Google 'open' memo betrays deep corporate delusion Google has sent itself a memo as part of an ongoing effort to perpetuate the self-delusion that it's the world's most open company. Monday afternoon, at the official Google blog, Google vp Jonathan "Perfect Ad" Rosenberg published an email he recently sent to company staffers under the heading "the meaning of open." Like so …
Of course google shouldn't open source their 'search algorithm' (this is, PageRank.) The author's arguments that they should are entirely ad hominem and confused, claiming that closing this algorithm reeks of microsoft, and comparing PageRank to system security.
The fact remains that if google open-source's PageRank, spammers will game the algorithm in droves (which they continutally try to do without the source.) Search quality will suffer and the best gamers rise to the top. Consumers lose.
Unlike a security hole in an operating system, which can simply be patched without degrading the system, the only counterattack to PageRank-gaming is to arbitrarily change the algorithm which necessarily weakens search results. This already happens to some extent to due existing gaming without benefit of the source. And not even this would work if the algorithm was open sourced, the spammers would instantly adjust.
A system can be made secure by closing all known holes; a ranking algorithm cannot be rendered ungame-able, by mathematical necessity.
So you don't publish it.
I would much prefer that everyone who is trying to get their web page to appear first in the list I see stopped doing so.
Because they are trying to show me what they want to sell me, rather than what I say I want to buy (or red or find out or contribute to ... ).
Google does a good job of finding from Web pages which correctly describe what they are about, the pages dealing with what I tell it in my search term I am interested in.
SEO shades from comon sense into advertising and on to fraud, and I'd as soon anything beyond common sense was banned.
Of course the SEO types want to know the exact algorithms Google uses, so they can make their pages appear different from what they are, so as to confuse fool and irritate people. It is barely different from spam.
Ok, so its a 'Forrest Gumpian' statement. The point is that only in hind sight can you judge the actions of a company in terms of 'good' or 'evil'. Companies will always attempt to act in what they believe as their 'best interest'. (And that in of itself is a complex gray issue...)
The interesting thing is this comment:
"Jonathan Rosenberg acknowledges that Google's view of open is profitable. But he fails to mention this wouldn't be the case without the closed. The way he sees it, the profits come because Google is smarter than everyone else. "Open systems are chaotic and profitable," he says, "but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else."
"
You have to remember that TANSTAAFL applies. Open Systems are in essence a 'free lunch' for Google because by releasing code in to the 'open' they are able to create enough of a critical mass that they can get support and development for 'free'. (Ok so they 'seed' the market so its not truly 'free'.) Google is capable of reducing their costs by 'openness' of non-essential systems which can be repurposed by other organizations/companies thus doing 'good'.
If Google sees a competitive advantage in keeping code 'in house', ie closed, they will do so. Keeping proprietary code in house is neither bad nor 'evil', so they are still true to their motto.
If you want to consider the motives of google in terms of 'good' or 'evil' then consider this comment... ' The greatest trick of the devil is to convince people that he didn't exist.' ;-)
If you believe that Google is trying to convince people that they are not always acting in their own self serving best interest, then you can say that Google is indeed acting 'evil'.
But hey! What do I know?
I'm just some guy... ;-)
I'm glad that they don't open source page rank.
The reason:
at the moment any website that anyone writes can hit the number one spot based on the quality of that site, the way that the site is put together, the quality of the article, keyword prevalence, and the amount of people that 'rate' the article and link back to it.
it means that regular people can write a site and they have every chance of getting ranked towards the top of google.
Open the page rank system and you open the possibility that people will be able to game the system.
so the search engine optimised spammers pages get to be top ranking pages.
Then the people that were just creating a website end up having to employ the services of the same SEO spammers in order to get their page to the top.
Open source page rank and you create a mercenary SEO industry that will stifle the ability of google to return useful search results, instead of just a lot of craftily made pages selling Viagra rather that giving information.
Companies like Google, Oracle and IBM use open source for purely propaganda value. They use the open source meme in their battle with Microsoft and Apple, to shift the market away from personal computing and more toward centralized server-based computing.
