Daily Mail owner sues Google over search results
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...
A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).
[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[2]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Sus...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9521649/amp/Fundrai...
I do see stuff like "Can you THINK yourself thin? A hypnotist to the stars says you can - and reveals the five-step technique to try if you want to shed the 'lockdown stone'"[1]
Taken from the front page right now. The article is even worse than the title suggests.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9492639/Hypnotist...
Ahhh this takes me back. What an amazing video. Made 11 years ago and it's just as accurate as it was back then.
Honestly? Fuck the Daily Mail. Also The S*n, Daily Express, etc.
The Daily Mail stalked Ian Hislop for years after this in an effort to find "dirt" on him (never found any), all because Piers made a complete arse of himself :-/
NY Times has conspicuously not been covering this NY story, whereas Daily Mail and NY Post have.
The only way that could possibly count as international news, certainly, is if you're looking for examples of some certain phenomenon and failing to come up with any more important or relevant than that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/us/slave-trade-auction-sn...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/us/texas-chivalry-assignm...
The average person on the left will deny and reject this since the communist American owned media only feeds them stuff they want to believe. Truth hurts sometimes.
A laptop is left with a computer repair salesman for some reason, in Delaware for some reason, and for some reason no contact information is given for the laptop's return, and for some reason the repairman both wanted to and was capable of getting a direct line to Rudy Giuliani who for some reason gave the only copy of the hard drive to the NYT without screening any other news outlets.
The repairman goes on to give contradictory statements repeatedly about the origin of the laptop. The FBI acquires the device for investigation into Russian disinformation campaigns.
When you say "for some reason" you are alluding that there is no answer and you're trying to downplay it, you are lying.
The laptop was turned in by Hunter because it was waterlogged. He signed the form. When he didn't come back in to get it and the owner noticed the illegal things on it, a copy of the hard drive was first given to the FBI, another was later given to Rudy because nothing was done by the FBI.
The emails and photos on the laptop have not been disputed. His business partner has confirmed the emails, and the DKIM of at least one of the emails have been verified.
--- to others in the thread ---
> After obtaining a copy of the hard drive, DailyMail.com commissioned top cyber forensics experts Maryman & Associates to analyze its data and determine whether the laptop's contents were real.
Company name is listed. You'd have to go ask the cyber-firm they used, any outlet could verify it and write a story debunking it if they wanted. Something tells me they don't want to because they know it's true.
An email from the laptop has been DKIM validated, here's the repo: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim
What are you suggesting was made up?
You should seriously reanalyze how you reach conclusions and look up what cognitive dissonance is.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9445105/What-Hunter...
Company name is listed. You'd have to go ask the cyber-firm they used, any outlet could verify it and write a story debunking it if they wanted. Something tells me they don't want to because they know it's true.
An email from the laptop has been DKIM validated, here's the repo: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim
What are you suggesting was made up?
Look up what cognitive dissonance is. You're experiencing a serious case of this here. I'd urge you to reanalyze how you reach conclusions moving forward, there's probably other areas of your life where you're doing the same thing.
That is literally how human communications networks work reliability of speaker is a pre filter for analysis of evidence. Do you specifically suggest that Giuliani is a reliable source?
If he's not anything whose exclusive providence is established through him is contaminated. Anything anymore including video is trivial to fake if you have resources and the laptop which whose very existence seems so unlikely turned up with maximal political convenience.
In brief we are supposed to believe Hunter filled a laptop with incriminating evidence, then dropped it off at a trumptards computer repair shop in a state he doesn't live in and forgot about. We are also to believe that he happily gave him the login to unlock the encrypted drive full of potentially election killing data that just happened to come into ghoulianis hands.
It's amazing that you believe this shit without hard evidence.
And The New York Post did none of this.
There are plenty of other articles written by about it by almost every news outlet[1]; it was never "buried". The difference was they treated the suspicious weird story as exactly that, instead of immediately rushing to conclusions.
Its not clear to ME that the physical device ever belonged to Hunter Biden or that it contains anything like what they claim it contains. The single source of truth is massively tainted because the source is a lying scumbag with zero integrity. If you conclude otherwise I conclude its because its the answer you wish were true.
Confession through projection.
Maybe they ought to have leaked the raw data for me to look at.
Also, there's ample evidence of an unfair election as well and zero credible verification of any results.
And none of this means the narrative it's used for is real (i.e. the claim that Joe Biden has corrupt connections to Ukraine). We saw this with previously leaked emails of DNC, Weiner, etc. where the intended meaning was twisted to "prove" some grand conspiracy. The emails were real, the conspiracy was bullshit.
That Hunter Biden is a bit of a screw-up is not controversial. That this somehow automatically reflects badly on his father is.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/john-ratcliffe-rejec...
