[HN Gopher] Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search result...
___________________________________________________________________
Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch
court order
Author : XiS
Score : 445 points
Date : 2021-12-02 06:57 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| formvoltron wrote:
| Oh noes! I'm going to have a hard time remembering
| thepiratebay10.org
| DrBazza wrote:
| I can think of other terms that Google should de-list that are
| far more harmful to society than a hooky copy of Indiana Jones
| and the Crystal Skull.
|
| Google is a private company can do what they want, but this is
| still a pretty poor decision.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Google is a private company can do what they want
|
| Not when they are a monopoly.
| DrBazza wrote:
| That's up to any significantly large country, or the EU to
| stop. Until then, they really can do what they want. And are,
| as this story suggests.
| new_guy wrote:
| Now if they'd only do the same with actual spam sites, see also
| related-ish discussion here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403947
| yosito wrote:
| Does anyone else remember actually believing that Google's
| mission was to "organize the world's information and make it
| accessible"?
|
| That seems so naive now. It's become painfully obvious that
| Google's mission is to manipulate access to information for
| profit.
| corin_ wrote:
| Supermarkets organise food and make them accessible [to
| paying customers], as does (not with food this time) a
| private library. Sure their way of wording it makes it
| possible to read it naively as being altruistic, but
| technically I don't think they're _not_ organising the world
| 's data and making it accessible. Just perhaps not always in
| the way the world would most appreciate.
| yosito wrote:
| Supermarkets and Google do not have comparable business
| models.
| corin_ wrote:
| My point was that organising something and making it
| accessible to people doesn't have to mean "without doing
| so in the way that makes money".
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Google Search has been unusable for a long time now. I cant
| remember the last time I used it. They are a company about
| Adverts now. Nothing else.
| squarefoot wrote:
| To me the ideal alternative should be something that aggregates
| results from major search engines, like DDG already does with
| Bing and Startpage with Google, but applied to a lot more search
| engines, then takes the results returned from all of them and
| builds the results page _uniq_ 'ing them so that if link A
| appears in 3 search engines and link B in 1 and link C in 6, the
| result will be 3 different links anyway. That way, if one link is
| censored from one search engine, it could still be present in the
| list in a similar rank for being returned anyway by other search
| engines.
| fault1 wrote:
| Sounds like the old metacrawler:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
|
| The problem is that the indexes (google, bing, yandex) won't
| let you freely aggregate them anymore. DDG is a client of
| Microsoft just like startpage is a client of google.
| cardosof wrote:
| Google is a media company. You can call it tech or adtech, it
| will never hide the fact that they want to get your eyeballs to
| look at the highest paying ad with the minimum effort. And they
| want to keep running this operation with the least amount of
| friction - the kind of comes when streaming companies are paying
| for search ads bidding with movie titles just to have their ads a
| few clicks away from an "unofficial" movie source.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Looking at my internet history, I hardly even use Google Search
| anymore compared to before.
|
| Five years ago I would still google pretty much any error message
| or problem.
|
| Nowadays I typically go to directly to the project's GitHub and
| search through issues there, go directly to their documentation,
| or just browse the code from my editor and figure stuff out
| myself. I have like 15 tabs just corresponding to the stuff I'm
| working on right now. It is pathetic Google managed to become so
| awful they managed to undo a decade of conditioning.
|
| Crippling their search intentionally even more won't help.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I'm always amazed that there are still people actively using
| torrents, given that even for popular software like Windows
| LTSB/LTSC there are virtually no well-seeded torrents on TPB and
| the music market has been pretty much eliminated by Spotify.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| It's gonna increase as these streaming services continue
| popping up for every single network and forcing you to pay
| ridiculous rates to see everything you want. I'm now back
| paying exactly what I did for cable/dish back in the day.
| ElectronShak wrote:
| depends on where you live probably, and how accessible things
| are on the internet for you...including how easy it is to make
| payments on the internet for you. Torrents are a blessing
| otherwise.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Seems what you are actually amazed by is that people use
| piratebay - not torrents. In reality they dont, not really, as
| _The_ piratebay is long gone and dead. These are just spam
| sites.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Audiobooks and E-books are really frustratingly distributed
| IMO. A lot are simply not available in my region, all the major
| platforms will game search results with misleading dark
| patterns to make you think they have a title until you're done
| signing up at which point you discover it's actually not
| available and you're locked in some account you need to contact
| customer support to delete/close. Sorry for the rant, went
| through this about 4-5 times recently before giving up and
| pirating a title.
| klibertp wrote:
| Well, looking at the E-books category, I can see quite a few
| well-seeded entries... unfortunately, most of them seems to be
| focused on finding G spot and/or having great oral sex (not
| saying that's not valuable, but!) Almost nothing that caught my
| attention, and having no sub-categories in E-books means that
| for every title I find I'd have to wade through pages upon
| pages of irrelevant results...
|
| Would be nice to know the alternative. Downloading everything
| and then deleting things that you realize you didn't actually
| want (after looking at the full contents) was a quite
| convenient UX.
| pjerem wrote:
| For ebooks, you can search in duck duck go, the last letter
| of the alphabet followed by the first three of the word
| "library"
| klibertp wrote:
| My first thought after I deciphered the puzzle was: oh,
| it's just the name of a popular compression algorithm
| library! :) Thanks, I didn't know about the site existence.
| Wondering if it got de-listed, too? :)
| IceWreck wrote:
| For ebooks you need to get into a specialized ebook focused
| tracker like myanonamouse
| southerntofu wrote:
| Except there's still so much content you don't find on
| commercial platforms, and even when you find it it may
| disappear from one day to the next due to evolving contracts
| between shareholders and the platform.
|
| Also, streaming from a big multinational corporation works fine
| in well-connected areas but is a terrible experience on the
| country side and in the Global South. Where your connection to
| AWS/Google/Netlify is measured in Kb/s, torrents are a blessing
| because it spreads the load across several routes (including
| more local ones, because cloud providers are really slow from
| eg. Africa) and you can leave the downloads running all night.
|
| Torrents and other content-addressed systems are by far
| technically superior to centralized location-addressed systems
| like HTTP.
| tiepoul wrote:
| Is there any existing decentralized search engine? I do believe
| that Google should not interfere with the listing. Even if it's
| piracy, it should not take any people's freedom to discover
| different information catered for the people.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| and it's not piracy in all countries. Not all countries are the
| USA.
| fsflover wrote:
| > decentralized search engine
|
| https://yacy.net
| KoftaBob wrote:
| On a somewhat related note: are there good options in terms of
| P2P/distributed torrent search engines, which would make it so
| that websites like the Pirate Bay don't even need to exist?
| Instead, that distributed index of torrents could be searched
| directly from the torrent clients.
| rasengan wrote:
| You could try https://private.sh which decouples the search
| allowing it to be end to end encrypted without anyone knowing
| both who you are and what you searched for.
| LightG wrote:
| That's totally going to have an impact.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Google de-listing websites reminds me of that episode of Black
| Mirror where everyone is wearing AR lenses and the person who
| just came out of prison or whatever is not visible to anyone else
| but is instead a red mosaic when seen through their lenses. He's
| effectively blacklisted in the physical world. Google (and other
| tech giants) have tremendous influence and power - as much or
| more than most governments. It is very dangerous that they act
| the way they act. We need to heavily regulate them or build
| public alternatives that are beholden to laws like the First
| Amendment.
| supperburg wrote:
| Google search sucks, has demonstrated political bias through
| deliberate intervention and has become dominated by direct and
| indirect advertising. And now they are just removing shit.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Sounds more like back scratching
| GordonS wrote:
| Around a year ago Google also delisted bluelight.org, which is a
| well-known site for recreational drug users - and it's focused on
| harm reduction
|
| It will still show results if you explicitly use
| `site:bluelight.org`, otherwise it never appears in search
| results - prior to Google delisted it, it always ranked very
| highly (top 5).
|
| I can't help but wonder about the harm that decision had made -
| people may well have literally died because of it.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| Great, glad Google has its priorities straight. Nevermind the
| rampant fraud that exists on their search engine like fake
| locksmith scams that they've done absolutely nothing about for
| years.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.
| They're predictable and tedious and usually turn nasty.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pnt12 wrote:
| Also that straight forward searches with an exact product or
| website name get their first result high jacked by the top
| bidder, forcing you to sell ads to users who are exactly
| looking for your site!
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Is there a list of the sites Google de-listed somewhere? I'm
| pretty sure (in fact I knew some, but I can't remember) it
| included some interesting and totally legal websites.
| Aulig wrote:
| The Lumen Database collects DMCA requests Google receives, but
| the URLs are not always visible.
| MushyRoom wrote:
| The easiest way is to look here at the transparency report [1].
|
| Which makes it easy to find new Piracy websites [2].
|
| It only mentions the TLD not the URL
|
| https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview
|
| https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/request/1280...
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| I went straight to 'rabbitmp3s' and pirated "Ironic" by
| Alanis Morissette. That site makes it really easy to download
| mp3s. Thanks google!
| dane-pgp wrote:
| It's a free ride when you've already paid.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| There also are websites Google delisted voluntarily which had
| nothing to do with copyright infringement or anything
| illegal. I'm also curious about these.
| [deleted]
| roosgit wrote:
| Now how can we get a court order against Pinterest?
| LightG wrote:
| Best comment I've read all morning!
