I have made this case before, but I will make it again.
The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "unsee" those results.
So, searching the world's largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?
What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can't understand how AdWords is ethical.
The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn't hold weight, as there is no "purity of information". Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc.
Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources.
That doesn't make it wrong. There's huge value there. Just the same, money is not evil. It's a mechanism for storing value. It's imperfect, and abused, and certainly not the only measurement of value. Keeping those value systems in balance is the key.
I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech.
The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out.
Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking. Let's just spell this out:
money !== relevance, therefore any influence of money on search engine rankings is, by definition, noise.
Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square.
Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views.
In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing people's minds, as it rarely does that.[1] Advertisements and the like usually serve to give voice to the views people already hold, and inform them of things they were not aware of. An advertisement will never convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works.
Try to sell a bad product? It's done all the time. Heck, a tube of wax called "HeadOn" managed to sell pretty well with an ad campaign that stopped just short of claiming it helped headaches.
The fact that one product which seems to be a placebo may have made some money does not disprove my point; I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product, just that it is vanishingly unlikely. If you think that selling diluted ingredients in wax is an easy way to make money, please go ahead and try your hand at it.
My position is that advertising a bad product is a very bad bet; the fact that someone has won the lottery does not mean that anyone should play it.
Of the major companies out there, almost all of them made money from bad products. McDonald's food is so unhealthy it makes you ill almost immediately when it's even edible. Comcast is hated almost universally for their crap internet and crapper customer service. Fox News makes money by actively deceiving their customers. These aren't exceptions to the rule: these are the rule. They're leaders in their industries.
I disagree with you on every point here. McDonalds provides a consistent array of food and beverages across many countries, and many people (especially children) enjoy the experience in their restaurant. Comcast is often the only provider of Internet services, and in other instances provides faster or cheaper service than their competitors. Fox News is like every other news channel, in that it informs their viewers with the information the viewers want in a format they enjoy for a price they accept. Fox News is no more biased than CNN, NBC, or just about any other news sources; there is no arbiter of truth, and most of the perceived bias comes from the stories each outlet chooses to pursue.
I say this as a person who hasn't gone to McDonalds in 11 years, has no access to Comcast, and doesn't watch television news. The fact that you or I dislike a product does not make it 'bad'.
>The fact that you or I dislike a product does not make it 'bad'*
Yes. Bad requires either a quantifiable judgement (McDonalds fares poorly in healthiness, nutricients, calories and lots of other metrics), or a qualitative one, based on some sort of agreed ypon "what constitutes good food" standard -- which in the end comes from what vision one has for the world.
Even if the latter is not objectively verifiable (that a steak at Peter Luger is better than a Chipotle one for example), I still find a society where isn't enough common agreement to label McDonalds as bad, a sad one.
My definition of a bad product would simply one where the purchaser would not have bought it given the information they learned after acquiring it. A simple way to measure how good a product is would be to see whether the product is recommended by the purchaser, or whether they buy similar products from the same brand/source again.
Ah so you don't mean good and bad in terms of morality or the harm it will bring to the user but solely upon consumption preference. By this definition crystal meth can be considered a good product.
If these things are so bad, why do people consume them?
Is everybody else but you so stupid as to be consuming these obviously 'bad' products?
Just because you think something is bad, doesn't mean it is bad. I would have no trouble selling something you think is the 'worst shit in the known universe' as long as everybody else thinks it's pretty good.
People consume bad products because they are in bad circumstances. Maybe they are too stressed to cook and can't afford a healthier alternative, and then become addicted to the sugar content (McDonald's), maybe the company has a monopoly on something people need for work and school so people have to buy it (Comcast), or maybe human psychology makes us susceptible to certain kinds of deception (Fox News).
Claiming that a product can't be bad if people consume it is incredibly naive.
>I never said it was completely impossible to make money by selling a bad product,
from last comment in the thread -
>An advertisement will _never_ convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works.
"We just had a misunderstanding, I thought I lived in the U.S.A, the United States of America, and actually we live in the U.S.A, The United States of Advertising -- freedom of speech is guaranteed, if you've got the money!"
> Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech.
