I hate to do a tl;dr, but here it is: Google has bought and/or acquired so many web properties that they all can't appear in their own little special spot in search results. If you type in the name of an article you wrote and it's the 3rd or 4th listing, below somebody just mentioning it on G+? It's broken. Like Facebook, but to a greater degree, Google is making the internet crap by putting it's own little frame around everything.
To me Google isn't evil by any means, but it has way too many smart people all trying to jump on whatever the latest popular bandwagon might be. It's definitely getting a "McGoogle" feel to it. Whatever is getting popular on the web, some little Googlite is busy working to assimilate it. I like Google a lot. The author has a point. At some point enough is enough. I think he exaggerates to a much greater degree than is necessary. So far.
this issue isn't something new either. I mentioned Google+'s looted copyright content problem back in September
http://www.seobook.com/the-doors
Google creates the Panda algorithm against thin content & then they shag the ad impressions that quality content deserves...it's pretty hard to have a sustainable quality-based content business model when Google can just displace you with their copy of your own content!
That's not broken. If you had website foo.com and then added bar.foo.com you would expect that your pagerank transfer to your subdomain as well. Of course when the owner of pagerank has this apply to them it's suddenly "broken" though huh?
The mechanics of how the search results are ranked (pagerank) is irrelevant. The system is "broken" when original source content is ranking below people merely linking to it from another site.
I don't think it's that clear cut. I can think of lots of examples where I'd rather see the comments / links from trusted individuals or sites ranked above the original source content, regardless of what search I'm using.
Pagerank shouldn't be universal - it doesn't make sense to believe that the same ranking system should work equally well for all users.
Some very convincing examples would be appropriate here. As for myself, even if I would want to read secondary sources first, I would still want the original content at the top of an unbiased search, recognizing that my desires are somewhat weird and that the original content has a certain moral right to be at the top when searching for that exact content.
I think a good way to identify original source content is through author attribution, with trusted identities, in a social graph, curated by users in a web of trust.
Hmm... That sounds like exactly what Google+ is doing.
If you happen to Encircle someone who created the comment in the first place, it's debatable about which post you'd rather see higher.
I think he didn't make it clear enough. The system isn't broken, the original source just has a lower pagerank.I fail to see where the issue is. I've seen links rank lower than their relevant HN or Reddit posts on Google before.
The thing is, the pagerank should not matter. What you want when you search the internet is a relevant result, regardless of its pagerank.
If the system relies too much in the pagerank to determine whether a site is relevant to your search terms or not, well, yes, the system is broken.
I think you're getting downvoted because you're ignoring the point.
The point isn't that the "Pagerank" system is broken, it's that the "placing quality search results above irrelevant casual mentions" system is broken.
That you continued to reply as though you didn't read the parent remarks is furthering your downvoting.
I don't agree in downvoting on that premise personally (and haven't here), but I certainly understand it, and would state that it's at least better than getting downvoted for having posted an unpopular opinion.
Had you done a better job of explaining your position, or differing it from your original statement when dealt replies that furthered their original claims, then you might have had a chance to recoup some of the cost.
Beating a dead horse on a post that already got downvoted is likely only going to get you more downvotes, and rightfully so.
What do you mean 'hides' downvotes? You mean you aren't allowed to downvote, or that it doesn't tell you who downvoted you?
As for the former, downvoting is a privilege for those who earn it. The bar for insightfulness is deliberately high, and by putting it there, I believe the goal is to encourage everyone to strive for more meaningful commentary.
Looking through your comment history, it seems that you have some valuable opinions, otherwise I wouldn't be pointing any of this out. That said, it doesn't appear as though you put much effort in your posts either.
The hardest thing for me to learn about HN years ago was that it's often easier to just not say anything. I try to reserve my comments to where they either add value, or when my opinion was solicited. I'm not always able to avoid disagreement, but I try to always do so with respect and civility.
Simply put, it's a different place, and even though you shouldn't worry about, karma doesn't just drop in your lap. It's there to be earned. Earning karma takes effort. Effort in abiding the rules, effort in maintaining civility, effort in knowing whether your comment is worth posting or not.
HN is definitely not a groupthink, in my opinion, and some of the best chats on here are about arguments from high-profile users. In many of those arguments, there is resolution, where either one party has convinced the other that they are right, or they are able to come to terms with each others' opinions.
I think if you look at your comments in this thread honestly, with the criteria laid out here, you'll realize that they weren't exactly crafted with love. They aren't deserving of karma. Even if your opinion was unpopular, but presented well and thoughtfully, you'd see that you got karma in the process.
If anything though, karma is a long con. Don't worry about the karma on any given post, but try to keep the long-term average high.
"Well, that didn't make me feel much better, because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people."
OP is a web-tech blogger and he just now learned this? I don't use G+ much so I can't easily evaluate the rest of OPs assertions, but I am questioning them by default because when someone makes one statement I know to be false (or in this case inexcusably ignorant), it calls the rest of their statements into question. This is unfortunate because I think much what OP says is useful, but, c'mon: if you blog about web tech and didn't know google tailors results, it makes you seem like you "don't know how any of this stuff works" and I can't take you seriously in that regard.
I am very confused by the section about plagiarism/mis-attribution/non-attribution. OP says his work was "almost-unattributed" but I couldn't find any link back to him on the G+ posting. Did someone click the share button, or paste in a link to his article? Or did someone copy and paste his article? If it's the latter, this phenomenon is much older than the Internet and has nothing to do with G+, specifically, besides the fact that Google may rate your plagiarized "work" higher than the original on its results (which is a distinct issue that applies to both plagiarized and properly-attributed posts).
EDIT: I see the name now, it was next to the title in the post. Thank you OP.
