their DDoS prevention scheme as outlined does not harm privacy in any way.
Is something still a PR shield against accusations if it is correct? I'd argue an actual rebuttal to the accusations is more than a PR shield. As described in my response, I consider the article to be a rebuttal of the accusations presuming they are not lying. Thus I conclude that it is not a PR shield. Notably, I'd say that outright lying about facts isn't a PR shield.
posteo implements multiple encryption schemes: encrypt incoming mails with GPG (making them inaccessible by any end device not having the corresponding secret key). Or encrypt via the login passphrase with transparent decryption on authorized access.
It is great data hygiene to use encryption at rest. However, it gives no security guarantees. You still need to trust posteo.
If posteo wants, they can read all incoming email. Their security scheme depends solely on their good intentions.
Still great that their data at rest is encrypted in a way even they cannot read.
The scheme does defend against third parties outside of posteo being able to access data, or coerce posteo to decrypt data. Posteo could probably still be coerced to push out a fraudulent client update that still breaks their encrpytion, but that is a very hard problem to deal with.
> Posteo could probably still be coerced to push out a fraudulent client update that still breaks their encrpytion, but that is a very hard problem to deal with.
They are based in Germany and would need to be coerced in accordance to german law. I don't think that there is something like National Security Letters in Germany, so doing such a thing without (eventual?) public disclosure seems unlikely.
Also posteo regularly releases as much information as they are allowed to regarding their interaction with law enforcement, e.g.:
There are other methods of coercion than courts, but I agree that the German courts are probably much safer than the American courts.
In any case, the fraudulent client update is a very hard hole to patch. The only solution for this I know of is local hosting. At the moment, defending against this in web-apps is simply not possible.
The only real antidote against unauthorized access is using end-to-end encryption between email's sender and recipient(s), via PGP/GPG or S/MIME. Unfortunately this requires the sender's cooperation. As long as the sender does not cooperate, there will always be some leg of the communication path that is vulnerable.
Indeed. But that problem has been to "Show clients how to install the relevant plugins, make their certs, and then appropriately use certs." That's been error-prone since the beginning with PGPMail and PGPphone.
That's why this was switched to doing it in a webapp, to streamline the process and remove user error out of the equation. There's one problem, and that the owner of the script can change it to a bad one that does X.
With an immutable data structure, like what IPFS uses, can provide that chain of custody with a script they make that simplifies PGP usage, while still maintaining "We didn't change anything" - and you can prove that.
And not only German intelligence services. This is why most websites nowadays protect against pervasive monitoring by using TLS and ephemeral keys (including Posteo). Also the mail transport layer of most mail servers uses TLS-encrypted SMTP which is safe against pervasive monitoring (but may be affected by MITM attacks).
Some mail servers are set up or can be configured to not trannsmit or receive mails unless TLS protocol can be negotiated (I think mailbox.org allows users to enforce SMTP via TLS by using the domain secure.mailbox.org, not sure about Posteo).
Not sure about Posteo but at least Mailbox.org allows you provide public key and all the email coming in will be encrypted with your public GPG/PGP key.
So you can only read them in your mail client with GPG support.
Yes, mailbox could create copy of your email before encryption. But assuming that they don't/didn't so far, in case they change their mind the historical emails will not be accessible.
The other solution where they keep private key (pass protected), well sure, that pretty much open for abuse but at some level you have to start trusting the law, otherwise everything false apart.
I've been very happy with migadu.com although I've only recently moved to it. But they make a pledge to privacy in a similar fashion to ProtonMail. I like their pricing and simplicity, they're worth a look.
Not sure what you are talking about. What does a Swiss email service has to do with Israeli military? I like conteos as much as the other guy but these allegations are a bit far fetched say the least.
Are you wanted by the Israeli military? And, do you actually have any evidence of "ties" beyond ridiculous conspiracy theories? Radware isn't the "Israeli Military" -- and even if they were, I'd trust them more than I'd trust, say France [1] or any EU country for that matter -- even Germany. [2]
I just use duckduckgo. I've tried it for years and it just wasn't good enough and then about a month ago I got fed up with Google's data mining again and tried it for like the 5th trial period and I haven't switched back. If you haven't tried duckduckgo for over a year then I suggest you give it a trial again.
I'm running a custom theme to remove the Google search bar from my Android phone, installed Firefox Quantum and set up a Mozilla account, so now everything is gone from Google except my Gmail and that will happen next along with Dropbox too.
If you want Google to be a better organization then you have to vote with your feet. Do that and your voice will eventually mean something, but until then Google won't listen.