How is this not implicitly the case with "only organic" search results? PageRank was built off of the idea that a website's value was based off of inbound links. Back in the day, high school kids could get $50/hour (in 1990s dollars) to build and upload a simple webpage for a local business. Money has always been a factor in influence, before and after search engines.
> It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking
Again, this purity is an illusion -- the things that can be objectively ranked are things in which the metric is simple, i.e. alphabetical order. Stray from that and rankings are no longer "pure" by any stretch of the imagination. Not even early PageRank -- the many easy ways to game it, and the many ways that PageRank has evolved to avoid such gaming, should make that assertion self-evident.
Money is absolutely part of the formulation of relevance. It's just not the whole equation. Nor is word-matching (altavista), nor is popularity (google). But each is relevant.
Someone (advertiser) is paying money because they believe they have information relevant to you. How is that categorically different than the blogger/webmaster who's paying money (time/hosting) because they believe they have information relevant to you?
All information has a cost associated with it. And that cost bears some significance on the value of the information. Measuring and weighing that significance relative to other inputs is the beauty of an effective system.
At the risk of sounding flip: Install adblock. If this "purity" is really that important to you, you're about 3 clicks away from banishing the paid advertising and only having organic results show.
I use AB+ AND NoScript(Google-free whitelist) and my results aren't even organic-ish. I searched for cabling a few weeks back & monoprice.com's first result was on page 12. First 3 or 4 pages were almost exclusively amazon & ebay. That's google's algo, sans adsense.
And those are organic results, not paid ones. The algo has learned that when people search for a product, having results from the most common places up front is more relevant.
I don't think sponsored results are a big deal, as long as it's transparent, and "pure" results are easily accessible too (and they are).
We live in a society where advertising exists. I'm not saying I like advertising, but it is a basic skill to be able to differentiate advertising from content. If some people can't tell the difference, I don't think that's a very strong argument for saying the practice should be banned.
Having some cruft around my search results is a small price to pay for a free service that basically powers modern society.
Power buys presence. Whether that power is national and the presence armed excursions, or the power is political and the presence is your ideas being heard from your pulpit. Money is just a proxy for other types of power. This has never changed.
Then you can keep claiming your results are non-biased long after it stop being organic as these things tend to do with fresh people and their friends with same mindset. I've come to dismiss everything that claims to be neutral. DailyMail, Guardian, the sheets of toilet paper, all used for the same purpose.
PageRank is of ... anthropically/existentially significant importance to the continuation of Google as a going concern.
You can't trust people to be transparent about things that are anthropically significant and that they realize are anthropically significant. Now throw in that it's legally protected as proprietary...
It's just one of those things...
The fact that Stallman cannot or will not accept this troubles me. I view this as a mechanism for choosing continued disappointment on his part. But it does serve as part of a dialogue.
If the queries were totally anonymized to protect it from the government itself, and the information provided was thorough and unbiased, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.
If it were done the way China does it, I would.
A service offered by the government is really only as trustworthy as the government that's offering it. Do you have a problem with Xinhua News Agency? What about PBS or the BBC?
Quite frankly, it might not be the worst solution. Britain has a government-sponsored TV station which is generally pretty well-regarded, for example...
So we'll all be happy to do our searches through NSA.gov? Or would you prefer the alternative, google.nsa.gov?
We can even make searches like FOIA requests, where if you search something they don't like, they redact the results you wanted, and if you don't phrase the search correctly, they just give you nothing.
When something is paid for directly (and consequentially cannot be afforded by some), it will be biased towards the opinions of its backers, and thus, the wealthy.
And when it's paid for by the government, it will be biased towards the opinions of government officials, their backers, and thus, the wealthy (or the influential, in a political system where money has less influence than in the US).
>The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money.
That's not what he asked though. Generally libraries don't have special "sponsored" books, and don't control and push certain books to people more than others.
Those libraries that do, fall into 2 categories:
1) Promoting widely recognized cultural works (e.g. with events like "Mark Twain Year", etc).
2) Promoting some ideological agenda (e.g. a creationist library in a religious school).
The latter are dangerous.
Google, besides the opportunities for pushing its own corporate/political agenda, has also financial motives for pushing ads/brands.