“This is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign. The intelligence community has not been involved with Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hunter Biden is a U.S. person, and he would be subject to any investigation regarding fraud, or corruption would be rightfully the jurisdiction of the FBI. So, the FBI has had possession of this, and what I can say without commenting on any investigation that they may have in corruption or fraud — is to say that their investigation does not center around Russian disinformation, and the intelligence community is playing no role with respect to that,” Ratcliffe said. “Adam Schiff saying that this is part of some Russian disinformation campaign and that the IC has assessed that or believes that is simply not true, so I appreciate the opportunity to be able to tell the American people that that is the case."
Some examples I can think of
- locating where Ghislaine Maxwell was hiding out
- Anthony Wiener sexting scandal
- Floyd arrest body cam footage
This article chronicles their American operation. They do aggressive tabloid reporting/investigation, which may generate a lot of forgettable celebrity content, but is also brought to bear on politicians, officials, and other ‘important’ news subjects. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
tl;dr best quote (imo) "The Mail should be on the citation blacklist. There's no area of news where it is actually reliable. It can be relied on to accurately report celebrity gossip, but in that case the gossip itself is frequently false and the Mail doesn't check it. Their coverage of medical, science and political topics is a byword for deliberate inaccuracy."
Any somewhat political article is extremely left leaning.
God forbid you have to use it for research of any political topic, always check the references and compare to right leaning sources.
It's funny because their critique of DM can be applied to Wikipedia as a whole.
I've seen that same argument before to argue how the Nazis, and modern neo-Nazi groups are supposedly all "left wing", their categorization on Wikipedia as right wing and far right is allegedly only the result of that very same "left leaning" bias you are claiming.
Which, as a German, is just a tad bit weird, because it wasn't Wikipedia that defined these groups as such, those results come out of the political sciences. Nazis being right-wing, and neo-Nazis having moved further into the far-right is a very established fact in Germany.
What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.
I didn't mean to suggest taking the name itself as the only evidence of socialism.
Yes, because a socialism that benefits only members of the "Aryan race" while excluding, oppressing and murdering others in the same country is not socialism at all.
From Mao to Venezuela, the core idea depends upon excluding, oppressing, and murder of others in the same country based on class.
The only thing different about the Nazis is they targeted by race not class, though Communist China is targeting Uighur and other minorities in their country.
> The only thing different about the Nazis is they targeted by race
The government excluding, oppressing, murdering based on race ... so the American south was socialist then right?
I think the divergence in views is in the definition of socialism we have; I see it as an economical doctrine of state centralisation, you probably have other egalitarian ideals attached to it.
Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank? I think they were closer to socialism that nowadays mainstream left wing parties
This is like calling ancient Sparta - where the Spartans lived in an egalitarian structure while simultaneously oppressing their Helot slaves - socialism.
Or for a more a recent example, apartheid South Africa, where whites received a great deal of support via government policy that practically ensured their prosperity. That wasn't socialism, either.
Socialism is not about centralized state control. It's about whether the state plays a strong role in ensuring a standard of living for all it's citizens. In successful examples (like Social Security and Medicare in the US) it has accomplished this while the majority of the economy is not under state control.
In terms of economic policy, all the examples you cited are on the left side or going left in my book. There is definitely nothing capitalistic about state intervention.
It also makes sense historically: it took us a long time to understand that capitalism is the most efficient way to create value and advance technology. Even the communist dictatorship that is China understood that and it's using this to rule the world, while the western world (especially the USA) marched back on their capitalism and hampered their economy with more and more regulations.
I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.
Who was arguing the merits of capitalism? Not me.
But true colors shine through. It seems like your actual motivation for arguing that Nazis were socialist was just a device to argue for unfettered capitalism by falsely associating socialism with them. That's a weak rhetorical trick that far right commentators have been using for quite a while now.
Using that same line of reasoning one could frame the American slave trade as "socialist" in nature because the slave owners were "socialized" by the exploited slaves.
> Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank?
Which is kinda meaningless, if you want to see were Nazis stood on what you gotta look at their actions past abstract economic theories and their own PR, you have to look at the people they oppressed, persecuted, killed and for what reasons they did it.
Or you could also look at what kind of people [0] and ideas [1] in large parts inspired them.
Those weren't socialist/communist ideals out of the East, that inspiration came nearly exclusively from the West, a lot of it from over the pond, straight down to originally coining the term "Untermensch" and the associated race theories [2]
[0] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand-cross-1938...
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hi...
It is to anybody actually familiar with the history of the NSDAP. The "socialism" in their name was mostly PR, what little socialist currents existed in the early NSDAP, represented by the Strasser brothers, was bloodily purged during the Night of the Long Knives.
It's for that reason the very first victims in the concentration camp Dachau were not just Jews, they where German leftist political opposition Jews: Communists, socialists, antifascists, killed as early as 1933. The very same reason why Nazis considered the communist USSR as their arch-nemesis.
> What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.
All this information can be found on Wikipedia, not just there, but also local Wikipedias from the places it actually happened. Like the Fuerth Wikipedia being even more in-depth and detailed [0], which is the city next to Nuremberg, both very relevant places for the early rise of Nazism.
