> For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets.
A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...
A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).
I could absolutely believe that there is a "quality" ranking that pushes Daily Mail stories down because the domain contains such poor quality content, or that the pages are loaded down with so much crap that people hit 'back' almost immediately after clicking on one of their links.
That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
Here’s a Google AMP page of a Daily Mail page that crashes on every page load for me on my iPhone’s default Safari browser. They probably need to hire a front-end developer or web performance specialist to diagnose it.
Slow or failing page loads negatively affect search rankings on all search engines & 80% of users abandon your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.
Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly result in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users.
Furthermore what are you supposed to do with this data? If you ultimately find that one site is given one score and another is given another and you disagree with this are you going to demand that google show other people the sites you prefer in a higher rank? Nonsense.
No matter how they rank showing their hands would almost certainly be harmful to google because it would allow political groups of any stripe to put pressure on them to "fix" their results on any number of dimensions. Google would in short be crazy to give this to you and you aren't entitled to it.
> I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
It's a tricky problem, in principle I agree with you, but on the other hand more transparency also means more information for people who are gaming the system.
And there are many MANY people who (try to) game Google. Never underestimate the amount of ridiculous effort some people will go to to make a buck. Arguably Google's largest value is that it's actually reasonably good in preventing this.
Why should the public be given access to that information? Google should be under no obligation to provide any of that unless we "nationalize" the idea of search engines and declare them a human right. Until then, it's a voluntary service to be consumed.
The problem with that is if people know the exact formula for quality, sites can work to game it. Basically, once the formula for quality is known, it no longer is a formula for quality.
> and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
Isn't it one of the most sold newspapers in the UK? I like how elitist folks are. In Romania everyone I know would also go "no one buys Libertatea" (one of our trashy newspapers) but it is the most sold newspaper in Romania.
High brow people badly underestimate how much influence these tabloids have. There's a reason their readers made folks like Kim Kardashian a billionaire.
Sure, but that doesn't mean these particular articles were also widely shared or read.
I think this is confusing the general ("Daily Mail is the most read paper in the UK") with the specific ("this article was shared, linked, and read a lot").
Yes, many media outlets are sensationalist, have a poor record of journalistic integrety, yet their product is consumed by millions of people. That doesn't make them a good source; it makes them a liability.
It is high brow left wing types in particular that delude themselves about the oddness of their own beliefs. The Daily Mail becomes a special object of hate because it is a reminder that they are - at least politically - very strange.
I was about to say, this article makes perfect sense to me. The Daily Mail is one of my last choices of news, and I generally don’t use it as a source at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s algos have figured out the same thing many of us have…
tl;dr best quote (imo) "The Mail should be on the citation blacklist. There's no area of news where it is actually reliable. It can be relied on to accurately report celebrity gossip, but in that case the gossip itself is frequently false and the Mail doesn't check it. Their coverage of medical, science and political topics is a byword for deliberate inaccuracy."
If I’m searching for coverage of a news story via a search engine, I will always choose any other option than the DM even if its ranking is lower. It is a source of right wing hate, propaganda, racism, and generally all round poor journalism.
and I strongly believe that YOU get to make that decision. I don't believe that google in their monopoly position gets to make that decision on your behalf without clarity into how it's made.
Like what? I don't see anything that's not covered by other outlets.
I do see stuff like "Can you THINK yourself thin? A hypnotist to the stars says you can - and reveals the five-step technique to try if you want to shed the 'lockdown stone'"[1]
Taken from the front page right now. The article is even worse than the title suggests.
Completely agree. "Prestigious" American newspapers do so much selective coverage it's insane...most people have absolutely no idea the extent of it. It produces the result of censorship without needing to actually censor. Just look at the Hunter Biden laptop story for an example -- initially blacked out and denied by American media, blanket rejection of underlying premise of story & suppression of relevant facts, eventual subtle admission on page 10 that everything was true all along.
The average person on the left will deny and reject this since the communist American owned media only feeds them stuff they want to believe. Truth hurts sometimes.
If I had a mental s/Daily Mail/Reputable Newspaper/g I'd be able to give this article a little more time. The Daily Mail do seems, from my anecdotia, to be gaming the system.
I suspect few would care if Google gave manipulative scientology articles a relatively poor search rank. The Daily Mail is absolutely no where near that bad. But they are certainly close to the definition of dog-whistle manipulation.