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ckastner wrote:
| A good start would be to know why Google doesn't already
| penalize their rankings, as they have done with many others who
| have gamed their rankings.
|
| Yes, Pinterest does SEO like anyone else, but their ranking
| seems just outrageously overvalued.
| rasz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Silbermann is all you need
| to know
| exikyut wrote:
| > _Career_
|
| > _Before Pinterest (which launched in March 2010),
| Silbermann worked at Google in the online advertising
| group.[6] However, after a short time with the company he
| left and started designing his own iPhone apps with a
| college friend, Paul Sciarra. After their initial
| application, Tote, failed to gain significant traction,[7]
| the cofounders teamed up with Evan Sharp to create a
| pinboard product that would eventually be named
| Pinterest.[6] Silbermann says that the genesis of Pinterest
| really came from his love of collecting as a kid.
| "Collecting tells a lot about who you are," he said, and
| when they looked at the web "there wasn't a place to share
| that side of who you were."[8] A little over nine years
| after starting Pinterest, the company held its IPO in April
| 2019 which valued the company around 12 billion dollars
| beating expectations._
| texasbigdata wrote:
| So the CEO working at google previously many years ago is
| the key unlock? Not clear how this is helpful.
| lovelyviking wrote:
| is this the author of this annoying thing that appears in
| search results but doesn't allow you to see pictures
| without login so you have to close it with redundant
| movement of the mouse and then watch carefully to avoid
| opening it again?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Pinterest isn't a torrent site
| dazc wrote:
| It's all original content then?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Assuming the liberal use of the term I believe it is mostly
| original content.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Even with liberal use of the term, most of it isn't
| original content - or at least, it is about as original
| as content on facebook... but not quite. Folks are pretty
| free to post what they'd like on there, and often do not
| include sources for the things they find. Or folks will
| link to things that aren't really original, even if it is
| on their own blog.
| MadeThisToReply wrote:
| But it _is_ worthless garbage, unlike a lot of torrents.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Maybe on Google's regular search, but I've gotten good
| results from them when using Google's image
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| But it is against user's best interests in using a search
| platform. It's making google a joke and meme target, and they
| couldn't care less since they are virtually a monopoly. It
| only goes to show their arrogance to not do something about
| it.
| concinds wrote:
| Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget
| Chrome.
|
| Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both
| search suggestions and search results, with both Google Search
| and YouTube. Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll
| have to get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels
| covering the event, before you actually find the original video.
| They artificially promote "authoritative sources" which are
| anything but, since they may be second-hand coverage of original
| videos that get buried in search results.
|
| Google's results are not only manipulated by clever SEO
| people[0], but by employees[1], in direct contradiction to Sundar
| Pichai's sworn testimony. Some of that is very defendable. But
| there's zero transparency. Given their search monopoly, and that
| most people aren't aware that search results are manipulated,
| Google Search _is_ the web. Websites that get delisted are
| presumed to have ceased to exist. Focusing on browsers (Firefox)
| is good, but no longer enough.
|
| That's why Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web.
| Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the ones I
| trust, and there's tons more.
|
| [0]: how many times have you tried looking for a machine's user
| manual, mistyped the model number, and somehow "found" a webpage
| with the manual for a product that didn't exist? and then
| modified the model number further and found more results from the
| same website, with relevant keywords and yet another incorrect
| model number? My understanding of SEO isn't good enough to know
| how they do that. I don't believe websites can dynamically alter
| their index to show up for so many typoed search queries.
|
| [1]: https://medium.com/@mikewacker/googles-manual-
| interventions-...
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| the problem with DuckduckGo and Qwant (i don't know about
| Brave's search) is they're all so heavily reliant on Bing
| results, and they're not really new engines but privacy
| respecting engines hitting the Bing API and then supplementing
| with "answers" from other sources like weather services,
| wolfram alpha, etc..
|
| There no real alternative to the big players. It's google or
| bing, basically.
| generalizations wrote:
| Or Yandex, which doesn't get mentioned very often. At least
| it's someone else's government that has access to the
| queries.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Just be aware that just like mainstream media (and
| alternative media) it probably has a pretty huge bias.
|
| The reason I mention this is that just like with mainstream
| media and unlike alternative medias and newsletters it
| seems easier to forget the bias of search engines.
| ok123456 wrote:
| yandex is my go to now.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The Web is a threat to the Open Web.
|
| Though that's in very large part an inevitable and widely-
| foreseen consequence of Google's other arm: advertising.
|
| The monetisation of content is the root of great evil:
|
| _Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at
| bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is
| worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his
| subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every
| branch of literature there were only a few books, but those
| excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be
| made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a
| curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put
| pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of
| the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write
| for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish
| proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not
| to be found in the same purse--honora y provecho no caben en un
| saco._
|
| -- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
|
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship
| LaundroMat wrote:
| From the PhD dissertation [0] by Page and Brin:
|
| > we expect that advertising funded search engines will be
| inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the
| needs of the consumers.
|
| [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
| vidarh wrote:
| The majority of literature _is_ written not for money but
| because people want to write. Most books do not even get
| bought by publishers. Most books that do make next to no
| money. Few books even recover the cost of publishing them,
| much less produce a meaningful income for theirs authors.
| Many because the books themselves are dreck, of course, but
| many also simply because it 's _easy_ to write. Anyone _can_
| write a novel. Not everyone can write a _good_ novel, but
| enough people do that there isn 't a big enough market for
| most writers to be motivated by money.
|
| It is because people badly want to and enjoy writing that we
| have vast quantities of books. If people looked at writing as
| a commercial endeavour, most of us would never, ever consider
| writing a novel - it's a crazily oversaturated market, to the
| point that writing a novel to make money is much like playing
| the lottery: You invest far more time that you could have
| spent on other things, and the potential payout for the vast
| majority of authors is below minimum wage most places.
|
| We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of
| writers who earn well enough that their income might cause
| them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead
| of writing the best they could. Maybe. I'm not convinced.
|
| That said, outside of writing novels, things are different.
| You can probably earn more writing for a sketchy content farm
| than most of us will ever earn from writing novels, so the
| point is not entirely invalid, but it is not a good fit for
| _literature_.
|
| EDIT: Changed second to last paragraph for clarity, see
| response for mangled original.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Looking at the publishing industry through the lens of
| _most written works_ rather than _most revenue generation_
| misses the point spectacularly.
|
| Works, in Schopenhauer's time, and today, are commissioned,
| written, edited, and promoted _for their commercial
| potential_ in ways that are directly addressed by
| Schopenhauer 's rant.
|
| The works which _aren 't_ (excepting those written or
| promoted for propagandistic value, itself a major share of
| promoted works) rather prove his point.
|
| The essence of Schopenhauer's concern is that _information
| and entertainment should be intrinsically motivated, not
| extrinsically motivated_. Trying to please the public, or
| tap into the revenue stream (typically advertising), or
| feed the algorithm, etc., rapidly leads to corruption and
| devaluation of content, which is what I was addressing.
|
| Even where _good works are promoted_ this often happens
| without benefitting the original author or creator.
| Sometimes in literature (Mark Twain struggled financially
| his entire life, F. Scott Fitzgerald 's _Great Gatsby_ only
| entered the American canon during WWII, as a cheap
| paperback shipped overseas to soldiers, long after
| Fitzgerald 's own pickled death). The music world (both
| classical and popular) and art world are similarly rife
| with examples of this as well.
|
| Old Art was a very sour puss, but with good reason.
| vidarh wrote:
| > Looking at the publishing industry through the lens of
| most written works rather than most revenue generation
| misses the point spectacularly.
|
| Sorry, but I can't agree. He explicitly argues for fewer
| but better works, and laments that this can't be achieved
| as long as you can profit from writing, but the fact is
| *this can't be achieved*, as we can se from the fact that
| most writing is not profitable today, and never has been.
|
| Thinking that if only the commercialisation stopped,
| literature would suddenly be in a better place is utter
| nonsense that is based on a fantasy world where writing
| well is far easier than it is.
|
| It's not commercialisation of writing that is stopping us
| from getting better literature, but the difficulty.
|
| While there certainly is a lot of commercial writing one
| can easily dismiss, the notion that a profit motive
| prevents writers from writing from extrinsic motivation
| ignores that most literature is written by people who can
| never in a lifetime hope to life of their writing.
|
| There has never been more books written with extrinsic
| motivations.
|
| As I pointed out, there may well be a point here in that
| some types of commercialised content often is pure dreck.
| But only a fraction of a percent of literature is
| "commissioned, written, edited and promoted for their
| commercial potential".
|
| A lot of it for good reason, because a lot of that
| content is _also_ pure dreck. But even fantastic authors
| often struggle to get published and only a fraction of
| them make a living of it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is more cogent, thank you.
|
| The argument that Schopenhauer is espousing a fantasy
| probably does have merits, and we've the benefit of
| another century and a quarter of publishing (the novel
| really only emerged into mass culture during the 19th
| century). There's the challenge of recognising greatness
| as it first appears (it almost always takes at least some
| time for that awareness to dawn), and the sheer
| _arbitraryness_ of assessments as well.
|
| That said ...
|
| We're still left with the fact that _what financial
| compensation promotes is at the very least appeal to a
| minimum common standard_. That lesson has emerged again
| and again in the history of mass-media, beginning with
| street carnivals and players, the penny press (both
| newspapers and "penny-dreadful" fiction), the mass media
| of radio and television (Murrow's "Wires and Lights in a
| Box" and Minow's "Vast Wasteland"), and the Web, mobile
| media, Reddit, and Facebook (once _Literally Harvard_ ,
| now ... not so much).
|
| In the case of online content and services, it seems that
| true gems are virtually always underfunded. (The constant
| gripes aimed at Wikipedia's apparent _mostly sufficient_
| endowment are a rare exception.) Sites such as LWN eke
| out an existance, _Linux Journal_ ultimately folded ---
| for all that adtech supposedly pays for the Internet, it
| certainly failed there.
|
| Looking at collections of great books, what strikes me is
| how many of them predate not only recent history (say,
| the past 50 years), but all of modernity. How much of
| this is measurement bias and a varianty of the Lindy
| Effect, and how much is a well-placed assessment on
| whatever truth there may be in merits is of course very
| hard to say. But it's quite persistent.
|
| As I read through works (fiction and non), what I'm
| struck by is how little of what is _recent_ is truly
| _novel_. The refrain from Ecclesiastes, that there is
| nothing new under the sun, isn 't _entirely_ accurate,
| but it 's far more so than it has any right to be. I
| suspect it's a combination of pressures to publish and an
| ignorance (often cultivated through deliberate presentism
| and deprecation) of earlier literature that leads to
| this.
|
| On your "difficulty* point: part of the cause is also the
| haste and rush to publish leading to just plain sloppy
| work. That's not entirely new, and the practice can even
| be an art form (Kerouak's _On the Road_ ). But far too
| many _leading works_ --- bestsellers and the like --- are
| riddled with poor editing, rambling structure, typings
| and misspellings, and poorly-checked facts. There are of
| course exceptions, but again it seems that the pressure
| to publish and transact leads to poor results.
|
| (Self-published works can of course exhibit this to a far
| greater extent, but they're _also_ produced under profit
| pressures, and with far fewer available resources than
| traditionally-published works, for the most part.)
|
| I suspect that underlying this discussion are two
| questions that haven't been asked yet, so I'll ask them:
|
| 1. What makes a work "great"?
|
| 2. What are the _circumstances_ in which such works
| emerge?
|
| If you could provide any examples of "recent" (I'll give
| you anything published since Schopenhauer wrote, so 1891,
| though more recent would be more compelling) books
| meeting _both_ the "great" and "not commercially
| motivated" criteria, either fiction or not, I'd be
| interested in seeing what you come up with.