That's why it's really not this "open debate" you make it out to be. The only people who insist on that are usually US Americans, due to the caricature "atheist socialist leftist" boogeyman that's been peddled to them for decades and some Eastern Europeans with post-communism shock, to justify their ideological hard shift to the right into often straight up fascism.
At the same time, Hitler viewed Marxism not only as a philosophy close to its own, but also as a rival. I don't think the first victims of Dachau prove anything.
The only data I use to argue nazis were closer to socialism than free market capitalism is that their economy (despite having a semblance of a free economy) revolved around the state: prices, wages were fixed, members of the nazi party were put in control of private companies who disobeyed.
Hitler was definitely to the right of Stalin, but he was left of most modern left wing parties.
I also disagree with you that something is not open to debate, and I think it's worrying to hear people hold this view - especially on something so subjective as political categorisations.
Some more reading material:
https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-s...
https://fee.org/articles/anti-racists-should-think-twice-abo...
The main problem is that left wing and right wing are meaningless terms. Left and right generally apply to the economical sphere which goes from communism (entirely state operated economy) to libertarianism (entirely de-regulated market). Usually when people talk about left wing vs right wing they attach some authoritarian / anarchic connotations. The politicalcompass.org (which is kind of left leaning) has a nice explanation of this problem.
Going back to nazis: if you look at their policies and how the economy operated in nazi Germany, nazis are closer to socialism than libertarianism. There is a nice analysis here: https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-s...
Sure, Hitler may have been to the right of Stalin, but he was much more left leaning than any of nowadays left wing parties.
You realize Wikipedia itself is not considered a reliable or credible source for anything right?
That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
It's a tricky problem, in principle I agree with you, but on the other hand more transparency also means more information for people who are gaming the system.
And there are many MANY people who (try to) game Google. Never underestimate the amount of ridiculous effort some people will go to to make a buck. Arguably Google's largest value is that it's actually reasonably good in preventing this.
So ... I don't know.
Duckduckgo provides generally better results and has some very cool gadgets (like stack overflow answer expansion).
Google is winning on businesses' opening hours and safe search on images is not as safe as Google, which is the single caveat I need to remember about before looking for something.
It's like when people say google (or fb, etc) has no [first amendment] obligation to allow freedom of speech. Fine, but then don't constantly describe yourself of defenders of free speech, say from the outset you will police speech as you see fit, drop the pretense that your policing is somehow objective, and let the market digest that.
Where does it do that? Google search results being an opaque algorithm is not a big secret, given how Google clearly refuses to talk about details every time this comes up.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl...
Slow or failing page loads negatively affect search rankings on all search engines & 80% of users abandon your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.
An ethical take would be trying not to spread poison is the right thing to do. Inaction in the face of evil isn't neutral its evil.
If you think that you are missing out on legitimate information pick a different search engine or make one.
It's also roundly criticized as repressive, anti-freedom, and ripe for almost unlimited abuse by every first world nation.
Whether the government ought to let her spread her malicious lies is an entirely different question from whether for example amazon ought to carry her book or google ought to index her site. If your absolutist free speech position doesn't allow you to admit to the idea of the government censoring her I understand. However if you think that amazon and google ought to be morally obligated to help her spread her poison I don't understand your position at all.
A rational person can tell the difference between a grey area obvious nonsense and pretending that there aren't plenty of trivially definable black and white situations in which not carrying poison makes the world a better place is complete nonsense as is the idea that ANY editorial discretion magically leads to 1984. Life is literally the finding a balance point and I think we can reasonably discover a point of homeostasis between free heroin on every corner and constantly strip searching everyone for drugs.
If you don't think so you haven't considered the problem very deeply.
The problem at the end of the day is that we're not talking about extreme, contrived examples like the one just mentioned. We're talking about ideological things that rational people can disagree about in good faith, and there is no downside for tech companies to boost their preferred ideologies/candidates/etc and suppress their non-preferred ones.
That is a huge problem with, just like the governments, unlimited abuse potential... except it's more insidious. Government suppression of speech comes at the point of a gun, tech suppression of speech happens passively, in that you won't know it's happening unless you know to look for it, or its application is exceedingly blunt.
It's handwaved because many people find the list of boosting and suppressing targets acceptable.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti...
Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information? I'll do one. A restaurant has an established duty of care to maintain a minimum standard of cleanliness so as to provide sustenance and not illness. This duty is established in law and custom, maintained by inspection and certification. It's a duty whose exact performance and rules has changed over time but which goes back in custom over thousands of years.
This duty rendered real and specific by law and inspection is based on the most basic of rights the right to retain your life and health. It is trivially to suppose that someone ought to respect your desire to remain alive by not doing their job so poorly that filling your stomach once leads to you filling a hole in the ground.
Tech companies which so far as I can see have no duty of neutrality beyond what is required to keep our business are in fact very very circumspect about blocking things. Facebook happily left the groups up that I and others reported in the days leading up to the Jan 6 insurrection where they were planning to overthrow our government and it wasn't that long ago that reddit decided to remove communities like jailbait and subreddits in which the people who used to use lynching as social gatherings would have been quite comfortable.
