Texas Opens Inquiry Into Google Search Rankings 178
Hugh Pickens writes "The AP reports that Texas' attorney general, Greg Abbott, has opened an anti-trust investigation against Google spurred by complaints that the company has abused its power as the Internet's dominant search engine. The review appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition. European regulators already have been investigating complaints alleging that Google has been favoring its own services in its results instead of rival websites and several lawsuits have also been filed in the US that have alleged Google's search formula is biased. However Google believes Abbott is the first state attorney general to open an antitrust review into the issue."
When you can't compete, sue... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:When you can't compete, sue... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a politician looking for attention, not a competitor trying not to compete.
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You are even promoting it today.
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It's like every site owner has to sit in front of their PC all day long building links to compete
The good websites don't have this problem, they get links because people like them, and link to them. If you have to spend all day building links, maybe you should look at your website's content/service first. That could be where the problem lies.
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If you have to spend all day building links, maybe you should look at your website's content/service first. That could be where the problem lies.
The problem could also be because it's a new website. How do new websites get links without spending tyme letting people know about the site and requesting them? It's not like "create a great website and they'll come."
Falcon
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Good old Google! They would NEVER consider biasing things in their favor! They just love us all so much - and we need them so badly - NOT!
Ummm... what? I dont see the need for them to do so. They simply include their links at top as sponsored links. Why would they need to skew the actual search results when they've got the guaranteed first spot via the "Sponsored Links" section with a lot less work?
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More like "When you can't fix the real problems plaguing your shitty state, distract attention by opening up a pointless investigation on a very well known, big company."
I'd be 100% in favor of Google opening up their own investigation of Texas. Start with the Texas revolution. That was questionable.
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Strange, I would expect to see the AG of the failed state of California to be opening this kind of investigations then, not Texas which is doing pretty well these days.
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From the WSJ's article on Texas's massive budget deficity, which is substantially larger than California's.
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You let your senators run your state? Weird. In my state we let the governor and the state legislature do that.
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Strange, I would expect to see the AG of the failed state of California to be opening this kind of investigations then, not Texas which is doing pretty well these days.
Kind of sounds like you're saying the pot is not black because the kettle is also black. Anyway, the California budget may be absurd, but I blame that on the voters who decided, shortsightedly, that there was probably no reason taxes should ever go up, so it should be impossible to raise them when revenue goes down, costs go up, and you can't cut all the fat immediately.
Texas, however, I don't know who to blame. Of the states, they have the second highest percentage of their population locked up in prison
the California budget may be absurd, (Score:2)
but I blame that on the voters who decided, shortsightedly, that there was probably no reason taxes should ever go up
California's fiscal problems are not due to low taxes. Nor are they due to not raising taxes. CA's fiscal problems can be traced to the 1990s when while CA's economy was roaring the state increased spending just as fast. When tax revenue dropped the state didn't drop spending too. Hell, look at the Taj Mahal [yahoo.com] of public schools. While teachers are being laid off LA spends more than half a
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> To me this is not doing well
Try having a less infantile approach to the facts.
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They don't even know what grits are in Ohio.
Try somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line...
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"They don't even know what grits are in Ohio."
They call it Polenta.
Re:When you can't compete, sue... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Bullshit, the reason Google is the number one internet advertiser is because they are the number one search provider. The reason they are the number one search provider is because they give more relevant results than any other search engine. Google's "evil" practices have made the internet much nicer to use (do you remember how bad banner ads were at the turn of the century?), and they have consistently followed the business strategy of providing their customers the best experience possible in order to ge
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Bullshit, the reason Google is the number one internet advertiser is because they are the number one search provider.
Hail, fellow member of the tautology club [xkcd.com]!
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Google's ranking algorithm *is* public. Read Amy Langville's book, "Google's PageRank and Beyond."
What isn't public is how the values of certain thresholds are determined to, for example, weed out link farms and add small statistical variations to the link adjacency matrix so that it can be more easily solved. These are determined heuristically -- trial and error, in essence.
The devil is in the details, but who cares -- search indexes are easy enough to build and even easier to filter and skew.
Google is j
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Page rank is actually only one of several systems used in deciding the ordering of the results. Pagerank could not account for the grouping of links from one site (including hiding any after the first two or three), nor for the search history based re-ordering, etc.
Granted those other ranking systems are also certainly not very complex, almost certainly less so than pagerank. Similarly, how the various ranking systems are combined is probably quite trivial.
