Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Germany Wants Google to Disclose Its Secret Search Algorithm

The German's are acting like fascists again. They are using government power to muscle firms and protect entrenched establishment organizations and individuals.

Germany, for one, is calling on Google to disclose details of the secret formula that it uses for the ranking of search results..

In an interview with the FT Germany’s justice minister Heiko Maas said Google had to become more “transparent” about the algorithm used to create search engine rankings.

That's one way to destroy Google as a search engine. Disclosure of the algorithm would most certainly provide an edge to those interested in gaming the system.  As FT puts it, "a move that is likely to be welcomed by competitors."

Meanwhile, Uber, the San Francisco ride-sharing app operator, is due to appear in court in Frankfurt , over a nationwide ban imposed on its Uber Pop service.

-RW

2 comments:

  1. Bloody morons, the "formula" is a distributed algorithm into which myriad factors contribute in a distributed fashion and they keep on changing on a daily basis as thousands of engineers tweak the various factors. A lot of the decision making in the algorithm is dependent on curated data and deciding which Web data to curate ("crawl") on what schedule/cadence is in itself a continually learning process. Even the meaning of what "search results" are is continually changing, as Google experiments and brings on-line various ways of presenting results side by side, graphically, etc. There is no way to disclose "the algorithm" less than providing the govt full access to all the source code on an ongoing basis, as well as a full time liaison who'll be able to answer their stupid questions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If I'm Google I just deny service to Germany(if German's want to use Google they can go the proxy route) and tell the to kiss my ass. You're right, it's monumental stupidity.

      Even if Google somehow did hand over their current model, it'd be like tossing a Rubik's cube to a 1 year old and saying, "Here, solve it."

      Delete