David Allen Graff is the head of Google’s Trust and Safety Policy Team. When Google announces a new policy change cracking down on lawful businesses for lame political reasons he is often the person to make the announcement and promote it in the press. We found this out after Google targeted our industry. Our research into Graff revealed a pattern of similar behavior targeting somewhat less controversial industries. In this article we will briefly discuss his pre-Google career before highlighting efforts made by his department to harm businesses and conclude with whatever personal information we can find about him. Pre-Google CareerWe are relying primarily on Graff’s LinkedIn Profile for information about his pre-Google career. EducationGraff graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in American Civilization sometime during the early 1990s. He went on to attend Georgetown Law School where he earned a J.D. and was a member of campus groups indicating an interest in criminal law. Goodwin-Procter LLPGraff began his professional career as an associate at Googdwin-Procter LLP from 1995-98. Edison LearningGraff was hired as General Counsel and Executive Vice President at Edison Learning in 1998. He describes himself as their chief legal officer where his responsibilities included assuring the company remained in compliance with government regulations, defending the company from lawsuits, and drafting/reviewing legal agreements. Epic Media GroupGraff was hired as General Counsel and Senior Vice President by Epic Media Group in 2007. His job duties were likely similar to those he performed at Edison. Epic was one of the internet’s largest advertising networks. Online IntelligenceIn 2012 Graff became CEO of a now-defunct company called Online Intelligence. Graff described the company as a brand protection and traffic integrity service that helped advertisers with “monitoring for off-brand placements and prohibited content associations.” If Graff”s performance at Google is any indication, we can only image how many customers his clients lost due to Graff yanking their ads from running alongside any content remotely capable of offending anyone. This type of work and Graff’s history working for Epic obviously made him an ideal recruit in the eyes of Google. Red SparkGraff became General Counsel and Privacy Officer at Red Spark in 2012 despite still working for Online Intelligence through 2013. Red Spark is best known for the RTX Platform which is an alternative to Google’s ad network. Google CareerGoogle hired Graff as their Senior Director of Trust and Safety in 2014. Trust and Safety might as well be called the Glavlit due to their striking similar goals and tactics. Google claims their goal “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Unfortunately, Google has repeatedly shown that is not the case in recent years. It seems Google’s goal was to fulfill their stated mission just long enough to seize control of the search engine market so that they can control what people see. Google’s Real MissionNow that they control over 90% of the market Google is basically the gatekeeper to online information. The Glavlit “held ultimate editorial power over all printed materials in addition to overseeing public speaking and the performing arts” (see Glavlit and State Censorship). There were still underground newspapers and unsanctioned public speeches beyond Glavlit control in the USSR, but their effective use was of a rarity comparable to today’s alternative search engines. The United States government could never legally control our access to information in this way, so they’ve found a way to do it by proxy. By making print media and speaking in the public square obsolete means of communication before vesting ultimate control over their replacement to a private sector entity that works closely with the federal government. Google’s Relationship with the Federal GovernmentGoogle’s works hand in hand with the federal government. Their relationship is so close that one of first things they did to shut us up was report this site to the FBI. About a month after the first post on this site was written we were contacted by a federal agent inquiring as to the intent behind our posting of home addresses and other personal information. We explained that our intent was to “organize their information and make it universally accessible and useful” as a means of protesting them for sabotaging their stated mission to do the same with the world’s information. We have found over the years that simply adding an address or phone number to a critical article can be enough to motivate the subject of our criticism to begin a dialog with us when we would otherwise be ignored. That is not criminal intent. Criminal intent would require that we intend to cause someone fear of imminent bodily harm. Fear of bodily harm was never our intention. A federal prosecutor later described the complaint saying that people at Google claimed to fear for their safety, but that she was not aware of any criminal activity actually occurring. We have not posted about this before because we want to obtain some documentation before going into further detail. We believe those claims to be exaggerated as part of an effort to find a technicality capable of silencing us. It is really convenient to attack the publication of true facts by claiming those facts cannot legally remain posted because you fear for your safety. That might work on lesser publishers (like Google) that curtail any activity the second they hear of a FBI investigation just to play it safe, but we are not that weak and we think what really scares them is their own inability to scare us at all. We are not scared of the government because the government already did all they could to shut us up including putting our leader in a federal penitentiary for years. There is a reason why John Gotti said “I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t done time.” The reason is that usually only people that have done time can be trusted not to be intimidated by the government. When someone has done time and did it well they are not as afraid to do time as someone that never done time. They still fear having their quality of life diminished if they have to do more time, but they are not terrified of whatever lurks behind bars. Our founder did his time in general population at an active USP despite being a weak nerdy white boy. He did just fine in a high security penitentiary with violent career criminals including murderers and gangsters because he adopted their code and is head strong. Any true convict can tell you that the mind is what makes a solid dude. A