News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown. Parent comment

Re:U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crac... by kortilla on Friday April 16, 2021 @03:33PM (#26838159)
People use Google because the algorithm is a black box that is constantly updated to keep away black hat SEO crap. An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment. There is no current signal that can’t be trivially gained that doesn’t effectively require mass user surveillance (to see “what’s really popular”).

> 2. “This is why the search engine company should be separate from the company which owns all the other products”

This doesn’t solve the problem. They can still alter top listings to push things for “preferred partners and truths”.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crac... by neolog on Friday April 16, 2021 @03:55PM (#26838394)
> An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment.

Anybody with Search experience confirm or deny this claim?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crac... by random314 on Friday April 16, 2021 @04:44PM (#26838864)
I have experience, and this is trivially true. Search engines can only look at proxies for relevance , as General AI hasn't been achieved yet. Proxies can always be gamed.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crac... by telmo on Friday April 16, 2021 @05:50PM (#26839434)
> black hat SEO crap

Pretty redundant if you ask me: black hat, SEO and crap.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crac... by sigg3 on Saturday April 17, 2021 @04:06AM (#26842491)
Crap is not redundant. It's more popular than ever!

/s

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crac... by ben_w on Friday April 16, 2021 @06:55PM (#26839937)
> An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment.

We here know that, politicians don’t seem to and they set the rules.

Regardless: the fear here is that Google itself is gaming its own algorithm — or just directly bypassing it because they can. I make no claim about the validity of this fear.

[ Parent | on HN ]