Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by gregable | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gregable

It would be very interesting if Search could differentiate between the three users:

- WSJ subscriber, where WSJ results should be present and maybe even get a ranking boost.

- User happy with paywall results, these results could be surfaced, with UI treatment indicating paywall.

- User uninterested in paywall results, where these results would be essentially removed.

The ranking between the latter 2 of these users could be a bit of a sliding scale too, rather than two distinct groups.

View on HN

Why is it Google's responsibility to administer all this? They have a published algorithm that is intended to maximize fair play on the web. If you don't like that algorithm find a way to buy off the other search engines for paid placement.

>> Why is it Google's responsibility to administer all this?

Setting "don't be evil" aside, Google's only responsibility is to Google.

But here's the rub. Google's product is its users' attention. If they bias their search results enough, (maybe) they lose product inventory.

How much is "enough"? Probably much more than filtering WSJ.

But IMO bias in a search engine – a presumed oracle of truth – is evil. So there's that.

If you think that bias is a bad idea than Googles current approach seems okay. They don't bias against WSJ, but they don't bias for WSJ either - The Google bot has less material to work with, so their is less content compared to other sources, so it has a worse ranking. No bias.

There are no more unique WSJ results if they're all a paywall.

They could apply a subtle background (like they do for sponsored results) to results that are behind a paywall, behind a registration-wall, or otherwise inaccessible.

Alternatively, wsj could sponsor those results, and jump to the top with their paywalled content.

Or they could just demote them, since inaccessible by any of those means less likely to be useful to a searcher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com