When people talk about the problem with insidious blocking by tech companies I suspect the person is either an idealist or one of the deplorables. I'll do you the credit of assuming your in the former basket because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
It's interesting that you mention restaurants. Restaurants have standards that go beyond the casual cook in a home kitchen because the restaurant, owing to its scale, can multiply the effect of a problem with food safety and injure/kill very many people very easily.
To briefly answer your question: Big scale means errors are magnified means different rules apply.
Facebook by itself is the single largest website in the world outside of China. I find it outrageous to suggest that a company in that position (Google too) should get to just do whatever they please regarding the information input of a massive chunk of the global population.
Pretending that power doesn't exist does not nullify its effects or its abuse potential.
>because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
Your unwarranted personal attack aside, this is precisely what I meant about those handwaving the establishment of an abusable power structure simply because they're generally okay with the decisions that structure is making.
What about when you're not so okay with those decisions anymore? You mentioned the Capitol insurrection, I assume then, that you think Facebook should clamp down on such groups? Their answer to you is the same as their answer to me: "Our back yard, our rules."
I think we can do better than that. And to preempt the inevitable argument that the first amendment allows them to operate free of oversight in this way.. that's true. It would be a lot easier to tie their freedom from liability for the libelous, terroristic, etc. content their users post to some additional duties, transparency, and so forth.
There's only so many top spots in Google search results, I'd rather those not be awarded to parties that are the most litigious.
Furthermore what are you supposed to do with this data? If you ultimately find that one site is given one score and another is given another and you disagree with this are you going to demand that google show other people the sites you prefer in a higher rank? Nonsense.
No matter how they rank showing their hands would almost certainly be harmful to google because it would allow political groups of any stripe to put pressure on them to "fix" their results on any number of dimensions. Google would in short be crazy to give this to you and you aren't entitled to it.
According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".
The above statement seems to ignore the history of search engine paid placement (people are certainly entitled, so long as they pay) which has evolved into "Ads by Google" appearing above search results. Further, the statement admits gaming occurs ["gaming them more effectively"] regardless of Google secret "solutions".
Listing search results by subjective criteria while portarying this as some sort of pseudo-objective "search" is not helpful. The "web search engine" has become a front for an online ad services business. The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.
This is seen in practice. The yellow pages were?(are?) alphabetical, which is why you see so many business that start with the letter A.
The YP allowed an advertiser to pay for a larger type font, or a quarter/half/full page ad, in addition to the free listing. It is also divided into subject catgories.
What has been lost with Google's web search is the concept of the accessible free listing. It is only accesible under Google's secret rules. The ability to finger through the pages to get to, say, the last entry beginning with "Z" is not possible with Google search. Google will hide the bottom of the list and only display the first several pages. This creates pressure to buy ads or SEO services (game the search) in order to "appear at the top", which is "the only way to be found". Absurd. Google will not even return more than 400 results anymore.
While the phenomenon of naming things to begin with "A" may be seen in pratice outside of the web, this has not rendered the system of alphabetical listing obsolete.^2 Not even close. Also, there are likely other factors influencing the decision to name things beginning with letters like "A". As many computer nerds know, not all letters are equally common in the English language. Anyone who has looked at large zone files knows that domain names tend to begin with "A", but such choice of name is not done to game alphabetical ordering.
1. About 11 years ago I read a book by Ammon Shea called The Phone Book. It had some discussion of the history of the Yellow Pages.
2. Last year, Judith Flanders published a book on the history of alphabetical order.
The list of all phone numbers is obviously enumerable. There's a registry and a flat list of phone numbers. But, resource constraints aside, is it possible to enumerate all websites? I suppose you could theoretically enumerate every domain name, but that isn't necessarily the same thing.
You aren't entitled to one paid for by google but I don't think there is any reason you can't fund the PBS of search engines. There in fact save lack of interest or motivation why you couldn't start working on it tomorrow and lobby for government support.
It doesn’t deserve a click.
Daily Mail should not be able to litigate their way to my eyeballs.
Let's say I accept your claim about Google being a monopoly. Should the government force them to rank sites the way the government wants? Or do we just break up Google?
* https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthl...
> exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
Google doesn't own exclusive control of the supply of answers to queries about the rest of the web in fact it would almost be silly to even talk about such. Its also not the only game as far as ads
What people are worried in fact is google controls access to a very large share of incoming eyeballs in terms of organic unpaid for results such that ranking you poorly or not at all could harm you despite having no business relationship with google.
This however isn't business because the only customers are searchers and the ads on top of the results.
Whether you appear 3rd or 37th is material to your business but not a matter of google having a monopoly on my eyeballs. The framework which you understand commerce doesn't fit the situation.
If you believe it's worth addressing it will have to be via unique legislation that actually suits.
Isn't it one of the most sold newspapers in the UK? I like how elitist folks are. In Romania everyone I know would also go "no one buys Libertatea" (one of our trashy newspapers) but it is the most sold newspaper in Romania.