That said, the exact details are not published, qui
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In all seriousness, their algorithm works based on how many people look for something. Sometimes I use the search bar on my Firefox to look for Google (instead of using the URL bar). In any case, I'm not very surprised by the results of this search [google.com] anyways. Neither from these results [bing.com] although I find interesting that bing doesn't show up in their own search! Of course the latter are very similar to Yahoo's results [yahoo.com]. But even Yahoo promotes itse
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Yahoo's web search is powered by Bing, which explains the extreme similarity between the two.
I do find it absurd that Altavista (which was the best engine before Google thanks to it's advanced boolean search) ranks higher than Google in Bing results. Nobody uses altavista anymore.
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From the same state that was so critical of frivolous lawsuits and keeps trying to weasel creationism into science textbooks.
I'd wear getting sued by Texas as a badge of honor.
More on this... (Score:5, Informative)
As originally posted on Search Engine Land [searchengineland.com], These allegations are merely exploratory and it is difficult to determine exactly where the GA's office is headed in this investigation, or how Texas could claim jurisdiction. All the lawsuits in question are being raised by non-Texas corporations and against a California-based company.
Yesterday, Google responded to the investigation [blogspot.com], which has not been made public yet by the General Attorney's office. In it's response, Google states that they "listen carefully to people's concerns" and " we strongly believe our business practices reflect our commitment to build great products for the benefit of users everywhere". To some extent this sounds like the usual play from Google, invoking it's "do no evil" mantra.
Does Google manipulate results to thwart competitors and advance its own businesses? Some competitors to Google are concerned that the company lowers search results listings for certain firms and/or charging higher fees ads they place vs those of Google's partners.
Google has never revealed its search or ranking methodology for sites in detail, though it has published some papers on optimization and best practices.
Google's reply on a Friday night after business hours on the biggest 3-day summer weekend of the year is sure to draw little attention.
Re:More on this... (Score:5, Interesting)
If Google is listing its own products above those of their competitors, they're doing a pretty shitty job. Doing a google search for "search engine" gets me a wiki, an aggregator site, Altavista, Bing and then Google ;-)
The first news result is about Google facing some sort of Texas AG inquiry though...
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If Google is listing its own products above those of their competitors, they're doing a pretty shitty job. Doing a google search for "search engine" gets me a wiki, an aggregator site, Altavista, Bing and then Google ;-)
Bing came up as a sponsored link on my results. Google itself didn't even appear until page 4.
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Google not only prioritizes its own services it also provides "priority placement" to its direct customers. Ever notice how often paid services like springersource and experts-exchange rank high in search results despite only being available to paying customers?
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Because lots of people link to experts-exchange. Usually with a "scroll all the way down or fake your redirect" disclaimer.
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Just nit-picking here, but in America we call them "Attorney's General" after, somewhat ironically, the French style.
Texas can claim jurisdiction if all parties do business in Texas, and the internet being what it is, of course they all do business in Texas. The Texas AG will be bringing the suit on behalf of the citizens of Texas, and everyone who does business with Google in Texas (that would include all of the non-Texas based companies who have customers or at least attempt to have customers in Texas).
T
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Uh...it's free... (Score:4, Insightful)
People are going to draw parallels between Google and Microsoft or Intel. However, I need to point out that unlike the later two, Google's services are free to the end user. Not only that, but it's also monumentally easier to stop using Google than say, Microsoft.
I don't know if Google is doing what they're accused of, but so what? It's free, I'm not locked in, and they never said that they were impartial (so no false advertisement).
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Antitrust violations tend to be abuse of a monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering or gaining traction in a market.
Considering that Google isn't really even a monopoly, this doesn't have merit as an actual case.
Re:Uh...it's free... (Score:4, Informative)
As an easy to explain example, the deal that saw Google acquire Double click almost certainly ran afoul of the Clayton Antitrust Act in that it substantially reduced the market competition in the on line advertising space. That's just an example, but it pretty clearly demonstrates that being a monopoly isn't necessary for running afoul of antitrust regulations.
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Nope completely wrong. You can have 99.999% market share and not be a monopoly.
It only takes you about ten seconds to switch to a different search provider, if you use google it's from free choice.
the deal that saw Google acquire Double click almost certainly ran afoul of the Clayton Antitrust Act in that it substantially reduced the market competition in the on line advertising space
What does that have to do with this?
