Author Topic: A Very Simple Ethical Principle for Search: Google Fails Miserably (Read 46,650 times)

mouser · « **on:** May 04, 2007, 04:36 PM »

I'd like to suggest an extremely simple principle..

Shouldn't we want a web search engine which doesn't have huge financial (or other) incentives to send people to certain pages?

I mean, it sounds insanely obvious and yet the #1 search engine on the planet, by far, has it's entire business model based on people visiting pages with its ads on it, and is increasingly creating content and services that it benefits from sending traffic to.

I would concede that Google is one of the more ethical giant corporations around, but that isn't saying all that much.

Don't we need to find and switch to search engines which don't have such an overwhelming financial incentive to send us to their pages and pages of people that pay them? Is that even possible in this world?

note: one of my oldest friends and someone who has more integrity than anyone i know works for google; this isn't really a knock against what google is currently doing as much as it is a comment about what i view as an inherent and unacceptable situation in search.

f0dder · « **Reply #1 on:** May 04, 2007, 05:35 PM »

It's a nice idea, but I'm afraid it won't happen - indexing, storing, searching takes a lot of server capacity, which I doubt anybody is going to donate just because it's a nice idea... at least google is (still) one of the lesser evils.

Lashiec · « **Reply #2 on:** May 04, 2007, 05:43 PM »

I don't think this is going to change in the future. You see, ads are the only mean of revenue for Google. That's fine, and lots of companies usually do the same. Of course, when you deal with such a big company it's not exactly the same situation. One thing is clicking Google Ads and tolerating sponsored links between the actual searches, but a complete different thing is people at Google being lazy (in my opinion) and letting SEOs alter completely the search results, favoring commercial sites, "collective" sites (the ones that contain reviews of products, and are constantly plaguing every single search you do containing the word "review") and crap sites, who link one to another to another in an endless loop. Of course, Google is not whole responsible for this, but they couldn't do some changes to their algorithms to enhance the results.

What's not acceptable is the current state with Google Ads. It's been researched that most of the ads are pure crap who links to illegal sites, like some ones selling you freeware programs (do a search on "Firefox"). This is completely unacceptable. Google had been informed of this, and it's not clear if they did something or not. The recent purchase of DoubleClick, the tracking cookie kings worries me even more.

Another day we'll discuss the Google cookie... For now, I'll suggest Ixquick, which doesn't store any information about yourself, and works fine. Or maybe we should go back to Altavista... at least Babelfish it's essential to me

Just my two cents.

mouser · « **Reply #3 on:** May 04, 2007, 05:43 PM »

you know what would be a cool idea, have a kind of organization which collects a little bit of money from everyone and then funds major infrastructure projects like this, which are dedicated to serving the people, rather than turning a giant profit.. hmm it's an interesting idea.. we could even elect representatives to this crazy organization which would represent us.. if only there were such organizations in this world..

app103 · « **Reply #4 on:** May 04, 2007, 05:59 PM »

At one time it could have been possible.

In the beginning, when Google was a university project, there were no ads...but it wasn't making any money either.

Back in the days of dialup and ISP's like AOL not wanting to run their own inferior search engines, ones like Google could make their money by selling search services to ISP's. (and they did...and Google still does with AOL)

But as time went on and these dialup companies cut costs & services, or just disappeared, it became harder to sell search services.

I think the only way Google could be able to get away from shoving their ads down our throats is if they start charging us...making Google a subscription based search engine.

Are you willing to pay a monthly fee for using an ad free Google? I think most people wouldn't.

Way back before Google became as big and well known as they are today, companies like Copernic could sell a search application that would use various smaller sources to find what you were looking for...and it was quite good, considering what else was available at the time, so people gladly paid for it. But even Copernic knows that people don't want to pay for a search engine any more and have changed to desktop search, selling the licensing for their tools to companies like AOL.

To have what you want, ad free results, some government would have to step in and run a search engine supported by tax dollars. And I, for one, don't want the government involved in deciding what results I can and can't have (and making it super easy for them to track my online activities).

I'd rather have Google just the way it is now...ads, flaws & all...for free, than that.