High brow people badly underestimate how much influence these tabloids have. There's a reason their readers made folks like Kim Kardashian a billionaire.
I think this is confusing the general ("Daily Mail is the most read paper in the UK") with the specific ("this article was shared, linked, and read a lot").
You can check out their coverage of Romanians if you want some examples https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Adailymail.co.uk+rom...
Who cares? That only means that a lot of people want that hate (and probably feel that hate).
Also newspapers stirring things does sometimes muck up politics. Like in the 30s the Mail used to support Hitler and Mussolini who then went on to cause some bother.
I suspect few would care if Google gave manipulative scientology articles a relatively poor search rank. The Daily Mail is absolutely no where near that bad. But they are certainly close to the definition of dog-whistle manipulation.
Where's the line? This, of course, assumes their poor search rank isn't because Google has detected they're doing something shady, which due to the Daily Mail's history is not unlikely.
Sounds like they take a manual approach to manipulating their search ranking; spam is worthy of downranking.
It wouldn't surprise me if this claim is true: here's to the discovery process to figure it out.
I've always assumed this was the case, but has this been proven?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22319136/whatsapp-cloud-ba...
Unless there's something new on this case that I haven't seen?
The case was rejected on procedural grounds for lack of standing - a decision that has been hotly debated by many legal experts.
Did you ever actually read the filing? [1] I recommend it, very approachable.
If nothing else, the math and statistics cited should be of interest.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
I do remember it using that "1 in quadrillion" statistic that appeared pretty questionable even on the surface.
This is true, but only because it is such an amazing example of bad statistics. It asserts that there is a “less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States”. It bases this on two things.
First is that Trump had an early lead, so it is statistically impossible for Biden to have ended up winning. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that votes are not randomly distributed and mail in votes heavily favored Biden.
Second, that Biden performed better when compared to Clinton in 2016. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that people vote differently at different times and for different people. The same differences would be seen comparing Kerry/Obama or Dole/Bush.
This is pretty easy to debunk.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/el...
A quick search came up empty. Could you share a source?
A quick search I imagined doing (I even imagined that I used a VPN) turned up 10,000,000 results, 49 of which were news articles from the last 15 years detailing what, but not how, Google Search search results were censored. When I imagined clicking "Next" to see the rest of these results, I imagined that I was presented with a No CAPTCHA, asking me to identify which colored block of visual noise most closely resembled hell itself.
Edit: Oh, and then I did the search for real, and got 4.95m results of similar composition.
Anyways, searching "artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads" is inconclusive. However, if you quote "non-AMP", you get the expected results. Google seems to have a peculiar way of handling dashes and the "non" in "non-AMP" seems to get lost.
You might call that "sentiment analysis". Google has published papers on it. They've refined it so much that they even turned it into a well-documented feature of their Natural Language API [0].
> Google could probably pull it off but for what? Google hate drives views, and ironically, these are commonly monetized by Google itself.
If you could assign a monetary value to showing someone an advertisement (or several), would you? Google has.
If you could assign a monetary value to someone's knowledge about government/justice actions against yourself, would you?
If you could categorize sentiment into something that can generate revenue... or perhaps something that could hurt revenue... would you?
There's money in censorship.
> Anyways, searching "artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads" is inconclusive
Let me make it much less inconclusive . The two searches [1] [2] both reveal the lawsuit by the Texas AG which has explicit allegations [3].
[0]: https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/sentiment-tut...
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Google+AMP+second+delay+lawsuit
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+AMP+second+delay+laws...
[3]: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
Do you think they would spend it if they were on the right side of the law ?
This is an interesting example of a prisoners dilemma. If N companies are competing without lobbying, their lobbying costs are zero.
But if one company 'defects' and start lobbying to tilt the regulatory landscape, then every other company must also start lobbying to prevent it.
The end result is that every company lobbies against each other for no net benefit[1], despite large amounts of money spent on lobbying. Good for lobbyists, bad for the companies.
So a company spending money on lobbying doesn't really tell us anything. They may be a bad actor, a good actor, or anything in between. There are valid reason for every position in the spectrum to spent money on lobbying.
[1]. Obv the real world is far more complex than this. The lobbying may provide industry wide benefits, or may prevent the entry of new competitors, or there may be semi-random fluctuations in the regularly landscape, etc, etc, etc.
Lobbying can be a lot of things, but one of the most common is basically marketing & PR for lawmakers. If you're going to be in the news, you pay some clever marketers to make hyper-focused versions of what happened for every single individual law maker. The company wants their view to be easily understood by the 535 voting humans who are seated in congress right now. It's the second oldest trick in the book (after bribery which also ofc happens to a degree).
Lobbying can also include skullduggery and dirty tricks and also other mundane things, but it is not (and never will be) a clear sign that a company is doing something wrong.
> It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace.
Whether that's true or not is another thing...guess we'll have to wait and see.
I recall google from a decade ago being able to answer all my questions, where as now all I get is mediocre, politically-safe, canned answers with a ridiculous amount of ads.