But when it comes to their real family jewels -- Google search software, IBM and Oracle's database systems -- they are not open source at all. This kind of hypocracy is widespread. Few people (including the many liberal journalists and college professors who go on about open source) will sacrifice their own intellectual property, but are quick to pontificate, feign altruistism, and point at the professional programming or artist communities demanding that *they* collectivize their labor and property for the good of society.
I didn't see the problem with (what was excerpted from) his memo. It is troubling that google could be collecting all sorts of data. But, short of using encrypted connections point-to-point to exchange data.. I mean, search, webmail, etc., is probably similarly datamined by anyone else too. I personally pull my e-mail to my desktop and read it with pine (now with alpine), but my ISP could still be mining through it I suppose.
As for "open".. well, you know, I don't expect google to open source everything.
Regarding pagerank, "Security through obscurity" doesn't work, but I also don't think this is like a conventional system security problem either... I think rather than having "more eyes" on the problem, which is helpful for finding and fixing security flaws... instead, an important element of pagerank in terms of reducing google spamming has been that it's an opaque box, spammers don't know when the algorithm has been changed, and don't know for sure if something they try will in fact derank their pages instead of improving rank. With the code open, they'd know exactly what works and what doesn't.
I don't expect google to open the search, indexing, and distributed computing software either. It'd be nice but it's not sensible. 1) From what I've heard it's EXTREMELY customized to google anyway -- I doubt most of it's in a form suitable to just put into a tarball and distribute. 2) They already release patches that are of any general interest (i.e. improvements and bug fixes for the kernel and other software, a opposed to just changing in-source tunable parameters.) 3) There already is enough software to functionally duplicate google's system (hadoop, linux kernel, etc. allow a full MapReduce cluster to be set up.) Google has a stack like this, it is just HEAVILY HEAVILY optimized. This optimized code is frankly the lifeblood of the company, as much open source software as they release, I really can't give them grief for not releasing one of their biggest assets. I mean, if they did, Microsoft for instance could simply outspend them on data centers, and then use google's own software stack against them.
To me, Open Source is about transparency, about published interface standards and common code behavior. Open Source code helps in defining those standards. Its not about giving away the farm but it is about making a common set of building blocks available to everyone so that we can all be farm builders.
Many corporations, big and small, just don't 'get' open source. They feel that intellectual property is like physical property, its something that you grab as much of as you can and then defend that property from all comers. They still have the old West mindset where the bison are endless, the land uninhabited, limitless horizons to exploit. They haven't figured out that this was an illusion -- the land wasn't uninhabited, the bison disappeared, the horizons are finiite and that the only development that's sustainable involves work, adding value. Google seems to have figured it out which is why they're prospering. (Now all they need to do is employ a Ballimer like figure as CEO and within a decade it will be a shadow of its former self....)
I'm seriously starting to wonder who in the register got dumped by a chick from google or something similar.
I mean whats with all this google hate?
Valid issues would be interesting but criticizing google because its openness does not extend to allowing people to look at how the advertising and search engines work seems quite petty. After all that functionality is the bread and butter for google.
What possible reason would they want to give it away?
I mean there is open and there is just dumb.
And speaking as both a web developer (For another company entirely) and a website user thank god they dont make it available.
I still remember back in the early 2000's when webmasters could game the search algorithm so much that searching for information about C++ would provide results linking to girls doing nasty things to goats; on the first page no less.
It wont be the legitimate websites that spend an insane amount of time going through the hundreds of thousands of lines of code looking for exploits in the algorithms. It will be the malicious, fraudulent or just plain greedy.
This would result in an arms race between Google, legitimate websites and malicious sites which no one (users especially) really wants.
Yes they are a company. Yes that means that they actually have to make money.
Yes they make money from advertisers and they do so by offering the advertiser the ability to pay for the ad based on what the advertiser thinks it is worth.
Why do people get upset about that? Whats next anger at EMC for charging for disk on a usage basis? Or IBM charging support based on active CPUs? The point of charging models is to come up with a model both the vendor and the custom get benefit from. And lets face it if the customer did not get benefit from advertising with google they wouldn't.