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It only takes you about ten seconds to switch to a different search provider, if you use google it's from free choice.
You've fallen victim to one of the classic libertarian blunders!* Other people's choices affect your options. You don't get to select what you want; you get to choose an option that enough other people also choose. So if few people buy Oldsmobile, they go out of business, and you can't buy an Oldsmobile. If they are pushed out of the market by a dominant or monopoly competitor, it isn't even other people deciding what should succeed, much less you as an individual.
*The most famous is "Never get involved
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>> It only takes you about ten seconds to switch to a different search provider, if you use google it's from free choice.
>
> You've fallen victim to one of the classic libertarian blunders!* Other people's choices affect your options. You don't get to
Not at all.
A car is a commodity. There is a very large barrier to new entrants. However, there is
nothing stopping a new one coming into the market. You personally will have no problems
switching to a new player as soon as they enter the market.
That's
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> A car is a commodity. There is a very large barrier to new entrants.
I tried to point out that it's not just about switching costs of the consumer. It's also about what you can switch to. The common libertarian argument is that it's only the choice of the consumer that matters and that the actions of companies or governments don't matter. But if there's no competitor to "Coke or Campbell's or even Electronic Arts" then we can't switch to them. The theory, the possibility, isn't the reality and isn't the
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If anything, Bing is the one in a position to lower prices to drive Google out of the market. Microsoft can use the money from Windows/Office to subsidize it. Google doesn't have that.
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>> Nope completely wrong. You can have 99.999% market share and not be a monopoly. ...or Microsoft. ...or Standard Oil.
>>
>> It only takes you about ten seconds to switch to a different search provider, if you use google it's from free choice.
>
> Under your definition of monopoly pretty much only government-enforced monopolies would qualify (and of course, they would
Although the definition is about power to distort the market, not numbers.
Where is Google's power to distort the market?
T
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Yes, that's right...
Microsoft wasn't sued for their operating system, they were sued because they bundled other products with their OS, thus giving those products an unfair advantage.
ie. The crime was bundling/leveraging.
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So what if Google is producing biased results. That's what they do. Their algorithm is already biased against SEO spam. Nobody's crying for those businesses.
The key point is that Google's "users" are getting a (mostly) free service in return for providing demographic data to their primary customers, the advertisers. There is no contract in place where Google agrees to operate without a bias. If someone wants to pay Google for placement then so be it.
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Texas, why am I not surprised?
Why are you not surprised?
it's also monumentally easier to stop using Google than say, Microsoft
I would say that it's easier to stop using Microsoft. There are numerous free and non-free alternatives. Google, however, has become the de-facto premiere search engine.
Anyone who wants to prevent inclusion in the Google search index is basically ignoring a significant portion of web users.
It's easy to see that Google puts their resources at the top of search results for related terms. Here are a few to illustrate:
it's also monumentally easier to stop using Google (Score:2)
I would say that it's easier to stop using Microsoft. There are numerous free and non-free alternatives. Google, however, has become the de-facto premiere search engine.
Really? It's easier to stop using Microsoft? How many people install their own OS? How many buy Macs? How many buy PCs with Linux preinstalled? I, and anyone else, can easily use another search engine. Of course the quality of results might not be good. While I use Google mostly, because it gives me the best result most of the tyme, I
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PROPER because they are the best and most useful
That is an opinion that Texans don't share.
It's hard to come up with a non-web parallel, but I'll try.
If the phone book printing company also owned an auto parts store. It would be unfair for them to place ads for their parts store ahead of all other parts stores.
Where Google (supposedly) uses popularity to sort, the phone book sorts alphabetically. Altering the results to favour your own products is unfair.
Indeed (Score:4, Funny)
I also noticed this: Always when I enter search terms in Google, I always get Google search results. Not a single time did I get results from Bing or Altavista. :-)
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search results (Score:2)
I also noticed this: Always when I enter search terms in Google, I always get Google search results. Not a single time did I get results from Bing or Altavista. :-)
There have been tymes I googled something and got results from another search engine. For instance googling Monte Verde archaeology [google.com] returns About's webpage on Monte Verde [about.com] in 4th place. It used to be first place.
Falcon
Texas? (Score:4, Funny)
What's the problem? Google keeps on raking pages from Wikipedia higher than Conservapedia? I agree, that must be an anti-competitive conspiracy!
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Just reflecting reality's well known liberal bias.
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Wow, just wow.