solid dude like our leader can’t be intimidated by a bunch of little snitches at Google running their mouths. He also prefers not to do more time, so he has no intention of physically harming anyone or their property, but he won’t put up with their bullshit either. Google went down a path not knowing who they were stepping on and in the process stepped on somebody who won’t tolerate it because if he did tolerate it he would feel like a punk and he is not a punk, so when people cross certain lines with him he feels the need to do something about it. He probably would not be like that had he not done time, so in many ways he is a nemesis of the government’s own creation and Google’s too due to their relationship with the government being such that they might as well be a government agency. If Google really did fear for their safety as they claimed then why didn’t they agree to our proposal? They didn’t even try to meet us in the middle. That is not the conduct of truly intimidated people. If they really wanted to make a case for being scared they would have complied with our demands just long enough to get us to take this site down and then they would have used their compliance as evidence of their fear. The feds are not likely to prosecute Google for making a false report because it is hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they didn’t fear for their safety. Plus, law enforcement in general does not want to deter people with claims of fear from reporting those claims. On top of that Google’s actions leading up to the creation of this site suggests that a lot of their censorship is at the government’s urging or at least to prevent the government from complaining in the future. We think that is one reason why they won’t charge Google CEO Sundar Pichai with perjury based on his employees admitting that they manually manipulate search rankings after Pichai told Congress under oath that it is not possible for them to do so. We think the government does not want to deter Google from doing what they want when doing what they want requires admitting to perjury. Google’s Attack on Payday LoansIn 2016, David Graff wrote a blog post announcing Google’s refusal to sell advertising to companies offering high interest short term loans known as payday loans. Nothing about this decision was good for the company. Google failed their fiduciary duty to their shareholders by refusing to accept money from lawful businesses for reasons that did not result in greater gains elsewhere or a decrease in expenses capable of making up for lost revenue. Graff justified this decision saying, “research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users,” but Google provided no evidence to suggest that those default rates were harmful to Google. It is entirely likely that people who lose money on payday loans no longer purchase services from Google that they could otherwise afford, but unless that figure exceeds ad revenue from that industry this move was a bad idea. Google has a greater obligation to their shareholders than they do to society, which is why we would be outraged if we owned Google stock. Google’s Attack on Ticket ResellersIn February of 2018, Graff wrote a blog post announcing Google’s requirement that ticket resellers be certified to purchase Google ads. Graff claimed that this move was necessary because “some ticket resellers provide limited transparency in their ads about ticket costs and fees, as well as their association with a specific venue or event.” This regulation creates unnecessary costs at Google without increasing ad revenue. It also makes it harder for resellers to sell tickets by requiring them to disclose the original price of the ticket. Graff quoted a third party praising “Google’s dramatic step in consumer protection” while seemingly remaining oblivious to the fact that consumer protection is the government’s job and not Google’s. Google’s Attack on Bail BondsIn May of 2018, Graff wrote a blog post announcing Google’s refusal to sell ads promoting bail bonds. That ban on ads was followed by ranking manipulations according to a professional SEO we quoted in our manifesto. The person we quoted had refused to sell us search engine optimization services after Google attacked our industry citing bail bonds as an indicator that hiring him would be a waste of his time and our money. His exact words were:
Graff justified robbing Google shareholders of over $12 million a year for political reasons reeking of cultural Maxism, “Studies show that for-profit bail bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable, including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years.” Graff also included a quote from Gina Clayton of the Essie Justice Group trying to make this move look beneficial to incarcerated people, “This is the largest step any corporation has taken on behalf of the millions of women who have loved ones in jails across this country.” That claim is preposterous. While there are many problems with the bail bonds industry that need to be changed, the industry ultimately does more good than harm by getting people out jail. As we mentioned, our leader is an ex-con, but we did not mention that he was held without bail for over a year because there is no bail in the federal system where he was busted. In state court people are allowed to post bail if they are not released on their own recognizance due to being a flight risk or a danger to the community. In federal court those deemed a flight risk or a danger are held without bail. He is adamant that had he been given the opportunity to go into debt with a bail bondsman instead of remaining locked up in pre-trial detention he would have picked the debt. He also mentioned that his state abolished bail bonds a long time ago and recalls meeting many people who were in jail because they couldn’t afford to post 15% of their total bail amount to get out with conditions. The way the system there works is that people post 15% and are billed the rest if they violate their release conditions or don’t show up for court. Many people who can’t afford to post that 15% would gladly agree to a high interest arrangement with someone willing to post it for them. Google acts as if that is a bad thing. We agree that the bail bond industry should make themselves more affordable, but that is ultimately their call to make and having them around is much better than leaving people in jail. Google is making it harder for people to get out of jail by denying those willing to post their bail an opportunity to promote themselves. Bail bondsmen do drive people living in “communities of color and low income