Disclaimer: For the love of all that is good in the world, if you go and downvoat someone who posted this article, I will find you.
You may or may not have come across this article entitled:
Google will start ranking pages with intrusive ads lower on search results
If you listen, you can hear a faint roar of applause coming from the general public. Drown it out. This is not, in any way, a good thing.
What Google is doing here is exactly what they did with search manipulation to cut out any bad searches about Hillary Clinton , just under a fascade that people will get behind. Everyone hates intrusive ads, so, upfront, this idea sounds great. But, the problem is that what's really going on is the public giving Google the green light to disappear any website or search result that goes against their ideology.
You will begin to hear things from Google like:
"Oh, you don't see many search results about XYZ (sites that conflict with Google's ideologies,) because those sites have intrusive ads."
regardless of whether those sites have intrusive ads or not.
Another problem brought up by @SuperConductiveRabbi, is that Google will probably also disappear any site that doesn't exclusively use Google's Adsense.
Search results are now blatantly not going to be based on search relevance, instead it's going to be based on some arbitrary criterion setup by Google themselves.
This is all around bad news. People should be careful about supporting this.
TL;DR: Google is going to use this policy to censor any website that goes against their ideologies or possibly even site's that don't exclusively use Google's Adsense. This is censorship pure and simple.
OhBlindOne ago
Actually, it is. Based on Google's past performance and the fact that they've shown they are partisan and are willing to manipulate search results, I'm using inductive reasoning (which is a valid logical method) to conjecture that Google will continue to do the bad things they've done with their policies and ultimately use this one to manipulate search results for their own gain.
Yes, I don't have actual evidence of their intentions to do this, but you don't need current evidence in order to conjecture based on the past. So, while it's not a proven argument, it is actually logical. Therefore, your statement about it not being a logical argument is false.
I get that you think I'm fear mongering, but fear mongering usually entails my driving people towards some other entity for help (whether it be the government, corporations, the banks, anyone really,) in this case, I'm not. I'm just stating that Google has done this crap in the past and conjecturing that they're going to do it in the future. I'm not even telling people to stop using Google, I'm just pointing out that this new policy is not a good thing like everyone thinks it is. I'm not encouraging people to do anything other than not support Google's new policy. They are free to use the service at their own risk or support it as they please.
OhBlindOne ago
I'm not telling anyone how to think. I'm making a logical argument.
If you don't support censorship and Google's new policy is censorship, than you don't support Google's new policy.
People are free to do as they please, but rationally speaking, one cannot support freedom of speech and Google's new policy.
OhBlindOne ago
That's not the point of this post.
People who support free speech and hate censorship (most people on Voat,) shouldn't be openly praising and supporting Google for doing this, as it's just censorship masked in an appealing way.
Edit: just for clarification, I don't use Google.
BreesusLovesYou ago
I sort of agree, but I stopped using Google years ago.
duckduckgo.com doesn't bubble
OhBlindOne ago
I don't use Google, either.
Could I ask what you disagree with?
BreesusLovesYou ago
Just the idea that everything is always nefarious. I agree that Google is probably using this to nefariously frame their search results. But at the end of the day if they set a precedent that spambot ads are punished that's worth some non-zero value.
I would like to see a search engine that doesn't manipulate search results but also does punish spambot sites. Google isn't going to be that because they lost my trust a long time ago, but the general concept if taken at face value (which I don't for Google) isn't worthless.