|
| (Others can contribute as well.)
|
| ... I actually think that would be more interesting than
| continuing the debate above. I think your argument has
| some merits though I'm not fully convinced.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't have time to respond fully now, but as for a
| work: Kafka, "The Trial" immediately sprung to mind.
|
| Though I'd argue almost no published novels other than
| possibly subsequent works by bestselling authors are
| generally commercially motivated.
|
| As someone who have published two novels: If you write to
| get rich, you're an idiot. It _can_ happen, but it 's so
| fundamentally unlikely that it's grossly irrational to
| write with that as motivation unless you've already been
| signed to a publisher. Even then it's a dubious gamble.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion
| of writers who earn well for more commercial choices from
| those authors.
|
| I don't understand this sentence.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't either, and I wrote it; a bit to quickly.
|
| I meant to write that we might lose some great works from
| that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that
| their income causes them to make more commercial choices
| in their writing instead of writing the best they could.
|
| I'll edit the comment so it makes more sense.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| This is why I believe in UBI.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| All but certainly a large part of the solution, though
| there's something to be said for a profit motive. How much
| to be said, and how much profit ... leaves much to be
| said....
| [deleted]
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 100% agree on the advertising part. If we were to remove
| advertising from the Web (i.e. by law or if 90% of people
| would use adblockers) it would be a better place. When
| Instagram/Facebook/Linkedin suddenly charge 5$/Month for
| membership, you quickly check that you want your data to be
| portable and interoperable, as you probably will not be a
| lifetime member.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's a clearly obvious paygate for content access:
| Internet service providers, whether broadband or mobile.
|
| These provide services to areas which themselves can be
| generally ranked in terms of wealth, leading to the
| opportunity for a progressive, unmetered, universal payment
| mechanism. In this system, various publishers (and notably
| local news and information sources) would be afforded
| compensation or revenue, and subscribers would have access
| to any available information.
|
| Remote-but-locally-focused providers (e.g., the small-town
| paper across the state, or the country, or in another
| continent) would be compensated principally _through their
| local service providers_ (with some balancing within states
| having widely-varying economic distributions, e.g., NYC /
| upstate New York, Chicago / downstate Illinois, coastal /
| inland California, etc.
|
| National / general-interest content (national or
| international news, e.g.) might receive a share of
| local/regional revenues, say, for national TV and radio
| broadcast news organisations, nationally-distributed
| newspapers (WSJ, NYT, WaPo in the US as examples), and book
| and magazine publishers. (Other countries and regions could
| make similar allocations.)
|
| Much of this would offset online advertising, which costs a
| typical household of four on the order of $1,800/year
| within North America and EU ($455 billion projected 2021
| spend, ~1 billion population). This is what people *are
| already paying for "free" online content. Direct content
| spend is on the order of $100/person, or 1/4 the cost of
| advertising. Distributed across all households (pro-rated
| by wealth as noted), on an all-you-can-eat basis, would be
| a remarkable game-changer.
|
| Earlier:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719
| jpindar wrote:
| A better place for people who have money, perhaps.
| passivate wrote:
| I don't get it? Most people here are working for companies
| that have products and services to sell. Sales works by
| advertising your goods and services.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both
| search suggestions and search results
|
| Indeed, they co-opt every search now. Anything related to local
| businesses or directions, flights and hotels, etc. And
| everything I try to find about pop culture or new tech or video
| games seems to be a page full of YouTube links. I want to grab
| the appropriate people at Google by the ear, and scream, "I DO
| NOT WANT TO SIT THROUGH A VIDEO ABOUT THIS." I guess I'm just
| old or something, but video seems like SUCH an inefficient way
| to impart information that could just be typed out, and then
| read. It's not even like it would be more work for these video
| producers. They're typing out the script to read over some
| generic video loops. JUST PUT THE COPY ON A PAGE! GAH!
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I hate the slow creep of video content everywhere. Especially
| in documentation. I can't ctrl-f a video looking for a
| keyword and never want to. Looking at you Hugging Face!
|
| For reference:
| https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html
| _jal wrote:
| One of the first things I do when evaluating something for
| work is look at the documentation.
|
| If it is video, I move on to the next contender. That's
| simply a hard no.
| thekingofravens wrote:
| Agreed. Videos can be nice as a support item for things
| that are visually oriented, but they do not replace a
| proper manual.
| akolbe wrote:
| Try clicking on the three dots and then "Open transcript".
| Fatnino wrote:
| I've seen YouTube videos where the creator put the entire
| script in the video description so I can just pause the video
| and read the article. More people should do this.
| akolbe wrote:
| Many videos now come with an auto-generated script,
| available by clicking on the three dots ("Open
| transcript"). Time stamps can be switched off if desired.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Yesterday I wanted to grab an image of flowers. Any flowers.
| I searched on flowers in image search. Google returned a page
| that was inundated with ads. I had trouble finding an image
| that I could use because it wasn't an ad.
| bmn__ wrote:
| creative commons image search for "flowers": <https://image
| s.search.yahoo.com/search/images?imgl=cc;p=flow...>
|
| Learn to search (hint: searchlores), it is an immensely
| useful skill in this age of information; you don't need to
| be irked by bad tools any more.
| hugs wrote:
| "I guess I'm just old or something"
|
| Fwiw, my teenage son _prefers_ video content over written
| content. Even if you hate it, there are other people that
| love it.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| But is that because the majority of the stuff being served
| to him by Google has been video for his experience on the
| internet, and that's what he's used to, or because it's
| better, or because he actually just prefers it. (And, to be
| fair, we're probably not talking about the same sort of
| information, but the question still applies generally.)
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| yeah seriously who needs all this video junk that takes 5
| minutes to say the 1 useful thing they have to say
| jrockway wrote:
| I think the videos exist because people think that's how they
| can get paid for their documentary work. If you add
| documentation to an open source project, they strip your name
| off and a bunch of randos edit your work to the point of
| unrecognizability. If you document something on your blog or
| website, you have to pay to host it. If you document
| something in the form of a YouTube video, the hosting is
| free, and you can click a button to have a penny deposited in
| your bank account every time someone clicks it. You can even
| do your own side deal and insert an ad wherever you want!
| That's why everything is a video these days, it's simple
| economics.
|
| Certainly, there is still a lot of text in the world, but the
| reason things are moving towards videos is exactly because
| C-f doesn't work. You'll click a video hoping it will help,
| it won't, but the advertiser will still pay the content
| creator. If you visit a text-based website, search for what
| you're looking for, and don't find it, you'll be gone before
| the ads even load. And that was in a world where advertisers
| paid for text ads, which isn't the current world.
| nradov wrote:
| There are multiple free blog hosting sites.
| wraptile wrote:
| Honestly, we need to rework what we consider to be an
| aggregator and what we consider to be a publisher.
|
| I'd argue that Google these days fall in line more of a
| publisher than a search engine. More often than not I'm
| feeling that the search engine is trying to sell me something
| rather than do the work requested and I don't mean ads (which
| I think are good monetization balance).
|
| Same goes for algorithm social networks.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Switch to other engines. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search are the
| ones I trust, and there's tons more.
|
| This feels important to me, and at this point it actually feels
| like we have more choice than we have had in 15 years and we
| have a chance to change history.
|
| If you are one of the many who have noticed that Google has
| declined in recent years you can start by just changing to DDG,
| or even Bing as default. (Use Google as fallback if you want
| and see if you realize the same as me: their results are just
| as broken. If you don't, you can consider yourself lucky for
| now and go back to Google, but at least keep this in mind as
| they start heating your frog pot as well ;-).
|
| Do experiment with alternative engines: Kagi seems close to
| production ready now and search.marginalia.nu is just a
| delightful tour de force as to what can be done by a determined
| person!
| Diggsey wrote:
| I use DDG by default, but sadly it's quite noticeably worse
| than Google, so I end up having to override it frequently :(
| mikro2nd wrote:
| DDG has been my default for a few years, now, and on the
| _very rare_ occasions I 've been forced/mistakenly use
| Google, their results have been without exception worse.
| Much worse.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I also use DDG by default. I only rarely go to google and
| more than half the time when I do, Google's results are no
| better. I find that usually adjusting my DDG query is more
| effective than trying Google.
| adriand wrote:
| I have a weird search FOMO thing where after I DDG
| something, I will often throw the !g into it to see the
| Google results for the same term, to make sure I got the
| "best" or most comprehensive result. And usually the DDG
| result was fine in comparison. But I'm finding it hard to
| trust it and stop the habit.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| But why is there no methadon to slowly quit google? A search
| engine, that just appends to its results the first page of
| google results?
| vidarh wrote:
| DDG is "close enough": Add "!g" to the search and you end
| up at Google. So I often use DDG first, and then fall back
| on Google afterwards. My search bar defaults to DDG. The
| many other shortcuts like that (e.g. !gi for google images,
| !b for bing, !gn for google news; and tons more) is a good
| incentive to stick to that default.
|
| Google still gets lots of searches from me, but the better
| DDG does, the less it'll happen.
| Fnoord wrote:
| DDG is mainly Bing, so you can just stop having/using !b
| vidarh wrote:
| They have very different interfaces, so there are times
| when !b is worthwhile. Not generally for the results,
| though.
| wombatpm wrote:
| There is Neeva. No ads, private paid search. Been trying
| their beta and really loving it.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I've had bing as a default on mobile for a couple years now.
| And I have google, bing and ddg as defaults on different
| browsers (chrome, safari, ff, IIRC). Trying to mix it up
| decently, and bing for my mobile searches hasn't been bad at
| all.
|
| FWIW, people still often react weirdly when I tell them to
| 'bing' something. "When was that movie released?" "I dunno,
| just bing it". Reactions are usually confusion, mild
| amusement, but sometimes I've had some weird aggressive/anger
| issues emerge when I've suggested someone use bing.
| Strange...
| koonsolo wrote:
| > Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web
|
| I don't believe that. I came from a time when Yahoo and
| Altavista were used. Google took over that market very fast
| (personal experience, not data ;)). So I'm sure that also now,
| people could shift very fast when the results are better
| somewhere else.
|
| Although I can agree on YouTube, because that's a different
| beast. They actually host almost all the web video content. So
| there is no 2nd party to easily switch to.
| djmips wrote:
| Is there any way to find things transparently on the 'open web'
| without using Google? Is there a real alternative?
| skinkestek wrote:
| If you have a feeling something exists but doesn't show up
| you can try yandex, kagi or even search.marginalia.nu (the
| last one is a bit hit and miss but also fun/delightful, eye-
| opening and it seems a lot more resistant to black hat SEO
| due to their algorithms.)