It is enough to look at recipe websites to see that Daily Mail’s claim is clearly true. Recipe sites providing a user hostile ad-filled experience gain the top place, where as simple recipes without stories and tons of ads are nowhere to be found.
Why would Google do anything else? Website owners are paying Google to be ranked higher by essentially buying ads from Google. The difference between the ppc of a competitor and Google is the price the website owners pay. In return, Google will rank the website higher.
The top promoted answer leads to what looks like a reasonable site.
I think the greatest problem here is individual user bubbles. My take is that this would all go away as a problem if Google did away with behavioural tracking - thus the same query would lead to same answers globally.
The question is, how much would that degrade search quality?
The most obvious is location - 'show me chinese takeaways' is a different query depending on where you are and your past ordering profile. But its a solvable problem
In the past it did, but when I try to search a line of logging output, or a line from a stack trace, Google decides to omit much of my search terms, and even goes as far as replacing some of my search terms with other terms that do not fit the context of my queries at all.
The difference is that the ad-laden sites spend 90% of their time getting their rankings up in google, the recipes are usually taken/copied from elsewhere and the big long stories are there to make the site look unique to Google, to fool it into thinking there's legitimate content there.
In the end, of course the person who spends all their time gaming Google is going to rank higher than someone who actually cares about their recipes and spends 90% of their time curating, experimenting, etc.
It's a sad state of affairs, but spammers have ruined Google.
There are going to be sick or desperate people who follow that advice, or attempt to use those "cures", and some of them will be harmed because of it.
So despite being blindingly obvious, it is difficult to make a mature discussion based on 'feelings', vague as they are.
A research that would work would be to show how irrelevant current results are. Certainly, that wouldn't be hard to prove, even without comparing it to external data.
> Google [says] "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search."
Not a fan of either party, but I hope we get to find out who's accurate.
If I search for something and it's related to what I'm searching for then it is not useless.
If I pay an offshore content farm to do content stuffing, do you want my gibberish in your results?
Then it becomes a question of which algorithm you want. Filtering out daily mail bollocks is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to google. Am I concerned about the implications? sure; but here and now, it's doing exactly what I want.
I don’t like Google either, but the mail is an absolutely drain on society, and in my opinion has done much, much worse than Google ever has
Yeah google suppresses competition, and shamelessly sells your data, but they aren’t deliberately and carefully peddling hate and dog-whistle racism. Their business model isn’t literally to corrupt people’s minds, addict them to controversy and clastic words and profit from that. They don’t directly benefit from a less-educated society
Google was around in the 1930s, I find it hard to believe they would have come out in full support of the Nazis
1st Lord Rothermere, The Daily Mail (15th January, 1934)
It’s like someone is messing with the search results to only give one political viewpoint.
On the plus side it’s fun learning about what your not supposed to know by seeing the fact checkers disprove a story I hadn’t yet heard about. So convenient that the refutation ranks higher.
> The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died
While the referenced (archived) NYT article says:
> At some point in the chaos [...] he was struck with a fire extinguisher
and
> He returned to his division office and collapsed,
There is no cause of death claimed by the NYT. No “bashing until he died” claimed.
For background, that at least one rioter (Sanford) threw a fire extinguisher and hit three cops in the head (two wearing helmets) is alleged by the FBI based video evidence[1].
[1] https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Robert%...
It appears to have come from this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/flag-lowering...
As best as I can tell the fire extinguisher was a different event in which officers were struck by a thrown extinguisher. Sicknick did suffer brain injuries (a stroke). The medical examiner hasn't attributed fault to possible exposure to bear spray that some protestors might have used, so his stroke is determined to be from natural causes. I think we have to wait for the accused protestor's trials to determine finally whether they assaulted Sicknick.
Google supports China though, and that's not too far removed. You know people back then didn't believe that Germans ran camps despite all the evidence. It seems like the same thing is happening now - there is evidence of camps in China, but people happily buy products because it is cheap and companies wipe their faces and continue to do business there. You know in the 30s IBM has provided the infrastructure to run those camps. So you are making a bold claim here.
You mention IBM. That’s just one example. The US as a whole benefited enormously from selling weapons, vehicles and fuel to both sides of WW2.
By your logic, the entire US economy since the war might as well have written persuasive articles in support of the Nazis.
It’s basically nonsense
Ever heard of the Youtube alt-right rabbit hole? Google absolutely profits from hateful, extremist content.
The Daily Mail, Prager U, that little Speedy Gonzalez Jewish prick, and Alex Jones are the ones making the content.
That’s the difference
Printing press manufacturers do not provide book recommendations. Youtube does, 24/7, for every single customer walking through its doors.
In my experience, they have better American news than many local America news outlets (much more detail and photos/videos).
While some of their stories are sensational, they also have a lot of great articles with solid journalism.
At what point do we say that Google has a moral responsibility to provide unbiased information? I'm not sure we can.