Where's the line? This, of course, assumes their poor search rank isn't because Google has detected they're doing something shady, which due to the Daily Mail's history is not unlikely.
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of other signals that the Google search engines considers over and above back-links. This includes which links users click on the results.
Google has been caught doing a lot of seriously anticompetitive things, like colluding with Facebook to establish a duopoly, in exchange for things like scanning WhatsApp chat backups uploaded to Google Drive. Or adding an artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads.
It wouldn't surprise me if this claim is true: here's to the discovery process to figure it out.
I believe you're referring to the lawsuit from last year filed by the Texas attorney general. It's a complaint where nothing has been proved in relation to the scanning of WhatsApp backups.
Unless there's something new on this case that I haven't seen?
I know nothing about the case, but surely "nothing has been proved" just means there hasn't been an outcome yet? Attorney generals tend not to file cases unless they believe something to be true, at the very least on the balance of probabilities.
Yes, they would spend it even if they were on the right side of the law.
This is an interesting example of a prisoners dilemma. If N companies are competing without lobbying, their lobbying costs are zero.
But if one company 'defects' and start lobbying to tilt the regulatory landscape, then every other company must also start lobbying to prevent it.
The end result is that every company lobbies against each other for no net benefit[1], despite large amounts of money spent on lobbying. Good for lobbyists, bad for the companies.
So a company spending money on lobbying doesn't really tell us anything. They may be a bad actor, a good actor, or anything in between. There are valid reason for every position in the spectrum to spent money on lobbying.
[1]. Obv the real world is far more complex than this. The lobbying may provide industry wide benefits, or may prevent the entry of new competitors, or there may be semi-random fluctuations in the regularly landscape, etc, etc, etc.
I agree that silicon valley companies are anti-competitive, but I think you are dead wrong about lobbying.
Lobbying can be a lot of things, but one of the most common is basically marketing & PR for lawmakers. If you're going to be in the news, you pay some clever marketers to make hyper-focused versions of what happened for every single individual law maker. The company wants their view to be easily understood by the 535 voting humans who are seated in congress right now. It's the second oldest trick in the book (after bribery which also ofc happens to a degree).
Lobbying can also include skullduggery and dirty tricks and also other mundane things, but it is not (and never will be) a clear sign that a company is doing something wrong.
I feel like I am going crazy that this fact is not discussed at all.
I recall google from a decade ago being able to answer all my questions, where as now all I get is mediocre, politically-safe, canned answers with a ridiculous amount of ads.
It is enough to look at recipe websites to see that Daily Mail’s claim is clearly true. Recipe sites providing a user hostile ad-filled experience gain the top place, where as simple recipes without stories and tons of ads are nowhere to be found.
Why would Google do anything else? Website owners are paying Google to be ranked higher by essentially buying ads from Google. The difference between the ppc of a competitor and Google is the price the website owners pay. In return, Google will rank the website higher.
I believe you've got the cause and effect completely backwards. Someone that has a recipe site with no ads and no stories isn't in it for the money. In contrast, recipe sites with a ton of ads solely exist for the ad revenue—the recipes are just there as bait.
The difference is that the ad-laden sites spend 90% of their time getting their rankings up in google, the recipes are usually taken/copied from elsewhere and the big long stories are there to make the site look unique to Google, to fool it into thinking there's legitimate content there.
In the end, of course the person who spends all their time gaming Google is going to rank higher than someone who actually cares about their recipes and spends 90% of their time curating, experimenting, etc.
It's a sad state of affairs, but spammers have ruined Google.
What strikes me the most is that simple queries ("how much sun does [plant] need") only return 5 page keyword soups that barely answer your question. Google works reasonably well for more specific technical questions, but really struggles with the basic ones.
The top promoted answer leads to what looks like a reasonable site.
I think the greatest problem here is individual user bubbles. My take is that this would all go away as a problem if Google did away with behavioural tracking - thus the same query would lead to same answers globally.
The question is, how much would that degrade search quality?
The most obvious is location - 'show me chinese takeaways' is a different query depending on where you are and your past ordering profile. But its a solvable problem
> Google works reasonably well for more specific technical questions, but really struggles with the basic ones.
