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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

He goes a little further: he's objecting to the fact that Google is not acting as a "leveling" force to break up incumbent industries and change society. He appears to want them to act as a far-left government.

I don't really feel a need to rebut this desire, beyond saying "no".

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It's kind of fascinating how the supposed economic and social benefits of the open web that people spent 20 years or more evangelising are dismissed as 'far-left' once powerful incumbents have cornered the market. Suddenly advocating for the destructive forces of open competition is the same as being a radical socialist.

The problem here isn't that there isn't open competition. The problem is that he's lost at it.

The problem is that it isn't competition on services or products, it's competition in gaming and/or just paying massive incumbent middlemen.

Who provide value to the consumer that individual business sites do not. Why shouldn't they be more highly ranked?

>Who provide value to the consumer that individual business sites do not.

You're reciting this as if it's obviously true, yet offering no evidence. If a scraper beats a site, it's not a logical conclusion that the scraper was more useful to the consumer than the original site.

How many hotel sites offer price comparisons to other hotels nearby? That's value right there.

This is succinct. It appears that the Google we had 10 years ago was perhaps valid in light of our ability to capitalise on 'the most valid results' and the Google we have today hasn't innovated on their search platform to break away from 'what corporates want us to find' into 'what we want to find'. We should expect more from our worlds most used search provider.

The travesty isn't even perhaps brought about by Google directly. It may in fact be a reluctance of people to question the status quo or at least be heard in doing so. If nothing else, this blog is exactly what people need to deliberate over without prejudice toward the writer, and perhaps some knowledge or value will come from that.

Whatever it is, we're left with a fairly opaque 10 site list that people rarely delve beyond. And I hear the complaints already from some, sure it ever so slightly customisable, but I certainly haven't cared to do so for years.

Recall that Google's initial and ongoing innovation was moving away from what corporate entities want users to find. I think Google prioritizes what they believe users want to find and subject it to the review of user behavior.

The perceived problem with this is that what they think users wants doesn't always agree with what someone else thinks users want. Like in this article, where many users clearly want to see aggregators but the author believes they don't want to see aggregators.

I think you will find that the reason why big brands are big brands is because a lot of people do, in reality, want to find them. Just because I don't want to find the same things doesn't stop that from being the most popular choice. Google would appear to be delivering what the bulk of its users want to see.

He's raising the observation that the easier it is to game Google, the less useful Google becomes.

He's not prescribing a solution. Much less the solution of Google becoming a "far-left government."

But screw equality and open access, right?

Search engines are by their very nature un-equal. There's no way around this without removing the value in having a search engine.

Some search engines, e.g. Google 7 years ago, are less un-equal than others, e.g. Google today.

The job of a search engine is to second-guess your desire from limited inputs and try to fulfill it. I can't think of any sane way to be "equal" about that without relying on a lot of subjective judgments. Or being bad at making decisions.

Is the strategic priority of Google leadership a subjective judgement? Are these subjective judgements objectively implemented? There are always winners and losers for any given ranking algorithm, the question is whether perception of neutrality has improved or declined in the last 7 years.

What is the perception of Google's neutrality in enforcement of rules against traffic arbitrage, e.g. search toolbars: http://www.benedelman.org/news/012213-1.html ?

Almost anyone who loses out will perceive things as being subjectively against them. Almost anyone who wins will perceive it as being a sign of their worthiness and objective value.

Yeah, but who is making those decisions?

Google? SEO agents? Large multinational corporations?

Wikipedia is subjective too, that doesn't mean that they just give in and let PR people manage the thing.

Among other things, they pay attention to whether or not the user comes back to look at results again. So in a significant way, it's the market.

His point, and something I agree with, is that the easier gamification becomes, the less useful a search engine becomes.

I don't know if this is true for everyone. It probably isn't. (at least it isn't immediately obvious.)

But for the author it is, and I agree wholeheartedly.

> He's not proscribing a solution.

The word you want is "prescribe." To "proscribe" means to make forbidden or illegal. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Whoops, thanks.

Read the article carefully and you'll see that he does in fact prescribe a "solution": take search results away from entities who have lots of them and hand them out equally to everybody, so that everybody gets a "fair" amount of users directed to their site.

...which would of course render it utterly useless to those users and destroy any value it has as a search engine.

He even states that his main objection to Google search is that it is not acting as an artificial "leveller" to change society.

This is the manifesto of a far-left government. Google doesn't do these things because it's neither far-left nor a government, and his request is both poorly thought-out and quite bizarre.

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