| lovelyviking wrote:
| Please stop recommending yandex or any other service from
| Russia.
|
| Russia spreads lies propaganda and misinformation by all
| channels possible including RT yandex and anything under
| their control. If you unaware what russia does you should
| educate yourself.
|
| If you try to get any information from russia controlled
| channels not only you'll be heavily mislead and manipulated
| you'll also support that aggressive regime that actively
| attacks any light of democracy and freedom in the world.
| Russia already have used not only propaganda but also
| military to attack any attempts to build free society
| respecting democracy especially in neighboring countries.
|
| For instance in Ukraine yandex is simply completely blocked
| as result of a war that Russia started against Ukraine and
| it is done for a reason. Do not be less wise then Ukraine
| and just do not go there.
| [deleted]
| simiones wrote:
| While you're not wrong about Russia, similar things can
| be said about the US and its allies (of which my own
| country is one).
|
| True, the US typically attacks countries that are farther
| away, but their devastation of Irak and Afghanistan is
| much worse than Ukraine or Georgia (another victim of
| Russian aggression) have suffered in the last 20 years at
| least. And while Iraq and Afghanistan were by no means
| democratic regimes, we can see plenty of democratic
| governments toppled by American power and their allies -
| In Yemen in 2014 (mostly Saudi led, but with US arms and
| support), Haiti in 2004, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the
| late 1970s, Iran in 1953. There are also many other
| despotic regimes that the US successfully helped against
| revolutions that may have toppled them (most memorably,
| in South Vietnam, but also at various times in Iraq and
| much of South America).
|
| Empires are always evil, and they are always seeking to
| spread their propaganda. The only way of getting a
| slightly clearer picture is to use sources from multiple
| such empires and try to build a more accurate picture
| than any one of them wants you to.
|
| So yes, please use both Yandex and Google for search,
| read RT as well as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, AFP,
| etc.
| bbarnett wrote:
| What a borked view of the world. Yes, the US invades
| places. Yet the damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, is caused
| far more by their own people, killing and slaughtering
| each other over religious grounds.
| simiones wrote:
| > Yet the damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, is caused far
| more by their own people, killing and slaughtering each
| other over religious grounds.
|
| We, the USA and its allies, have directly killed
| thousands to tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan
| civilians, and many more "enemy combatants" (it's
| important to remember that under the rules of the "War on
| Terror", any adult male is counted as an enemy combatant
| by default, unless explicitly proven otherwise). The
| Russians killed as many or more during the Soviet
| invasion.
|
| The opposition forces are also responsible for a great
| many civilian deaths (many more than the US led forces,
| at least in Iraq, according to official numbers). But
| this is what happens when you invade a country,
| especially one already divided along sectarian lines: the
| people who rise up against you start seeing enemies and
| collaborators everywhere and killing their own as well.
|
| Were there sectarian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan
| before the war? Absolutely, but a mere fraction of what
| happened during the war.
| kolbe wrote:
| DDG is still bad, though. I use it out of principle, but
| whenever I'm doing a deep dive into some technical topic, DDG
| fails me badly. I almost always have to just search a second
| time on Google. Google may corrupt the top results, but DDG
| often doesn't give any relevant results.
| usrusr wrote:
| For now I'll grant them that they've removed the entirety of
| their old motto/claim - and not just the "Don't". I wonder how
| long that will last though, benefit of doubt is not an infinite
| resource.
| musicale wrote:
| > Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget
| Chrome.
|
| Google search seems to be something of a feedback loop at this
| point.
|
| Which is fine as 1) it's good for searching Google properties
| and 2) it opens the door for web search engines that search the
| web.
| mc32 wrote:
| It would be helpful if search engines were honest an open about
| what they censor.
|
| Google could plainly say we blackhole this and that content and
| ignore these keywords and don't autocomplete on these others,
| etc. same for Bing and any other. Just be open and transparent
| about the purposeful bias then the user can find and use the
| one that most matches what they're looking to use.
| SiVal wrote:
| Yes, what they censor and what they deliberately distort.
|
| Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself.
| Google will show you that the majority of American inventors
| throughout history have been African-American. You may be
| skeptical of Google's claim (disguised as search results),
| but the next generation, working on their school reports,
| will see the world as Google wants them to see it. Now
| imagine how much of what we learn about the reality of
| current events is coming from the same source with the same
| agenda and policies regarding narrative vs. reality.
|
| But in case you are thinking of contradicting Google's
| claims, remember: that's what their campaign against
| "misinformation" is intended to silence. They are indeed
| serious about misinformation.
|
| A couple of years ago, when they were testifying to Congress
| that they did not deliberately distort search results. At the
| same time, someone else in the organization explained _why_
| they deliberately bias results. Oops. I can only guess that
| it was some underling who, in a sea of leftists back in the
| office (and probably a few non-leftists who know what would
| happen if they were outed) took for granted that biasing
| search results for political objectives was something to be
| proud of. They didn 't realize what their execs knew, that if
| you're going to distort the truth for a higher objective, you
| don't admit doing so.
|
| On a Google web page that I can no longer find, they publicly
| explained (it was public, not an internal page) that search
| results that improved society were sometimes more important
| than simply reporting the facts. That must have sounded good
| to an internal audience, but apparently it had to be reworked
| into externally calling it a fight against misinformation.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I'm not sure we're seeing the same results -- when I (in
| the US) search for American inventors the majority of the
| people they show arek not obviously African American. It
| seems like "the leftists" haven't got to my results yet.
| handrous wrote:
| Just tried it in an incognito window out of curiosity. I
| didn't expect it to be true (if only because results are
| so variable) but sure enough, the parent accurately
| described the top carousel of results with photos (a
| feature I'm not sure I've ever actually seen before--I
| guess I don't tend to search things that trigger that
| page element to appear). 5/12 white, 7/12 black (zero any
| other group) of the set that appears on the front page
| without side-scrolling.
|
| (I make no claims about why this is--I haven't a clue--
| and don't, personally, really care that it's the case,
| but am just confirming that I do indeed see the described
| behavior)
| metabagel wrote:
| " Google will show you that the overwhelming majority of
| American inventors throughout history have been African-
| American."
|
| It could just be that there is a lot of activity on the web
| around African-American inventors which Google is
| reflecting. Google isn't an encyclopedia.
|
| Their campaign against misinformation is purportedly
| intended to reduce the spread of lies and propaganda. There
| might be some collateral damage where sources of lies and
| propaganda get generally downgraded (even when telling the
| truth), but is that really a problem? Most of us do that in
| our interpersonal relationships. If you are a liar, I'll
| tend not to believe you, even if when you tell me something
| true. (I'll assume there is some agenda or some part which
| may be false.)
|
| I don't feel like you have presented sufficient evidence to
| support your (apparently politically motivated) case.
| SiVal wrote:
| _There might be some collateral damage where sources of
| lies and propaganda get generally downgraded (even when
| telling the truth), but is that really a problem?_
|
| Of course it is if Google is one of the sources of
| propaganda rather than an objective source of truth. In
| that case "misinformation" is not a neutral question of
| factual correctness.
|
| When the judge and prosecutor are the same person, the
| judge considers most of the prosecutor's arguments to be
| true and the defense to be an unreliable "source of lies"
| that needs to be kept in line.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Such as Google's censoring of the never debunked lab leak
| theory? Oops. Or how about the now verified Hunter Biden
| laptop stories? Double oops.
|
| It turns out the line between "politically inconvienent"
| and "misinformation" can be very fuzzy, even for high
| profile / important topics.
|
| There is plenty of evidence if you look for it (and I am
| pretty sure I fall on the opposite side of the political
| divide from the commentor you are responding to.)
|
| Edit: Google's biases don't just hurt the political
| right. Google's quick bar for the 2016 Democratic
| presidential primary was happy list Hillary with all her
| pledged votes in addition to those she'd actually won, in
| violation of journalistic standards and Google's previous
| practices.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for
| yourself. Google will show you that the overwhelming
| majority of American inventors throughout history have been
| African-American.
|
| I'm not sure that is the best example. For one, this only
| applies to image results, regular search seem normal. For
| another, Bing (and the search engines that use Bing) does
| the same thing.
|
| Given that, I think that there may be some sort of guerilla
| SEO campaign to distort these results. That campaign could
| be leftists trying to change perceptions of race or it
| could be rightists trying to change perceptions of
| Google/search.
| concinds wrote:
| I think it's purely that most kids writing school reports
| are more likely to be asked to write about "African-
| American inventors" than "America inventors" or "Chinese
| inventors" or any particular country, and SEO-optimized
| blogspam has adapted to that. I don't think it's
| political.
|
| Bing Search, which has an independent web index from
| Google/Bing, has the same issue. It's interesting how
| search results can be biased without any malevolence or
| even any intervention by search engines.
| 323 wrote:
| I wonder how many people don't use DDG (like me) because of the
| stupid (in my opinion) name. It's so impossible to remember and
| pronounce.
|
| Whatever cool/hilarious/human reason they have for it (I don't
| care), I wish they also added another alias that is easy to
| remember and type.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| ddg.gg or duck.com are both easy to type. And I suppose
| duck.com is reasonably easy to remember.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I never type it because DDG is my default.
|
| I think Google was a harder name to remember for non-nerds
| who weren't familiar with the rather obscure word.
|
| There is a short alias: As someone else mentioned, duck.com
| redirects to duckduckgo.com
| metabagel wrote:
| It's a riff on the children's game "duck duck goose".
| quesera wrote:
| Oddly, in some regions of the US, the same game is called
| "duck, duck, grey duck".
| simiones wrote:
| The biggest problem is that it's the American (UK as well?)
| name for a children's game - not the sort of thing most
| English speakers would ever learn, unless they are really
| connected to US/UK culture.
|
| The game is probably more or less universal, but the name
| is unrecognizable.
| metabagel wrote:
| I feel like it's such an oddball name that it sticks in
| my head.
| akho wrote:
| duck.com
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget
| Chrome.
|
| I understand Google's utter dominance in search, but Google is
| not "the open web".
| laserlight wrote:
| I remember searching for a movie trailer on YouTube. I searched
| for the exact title of the video, yet the original trailer
| published by Warner Bros was buried down below spam reposts and
| stupid reaction videos.
| nradov wrote:
| If you're looking for a Warner Bros movie trailer then why
| would you search on YouTube instead of visiting the Warner
| home page?
