[1] https://firebase.google.com/support/guides/disable-analytics

Im just curious

I care about that information and I’m glad they removed your apps, maybe now you’ll start taking privacy more seriously.

I think the point is that you should be aware of it. It is your application after all. Yes, what Google does is weird, but the app developer needs to be more careful in general what 3rd party code they load.

On the other hand, I understand you. Probably you do your due diligence when you load some random dependency but you (like everyone else) used to expect better from Google. Not anymore I guess.

I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages.

Definitely changed from the Google I "grew up on."

That could have a very simple explanation: There is no Wikipedia page for "Gun Rights". There is however a Wikipedia page for "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" which is exactly what appears in the Wikipedia box on the right or as the first Wikipedia article when you search for "right to bear arms", "right to guns" and "arms rights".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_rights is a valid link, and seems like the obvious wikipedia page to deem relevant for that phrase. And Bing gets it right.

I have no reason to think it's some dark conspiracy, but it's certainly a pretty silly failure of their vaunted algorithms. Are there a lot of searches for common phrases where a Wikipedia page exists and Google returns a different Wikipedia page as the top item?

It's a bit like searching for "USA" and getting a result for "Canada"; just because the canonical wikipedia URL is "United_states" doesn't mean that a page about a different country is more relevant. :)

Put a finger on the scales, show us how it’s done.

Modeling this behavior, without tilting the scales completely is perhaps impossible.

I’m interested in seeing how such code could work, while scaling and not creating artifacts. I can’t think of anyway for such code to be deployed without breaking search and letting attackers gain even more

I totally agree, it could be as simple as the algorithm finding more usages of 'gun' and 'rights' on the Gun Control page than on the Right to Bear Arms page and basing its decision solely off that. However it could be as complex as skewed data in a deep learning model that takes in every users search term and subsequent selected result. No one really knows exactly how its decided except Google's own engineers.

The fact that most other, very similar search terms provide the expected results suggests to me that it is not an intentional misdirection, otherwise the other search terms about guns would also show the Gun Control page.

The philosophical question is if a search engine return what people want or should return return what is most biased for truth and informative.

The bot uses data, sure, but like the humans it also--

* Chooses what data it uses based on... * The rules that make up its processing which in turn are... * Influenced by the peculiarities of its creator(s).

Those last two can't be emphasized enough. A subject matter expert, for example, will choose data differently from a layman, who will choose data differently from someone completely ignorant on the subject. Someone driven to keep certain data suppressed will choose data differently from someone driven to research the matter, who in turn will choose data differently than someone wholly disinterested in the topic. Unless a person builds a bot with a 'willingness' to question both its data and its own programming (and perhaps even its creator) to present the best linkage the web has to offer, all bots will be mere dummy proxies of the creator programming it.

This is coming right up when you look for "gun rights" on DuckDuckGo.

I don't see the issue.

Same thing with Youtube, the algorithms seem to optimize for the lowest common denominator and all the interesting niche stuff is lost in thr noise.

Some of the solution is to do a better job of actively searching for good content instead of waiting for the algorithms to recommend it. But that itself has gotten harder too. Finding good content curators is hard.

Google has been doubling down on this direction progressively--their justification being that people game the long tail by producing a lot of low quality, highly niched content.

There may be no real solution to this within the context of Google's PageRank-inspired algorithm and this may be an opportunity for disruption.

It's bizarre to see "video you watched 4 times 5 years ago" on your homepage. Every day.

Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...

Even then, one could imagine that the Google could somehow detect that it is not a particularly informative page, and pick the most likely disambiguation link out of it. Logically speaking, that would be first link in the list. But before the page was changed to be a pure redirect, it had the following blurb at the very beginning:

   The term "'''Gun rights'''" may refer to:

   * The legal concept of the [[right to keep and bear arms]]

   * [[Gun control]], the set of laws or policies that regulate the
     manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use
     of firearms by civilians.

   ...

FWIW, I don't think this is the case of deliberate changing of search results. But I suspect that their algorithm is inadvertently picking up bias from somewhere else, and applying it here.