neighborhoods” significantly further into debt, but that surely is not worse for their finances than having no income at all due to being in jail. Even if it were better for them financially to stay in jail it is not better for them as people. People are rarely the same after they’ve been in jail for any significant amount of time. Our leader for example seems like a mentally detached and when provoked occasionally volatile version of his former self. His professional marketability took a huge hit which is why he still works in our industry. He’s often blamed his status as a pretrial detainee for keeping him from being able to properly defend himself from his charges and notes that of all the time he did the pre-trial detention was the worst. It seems they really do all they can to isolate pre-trial detainees and cut them off from the world. He spent his first six months in solitary because jail staff were ordered to keep him from using the phone or getting other inmates to use it for him after a judge banned him from making phone calls to anyone but his attorney just to keep him from running his business from jail. Just being able to use the phone would have made it impossible for the government to shut him down by leaving him in there which was the real reason for prosecuting him. They knew his business was legal, so they went after him for whatever petty violation of the law they could find to incapacitate him personally. Had he been allowed bail and given the opportunity to burden a bail bondsman with the responsibility of the bail money he would have chosen that option because he would have had no intention of obeying release conditions aimed at crippling his business. He thinks that the decision to prosecute him was made largely due to the likelihood of being able to hold him without bail and had that not been an option there is a good likelihood he would not have been prosecuted at all given the fact that the alleged victim had provoked him by committing several crimes against him which were clearly intended to provoke a violent response from him for the purpose of creating legal recourse where none otherwise existed. Google’s Attack on Tech SupportIn August of 2018, Graff wrote a blog post announcing that Google was restricting ads for third party technical support providers unless they complete a verification process. Graff explained:
In 2019, Graff updated the blog post to say that Google would no longer allow legitimate verified third party technical support services to advertise because they couldn’t tell the difference between them and bad actors.
Protecting the public from “abusive or misleading offline experiences” is not Google’s job and volunteering to do so is not good for Google. Google loses money by paying people to verify advertisers and loses more money by refusing to sell advertising while punishing innocent legitimate companies for their own failure to tell them apart from bad actors. Imagine what this must be like for legitimate third party technical support services. They help people solve a wide range of technical problems which is a good thing, but they can’t advertise that good thing on Google just because Google can’t tell if its really good. It is not hard to imagine the legitimate frustration and rage on the part of third party tech support companies when they found out they can’t advertise themselves just because some other company did a bad thing. How many companies have gone under just so Google can say they are protecting users from other companies? How many people have lost their jobs because their employer cannot generate the leads they need to keep them there? This practice of categorically shutting down traffic generation options for legitimate businesses just in case they might be a bad actor is not what got Google where they are today. In fact, the way they’re going we wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually just deindex everything that could possibly lead users to so called “bad actors” and justify it on the grounds of not being able to tell who the “bad actors” really are. Google’s Attack on Reputation ManagementIn 2021, Graff spoke to The New York Times about Google’s admission to manually manipulating search engine rankings based on a site’s removal practices. This is the move that targeted our industry. We had been featured in the preceding story which falsely accused us of peddling slander. Rather than realizing that there is no such thing as written slander, any article about written words titled “The Slander Industry” couldn’t possibly be grammatically correct, and something so unprofessionally titled should not be taken seriously, Google took it so seriously that they were willing to make incriminating statements about their CEO just so they could convince the Times they were doing something about it. Incriminating Sundar PichaiWe wrote an in depth piece about Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month in which we explained how statements made by David Graff and Pandu Nayak proved that he committed perjury in 2018 when he told Congress, “it is not possible for an individual employee or groups of employees to manipulate our search results” and that his company “provides users with the best experience and the most relevant information.” The practice of manually removing content from search results upon request based solely on the removal policy of the site hosting the content does not provide users with the most relevant information or the best experience. Furthermore, the practice of manually creating a list of search terms and a list of sites they don’t want ranking for those terms proves that it is possible for Google employees to manipulate search results. Graff defended these actions calling Google “responsible citizens” while admitting “I doubt it will be a perfect solution” and claiming “I think it really should have a significant and positive impact.” Whether it has a positive impact really depends on what you consider positive to be. If your goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable and useful” as Google claims then this couldn’t possibly have a positive impact because it means that Google no longer provides users with “the best experience and the most relevant information” as Pichai’s testimony claimed. Inferior User ExperienceWhen a person searches Google for the name of another person they typically do so with open minded curiosity. They usually are not looking specifically for anything negative or positive, they’re just curious to learn what is out there about whoever’s name they’re Googling. People typically pay greater attention to negative information because it gets