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| What an absurd thing to suggest.
|
| Should everyone in your opinion know the production
| companies of all upcoming films so they can look up their
| website to view trailers?
| usui wrote:
| Who thinks, "I want to look up a video trailer, so I'll go
| to the Warner Brothers home page, whatever that is."? No,
| the layman searches for it on the world's second most-
| visited website.
| coffeecat wrote:
| > Just try to look up any topic on YouTube, and you'll have to
| get past the hundreds of mainstream media channels covering the
| event, before you actually find the original video.
|
| I find this problem extremely frustrating. Does anyone have
| suggestions for how to easily find primary video sources,
| instead of the massive heap of commentary that a youtube search
| yields?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Isn't it an unavoidable social phenomenon ? as soon as any
| system / company starts to have weight in the group, they will
| face requests of accountability and responsability. They may
| try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it doesn't work
| often.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| It is avoidable through traditions and institutionalized
| processes that engender neutrality.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Google is an extension of American soft power. They're
| about as neutral as Huawei.
| [deleted]
| chii wrote:
| > They may try to use the "we're just the messenger" but it
| doesn't work often.
|
| it should work - it's up to society to make this work by
| passing laws to that effect.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Simple, if company works only as a messenger they will be
| left alone. They just present user content, and leave users
| to find their content.
|
| As soon as they introduce their own bias(curating content,
| recommendations, emergence of so called "walled gardens") it
| opens the floodgates.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Untrue.
|
| The history of communications and information is rife with
| channels and sources of all description being controlled.
|
| If anything, "neutral" sources are all the more subject to
| influence as they simply abrogate the role of censor /
| amplifier to others. All the more so if they're heavily
| used and relied upon, as this means that there is an
| influenceable audience present.
|
| As my friend Woozle puts it:
|
| _Because of a high percentage of the population being
| present, there is now substantial power to be had by
| influencing the discussions that take place._
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_e
| p...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > I don't believe websites can dynamically alter their index to
| show up for so many typoed search queries.
|
| One way to do it is to have some path through the site that
| lists relevant data, but also includes links at the bottom to
| typoed versions of the data. The web crawler will chase those
| links, and if each page that you retrieve generates more such
| typo links, you can feed the crawler an infinite stream of
| typos.
|
| Google will consume quite a large chunk of an infinite stream
| before it trips any kind of "circuit breaker" to cut off how
| much crawling they'll do on one site. They have a lot of
| storage.
| concinds wrote:
| Fascinating. Thanks
| iso1631 wrote:
| Film trailers on youtube are particularly bad, especially as
| you not only get other companies simply rereleasing them with a
| logo over the top, but you get fake trailers polluting the
| results
| thweriu2343 wrote:
| DDG removes quite a few "dangerous" pages too. You need to use
| Yandex these days to get stuff the "ministry of truth" deems to
| sensitive.
|
| I'm sure the irony is lost on the Freedom-Democracy-landers.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| DDG pretty much just whitelabels Bing.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| Honestly DuckDuckGo doesn't censor anything. It just uses the
| bing index with a few custom results. I have been unable to
| find an example for which DDG and bing would produce
| different results though.
|
| And the fact that the our societies have been rushing towards
| totalitarianism doesn't make Putin Mr. Nice Guy all of a
| sudden. It is not that simple.
| terafo wrote:
| You can't find many things that Russian government deems
| inappropriate in Yandex. Yandex, Google and Bing(DDG is
| basically Bing proxy) just have different sets of biases.
| malka wrote:
| It is time to go back to meta search engines I guess
| handrous wrote:
| My monitor's pretty hi-res and big.
|
| How about a 3-column search that's Google, DDG (so,
| Bing), and Yandex, with a single search field for all
| three? Bonus points for syncing it up so if I click, say,
| the "Images" tab on one of them, it switches the others
| over, too.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Nah, Yahoo style pages with links
| millzlane wrote:
| What about startpage?
| Dah00n wrote:
| Owned by an Ad company these days. But yes they do
| promise "We'll never do evil". They belong in the grey
| area. But at least they haven't been caught with their
| hands in the cookie-jar multiple times like Brave so they
| got that going for them. I'd stay clear.
| starsep wrote:
| Startpage is a Google proxy. The Pirate Bay is filtered
| out there as well.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I don't think meta has a search engine yet, though.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| _slow clap_
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I don't see how this is something to be applauded. The
| company is successfully worming it's way into common
| vernacular. Meta, Apple, Block, etc. Pretty soon you
| won't be able to speak a sentence without invoking 6
| different brands' free advertising.
| istjohn wrote:
| They are applauding the pun, not the company the pun
| refers to.
| janeroe wrote:
| > You can't find many things that Russian government deems
| inappropriate in Yandex
|
| What are those things that Yandex can't find? It seems to
| me it shows pretty relevant results for "putin's golden
| toilet" [1], "putin's blasting houses" with US State
| Department / Soros funded web-site as one of the top
| results [2]. A query with "navalny's statement" shows both
| his twitter and his web-site on the first page.
|
| When comparing to google, "gab" in yandex shows the web-
| site's link as the first result. Google doesn't show it at
| all, there is only CNN, wikipedia, some woke dictionaries
| all telling you gab is not something you should search.
|
| So, who's got totalitarian system with censorship after
| all?
|
| [1]: https://yandex.com/search/?text=%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%
| BE%D1%...
|
| [2]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B
| 8%D0%B...
|
| [3]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%B
| 2%D0%B...
| sufficer wrote:
| I googled gab and it was the first result. Did your
| machine get pwned?
| janeroe wrote:
| Where are you from? I checked from American IP and it's
| indeed the first result. Not the case with Asian IP.
| scarmig wrote:
| When I search for Gab on Google, it comes up as the first
| result.
| janeroe wrote:
| What does "us election fraud" shows, any web-sites that
| are not in line with "the correct" narrative? For me
| google shows one side, yandex both of them.
|
| Now, "golosovanie na pen'kakh" (voting on stomps) is a
| mockery of Putin's constitution referendum by opposition.
| When searching this phrase in Google the front page is
| again Putin controlled media: tass, rbc, kommersant, rg.
|
| Yandex apart from the aforementioned web-sites has US
| State Department / Soros funded meduza and svoboda.org,
| liberal (in American sense) tjournal, Deutsche Welle.
|
| It seems Yandex gives preference to the most relevant
| sites when Google decides what's good ("credible") for
| you.
|
| [1]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0
| %BE%D1%8...
| fault1 wrote:
| > when Google decides what's good ("credible") for you.
|
| One of the problems is that black hat SEOs (among other
| people) have huge economic incentives to spread
| misinformation, including about the election. This is of
| course, an eternal cat and mouse game. This is not new, I
| remember when gmail started filtering chain letter scams
| more than a decade ago.
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm just checking a claim I thought was implausible and
| also easily verifiable.
|
| It'd be weird for Google to bury bad think only for non-
| American IP addresses but allow it for Americans if it
| was on some woke crusade for the benefit of the US
| government. Now, I'm not sure why it's removed from your
| results, but my point is that what you cited as a piece
| of evidence for malign intent on Google's part isn't
| actually supporting evidence.
| oytis wrote:
| Would be great to have a search frontend that aggregates
| results from both then.
| michaelbrooks wrote:
| Brave have their own search engine that uses an
| independent built-from-scratch index. [0]
|
| [0] https://search.brave.com/
| generalizations wrote:
| At least it's a different set of biases from the usual ones
| in the us. It's more obvious what's missing.
| metabagel wrote:
| I would personally not use any information source which could
| potentially be under the control of either the Russian or
| Chinese government. Both governments are tightly controlled
| by strongmen who spread disinformation and propaganda
| (information warfare).
| Sunspark wrote:
| If Trump runs and is re-elected, the American companies
| like Google will be under the control of his government. He
| has a lot of anger about being deplatformed, and they will
| be brought to obey his bidding as a priority and fairly
| quickly, since this time around it's personal instead of
| being some boring piece of paperwork.
|
| In that scenario, ironically, the Russians might end up
| being more free.
| subliminalpanda wrote:
| I noticed that with DDG recently. Tried searching for fmovies
| (pirate streaming stie), DDG yields nothing now when it
| previously had the results I wanted. Same results searching
| for iteroni.
|
| I compared it with brave search and the latter remains
| unfiltered for the time being.
| aembleton wrote:
| Are you expecting to see https://fmovies.kim ? That's what
| I get at the top of my results: https://imgur.com/yW893ld
| subliminalpanda wrote:
| Interesting. The past few days when I searched I got none
| of the hits, but yes along those lines.
|
| Today I see this:
|
| DDG: https://imgur.com/a/CfDXfoq Brave Search (for
| comparison): https://imgur.com/a/vvEfaMF
| Valakas_ wrote:
| DDG should change their name though. Seriously. Who wants to
| use such a ridiculous sounding search engine? AltaVista sounded
| good and had a meaning (seeing from above). Yahoo fine. Bing
| also ok. But duckduckgo seems like the most ridiculous name
| someone came up on a brainstorm meeting for search engine
| names. But then they did went with it.
| dqpb wrote:
| I agree, naming is very important. I once tried to have a
| conversation with a group of colleagues about Coq, and
| literally the conversation couldn't move past the name. Now I
| just use TLA+ or Lean.
| athenot wrote:
| They own duck.com and it redirects to their site. They should
| just adopt "duck.com" as their main brand, which will
| inevitably get shortened to "Duck" in everyday conversation.
|
| Then we can turn it into a verb. "Go Duck <term>"
|
| They could even capitalize on the famous autocorrect
| substitutions: "Need an answer? Duck it!"
| mrandish wrote:
| Wow. I did not know this. They should absolutely do as you
| suggest. Duck is a far better name.
| GordonS wrote:
| IIRC, Google actually owned duck.com until a few years
| back, when they voluntarily handed it over to DDG.
| soylentcola wrote:
| I once worked with an "interesting" guy who had a tshirt
| that read "If you can't duck it, fuck it" over an image of
| a roll of duct tape.
| kolbe wrote:
| Unfortunately Apple's autocorrect has totally hijacked the
| meaning of "Go duck ___"
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Are you telling me to go duck myself?
| wcunning wrote:
| Last night, driving home through a not great part of Detroit
| at nearly 10:00pm, I saw a box truck with DDG advertising on
| all sides. I was amused by the dedication to offline
| advertising.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Nah HotBot and AskJeeves didn't have a problem back in the
| day. Google sounded just as ridiculous when it came out.
| Fnoord wrote:
| With the blink of an 'y', Hotbot was one letter away from
| something completely different. Although the term NSFW was
| yet to be invented back then.
| soylentcola wrote:
| One of my first exposures to "typo squatting" was when I
| accidentally typed in "hotbat" in the early 2000's. It
| led to some generic porn site with a girl in a tight
| tshirt holding a baseball bat as a splash image. No other
| real connection to the name as far as I could tell. Just
| a run of the mill (for the time) paid porn site.
| m10i wrote:
| I'd argue that HotBot is a lot more catchy since 1) it
| rhymes, 2) it's shorter in length.
|
| AskJeeves would also be abbreviated in conversation to just
| "Jeeves", which is definitely as the original creators
| intended. "DuckDuckGo" doesn't have these features going
| for it.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Dogpile
| jachee wrote:
| Lycos.
|
| Bing.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Excite.
|
| AltaVista.
| adolph wrote:
| Veronica
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)
| excitom wrote:
| Frankly that was my reaction when I first heard of "google".
| mikepurvis wrote:
| At least to most normal people "google" would have sounded
| like a silly, made up word. Or like, the most association
| it might have had would be to something like googley eyes.
|
| DuckDuckGo has the disadvantage of not only sounding silly,
| but also being composed of silly-sounding real words. And
| not having a secret geeky meaning that people find out
| about and then feel like they're part of an elite club.