It's "almost-attributed" because he included my name, but there was no link or mention of my site. I don't care about the name. I care about the site. That's what the whole rant is about.
Of course I knew that Google tailored results. How would I have been able to include any context in this post otherwise? You took a human-written sentence out of context and made it make less sense than it does in the body of the post.
Honestly, I immediately noticed that sentence too, and it really detracts from your article.
As for your attack on G+, the only real problem I see is if they promote G+ posts over the original. But that could also just happen because maybe many of your "friends" liked or shared the G+ post (that wouldn't be surprising), and you being logged in to google, the algorithm interpreted those social cues of high importance for you. The best solution, though, would be if those "social love" was transferred to the linked article.
"I changed it, because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point."
I am polite, point out that much of what you say is useful, and thank you for a correction, and I'm a troll. Reddit is that way, friend. -->
As for my "misinterpreting" the meaning of what you said, there was no misinterpretation at all. 'A friend told me her results were different than mine / I now know that google serves different results.' Without more context, the only reasonable interpretation here is that you learned the latter from the former, there is no misinterpretation.
"My business went under / now I'm broke." If you interpreted the latter as a result of the former, you would be correct, not mistaken. ;)
"because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point."
Don't call people trolls just because they highlight a confusing statement of yours. Judging by the comments here (and on RWW), it was easy to interpret it "wrong" even with the context of the article.
Even if he didn't know, would his not knowing that Google tailors results per-user somehow make his other points worthless? That seems like a form of poisoning the well.
I looked up "poisoning the well" because I didn't know the precise meaning, thanks for the new phrase! In fact I'm not "poisoning the well" because a) My opinion was the one in question; Poisoning the well requires an audience and poisoner and more importantly b) I didn't introduce this information, the author wrote it himself.
Anyway regarding poisoning the well, check out the second example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well#Examples
"The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and then when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" [roughly, "You misunderstood me; you are an idiot"] (hence "terroriste")."" Ironically, this does precisely describe the behavior of a commenter here, but it's not me. :p
Thanks for your response. What I meant was that him not knowing Google tailors results has no bearing on his gripes about
1. not being able to link to the original article,
2. Google favoring Google+ posts in search results overall,
3. and the Google+ interface looking and working terribly.
I used poisoning the well because it was a related ad hominem: you're saying him being wrong in this one instance means he is wrong in these other unrelated instances.
Hmm... I certainly didn't mean to say he "is wrong." Given many claims I can't verify, I give the person the benefit of the doubt: I can't say if it's right or wrong so I'll assume the author is right. BUT, once I see one assertion that I know to be way off or highly uninformed, I revoke that "benefit of the doubt" on all the other claims. As I said it's unfortunate, but I can't assume the other assertions are any more valid than the one I know to be wrong/uninformed.
Horse flogging, stop now: If you were to tell my that northern Spain is rainy in the winter and Sweden has long dry summers, I'd take your word for it (I know little about the climates in those countries). BUT if you then told me snow is rare in winter in the US Northeast, which I know to be false, I ask myself "hmm... could his statements about the other places be equally inaccurate? He has demonstrated he does not know what he's talking about vis-a-vis local climate trends." Do you see what I mean? I'm not saying anything he wrote is true or false, it's just called into question by a demonstration of ignorance on the topic.
In this case, it might make the overall thrust of the article - that G+ is reducing the quality of Google search results - worthless, because it calls into question his credibility with regards to his ability to assess that quality.
It's like Yelp reviews of sushi restaurants that start with "I don't usually eat sushi, but..." ... the points involved may still be valid, but the overal credibility of the assessment is seriously impaired.
Google search results are beginning to bore the life out of me, and part of it has to do with inane google-plus entries in the search results.
WTF goog search? It seems like ever since Bing showed up and did that little left-hand column of filters, you started running around doing all sorts of "innovation" and it seems messy and quality control is just starting to suck wind. It's obvious you're tinkering with search results to promote your own services -- did you not think anyone would notice?
The main winning feature - they respect the + operator. I can string together a bunch of technical terms, and know that all of them will appear in my results. No doubts.
When google started going all fuzzy on me and returning things that sorta matched what I was looking for, I tried ddg and was happy to get exact matches.
I guess google is trying to satisfy the 80%, but I am in the 20% way too often.
That's really not what's happening here. I have a fairly unique name, and the basic problem is that when you search for a person's name, their personal website has a lower rank than any social network, so LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and G+ will often show up above someone's personal site. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how the ranking algorithm works.
I was complaining about Google search, the inclusion of google-plus entries, and how it's search results have taken a turn for the worse. In my experience, I've started to see more and more google plus entries in search results, and those results are often crappy.
But never forget that you're Google's product, not its customer.
And never forget that you're a ReadWriteWeb product, not its customer. You don't pay for the articles, your eyeballs are sold to RWW sponsors and partners.
Sigh. Hypocrisy much? This is how most of the web works. The constant attacks on Google or Facebook over it are ridiculous and tiring.
Everyone's a hypocrite. If you are not a hypocrite then you aren't saying anything interesting.
His point may be a tired one, but it's valid. We rely on Google for a lot and would do well to keep their allegiances in mind; all the more so because Google has traditionally been something of a benefactor to the web user (although the cracks are starting to show since they lose money on most of their free services). The reason his hypocrisy is irrelevant is because we don't have any illusions about ReadWriteWeb's allegiances, and even if we did we don't rely on them for shit.
I disagree, but I'll get to that. First, even if it was, it's repeated every single day to the point of exhaustion. And I still wouldn't have minded it, if this was a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on free services instead of a hate piece against Google (oh, and with a jab at Facebook).
Secondly, how's the allegiance when Sony pushed a rootkit up their consumer's, or tried to force them to sign away their rights? Or expensive Ubisoft games that stop working when your net connection goes down? Or what about SOPA lobbying, think that will benefit their consumers?
