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Comments: 91 +- Your Rights Online: Publisher Whining Prompts Italian Investigation of Google on Friday August 28, @02:33PM
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday August 28, @02:33PM
from the sounds-like-pure-unadulterated-greed-to-me dept.
from the sounds-like-pure-unadulterated-greed-to-me dept.
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Complaints about "lack of transparency" from publishers have prompted Italian competition authorities to begin an investigation of Google's search and news services. I'm sure their motives are completely altruistic. "Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising. Ad revenue on the Web is directly proportional to the size of the audience, which is heavily influenced by search or Google News rankings."
Necessity is a mother.
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Epic Fail (Score:2)
Complaints about "lack of transparency" from publishers have prompted Italian competition authorities to begin an investigation of Google's search and news services.
Good luck in getting a bunch of bureaucrats to wrap their minds around google's ranking algorithm.
Re:Epic Fail (Score:5, Funny)
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Just one word:
"Burlusconi"
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Re:Epic Fail (Score:5, Funny)
This sure is a nice search engine you got here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it. You know, I gots an idea, how's about you pay my boy Vinnie here 8.4 Billion Euros, and he makes sure nothin' happens to your little website. Ain't that right, Vinnie?
Parent
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Give me a break. (Score:2, Insightful)
Google provides a service. If you don't like their service, go use something else. Or better yet, build your own damn search and aggregation engine.
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This isn't about Italians using or not using Google. This is the Italians wondering why their news sources aren't ranked higher on Google News.
The newspapers don't opt-in to Google News, they aren't "users" of Google News, the public are the users. The newspapers want to know, considering the fact that a lot of people use Google News, how do they get their content listed higher, and are they being unfairly discriminated against?
But regardless of the details, this isn't a "if you don't like it use somethin
I believe google answered this a long time ago. (Score:2)
Among other things, the Google's search algorithm is based on the text within the links to a page, the title of a page, the header text near the top of a page... News sites like to use titles that make you think "What is that article about". That is a horrible way to have Google link to your page with a high page rank.
For example, one of the top articles on CNN.com about Kennedy's death is
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The newspapers are using Google as free advertising for their websites. If they want a higher spot on search results, they can always pay Google for it.
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Also, apparently google is too complicated... (Score:5, Informative)
What a coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a coincidence (Score:4, Insightful)
"Mr. Malinconico said that in addition to the complaint against Google, the federation was also looking at other measures to try to generate more revenue from the Web"
I'll translate that from Italian.
"We don't think people should make money unless they share it with us, despite the fact that we have nothing to offer that anybody wants to see."
Parent
Italian politics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Italian politics (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's true in either direction. First, a great deal of Americans don't believe there is anything akin to morality in the operation of government, whether they're left-wingers who think the government is the tool of imperialist-capitalist interests, conservatives who think the government is spreading hedonism and immorality via the public schools, or libertarians who don't like any operation of government at all.
And on the flip side, a good many Europeans expect there to be something akin to morality in the operation of government. Italy is not representative of most of Europe, and places like Sweden have very different expectations from their government, which are more positive on the whole, even if there is still plenty of cynicism about politicians.
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Uh-huh (Score:5, Insightful)
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>>>they want to change their pages to artificially inflate their page rank
You beat me to it, and said what I was thinking. I would also add - Isn't "Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking results" generally a good thing??? That means NOBODY can game the system, so it's an equal opportunity for all publishers. And even if somebody does get a high ranking, it's only temporary because Google is constantly changing their methodology.
Only in Italy would somebody think it's okay to cheat.
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That is exactly what I was thinking when I RTFA. (yeah, yeah, I know...and no, I'm not new here)
The other statement that jumped out at me from TFA, was this:
Publishers in a number of countries have complained about Google News, saying few readers bother to click through from the blurbs to their own Web sites.
"live by the sword, die by the sword" seems to apply here.
They (news media) have been playing games with soundbites for long enough, now that's what most people are used to.
The blurbs give them that soundbite summary that they have been trained to expect...why would you expect them to actually click on the link to actually RTFA?
You see it here on /. ev
Quid pro quo... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are the newspapers going to provide similar transparency for the coverage they provide local businesses?