All this spite and bitterness is resulting in is if google does actually do something bad it will get lost in all the whining about how google isn't open enough, how it runs on data and how it wont let people game the system.
That is assuming that hasn't happened already.
I've never heard anything about Google as a company that they somehow need to or commit to being more open than any other company. In fact, on their corporate web site, they merely state that they "are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers", which as far as I can tell they in fact are. Nothing in their corporate statements says anything about them needing to open anything, except that they are active in open source software development.
So where is this B.S. coming from? Did someone just assume that Google would open everything? Did someone make up some fanciful open source code of conduct that Google should adhere to? Tell you what, if you don't like what Google's doing, make your own, better search algorithm and release it to the world. Make your own, better ad serving software. Build a billion dollar company around these technologies and feel free to make them open source. Show Google how wrong they are. Or better yet, just stand in the peanut gallery and tell everyone what a horrible company they are and what huge mistakes they are making and that you'd do so much of a better job if you were king of it all.
Comparing the concept of 'security through obscurity' to Google's obfuscation of their search algorithms is EXTREMELY non-sensical:
The reason why 'open security' works is that one cannot decipher encrypted messages that use modern public-key cryptography, because the actual encryption and decryption depends on several (very large) unique numbers that are actually required to be 'obscured', and NOT on the method itself. There is still 'obscurity' - it is shifted to a different level (that of private or secret keys).
Page-rank and search algorithms do not fall into the same category because, unlike encryption and decryption algorithms, they operate directly on the content itself, and not on separate, obscured entities like private keys. Therefore, advertising the actual logic of how each page is ranked is not possible without giving away the 'keys' to highly-ranked pages, which would in turn, allow anyone to artificially boost ANY page.
Richard Stallman and his FSF hold up an admirable ideal, that ALL software should be open source. Nothing wrong with that, but in very few cases does a pure open source model work in business, but rather both open and closed source have their place. But to call this memo a "delusion" is in itself a delusion. Google has given away a lot of great software and given away some important source code to the community (ie Android, Go programming language). Please give Google a break and give them some credit for what theyve done.
I think the argument that search has to be closed for SPAM reasons is a very seductive one, but still rather misguided.
As an operator of a number of websites I am in complete thrall to google. They have 95%+ of the search market. Lots of people are employing SEO methods to increase rankings and as such I have no choice but to follow. If our sites are not on page 1 then we don't get customers. We don't get customers we don't eat. etc.
However these services are for the most part snake oil. Complete BS. This exists because nobody really knows the rules.
If you look at the way email operates (still bigger than HTTP traffic I think) there are a number of providers of ANTI-SPAM software (from small to large) which operate on understood rules. Why could there not be an equivalent set of software available to me to help filter out SPAM sites?
Surely it would be better if the "army of good guys" (myself included) could be in a position to help improve the rules that govern spam. To act as a community to help remove bad sites?
Maybe this is pie-in-the-sky but in my experience solutions worked out collectively tend to last longer and have less negatives than closed-door solutions.
And i second the call for both Holy and Evil google icons. I want one.
If Google don't want to release the code they use in their search engine (ie the same code that's made them the leading search engine) then that's their prerogative.
Sure, it looks a bit silly to then turn round and say "we're so open because we release code for other bits and bobs", but at least they do share some stuff. They don't have to, after all.
Why exactly is this worthy of a full-length frant feature? Or am I missing something?
I just checked my stuff via Google Dashboard. That crap about "Anonymizing your data after 9 months"? A lie. My web history (which I don't remember signing up for, in the first place), goes all the way back to 2006!!!
I may start anonymizing my web information myself from this point on, bastards.....
I third the suggestion for the Google Halo/Horn images.
i really wonder about some of your reporters, either, as someone mentioned before, your google employed lady friend dumped you, google themselves rejected to or you just have it in for the new big boys!
Google dont have to open anything, and expecting them to open ad words and search is just plain ridiculous, go back to basic business school and learn yourself!
Without google we'd all still be with our crappy 2mb hotmail accounts!
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