(Most) companies are loyal to themselves, their top managers and possibly their shareholders. Whether we're consumers or products is a red herring.
Your comment makes two distinct points. The main point, an assertion of hypocrisy, is not a valid disagreement, it's simply ad hominem tu quoque (which reminds, me, what's the latin for "things said in Latin aren't nearly as important as they seem?").
The second point, that "users are the product" is not a novel insight, makes perfect sense.
"anything said in Latin sounds profound". A recent
ironic Latin phrase to poke fun at people who seem to
use Latin phrases and quotations only to make themselves
sound more important or "educated".
This is a case in which the hypocrisy isn't just ad hominem, though. It's not just "you've done things you're now accusing others of!" The hypocrisy makes the author's argument apply to the author himself. That is, the argument the author is using to call Google into question applies to the author, thereby calling the author's authority and trustworthiness into question.
It's not just that the author is a hypocrite (which he is). It's that his argument sort of invalidates or at least incites suspicion of itself.
I'm torn on this issue. Before Google+ things were all over the place. Google had lots of great services, but they were poorly integrated, appeared and disappeared frequently, didn't work with apps users or vice versa. Now Google clearly is moving in a direction that promises better unification and clean-up of annoying edge cases.
The problem is that Google is losing track of its mission statement. It's seeing everything through the lens of social, which is not really in its DNA to begin with. I understand they don't want to dismiss a threat and get their lunch eaten, but they are throwing away a lot of what made them great. There's gotta be a happy medium between completely ignoring up-and-coming threats and throwing yourself so fiercely behind every trend that you end up sabotaging your own strengths that are the very weak points of your feared competitors.
And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+ post about the article than the article itself, because, and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump through hoops." Hoops like reading the article?
Sigh. No, jumps to comment. He likes the G+ links for the same reason I prefer HN over a simple RSS feed: because we can read the article and then comment easily in a good community.
The thing is: he can get to your article through the G+ link, but he can't get to the G+ comments page from your article. Therefore, the G+ link is richer.
(Not that I'm condoning that Google put his products above everything else. But to the G+ user, it's obviously better)
I like this point, but i wonder: how would people feel if, for instance, this HN conversation page ranked higher in Google search results than the actual RWW article?
In many cases, I find the HN comments just as insightful as the articles and at least the HN comments link to the article (doesn't usually work the other way around).
Perhaps the best situation would be if sites such as HN and + didn't take up their own slot but were listed subordinate to the original article (underneath it as an icon or a single-lined link).
You raise a good point. How many of us would comment on articles if the YC HN article feed if it was just a Google+ hangout with posted links? It sure seems that the barrier to entry would be lower to comment/discuss articles, however it is unclear if whomever the moderaters are here would have as much control.
Maybe this is obvious to everyone, but this is clearly Google's reactionary response to the assertion that social is the future of search. At some time in the past, there were a slew of articles espousing the belief that users would change from searching Google for their quandaries to a more personal exchange of information: asking someone you know.
I don't know what the underlying causes are, but I know three kinds of internet users:
A) Those who are capable of finding information using a search engine
B) Those who aren't capable of finding information using a search engine
C) Those who never even try; they just ask someone
It's easy to jump to the conclusion that the type A individuals are simply more "savvy", but my father, who hardly uses a computer, astounded me the other day by deftly searching out a fantastic manual for the carburetor on his Suzuki Samurai. My father is the type that would much rather be out de-gunking his carb than sitting at a computer. How is he so effective at search? I would have expected him to fall under the type C user category.
Google knows this scenario all too well. They're watching it play out in real time on the web. They have to get in front of it and provide solutions for all three types of users. For better or worse, giving Google+ pages "website" status in their results is their way of getting ahead of sites like Facebook and Quora.
Because Google favors G+ results in search, G+ is going to become a very powerful SEO tool and this is going to push publishers to become more and more invested in G+. Search is Google's advantage over Facebook and they are going to press this advantage to the max in order to take on Facebook.
I can't say I blame them but I do wonder if there are no real anti-trust issues here. How is this different than when MSFT used its OS dominance to promote its (late-to-the-party) browser? Google is basically using their own dominance in search to promote their (late-to-the-party) social network
I'm not sure that this is true. Typically, Google's results are tailored for you based on your circles and browsing history. This tweaking does not help people that aren't already your friends.
As an example, when I search for the article this article is about with the terms "wired world jury duty", I get the readwriteweb article (with a picture of Jon Mitchell beside it) as the first result. Only the 7th result is a Google+ page, and it's not explicitly advertised in any special way.
Google+ is about your social network, not "the" social network.
(I personally love seeing the "8 of your friends have +1'd this" on the search result page. Instant authenticity!)
>One commenter said, "It's an algorithm. Get over yourself." Typical, orthodox devotion to the Almighty Google Algorithm and its Infallible Wisdom.
That's a pretty disingenuous take on his comment. He's actually suggesting that algorithms are not perfect and that it's silly to infer intention from an arbitrary search result.
An algorithm exists to reduce arbitrarity, and until recently there wasn't much question about Google's success in that department. Now though, they are a competitor against other search results and - since the algorithm is in Google's possession - it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour.
it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour
No, it is not a "big leap", but that doesn't mean it's true. It is conceivable that the search results are organic, especially given the content. It is also conceivable that an impartial query could determine that a G+ page (or any other page) is more relevant than the source article.
