If I had a mental s/Daily Mail/Reputable Newspaper/g I'd be able to give this article a little more time. The Daily Mail do seems, from my anecdotia, to be gaming the system.
I suspect few would care if Google gave manipulative scientology articles a relatively poor search rank. The Daily Mail is absolutely no where near that bad. But they are certainly close to the definition of dog-whistle manipulation.
Where's the line? This, of course, assumes their poor search rank isn't because Google has detected they're doing something shady, which due to the Daily Mail's history is not unlikely.
> That is despite the Daily Mail writing multiple stories a day about his comments around that time and employing him as a columnist.
Sounds like they take a manual approach to manipulating their search ranking; spam is worthy of downranking.
Google has been caught doing a lot of seriously anticompetitive things, like colluding with Facebook to establish a duopoly, in exchange for things like scanning WhatsApp chat backups uploaded to Google Drive. Or adding an artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads.
It wouldn't surprise me if this claim is true: here's to the discovery process to figure it out.
I feel like I am going crazy that this fact is not discussed at all.
I recall google from a decade ago being able to answer all my questions, where as now all I get is mediocre, politically-safe, canned answers with a ridiculous amount of ads.
It is enough to look at recipe websites to see that Daily Mail’s claim is clearly true. Recipe sites providing a user hostile ad-filled experience gain the top place, where as simple recipes without stories and tons of ads are nowhere to be found.
Why would Google do anything else? Website owners are paying Google to be ranked higher by essentially buying ads from Google. The difference between the ppc of a competitor and Google is the price the website owners pay. In return, Google will rank the website higher.
> [DM] alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace
> Google [says] "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search."
Not a fan of either party, but I hope we get to find out who's accurate.
If anything google should downgrade the daily mail even more. Not for its content (which i personally dislike, but censorship is a risky business), but rather for its spammy practices and clickbait titles.
The irony of the daily mail talking about manipulation
Not particularly liking the DM as they have their fair share of shady dealings, but I support anyone going after Google and other big companies abusing their position.
I guess I'm in the minority, but I actually like the Daily Mail. They have stories with videos and photos that I cannot get anywhere else on the Internet.
In my experience, they have better American news than many local America news outlets (much more detail and photos/videos).
While some of their stories are sensational, they also have a lot of great articles with solid journalism.
Ok, I might get roasted for this, but will still take a shot at it.
At what point do we say that Google has a moral responsibility to provide unbiased information? I'm not sure we can.
It is a free market after all, and Google is a private corporation. Even if the Daily Mail's allegations are true, Google is still doing what is in it's best interest, and not illegal (afaik its not illegal to modify the algorithm of one's core product, happy to be corrected)
The daily mail is trash. I'm glad google is filtering out such low quality blog spam.
So its the Daily Mail best known in the industry for their ability to rank barely legal pop starlets in revealing outfits
I suspect what happened is the daily mail was considered a low quality news site which the majority of the UK population would agree its a fair assesment.
And Piers Morgan is pretty much one of the most hated hacks in the UK.
Sounds a bit similar to what the WSWS has been dealing with [0].
[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
I can imagine their CTO, Oleg Vishnepolsky’s deposition:
We hired a FELON to do our SEO
Nobody would give him a CHANCE after he lost his HOUSE.
The other companies FIRED him because they thought it was his FAULT because their google PR was LOW.
I think the Mail is going to have a real tough time proving Google is doing anything nefarious because the algorithm used by Google is closed source.
I'm not up on law. I wonder what actual law they've allegedly broken. Are there any legal precedents implying you have to rank the Daily Mail high in your organic results?
I mean I understand the words "anti-competitive" but not sure how that translated to me needing more Piers Morgan in my search results or how the judge is supposed to even rule on that.
We're not ranking high enough on Google, better get the government involved!
Hopefully this makes it to a discovery phase where google is forced to reveal the baked in censorship params.
The Daily Mail can definitely simmer down.
If you build your business on clickbait and bullshit "journalism" you can't complain when your main source of traffic decides to squeeze a bit more cash out of your enormous money pit.
Cry me a river.
Daily Mail can fuck themselves. They published an article a complaint I filed with the Oklahoma coroners office in 2012 because it was taking 12+ months to get results when my 5yo son died. They also spun it as parents in "outrage" to get clicks and refuse to take the article down even now that there is no way it is producing revenue for them.
Google clearly was affecting the actual results seemingly in accordance with their agenda seems fair even though having to choose between this two companies seems borderline systolic the DM is in the right here
Ah, yes, the paper that supported Hitler and lies about immigrants. The same one that supports Fox in holding a duopoly on British newspapers.
Excuse me while I find a different hill with more believability and less racists...
Has DM tried hacking their voicemails? Seems to be a Rupert Murdoch go to.
Google Search no longer exists to deliver relevant results outside the ads at the top.
They curate it heavily to match with their preferred ideology.
The conflict of interest between Google's Search and Advertisement divisions is too problematic and these divisions need to be split into separate companies.
Stop using Google, it's a bad company with bad practices and it's search engine is becoming increasingly worse at providing good results. There are other options that are just as good now.
Our worthless government needs to do their job and break them up.
'The Daily Mail' has a case. Go and visit their site right now [1] and tell me where the inflammatory or irresponsible headline is.
Now try 'The Daily Beast' [2], it's I think a little bit worse, and you have this flame-nugget: "White Violence Links Black Lives From Emmett Till to Floyd" which is an interesting thesis, but kind of racist.
The DM really isn't that bad, and much like the issue of 'Fidel Castro' it's a litmus test to see if people are emotionally clouded ideologues or not.
DM is a regular tabloid, that's it.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html [2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/
> For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets.
A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...
A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).
[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[2]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Sus...