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A comment on Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work. Parent comment

Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by nostrademons on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:50PM (#21278238)
The thing is - it didn't, at least while I was there. The triggering of universal result groups (eg. Local, Shopping, or News results within the search results page) was based on the probability that for a given query, the user would end up wanting to switch over to the respective Google property rather than click on the top result. There was no manual tweaking of search results, and the formulas were so simple (basically straight ratios) that it's hard for them to be mucked with.
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Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by mike00632 on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @10:10PM (#21278320)
What you say makes a lot of sense but a court ruled that Google's search ranks were self-promoting. I guess a good question here would be whether there were similar algorithms to funnel people towards E-Bay or other competitors' shopping services if they were likely looking for those.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-e...

But this is really a digression. The point is that search rank does promote. We can come up with many cases where Google perhaps shouldn't display the most relevant results. The question is whether Google should use their near-monopoly to influence the world via search results according to their moral code instead of strict legal responsibility.

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Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by Nasrudith on Thursday October 17, 2019 @09:06AM (#21281574)
Just because a court says something doesn't mean it is reality. At all.

Likewise can we all please give the open farce of abuse of the word "monopoly" to rest?

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Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by mike00632 on Friday October 18, 2019 @04:14PM (#21294725)
A court is a third party that is more objective than a Google employee. That is why I mentioned it.

Google is a great service (that I love and use daily by choice) but they also spend a lot of money to make sure they are the default search provider. They have more means than smaller search companies and they use those means to achieve almost total market share. Then Google used their vast market share to skew business in their favor. That is almost the textbook definition of monopolistic behavior.

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Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by colejohnson66 on Friday October 18, 2019 @01:40AM (#21288969)
> What you say makes a lot of sense but a court ruled that Google's search ranks were self-promoting.

And over a hundred years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that “seperate but equal” was a valid argument. Doesn’t make it correct.

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Re:Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work by mike00632 on Friday October 18, 2019 @04:09PM (#21294686)
Google was literally funneling people to its own services via its search results and had no similar linking for other services. The court's decision seemed reasonable.
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