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| This comment is so unrelatable to me, every kid over the
| age of 7 when I was in school knew what a google was or
| better yet, a googleplex. This was also in the 90s so it
| predates the search engines popularity by a good bit.
|
| It was, simply put, the biggest named number anyone knew
| and was frequently used as such in arguments... e.g. I
| watched that movie 1000 times! Oh ya? Well I watched it a
| google times.
| bigyellow wrote:
| It's a ridiculous name because it's a ridiculous company.
| "Private" search engine, hosted on US-based Microsoft Azure
| servers? Give me a break, what a complete joke.
| skinkestek wrote:
| To me it seems search engines needs weird name.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong and someone has a list of somewhat successful
| general search engine with a somewhat serious names besides
| Alta Vista (and I never thought about that before) and Fast?
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| 100% agree. It is so obviously a huge impediment.
|
| Weird names can be overcome (see "google"), but weird +
| clunky + needs to disrupt _massive_ established players...
| what are they thinking?
|
| At least lose the "Go".. DuckDuck we can work with.
| jdofaz wrote:
| They already own duck.com
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| Google has been on this crusade against piracy for awhile now. I
| first noticed when I tried to do this query a few months,
| years(?) ago:
|
| site:[famous non western tracker].com [insert music here]
|
| zero results.
|
| Same query, on duckduckgo: Everything there.
|
| Another query:
|
| [famous ebook sharing sites] on google.
|
| Non-related results
|
| Same query on duckduckgo: First hit is the correct website.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is why using alternatives is important.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I use DDG for normal searches, but when I actually need to find
| something i'll use google.
|
| One example is i like chill hop radio. whenever i search on DDG
| might get results, but google will usually send me directly to
| their bandcamp page which the the ideal result
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| Google Search itself is now a threat to the open web. Forget
| Chrome.
| CyberShadow wrote:
| Title is editorialized by submitter. Actual title: "Google
| Removes Pirate Bay Domains from Search Results Citing Dutch Court
| Order".
| nosianu wrote:
| It is accurate though and it's an important detail. The
| headline makes it sound as if Google was ordered, which is not
| the case.
|
| > _The order targets ISPs and doesn 't name Google but the
| company chose to voluntarily comply._ _does_ allow changing the
| title sometimes:
|
| HN guidelines _do_ allow changing the title on one condition:
|
| > Otherwise please use the original title, _unless it is
| misleading_ or linkbait; don 't editorialize.
|
| The original title is misleading, leading one to believe Google
| was ordered.
| lolive wrote:
| The legal department of Google is probably doing that to
| avoid a second court decision, targetting them directly.
| sct202 wrote:
| Considering how often Google gets slapped with billion dollar
| fines in the EU, I'm not surprised they're voluntarily
| complying.
| dustintrex wrote:
| Not really? The original title is careful to say " _citing_
| court order ", not "per court order" etc.
|
| If anything, I think your title is more editorialized, since
| Google is clearly doing this for legal reasons, not exactly
| "voluntarily".
| southerntofu wrote:
| As a non-native speaker, the difference between "citing"
| and "per" would have me confused. The HN title is much more
| explicit.
| nosianu wrote:
| "citing court order" to me as a non-legal person indicates
| that it is one they received. I hope you don't expect this
| non-legal forum's headlines to be parsed like legal text?
| How does "citing" indicate it is not an order Google
| received?
|
| I merely gave my opinion as a non-legal casual news reader.
| To me at lest this new headline conveyed what happened more
| clearly before I delved into the article.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| "citing a court order against ISPs" would be sufficient,
| I think.
| dang wrote:
| I don't think the title implies that. If anything, it weakly
| implies the opposite - that's how I read the word 'citing'.
| If the court had ordered them to do it, the headline would
| have been something like 'Dutch court orders Google [etc.]'
| or whatever.
|
| If there's a misleading aspect, it's that they only removed
| the search results in the Netherlands while the headline
| doesn't really make that clear. I think it's borderline
| though.
| CyberShadow wrote:
| This is subjective to my non-native English skill, but I
| found the editorialized title much more misleading.
| "Voluntarily" to me meant with zero obligation or coercion,
| explicit or implied, from any authority, i.e. doing it out of
| their sense of duty or something like that.
|
| Happy to compromise on that both titles are not ideal :)
| hef19898 wrote:
| No idea what's going on there in the EU right now. But there
| has been an other case in Germany where certain adult sides
| are blocked unless they put "strict" measures in place to
| verify the age of users. Because porn causes severe damage to
| children and youth. Those sites, xhamster among them, are
| based on Zyprus in the EU. And a German court found that they
| have to adhere to German child protection laws.
|
| SO we have the case against that DNS provider, one against
| adult sites and one from the Netherlands against Pirate Bay.
|
| Two thoughts: What the fuck happened to the free internet? It
| seems that the EU is slowly, intentionally or not, building a
| Chinese wall around European internet. And secondly,
| apparently those courts didn't realize that VPNs are a thing.
| My son used VPNs on his phone before I even thought about it.
| And he didn't pick the worst ones. He is 13.
| lgl wrote:
| Ok, I'm from the EU and even I disagree many times with
| some of the more ridiculous laws that the EU tries to
| impose on the internet, but on your examples I'm not really
| sure what exactly is the big deal?
|
| What alternatives do you propose except passing laws? Just
| allow corporations or individuals on the internet to
| exploit people and children for their own profit without
| any repercussions because they're on "the free internet"?
| To allow stealing and profiting out of copyrighted works
| without repercussions because they're on "the free
| internet"?
|
| There was never such a thing as "the free internet" except
| in the ideological minds of some people. In reality, when
| you don't place laws and guards in place, things will
| always get abused and go downhill pretty fast.
|
| For instance, children can't get into strip clubs or
| casinos in most countries. Those laws exist for a reason
| and there's no argument you can make that they shouldn't
| just because those venues are now on the internet, so if a
| company wants do do business in country X, then they have
| to abide by that country's laws. It's a perfectly logical
| and reasonable thing to do and being an "internet company"
| shouldn't exempt you from all the laws in all the
| countries, that's just a silly proposition.
|
| The fact that VPNs and other workarounds exist also
| shouldn't preclude such laws from being put in place,
| otherwise there would be no legal ground on which to
| prosecute any offenders. There are workarounds for breaking
| and entering but you wouldn't argue that there shouldn't be
| such a law because "apparently those courts didn't realize
| that lockpicks are a thing".
|
| So I'm not sure why you're getting so angry about on your
| specific examples? Laws being put in place that target
| certain internet behaviors that are already unlawful when
| not on the internet? Kids not being able to easily access
| porn websites? Being slightly harder to find pirated
| content online? It's a strange set of arguments to put your
| foot down on imho.
|
| Also, the country's name is Cyprus.
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now. Thanks!
|
| (Submitted title was "Google voluntarily de-lists The Pirate
| Bay")
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| yandex.com for the win. thank me l8r.
| authed wrote:
| Also great for searching by image
| nick__m wrote:
| I was about to say the exact same thing in a more verbose way !
|
| yandex.com is seriously awesome for infosec related searches
| and I guess (it's been a few years since I had to pirate
| something) that it's equally great for pirated content.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| guess where I found the streams for all portlandia episodes
| which I happen to watch just now.
| mountainb wrote:
| I think the standard that I want to see service providers is
| "force me to do it, or I'm not going to do it." Get a court
| order. Get a warrant. Kick down my door. Sue me. Subpoena me.
| Stop rolling over without even getting a treat for it; it's
| pathetic.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In fairness, there are gradations of response.
|
| I'd like for search engines to be highly and independently
| responsive to CP, spam, SEO gaming, fraud, malware,
| cyberstalking, cyberbullying, revenge pr0n,and similar threats.
| Relying on court orders would simply be too slow.
|
| I'd also like for search engines to be responsive to propaganda
| and disinformation. This calls for a much more nuanced response
| than the first category, and is inherently political rather
| than merely criminal.
|
| In the case of general copyright claims, specific targeted
| removals _if executed reasonably and fairly_ , which quite
| arguably YouTube's ContentID is not, as an example, should be
| possible with a fairly minimal degree of legal mechanism (e.g.,
| DMCA 512 takedowns under US law). Though that process should be
| amended to reduce abusive exploitation of such measures.
|
| Delisting entire domains for copyright infringement absent a
| specific legal action ... moves into much stickier waters.
| Ultimately, torrent sites will likely have to provide their own
| well-known search alternative which is resistant to such
| threats. I'd like to see that possibility further developed.
|
| (I'm aware that many such sites already claim the legal shield
| of serving as directories to content, not as hosters of that
| content themselves, which would inlcude The Pirate Bay itself.)
|
| Widespread global civil disobedience in the face of
| overwhelmingly asymmetric and self-serving copyright
| legislation and case law is among the very few avenues the
| average citizenry have of voicing opposition to such laws. And
| that fact alone should carry great weight.
|
| I'd like for search engines to be strongly resistant to
| removals based on overly-broad copyright claims,
| jug wrote:
| Google already acts upon DMCA requests, delisting sites if
| requested. They add a small note to the end of their results to
| inform you if the page should normally have had more search hits.
|
| So this raises so many questions. Has _no party_ requested to
| delist TPB under DMCA?!
|
| That sounds incredible if true. But the only explanation I have
| for Google feeling like they need to go this far, delisting on
| their own initiative! It's like a scenario that should never have
| to happen, and something they should never do either.