Besides there's another key difference: there are thousands upon thousands of libraries (and people don't care much about them anyway). There's only one Google (and the majority of web users use it everyday).
>That doesn't make it wrong.
I wonder what some people DO find wrong. Apart from things like cannibalism and hurting kittens, which we all probably agree on.
You're missing the point that organic results are also hugely influenced by financial motive. The underlying concept is that all information is biased.
A system that incorporates bias is vastly more useful than one that ignores it.
> The underlying concept is that all information is biased.
Right, but why add more bias if we don't have to?
Organic results are influenced by the content of the pages as well as their relationship to other pages. Sure, people spend thousands of dollars on SEO to make their page more attractive to Google, but at least they're trying to fit Google's idea of what makes a useful web page. With AdWords, money is directly influencing rank. Why is it good for Google to incorporate more financial bias than it has to?
Read the original PageRank paper. Page and Brin themselves acknowledge that (while they were still academics):
[L]ess blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors.
Google absolutely does this - for example, to a site that I own.
So it's not just theory: Google has put it into practice.
In this case, my site is subject to the "subtract a factor from results from competitors", but that's equivalent to Google's preferred site buying rank.
Unless you're talking about AdWords, it is not possible to pay Google in any way to improve the ranking of your site.
This was obvious back when Yahoo, WebSpider (Spidercrawler), AskJeeves, and AltaVista did it.
It was ridiculous that you would type in "Delta Airlines tickets" and the results would go: United Airlines, TWA, Fly By Night Corp, Rickety Rickshaw Airlines, We Barely Stay in the Air, and DuctTape & Flights.
The results were so bad that when Google came along and used the PageRank feature to deliver information, it was a godsend (Thanks God). Try searching for something on Google today and there is a high likelihood that you find or at least get close to it.
Just remembering how bad it was back in the day until the web search engines got their act together and became Bing and Google.
Has Google ever officially stated that they've done away with the old practice of buying rank? The same thing happens now, just unofficially. Employees of Google manipulate its search rankings, even if there is
no "official" way for companies to purchase rank.
Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?
Because it's the only practical and effective way anyone has every come up with of building such a system?
This isn't a comment on the ethical nature - just that I don't believe there was any point where you could choose between commercial drivers to the growth of the "information system", and any other approach that would have resulted in similar growth. If the commercial explosion on the web hadn't happened, we wouldn't have anything like the same scope as we do now. For good or ill.
It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence. So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence. I wish there was a third way that we could crowdfund a platform without making it beholden to any specific set of donors.
"It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence"
That wouldn't fix the problem. Ultimately, somebody has to decide & implement what goes into the ranking algorithm that determines the search results that people see. That person has significant power, and will be both decried by intellectuals who feel like they're on the losing edge of the power dynamic, and courted by donors/lobbyists/etc. who wish to gain some of that power. If it were funded by taxation, you would see the same distrust that the FBI and NSA face today (both of which are funded by taxation). If it were crowdfunding, it'd be exactly the same problem that Google faces today - Google's AdWords auction essentially is crowdfunding, and if you give Google money, you get to influence the ads shown on some subset of queries. (Try it - you can get started in 10 minutes for a few bucks.)
What would fix the problem is if people didn't blindly trust Google, and instead researched in-depth on a number of competing search engines. The article alludes to this - Google's power comes from monopoly, and competition is the way to negate that power. But this only fixes the specific case of Google - if you broke up Google into many competing search engines, then Facebook would simply become the 800 lb. gorilla of how people get their information. Break up Facebook, and it becomes Reddit. Last century, it was ABC/NBC/CBS, and before then, Pulitzer and Hearst (who were a lot more unethical than Google was...Hearst started a war so he could sell more papers).
You can't avoid power, you can only understand it, and perhaps manipulate it so it serves yourself better.
It's at least theoretically possibly to configure the search engine to their liking, or the search algorithm would be open-source and vetted democratically.
So yes, you cannot avoid power, but you can distribute it or shine a light on it.
The essential point I want to make is that just because you have a right to something, does not mean you have a right to the material implementation of that right. (Because that would mean you had a right to the labour and property of others, i.e. a right to violate their rights).