I enjoy G+ and it's a huge usability improvement over fb, but there's another 'feature' I simply can't stand - that comments are visible in the stream under the post. I don't mind it under my friends' posts, but public popular profiles are another story. I'd like to progressively replace my twitter newsfeed with g+ profiles, but twitter gives me the comfort of not seeing opinions of some random people who like to comment on mainstream, the names who shared (I don't know some John Doe, why would I care he and +320 other people shared it?) and other noise. G+ is nice with the preview and lack of artificial 140char limit, but on twitter I can quickly scan the news without TMI I don't care about. example: http://i.imgur.com/8i8Az.png
I agree. I'd really like for there to be a "condensed" viewing option, where characters after 140 or so are truncated, and comments are hidden by default. Between that and their new controls for filtering how much of each circle ends up in your main stream, skimming G+ would become a lot easier.
Me, too. This is the crux of the problem. Allowing such huge posts and so many media types makes the stream impossible to scan. All the reactions the post is getting from G+ worshippers skip over this point, so I guess some people like being assaulted.
I don't mind previews longer than 140 or even bigger thumbnails. These is at least good display of valid information (a huge advantage over twitter), while +counters and strangers' opinions are pointless noise.
If they want to expose the number of +s why not line it up next to the [+1] button? Why take a full line just for one number? Likewise, the number of shares can be next to the share button.
Doesn't it give you a warm, soothing feeling that 320 people shared something you like? I think we all crave the social proof, no matter what you say...
"The quickest way to do that was to type 'jon mitchell jury duty' into the Google search bar.
To my astonishment, the post I wanted was not the first result. It was the third. Ranking above the result I wanted were two Google+ posts, one by me, and one by our webmaster Jared, that were nothing more than links to the article with brief comments."
So Google continues to use it's search muscle to promote it's own web services first, and yet some people still find this surprising.
They should have a section for G+ results which are equivalent of 'paid links' i.e. if their rank has been boosted then mark them as such. Otherwise they risk losing credibility on search results as the first page is not best match but unmarked advertising. While not evil per se, a little naughty.
> Culturally, it feels like walking into a religious school.
Your Google+ is made up of who you Circle. Just like the parties you go to are made up of the people who are at the parties you go to. If yours feels a certain way, it is because of who you Circle, and who you share posts with.
> It was familiar because I had written it. I didn't see any attribution, though, let alone a link to the story.
Rohit Shrivastava was a bad actor, in this case. Plagiarism is a terrible problem, and it's childish of you to blame Google+ for it. It is very easy to correctly link to an article, or share it. I agree that you have legitimate usability problems in many of the versions of Google+ that you used, but Rohit intentionally plagiarized you. You don't want attribution, you want links - that's understandable. Encourage people to use the tool the way it was intended to be used, don't blame the tool for existing.
> Google thought I would prefer to click through Google+ to find my article than to go straight to it.
Google thought that you and your friends are more interesting to you than the unwashed internet. In general, I think that's the correct choice. If I search "Steve Smith," I probably care a lot more about my friend, than any of the other Steve Smiths on the internet.
> One comment (to which Google+ allows no way to link)
I can't link to comments on your site either, Jon.
> Hoops like reading the article?
Hoops like Disqus, which you use allow people to comment.
> All this personalization and real-time stuff surely helps Google organize its content, but it's breaking search.
No, it's not. It's combining multiple searches into one interface. Searching your Google+ friends is one aspect of what a person could possibly want to search for. It sounds like you don't want to search the people you've Circled, and what they say. Other people do. If you want to search the internet with as little personalization as possible, your best bet is to open an incognito window.
> Remember when it was "minimal?" This is what it looks like now:
Look at your own site, Jon. No, seriously - go back and look at it for a moment. Sites got rich, with lots of content.
> But Google is different. Google used to be about organizing the world's information. It was a service to the entire Web. But this social tangent is changing that.
No, it's not. It's an outreach of that. It's a recognition that your view of the people that you know, and what they think, and how they're talking, is information - information that they're trying to help you organize, if you wish to use their tools. If you wish to use Google News. If you wish to use Android. If you wish to use Google+.
> Thanks to the Scoble effect, I have 8,000 encirclements on Google+. It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time.
There are people who want to know if you say anything publicly. If you don't want to say anything publicly, don't.
> I changed it, because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point.
Trolls?
Do you want people to care what you say, or don't you? Whose job is it to make sure that people think you're saying what you mean to say?
> Google+ Hates The Internet
Who is the troll? No, seriously - please define the word troll such that it includes the people who pointed out how ridiculous it was for you to say "because now I know Google is showing different Internets to different people", but excludes you, when you say "Google+ Hates The Internet."
> I hate Google+.
That's unfortunate. I wish it was a valuable tool for you, to help you organize how you're sharing content with people you know. If it's not, then oh well. My mom hates email. If she wrote an article like yours about how email is ruining cursive, she'd have a valid point. But the world is moving forward - and social interactions on the internet are going to spread everywhere. The only question is, what tools are we going to want to use?
Again, you have legitimate complaints about sharing links on some platforms. I hope they get fixed, over time. But your other complaints strike me as either being your own fault for how you used the tool, other people's fault for doing the same bad things that people have been doing forever, or minor differences of opinion about usability... or just lamenting the decline of cursive.
Your point-by-point answer focuses on the details of his post rather than his general point, and makes your answer both pedantic and accusatory. The way I read it, he only has a few main points:
1) Google+ makes it easy to unintentionally plagarize. Case in point, he wasn't able to easily get from a re-share to the original.
2) Google (the search engine) should NOT rank a Google+ post which is itself a clone of an actual article above the article itself. (Quote: 'But my query for "jon mitchell jury duty" didn't mean "Show me what my Friends+ are saying about 'jon mitchell jury duty.'" It meant "Show me Jon Mitchell's article about jury duty!"'.)
3) The Google+ web app is ugly.
4) Google (the company) is forcing you use your Google+ profile to identify yourself.
Summary) Google+ is a bad service.
You can disagree or agree with the above points, but simply quoting individual sentences doesn't lead to positive discussion.
I think Jon's post was a troll post, with some personal opinions (which are totally valid), a few technical criticisms (totally valid), but mostly "user error" and "nothing new."
The internet makes it easy to unintentionally plagiarize, the internet makes it easy to intentionally plagiarize. Jon makes the valid point that linking is better on the internet than quoting with attribution. He makes the invalid point that plagiarism of any form is Google+'s fault.
Specific ranking is a matter of opinion. Really what Google (the search engine) has to go off of is people's behaviors. If people legitimately like Google+ posts more than anything else on the internet, how would you have them behave?
Google (the company) is forcing you to use your Google+ profile to identify yourself to people who use Google Search, and Google News. Facebook is forcing you to use your Facebook profile to identify yourself when you post on Facebook. Yahoo! is forcing you to use your Yahoo! ID to use Yahoo mail.
Summary) Google+ is as valuable to you as you choose to make it.
Jon's post was designed to attract attention, not to lead to positive discussion. I responded in kind.
Totally fair. Bloggers are professional trolls, but, as I think you've conceded (correct me if I'm wrong), I only trolled to get people in the door, and there are substantive arguments waiting when you get there.
I just want to point out that you absolutely can permalink to Disqus comments. The timestamp is the link, just like on Twitter.
"Dad is ruining this family." That's a way to get people in the door, and there are substantive arguments waiting when you get there.
Isn't it a bit too negative, though? Dismissive? Whiny? Dishonest? Trollish?
There are people who want what's best for me, and there are people who attack me without reason. What are your feelings for Google+, Jon? As far as I can tell, you hate it, and you think it's ruining the internet.
"If people legitimately like Google+ posts more than anything else on the internet, how would you have them behave?"
So are you suggesting that might makes right or that if a site is popular it should be able to outrank the original content source just because it is popular?
Using this theory shouldn't Google check to see if Facebook has a similar post & rank that above the Google+ post whenever possible?
~~~
More seriously though, Google allows Google to create "relevancy" signals that are unique to certain pieces of content hosted on Google.com (or, at a minimum, over-represented among nepotistic sources), thus Google should aggressively discount that self-serving bias to error on the side of safety rather than setting up platforms that make it really easy to "accidentally" plagiarize content.
Obviously Google biz dev people realize the above self-serving bias & will do nothing to correct it, but it isn't a fact that should be ignored in public debate. At least not if we want to have an honest debate.
No. Troll means "Says things in order to rile people up, often to attract attention or amuse the troll". Bad arguments are one popular method of trolling.
1) Hm. I usually just click on "Ripples", and I see the entire _chain_ of shares. All the way back to the first poster. We can debate the discoverability of that feature, but it's definitely there.
2) That, again, is debatable. It's certainly imaginable that the discussion about his article is more interesting to people than the actual article. It's true for this article, too - we're discussing it here, not over on his site.
3) There's no accounting for taste.
Going from there to "Google+ is a bad service" at least deserves a "for Jon Mitchell" qualifier. "is going to mess up the Internet" is pure link bait.
"Have fun flaming, +Friends" at the closing of an article makes it pretty clear he's not really interested in any discussion anyways.
Actually, I think Jon's postwas deliberately inflamatory and laden with hyperbole. This response is welcome as it goes through each issue raised one by one.
I didn't intentionally plagiarize, I mentioned Jon Mitchell name on the post, before I shared the post which WAS presented better and then later shared by Mike Elgan did it became famous and the question of plagiarism arise before that no one really cared for that content.
In my defence... Rohit Shrivastava. The guy who unintentionally shared something that bombed big time.
On the internet, anything without a link is the new plagiarism.
I think Jon is completely overreacting, but I think the lesson we should all learn here is that linking is the polite thing to do. Attribution is no longer enough.
I should not have used the word plagiarism so carelessly, in association with your name. I apologize to you.
I don't really mind it as much since the intention was not wrong, infact on the contrary there were more discussion on the way we, me and Mike Elgan shared the story then as originally shared but Jon, I did mention his name on it though I WAS not sure about the fact if he WAS on Google+. I usually avoid links because not all users would want to get out of Google plus to read articles, I mean I as a user
never click on shared links on social site, that's just a behaviour pattern.
So, a self-proclaimed "technology evangelist" doesn't know how to properly credit someone? You are essentially saying you have no clue how Google search works?
I am technology evangelist not a google+ evangelist.
Also Jon Mitchell was always on the post, had he brought it with me I would mentioned him the original post itself. But I guess that was not Jon Mitchell's intention. He wanted this to be self promoting propaganda. Nobody cared about the post by Jon Mitchell until it was shared by ME & Mike ELgan.
It is childish to run a search company & create platforms for stealing content without checking for stolen content during the ranking process.
All the hard work on scraper sites doesn't apply so long as the content is hosted on Google.com???
As a search company your primary job is to deliver relevant search results to user. But as a secondary goal (every bit as important as wrapping everything in ads is) you need to ensure that the right people who are putting in human and financial capital get rewarded for their efforts. If you don't then the ecosystem you create becomes a ghetto.
Sites like Mahalo requiring the Panda update were funded by Google. Sure Google may have (eventually) solved that problem, but they created it too.
And in terms of "Google as scraper site" this isn't Google's first time around with this "accidental problem" either, as I distinctly remember them doing the same thing with Google Knol.
http://www.seobook.com/google-knol
Worse yet, when they did it with Knol they even had a check for how related the article was to other content that they posted right on the article, but still chose to outrank the original source.
http://www.seobook.com/images/knol-similar.png
And I publicly posted about the above Google+ scraper site issue last September.
http://www.seobook.com/the-doors
I know Google engineers read my blog & read that post, so PR spin that tries to blame another party is simply unacceptable over 3 months later.