Lashiec · « **Reply #5 on:** May 04, 2007, 06:01 PM »

* Crazy idea pops out *

Would it be possible to use either distributed computing or P2P protocols like BitTorrent to create a distributed search engine?

urlwolf · « **Reply #6 on:** May 04, 2007, 06:12 PM »

Quote from: Lashiec on May 04, 2007, 06:01 PM

* Crazy idea pops out *

Would it be possible to use either distributed computing or P2P protocols like BitTorrent to create a distributed search engine?

You mean using distributed CPU power/memory when computers are iddle, kind of like that extraterrestial life searching project?

One problem that I can see would parallelization. Not all algorithms can be parallellized. Not sure about google's. But many Information retrieval algorithms are hard to split into smaller memory sized in different machines.

I'm sure whatever google is doing can be parallellized... the sheer size of the dataset makes that a fact.

mouser · « **Reply #7 on:** May 04, 2007, 06:28 PM »

In case it wasn't clear, i was being sarcastic and suggesting that yes, a search engine is one of those things best funded by citizens and kept out of the grand game of trying to maximize profits. App may be right, that the alternative to a privatizes money-gobbling corporation running search engine is worse, i just can't help but think that some things are best taken out of this game of maximizing profits and just funded by the citizens for the benefit of the citizens at large.

Lashiec · « **Reply #8 on:** May 04, 2007, 06:40 PM »

Some months ago I read an interesting article about creating a distributed Internet o_O. Seems like the page hosting it went down, so I searched for a copy, found in in this forum. Yeah, it's in Spanish, a copy in English for those who can't understand (not that Babelfish does a perfect job, but it's better than nothing). As I said the idea is quite interesting, but it seemed a bit utopian and impossible from a technical point of view, but you guys are more clever than me

Quote from: mouser on May 04, 2007, 06:28 PM

In case it wasn't clear, i was being sarcastic and suggesting that yes, a search engine is one of those things best funded by citizens and kept out of the grand game of trying to maximize profits. App may be right, that the alternative to a privatizes money-gobbling corporation running search engine is worse, i just can't help but think that some things are best taken out of this game of maximizing profits and just funded by the citizens for the benefit of the citizens at large.

Sarcasm... wonderful thing, but considering that we have problems in Real Life to notice it, you can suppose how hard is in the Internet

EDIT: 200 posts... I didn' take my screenshot

app103 · « **Reply #9 on:** May 04, 2007, 07:16 PM »

You could always use Scroogle and get the top 100 results without the garbage...and tracking.

Found on their donate page:

Quote

Showing Google's results without their ads is another political statement. About 99 percent of Google's total revenue comes from ads, and these are ruining the web. Thousands of "Made for AdSense" domains are spewing garbage. Since these sites need content to trigger Google's ads, they steal it by scraping legitimate sites, or generate their own by purchasing junk from bulk writers. Meanwhile, click fraud is rampant. Zombie botnets are used to click on ads. If you cannot afford to buy a botnet from some shady character, then you can contract with someone in a country where labor is cheap. They will hire people to click on ads all day at below-minimum wage.

It's time to stop pretending that Google's revenue model is anything more than a temporary bubble, and it's time for Google to start developing more socially-responsible sources of income. Showing Google's results without the ads amounts to more public-interest advocacy. It says that the web spam situation is intolerable.

Grorgy · « **Reply #10 on:** May 04, 2007, 08:35 PM »

You can make google mmore or less ad free using some of the scripts written for firefox extensions greasemonkey and stylish and ad block plus also removes a lot of the ads on most sites, I find these particularly useful, and while i still get some ohe more sneaky folk, the ones that tell me they have t he best deals on (search term) overall its an improvement.

Dangerously socialist ideas popping up in here, lucky it isnt the 1950s and Mcarthy has gone

mouser · « **Reply #11 on:** May 04, 2007, 08:53 PM »

I should point out something that may not be obvious -- it's not so much the ads on side of the results that concern me about google, it's the fact that they use secret "algorithms" to decide which pages should be ranked higher and more likely to return to the user for any given search. i.e. google decides how good a page/website is and that effects whether the page will be ranked #1 for various searches, or #99,999.