On the one hand, net neutrality is truly a problem: evil ISPs decide for you what you will and will not see. On the other hand, google, youtube, facebook, twitter and others already decide this for you. But you don't even know that they don't show things to you.
Google needs to be investigated and broken up.
Its beyond time for an investigation and regulation of Google from the united states government.
Other countries are already starting work against Google.
The power Google wields over the general public warrants severe investigation at even the hint of abuse of power.
What one could do to prove this type of abuse would be to do a daily search for terms you think should match your site and record how high in the results it appears, and do it for various search engines.
If you plot this over time and see a sudden drop you know Google has identified you as a threat.
To me, this is why the arguments over Net Neutrality are really an argument over which corporations are favored by existing regulations. Google isn't neutral and it is integral to the way people use the net.
I wonder if this will backfire somehow. Google (privacy nightmare) removing ProtonMail from its search results will only attract more privacy conscious people...?
"Google's search results should contain exactly what I personally think they should in every case," said the HN commentator. "But they mustn't be personalized," said his boon companion. "Oh no, personalization is Evil." They nodded in agreement and upvoted each other's comments.
Amusing quip, and perhaps characteristic of certain classes of HN comments, but it's important to distinguish between the claim that something ought to appear in the search results and the claim that the results ought to conform to my personal preferences. Relevance w.r.t. subject matter is not the same as relevance w.r.t. a particular person's preferences. By analogy, sampling a population to determine the statistically favorite ice cream flavor is different than asking for your favorite ice cream flavor.
Yeah, it's not so much a diagnosis of this particular case as it is a pithy vignette on the expectations people have of Google and the reasonableness thereof.
But again, you are acting as if there is a definitive answer to the query [secure email] (which is one mentioned at the top of the article, and what inspired my comment). Among the results - after a healthy block of ads (and since this is an article from 2016, Protonmail) - I saw a page about setting up Mozilla Thunderbird, Hushmail, and numerous blogs/articles about eg "The 5 Best Secure Email Solutions". This is not to say there wasn't a problem back in 2016; I just mean that on a broad query like [secure email] with probably dozens or hundreds of good results, not seeing one in particular is not really a red flag that something is wrong to me, the way not seeing ProtonMail for the query [protonmail] would be.
Meanwhile, people immediately jump in with accusations of "Perfidy!", assuming that Google must have Done Something, and simultaneous with that demands that Google Do Something, and complaints that it is hard to get Google to Do Something whenever you find such an obvious problem.
And from the inside, you just sort of have to laugh-cry whenever this comes up, because (despite some fraction of techies wanting Google to act like an SQL query on the web) you are intimately familiar with the legendary Algorithm as an immense, constantly mutating series of heuristics running on inputs which (being from the web) are frequently garbage. You debug queries constantly, and while very rarely there is an obvious, correctable data problem or bug, you are really working to identify "loss patterns", large numbers of queries that are wrong in the same way for the same reasons. Your job as a ranking engineer is to then try to correct these loss patterns, knowing that when you do you'll be creating new, smaller loss patterns. Smaller because you spend years of your life evaluating your changes to make sure they are creating fewer problems than they fix.
And though you spend all your days carrying baskets of pebbles from the valley of losses to the mountaintop of good answers people crowd around you to point at a particular pebble lying on the ground, declare it the most important pebble and demand you put down your basket and carry it to the top of the mountain first, cradled gently in both hands. And each person in the crowd points at a different pebble, demanding the same thing.
</rant>
(No, really, it's a very rewarding job with challenging work and they treat you pretty good here; if you're interested in the problem, I encourage you to apply. There are a lot of pebbles left.)
We needn't invoke foreign entities to explain why HN voters would upvote it. Smug comments routinely get upvoted. The fault is with us, not shadowy outsiders.
Apropos of which, it's in the site guidelines not to bring in insinuations of astroturfing unless there's actual evidence, so could you please not do that on HN?
Are we complaining that you can't put up a poster explicitly designed to incite violence against anti-fascists with a ProtonMail email address?
I'd imagine they might also disable your account if you use swastikas as your logo, is that "awful censorship"?
If you wanna do that sort of stuff then roll your own ffs. Consider that they might have some form of legal liability.
Liability for what? What if the user used a random string for their address instead? Does one have to pretend to agree with their provider's politics or fear having their accounts deleted?
Some people would probably assume that they won't have to do that, since PM doesn't really present their service as exclusive to people with certain political leanings (unlike, say, riseup).
What the parent post was saying is that anyone can print out a piece of paper with your mail address on it, complain on twitter, and ProtonMail's feeling-based policy will have you banned.