I've always been curious of locked topics to see some type of analytics breakdown. The most hotly edited items are generally the things I'd most like to see surfaced.

When asked "gun rights", google added the link to the only section of the article discussing gun violence. They obviously manipulate their search results pushing political BS :-(

Google seems to like to include results appropriate for common phrases if you include only part of the phrases. My guess is that the "american" in "american inventors" brings in results for "african american inventors" too.

EDIT: To clarify, why is that list so bad?

The entire results were full of the other phrase and not the one I searched for.

I kinda hate AI.

(Because it's dumb. Do what I told you, not what you think I want)

https://imgur.com/a/7GHeVZM

槍枝管制 "gun rights"的圖片搜尋結果 槍支管制是指任何對定義、限制或限制擁有，生產或改裝，進口，運輸，銷售和／或使用槍械的法律，政策，實踐或提案。 槍支管制的法律和政策在世界各地有很大的差異。有些國家，如英國和中華民國，擁有非常嚴格的槍支限制政策，而其他國家，如美國，有相對溫和的限制。槍支管制的支持者普遍認為，普遍民眾擁有槍支會導致危險性。 維基百科

/

Gun control Search results for "gun rights" Gun control refers to any law, policy, practice or proposal that defines, restricts or limits the possession, production or modification, import, transportation, sale and/or use of firearms. The laws and policies governing gun control vary widely around the world. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, have very strict gun restrictions, while others, such as the United States, have relatively modest restrictions. Proponents of gun control generally believe that the widespread possession of guns can be dangerous. Wikipedia

As in, if some full blown NRA guy searched gun rights, what would he get?

Info cards are not influenced by your account's history as far as I know. They are purely programmed by a combination of bots and hand tweaked responses. The hand tweaked responses come from a combination of user complaints/requests and internal pushes by engineers.

(And, as much as Matt Cutts might deny it, it seems inconceivable that Google do not use revenue generated by advertising as a search signal...)

This is my biggest gripe with Google's search engine. It used to be that you could specify exactly what you want to get and it would find it for you. Now it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it refuses to show me things I know exist and that every other search engine will find with very simple, straight-forward search terms.

It is known that Google employees have the capability to skew search results politically, just not whether they do it in specific circumstances (of course it would be robustly denied)

https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041

(For those that say “good” remember that tomorrow this could be used against you. I am certain it was used against Bernie for example)

That would be important if it were true. Can you back it up?

I ran such an agency. As someone who is proficient in PPC, the AdSense sales team was inexcusably poor at their jobs. They'd offer to setup campaigns for free with thousands of barely relevant keywords and would push upping the budget past what was reasonable.

Their tactics were so bad for my clients that I stopped accepting their "free" help and did the campaigns in house. I hate to think how many agencies simply went along with their advice to the detriment of their clients.

Worse is when you get billed for clicks for inactive campaigns, even ones that were never enabled.

I really really wish Microsoft or someone outside of the duopoly, were more powerful in the mobile and search space so people had a choice. I do have an Android phone, but only because Apple is so locked down that I essentially have to use their services, and I don't use Google services outside of their store...but I know just by having an Android phone Google is tracking me.

As for advertisers, I know for a fact that some SMBs/agencies don't serve on Bing, not because the traffic isn't there...but because it's hard to manage so many bids and pacing in so many different platforms. Google makes it so simple, even if the ROI is slightly lower by not using Bing, etc. It's maddening, it is certainly a very monopolistic company.

I want to touch on this because in my experience this is less true than it seems on the surface.

The contacts app and calendar app support carddav/caldav respectively- photos use the standard camera interface (mpd?) the things that suck are that you need to use Xcode to develop for it, and you need iTunes to put music on the default music player app (however using plex w/ sync has been my cross platform solution for a while- and honestly I don’t know many people who aren’t using Spotify)

Am I missing something?