You have a right to free speech. You do not have the right to publish your opinions in any outlet of your choice (because that would violate the publishers' rights). Even if you lived in a small town with only one newspaper, and they wouldn't print your letters to the editor, it still wouldn't be right for you to compel them to print your letters by legal means. They built the audience, its their right to communicate with them as they see fit. (This isn't censorship, because you're still free to hand out flyers in the street, start your own newspaper, sue the existing newspaper if they commit libel, etc).
Your argument is essentially that because Google is "the world's largest information system", we shouldn't be "letting" them put whatever content they want on their pages, for whatever reason they want. The implication is that if someone builds something really useful, that thing should become public property. (People are saying the same thing about Twitter).
AdWords is absolutely moral because a privately-run service needs a source of funding. (I should note that I do think many PPC ad networks are exploitative and immoral, but that's not the case for Google).
Unless someone sets up a nonprofit search engine run by donations, the only alternative is a public, state-funded search engine -- that's the only way to get an "information system not biased by money". On the unlikely possibility that the state could build and maintain such a system, it would be the most powerful tool for potential censorship imaginable.
Personally I've found Google to be frustratingly difficult to search in recent years. I can't find articles & essays that I remember fondly because the namespace is so polluted with Great SEO.
Have you fond a better search engine? I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google, where I find what I was looking for.
Of course, one can always suggest that I am just better attuned to Google (I have Google Fu from long experience with Google and wrongfully expect DuckDuckGo Fu to be the same skill and have not developed DuckDuckGo Fu).
I'd suggest spending some time learning DDG. It is a very good engine once you get used to it.
Another trick I use with Google, especially when I'm searching things that are outside of my usual interests, is clearing my cookies. Best I can tell, this makes it skip the statistical model of me that, say, suggests 'logging' is more about daemon output than about killing trees.
Now if only all the engines didn't have such a bias towards "new" material. My major search-related frustration over the last while has been how buried things become over time, especially if they share identifying lexemes with things in the news.
There's been a dozen things I've tried to search on HN, for example, looking for keywords and there's literally dozens of other links with similar topics that prevents me from finding what I looked for.
Various programming questions. Don't have an example right now, sorry.
No, DDG often fails me too. Especially when searching for programmer things -- sometimes what I really meant to search for is StackOverflow.com + any "programming blog.
Search for programmers?
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the internet is a great idea but the implementation sucks and there's no easy way to fix it.
I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you.
Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately. Reality is for sale.
Good news: I agree that this is a problem.
Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize.
If communication of information isn't democratized, you can't have a democracy. It shouldn't be a surprise then that we don't have a democracy, but an oligarchy [1].
Mind you, this is just one of many factors that makes a true democracy impossible as they currently exist. [2]
>You are ultimately responsible for your own perceptions.
Would you consider a Muslim born and raised in the Maldives, where the state and populous are all Muslim and questioning the status quo can result in severe injury and incarceration, personally responsible for their views even though they are denied alternative perspectives?
What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence.
But it is biased! The card catalog might be an unbiased representation of what the library has- but have you considered that what the library has is biased by monetary influence? What the book costs. Whether the book is demanded (advertising). Jacket design (you grab the most interesting-looking book).
The flaw to libraries is their naturally limited capacity.
But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions.
Luckily, the world does not have to conform to your standards. What you are arguing for is authoritarianism, that your opinion be forced upon actors. This kind of thinking is exactly what erodes the basis for innovation and liberty. Google is the top search engine because their results are just unmatched in quality. If you don't like the results of google, then visit another search engine - or better, create a better one that conforms to your puritan principles. But please don't tell others what to do, and for goodness' sake, please don't involve the state and more legislation in this.
Maybe because libraries are not private compaines? I mean, you mention competitors not having the revenue to crawl an increasingly complex web. But how else do you see them being able to facilitate this without a similar advertising strategy to Google?
I just have little patience for complaints about free products like Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. They cost you nothing but time and attention - both of which you have complete control over.