Exactly The Way It Should Be (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the way it should be. You shouldn't write news in order to garner more ad revenue. By keeping this secret, Google is doing it's part to protect the integrity of those hacks who would alter the news -- otherwise known as Selling Out -- to be whatever paid the best. When that happens then we've all lost -- including the newspapers that will become nothing more than the new Tabloid Press.
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Yeah, how dare Google hide the rules so that they can't "game" the system. I'm surprised the newspapers could even complain about it with a straight face.
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Actually, I'm pretty damned sure that's how the newspaper industry works...
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**With "industry" meaning whatever industry is relevant to the particular
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Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
"We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us," said Vanessa Thorpe of the Guardian Media Group. "I tried an advertorial repeating several times that nothing will be free any more, to magic it into happening. I also subtly implied the Pirate Bay were Nazis -
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So what you're saying is that newspapers should write the things that people want to read?
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Source [google.com]
I don't know how much more succinctly Google can state that.
That's the point (Score:4, Insightful)
"Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising."
This is exactly why Google will never disclose their raking criteria. The last thing they want is for people to 'hone' their content to drive per-site revenue. It's bad enough they have to worry about SEO companies trying to game the system. Exposing the ranking system would effectively invalidate it. You go down that path and people stop trusting the neutrality of the search engine. At which point Google might as well close up shop as an untrusted search engine is an unused search engine. Just ask Microsoft.
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LOL, I was already thinking of Microsoft's failures while reading your response when I read that line. Too funny.
I think this might turn out to be why Microsoft will never be competitive with Google; the whole trust thing. Even if a person or company does not have any history with Microsoft, they'll quickly come to realize that you have to pay to play with Microsoft. And there goes credibility.
Google search is not a product (Score:4, Insightful)
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Google has a de facto monopoly in search. Realistically, no business can afford to be blacklisted by Google. That this is due to quality (and inerti
Everyone knows how Google sorts search results... (Score:3, Insightful)
Google ranks pages based on what people are searching for. The obvious way to get pagehits from Google is to, ahem, write news that people are interested in.
Anything else and you're just trying to game the system.
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There's also an algorithm that will rank things by relevance to your search, what the tags are on the link, such and such.
For example, if you search "NEWS"
the word News is the only tag it searches for, thus whoever has the most page hits gets it. You'll notice, Google news is not #1. So they aren't cheating.
If you type, "Canada News" ..." in that o
Now it searches for something with Canada as a High Relevance point, with slightly less on the News Point, but both. Those Web sites whose tags are "Canada, News,
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How Relevancy is derived for both the Search String and the Tags is unreleased - thus News Sites don't know how to Tag their sites for maximum relevancy.
Logically.
False Premise (Score:2)
" Ad revenue on the Web is directly proportional to the size of the audience"
That would only be true if every ad was the same price. Even ads that use different metrics vary inside their own class. Ads that are sold on a PPV (pay per view) vary - so do ads sold on a PPC or PPA (pay per click, pay per action) basis. Then there's the value based on the site.
Just one more example of how the dead-tree crowd still, after almost 2 decades, doesn't get it.
Biased and misleading summary - read TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure why I still bother reading Slashdot (less and less often), with such biased summaries. If you actually take the time to read the original article (and maybe read the story from other sources as well), you'll find out that the main complaint of the italian publishers is NOT that the PageRank algorhitm is secret.
They accuse Google of dropping them out of their search results (or at least lowering their pagerank) if they ask Google to remove their articles from Google News. So the accusation is abuse of a dominant position.
Basically they find Google News to compete with them, because it takes the news from them (for free), readers don't bother clicking the link to read the full original article, so when a reader clicks on an ad, the revenue stays with Google and not the original publisher. So far, fair enough (?). The problem (and the core of the accusation) is that the publishers suspect that when they ask Google to not include their articles in Google News, Google also removes them from their normal search results (or lowers them in PageRank). Google denies this.
The core of the problem is that Google, starting from a role of search engine, is now starting to compete with its own customers, by entering their market. And it is using its dominant position in the search market to get an advantage.
