I could absolutely believe that there is a "quality" ranking that pushes Daily Mail stories down because the domain contains such poor quality content, or that the pages are loaded down with so much crap that people hit 'back' almost immediately after clicking on one of their links.
That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
Here’s a Google AMP page of a Daily Mail page that crashes on every page load for me on my iPhone’s default Safari browser. They probably need to hire a front-end developer or web performance specialist to diagnose it.
Slow or failing page loads negatively affect search rankings on all search engines & 80% of users abandon your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.
This became my most upvoted comment of all time (+22) so it must’ve gotten a lot of attention and is probably worth me following up on. The Google AMP link above now loads impressively fast in under 1.5 seconds in the same iPhone Safari browser. If you click-through the AMP link to get to the Daily Mail’s full version of the page, that loads in 9-10 seconds on the first view and about 6 seconds on subsequent (cached) views.
Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly result in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users.
Furthermore what are you supposed to do with this data? If you ultimately find that one site is given one score and another is given another and you disagree with this are you going to demand that google show other people the sites you prefer in a higher rank? Nonsense.
No matter how they rank showing their hands would almost certainly be harmful to google because it would allow political groups of any stripe to put pressure on them to "fix" their results on any number of dimensions. Google would in short be crazy to give this to you and you aren't entitled to it.
"Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly results in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users."
According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".
The above statement seems to ignore the history of search engine paid placement (people are certainly entitled, so long as they pay) which has evolved into "Ads by Google" appearing above search results. Further, the statement admits gaming occurs ["gaming them more effectively"] regardless of Google secret "solutions".
Listing search results by subjective criteria while portarying this as some sort of pseudo-objective "search" is not helpful. The "web search engine" has become a front for an online ad services business. The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.
> According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".
This is seen in practice. The yellow pages were?(are?) alphabetical, which is why you see so many business that start with the letter A.
The Yellow Pages still exist IRL. There was an interesting book I read some years back about the history of the phone book and it included some history behind the yellow pages.^1
The YP allowed an advertiser to pay for a larger type font, or a quarter/half/full page ad, in addition to the free listing. It is also divided into subject catgories.
What has been lost with Google's web search is the concept of the accessible free listing. It is only accesible under Google's secret rules. The ability to finger through the pages to get to, say, the last entry beginning with "Z" is not possible with Google search. Google will hide the bottom of the list and only display the first several pages. This creates pressure to buy ads or SEO services (game the search) in order to "appear at the top", which is "the only way to be found". Absurd. Google will not even return more than 400 results anymore.
While the phenomenon of naming things to begin with "A" may be seen in pratice outside of the web, this has not rendered the system of alphabetical listing obsolete.^2 Not even close. Also, there are likely other factors influencing the decision to name things beginning with letters like "A". As many computer nerds know, not all letters are equally common in the English language. Anyone who has looked at large zone files knows that domain names tend to begin with "A", but such choice of name is not done to game alphabetical ordering.
1. About 11 years ago I read a book by Ammon Shea called The Phone Book. It had some discussion of the history of the Yellow Pages.
2. Last year, Judith Flanders published a book on the history of alphabetical order.
It's not obvious to me what the bounds of "all websites" are.
The list of all phone numbers is obviously enumerable. There's a registry and a flat list of phone numbers. But, resource constraints aside, is it possible to enumerate all websites? I suppose you could theoretically enumerate every domain name, but that isn't necessarily the same thing.
> The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.
You aren't entitled to one paid for by google but I don't think there is any reason you can't fund the PBS of search engines. There in fact save lack of interest or motivation why you couldn't start working on it tomorrow and lobby for government support.
> I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
It's a tricky problem, in principle I agree with you, but on the other hand more transparency also means more information for people who are gaming the system.
And there are many MANY people who (try to) game Google. Never underestimate the amount of ridiculous effort some people will go to to make a buck. Arguably Google's largest value is that it's actually reasonably good in preventing this.
