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Comment by adharmad | Hacker News Reader

Care to elaborate? RG clearly broke the rules and forced google's hand here. Google has to protect the integrity of their search results against such gaming, else a day might come when all of Google's search results are due to black-hat SEO and Google's brand itself would be worthless.

This would be the equivalent of Walmart/Safeway refusing to carry some company's products because of {false/mis}-representation.

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I don't disagree with what Google did at all, and I don't agree with what Rap Genius did.

What I'm saying is that when there isn't a lot of competition in the search space, businesses will use underhanded tactics to game a certain search engine. Having so much depend on a single entity is antithetical to the web and good, competitive business practices.

Google's response does seem a bit heavy-handed. Under less public circumstances, maybe a strong warning would have sufficed. However, the public nature in which RG got caught forced their hand. Google could not afford to be seen as condoning such an obvious transgression of their rules with a slap on the wrist.

Again you miss the point, which is not to debate about the correctness of Google's decision, but the fact that one search engine can make the entire difference between a company being successful and not. This lack of competition is surely a bad thing, even if the decision to penalize RG specifically was a good decision.

I think bluthru meant that one company can decide what the rules are and basically remove sites from the internet from a normal person's point of view.

"RG clearly broke the rules and forced google's hand here"

One company's rules not some standard organization. Its Google's site, but they wield more power than Microsoft ever dreamed of.

He's hating the fact that we are in an environment where a single site has so much power, not taking issue with the particulars of this decision.

The point is that Google sets the rules for the internet based on what makes their algorithm work - I.e. What is good for Google. Instead of improving their algorithm, they now manually punish sites for not obeying.

> The point is that Google sets the rules for the internet based on what makes their algorithm work...

Google sets their own rules for their own product. They don't run the Internet.

These RapGenius guys consciously decided to try to game Google and lost. Boo hoo. Can't win every game you play.

In effect they do set rules for the Internet as a whole, though. For instance, if you're the owner of (say) a news website, Google don't want you to host text ads that contain live links because their entire search engine is based around the assumption that links are non-paid. So they penalized a number of major news sites for doing this, effectively forcing them to stop by taking away one of their main sources of traffic.

Sure, but, arguably, those rules are "correct". The fact that they run the leading search engine implies that they provide the best quality (or at least best perceived quality) search results. Those rules presumably contribute to that.

That's a circular argument. Google has only been able to punish rule breakers since it became the leading search engine.

That is still a rule for their product, not for the internet.

Their product has a monopoly in most of the world. Therefore it's a rule for the internet.

> Their product has a monopoly in most of the world.

Yeah.. it really doesn't. The DoJ would be all over their ass if there was really a case to be made there.

> Therefore it's a rule for the internet.

That doesn't even logically follow if we assume the first. It is more than possible to use the internet without giving a shit about google's product. Even if it were a monopoly this would be true.

Google changing how their product reacts to RapGenius does not effect anything other than how their product reacts to RapGenius. Just because RapGenius cares a lot about how Googles product reacts to their own does not mean that the rules of Googles product are rules "of the internet".

If Google had the power to set "rules of the internet", then the MPAA/RIAA would have won their battle when Google changed how their product handles search results for torrents. Of course they did not, because Google cannot.

> Yeah.. it really doesn't. The DoJ would be all over their ass if there was really a case to be made there.

This just shows that you don't understand what a monopoly is. Monopolies are not in themselves illegal, so there is no reason for the DoJ to get involved unless they break one of the laws regarding what monopolies can and can't do.

And, of course they are being investigated for doing exactly that in Europe.

Google sets their own rules for their own product. They don't run the Internet.

Can you hear yourself?

Google has an acknowledged monopoly.

I'm not defending RapGenius - I think what they did was slimy. That doesn't change the fact that it's Google who decides the rules and polices them.

Instead of improving their algorithm, they now manually punish sites for not obeying.

They definitely also work on improving their algorithm; it's just that often the algo does not automatically penalize or ban a site, but rather flags it for human review, which certainly makes sense to me.

I'm curious to know whether you have a citation for this automated flagging process - not because I don't believe you - I think it's very likely to be true - but because I've never seem this acknowledged.

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