their guard up and naturally they click on negative headlines due to a somewhat subconscious urge to find out if the subject is a threat to them. That is why negative search results jump out of the page and have higher click thru rates than articles of neutral sentiment or social media profiles. Before Google began manually censoring results from our sites we often noticed that articles about people ranked on the first page for name searches because our sites had a decent amount of link authority and our pages were optimized for those queries. Graff later claimed that “These sites are, frankly, gaming our system,” but the truth is we simply followed Google’s own guidelines which are intended to help Google better understand content. When a page is about a person and the webmaster makes sure the markup of the page makes that clear they’re not gaming the system. They are actually doing the opposite of gaming the system. Just because other websites don’t optimize their content as well and in many cases their content is of higher quality does not change that. If a low quality article outranks a higher quality one in name searches for its topic that is usually the fault of the losing webmaster for not doing a better job following Google’s guidelines. Unfortunately, this has led Google to obsess over quality and in many cases prioritize the overall quality of content over relevance to the query. A decade ago top results for a search were often full of exact matches while today they are often full of synonymous results from arguably higher quality sources. In many cases users are better served, but often they have a harder time finding exactly what they’re looking for. If a user has to click on more pages to find what they’re looking for the user experience suffers. The subjects of negative articles often counter our argument by saying that finding negative articles when Googling yourself is a horrible experience, that having to pay removal fee makes it worse, and in cases of false accusations make it harder for other users to find accurate information about them. Those arguments fail to realize that usually there are more users Googling a subjects than subjects Googling themselves, that inaccurate information is still relevant to the topic, and having the opportunity to purchases removals beats the alternative. Googling YourselfRecent statistics indicate that about 60% of the population Google themselves, about half of them only do it once or twice a year, less than 10% have Google alerts setup for their names, and just 5% use reputation management software. It only takes 2 people to Google you before the overall user experience for search results about you is improved by including negative information. Inaccurate is Still RelevantWe’ve heard from critics that claim Googlers are worse off when false accusations against people get between users and verified information. The basic logic is that users learn nothing useful from false accusations. We disagree, we think people learn something extremely valuable from false accusations against others. They learn that the person they’re researching has enemies. They might even get an idea why that person has enemies, how tenacious those enemies are, and if those enemies are known to target their associates. That last one can be extremely valuable to anyone looking to keep themselves from being tarnished by association. The story about Nadire Atas from the Times which led to Google targeting us is a good example. In that extreme case a crazy lady targeted everyone she could link to her target. If we knew that guy we would have taken preclusions like asking him not to broadcast our association online and not openly admitting online to knowing him. We would have viewed his Google results as the likely work of some nut job and we would have disregarded her claims. Unfortunately, most people that should know better don’t do that and allow themselves to form conclusions based on posts like hers or allow the fear of others doing the same to influence their decisions. That is a societal problem that needs to be addressed by teaching people not to believe what they read online. Censoring unverified claims just because accusers might be lying is not the answer. False accusations against people are not like other types of misleading information. Google is starting to treat them the same as misleading medical, legal, or financial advice which is inappropriate. If people believe false claims that beer cures COVID, murder is not illegal, and sending money to a Nigerian prince will make them rich we’ll end up with sick alcoholics rotting away in prison sending whatever they have left to a scammer oversees. Unlike a false accusation of a personal nature nobody can learn anything valuable from such things. The value of truthful information posted online by anonymous users can be extremely useful to protect others. A legitimate warning about a scam can save people money, a warning about an unfaithful significant other can save their potential partners heartbreak, and a warning that someone has a contagious potentially lethal disease can save lives. The fact that such a warning exists is highly relevant to anyone researching someone except person being Googled even if they might not be true. Google has prioritized the emotional distress of defamation victims over the financial and medical wellbeing of others. We believe this can be explained somewhat by former Google employee James Damore who wrote in his paper Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber that “Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety.” Google is acting as if sites hosting negative articles about people become completely irrelevant the second they offer to suppress information for a fee. Sites added to Google’s list of sites with “exploitative removal practices” are demoted in name searches so much that users must page through a bunch of irrelevant results that have nothing to do with their search to find them. That is where we drew the line because its one thing for Google to say that because our content is not verified that it should be ranked below verified content due to verified content being of higher quality or ranking it below benign content of neutral sentiment because negative accusations are more likely to be false. In those cases Google would still arguably be providing “users with the best experience and the most relevant information,” but nobody in their right mind can say the same when users are served completely irrelevant content. Nobody is well served with an advertisement for a Ford Bronco when they Google their name unless their name is