The main reason I gave up Google as default search engine is that results were not good and I couldn't find material.
Duckduckgo provides generally better results and has some very cool gadgets (like stack overflow answer expansion).
Google is winning on businesses' opening hours and safe search on images is not as safe as Google, which is the single caveat I need to remember about before looking for something.
Why should the public be given access to that information? Google should be under no obligation to provide any of that unless we "nationalize" the idea of search engines and declare them a human right. Until then, it's a voluntary service to be consumed.
Governments would be absolutely salivating at the prospect of such simple censorship if they owned the search engines. And be under no illusion that all without exception would abuse that power in some way or another.
All limited-liability companies are government-supported entities and it's perfectly fair to impose corresponding social responsibilities on them. In this case Google is in a monopoly position which means they have a stronger responsibility to not only be fair but be seen to be fair.
Of course google isn't under such a legal obligation. But then they should be explicit: "We are ranking results on our own quality metric which we won't disclose, you'll just have to like them", and let the market react. This position can then be taught in schools to kids, and used whenever google search results are being evaluated by the public. Right now google brands its search results as being driven by the public.
It's like when people say google (or fb, etc) has no [first amendment] obligation to allow freedom of speech. Fine, but then don't constantly describe yourself of defenders of free speech, say from the outset you will police speech as you see fit, drop the pretense that your policing is somehow objective, and let the market digest that.
> Right now google brands its search results as being driven by the public.
Where does it do that? Google search results being an opaque algorithm is not a big secret, given how Google clearly refuses to talk about details every time this comes up.
The problem with that is if people know the exact formula for quality, sites can work to game it. Basically, once the formula for quality is known, it no longer is a formula for quality.
But the point isn't 3rd part assessments, the issue is that people want transparency of the algorithms; i.e. the intellectual property is exactly what people want to see.
Unless you think it's even in the realm of possibility to have a human being do the assessment, at the end of the day it's still going to be an algorithm that can be gamed.
If you ever want to play censorship scavenger hunt, try to get Google to link to breitbart.com without including the word breitbart. You can search article titles word for word in quotes and the names of the authors but google will not return a single breitbart.com link.
I know I’m a sample size of one, but I just searched for the string (without any quotes) ‘biden doj to investigate mpls police joshua caplan’ on Google, the story on breitbart.com was the 2nd result, the first result was the same article on ‘newsbreak.com’
That is an interesting observation. I can confirm I get those results too. Perhaps they are relaxing their algorithms now that elections are over. I originally tried this month (or maybe a few) ago and was unable to get any link to breitbart.com even if I googled entire paragraphs.
Some sources aren't merely low quality they are poison. A website on fragrances isn't liable to show you which sort of toxin would make your corpse smell most sweet after you have choked on your own death.
An ethical take would be trying not to spread poison is the right thing to do. Inaction in the face of evil isn't neutral its evil.
I'd rather decide for myself what is "evil" and "poison" rather than have that decision made for me by a search engine who's only job is to return the information I'm asking for. I could want this "evil" information for any number of non-evil reasons, it is not their nor anyone else's job to make that decision on behalf of the user.
I think I will be better off if social media and search engines don't help people poison their minds. That is to say its possible that your desire to be informed and my desire for you not to find what you are looking for might be opposed.
If you think that you are missing out on legitimate information pick a different search engine or make one.
There are lots of oppressive things we can do to help people not "poison their minds". Strictly controlling the information your citizens interact with, as is done in places like China, shows what an implementation of this may look like.
It's also roundly criticized as repressive, anti-freedom, and ripe for almost unlimited abuse by every first world nation.
You're right, but the question is, how absolutist should we be on that principle? The results of free sharing of "information" can be seen in measles outbreaks, for example.
Even if you had freedom from legal coercion it doesn't imply a platform ought to use that freedom to help poisonous crap spread. Lets give an obvious example there was a lady spreading nonsense about how you could cure your autistic kid by giving them bleach anally. She is encouraging dumb people to torture their vulnerable mentally challenged children.