Google tends to do a very good job of "properly" (in terms of giving you what you are looking for up front) ranking search results -- that's partly why they got so popular and remain the search engine of choice, but that still doesn't do much to allay my concern that the entire weight of their corporate model is pushing them to give higher ranking to their own pages and pages of people who advertise with them [see some of the recent essays on how google has upset people by leveraging their pages to suggest people install their toolbars and tools in ways that many see as unfair to the competition -- something they originally said they wouldn't do].

momonan · « **Reply #12 on:** May 04, 2007, 08:59 PM »

I have admuncher and almost never see an ad -- even on google. Does anyone else use this? http://www.admuncher.com

app103 · « **Reply #13 on:** May 04, 2007, 09:43 PM »

If you use Ad Muncher you never see any ads, on any site, with any browser.

I had suggested Scroogle for the reason that not only does it give you ad free results, it makes a statement, too.

I am not entirely anti-ad. I am against how Google is using them in their results and what effects it has had on overall results, with them being filled with garbage pages that exist solely for the purpose of making money with adsense. The quality is going downhill.

It's really bad when someone can steal the content of someone else's site, post it as a blog post on hundreds of splogs with Google's help (blogger.com is owned by Google) and because it has adsense ads on the page and it's hosted by Google it gets a higher ranking in the results, than the original site. They are helping the splog owners steal visitors from quality sites and flood the search results...all in the name of making a buck.

And the creators of these splogs don't care about the content. They are not going to go back and edit it and fix it and keep it up to date and make it worthy of visiting...they just want you to come and click an ad and make them some money. And Google's adsense is the driving force behind this.

The problem is Adsense...it has to go before it destroys the web for everyone.

nudone · « **Reply #14 on:** May 04, 2007, 09:44 PM »

how about something like copernic. it returns a set of results by combining the results from several search engines.

the idea being that we assume that most search engines will be favouring their own add infected web sites in the results. the copernic like program does the filtering, cross referencing the results - similar matches found high ranked across all of the search engine results are considered genuine good finds. this then removes the bias of any particular search engine - assuming they have their own set of advertisers that distinct from each other.

i just say this as i assume that the other search engines are working in a similar way to google and bias their results to favour their advertisers. maybe it's only google doing that - i have absolutely no idea what other search engine companies are doing.

wouldn't this work?

mouser · « **Reply #15 on:** May 04, 2007, 10:01 PM »

i think nudone might be onto something.
in fact you could even imagine a tool that specifically tried to "undo" the biases of these commercial search engines by penalizing sites with advertising from the search engine company, etc.

ie. imagine retrieving the ranked list of results from google, and then RE-RANKING by penalizing each page based on their relation to the search engine company.

very interesting idea.

Curt · « **Reply #16 on:** May 04, 2007, 10:01 PM »

It can harm me to the extreme when I do a Google search for "some special words" only, and recieves just one or two relevant, but many many irrelevant, answers.

I May go with April (sorry!

I couldn't help it) and say Scroogle
- maybe even Scroogle Scraper.

[attachimg=#]

Cpilot · « **Reply #17 on:** May 04, 2007, 10:53 PM »

Too much ado about nothing.
Making money is not inherently evil, and as it was pointed out before servers don't grow on trees and IT fairies don't come out at night to service them (although there could be some debate on that

).
If ads bother you ignore em.

superboyac · « **Reply #18 on:** May 04, 2007, 11:04 PM »

You know what I realized just now while reading this thread? I don't really use Google, or any search engine, anymore for actually searching for information. Most of the time now, I pretty much know where I want to go and Google just helps me get there (if this is making any sense). I rarely do blind searches, so to say, like where I type a word and just go. And this may due to a combination of many reasons:

--I've used the internet so much now, that that initial curiosity I used to have is pretty much gone. Now, I have a pretty good idea of where I want to go, and I ignore anything else in between.

--I have a "sense" of what is a legitimate link and what isn't. I'm sure most of you do this too. In the list of results, you can tell from a very quick glance which link is a good one, and which is junk. Novice or uninformed users probably click on a lot of the crap, and that's one reason why most non-computer people get a lot of adware and spyware. And then they go on to say how it's Windows' fault. Not really, it's just that us powerusers can tell what we should and shouldn't click on. But it's kind of hard to explain it.

--I'm a lot more busy now. I have less time to click around and get distracted by random thought chains. This is actually not that true, because if there was something really interesting, I'd probably take a couple minutes of my work day to check it out. Honestly, I've run out of things to search for (randomly, that is).