It is a free market after all, and Google is a private corporation. Even if the Daily Mail's allegations are true, Google is still doing what is in it's best interest, and not illegal (afaik its not illegal to modify the algorithm of one's core product, happy to be corrected)
For example, I think we can agree that a teacher should have a moral responsibility to teach students in an unbiased manner. If that is the case and their teaching involves the use of google, then is the teacher not at risk for introducing bias and should be held responsible? Otherwise why even put the standard on the teacher if it can be done away with by outsourcing some of the work?
If you query Google for the shape of the Earth should it return "round" and "flat" pages equally so as to avoid bias?
I don't think it's reasonable to compel private companies to change their search ranking algorithms because that would violate fundamental free speech principles and there is no objective standard for bias. A better solution would be to impose stricter limits on market share and dominance even on companies that aren't monopolies. That would preserve competition and give consumers real choices on which services to use.
Apart from that, I think this might turn it into the classic socialism vs capitalism debate. Which I don't want to get into
Just closing out with this cool video, watch it if you haven't, I always go back to this when I get into such debates.
uh, no, debate is literally 100% of the purpose of courts.
I suspect what happened is the daily mail was considered a low quality news site which the majority of the UK population would agree its a fair assesment.
And Piers Morgan is pretty much one of the most hated hacks in the UK.
[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
> It is highly significant that—after more than three years of stonewalling and refusing to answer any questions or respond to a single demand—CEO Pichai has admitted that the technology firm controlling nearly 90 percent of worldwide search traffic has been suppressing WSWS content all along.
Political censorship is equally harmful whether done by the government or by a megacorp. When the megacorp becomes more powerful than government, it's time to either break them up or make them a public utility.
We hired a FELON to do our SEO
Nobody would give him a CHANCE after he lost his HOUSE.
The other companies FIRED him because they thought it was his FAULT because their google PR was LOW.
I mean I understand the words "anti-competitive" but not sure how that translated to me needing more Piers Morgan in my search results or how the judge is supposed to even rule on that.
If you build your business on clickbait and bullshit "journalism" you can't complain when your main source of traffic decides to squeeze a bit more cash out of your enormous money pit.
Cry me a river.
They don't like it when it comes back to bite them.
Capitalism is about increasing efficiency / resources through brutal competition.
Just don’t let them make laws giving one group special treatment. Like banning the competition.
More generally, having a market does not mean having a government that supplies no public goods -- that is, having a government, since supplying public goods is all a government does.
The existence of some free markets does not imply that every market is free. Excepting failed states, nowhere is every market free -- the markets for grenades, ivory, medical licenses, political appointments, assassinations, etc. are all things most of us want either tightly controlled or entirely suppressed.
And even in an extremely competitive market, like the ones for lettuce or generic drugs, there are still important roles for government to play. Of course regulation can be and often is grossly wasteful, even corrupt. But it's also critical to our safety.
There is a lot to dislike about the Daily Mail I'm sure (I don't read it). But you aren't catching them in a moment of hypocrisy here. Everyone hates losing, doesn't mean they are wrong about what the rules of the game should be.
Eventually I landed on the Daily Mail's site and what do I see? A headline: "Woke Word-Salad". At that point I had to concede: okay, maybe this is where I belong.
Written from the perspective that the most straightforward explanation is true:
Bad analogy. Nobody entered anyone else's business.
The defendant prefers that its users get good quality information, and the plaintiff's reputation for low quality information runs afoul of that practice.
Also, why would a thief report his own crime?
> Also, why would a thief report his own crime?
The thief isn't reporting their own crime, they are reporting that they have been robbed by someone else.
FTFY
There was a Daily Mail article about a thief who was unable to report a burglary? Or what exactly did you mean by that?
Many truths are infuriating. Reporting them does not in itself imply a lack of ethics.
See: russiagate; russian bounties for american soldiers; the lack of representation of blacks and minorities in initial Covid coverage, leading many to assume it did not affect them; etc.
Edit to clarify: you're making a statement, you should be able to provide direct proof.
Most sources claim the Guardian is mostly factually correct:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ ( which is American-centric, so ignore the bullshit liberal and conservative arguments) says they're mostly factual with the `Failed Fact Checks` section including opinion pieces and reporting as per X (e.g. https://fullfact.org/education/barnardos-foster-care-coronav...) , and the fact check saying X's report is wrong, not that the Guardian are misrepresenting facts.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-bias-and-reliabil... says they're very reliable.
When it comes to your links, consider that media ranking the media is perhaps not the least-biased judgment. Outlets branding themselves as fact-checkers are often particularly egregious. Snopes, for example, can't even dispassionately and accurately rate stories that do not fit a woke worldview.
I once read a NYT "fact check" that was checking a trump quote. One of the quotes was "we've been fighting in the middle east for 17 years." They rated this statement False, flat-out. Why? The correction stated, "We've been fighting in afghanistan for 17 years, but afghanistan is not the middle east. We've been fighting in the middle east for 16 years."
It completely ignored the point of the statement to issue a False rating on a technicality. Any reasonable interpretation would not have done so.