Whether the government ought to let her spread her malicious lies is an entirely different question from whether for example amazon ought to carry her book or google ought to index her site. If your absolutist free speech position doesn't allow you to admit to the idea of the government censoring her I understand. However if you think that amazon and google ought to be morally obligated to help her spread her poison I don't understand your position at all.
A rational person can tell the difference between a grey area obvious nonsense and pretending that there aren't plenty of trivially definable black and white situations in which not carrying poison makes the world a better place is complete nonsense as is the idea that ANY editorial discretion magically leads to 1984. Life is literally the finding a balance point and I think we can reasonably discover a point of homeostasis between free heroin on every corner and constantly strip searching everyone for drugs.
If you don't think so you haven't considered the problem very deeply.
I thought we were speaking mostly about governments in this discussion, but quite frankly, the amount of power that Google and Facebook combined have over the average internet user's information intake puts them in a similar place. I believe the "moral obligation" is to act like the common carriers they play at being when it's expedient to do so, keep their hands off, and allow the government apparatus equipped to handle incitement to violence to do its job.
The problem at the end of the day is that we're not talking about extreme, contrived examples like the one just mentioned. We're talking about ideological things that rational people can disagree about in good faith, and there is no downside for tech companies to boost their preferred ideologies/candidates/etc and suppress their non-preferred ones.
That is a huge problem with, just like the governments, unlimited abuse potential... except it's more insidious. Government suppression of speech comes at the point of a gun, tech suppression of speech happens passively, in that you won't know it's happening unless you know to look for it, or its application is exceedingly blunt.
It's handwaved because many people find the list of boosting and suppressing targets acceptable.
Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information? I'll do one. A restaurant has an established duty of care to maintain a minimum standard of cleanliness so as to provide sustenance and not illness. This duty is established in law and custom, maintained by inspection and certification. It's a duty whose exact performance and rules has changed over time but which goes back in custom over thousands of years.
This duty rendered real and specific by law and inspection is based on the most basic of rights the right to retain your life and health. It is trivially to suppose that someone ought to respect your desire to remain alive by not doing their job so poorly that filling your stomach once leads to you filling a hole in the ground.
Tech companies which so far as I can see have no duty of neutrality beyond what is required to keep our business are in fact very very circumspect about blocking things. Facebook happily left the groups up that I and others reported in the days leading up to the Jan 6 insurrection where they were planning to overthrow our government and it wasn't that long ago that reddit decided to remove communities like jailbait and subreddits in which the people who used to use lynching as social gatherings would have been quite comfortable.
When people talk about the problem with insidious blocking by tech companies I suspect the person is either an idealist or one of the deplorables. I'll do you the credit of assuming your in the former basket because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
>Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information?
It's interesting that you mention restaurants. Restaurants have standards that go beyond the casual cook in a home kitchen because the restaurant, owing to its scale, can multiply the effect of a problem with food safety and injure/kill very many people very easily.
To briefly answer your question: Big scale means errors are magnified means different rules apply.
Facebook by itself is the single largest website in the world outside of China. I find it outrageous to suggest that a company in that position (Google too) should get to just do whatever they please regarding the information input of a massive chunk of the global population.
Pretending that power doesn't exist does not nullify its effects or its abuse potential.
>because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
Your unwarranted personal attack aside, this is precisely what I meant about those handwaving the establishment of an abusable power structure simply because they're generally okay with the decisions that structure is making.
What about when you're not so okay with those decisions anymore? You mentioned the Capitol insurrection, I assume then, that you think Facebook should clamp down on such groups? Their answer to you is the same as their answer to me: "Our back yard, our rules."
I think we can do better than that. And to preempt the inevitable argument that the first amendment allows them to operate free of oversight in this way.. that's true. It would be a lot easier to tie their freedom from liability for the libelous, terroristic, etc. content their users post to some additional duties, transparency, and so forth.
That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.