Politically, I'm pretty conservative, diverging from folks like Glen Beck on only a few of the more extreme views and attitudes, and I just have to say that site is so obviously biased that it can't possibly be taken seriously. I know Wikipedia has a lot of "liberals" who edit it, that's to be expected - there are a lot of liberals in the world (about as many conservatives, really), but Wikipedia doesn't feel biased one way or another. Sure some articles definitely are, but the site as a who
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You think that's bad? The loons behind Conservapedia are working on their own translation of the Bible from the conservative perspective:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project [conservapedia.com]
Biased? Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we should start an inquiry about bias with Texas attorneys, not Google. It seems that they are too embedded in the old boys network to have anything to do with justice.
Look at the companies that file complaints: three companies that anyone would rather filter out than in. Seems to me that these aren't the companies that warrant the investigation. So I've got a very strong feeling this other company is behind it.
For me, this is just a big ploy to get to the page-rank algorithm. It would not be hard to leak it when the investigation starts for real.
Google sez this is the first? (Score:2, Funny)
Never heard about the complaining sites. (Score:5, Informative)
Harrison said that Abbott has asked Google for information about several companies, including: Foundem, an online shopping comparison site in Britain; SourceTool, which runs an e-commerce site catering to businesses; and MyTriggers, another shopping comparison site
Never heard of any of these sites. I Google shopping comparison, and I get the well known comparison sites I expect to see at the top. I do not get MyTriggers.
.co.uk domain suffix - Google doesn't like this as much. Also, this time there really aren't any merchant rankings. They do have a Google bash on their home page with a link to SearchNeutrality.org - a site they also own.
So I go to the MyTriggers site itself to check it out. At first, I didn't think they even had merchant site reviews. Then I realized they do, but may of the sites have not been reviewed yet. Only 2 reviews for Target? 12 for Amazon?
Whois search reveals the site was registered in 2005. Not bad, but if they have been around for 5 years I should have heard about them by now. Also, their domain registration reveals that they renew their domain every year. Google gives better ranking to sites that pay for many years at once, since that shows they owners have faith if their company. Basic SEO fail.
Quick investigation reveals that the company also owns ShopBig - one of those penny auction sites. I hate these sites and the way they operate. The MyTriggers site is hardcoded to show a big ad link to ShopBig on every page. Aren't they in fact doing the same thing they accuse Google of. They don't give other penny auction sites a chance to advertise there or appear on their search result rankings.
Let's pick on another site. TFA says that SourceTool is a e-commerce site catering to business, but the title on the home page says "SourceTool - A B2B Search Engine". If I Google B2B Search Engine, they are number 2 in the results. If I Google e-commerce for business they do not appear. The word commerce doesn't appear on their home page. So what are they? SEO Fail.
In the end, the site is a search engine for companies that sell to businesses. Since they have a medical category, and the company I work for is #1 in several categories for medical devices, I decide to see if they are listed. After waiting a full minute for the medical page to load, they are not. They don't even have the proper category for my company. Just to be sure I click on company profiles A-Z to see if I can find my company. It shows all companies starting with the #1. and a button for next page. No simple button to show companies that start with letter X. Do I have to click Next 50 times? They have a search box on this screen, but if I use it I get a 404 error.
I wasn't going to review Foundem at first since they are based in the UK and I don't live there. Google should be smart enough to lower their site on my search simply because that site applies less to me. Still I look anyway. They use the less popular
I think the real complaint from these companies is the fact that shopping.Google.com results are now always shown on the search results page if Google thinks you are searching for a product - Something Bing did first. This pretty much destroys the business model for many companies. If Google thinks I am trying to purchase something, should they send me to a site that can't sell me the product? Should they send me to another site where I have to do 4 more clicks to get to a list of merchants and prices for the product I am looking for. If Google guesses wrong, should they show me a list of shopping sites on the first page when I really want a product review? I think the way Google handles shopping results is the best way for me, and they are in the business of satisfying my needs. This is still search.
Re:Never heard about the complaining sites. (Score:5, Funny)
Gentlemen, if I may direct your attention here - you'll notice a rare individual of the species criticus cogitans, as he strives to bring rationality to the discussion. Notice the sincere effort to evaluate the content of "The Fucking Article" (as the natives call it), even going so far as to actually investigate the validity of the claims reported in TFA. Notice, also, how he was not able to write his post quickly enough to have it anywhere near the top of the page (the most desired location for this, and many other, internet tribes), and thus has been muscled out of the pecking (and modding) order by those members of his tribe who were able to more quickly spit out a generic response representing their previously held ideologies, as applied to this topic (monopolies/government-regulation/competitiveness).