We're now 5+ posts down the tree and people still aren't getting the post, probably the reason it was flagged and silenced.
Currently a human is making the judgement call to ban someone, based on their feelings. They could very well be looking at misinformation, but have no way of verifying.
The address banned could be completely unrelated to this hate group, maybe the hate group doesn't even exist, this is the point the poster was making. You easily can misinform, and get someone behind a protonmail address banned.
Their mistake was obviously that they openly justified the ban with human judgement and gave insight into their evidence used for the ban.
They should have simply said "our algorithms determined the likelihood of this account being used to incite violence sufficiently high" and everything had been fine...
The email address in question was an unequivocal white-power slogan (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/10/when-white-na...) on a poster that called for white-power violence and repeated the same slogan. ProtonMail was quite specific about all of those things together being the cause of the ban.
Unless you're a perfectly innocent citizen who happens to use BloodAndSoil@protonmail.com for completely non-Nazi-related reasons, I don't think you have anything to worry about.
Did you not read the article? It was eventually "fixed."
> ProtonMail tracked this situation through Spring 2016, trying to get in touch with Google to query why it had vanished from search results — and initially having no luck getting a response. It only eventually got an acknowledgment of the complaint in August after it had tweeted at Google staff.
It wouldn't take anything away from your response just leaving that question out.
BTT: Why is this even an article on here anyway when the situation has been dealt with one year ago? The title should already mention that it's from 2016.
I get what you say about not insinuating, though I feel the two people who asked so far weren't so much insinuating as actually puzzled, as it genuinely seemed the parent couldn't have read the article and still thought it was an ongoing issue.
The question "Did you even read the article?" adds nothing of value, if not downright hostility. When someone asks a question/writes an uninformed response and one wants to respond to it, fine. But don't complain that someone made you respond to it.
This is a bit naive in a world where the address and search bars in browsers have merged, and many physical adverts don't even feature a website address any more, just search keywords.
It's branding. You advertise for a trademark that you have control over. If the users are using Android or Chrome they'll see some ads on their way to your website, but they will eventually get there, but that's ok I guess. What I mean is you should not depend on, for the life of your business, that a keyword like "secure email" will send traffic to your website, unless that is your trademark or brand name, and in that case you better own secureemail.com
Back in 2006 or so when the address field became a search bar in most major browsers, I started to get a lot of traffic from Google, but 99% was searching for mydomain.com, I'm not talking about that kind of traffic, I'm talking about SEO keywords that will kill your business over night when (not if) Google change their formula or some algorithm removes your site from the search result.
It's a bit upsetting that web browsers have monetized the address bar, but that's another, yet important discussion.
You're not wrong, but this would require a radical re-architecting of huge swaths of how marketing and entrepreneurship currently works in most of the world.
It's not such a big deal if your unmonetized blog disappears from Google search results. But for a company that lives or dies depending on search traffic it does. Never put yourself in that situation! It's OK to have some of your traffic from search, but you should not depend on it, think of it more like a lucky bonus. Now for your blog it depends on what you are writing about, but it's always a good idea to make public relations. Instead of doing printout flyer's, do something interesting, and good, and make sure it's covered in the news. Make people engaged.
>"“[E]ven though Google is an American company, it controls over 90% of European search traffic. In this case, Google directly caused ProtonMail’s growth rate worldwide to be reduced by over 25% for over 10 months,” he adds."
If a substantial part of your funnel is attached to another company's whims then maybe it was past time to think about your strategy for building product and brand awareness.
>"“The only reason we survived to tell this story is because the majority of ProtonMail’s growth comes from word of mouth, and our community is too loud to be ignored."
Again it was up to you to diversify what sounds like an over reliance on Google for 25% of your growth. Portraying that as into "victim survivor" story is a bit dramatic.
This sounds like a yarn they are spinning for potential investors. And not a very good one.
I mean, if that one company is Google and the reason is search, you don’t have many options. This specific case is much harder to avoid than the general one of over reliance on one entity.
>"I mean, if that one company is Google and the reason is search, you don’t have many options."
The point is you shouldn't rely on the vagaries of a third party for your business growth period. More especially a third party you don't appear to have any relationship with. They even admit in the blog post that the majority of their growth comes form "word of mouth." Word of mouth and "hoping for the bes"t with Google searches is not really a solid marketing plan.
Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
Of course, there can be other issues preventing a site from showing up in the search results (e.g. site migration issues, accidentally locking out Googlebot in robots.txt, ...). In such cases, the best way to raise the issue would be to report it on the webmaster forum, which is frequented both by smart and helpful users and by Googlers working on search quality: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters