If you are wondering why searching for "firefox" leads people to install malware the main reason is that most of the ads Google shows for that term, and which appear at the very top of the results, take you to sites with malware downloads.
I've mentioned it a few times on here before[1], even directly to Google employees[2] and they don't seem to give a shit at all. I've even noticed searches for Chrome sometimes show links to (what appear to be) malware sites now[3]. Maybe that will motivate them to sort this out but I'm not hopeful.
Putting my conspiracy hat on; it seems like there isn't much motivation for Google to sort out the problem because every new malware loaded PC is another potential convert to a locked down cloud based platform like ChromeOS. There isn't really much downside for them in making Windows as horrendously unsafe for non-experts to use as possible. Why Mozilla aren't screaming about it constantly is more of a mystery to me.
Absofuckinglutely. These sites thrive solely because Google ranks them at the top. Crapware sites appear so consistently at the top of searches for software that excludes the term "linux" that coincidence is many sigma less likely than intent.
Considering that what most Windows crapware installers do is mercilessly track users for the purposes of marketing and that Google's main business is tracking users mercilessly for the purpose of marketing, it is hard to see how this is some random event.
Google's definition of "best search results" is related to their bottom line, and the goal is to be as intrusive as possible without driving searches away. This is why the Google ad network laden "weather.com" is returned before the ad free and purely scientific "weather.gov" from a US search for "weather."
For real fun, search for "pdf to html" and "pdf to html linux" to compare the degree to which Google promotes solutions that collect data on users. A Windows user would never know that a free quick private and powerful alternative is just one VM away.
You are confusing search results and paid search ads. Google will happily put whoever bids the highest in the ads, but they don't force weather.com to rank above weather.gov in the organic results. That's a totally baseless conspiracy theory.
A lot of ordinary consumers confuse search results and paid search ads, and this is _entirely_ Google's fault. It would be very simple to make them look completely different.
Also, it's not just malware. Google also makes money by promoting scam sites that charge people for free government services.
Explain how Google's corporate officers better meet their fidudiary duty to maximize shareholder value by not structuring search results to optimize revenue than they meet that fiduciary duty by structuring search results to maximize returns.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's basic business and doing otherwise would be the basis for a tort.
There's no actual fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value (though a few cases in the early 20th century said otherwise). The fiduciary duties of a public corporation are a lot more narrow, mostly involving not prejudicing some shareholders at the expense of others, or enriching the officers at the expense of the shareholders. Making unprofitable market decisions out of principle (even if misguided), however, is not a breach of fiduciary duty. For that kind of run-of-the-mill disagreement over how to run a business, the shareholders' remedies don't lie in the courts, but in their control over the board. Courts in the past few decades really aren't interested in second-guessing strategic/policy/market decisions, certainly not getting into stuff as detailed as whether Google could choose to ban malware ads, for any definition of "malware" they choose.
You're simply wrong. It is in Google's long-term financial interest to continue to provide objective, trustworthy search results. For a non-Google example of something similar, see the recent story of Apple CEO Tim Cook challenging a shareholder who challenged the impact of Apple's environmental policies on Apple's bottom line:
http://gizmodo.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-shuts-down-anti-enviro...
Oh bloody fucking hell, Cook told shareholder activists to piss off because a CEO's job is to tell shareholder activists to piss off. Rarely is it so easy as in Cook's case where the activists were total wingnuts, had no business case since Apple's investment in renewable energy is almost certain to payoff over the long term, and presented a massively unpopular position. They got the microphone because their pitch had homerun written all over it.
In Google's case, their officers are responsible for optimizing the mix of objective search results with revenue producing search results. That optimum can be described as just good enough not to drive too many queries away while maximizing clicks to their customers. There's no legal requirement or demand from shareholders for a wall.
And indeed the very idea of tailoring search results to an individual's past browsing history is always going to push sites that share data with Google to the top of the results page.
You should read Google's corporate filings. It's clearly not a fiduciary duty of their executives to maximize shareholder value. They were very clear about that when they went public. There is also no SEC - or any other - regulation stipulating this as the prime directive for corporate officers.
The constantly repeated 'duty to maximize shareholder value' line is nothing more than a myth.
In the case of Google, the triangle of Page / Brin / Schmidt basically control Google outright, regardless of the other shareholders, due to their voting shares. So they absolutely do not have any duty what-so-ever to maximize anything. Buyer beware, is basically what they stapled to the prospectus.