O.J. Simpson. We’ve done image searches for people’s names only to find pictures of flowers and picnic tables hidden behind anyone with the same first or last name instead of our image even thought our image was the top result due to clearly being named firstname-lastname.jpg. Real Impact of Removing Pay to RemoveWhen most people think about stopping sites from charging removal fees they think that would just lead to sites removing negative content upon request or requiring at worst some proof that a claim is false. Unfortunately that is not the case. Usually sites that are forced to stop charging removal fees stop removing anything at all or only remove stuff they are required by law to remove. That is because sites typically end up in the pay to remove business due to declines in advertising revenue that makes traditional moderation not economically viable. Google has played a huge role in that by banning edgy sites from running their ads. The next best things to Google AdSense usually have policies similar to Google, so sites must resort to inferior ad networks that require a lot more traffic to generate the same amount of money. Often it takes a long time to get there and in the meantime webmasters often learn that they can’t afford to waste time responding to complaints themselves let alone hire moderators. In such cases the only realistic option is to monetize moderation which means removal fees. People usually don’t realize that they are paying for an opportunity that would not be possible otherwise. That is why when sites can’t charge removal fees they usually stop removing anything. Mugshots.com is a perfect example. Google targeted the mugshot industry in 2013 after the Times did a similar series on people claiming to have been wronged by having their mugshots posted online by sites that charged removal fees. They did all they could to make it look like a crime even though charging a fee to perform a removal service cannot be called extortion as a matter of law. Eventually states began passing laws against charging to remove mugshots. So far we are not aware of anyone challenging the Constitutionality of such laws. Most of the laws require states to exert claims over mugshots as public records and require public records brokers to provide free opt out options. The authority to pass such laws depends heavily on the fact that the government created the mugshots in the first place. Today the Mugshots.com Removal Policy only allows removal in cases of expungement and everyone else has no removal options at all anymore. Absent the presence of ads that allow sites to make more money off less content they need all the content they can get to make what they still can. At that point the business model transitions from one where content moderation is done for free to maintain quality ads to one where content moderation needs to be made profitable. That is how our leader ended up doing what he does. He had a site that made some decent ad revenue off AdSense alternatives, but not enough to make moderation worth his time. He had been getting a lot of complaints from lawyers and he realized that people were spending good money on incompetent attorneys incapable of getting content about their clients removed from Google. He then offered an expensive service where he would place a noindex tag on the page, provide people with personalized advice intended to help them improve their reputations no matter where the negative stuff came from, and would contact authors in an effort to mediate disputes. His service did not fit Google’s definition of an exploitative practice, but Google treated it the same which just goes to show that you can’t rely on the written word of Google’s policies to figure out what is or is not allowed on Google. He viewed his service as a sacrifice for the greater good because even though it went against his principles it allowed him to stay in business and it had a trickle down effect causing him to respond to everyone’s complaints more promptly. Google’s recent penalties leave him with few options. He could try disbanding his paid removal service hoping Google will lift the penalty; he could try rebranding his site using a new domain name without offering paid removals; he could stop advertising paid removals while offering them in secret; or he could do other things. Right now he is focusing on other things. He doesn’t think Google would lift the penalty if he stopped offering his paid service because they claimed it was done to suppress low quality content and they never lifted the penalty on mugshot sites after they stopped charging removal fees. This is both good and bad for people listed on his sites because for him “doing other things” means just leaving poorly performing sites online with a total lack of oversight while he does other stuff. His logic is that it costs nothing to keep hosting poorly performing sites on servers he would be paying for anyway to host other sites that are not performing poorly. Its good for people listed on the penalized sites because it means he won’t try to make content about them rank anymore, but its also bad because Google is not the only search engine, the sites still do well on others, and without paid removals it is not worth his time to moderate them at all. The most popular solution to Google’s actions in the industry has been to stop advertising paid removal services while at the same time continuing to offer them behind the scenes. This usually involves posting notices on sites saying that removals are not available in an effort to make Google think they’re not or at least create plausible deniability as to their existence. In such cases the removals are typically marketed via direct messages or emails in response to complaints or by advertising the ability to remove content on a second site. For instance, you’re likely to find Site A hosting negative information and Site B advertising guaranteed removals of content on Site A as part of a reputation management service. This scenario is not good for anyone. It is bad for the websites because only a few people are made aware that services exist and it is bad for the customer because it makes doing business more expensive which means the price of the removal services increase significantly. We find this frustrating because some of our sites offer automated solutions that allow anyone to remove any page instantly for a small fee. It leads the industry as the cheapest and fastest removal option, but fewer people are using it because just using it at all results in a Google penalty. At the same time our competitors can stay on the first page hosting similar content about