The ads you see for a given search are highly likely to be profitable (since it is so easy to track and manage). That means people are clicking on those links, and a reasonable fraction of those clicks are being converted. From this, I would like to posit that the profitability of an ad is directly related to the product or service's relevance/value to the user (barring deceptive advertising).
Lets also assume that people buying the ads are willing to increase their ad bid until the cost per acquisition approaches equilibrium with the expected lifetime value. Over time, this should result in only the most profitable ads being displayed. This implies that only the most valuable/relevant ads are being displayed, given the point previously posited.
Thus, over the long term, assuming a fairly efficient market and some restriction on deceptive advertising, the ads can be thought of as an alternate form of result, with a very direct, user-centric ranking metric.
Would it be more palatable if the SERPs were divided into two columns, one being "web search results" and the other being clearly labeled "product/service search results"?
Just because a product or service is profitable it doesn't mean it's a good product or it's not a scam, and in the case of Google results the companies can make the honest reviews of the product rank lower or basically hide them in the second page of results with their paid ads, which is making it harder for the consumers to figure out the real quality of the product before buying.
Of course not every organic result is honest but ads can make it worse.
I don't think it's so bad, and more importantly I don't see the solution. Google does what it does to make money, and ads are how it does that. If there's a more ethical solution it'll only be implemented if it's also more profitable. All that is fine with me; Google doesn't have any obligations to me or you or anyone besides their shareholders.
"I don't see any problem with the way the world's most powerful system for freeing the mind has been co-opted by for-profit enterprise. I am ignorant of any possible alternatives. Capitalist businesses sell goods and services in exchange for money. I accept that no effort will be made to find more ethical alternatives unless it can produce even more money. We as a society have no control or influence over what individual actors do, and thus no discussion of possible alternatives is necessary."
Your highlighting of "for-profit enterprise" takes me back to old Catholic anti-usury biases. They are rather juvenile. I'm also unsure of how you managed to reduce "capitalism" to the mere monetary exchange economy, which completely evaporates all substance out of the already butchered term. I also hope your idea of "ethical alternatives" doesn't involve what amounts to state corporatism, which all the progressives and Galbraith types are enamored with for some reason. The modern left knows nothing of Proudhon, Bakunin or Kropotkin. It's all top-down planning for them.
I don't believe I've said anything about why I dislike for-profit enterprise controlling the world's most valuable institution, so I'm unsure how you could correctly infer my reasons for feeling that way. As far as capitalism, my statement was factually correct and I made no attempt to fully describe the institution. In fact I disagree that capitalism equates to the monetary exchange economy, as the latter has existed far longer than the former. I've made no recommendations for what the alternatives might be, only mocked the idea that, since the parent can't think of anything, we shouldn't ask the question. In fact your assumption that I am for centralized State Capitalism (to use Richard Wolff's definition of Capitalism) and top-down planning is again false. I subscribe to Marx's suggestion that workers should own the means of production, and do a reasonable amount of reading to support that belief.
In short, most of what you've assumed is incorrect.
The Bakunin critique of Marx is then relevant, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is trivially hijacked by vanguardist interests. Moreover, Marx's diagnosis of capitalist breakdown in Vol. III of Capital has failed the test. The scenario of rising organic composition of capital (ratio of constant capital to variable capital) triggering a falling rate of profit and a growing reserve army of labor has not played out. Marxists scrambled to revise the thesis. Lenin and Luxemburg proposed imperialism. Rudolf Hilferding spoke of "finance capital". Ernest Mandel himself identified a stage of "late capitalism" borrowing in turn from Sweezy and Baran's "monopoly capital". Prebisch and Furtado developed the dependency theory model of international trade. The interpretations of capitalism are so numerous that Marxism has become incoherent in explaining it, aside from the problems of historical materialism as a method of historiography with its overt bias to economic determinism.
Ideal scenarios of worker cooperatives and revolutionary syndicalism haven't at all materialized. Instead, it has led to platformist organizations that are the laughing stock of anarchism. Don't forget that Georges Sorel's idea of national syndicalism developed from his Marxist revisionism ended up giving us Spanish and Italian fascism.
People's moral, values, tastes obviously come from artificial (is that the right word?) sources, so where do we want them coming from? Do we want people inundated by so many contradictory opinions that they become paralyzed like Hamlet? Do we want people to be able to argue in favor of any opinion and therefore be unable to be captured by any opinion? (In which case, we should have all students participate in National Forensics League's Cross-Examination debate.)
Mind control is not new, what is new is having so many people try to control each individual mind in so many ways. In the Egypt of ~1500 B.C. or in the society that produced the Epic of Gilgamesh, there were so few voices heard per brain that many thoughts were "heard" in the brain with the voices of those who first uttered them to that brain. Now we hear words from so many voices (and read them silently) such that they don't have a particular voice in our brain. Each individual command or religious proclamation was much harder to critique or resist. Power, including monetary power, has always influenced salience of information and always will.
We need a positive conception of what we want—a purely negative conception that just wants no outside influence on another's thoughts... makes no sense. It means no schools, no media, no habitat / creature interaction whatsoever!
Your local library does have a biased card catalog based on what officials decide to buy and keep. Even donated books are subjected to processes and must be approved by staff.
If adwords is unethical, how should we expect Google to operate? If people paid for search, they could get more helpful results, but how are they going to get the resources to pay for it? Most people no longer pay sustainable prices for news, software, music, or videos. Is that ethical?
Page and Brin: "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines."
One could read this in a unwonted way: sometimes internet companies have to provide an intentionally poorer service in order to get the revenue needed to provide any service at all.
Money !== relevance, but money is a strict subset of relevance; it is certainly not noise. I'm more worried about its influence being against my interests than being a more chaotic / passive obstacle to my interests.
We shouldn't talk about money buying speech without an eye to what buys money. Should everyone get equal time on the networks and equal space in the newspapers until they look like comments sections / public access / twitter / facebook, too? Until Donald Trump looks like a moderate? If there's no centralized propoganda forming a "Common Core", then there's no basis for a society and Babel is the result. So things need to be balanced somehow. I feel afraid, too, about Google. Obviously Eric Schmidt and I are not equals, because he is the chairman of the Defense Innovation Advisory Board that will revamp the DOD's technology, he is the head of The Groundwork that is the tech heart of the Hillary campaign, and he is the head of the company that controls what we get to look at through the internet.
"So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence."
Well, and the government is heavily influenced by money through campaign donations and the Clinton foundation (and similar groups) and the government heavily influences money through grants and stimulus and prosecutions and fines and regulations and so on. What's important is to try to diversify the influence and try to spread it out and get enough "blood" flowing to the parts that will benefit from that. These elements will always be in flux and we need to figure out what we want the system as a whole to look like.
"Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior."
I don't know what you consider ethical or if you know what you consider ethical. How is money not just a tool? It's a counting mechanism, but it is also a religious talisman. What bothers you is that money is given to some things that you like and some things that you don't like. It's good that you feel a difference between utility and the ethical, but that presumably would always be there unless you equate the two. That's why it makes sense to say "more money should be spent on this" or "people should stop spending money on this" but not criticize the "influence of money" since money is an exchange medium not a power in-and-of-itself... it's lack of power in-and-of-itself is it's most defining characteristic. For example, candy doesn't make good money because if you get a craving you might eat it. The system is always firstly in people's minds / thoughts / ideas / whatever drives their behavior. That and software. Oh sure, the system is in everything but software is what's most efficiently changed.
Re: the "Omelas" bargain:
I don't get how the reference is relevant. Who's the kid in this scenario? I do think that pleasure is often bought at the expense of pain and that pleasure often sows the seeds of pain... Certainly a lot of the video games I've enjoyed have been hell to create. Overall, Omelas makes no sense; it doesn't attempt to explain in any realistic way how the kid's suffering can provide for so much joy, how people can sustain their economy / consumption / partying without painful labor, how people can avoid hedonic adaptation, or many other obstacles to trying to map this story onto the universe as some sort of useful metaphor.
Re: fund Google like a Kickstarter with a low "max donation" amount
I think Kickstarter's rely on big fish almost as much as "casual" games. I do not think that's a workable solution.