|
| So what's going on here?
|
| Update: Ugh, editorialization... Apparently court has been
| involved here and while Google may not be individually targetted
| and forced YET, so "voluntary", it's easy to see how Google see
| the writing on the wall and choose to comply. No point in
| fighting this with such a clear cut DMCA violation. But in this
| case I'm still surprised it took this long!
| Stevvo wrote:
| When delisting for DMCA requests they don't delist the whole
| site, only results pointing to specified infringing torrents.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Regardless of your opinion on piracy, I think Google (and ISPs)
| should not moderate search results.
|
| Basically, search engines are used to find things publicly
| available on the internet, policing should be done on the actual
| hosts of the content.
|
| Same goes for ISPs, they are here to provide access to publicly
| available computers, without interfering with the content or
| accessibility.
| Vinnl wrote:
| But Google moderates search results by definition. As in, it's
| not like there's an objective external measure of what the
| results for a given search term should look like - it's all
| Google that determines what to show you in what order.
| jtbayly wrote:
| First, there's a difference between moderation by
| prioritization vs blacklisting.
|
| Second, if I search for "the Pirate Bay website" I'm pretty
| sure there's an objective result that should be there at the
| top.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| if "the pirate bay website" is written in lots of documents
| discussing the legality of the website, but the actual
| website is called "https://www.piratebay.org" and doesn't
| contain the words "the pirate bay website" at all, then by
| any objective measure that site should be way down the list
| of any search results for "the pirate bay website".
| acchow wrote:
| This is 2021. Search engines are aiming for semantic
| matches.
| jtbayly wrote:
| You honestly think that it's the wrong answer to show
| that website when somebody searches for that term?
|
| The title tag of the site is as follows: "Download music,
| movies, games, software! The Pirate Bay - The galaxy's
| most resilient BitTorrent site"
|
| And it's the number one search result for that phrase on
| DDG. Because search engines are actually programmed well
| enough to figure out that's the right answer. I'm not
| sure why you think it's the wrong answer to show that
| site as the first result, but I'm pretty sure everybody
| else in the world disagrees with you, and would prefer
| that they see the website they are searching for, instead
| of news articles about the site they are searching for.
| willis936 wrote:
| I don't see a difference between not listing something and
| listing it below an infinite number of null results.
|
| 1 / [?] = 0
| vadfa wrote:
| There is a difference between having a set of rules and doing
| ad hoc moderation.
| 8note wrote:
| So writing a rule "don't show results from domains on list
| X" makes it ad hoc ad not a rule?
|
| I don't think there's sombody manually removing each result
| from search queries by hand. That wouldnt meet latency
| constraints
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The set of rules includes "results that are illegal to
| divulge in a jurisdiction will not be shown."
| shkkmo wrote:
| Since Google is doing this voluntarily, many of the
| blocked results were legal to divulge but Google is
| choosing not to, which does make it ad hoc.
| axutio wrote:
| This just becomes a question of pragmatism at that point
| - Google lacks the capacity to determine which of the
| blocked results are legal versus are not without
| incurring cost, so the most realistic approach is to
| recognize that a majority of results from that domain are
| illegal and block the domain. This is just the simplest
| way to enforce a particular rule in a particular case
| that can't otherwise be cheaply codified programatically.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I don't think anyone actually thinks in these absolutist terms.
| I mean, it's an oft-cited whataboutism, but what about CP?
| Terrorist propaganda? Insert your own list of abhorrent content
| here.
|
| I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet libertarian
| ideal, but there's plenty of examples out there what that looks
| like - 4chan, 'old' reddit, parler & co (which ironically
| censor a lot of stuff), all of the dark web, etc.
|
| You state "policing should be done on the actual hosts of the
| content", but what if the host says "lol no"? That's what's
| happening here; BREIN demanded (and has done so for at least
| the past 10 years, probably longer) that since the hosts are
| untouchable and not legally required to comply (these things
| get complicated once you go abroad), they went for the ISP's
| and search engines instead.
|
| If something is deemed illegal, and the source is untouchable,
| you have to go for whatever passes it on. I mean hard drugs are
| illegal, they are shipped across the world, and only when they
| arrive at a port is there something that can be done to stop
| it.
| 8note wrote:
| China gives the proper answer - a national firewall.
|
| If a host doesnt comply, they get denied by the firewall.
| Zababa wrote:
| > I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet
| libertarian ideal, there's plenty of examples out there what
| that looks like - 4chan
|
| 4chan has rules that are enforced, especially since the split
| between 4chan and 4channel. What might give the impression
| that it's "some kind of internet libertarian ideal" is that
| people often not report posts. But when they do, the janitors
| usually do their jobs. These days even troll posts are
| deleted!
| thinkingemote wrote:
| You were on the right track with the ironic parler comment,
| however, 4chan and old reddit, old school forums both always
| had and currently have moderation. The moderation rules are
| just different than on other sites, but they had hundreds of
| humans moderating. Even the newer, arguably worse web forums
| out there are still policed internally, as you note.
|
| It's a myth that there was zero moderation. What the
| libertarian ideal was privacy and anonymity. Where a user
| could say something like sharing a link to the pirate bay and
| not worry about it too much when it got moderated. Websites
| would respect a users privacy. Moderation was about cleaning
| the site, not sharing a users personal data with authorities.
| It wasn't about free speech so much as a kind of place for
| users on the internet with no real world consequences for
| sharing, for example, a link to the pirate bay.
|
| They all moderated.
| klibertp wrote:
| > I mean, it's an oft-cited whataboutism, but what about CP?
| Terrorist propaganda?
|
| I like the Freenet's author take on this. He says that porn,
| terrorists, drug dealers and all kinds of "abhorrent" content
| are a price you pay for the lives of whistleblowers and
| people fleeing from their dictatorship states, sects, and
| terrorists; and for preservation of valuable, but
| controversial, content.
|
| Well, it makes sense in case of Freenet, which offers full
| anonymity and resilient storage (you can upload content, and
| as long as there are people viewing it, it will propagate
| itself along the node connections path, and it's impossible
| to take the content down). Torrents, Reddit, and 4chan are
| different, so maybe here the trade-off will be different too.
| syshum wrote:
| >>I mean, zero moderation is some kind of internet
| libertarian ideal, but there's plenty of examples out there
| what that looks like - 4chan, 'old' reddit, parler & co
| (which ironically censor a lot of stuff), all of the dark
| web, etc.
|
| There is a couple of problem with this, first I see no
| problems at all with 4chan, old reddit, or parler. So using
| them as an example of something bad that should be banned is
| ridiculous, parler in peculiar was gaslite into a false
| narrative around 1/6 protests when in reality most of the
| communication, as stated by the FBI, where done via Facebook
| and other larger platforms not parler. Parler was the scape
| goat. Parler should fail for any number of reasons but not
| because of censorship, it is a terrible platform
| technoligically, it is terrible security posture, and various
| other usablity issue.
|
| Then there is the unintended blowback this type of
| censorships leads to. Such as increased levels of echo
| chambers and extremism. Take for example the fall out from
| Backpage removal. Did it end trafficking, and prostitution.
| No, not by a long shot, it just make the criminals harder to
| catch, the victims harder to find, and made things more
| dangerous for legal age sex workers.. Good Job Government.
| Pyramus wrote:
| I absolutely agree with you - we don't live in a black and
| white world, and black and white measures rarely work in
| practice.
|
| Should Google de-list Pirate Bay? In my opinion no.
|
| Should Google de-list some things? No doubt yes. That is how
| society works - your rights end where somebody else's start.
|
| As the down-voting of parent shows, HN gets defensive when
| this is pointed out.
| lovelyviking wrote:
| >we don't live in a black and white world
|
| you say that and then I see this:
|
| >Should Google de-list Pirate Bay? In my opinion no.
|
| Looks like pretty black in white about Pirate Bay here.
|
| Also doesn't look like you are too much against censorship.
| You do not even discuss whether it should be or not. I
| sense it is pretty white there for you too.
|
| It reminds me how russia controlled media spread idea that
| not everything is black and white but when they decided to
| attack Ukraine using military and took Crimea and parts of
| other two regions with force it suddenly became black and
| white for the moment of attack and then again coming back
| to 'oh it's not black and white we didn't took anything'
|
| I personally love how "everything is not black and white"
| concept is used to justify censorship and promote
| everything that serves totalitarian dreams.
| ksec wrote:
| I think a possible solution is to at least list The Private
| Bay just as a site but not the content within its site. So
| if you want to search something within The Private Bay, PB
| can do it within their own site.
| fsflover wrote:
| The "content" of TPB is just hashes. Are they illegal
| already?
| ksec wrote:
| Not really, the solution is just something to offer
| balance between both sides.
| [deleted]
| fsflover wrote:
| > Insert your own list of abhorrent content here.
|
| There are clear laws and court decisions which Google must
| obey. The title says "voluntarily", which is the actual
| problem in this case.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I guess the question is, is it actually voluntary? The ESRB
| rating system was established voluntarily, but that was to
| avoid legislation and legal action that would have happened
| if they didn't. Could be a similar situation here.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The basic problem with the argument against moderation is
| that the Internet started without moderation.
|
| You could post whatever you wanted to Usenet. You could email
| whatever you wanted to anyone, and they would see it in their
| inbox. Heck you could "finger" to see who was online in
| remote networks, and "talk" to open a live chat with anyone,
| totally unmediated by any commercial product. You could log
| in to open FTPs and trade files.
|
| We've been to that particular heaven, and most people didn't
| like it.
|
| Why? While trafficking in CSM was an important and awful
| consequence, the negative that dominated most people's
| experience was spam. That's why web forums beat Usenet;
| that's why centralized webmail beat a forest of naked email
| servers. Etc.
|
| People don't actually want unmoderated search; it would be
| choked with spam.
|
| What people actually want is whatever they want, as easily
| and cheaply as they can get it. The Pirate Bay and other file
| sharing services are popular not because they represent some
| sort of libertarian ideal, but simply because they shovel a
| lot of great content to people for free.
|
| Of course they're popular! A person handing out $10 bills on
| the street corner will be popular too. But it kind of matters
| where he or she got those $10 bills. There are societal side
| effects we might want to manage.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| (full disclosure, I work for Google)
|
| I think it's easy to take an absolutist approach when it's
| _somebody else_ who faces the consequences. In some ways it 's
| a rehash of the arguments when the Navalny app was delisted.
|
| In a vacuum, "should someone follow politically motivated
| requests to take down content?" is an easy question to answer.