the same people just because they don’t advertise their removal services. Making removals available to just a select few that are aware of and willing to use a service that costs at least a few hundred dollars is not better than doing the same thing for anyone for far less than a hundred dollars. We were hoping that by undercutting their prices we could take credit for lowering prices across the industry and maybe even get our competitors to implement our automated solution as part of a partnership, but now they might be better off not doing that. Most of the people that use our automated solution never bother asking us to remove anything beforehand, so we doubt we would be better off only offering paid removals only to people that complain because most of them don’t buy anything and the number of complaints we get doesn’t exceed the number of sales by much. If we stopped offering the automated solution we would have to jack up prices significantly to make up for losing customers and having to manually solicit sales. Google’s changes have made the user experience slightly better in one way. Results are no logger clogged with duplicate content. Before the change search results for names often resulted in a whole bunch of similarly titled results featuring the same articles from different websites because there was nothing else out there about the person. We concede that can create an arguably worse user experience even though no other relevant stuff exists. In such cases people must page through copies of the same thing to see that nothing else exists. People are better served if they only see one or two copies of the same article on the first page. Then they can see from the rest of it that there is nothing else relevant. This seems to have been one result of Google’s actions in some cases, but with the deciding factor on which articles stay being based entirely on whether or not they can be removed for a fee. In many cases there are no relevant results other than our articles which is where we draw the line. We also think this can make search results more damaging because only having a couple makes it less obvious if they are the result of a smear campaign. We think seeing dozens of reposts on Google makes it obvious that they are the work of a vindictive individual. Leaving just a couple makes them look more like legitimate use of the host websites. The compromise we propose in our manifesto would revert search back to its pre-manipulation state with the addition of warning labels advising users about unverified, disputed, or misleading content. We think giving users more information would lead to a much better user experience than denying them access to information for reasons irrelevant to content quality. Personal InformationDavid Allen Graff is a 54 year old resident of San Francisco, California with property in Massachusetts. A comprehensive criminal background check did not reveal any charges or arrests, but it did result in a boat load of personal information. We also learned that he is a registered Democrat with a law license and a Facebook profile. Where He LivesGraff’s last known residential address in the San Francisco Bay Area is 322 Missouri St, San Francisco, California 94107. Graff owns what appears to be a vacation home in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts at 200 John Hoft Road. Phone and EmailWe’ve linked Graff to a few phone numbers and email addresses that appear relevant and recent. Phone numbers include (508) 684-8240 which is linked to his San Francisco home, 973-783-2922 a New Jersey based mobile number linked to property we believe Graff to have sold in 2018, and 917-456-7297 which is also linked to his San Francisco home. There were others, but we only like to include phone number that our background check service give a 5 out of 5 confidence score. We’ve found several email addresses that appear linked to Graff. Old work emails that may or may not be active include [email protected] and [email protected]. More recent emails include [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. Law LicenseGraff received a license to practice law in the state of Maryland on December 12, 1995. His license number 9512120314. His license is still active. ConclusionThis is the best article ever written about David Graff. It covers his history with information not found elsewhere, but we doubt it will ever rank well on Google. Surely Graff will find some lame excuse to justify demoting it in search below many pages of irrelevant content. The post David Graff: Google’s Mistrust Policy Team Leader appeared first on Google Employees. via Google Employees https://googleemployees.com/david-graff/
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Catherine A. Edwards is an engineering vice president at Google who was head of image search and user trust for search as recently as last year. Today she leads Google Apps, Google News, and other efforts. In this article we will discuss her professional career and personal information. CareerEdwards made a name for herself in the tech industry as co-founder of Chomp before becoming an Apple engineer, founding Undecidable Labs, and eventually joining Google. ChompEdwards co-founded Chomp with Ben Keighran in 2009. Chomp was a search engine for apps. It used advance algorithms to figure out what apps users were looking for and serve them the most relevant apps. It was basically a Google for apps. Apple bought Chomp in 2012 and shut it down. AppleEdwards went to work for Apple when they acquired Chomp. She was put in charge of fixing Apple Maps. At the time Apple Maps had been so inaccurate that the following year Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly apologized and recommended that people use Google Maps instead. Edwards took credit for improving Apple Maps, but despite that left the company in 2014. Undecidable LabsEdward co-founded Undecidable Labs in 2015. Undecidable Labs was a shopping search engine described as a new way to turn online searches into purchases by relying heavily on “smart” image search. Google acquired Undecidable Labs in 2016. Edwards was put in charge of image search at Google in 2016 shortly after Undecidable Labs was acquired. Google obviously noticed something about Undecidable Labs that would make image search better. Censorship NexusIn 2019 Edwards was awarded the title “VP of Engineering” according to her LinkedIn profile. The following year she began appearing in propaganda videos put out by Google and Google Australia via YouTube under the title “VP, Search” with narrators describing her as “head of user trust for search.” In the above video about fighting spam, the narrator describes Edwards’ job, “head of user trust for search, which basically means she deals with a lot of crap so the rest of us never have to.” Edwards described web spam as “a low quality page which is artificially boosted in our results” and the narrator lists several examples such as AI generated nonsense text, hidden text, and URL hijacking intended to trick their way into people’s search results. While their list was not exhaustive we noticed that none of their examples include anything relevant to us. The narrator described “the kind of websites that when you end up on them you hit the back button as quickly as possible.” None of our websites fell into that category either. In fact, the most recent data from Google Analytics for the two sites manually penalized by Google for which we created this website in protest indicates that their bounce rates have gone up slightly since being penalized. If Google’s manual action was intended to improve the user experience by eliminating low quality or less relevant results the numbers sure don’t show it. When comparing our first site’s organic search traffic from its best month ever several years ago we noticed that our bounce rate was 10% less back then even though we received over 70,000 more visitors from Google. Those numbers overwhelmingly support the conclusion that Google’s manual suppression of our content has done far more to deny users access to relevant and useful information than it has to protect users from “harmful” content. That is especially true when “harmful” is defined as containing allegedly false accusations against people and the basis for the suppression is an option to purchase noindex tags. If Google’s actions made search better our bounce rate would have dropped. Google has been treating our content like spam just because the minority of users that authors are talking about have been extremely vocal as of late and the press has been taking notice. Rather than defend search results full of allegedly false allegations against people as the most relevant and useful results for the majority of people searching for those subjects, which they are, Google has been suppressing the information. This forces users to sift through several pages of irrelevant results to find our content. Nothing about that is consistent with the primary goal of Google which is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” None of our results were artificially inflated. We simply made sure that our page markup clearly identified subjects so that search engines could easily understand what they were about. That led to higher rankings, but those rankings were organic and not inflated. Google has been treating our content like false information even thought our disclaimers clearly make every page on every site of ours 100% true as accurate quotations of others even if those quotations contain false statements. To say “someone said” followed by an accurate quotation of their words will always be a true account of their statements. Numbers overwhelmingly show that more people are interested in learning what others have said on such topics even if those statements contain false information. Even when an author lies the fact that their topic has at least one enemy willing to attack their reputation online is still useful information for people searching about them. We can think of many cases where better content should be outranking ours on Google because it is from sources more reliable than our users, but our content should still rank higher than content Google knows to have nothing to do with the subject. At about 21:35 in the video below, Edwards talks about the importance of making search useful for journalists. She described “uncovering information” as one of the most important parts of their work which is why Google has been using AI to save them time. Edwards says, “for those of you who are not journalists, try to imagine how much time and effort it can take to sift through everything,” thanks to Google’s new manual removal and suppression of information they don’t have to. All they need to do is Google anyone whose name has been featured on either of our sites which Google attacked. Now anyone looking for anything about those people must sift through pages and pages of Google search results that have nothing to do with them just to find what was and should still be on the first page. It is unfortunate that the Google Pinpoint tool for journalists mentioned in the above video has not been expanded to search in general. Right now it only involves selected collections of government documents which can be searched for names of people, places, and people in places. Those are the exact types of web searches that Google penalized our sites in and we think using Pinpoint’s UI to search the Google search engine would be great if Google stops suppressing content for reasons irrelevant to relevancy or quality. We would also like to see Google do away with Pinpoint’s application process because something so easy to use that a journalist can use it should be accessible to everyone. Current PositionAccording to Search Engine Land she was made lead of Google Apps, Google News, and “other ecosystem efforts” in April of 2021. As far as we know she remains at that position. Even though she is not technically in charge of image search or user trust for search as far as we know, she is none the less a member of the Google team with great influence over search which is why she is our jack of hearts. Personal InformationCathy Edwards was born and raised in Australia which can make finding her information slightly more difficult because other countries do not have the types of openly accessible online public records that we do. Fortunately, she moved to the United States during the mid-2000s and created a paper trail that we believe to have located. Where She LivesThe last known home address that we found for Cathy Edwards is 300 Ivy Street, Apartment 102, San Francisco, California 94102. That address is in the heart of San Francisco just blocks from notable downtown buildings. It was purchased in 2014 for $1,167,000. We found the above address after doing a background search on phone numbers listed under her name on SignalHire. There are a lot of people in California named Cathy Edwards, so we were having difficulty finding her in part because we could not find any mentions of her exact age in the media. Three of the mobile numbers from SignalHire appear to belong to other people also named Cathy Edwards, but number 650-492-1397 belongs to a female in San Francisco whose address history only dates back to 2007 when Edwards