> checking for stolen content during the ranking process
Google should check for stolen content during the ranking process, huh? That's a cool idea. How exactly would they do that? They find 5 web pages that all have the same content. How would they figure out who actually wrote it?
Perhaps if they had some form of trusted identity service, where you knew what a person's real name was. And if you could mark up your web page with attribution tags of some sort, so that they knew it was you who had said it.
But what if multiple people all do this, with the same content? Well, then maybe they would have to invent some kind of social graph, so that they could see which sources you trust most. Is it Linus Torvalds or Deeke McSlayton that you think is the most likely author of this post on the Linux Kernel?
And maybe when you search, they should rank results by how close someone is to you in your social graph.
>> checking for stolen content during the ranking process<<
>Google should check for stolen content during the ranking process, huh? That's a cool idea. How exactly would they do that? They find 5 web pages that all have the same content. How would they figure out who actually wrote it?<
Duplicate content filtering is nothing new.
Scraper sites (mostly Google funded) have been around even before Google+ started behaving like a glorified Mahalo-esq scraper site.
Document first crawl date is a great data point. And if a document links to another document with nearly identical content on it, then the document that is being referenced should probably rank higher, especially if the document was created earlier.
>Perhaps if they had some form of trusted identity service, where you knew what a person's real name was. And if you could mark up your web page with attribution tags of some sort, so that they knew it was you who had said it.<
You don't need real names to allow the link graph to work.
If the proposed service was NOT SELF-SERVING GARBAGE it could use the signal from that network to act as a signal to help rank the rest of the web, rather than sucking content into that network and OUTRANKING THE ACTUAL LEGITIMATE ORIGINAL CONTENT SOURCE.
>But what if multiple people all do this, with the same content? Well, then maybe they would have to invent some kind of social graph, so that they could see which sources you trust most. Is it Linus Torvalds or Deeke McSlayton that you think is the most likely author of this post on the Linux Kernel?<
And, once again, if the service wasn't SELF-SERVING GARBAGE it would create a signal that would apply to the rest of the web so that the ACTUAL LEGITIMATE ORIGINAL CONTENT SOURCE ranked before the house-hosted copy of it.
If I pull a chunk of content from a document and post it to Google+ it is pretty easy for you to put that citation in the SERPs (sorta like what is done with the Google+ votes on AdWords,
http://explicitly.me/how-to-get-a-celebrity-to-endorse-all-y...
but maybe in a less sleazy way).
>And maybe when you search, they should rank results by how close someone is to you in your social graph<
I have seen Google+ scraper pages that were not in any of my social circles outranking original content sources. That is part of what makes Google's behavior so outrageous.
>Oh wait... That's what Google+ already is.<
Except it's not.
Google was already one of the most heavily linked to websites before launching a social network & now Google+ is a PageRank funneling scheme
http://www.thegooglecache.com/white-hat-seo/how-to-buy-11788...
built around coming up with a cheesy excuse for Google to outrank original content sources for their content. If it were legitimate then the original content source would outrank the scraped version hosted on Google+
I realize that things are "not spam" when they are done by Google, but if the mechanics & impact are the exact same as what a spam scraper site does then the quacking animal is a duck.
I really wish that all technology challenges were as easy to overcome, as you think they are. That would be a beautiful world.
And then it would be easy to blame companies for having products that weren't perfect.
You could discount all of their efforts to try to make something new, original, and helpful - if it weren't absolutely perfect in its first iteration.
Let's all switch to the search engine that is perfect, and does everything you describe. Since it's so easy to do, clearly there must be a search engine like that. Which one is it?
But that's exactly what everyone is saying and the OP was trying to get at. The Google Search before this WASN'T broken with this 'imperfect product' like it is now. It worked really well and that's why it became #1.
You guys wouldn't have to do all this social rigging if you hadn't broken the web's tried-and-true link graph in the first place by making sites' feel like they had to 'hoard' pagerank and link-condom every outgoing link citation with a no-follow flag.
Unintended consequences for sure, as no-follow was well-intentioned and designed to help with blog comment spam, but unintended consequences can be a bugger. The result is still sad.
I'm sure there's no rolling back now to the 'old' google with 10 blue links, but I sure miss it.
Google introduced a game, and people figured out how to exploit it. Now they do everything they can to stop exploitation. It's a classic predator/prey relationship.
I don't think search is an easy problem. And (where it is not conflicted by self promotional interests) Google does an amazing job of indexing, filtering & scoring.
It is nearly unbelievable how good Google is in many areas. But that is also the problem...Google set the bar for itself rather high through its own performance.
A gold medal sprinter doesn't get a pat on the back for running a 23 second 100-meter dash.
When most companies put out a product they have to make it better than existing products to win marketshare. They can't put out something sort of average and then just arbitrarily promote it in the results through bundling (the way Google has with things like Checkout, places, product search, flight search, and +)
In the past Google did a much better job at search when it wasn't actively subverting itself.
If I searched on Google 3 or 5 years ago I didn't see Avis-rent-a-car ranking near the top of the search results for "Las Vegas hotels" ... it was only after Google decided to displace & monetize the organic results that Avis started ranking on hotel searches.
If the monetary incentive wasn't there, I am sure Google wouldn't be polluting their own search results, especially as they have put thousands of man-years in trying to do the opposite.
~~~
I also think the suggestion that a person should switch their default search engine is a bit inauthentic for 2 reasons:
1.) Google is spending BILLIONS of Dollars per year buying search & browser distribution + buying default search rights on 3rd party browsers
2.) even if I change my default search engine that personal choice wouldn't impact how other users search & for those other users the copy of copyright content hosted on Google.com will often still outrank the original source.