On the one hand I understand the complaints about Apple's "walled garden," but I've pretty effortlessly connected to both Google Calendar and Exchange services. (And I don't use Apple's own Calendar app anyway, although I configure the calendars through the iOS system preferences so they integrate with all the Apple stuff relatively gracefully.) I do file syncing with Dropbox, which integrates with Apple's Files app pretty nicely as of iOS 11. I keep passwords in 1Password, which always integrated fairly well with iOS and does even better as of iOS 12. I get a lot of ebooks in DRM-free ePub format from various vendors and can just open them directly in iBooks. (I suppose using iTunes is still a problem, although iTunes Match and, now, Apple Music actually made syncing pretty painless for me. After the initial pain of moving from iTunes Match, which worked great, to Apple Music, which did...not...work great for its first year. But I digress.)

More apropos to the linked post, I trust Apple with my data rather more than most companies I deal with. They not only don't treat it as a profit center, they seem to prefer to minimize the amount of personally-identifiable and unencrypted information they deal with. I do still use some Google services, but I prefer to use Apple's equivalents when possible -- and I've been using Safari instead of Chrome for years. A lot of people think I'm nuts for that, but occasionally I feel a bit vindicated...

For years I've used an Android phone with no Google account attached - I simply skipped the OOB assistant and then created an account pointing on my company's Exchange, where all my mail/calendaring/contacts were. For maps, I used Sygic, which you can purchase outside Play Store.

Yes, I did lose Google Play, Youtube, Hangouts, but exactly that was the intent - not using Google services. Today, it would be even easier, with the existence F-Droid providing third-party apps.

Had to uninstall DNS66 and F-Droid because of it.

I'm fairly annoyed on Android that I can't uninstall some stock Google apps.

they did finally start to take ownership of experience with the surface stuff, and I'm tempted to move back to that world in 2019 with a surface book of some stripe.

Nadella won't because of MS hate.

Lots of naive developers are drunk on the false open source android story and won't apps for their OS - e.g. snapchat founder refused to build an app for WP. And kept sending take down notices for community built clients. This is why MS keeps pursing web apps and "universal apps."

Ms spent at billions in payment (bribes) to developers to build WP apps, yet.

Microsoft of today would never have created Windows. They have tried and failed multiple times to turn Windows into a store only OS.

Their OS was unjailbreakable far more so than IOS. WP's inability to share apps is the major reason why WP failed in my own country. Even till today, people still beam android / windows apps.

Windows 10 auto updates is another clue that MS is clueless about data costs. I'll bet, more people left Windows for autoupdating than for being insecure.

PERSONALLY... I think MS could mount another shot at the phone market - but they'd have to be serious, commit long term, and be willing to lose out $ for a while to gain marketshare.

I don't recall them spending billions on getting WP apps built. If anything, the anecdotes I heard were mixed - both cheap funding of lots of stupid one-off apps to try to inflate numbers, but cheaping out on funding for established apps with existing users/communities. In neither case did I ever read about billions being spent in those pursuits.

Again, I think there's probably one more chance MS has to make a run for this - new leadership since the ballmer days, commitment to manage their own hardware, and a public commitment to long-term investment in that ecosystem... - lots of folks are waking up to the privacy issues in mobile - apple has a story, google doesn't have a terribly good one. Lots of smaller/secondtier players in ios world are fed up with 30% fees. MS could address privacy and fee issues, and attract/keep new market. But... we don't want another 'playsforsure/zune' situation. :/

I don't think privacy is a mass market appeal. Here's an experiment you could do. Stop a few random persons on the road or on the train and ask their opinion about equivax, Cambridge Analytica, and Chrome's recent privacy violations and I'm sure you'll get blank stares on 90 out of 100 people.

As for developer fees - the jumping CEO reduced the app registration fee. No one noticed. He gave the OS for free - OEMs didn't bite.

Nadella recently reduced the their store fee from 30% to 15%. And you didn't know about it.

I feel that focusing completely on consumers would get MS 95% of the push it needs. The wishes of external parties is what gave us the DRM, Youtube's content ID and much more - all anti-consumer.

Developers complained about losing revenue to piracy - voila. Microsoft built WP so that it was impossible to get apps outside the store.

Apple has "arguably" been about consumers and we can see where that led them. IMO, fuck everyone else, design consumer friendly stuff. At least that's how Google search, android, and gmail began.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/campaigns/micr...

But repeat the same experiment asking them about Facebook listening to their conversations (whether true or not, it's now believed) and about adverts tracking them around the web and those same people will start complaining vociferously and tell you how creepy it is.

Innovators' curse maybe? They were pioneers in voice assistant, smart phone and tablets. Alas!

MS has begun to coast with AR - hololens, no new version in a while. Apple is well positioned to take the lead here.

As for IOT, I feel the current MS won't win. Windows 10's constant need to phone number will wear battery down and consume previous bandwidth.

Which is well-earned, they saved it for decades. What fueled their growth before, now is working against them.

> Lots of naive developers are drunk on the false open source android story

If you think leopard can change its spots, it's you who is naive. The arrogance with handling Windows 10 should tell you, that they didn't change; they will abuse their position when they think you have no other option. The "naive developers" as you call them know that and will not do anything to put Microsoft into that position.

> Ms spent at billions in payment (bribes) to developers to build WP apps, yet.

Yes, they did. They thought that their existing partners will help them. Fortunately, they were wrong.

> They have tried and failed multiple times to turn Windows into a store only OS.

Yes, developers giving Microsoft more power over themselves. What could possibly go wrong... It's a good thing they failed.

OS Store is not the thing that keeps Windows used.

> Their OS was unjailbreakable far more so than IOS.

That's another "feature" nobody asked for.

> Windows 10 auto updates is another clue that MS is clueless about data costs. I'll bet, more people left Windows for autoupdating than for being insecure.

That's just a symptom of hubris, mentioned above.

I recall Ms was banned from building their own hardware. Just like how Car companies are banned from retailing their own cars in the US.

Here's hoping that Trump in his second term hits the digital monopolies with the anti-trust legislation they have been flaunting for the last 10 years.

Just because they are somewhat closer to me socially doesn't mean I want to sell out my freedoms to them.

One only has to look at what the Murdoch paper monopolies did to any politician who dared stand against him: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cancer-eating-the-he...

He could solve that problem by simply ceasing to say and do dumb things. I'm not convinced the media is out to get him, he just shoots himself in the foot about 20 times / day. I wish the news were focused more on policy than politics (though not sure that would help him), but people like drama and news orgs like money.

as much as I dislike trump, i do think some of the negative media coverage of him is over the top, and does its part in destroying credibility of real issues. my own gut would be on those '20 times/day' things, probably 5-10 of them are overblown or taken out of context (the 'fist bump' on 9/11 was overblown, imo, when you look at the complete footage and context).

agreed, but it becomes a bit of "boy who cried wolf!" If everything is 'over the top' and 'worst ever', etc, then nothing is.

there's legitimately enough to be covering about policy and real political issues at stake - the 'fist bump' coverage and 'outrage' from anyone was worse than trivial - it gives cover and legitimacy to the folks who are on the fence about 'fake news' charges.

But should we just allow the normalization of such behavior? I don't think so; I think we should continue to call him out on it.

>there's legitimately enough to be covering about policy and real political issues at stake - the 'fist bump' coverage and 'outrage' from anyone was worse than trivial - it gives cover and legitimacy to the folks who are on the fence about 'fake news' charges.

Agreed.

what behaviour?

let opinion journalism call him out for stuff that is opinionably bad. let fact-based news call him out on 'real' stuff. again, i go to the fist-bump thing (but the 'koi fish food' thing last year fits too) - there's no need for that to be covered by the same folks and with the same level of coverage as state of the union speeches or cabinet appointments.

The rich will not save us from themselves. But they will put a nice rainbow flag up with the wages they stole from us.

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters

I don’t believe the founders have had personality transplant, so why has google become evil?

Once it reaches that point, every business optimization is in detriment of either the final user or society, quite often both.

This need to have 7-13% yearly returns force companies to grind their employees and customers.

I like capitalism, but I can easily see capitalism doing evil things to create short term profit.

Lack of reporting from others is no reason to believe Breitbart was first to know, e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/jacknicas/status/1040014678263386...

> Doesn't that bother anyone?

I think it actually helps insulate Google from closer scrutiny of its monopoly position and deplorable business model. Why would any self-respecting country suffer an all-powerful ad-financed private Alphabet Agency? Because they think Evil is "on our side".

Within a few months of Gmail going public it changed from gmail.com to gmail.google.com or google.com/gmail or some such thing, and I knew instantly they had bamboozled everyone.

That was years ago, the rest has been the expected trend.

The domain gmail.com became unavailable in Germany due to trademark disputes [...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Germany

To think we were so naïve.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/07/google_kills_www/

Here's an article from June 2004:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/gmail_spook_heaven/

The privacy implications were widely discussed when Gmail launched, but then the media interest just faded out because people were apparently OK with it and Google promised to "do no evil". So here we are, 14 years later.

Same thing happened to me shortly after Adsense started up. They banned my account when I was 17/18 for clicking on my own ads, which I'd never done because I knew you'd get banned for it. I'm now 32, so in two years my Adsense account will have been banned for literally half my life.

And because everyone's on the latest version, it's harder for individuals to downgrade or stay on old versions for longer without getting obsoleted.

It's actually closing the web. The excuse for aggressive upgrades & auto-updates are mainly for security purposes, with the side benefit of reducing the work of web developers. But on the flip side, it's actually huge centralization move.

Which video?

Typical Breitbart trying to create much ado about nothing, I've had similar "town hall" discussions in the UK since Brexit - "what does this mean for our employees? etc"

[0]: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

EDIT: As it turns out, sources for this are pretty easy to come across online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-travelban/google-s...

To me, that is not "subverting democracy." It is, however, taking an active political stance.

If the primary source of information is manipulated in the name of political activism, how can they become well-informed?

Sadly I must qualify this by saying I don't believe the general public in the West are well-informed, but that doesn't mean that ideal should be given up entirely.

> show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies

From you:

> fundamentally predicated on a well-informed electorate

Describe how anything in the parent statement fails to contribute to, or detracts from, a well-informed electorate. Both examples are involvement in the functioning of a democracy, not detracting from it.

Nor is any private party obligated to provide "equal coverage". That the level of "informed" goes up, but does not encapsulate information -you- think should be included, does not negate this.

The WSJ is unabashedly an outlet for conservative and GOP talking points. That is clear on its opinion page, and I know that somehow people trust its news pages, but the same editors control the rest of the publication, as does the owner of the WSJ and Fox News, Rupert Murdoch. I wouldn't trust their summary of something relating to a conservative talking point.

"Their staff have openly called to subvert democracy,"

The key here being "openly" and a specific call to "subvert democracy". None of this happened, and your source does not back up this claim in any way. These are apparently in internal only threads, and they were merely talking about tweaking search results.

Internal, private emails threads are objectively not "openly calling" for something and merely "tweaking search results" is not "subverting democracy" in any sane world.

You are spreading misinformation at best.

Any more details on this?

That right there is the issue. “Real” news organizations share ideological views and their choice of what to investigate is a result of that ideology. When a newsroom cheers or is despondent over an election result, it’s unrealistic to expect them to provide hard-hitting coverage that potentially undercuts their own biases.

The coverage of Russian “collusion” is a great example. Hillary Clinton’s people met with the ambassador of China as well as Russian officials during the campaign. But there was not even cursory coverage in mainstream media outlets or any investigation into Hillary’s campaign while similar alleged actions by members of the Trump campaign have led to a years long special prosecutor. I am not going to relitigate the collision case here, but alleged Trump collusion or alleged Clinton collusion would both be considered crimes, that Clinton didn’t win is immaterial since the crimes being alleged are collusion before the election. However, there hasn’t even been any cursory investigative reporting of the actions of the Clinton campaign despite secretly meeting with both Chinese and Russian officials. Just those meetings alone would be grounds for concern, but media outlets, in their disdain for Trump, ignored a potentially identical crime committed by Clinton’s campaign, not because it wasn’t newsworthy, but because it didn’t fit the ideological ambitions of many major “reputable” news outlets. I am not claiming Clinton did or didn’t collide; only that there was enough evidence to inspire at least some investigative reporting by the media — but the problem is that such reporting would weaken the “case” against Trump in terms of public opinion.

Keith Ellison a congressman with multiple, credible sexual assault accusations against him gets a pass in the media despite him running for Attorney General of Minnesota and he’s the deputy Chairman of the DNC. Yet, the media goes after the Kavanaugh story despite a far weaker accusation than the police-record supported claims against Ellison. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Again, I am not litigating the Kavanaugh case here, only pointing out that the media has a propensity to cover news with an intensity to suits an obvious agenda as opposed to covering news impartially.

With the Google politics situation, why would the “reputable” media care when it’s a sentiment they already share.

I was a contract journalist for Reuters from 1996-2002 and, in my opinion, journalism has declined prodigiously since then. It has become a click-bait driven industry that preys on tribalism and emotion. My first real exposure to the 24 hour news cycle was during Desert Storm and I remember the coverage of CNN was not only reputable, but explemplary. The NY Times was an extraordinary paper along with the Seattle PI, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe And Miami Herald. My old hometown paper where I interned before going to Reuters was also great — attacking left and right with equal aplomb, passion and fairness. But something happened along the way. We could blame Trump as is the fashion, but Trump was a product of this, not the cause. There have always been fringe media outlets like Breitbart, however they really didn’t have much of an audience because the majority of people of all political stripes had a reasonable trust in the major media outlets. The issue of media bias isn’t even one of specific stories and how they are written, but something far most sinister — the quiet influence of the assignment editor who decides what stories are even worth considering. The NY Times for example, well written, generally solid stories however, the real bias comes from what they choose not to cover. The Trump stories are certainly worth ink, but so are the stories about Clinton Foundation irregularities, quid pro quo arrangements with foreign governments, the Moroccan phosphate deals, Russian Uranium and campaign money laundering to the time of $84 million.

In full disclosure, I didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t support him at all, but I am a libertarian-leaning conservative frustrated that ridiculousness like modern Breitbart even needs to exists. (I say “modern” Breitbart because under Andrew Breitbart, it was actually a pretty decent new source, albeit from a right perspective — it was the conservative answer to the Huffington Post, though now, it’s pretty close to Infowars territory.

I apologize for the rant, but I agree, it’s a shame that fringe media has done more investigating into google than the “reputable” media.

?!?!?! It's funny to see how different viewpoints can be. The CNN coverage of Iraq 1 (and 2) is often given as a textbook example of how pro-military propaganda can be achieved thanks to "embedding": News networks need images, the easiest way to get the most striking images is to be embedded within military units, the military are more than happy to comply, as long as they keep editorial control of what is published: win-win for both, but a definite loss for impartiality

They learnt the lessons of the Falklands, where the BBC was happily informing the Argentinians that e.g. they were setting their bomb fuses wrong...

How do you know that? Has this happened?

It's not just the news media. The justice department seems to be ignoring it too.

I'd love to see specific sources that back up your claims about Hillary Clinton's 'secret meetings'.

And, on a more general note, I'm pretty astounded that you spend so much time railing against the bias of what we are obviously meant to infer is the left wing media without even acknowledging the existence the right wing media machine. And no, it isn't Brietbart and only Brietbart.

>Keith Ellison a congressman with multiple, credible sexual assault accusations against him gets a pass in the media despite

a) There are definitely some inconsistencies in the stories about what he did/did not, and after reading through a few articles on the subject, it doesn't exactly seem like there's very much concrete evidence at all. AND EVEN THEN, the allegations are not as far as I can in any way sexual assault allegations. And furthermore, I found a litany of sites discussing the situation on both side of the traditional spectrum.