In fact it's no more complicated than this: if some random shareholder is upset, they can stir the pot accordingly, and the waves they'll make is almost always in proportion to the shares they can vote directly or indirectly. There is no singular objective qualification on what would lead to the maximization of shareholder value, it's an opinion that varies from one shareholder to the next as to what they think is "best" for the company.
Simple example: some shareholders might think it'd be better to slash salaries at Costco to boost the bottom line. Others believe part of the reason Costco is so successful is their employee culture.
If users lose their trust in Google (as I have, FWIW), then it loses its eyeballs to sell.
Short-term-ism in terms of maximizing ads revenue which costs long-term goodwill is a serious negative for Google.
I'd argue that in the past year or three, the company has started showing its vulnerabilities. I'm not sure who will take over from it, or how, or what that company's business model will be, but I see vulnerabilities.
I switched to DDG a while ago as my "default" search. Unfortunately, Google does reliably provide better results. They'll maintain a user base as long as that's true; I still switch to them when DDG fails.
Well, it provides better results when it doesn't rewrite your search into oblivion in an attempt to save you from typos you didn't make. Unfortunately, DDG being worse at everything else still leaves Google in the lead. But it also still leaves me very unhappy when I search.
Usually it's turning an uncommon domain specific word into something uselessly common (and completely unrelated) for me.
Or when I put an entire error message in quotes and it deems the number of results for that error message too low to be intentional so it deconstructs it into a useless mashy search of all the words in the error. Note, I don't mean when the results are zero, but even then I usually have to spend an annoying amount of time before I realize that my search actually had zero results instead of the millions it claims it had.
There was a time when google's cleverness was just enough to be useful, but it gets more and more clever (and frustrating) every year now.
Convincing Google that I don't want its assumption that I want a typo fixed is getting more difficult.
The dynamic Google results page means that it's really difficult to refine a search based on the presently visible results which disappear as I update the search. I find that that behavior incredibly annoying, and greatly appreciate that DDG doesn't do this.
It took me two goes to make DDG stick but since June of last year (just after the Snowden revelations started) I've been using DDG as my primary and nearly exclusive search engine.
It's much better than the first time around: more relevant, faster, and very few technical hangups.
I still fall back to Google periodically, especially for:
• Date-bounded search. DDG doesn't support this.
• Specialty searches: news, books, scholar. I've also keyed up custom searches for a bunch of sites in my browser.
• Rarely: I don't seem to find what I'm looking for on DDG. Usually first an !sp re-search, if that fails, !g. About 2 times out of 3, I still don't find what I'm looking for and return to DDG for more refinement.
RSA maximized their profits up $10 million by selling their customers out to the NSA, and that cost them some serious long term goodwill and reputation. Were their shareholders happy about that piece of financial calculus?
Ignoring for the moment that you are wrong about them having to maximise shareholder value, and ignoring that just taking any money doesn't maximse value anyway, you are still wrong.
Google has a dual class stock. The only shareholders with any power are Larry and Sergy. That was done to avoid short term thinking (precisely like you are proposing). Investors know this when they buy on.
A long time ago, I started treating downvotes as a critique of my writing. My first response is always to edit the post to express my ideas more clearly, my second is to consider if the comment is doing little more than inflaming passions for no benefit to the community. In the latter case, I tend to delete the post.
This is a case where I posted in a rush. The basic idea that Google's ranking algorithm is optimized to serve Google's interests first and those of its customers second is the only possible way for Google's officers to fulfill their legal obligations to the shareholders they serve.
The key to understanding this idea of the best search ranking algorithm is that people who query Google's search engine are not Google's paying customers. Google Search's paying customers are almost exclusively advertisers.
The best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue. Not enough traffic directed to ad buying customers and advertising dollars may go somewhere else. Sure too much obvious selling might drive queries elsewhere but the threshold for tolerating advertising keeps going up. So many people take tracking across sites for granted that Google can push a "weather" search onto an advertising affiliate's site and still meet the expectations of the data point making the query. There is no objective reason other than income for ranking secondary sources above the primary source, "weather.gov".
This is a bit simplistic, and I'm not saying that to be rude.
It's true that searchers don't pay Google money, and advertisers do. But Google is running a platform. In the past I've compared it to an information marketplace. And the goal for Google is to make the market run as efficiently as possible, otherwise they risk losing one side.
Searchers don't pay Google, but they do (presumably) pay Google's advertisers, who pay Google. If you lose the searchers, you lose the advertisers.