Truly, gentlemen, we are observing evolution in action, as this individual will receive less recognition for their efforts than their fellows, precisely because of his desire to exercise his critical thinking abilities. Over time we will be able to observe as lalena (1221394) becomes more and more frustrated with being unable to communicate his ideas to his tribe and be rewarded (this community uses a source of nourishment called "mod points"), until he either dies (see the number of inactive/dead 5-digit or less UID for evidence of this), or must adapt his posting style to cater to the whims of masses, just in the hopes of striking a chord with moderator who holds to a similar ideology. I, myself, was gifted by the tribal leaders with a handful of these mod points, to dole out as I see fit. Unfortunately, I appear to have used them all up on the previous article on Craigslist and prostitution.
tl;dr: Mod Parent Up!!
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Also, their domain registration reveals that they renew their domain every year. Google gives better ranking to sites that pay for many years at once, since that shows they owners have faith if their company. Basic SEO fail.
Wow. Why doe some people read so much into nothing? Some companies have a policy that they will review important assets on a regular basis. The federal/state/provincial registration of a company and the regular upkeep of the federal/state/provincial registration is done on annua
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Suddenly governments hate Google (Score:2)
Google "search" (Score:3, Informative)
I just Googled, "search" and Google was at number seven. Bing was at the top. Using "search engine" and Google isn't even on the first three pages (I got bored after that). So clearly, Google isn't exercising it's monopoly powers very well.
P.S. I would Google for "Google" but I didn't want to break the Internets.
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Corporate Rights (Score:2)
It really upsets me to see how popular it is for Attorney Generals to abuse their powers to feather their political beds. I suppose it was started by Elliot Spitzer's great success at the tactic. We need a way to check their powers.
Might the Citizens United decision point the way? In that decision, the justices said that corporations are people with respect to first amendment rights. What about fourth amendment rights about unreasonable search and seizure? It seems that one of the primary forms of
Half a Brain... (Score:2)
Short-bus net neutrality? (Score:2)
Maybe I'm completely off here, but I'd say this is sort of the soft, short-bus version of government fighting for (or at least trying to advance) net neutrality. In this case, the prospective non-neutral area isn't ISP-based. (By extension, it's also not Telcos carrying on about their business rights, either -- which probably goes a very long way to explain why government officials might speak on behalf of the consumers.)
Greg Abbott can go screw himself. (Score:2)
When an on duty, in uniform, on the clock deputy guards a U-Haul when his wife backs it up to my house and helps to clean it out, then I get an audio recording of a participant not only admitting to it but taunting and bragging about it, then the sheriffs department calls it a "civil matter" I would say some monkey business was going on. I wrote Greg Abbott for help on the matter and the fact that a judge was obviously biased in the matter when issues surrounding this went to court. Greg Abbott told me to
Kellogg's Heartwise Cereal and Texas (Score:2)
Ever wonder why you cannot buy Kellogg's Heartwise Cereal anymore? Thank the Texas Attorney General's office.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/03/garden/kellogg-files-slander-suit.html [nytimes.com]
I laughed at the lawsuit at the time because the claims were baseless. Soon I could no longer buy my favorite cereal.
There's no solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Two alternatives: you either let them do it or you force them to publish their ranking algorithms.
If page rank were public, there would be no search engines worth using. The whole internet is bad enough with spam as it is.
Better let Google do their stuff, it's not as if they were keeping others from posting their own search results. I started using Google when they started giving me better results than Altavista, which was the search "monopoly" back then.
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I remember Altavista. Horrible results.
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It was better (and certainly faster) than anything before - but I don't think it was quite ready for prime time. At the end their results seemed have serious issues with it. Actually, I don't think Google is that great either - I cannot filter out all "add your own review" from the various sites. This is probably due to Google actually *not* manually altering the search results (although they have seemed to get better).
Altavista will probably always be remembered as the one that started the search engine wa
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The worst thing about Google for me is that too many results aren't what you get when you click the link.
There are many sites selling technical and scientific papers that send the full text to Google but when I go there all I get is an abstract and a "click to buy" button.
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-shareware +freeware -trial I usually get great results. Good Googling isn't too hard with their excellent filtering via commands. I've had pretty good luck finding free software.