--Trust. Do I really trust anything out there? Not really. If I search for "best notepad alternative software", am I going to trust the slew of sites that get returned. Probably not. In those cases, I'd go straight to the source, like here (DC forum) where I trust the opinions of the people writing. Is that Google's fault? Not really. How many people out there either know what they are talking about, or have unbiased (financially speaking, that is) opinions? The internet has allowed anyone to put up any type of content unrestricted. Even in real life, I don't trust too many people, and I go straight to the experts for answers to my questions. So, in a sense, Google is just mimicking real life.

I have a feeling that no matter what happens, it will eventually be reduced to a pile of average-at-best junk, because the internet is going to represent society as a whole. If you put everyone in the world in one place, and take an opinion, that opinion will be the average opinion, not the best or the most knowledgeable one. So how can we avoid that? We can't really. It's up to me as an individual to filter through all that and find who I am looking for.

That's a little off topic, but let's get back down to the money issue. People are making money participating in these broad, all-encompassing phenomena, like Google. Well, again, I can't do anything about that, nor will I try. If I could make money doing it, i would also. I probably wouldn't be as successful because I have the desire to not let gimmicks ruin the quality of the product...but unfortunately, that might not necessarily be good for business.

There aren't a lot of people like you, mouser, who are so dedicated to providing quality content with your level of expertise without a concern financially. You are indeed a very rare breed of person to do all this, pretty much for free. We'd all like to think that if we were CEO's of multi-billion dollar companies, that we'd do it differently and with integrity. But I can't say that. Honestly, I don't what I would do because I can't even fathom myself in that situation. I'm not afraid to say that I may turn out to be just as greedy or unethical as the worst ones. I don't know what kind of pressures they deal with, so I can't say one way or the other.

Anyway, that's a couple of things that I was just thinking about while reading this thread.

mouser · « **Reply #19 on:** May 04, 2007, 11:55 PM »

just a clarification: i don't pretend not to care about money -- my student loans make it impossible for me to last more than a few days a month without worrying about it. i just don't think the goal of life is to get filthy rich; if i can find a way to make enough money to get by i'll be satisfied. i get frustrated sometimes with how hard even that can be, and that's when i start getting upset when i see how hard it is for some of us to just get by, and how random or automatic it can be to accumulate money once you have enough of it - where it seems to grow overnight in the bank (much like my student loan debt grows when im not looking).

furthermore i don't really think google is doing bad stuff now.. i just look at the incentive system inherent in it, and the direction that is likely to pull things, and more and more i'm realizing what an gigantic potential conflict of interest it is to be selling ads to websites, and at the same time be the arbiter of deciding which websites to send people to.

dk70 · « **Reply #20 on:** May 05, 2007, 12:04 AM »

Settle for enjoying Google with CustomizeGoogle (including links to other search engines) and/or some Greasemonkey scripts like http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8477 and http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6136 Not to forget Bumblesearch http://www.bumblesearch.com/bsearch/home/ check the shots. Dont be too idealistic on Googles motives or power of top 10 hitlists, dump default search page and make advanced one default, increase hits to 20 or higher. Lots of ways to improve searching http://www.googleguide.com/

Seems to be there are more important issues with Google position than dusty claims of evil cookies/ID tracking. Think even CustomizeGoogle author jokes a bit about the "paranoid" user. Ive yet to see some proof of unauthorized or not the same as everywhere else tracking. Even tiny requirements will bring some people in trouble as was seen when they launched Google Notes with "public" as default setting. Stories that snowball and NOW Google is insecure blah blah... Everyone is free to change to alternatives, like the safer Yahoo, Microsoft!

Google search is like a so so program which becomes way better once tweaked. Considering size of money machine they are very friendly, still! Or they are very good at appearing friendly

Dont worry too much about "risky" ads. Google kick their own behind if not fighting scams/spam is top priority. Their algorithms of ranking will probably forever be internal secrets. So some SEO tricks are obvious but when to be sure? Will always be good question. Should be possible to Google without having full faith in everything they deliver - the opposite may be more scary!

I thought the conflict from users point of view was that if noting was "done" to Google we eventually will end up having to like Google cause it is the only one. MS give up, Yahoo dies out - plans of new comers to attack Google not likely to succeed. Advertising/revenue logic vs. organizing and guiding world information is just how internet works.

broken85 · « **Reply #21 on:** May 05, 2007, 12:11 AM »

Very well said superboyac!

