Comment by AlexC04 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexC04 | Hacker News Reader

I completely disagree with the article. The 25% bonus is not a blunder at all. It's a big shake-up that's certain, but based on what I've been reading about Google recently, I think it's actually quite a visionary move.

If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably have read two major complaints about the company.

    1) their search results are getting spammier
    2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on.

The +1 bonus addresses both.

In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale.

And YES the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding 'unnaturally correlated voting blocks)

+1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core business is appropriate.

The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do.

The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff. The internal middle managers' squabbles.

Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way. 25% of your bonus is tied to this project"

If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is don't fail.

I agree that rallying their entire company around a key strategic initiative like this is not a blunder. It's an act of transparency that clearly communicates Google's direction both internally and externally.

There are many different perspectives at Google, and by focusing the entire organization on "social," he attempts to tap into the creativity of individuals throughout the entire organization. That type of engagement leads to unexpected benefits.

There are some good ideas in the article, like, "People want to isolate social from nonsocial aspects of their lives."

I suspect there is something to that, although there is also another factor the author may want to consider... the how much better are you than the current leader factor?

If a great new search engine launched tomorrow, that was a little better than Google, would it beat Google? No. Years ago at a Kelsey Group conference (2004ish) an executive at Google talked about the 50% rule. She said that for a search engine to beat Google, it had to be 50% better.

The point is that it is very difficult to persuade humans to change their behavior, and they will only do so when there is a huge benefit.

"In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale."

And if a disproportionate number of those humans who bother to vote are spammers?

As I touched on - that can be taken care of in part by algorithms. Consider that each vote requires a google account & IP address. Assume also that google will be able to identify at least a handful of "Definite Humans" and monitor their behavior.

Definite humans do certain things, like browse the web in certain predictable patterns, their +1 votes might cluster around certain interests, and generally "human looking stuff". Without enough data to look at I can't tell you exactly what that means but I'm assuming that patterns would emerge once compared with computers.

Assume that spammers manage to automate a certain number of google accounts to vote +1 on their web properties. At the click of a button (in low orbital ion cannon style) thousands of robot-accounts log in to +1 against an individual link.

Now the spammers may find a way to stagger the automation of the logins, but unless they're particularly sophisticated how do they manage to create the rest of the simulation of a web-browsing individual?

Do they automate "fake humans" to run google searches from time to time? Click about on links? What about the analysis of the 'clustering' of accounts? A given group of 1000 accounts always voting on the same things together? What about the odd similarity that all the +1's seem to be routed through the same handful of IP addresses? What if +1'ing is closely related to other people +1'ing near your own geolocation?

I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, indeed they're buying themselves another "arms race" - it really would be interesting to investigate what proportion of Facebook's like button is being "astro-turfed"

There's definitely going to be mechanical turk jobs to search my link, click +1 and such, but that exists for facebook as well.

I firmly believe that as clever as spammers are, there're not going to be able to accurately simulate the behavior of real humans for long. There are too many factors that can trip them up.

Again, this is probably one of the things that 25% of the bonus is tied to addressing. Clever, interested engineers now have a serious incentive to spending their 20% time addressing your concern.

Right?

Consider also Reddit's method of spam-user-flagging. They use something that's been nicknamed "Ghost Banning" they can continue to upvote links, comment on threads everything from their point of view looks like they exist. They never get a message that says "hey by the way, you're not being counted"

They're just not counted.

Ghost banning can give you a a large number of false-positives without the same level of risk of upsetting others.

In fact, with google's version of ghost banning, they could further tie your votes to the accounts of your friends.

Google algorithmically thinks your a spammer, you're ghost-banned - except to you and except to people who have elected to count you as a friend.

It will be very hard to feel slighted if you never know that your votes don't really carry an impact.

Obviously there's work in getting this right, but it's got a good chance of being a very solid quality filter.

This is also known as a "hellban" http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

I think it's a deliciously evil solution to spammers and trolls, as you've described.

As long as they count votes in a reasonable manner, I don't expect it to hurt. If Google can get normal people to vote up good results, the intentional spammers will never make a big enough dent to matter anyway. And even if they can't, the user votes won't make up the entire placement process, so hopefully they'd be no worse off now if they get useless results. Perhaps they can just leave it out of the mix entirely until they get a realistic-looking profile of user votes.

Agreed. If Google's incredibly talented and distributed employee base can pull their networks in to whatever their new social initiatives are, it's a huge aset to them in the battle with Facebook and everybody else for "who owns social". Tying everybody's bonus to this encourages each individual employee and team to think creatively about how they can help. It's a strong signal that "this is our top priority and yes we really mean it".

Which doesn't mean it will work, of course; see ScottBurson's points above. But from a strategy perspective it's a classic way to align priorities around the critical corporate goal.

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