"It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time"
The above line really shows the author doesn't get Google+. While I do have my own grievances about Google+, the author doesn't make valid claims and shouldn't be making any because the author has not understood it.
I have to agree. Google+ is more of a "rich Twitter" than a "not-Facebook Facebook". People often mistake it for the latter, which I think may be a large part of the reason that so many people are ho-hum about it.
The plagiarizers response (in the link above) to why he copypasted rather thank linking:
You have a good point, I have only kept major content and not the whole article, at times I feel sharing a link just dissuades users from reading the post. Or plain & simple kills interest. I have though started making the change you have suggested few articles too long are again too daunting to read. But overall your feedback taken. Thanks for pointing this out.
"I feel sharing a link just dissuades users from reading the post." Wow.
The author's problem with G+ is not Google. His problem with G+ is bad curators who don't respect the creators of the content. As curation is my forte (I run a popular Tumblr news blog), Rohit Shrivastava's response really annoys me.
Tumblr, which shares a lot of cues with Google+ in terms of how content is shared publicly, has similar users to Rohit. I think it's bad form to post the entire contents of an article. Post small bits, the gist, but encourage people to keep reading if they like the basic idea. IMHO, Tumblr does a better job of encouraging users to respect content creators.
But the thing is, the problem is not unique to either of these platforms. How many random WordPress splogs steal RWW's content wholesale and just scrape the RSS feed? A lot. All the big tech sites have this problem. The difference with G+ is, Google seems to enable these copy-wholesale types better by giving them strong positions in search results. Tumblr is not as good at SEO (it makes up for it with design), so it's not as big an issue.
To users like Rohit, respect the content creators. It sucks when they get screwed because you couldn't stop after a single paragraph or rewrite the piece.
It's true. I'm much more likely to read a black of text that's already loaded inline with the thread I'm reading, than I am to click over to another page to read the same thing.
> And it hit me: True Believers of the Holy + might see this re-shared Google+ post of an almost-unattributed rip of my story instead of the original. Google+ hates the Internet!
Stopped reading here. This is a waste-of-time troll article.
Google isn't the internet and if it fails , it's google's problem not ours( or internet's ?). There is other alternatives to google's services, if one finds the others better than google, he is free to use them. Seriously, just don't use it if you hate it, that's the best response that you can give.
I don't use G+ because of the "Real Name Policy". It's my choice to give my real name or not and Google don't respect my choices. I have FB, e-mail (yay!), blog, skype etc... I have everything to communicate with my friends or with the world ! I don't need some Nazi to give me an advice like "If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It"....
I'm sorry, but for a large amount of people who only use Google for search, Google is the Internet. That's why I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago, but people like me are a tiny minority.
Now speaking as a web publishing, if people started to copy-and-paste my articles into Google+ and these entries got higher rankings on Google search than my original content, I'd be pretty upset too. It isn't a question of what search engine I use in this instance, but what the majority of everyone else is using.
Google can be a giant now but it isn't mean that it's invincible. Google isn't innovative since "Gmail", keeps making mistakes (buzz etc) and make people angry. Nowadays people aren't royal to the products and even "normal" users can change their habits (remember icq -> msn transformation)
Can you elaborate on...well, everything, in your post? What do you mean "keeps making mistakes." That Google, like everyone else, makes mistakes, and will continue to do so until the end of the world? Or that it is making a higher-than-expected number of mistakes?
That services either acquired or created by Google. They were valuable but now closed . For example : Buzz has fascinating technology behing it, but still failed. Google didn't understand users ( there was not so much people because of the invitation thing and mass was important ), user wasn't able to understand "What the heck is the Google Buzz" ( communication error by google ? ).
As for G+, Eric Schmidt's response wasn't the nicest response to give the users who complains about real name policy. And again "elite g+ club" enthusiasm was a mistake, like buzz, because a social network means nothing without your friends ( this time they realised their mistake and act before it's too late ).
DejaNews - I was excited by Google buying this. All those news posts, with a good search engine in front. What could go wrong?
And then clueful users didn't want their words used for ads, so they started x-no-archiving their posts. And then eternal September really took off with vast numbers of people using Google Groups.
Usenet was dying a slow horrible death and there are lots of reasons for that (Dutch dumpers; stealth binaries; rushed "standards" like Yenc; etc) but Google didn't help (and probably made things a lot worse) when they borked DejaNews.
Ask one of your friends to flag your profile for having a non-you picture or a fake name. I will all but guarantee you get a g+-esque nastygram within 48 hours.
I think Facebook relies entirely on user flagging. Just because you haven't been caught breaking the ToS doesn't mean you're not breaking it.
A nastygram at least tells you what's happening, and I believe Facebook has an appeals process. G+ will just silently remove it, at least in the profile picture case.
Out of desperation, Google's gone evil. For all of the shady things that Google had done in the past that people said were evil, nothing approaches the infection of their search service with Google+ rankings. Google had always largely maintained the integrity of their search product which, despite minor adulterations added over the years, was still essentially based on little more than a strict, normative interpretation of the HTTP and HTML standards. By doing so, they maintained the integrity of the company itself. The standards now take a back seat to Google+.
The author is spot on about this. It's evil. In my estimation, it's disrespectful to users. And it therefore creates a huge opportunity for Bing, et al. What remains to be seen is whether, on balance, this degradation of the search service is significant enough to drive away a substantial number of users.
"And he goes on to say that he'd rather see a Google+
post about the article than the article itself, because,
and I quote, "I can comment here without having to jump
through hoops." Hoops like reading the article?"
The hoops I think he is talking about here is having to typically set up an account on a third-party site to comment. I've not commented on a blog post or article because I don't feel like figuring out a username/password (and then remembering it), doing the typical confirmation steps, etc., just to give some feedback. Some have Facebook integration to save you a step but I, like others, don't particularly like having every comment I ever make aggregated by Facebook.