Re: "workers should own the means of production"
What could that possibly even mean today? Especially for this particular topic? Should "the people" own Google? If so, everyone would have their own search engine to the point there would be unsustainable redundancy, or it would be too small to be useful, or it would still be huge and centralized but "the people" would no more control its operations than the People's Republic of China. Or if Google employees should own it, that's not really too many people. With Apple spending $2 billion dollars to build a massive data center in Arizona that will employ a whoppping 150 people, it's clear that workers owning the means of production will soon mean that the few people who know how to run the world should own it, or its time for the computers to own themselves. Given that fewer and fewer people will be able to meaningfully "work", it seems that the former slaves are getting too useless for the elites and a retreat to the pity religions or the post-Marxisms that don't rely on now completely untenable labor theories of value or a radical luddism if one wants to hold onto these labor theories, believing that labor and "[f]reedom... is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion" (Freire).
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard
Who should pay for it then? Google's expenses are in the billions of dollars, and I certainly don't want the government to own "the world's most powerful system for freeing the mind" given that it would give them an even less adulterated look into my oh so free mind.
It has been co-opted from its original purpose to allow the more efficient organization and deployment of violent force. Discussion of possible alternatives is fine, but that discussion should be aware of the internet's history as an ARPA project.
> which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical?
Money itself is just a tool, it cant be (un)ethical. Best to focus on the human agents and incentives.
> should not be biased by monetary influence.
Influence will exist because it's part of human nature. Take away monetary incentives and you 'll have political influence, religious influence etc. We 've learned that from history.
Money is not just a tool. I think it would be possible to make the case that money as it interacts with our systems is inherently unethical in that it forces unethical behavior from agents trying to maximize their utility. And the legal system that we have built around it only amplifies this behavior.
I also used to fantasize about the democratization of speech via the internet. No longer would money determine what information reached you.
Adwords is no less ethical than search rankings, newspapers, TV, radio, literature, bus stops, music - reality, ultimately.
Good news: I agree that this is a problem.
Bad news: It's incredibly more prevalent than you realize.
If communication of information isn't democratized, you can't have a democracy. It shouldn't be a surprise then that we don't have a democracy, but an oligarchy [1].
Mind you, this is just one of many factors that makes a true democracy impossible as they currently exist. [2]
I wrote this a few weeks ago on HN but your argument is missing consideration for Google's "Page Quality Score" (PQS) algorithm - which is designed to provide at least some layer of quality / $$$-bias-arbitration.(1)
In short they believe that the most reliable way to drive search relevancy / quality EVEN in paid categories is to make sure the guy on the other end of the table is willing to pay for that user's attention.
QPS is designed to penalize the advertiser if they don't hit "relevancy" metrics which makes it more expensive for that advertiser to reach you - as a percentage it can make clicks literally 600% more expensive (worst case).
The relevancy metrics they'll use include page speed (good for user), time user spends on site (relevancy), actions taken - tracked by Google Analytics (relevancy), and content quality / uniqueness (relevancy).
If you've got a guy willing to pay with high relevancy it's a compelling reason to show nothing but ads.
Now is that REALLY good for the user across the board? No way.
But there's at least a superficial effort to arbitrage the $$$ bias.
I agree with you.
Let's just give thanks that Larry Page doesn't run Wikipedia. At this point Google is way past the point of no return. They are more bothered about empire defense than information.
Information produced costs money. Groups that do not have equal funding can have far less information produced about them. This becomes a significant issue in social science where only certain questions get funding and related but opposite questions do not, resulting in a one sided view of information (especially since many people think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence).
I'm not even sure why Google has sponsored search at this point. They have more than enough revenue from other sources to jettison this odious practice.
"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."
hmm.. AdWords seems like the tiny tip of the iceberg. Perhaps you don't realise, but the problem you are alluding to is that money influences which information gets created. Those 'organic' search results are in the same boat as the ads.
Just imagine what TV/"news papers" used to be and still is. I can see why many left wing extremists worked on TV as it can be easily used to shape people with no alternative source of info. Until that pesky internet came and along and with it a lower barrier to entry. Things have improved, even with Google.
The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "unsee" those results.
So, searching the world's largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?
What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can't understand how AdWords is ethical.