In the past it did, but when I try to search a line of logging output, or a line from a stack trace, Google decides to omit much of my search terms, and even goes as far as replacing some of my search terms with other terms that do not fit the context of my queries at all.
What plants are you having trouble finding that number for? I just tried corn, strawberries, rhubarb, and beans and got the answer in the first or second link.
I agree, it seems like results are getting worse, a few years back I could ask a question and get an answer. Now I don't even bother and go straight to sites to search, be it wikipedia/ github/ stackoverflow/ ebay. Googling for it is just a waste of time.
It’s gotten especially bad in the past few years. I had a minor health scare recently and found it incredibly difficult to find relevant search results given hundreds of different queries describing my condition.
The amount of health-related blogspam on Google is criminal, IMO. I've come across dozens of sites soliciting health advice, treatments, and "cures" that were not only not approved by the FDA, but weren't written, approved or edited by medical doctors at all.
There are going to be sick or desperate people who follow that advice, or attempt to use those "cures", and some of them will be harmed because of it.
it is hard to talk about an issue for which no solid data is available. To make a comparison, a decade ago, one would have needed to have started recording searches. Unfortunately, and this is why algorithms can be so insidous, collecting data to prove the decline of google is almost impossible.
So despite being blindingly obvious, it is difficult to make a mature discussion based on 'feelings', vague as they are.
A research that would work would be to show how irrelevant current results are. Certainly, that wouldn't be hard to prove, even without comparing it to external data.
> [DM] alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace
> Google [says] "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search."
Not a fan of either party, but I hope we get to find out who's accurate.
If anything google should downgrade the daily mail even more. Not for its content (which i personally dislike, but censorship is a risky business), but rather for its spammy practices and clickbait titles.
Then you might as well include every major media organization there is since they all thrive on sensationalism. Google should not be in the business of deciding what's appropriate for us to see. I didn't vote them in as the arbiter of truth.
Google is not in that business. The Daily Mail does not allege that Google is preventing it from being accessed. Censorship is not part of this conversation.
No, but by using Google you did decide they were most likely to have a good answer to your query (or that they were most convenient), and if they're not allowed to rank results because of 'fairness' that would kind of break the entire value proposition of a search engine
The only way we win is if they both dump many millions into lawyers handling the case, then both get a ruling that restricts what they're doing. Just like like the Oz / FB / Google issue, I'd love all sides to lose.
Readit News
A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...
A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).
[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[2]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Sus...
That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl...
Slow or failing page loads negatively affect search rankings on all search engines & 80% of users abandon your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.
Furthermore what are you supposed to do with this data? If you ultimately find that one site is given one score and another is given another and you disagree with this are you going to demand that google show other people the sites you prefer in a higher rank? Nonsense.
No matter how they rank showing their hands would almost certainly be harmful to google because it would allow political groups of any stripe to put pressure on them to "fix" their results on any number of dimensions. Google would in short be crazy to give this to you and you aren't entitled to it.
It's a tricky problem, in principle I agree with you, but on the other hand more transparency also means more information for people who are gaming the system.
And there are many MANY people who (try to) game Google. Never underestimate the amount of ridiculous effort some people will go to to make a buck. Arguably Google's largest value is that it's actually reasonably good in preventing this.
So ... I don't know.
There's only so many top spots in Google search results, I'd rather those not be awarded to parties that are the most litigious.
https://www.zachvorhies.com/msm_rankings.html
Isn't it one of the most sold newspapers in the UK? I like how elitist folks are. In Romania everyone I know would also go "no one buys Libertatea" (one of our trashy newspapers) but it is the most sold newspaper in Romania.
High brow people badly underestimate how much influence these tabloids have. There's a reason their readers made folks like Kim Kardashian a billionaire.
You can check out their coverage of Romanians if you want some examples https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Adailymail.co.uk+rom...
I think this is confusing the general ("Daily Mail is the most read paper in the UK") with the specific ("this article was shared, linked, and read a lot").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
tl;dr best quote (imo) "The Mail should be on the citation blacklist. There's no area of news where it is actually reliable. It can be relied on to accurately report celebrity gossip, but in that case the gossip itself is frequently false and the Mail doesn't check it. Their coverage of medical, science and political topics is a byword for deliberate inaccuracy."
Deleted Comment
It doesn’t deserve a click.