This is not actually a Google+ problem. It's a social networking problem. Facebook.com, linkedin.com, and google.com are all preferred over anyone's personal site.
My name is a good case study because it is, as far as I know, unique. Google is currently doing the "right thing" but previously it had been returning my Facebook page above my personal website. That's broken, but it has nothing to do with G+, and everything to do with the way all search engines rank people. (Bing does the "wrong thing" with respect to my name, and shows LinkedIn first. DDG also throws in two random things from years ago in before getting to my modern website.)
Search is a hard problem, and the result is subjective.
As well as the user experience being crap, there are the issues of Google silently removing swearing from your profile, and kicking you off if they don't think your name is real.
Lol, I just Googled "jon mitchell jury duty" myself and the first 4 links were 1) this post about google+, 2) google+ page 3) google+ page 4) the original article. So writing about this problem has only made things worse!
While I agree Google is deprecating the URL, as indicated by the removal of the Shared in Reader features, isn't this just a case of somebody cutting and pasting without attribution? G+ can't do anything about that.
Yargh. OP searched on his name plus "jury duty" and is complaining because Google returns two G+ hits with his name in the title before getting to the article he wrote about jury duty?
I believe that Google itself will end up being the 'Google killer'.
I used to enjoy google products because they had very little branding footprint (or maybe I just thought they did), but now I'm constantly trying to avoid branded/sponsored content in order to get the real thing I wanted.
I'll be slowly migrating away from google products from now on because of that. Like the post puts it, I'm tired of being the product. If search and social web won't change it's ways, then I'll be changing away from it.
It seems like most people here are jumping on this guy's throat about minor problems in what he wrote. Let me instead back-up one of his points with more evidence:
First off: I am a huge Google fanboy, I'm a full-time Android developer and Google scholarships even helped pay for my college. It seems that every time I say anything bad about Google anywhere on the Internet people call me an Apple fanboy so I just wanted to state that.
> Google's Weird Attempt At Social
Let's take a look at how many different ways I can do a simple chat with my friends using Google products on my Android Ice Cream Sandwich device.
Google Voice - My main way of text messaging.
Google Talk - My main way IM client
Google+ Messaging (Formerly known as Huddle) - A mobile only way to communicate with my G+ friends.
Here's where it gets weird:
Google Voice - Anything I can is instantly synched with the Google Voice app on my iPad, Google Voice on my browser, the third party Google Voice app I use on my computer and my phone.
Google Talk - Anything I do is synched up to Google Talk on my computer or any place I'm logged in, which also means all my Google Talk conversation logs can be found using the GMail app on my phone.
Google+ Messaging - Boom. Say something to any of my friends on here, unable to look back at the messages unless I get on my phone again. "Oh, where did Kyle say we're meeting up tonight? I should print directions" Oh, my phone's out of battery and charging. Well, there goes that plan.
The craziest thing is that if I want to do Google+ Hangout (worst name I've ever heard for any product) I have to either use the website or the Google+ Messaging app. That's right, if I want to do a Hangout on my phone (a feature they're really pushing with their ICS video ads) I have to do it in a self-contained application that will not reflect any changes on the website. How does this make any sense?
It's even worse when you think about it. If I want to do a video chat with my friends using ONLY Google products I actually have two different choices! I can either Google+ Hangout with them using the Messenger application on my phone (try to comprehend that sentence, seriously.) or I can use Google Talk's video chatting (the feature they were pushing very hard with Honeycomb). Why couldn't they just integrate group messaging and video chatting right into Google Talk? I already have a fully functioning video chatting application on my phone that doesn't require people to be on a website or their phones to use it! I can use Google Talk's video chat to talk to anyone using Google Talk anywhere!
I know that Google's Weird Attempt At Social is due to buying so many different companies and not consolidating them, but it's not anything close to an ideal user experience.
Sidenote:
As soon as my Sprint contract is done I'm switching over to an iPhone, iOS 5's text + iMessage all in one application is a wonderful implementation of what Google should be doing with all of their conversational products.
Warning, OT: none of the apps you mention actually synchronise anything. Apart from Google+ Messaging, all of the apps you mention access a single (central) source of content.
Google+ Messaging, on the other hand, creates content locally, rather than centrally. Syncing content implies sharing it between each device that needs it. That may or may not include a central server.
I also enjoy using G+. and as the writer said that he wanted it to get off his chest, that's what he did. so no problem...keep writing.. People will do what they want to do...
For a lot of purposes I have switched to Wikipedia. Automated web search simply isn't the right tool these days for many of the niches in which Google got its foothold in the '90s.
This sort of post is further evidence that whenever G+ adds some new feature or publishes new numbers a PR attack is imminent. Usually you can tell straight away by the hyperbolic headlines.
What a bunch of link bait... The title is blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It should have been "My free Google service is messing up my free Google service"
The beauty of the internet is and always has been that if you don't like something its really way to switch to something else.
The core issue isn't just how one free Google service interacts with another free Google service, but how when combined they undermine the copyright & revenue potential for a content creator by displacing that person's work with Google's copy of that person's work.
If you are not in business (and don't care if your favorite non-Google sites eventually disappear) then it is no big deal.
For everyone else it has the potential to be a big deal.
If publishers do not complain about it now then it will get worse. How bad does it have to get before the complaints are valid to you?
To me Google isn't evil by any means, but it has way too many smart people all trying to jump on whatever the latest popular bandwagon might be. It's definitely getting a "McGoogle" feel to it. Whatever is getting popular on the web, some little Googlite is busy working to assimilate it. I like Google a lot. The author has a point. At some point enough is enough. I think he exaggerates to a much greater degree than is necessary. So far.