| But when you have to worry about consequences like giving up
| your freedom, I can't say that I'd have the courage to follow
| through. The Dutch prisons might be nicer than Russia's, but
| asking someone else to give up their freedom for ideals is
| still a tall order.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would like to see Google highlight legally removed search
| results.
|
| For example, leave a gap in the search results where the
| missing one would have been, perhaps with some details of the
| result which do not fall under the removal request (for
| example, the title of the page, even if the URL must be
| removed).
| briga wrote:
| In principle I agree but in this case I think Google is trying
| to protect itself from lawsuits. Which seems like a reasonable
| thing to do from their perspective. Any search engine that gets
| big enough will eventually have a target on its back for DMCA
| trolls
| southerntofu wrote:
| > I think Google is trying to protect itself from lawsuits
|
| That is unlikely. Google breaks many privacy-related laws
| across the globe and deals with billions of euros of fines
| regularly. They have an unlimited wallet and couldn't care
| less about spending a few billions to extend their dominance
| over the Internet.
| Pyramus wrote:
| That's a logical fallacy - just because Google lost money
| in the past doesn't mean they want to lose money in the
| future. We don't know what Google's utility function was in
| the past, and certainly can't extrapolate to this case.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Google search prints a ridiculous amount of money. I
| think the lawsuit costs do pale in comparison to keeping
| their dominance. If Google is doing this voluntarily,
| they must see an upside that helps maintain that
| dominance.
| southerntofu wrote:
| I'll concede that we can't know for sure. But given their
| vast legal spendings and huge profit margins, i'd argue
| that whatever their strategy is, legal threats from BREIN
| is a drop in the ocean for them.
| antiterra wrote:
| Why wouldn't this result in absolutely horrible search results?
| Any sort of algorithmic tweak to prevent confusing, misleading
| or low quality results could be counted as moderation.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| So maybe hide them behind "show more results" or something.
| That's still better than removing them outright. But of
| course, copyright holders wouldn't be happy with that.
| sysOpOpPERAND wrote:
| agreed. it actually might be used in court someday.
| considering they were under microscope and have said that
| they do not manipulate search results. this could be proof
| enough for a further investigation into google. i know some
| people who work for google may not want to hear that but,
| it's not gonna be ignored if the right people investigate
| google again
| notyourwork wrote:
| > search engines are used to find things publicly available on
| the internet
|
| This used to be the case. As the internet grew in size search
| providers felt it was in best interest in general user to cull
| these results and present their definition of best at the top.
| They wanted to solve the needle in the hay-stack problem by
| taking all the noise out and funneling the best result to the
| top.
|
| Best is a subjective term and I don't think I agree with it.
| However, your definition is not the same as Googles. Search
| providers can define what their search engine does the same way
| a restaurant gets to decide what's on its menu even though all
| restaurants serve food.
| 8note wrote:
| Alternative take: SEO became a thing, and the initial search
| algorithms were not designed for an adversarial game
| visarga wrote:
| If you take ranking/filtering criteria away from Google and
| social networks they lose a lot of power but we gain a lot of
| freedom. They should be forced to open the filtering part of
| the stack, allow more competition and user input in that space.
| adolph wrote:
| Is not indexing certain things the same as moderating search
| results?
|
| Is default but optional moderation a bad thing?
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| People will freak out about this, but I'm not worried. Search has
| this whack-a-mole find-the-pointer-to-the-pointer problem where
| unless you're going to up the state control at China levels it's
| essentially pointless.
|
| If you can't find the torrent site, you Google enough to find a
| community that will link to it. If you can't, you ask on Twitter.
| Etc. Etc. It's never going to stop someone determined. Credible
| threats of jail-time may, but these minor changes by Google and
| others aren't going to change anything important.
| fortyseven wrote:
| The anti-piracy crowd is big on "speed bumps". They know they
| can't stop piracy, but they can make it a pain in the ass and
| hope you'll get frustrated and give up.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| They're unlikely to succeed, though. They've been trying for
| decades and it's still easier to pirate most content than it
| is to buy or rent it.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| _in the Netherlands, following a court order_
| deadalus wrote:
| >The order targets ISPs and doesn't name Google but the company
| chose to voluntarily comply.
| postsantum wrote:
| Just a coincidence that Google goes all out on following the
| law in the country it uses for tax evading
| danmaz74 wrote:
| Unfortunately it's not tax evading, as it's legal.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| However, language isn't all about what's legal/illegal
| but also perception. Your average person is going to
| reasonably infer they use various countries to dodge
| taxes that they should reasonably be expected to pay if
| we take a holistic view of the world.
| luluganeta wrote:
| It is legal, yet it is still tax evasion, even if one
| uses euphemisms like "tax optimization" and so on.
| toyg wrote:
| Talking about the distinction between tax evasion and tax
| avoidance was when I really understood the power of
| controlling language, and why the ruling classes strive
| for getting their kids educated since the dawn of time.
| [deleted]
| HPsquared wrote:
| There are two terms because they are different things:
| one is illegal and generally involves other illegal
| things such as fraud, while the other is legal 'gaming
| the system'. Gaming is not the same as cheating.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Go on, play games with your friends and abuse the tiniest
| rules and tell them "ah ah, it's not cheating". See how
| long you last.
|
| Not respecting the spirit of the law is illegal in most
| of europe, and it's merely a matter of money being thrown
| around, preventing any legal action. But every time it
| happens, Google is found guilty. See their latest 5
| billion fine, see what happened with Ireland.
|
| It's "legal" because noone can spend the money to
| investigate them on their crimes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The difference seems to be mostly the amounts of money
| involved.
| MadeThisToReply wrote:
| Sorry, but you don't get to decide what words mean. "Tax
| evasion" is illegal by definition. "Tax avoidance" is
| legal.
|
| According to Wikipedia, the term "tax noncompliance" (or
| "tax avoision"... bleargh) can be used as a general term
| to refer to both of those things
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_noncompliance
| LinuxBender wrote:
| And to help people remember the difference, here is a
| video of David Mitchell explaining his thoughts on the
| matter [1]
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q-Csk-ktc
| [warning, language]
| xphx wrote:
| Sorry, but Wikipedia also doesn't get to decide what
| words mean, nor you or I, at least not authoritatively.
|
| Linguistically, tax evasion is: evasion of taxes. I can
| use the words to describe any action taken to evade
| paying a tax. The words simply do not imply a state of
| legality.
|
| That there are domains that overload the terms with
| extended restrictive meaning is by definition arbitrary
| and has no priority over natural language.
|
| Usually Wikipedia indicates this by explicitly naming the
| domain, e.g. "In US tax law, tax evasion is ...", but
| fails to do so here.
| jjk166 wrote:
| According to the oxford dictionary, tax evasion is "the
| illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax." Dictionaries
| don't decide what words ought to mean, they list what
| people who use the words mean by them. Yes, taken on its
| own evasion does not require illegal activity (though it
| does have a much more nefarious connotation than synonyms
| like avoidance), but when you put the word tax in front
| of it, that changes the meaning. When the average person
| talks about tax evasion, they are talking about the
| crime, and when someone says something is not tax
| evasion, it is commonly understood to mean it is not an
| illegal nonpayment or underpayment of taxes. Similarly
| the word exploitation can mean a lot of things, many of
| which are not illegal, but when you put the word sexual
| in front of it then suddenly it refers to a definitely
| illegal thing.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Sorry, linguists don't get to decide what words mean.
| Yes, you read that right. Words' meanings transcend any
| given definition, and all of the linguists in the world
| working 24/7 are insufficient to describe all of what a
| word means, in all places, at a given instant in time.
|
| This is why the court "reasonable person" standards:
| Sometimes definitions aren't enough. You need context.
|
| If an accountant, under oath says you committed "tax
| evasion" and then later says "Oh I meant the LINGUISTIC
| meaning of the word, silly you, you thought I meant the
| TRADE TERM that fits my PROFESSION? How silly of you"
| that won't fly, probably.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Curiously, the interests which literally bankroll the
| making of laws and electing of legislators _do_ get to
| define what words mean.
|
| "U.S. Policies Favor The Wealthy, Interest Groups, Study
| Shows"
|
| _Gilens and Page analyzed 1,779 policy issues from 1981
| to 2002 and compared changes to the preferences of
| median-income Americans, the top-earning 10 percent, and
| organized interest groups and industries._
|
| _" Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely
| substantial power over policy decisions; they have little
| or no independent influence on policy at all," the
| researchers write in the article titled, "Testing
| Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups,
| and Average Citizens."_
|
| _Affluent Americans, however, "have a quite substantial,
| highly significant, independent impact on policy," Gilens
| and Page write. Organized interest groups also "have a
| large, positive, highly significant impact upon public
| policy."_
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/government-wealthy-
| study_n_51...
|
| Though this particular study is specific to the US, the
| relationship doubtless exists elsewhere.
|
| See also:
|
| "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest
| Groups, and Average Citizens" (2014)
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-
| poli...
|
| Alphabet Inc. (Google LLC's parent corporation) spent
| $27.4 million in contributions and $12.8 million in
| lobbying (2019) according to OpenSecrets. That's slightly
| more than I've managed, personally.
|
| https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-
| inc/summary?id=d00...
|
| Alphabet (Google), Facebook, and Microsoft are the three
| top spenders in EU lobbying:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-facebook-
| microsoft...
| southerntofu wrote:
| Whether it's legal or not greatly varies from one country
| to another. Some parts of their plan may be legal in
| isolation but huge corporations like Google are very much
| breaking tons of laws every single day (if only, privacy
| laws).
|
| Also "tax evasion" means evading to pay taxes. It may
| have more specific legal meaning in some places, but the
| general understanding is if you're a company who does
| business somewhere yet doesn't pay taxes, you're doing
| tax evasion.
| dustintrex wrote:
| And only in the Netherlands. Calling this "voluntary" seems a
| stretch.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I wonder if BREIN will contact me once I pass 100TB seeded on
| my gigabit fiber connection. At 85TB and seeding hard.
|
| In the meantime, TPB is never hard to find. I haven't used it
| for a while and easily found https://thepiratebay10.org/ which
| still works here in .NL.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Good luck reaching this milestone! People like me and my bad
| xDSL need more people like you and your fancy gigabit uplink
| :)
| k8sToGo wrote:
| This they delist, but all the garbage spam sites they do not
| delist "voluntarily"?
| Bud wrote:
| Why was the headline on this article re-written in an obviously
| biased way? Wasn't the original, factual headline good enough?
| lexapro wrote:
| Google itself is a torrent search engine. Just google
| <anything> filetype:torrent
|
| So when is Google going to delist Google?
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