Another example is in Australia, where the two main real estate listing web sites (Domain and RealEstate) have threatened to cancel all their advertising on Google, when they heard that Google was planning to launch its own real estate listing aggregation service. The story is here: http://www.businessday.com.au/small-business/smallbiz-marketing/google-faces-property-ads-war-20090727-dy0j.html
Other countries (quoted in the same article on the NY Times) are seeing their publishers up in arms against Google.
Slashdot, get some decent editors.
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They accuse Google of dropping them out of their search results (or at least lowering their pagerank) if they ask Google to remove their articles from Google News. So the accusation is abuse of a dominant position.
As far as the newspapers are concerned, news search and web search are separate business, but I doubt google should be forced to folllow the same definition. Abuse of dominant position requires one to have monopoly power (granted, google has it on web search and plausibly also on news search) but also deliberately using that power to somehow hinder competitors. I am not sure that google should be required to keep newspapers on one index while removing it from other or to prevent changes on one index to be r
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Not sure why I still bother reading Slashdot (less and less often), with such biased summaries.
Fully agreed on that one. If I had to pick the one thing that annoys me the most about Slashdot these days, it's the constant editorializing in the summaries. Tends to happen with some "editors" more often than others, but I won't name names.
Seriously though, leave the commentary to the ensuing discussions where it belongs. And if you can't do that, then at least change the site's tagline to "Opinion for nerds. Stuff that matters to people who've already decided."
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I assume you're argument is that Google has every right to ads on the page going to the news, but nothing more. The problem at hand shows that Google has gotten so good at aggregating the meta-data about any topic that they can actually use that to the aggregate the data itself, whether it be news, real estate, restaurants etc.
Think about it:
Google already knows search patterns of people searching for travel plans and airfare. They're in a good position to start using that information to find the cheapest f
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I suspect this to be a consequence of Google's PageRank algorithm itself, though. Or, at least, part of it. The part that makes links from high PageRank sites bump up your own PageRank, specifically. You can't expect to demand Google (a site with high PageRank) to not link to your content and expect your PageRank to stay the same.
What they want is for Google to boost their PageRank to where it would be with the Google linklove, without wanting Google's linklove. Which seems like a perfectly unreasonable
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What they want is for Google to boost their PageRank to where it would be with the Google linklove, without wanting Google's linklove. Which seems like a perfectly unreasonable demand to me.
Precisely. And that doesn't even assume that google probably trusts more the link data it gets from its own sites (which it controls) over the one from the public at large (therefore again boosting web search rank for the sites that are cited in google news or indeed, any google generated content...
good (Score:2)
>> newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.
I'm pleased Google don't publish their strategy for ordering search hits. If they did, the newspapers would just sacrifice everything to get a high Google ranking so there would be an immediate and massive drop of content quality and readability.
$NEWSPAPER wants free money from Google (Score:2)
$NEWSPAPER has asked the Government to examine Google News and other content aggregators, claiming they contribute insufficiently to their income.
"The newspapers put their content up on the web for free and then Google, the freeloading bastards, tell people where to find it. We told them to pay up or stop using our stuff, and they said OK, they'd stop using our stuff!
"We need the Government to bring back balance, 'balance' defined as being able to make them give us money because we want it. You'd think
Honing Content? (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the compromise? Do we come up with a standard way of ranking that can be exploited much faster than we can update the standard to prevent this? I think here, the product that Google is giving customers is the method that they are aggregating content. Perhaps these publishers would be better off going to a competitor, but if customers don't prefer the competitor's method of aggregating content, they will come back to Google, which is a sign that Google is doing things right.
I don't think publishers should have a say on the method that Google presents its index, because Google does not have a monopoly on indexes. I think they are just targeting Google because it is popular (and not by any anti-competitive practices, correct me if I'm wrong), and they are not able to increase their ROI without unfairly gaining an advantage. These publishers really do seem to be whining.
Re:SEO (Score:5, Insightful)
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This seems to be the SEO scumbags, demanding that the state step in to make their jobs easier.
This seems to be the SEO scumbags, demanding that the state step in to make their jobs easier ^H^H^H^H^H possible
There! corrected it for you.
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Is there a law that requires that their job be possible?
Especially when "their job" equates to "gaming the results of another company's business"?