I do see stuff like "Can you THINK yourself thin? A hypnotist to the stars says you can - and reveals the five-step technique to try if you want to shed the 'lockdown stone'"[1]
Taken from the front page right now. The article is even worse than the title suggests.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9492639/Hypnotist...
The average person on the left will deny and reject this since the communist American owned media only feeds them stuff they want to believe. Truth hurts sometimes.
I suspect few would care if Google gave manipulative scientology articles a relatively poor search rank. The Daily Mail is absolutely no where near that bad. But they are certainly close to the definition of dog-whistle manipulation.
Where's the line? This, of course, assumes their poor search rank isn't because Google has detected they're doing something shady, which due to the Daily Mail's history is not unlikely.
Sounds like they take a manual approach to manipulating their search ranking; spam is worthy of downranking.
It wouldn't surprise me if this claim is true: here's to the discovery process to figure it out.
Unless there's something new on this case that I haven't seen?
Do you think they would spend it if they were on the right side of the law ?
This is an interesting example of a prisoners dilemma. If N companies are competing without lobbying, their lobbying costs are zero.
But if one company 'defects' and start lobbying to tilt the regulatory landscape, then every other company must also start lobbying to prevent it.
The end result is that every company lobbies against each other for no net benefit[1], despite large amounts of money spent on lobbying. Good for lobbyists, bad for the companies.
So a company spending money on lobbying doesn't really tell us anything. They may be a bad actor, a good actor, or anything in between. There are valid reason for every position in the spectrum to spent money on lobbying.
[1]. Obv the real world is far more complex than this. The lobbying may provide industry wide benefits, or may prevent the entry of new competitors, or there may be semi-random fluctuations in the regularly landscape, etc, etc, etc.
Lobbying can be a lot of things, but one of the most common is basically marketing & PR for lawmakers. If you're going to be in the news, you pay some clever marketers to make hyper-focused versions of what happened for every single individual law maker. The company wants their view to be easily understood by the 535 voting humans who are seated in congress right now. It's the second oldest trick in the book (after bribery which also ofc happens to a degree).
Lobbying can also include skullduggery and dirty tricks and also other mundane things, but it is not (and never will be) a clear sign that a company is doing something wrong.
A quick search came up empty. Could you share a source?
I've always assumed this was the case, but has this been proven?
> It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace.
Whether that's true or not is another thing...guess we'll have to wait and see.
I recall google from a decade ago being able to answer all my questions, where as now all I get is mediocre, politically-safe, canned answers with a ridiculous amount of ads.
It is enough to look at recipe websites to see that Daily Mail’s claim is clearly true. Recipe sites providing a user hostile ad-filled experience gain the top place, where as simple recipes without stories and tons of ads are nowhere to be found.
Why would Google do anything else? Website owners are paying Google to be ranked higher by essentially buying ads from Google. The difference between the ppc of a competitor and Google is the price the website owners pay. In return, Google will rank the website higher.
The difference is that the ad-laden sites spend 90% of their time getting their rankings up in google, the recipes are usually taken/copied from elsewhere and the big long stories are there to make the site look unique to Google, to fool it into thinking there's legitimate content there.
In the end, of course the person who spends all their time gaming Google is going to rank higher than someone who actually cares about their recipes and spends 90% of their time curating, experimenting, etc.
It's a sad state of affairs, but spammers have ruined Google.
The top promoted answer leads to what looks like a reasonable site.
I think the greatest problem here is individual user bubbles. My take is that this would all go away as a problem if Google did away with behavioural tracking - thus the same query would lead to same answers globally.
The question is, how much would that degrade search quality?
The most obvious is location - 'show me chinese takeaways' is a different query depending on where you are and your past ordering profile. But its a solvable problem
In the past it did, but when I try to search a line of logging output, or a line from a stack trace, Google decides to omit much of my search terms, and even goes as far as replacing some of my search terms with other terms that do not fit the context of my queries at all.
There are going to be sick or desperate people who follow that advice, or attempt to use those "cures", and some of them will be harmed because of it.
So despite being blindingly obvious, it is difficult to make a mature discussion based on 'feelings', vague as they are.
A research that would work would be to show how irrelevant current results are. Certainly, that wouldn't be hard to prove, even without comparing it to external data.
> Google [says] "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search."
Not a fan of either party, but I hope we get to find out who's accurate.