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Have you tried the advanced search option?
Google has had filtering since day one, see the section "But don't show pages that have..."
Put in the "add your own review" in that section and those pages won't show up. Done, easy. I'm sure they have a special character for that (like the + or the quotes) but I haven't bothered to find it.
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en [google.com]
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I remember Altavista. Horrible results.
Not true. AltaVista is now the only remaining engine to publish link data, after MS pulled the plug on backlink results from yahoo [seomoz.org] as one of the steps toward the site's dissolution in favor of Bing. Who knows how long it will last, but it's there now.
Observe the backlinks to a recent slashdot story [altavista.com].
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Check your Google search preferences. Also, the meta-search I use does that by default. That does not make the results any better.
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Altavista was wonderful back in the late '90s, mainly because they were faster than everybody else and their search database was larger. This was before Google, and their main competitors were Lycos and HotBot.
Actually, back then, Altavista's page was just as simple as Google's used to be. Search box, logo, a button. I quit using the service once the PHBs turned that page into a slower Yahoo that took forever to load.
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I loved using Hotbot back in the day. Found it's results better, in general, then anyone else's including Yahoo's.
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I could honestly see several potential alternatives:
(1) Microsoft and / or Yahoo paying Stanford NOT to grant Google a new, exclusive license.
(2) Stanford (in the interest of advancing technology) NOT granting Google a new, exclusive license.
or (3) any number of various governments (to include the U.S. gove
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Even assuming Google needs to keep that license (with the current state of their pagerank algorithm), you'd need to know the details of that agreement - which may include things such as a clause allowing Google to extend the agreement for a certain amount of time (a year? a decade? forever?). Many such agreements come with such clauses, and due to the nature of the creation of PageRank, I'd suspect the agreement may come with such a clause (or one similar, such as Google being allowed first offer, and faili
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Google's exclusive license to the Pagerank algorithm expires in 2011.
One, that does not mean they have to release the algorithm. And two, Google is constantly altering and tweaking the algorithm to make it "better".
Falcon
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Two alternatives: you either enforce the law or you don't.
I'm not saying that Google did break the law, but I am saying that your or anybody else's consideration of practical results of either action should have no bearings on the issue at all. If the law causes bad consequences, then that law should be changed, not applied selectively.
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Third option: disclose the algorithm to a trusted third party under a non-disclosure agreement. Basically you'd have the Justice Department appoint a review board of academics with expertise in algorithm design, and allow the board to investigate the algorithm. They would then disclose the general business objectives pursued by the algorithm, or at least the lack of certain legally proscribed objectives like stifling competition.
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As it is it's pretty easy to get listed in the top couple spots for most queries. It's only difficult if you want extremely competitive terms such as 'porn' or 'ipod'. I have tens of thousands of products that come up on the first page of most searches with the likely keywords. All you have to do is follow Google's directions and think about what you're doing. Even if you do hit page one for more competitive terms it usually isn't as valuable as you'd expect because conversion rates are much lower for gener
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"If TEXAS does it, it must be E-V-I-L."
Not really, but their track record is not so good, especially regarding justice.
"But European governments are doing it too?!?!?"
Yes, and even though they do weird things, they do have a better track record.
"But it's oh-so-wonderful Google!!!"
Google has been very nice up till now, but strength tends to be abused. We should be vigilant without necessarily harming Google.
"OH NOES!!!! SOMEONE TELL ME WHAT TO THINK!!!!"
We should take a very good look at Google from time to
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Huh? How does it break anti-trust laws?
Google doesn't have a monopoly. Switching to Bing, Yahoo or whatever takes a few seconds - there's no lock-in, no barriers, nothing forcing you to search with google. If you don't like it you can go somewhere else.
I repeat ... market share alone doesn't make a monopoly. You have to engage in monopolistic practices - something which is almost impossible for a search engine.
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a) Neither Android not gmail have dominant market share, not even close.
b) It's not true ... Android is open source so anybody is free to change that arrangement.
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There is nothing stopping a competitor from coming in and wiping the floor with Google, they just need to have a better search to do it.
And that's the rub - so far, nobody has been able to compete with Google on a purely competitive basis. There would be an argument here for a lack of diversity among search engines if there was a better search engine, but because of Google's dominance was not able to compete.
That isn't the case though, nobody has been able to produce a better search than Google, so no matt