I also tend to use google now-a-days less for "searching" and more for "getting there" because there isn't much that I'm clueless on how to find anymore. Sometimes even if I know a company's website I'll search for the page I want in google so I don't have to look for the particular link in some other navigation scheme.

Slightly off topic of advertising, but about link relevancy in google...
I don't think any search engine currently developed can actually only return useful information... because people try very hard to get their content as far up the search results as possible. With Google this is much more complex, but the fact is, many relevant sites could care less about search engine placement, and many irrelevant sites will use every trick in the ever-expanding book to increase their search ranking for the very keywords you're looking for; and who's to say which will have the higher PageRank or be listed first? Something that simply parses code and displays results based on the very algorithms thousands of sites try to "persuade". And that's before you even factor in paid advertising which may or may not, now or in the future, be involved in the behind-the-scenes algorithms.

But it's the human aspect in us that lets us easily filter through even Google's results quickly and click on the links we *know* are at least somewhat relevant. I think it is (or should be) the ever-expanding goal of any all-encompassing search algorithm to do more and more of this work for the user so that we can start to see one page of relevant results instead of having to weed through them ourselves. But how does a search algorithm get around the limits of its static nature and those trying to trick it?

I suppose just by becoming more and more complex, and appearing less and less static. But I guess the question then is where do you draw the line? What I consider junk or advertising some users might consider the most relevant results. Perhaps since Google is already doing personalized searches and keeping account profiles, they could implement an adaptive set of algorithms that remember patterns (or the lack of certain patterns) in the results you actually click on and start ranking those types of results higher for you.

Or we could do away with automatic page ranking altogether and each end user could visit and rate every page in google's index for themselves. It might take several years (lifetimes?) but hey, we'd filter out the junk alright!

Or, less sarchastically, it could be a collective project... have an open search engine which parses google's results but allows page rankings to be submitted by users (through a firefox extension maybe) which would average out, or be weighed somehow, and which would override google's rank for that particular site and place it accordingly in the results. Granted it would take some time before the database was large enough to make a collective difference, and would then be subject to its own need for filtering out junk that is submitted, but it would be one way of adding the 'human' aspect into google's search results without losing google's great algorithms and without relying on the page's webmaster or their code to define its relevance.

But I don't know how easy or fast it would be to filter through large numbers of google results in order to re-organize them on the fly. Google is quite fast though!

*EDIT*
More on point with mouser's topic, the above mentioned collective project could also allow junk sites, advertising sites, etc. to be re-ranked, or filtered out entirely based on user submittals... and maybe even its own algorithms and/or filters based on common junk/spam techniques or domains/URLs

Cpilot · « **Reply #22 on:** May 05, 2007, 12:40 AM »

Maybe you could set up something like Digg, where users submit urls and everyone votes for em based on how commercial or not they are.
If their voted out then they get deleted and only the ones approved by the majority would be left. Then you could use a site search feature that would return only user approved links.

BTW mouser, I want to accumulate more than just enough to get by.
The prospect of eating dog food in my old age is very unappealing.

app103 · « **Reply #23 on:** May 05, 2007, 12:43 AM »

Quote from: nudone on May 04, 2007, 09:44 PM

how about something like copernic. it returns a set of results by combining the results from several search engines.

I had Copernic a long time ago...and I loved it. I stopped using it about 5 years ago and I don't quite remember why. I think it was just easier to use Google.

I didn't even know they still had a web search product. I thought they switched over to desktop search and gave up trying to compete with Google.

Maybe it's time I give it another try.

And guess what? I get to upgrade to the most recent pro version for free! How cool is that?

Of course I'll still be waiting for StumbleUpon to become a full fledged search engine and not just a social bookmarking site.

nudone · « **Reply #24 on:** May 05, 2007, 07:08 AM »

i have to say i don't really have any complaints about google either. when looking through the results it returns, i will often view them way past page 10 - past page 50 if need be. like superboyac said, you can pretty much spot what looks like a relevent link so it doesn't take that long to go through a load results. and, of course, usually you'll find a site that will provide further links that are even more relevent to your original search. i think it's called web surfing.

google still seems to be the best out of the bunch. it will be interesting to hear how app get along with copernic.