Now of course there is a balancing act, which you allude to in your last paragraph. But there are plenty of easy examples where Google returns no ads even though they could. A search for "how old is barack obama" just returns the number (or Wikipedia), without ads, even though I'm sure there are advertisers out there who would pay for an ad to be shown.
So obviously it's not universally true that "the best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue." Perhaps adding some subtlety to your argument would help me understand exactly what you're saying.
All abstractions are simplified. That's what makes them both abstractions and useful.
For example Google Search might be considered a marketplace, but such an abstraction might lead a person to lump buyers and sellers into amorphous blobs and ignore the heterogeneity within each group. Ford and overstock.com are different sorts of advertisers and thus Google's business comes down to segmenting end users.
Plain and simple the most valuable end user segments are people who not just tolerate tracking and targeted advertising but who actually derive value from it. They are valuable not only because they click through and buy stuff but because they validate Google's claims that its business of tracking users and pushing ads and tailoring search results toward commercial interests and away from the long tail is objective.
Long tail results are not revenue generating and Google has simply removed bit by bit the end user's ability to specify them. Sure spelling correction is useful, until Google search refuses to respect quotation marks and simply renders some terms unreachable. Local search is useful, until a person wants to search across borders or outside their local language.
This is also a problem for search queries like, "yahoo phone support" or "apple phone support", both of which have bitten some of our customers in the past, directing them to call-in scams: "oh no ma'am, according to Microsoft your computer is infected with viruses, I need remote access to your system right now, we can clean it up for $89..."
Google's malicious advertising is the number one reason that we're able to justify installing AdBlock Plus on every client's system (we talk to them about it first) and disabling ABP's new "feature" to "allow non-intrusive advertising".
Sites that depend on ad revenue should be screaming at Google to fix this.
Google does care, and will take action to disable malicious advertising. For many of these sites, there is no obvious badness on either the ad or the landing page, so a manual report will help us fix malicious advertising.
I work on some small portion of Google's systems related to automatic malware scanning (albeit, not anything that would show up on the search results page), and I want to make sure that we don't direct people to malicious advertising.
Thanks! I've bookmarked this and will try it in the future.
But: as an experiment, I just turned off ABP and Google'd (heh) "yahoo support". One of the ads at the top was for http://www.aurasupport.com/email_service; at a quick glance, I see a website template from http://pixel-industry.com/website/, lots of broken English, and a domain that was registered just last Summer to a house address in a suburban development in Texas. Not exactly a smoking gun, but also probably not what somebody's looking for when they search for "Yahoo support"...
And, farther down the first page of the actual search results is http://www.yahoosupport.org/, which has a toll-free phone number in the title, 1-888-551-2881. Googling that phone number takes you down a rabbit hole of lots of dirty SEO (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEO5-2RpYvo), no actual customer reviews anywhere, and offers for support for lots of services -- including, uhm, Gmail (http://www.password-recovery.us/contact-us, look at the page title).
So, I'll be happy to use the link you gave, but this seems to be a fairly serious problem, and I'm a little surprised that Google doesn't have a better handle on this.
It should be reasonably simple to add a "report malware" button next to banners when the search includes the word "download". It would be less simple to review flags every malware provider would make on every competitor, but the beauty is, you wouldn't need to - when someone asks for "download firefox" I'm pretty sure all banners advertising Firefox will include some form of malware.
I wonder why Mozilla doesn't go after these sites for trademark infringement. Mozilla made Debian change the name of their Firefox package to Iceweasel because they made modifications; surely bundling in adware also violates Mozilla's trademark policy?
It does. Google goes after them as well. However, there is generally a large delay before they manage to take them down and verification is always done post-display and not pre-display. You can report bad adverts at https://support.google.com/adwords/contact/feedback?hl=en and Google will eventually get to them, usually after their account balances have run down a bit. There's definitely no sign of any urgency on that front.
Iceweasel actually modified Firefox, this sounds more like bundling Firefox with other stuff in the same installer package. Vaguely reminiscent of distributing a Linux ISO that installs Firefox, along with other stuff...
Except that the Linux ISO is not called "Firefox." It would be OK for the Linux distribution to use the Firefox trademark descriptively to say that it includes Firefox, but that's not what these adware vendors are doing. They're calling their "Firefox bundled with some adware" Firefox.
It's like that on purpose though. You can't be rude to your customer after all. In this case, advertisers are paying Google a lot of money so they don't have to go through things they wouldn't like, such as harsh verification. Users of Google search aren't really important in the same way. If you lose a couple search users to malware, who cares? At least you got the advert money up front.