This is an example of the accuracy of modern-day "fact-checking." It's basically made up.
A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...
The Daily Mail will actively gin up uninteresting or patently false stories with the hottest headlines they can possibly get away with. They'll skip coverage of important news if they can find a story about a prominent person misspeaking about something inconsequential. Look at the lawsuit. They were upset that publishing multiple stories a day about Piers Morgan weren't all getting top search ranking. The world doesn't need multiple stories per day about Piers Morgan any more than it needs multiple stories about celebrity bikini bodies like what's on their front page right now. DM is fluff, it's pandering, it has no redeeming value.
The alternative take is that story pretty much is just juvenile hijinks, and the NYT is pretty much ginning up a story. A lot of the kids I knew in school were horrible to each other and nobody wrote an article about them.
Most print journalism has gone to the gutter these days, the NYT isn't a respectable institution. There is a bunch of stuff on the internet that is more reliable.
> The NY Times headline includes relevant details to inform the reader.
Lets see which details were no longer relevant once the story turned out to be false, and the Times (to their credit, unlike the Mail) changed the headline to reflect that:
Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...
From the front page of the NYT website right now: “Proposed G.O.P. Bills Protect Drivers Who Hit Protesters With Cars”
I rest my case.
Is that a legal argument?
I have no sympathy whatsoever, but as for the legal case I have no idea how this plays out.
The DM regularly loses libel cases for publishing fake smears about various victims. But apparently it considers these losses a cost of doing business.
It has been called out for its racism on numerous occasions.
It's notorious for wildly exaggerated tabloid abuse of legitimate refugees and immigrants.
It called judges who forced proper constitutional proceedings during Brexit "enemies of the people" - sparking a record number of complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation.
Its comments section is a cesspit of race hate and petty ignorance.
It literally supported Hitler before war was declared.
There isn't a rational case to be made for not disapproving of it morally.
That, and I say this with sadness, doesn’t follow from your other points.
It just means they have different morals from you and I.
In context - and especially in light of yesterday's verdict - it's really rather unconvincing.
So did the Daily Mirror. And the Guardian was a big supporter of eugenics. All irrelevant to the current papers.
Interestingly, the writer of the article in The Mirror that supported Hitler was one Lord Harmsworth - great grandfather of the current owner of the Mail.
Harmsworth also used to own the Mirror before it was sold and changed its political orientation.
The Daily Lie, The Daily Hate-Mail, The Daily Heil
Of course these could all have been generated by the left wing liberal elites who have an issue with straight forward honest reporting. Best you have a bit of a google/search engine of choice to determine which is more likely to be true. You could of course try visiting their website and seeing for yourself.
The Daily Mail, however, has spent the last few years describing the UK judiciary as "Enemies of the People", so they can continue to cry me a river.
To me that is the basic reason for having humans in the process.
Also taking into account the surroundings of a case, including who’s involved and their history is not preconception (or then everything becomes preconception).
It’s not the same if you’re a CEO filing a suit against a grandma who shouted insanities at you when you fired their son, and if you’re a worker subject to verbal abuse from your boss.
During these polarized times when censorship is rampant and diverse perspectives are hard to come by, I’m glad to have someone like the Daily Mail around. A recent example of a great article is their story on COVID vaccines potentially affecting menstruation (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9446907/Some-wome...), which they wrote about before any other major news media. Read for yourself and decide how you feel about the content.
Your argument can be summed up by just saying you only want information that supports your preconceived notions available. Which, is obviously bad for a variety of reasons....
They curate it heavily to match with their preferred ideology.
In which case, you're still left with your core problem - Google Search Inc can, potentially, manipulate search rankings to sell ad space.
Our worthless government needs to do their job and break them up.
Now try 'The Daily Beast' [2], it's I think a little bit worse, and you have this flame-nugget: "White Violence Links Black Lives From Emmett Till to Floyd" which is an interesting thesis, but kind of racist.
The DM really isn't that bad, and much like the issue of 'Fidel Castro' it's a litmus test to see if people are emotionally clouded ideologues or not.
DM is a regular tabloid, that's it.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html [2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/
The mail should be spending more on web development and less on lawyers.
Of course they can’t turn web development into self-sustaining sensationalism though, can they?
That you would pick on this one highlights the bias in the system.
If there were a 'disconcerting rag' it would be Brietbart, not the Daily Mail.
that I would pick on this one doesn’t highlight the bias in the system, it highlights that the article I’m commenting on is about the daily mail
I don’t see how breitbart is relevant
Breitbart is a much more aggressive tabloid, and individuals within Google wanted to ban it outright, arguably because of their 'poor quality' but mostly because their political bias.
My point is that if there is a 'right wing tabloid with questionable legitimacy' that might make people uncomfortable, it's Breitbart. Not The DM.
People are lamenting the DM here because they use 'click bait' headlines and 'misrepresent' information, people are using shamefully hyperbolic language on this thread.
But in reality The DM is just a regular tabloid, and it's not that bad - technical quality issues notwithstanding.