You! GOOGLE! HAND OVER the special SAUCE, says Senate (of France) Google’s European woes continued on Thursday as the French senate voted to force the search monster to expose its algorithm and highlight rivals on its welcome page. The amendment, proposed by Catherine Morin-Desailly, which would force Google to offer at least three competing search engines on its homepage and explain how …
Not a court; a government. Though my understanding is that the French Senate is a bit of a joke, and has far less power than the Assemblée Nationale, the lower chamber.
It's a bit funny that they want the link to three competitors. I suppose the competitors will not be forced to the same.
But it's very funny that they want Google to reveal their algorithm. It's very clear that Google will close down their .fr website and their French offices before doing this. And keep selling ads on French websites from Ireland.
I'm not sure whether Google's algorithms are trade secrets or patented. If the latter, then public disclosure has already been made. And Google holds a ton of patents.
Now, the method for determining what bubbles to the top of their search lists may be completely fluid and ad hoc. I'd bet that, whatever it is, it changes a lot. And I'm not sure that making it public serves the public well; such disclosure could just allow gaming the system.
Overall, this seems like a pointless bit of legislation.
The truth is, that may not be a bad thing for Google. Take their ball and go home. Those that insist on using it will use one of the other "Googles"... .com, etc. The government will be happy as the problem isn't theirs anymore and the people will still have their Internet.. err... Google. And Google still gets their data and ad serviing. Win-win all around.
They actually provide a great service and are less intrusive to your privacy than various European governments (esp. the UK who record each and every Google search you do as well as a whole lot more the share it with a bunch of other countries). They're providing their services at no financial cost no matter if you're rich or poor. And AFAIK they've not had any massive data breaches.
Fuck the French, Google's doing a fine job. It would be interesting to get their algorithm independently audited to see if there's anything particularly out of sorts, though.
Seriously doubt the "average" user gives a crap about how results are ranked. Showing it to them is not going to change that. A tiny minority of users will have some interest, maybe even decide they see some kind of bias they don't like and go elsewhere.
Note that does not mean a bias actually exists. People will see what they want to see. Maybe there is a bias, maybe there isn't.
Google is where it is because they provided a tool that worked better than the competition, of which there is plenty. If the competition provides what users feel are inferior search results, well that is not Google's fault. The fact that Joe Sixpack sees Google as "the internet" is not Google's fault either.
As has been commented earlier, I cannot see how Google can be compelled to reveal their trade secrets. Attempts to do so are unlikely to succeed except in a kangaroo court, and if Google did lose - unlikely, and they would certainly appeal - expect Google.fr to disappear and French users to just go to Google.com or Google.some-other-French-speaking-domain where the French government can't touch them.
I got links to Wakipedia, DuckDuckGo, Bing, ixquick, ... and freefind.
If we try the same elsewhere:
Wakipedia tells me about search engines and has links to the Wakipedia pages for each of the major ones.
DuckDuckGo links to Wakipedia, Dogpile, Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, ixquick and webcrawler.
Bing links to ixquick, Dogpile, Wakipedia, freefind, DuckDuckGo, ..., Google.
ixquick shows freefind, ........., Google, ..., ixquick, Wakipedia, ..., and Yahoo.
freefind wanted an e-mail address.
Dogpile won't give results without javascript.
Yahoo links to Wakipedia, Dogpile, Google, ..., Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, ixquick and webcrawler.
webcrawler won't give results without javascript.
So, most search engines do not put themselves first or even on the first page. For three of these nine, I want my money back - but as I paid nothing to any of them, all of them gave me a full refund without any hassle.
Anyone want to try this in French?
"Tesco being forced to offer Sainsbury's own products on the eye-line shelves and show the price they paid the supplier for the products, together with how much the big brands have paid for the best shelf space for their products."
If Tesco had more than 90% of the grocery market, you might start to find such laws appearing.
Google got so big because its search algorithms were much better than those of its competitors.
It has to keep tweaking those algorithms because people keep trying to game the system to get their ranking higher.
If those algorithms are made public they would be handing the crown jewels of their company to their competitors, and telling everybody how to tweak their web pages to distort the search results.
I presume that the web sites of all french political parties give clear links to the web sites of their rivals?
"...insists that a [search engine] must operate in a “fair and non-discriminatory manner, without favouring its own services or those of any other entity with which it has a legal relationship..."
So how come eBay continue to get away with requiring sellers to accept PayPal [owned by eBay] while disallowing other payment processors like Amazon Payments and Google Wallet (for unbelievably spurious 'security' reasons)?
Another poster in a different article posted a link to Wikipedia for the EU Commission on Human Rights.
1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed.
Since France is part of the EU, don't you think this statement is rather hypocritical since they are changing the laws so they can grass up Google?
I use google search because It does not load a bunch of crap (data i don't want like images, click bait and adverts) at their homepage, and the results suit my query better than other engines. Maybe the French gov should finance the creation of a new algorithm/search engine? At best they take over the world, at worst we get another dodo bird.
Mobile Friendly will be supplemented with Spy Unfriendly. The Chinese Army and its Great Cannon will go poof. Actually privacy will be enforced. Inserting fake websites into the middle of private transactions won't work. Nevertheless, wordsmiths will persist in trying to find the right words to admonish Google to do the math.
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