I don't think this is their mentality, I think this is more like a myth that gets perpetuated ad nauseaum.
The problem with a search engine is that there's no lock-in other than brand recognition. Google won over AltaVista and Yahoo by being superior. I still remember the first time I tried it, it was so much better that it made an instant convert out of me, even though typing "altavista.com" was rooted in my nervous system and this was in the days before they were big, before AdSense/AdWords/AdX. And I could see it at Internet Cafes catching like fire, within mixtures of technically oriented and unsophisticated users alike.
And it can happen again. What pains do normal users have when using Google lately? Malware, content farms, "aggregators", too many ads. The only reason for why Google is still number 1 with a near monopoly is because there is no better alternative. DuckDuck Go is awful for me. Bing too. You may not notice how awful they are, unless you're living outside the US.
And I'm pretty sure they know that they can lose users fast. And once a significant chunk of users are gone, advertisers will be gone too. That's why Android exists in the first place, though distributing Bing as the default doesn't really help Microsoft, so having your own platform only protects you against walled gardens. And there's even a bigger danger therein. Google doesn't even have to lose users for advertisers to leave - Google already knows that the majority of clicks on all served ads are done by a minority and advertisers are increasingly aware of this fact too, as quality conversions are going down. This is because targeting is not so good after all and because users are increasingly fed up with spamy results and annoying ads that aren't targeted well.
I think their problem is that they are trying to solve this through algorithms only. The problem with algorithms is that algorithms can be gamed, you only need to find the ranking formula, which can of course be done through trial and error. It's a whac-a-mole game basically.
But for popular searches, like Firefox, they could have exceptions in there to propel those as first results. Is it not obvious that users searching for Firefox actually want Firefox, the browser from Mozilla.com, in spite of Mozilla.com's ranking? Is this against their policy or something? And now that they have Google+ accounts, why don't they add a "Report Result" button? If flagging email as Spam in GMail works so well, why didn't they do the same thing for their search engine?
"The problem with a search engine is that there's no lock-in other than brand recognition."
This is not quite true. The 'lock in' are the advertising channels. If you want to replace Google you need replace their lock on advertisers. I have direct visibility into the effectiveness of Google's, Yahoo's, Microsoft's and third party advertising networks, I can state with certainty that if Microsoft was able to show Google advertising feeds on their search property, even with Google taking 20 - 30% off the top, it would be Microsoft's most profitable division, swamping the profits from either the Windows licensing stream or the Office licensing stream.
Your point about _advertiser_ lock-in is true in the short term.
However, the limited _user_ lock-in means that a 'better' search engine could take user share, which would then make it more attractive to advertisers.
Well in my case (@Blekko) I'm a startup that has worked at taking market share from Google organically. We actually crawl the web and index it, and that takes hardware and network bandwidth. I recently had the opportunity to look again at what a 'small' cluster would cost to run in EC2 (about $2M/month so $24M/year). We don't do that, since it would be impossible to make any money if we did, but even just break even on that sort of investment is hard to achieve without advertising support. Trust me when I say that the search advertising business is very much a sausage factory.
You're just a startup so you're money strangled, but $24 million is pocket change for other companies - so what stops a bigger company that already have their own data-centers and enough talent, such as Microsoft, or Apple, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever, to create a better search-engine? I think that's simply because it's a very hard problem to solve.
Thanks. Is the point that it's chicken-and-egg? You need users to get ad revenue, but you need ad revenue to improve search quality and thereby attract users?
Many people, especially older ones and people with bad or old monitors don't even realize they are ads. There's purposefully no border and a light background is used to confuse people into clicking ads.
I'm pretty sure this isn't intentional. No one at Google is going to be using a crap monitor. I've used similar colors in business software before. It wasn't until I was at a conference and saw our software on a crappy screen that I realized the required field color was white on some monitors.
I've mentioned it a few times on here before[1], even directly to Google employees[2] and they don't seem to give a shit at all. I've even noticed searches for Chrome sometimes show links to (what appear to be) malware sites now[3]. Maybe that will motivate them to sort this out but I'm not hopeful.
Putting my conspiracy hat on; it seems like there isn't much motivation for Google to sort out the problem because every new malware loaded PC is another potential convert to a locked down cloud based platform like ChromeOS. There isn't really much downside for them in making Windows as horrendously unsafe for non-experts to use as possible. Why Mozilla aren't screaming about it constantly is more of a mystery to me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7101939
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089727
[3] http://i.imgur.com/yVIMYKO.png