I'm not sure I understand this. If you don't like Google's search results... don't use Google. That's how the free market works.<p>Personally I have been extremely happy with DuckDuckGo's results recently. I switched my default search on my Mac and iPhone to it, and very rarely have to go back to Google for anything. (Occasionally when searching for extremely recent pages.)<p>(Though I wish that DuckDuckGo would consider renaming themselves to something less... silly. Not that "Google" is much better, I suppose.)
tl;dr "A few engineers at Yelp and TripAdvisor" want to tell Google what to put on their SERP via law enforcement, because of "Google’s anti-competitive conduct".
Somehow I read "what the users want" as "what location based rating companies wants". From all the faults you can blame on Google+ (real name policy, tighter integration, etc), this is probably the one users are most unconcerned with.
If I understand their argument correctly, when Google+ allowed you to specify who you Follow, and then Google Search started showing you results informed by the things those people had +1'd, that's an example of Google "cheating their algorithm."<p>So, instead, Google shouldn't let you search based on the recommendations from your friends and other people you trust...?<p>I'm sorry, but this movement is wrong-headed.<p>I <i>like</i> to see reviews based on my friends. The restaurants, movies, apps, products that they like and recommend.<p>If there were an open and federated way for all users to express their recommendations, sure, we could yell at Google for not using THAT instead.<p>But yelling at them they can't INVENT a system of recommendations, or use it in their search results, is a bad argument for me.
Considering the explicit mention of "privacy-friendly" Piwik in the footer, it's pretty ironic that the embedded genius.com scripts actually load Google Analytics and fire a tracking pixel.
It's not bad rhetoric, but there are a few problems:<p>First, the ranking algorithm for a local search is not necessarily the same as that for a web search (even a web search with possibly local intent). In fact, the results from this tool were total garbage for the last local search I'd done (zurich augenarzt). It gave me results in Germany, results where the address and map pins were wrong, a link to the front page of some local search company I'd never heard of, etc.<p>To go back to my previous example, in fact the <i>most</i> appropriate result that this extension was able to give was pointing to the Facebook page of a eye care center in Zurich (hey, at least it was the right city) showing content that had basically nothing to do with their business. The only valuable content from the point of view of a potential customer was the link to their actual website. Which brings me to the next point.<p>Second, the supposed Google+ results are not actually Google+ results. The link is generally pointing to the website of the business itself. At least for me that's generally the result I want. The Google+ page is only used as a fallback when Google doesn't know which website is associated with the business. Of course a local search company's goal is for as many users as possible to be funneled to their web site. It's not a goal I'm very sympathetic to.<p>Would the "few engineers from different local search companies doing this purely as a side project" still be happy if the link to their site was treated the same way the G+ pages are treated in the results right now? That is, as an auxilliary link rather than as the main result?<p>Third, companies like Yelp have made it abundantly clear that they don't want "their" data aggregated by Google. While an actual production version of this would depend on that. You can't have it both ways.<p>As a final note, you guys really need to redo that video with a real human doing the talk. It's hard to get the viewer to sympathize with a bad voice synthesizer, and it comes across almost as cowardly. And worst of all it's pretty hard to understand. It took me almost the whole movie to figure out that the word I was hearing as "parrot" was probably "powered".
Javascript is hurting the "Internet" (the web really) by encouraging people to write websites like this. No content is loaded. The links at the top don't work because the anchors in the page don't exist. I would much rather the EU outlaw javascript than g+, because that is dying all on its own.
A little off-topic, but I can't help but remark. Rap Genius is now Genius and provides a service with annotations? I think it looks pretty slick, at least on a laptop. Definitely adds to the experience since it leads to less parenthesized text and allows one to provide context without distracting.<p>EDIT: Yeah, I guess I did deserve the downvote. Still, I haven't seen it before and found it interesting.