was a product manager at 3Jam Inc. in Menlo Park. The same record lists Undecidable Labs as a possible employer and corporate affiliation. Other online information indicates that Edwards used that address to register Undecidable Labs with the California Secretary of State, but that it is also a residential address. We believe that Edwards ran Undecidable Labs out of her home. ConclusionCathy Edwards has played a huge role in the search department at Google as recently as this year and continues to work in a highly influential capacity which places her near the heart of the Google problem. The post Cathy Edwards: Former Head of Google Images and Search Mistrust appeared first on Google Employees. via Google Employees https://googleemployees.com/cathy-edwards/ Ruth Porat is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Google. As CFO she should be well aware of all the money Google is wasting on censorship. We can only image how many people it must take to manually sculpt search results to fit their ideology. In this article we will discuss Porat’s history, what is expected of a CFO, and how she has failed the common shareholder. Morgan StanleyPorat rose to prominence at Morgan Stanley where she is credited with a long list of accomplishments on Wikipedia. Those accomplishments led Barack Obama to consider naming her Deputy Secretary of the Treasure in 2013, but she asked for her name to be withdrawn. Porat has long ties to leaders in the Democratic party. In 2008 she hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s campaign at her apartment (see Washington Post). She became well know for being outspoken with her far-left views. Google hired Porat as their CFO in 2015. She was quickly credited with saving the company money and increasing their stock value by reorganizing the company and imposing financial discipline. Unfortunately, she did not teach them to remember how they got where they are today and not to engage in contradictory behavior. However, Google was still pretty free speech friendly back then. In 2016, Porat hosted another fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and later broke down in tears when Trump won. Her reaction explains why someone in her position would encourage or at least sit idly by while her co-workers began wasting money by paying staff to manually manipulate search results. As you can see, she became quite disturbed by the results of the election. She broke down in tears and described felling like she had been kicked in the gut. Anyone that reacts that badly to an election cannot be expected to behave rationally in the next election. She was not alone in her overreaction, as the video below shows many of her fellow executives reacted similarly. That video was shot right after Trump won the 2016 election. We think that was the turning point when Google decided to get more politically involved by manipulation the kinds of information available to the public via their platform. We already have evidence of them manually manipulating search results years earlier, but after Trump got elected they obviously seemed regretful for not doing it more and were determined to pull out all the stops. Ruth Porat can be seen in the video at 12:30 saying exactly what she said in the first video, but before that Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker asks at 7:23 “what can we do to reach out to people whose perspective we have a hard time understanding?” We think the answer to that question is manual suppression of search results. Rather than reaching out and trying to change people’s minds, Google went on a crusade to suppress their voices before they could convince others to join them. They began abusing their position to impose a Stalinist curtain of censorship over search packaged as “a solution to this problem” like Walker said was needed at 10:40. There is a back and forth between Sundar Pichai and the audience starting at about 27:00 which seems like a good indicator of Google’s intention to use their position as gatekeepers of the web to lock people out of places. Not long after this video was shot people began noticing that conservative news sites suffered sudden unexplained drops in search visibility. It was like someone at Google flipped a switch. Google of course lied to the public and even Congress claiming there is no manual manipulation (see our article on Sundar Pichai). Then they admitted to manually manipulating search results in the same manner on different issues (see our article on Pandu Nayak). Those other issues included us which is why this website was built. Google took over the search engine market by gaining the public’s trust as a reliable place for people to find what they were looking for. After gaining that trust, Google decided to tell the public what they should or should not be looking for. That is where they crossed the line. Personal LifeRuth Porat was born to a Jewish family in the United Kingdom in 1957 making her 64 years old. Her parents moved her to Cambridge, Massachusetts when she was a young child. She has been married to a prominent lawyer since 1983. She has degrees from Stanford University, the London School of Economics, and Stanford University. Where She LivesPorat purchased a $30 million mansion in Palo Alto located at 1950 Cowper Street in 2015. A CFO’s JobInvestopedia owns to Google featured snippet for the search term “cfo job description” so we will use Investopedia’s definition to prevent Google from accusing us of using an inaccurate definition down.
Porat has performed those duties quite well overall. So well in fact that we don’t expect any of the shortcomings we point out here to be so significant as to outweigh the overall benefit Google has received by employing her in this capacity. However, we feel that the shortcoming are still shortcomings that someone in her position obviously feels entitled to allow. Those shortcomings include a failure to take corrective action in response to unnecessary labor expenses that diminish the value of their core service. Specifically, the hiring of employees to remove content from search results that they are not required to remove by law and manually manipulate rankings. Common Shareholders Suffer MostMembers of the Google high command such as Porat have already made so much money that have the luxury of not having to worry about money. The same cannot be said of common people that own small amounts of Alphabet stock. Those are the people that Porat has an obligation to, so when people like her think to themselves that they’ve got plenty of money and can easily afford to waste it for some societal purposes common shareholders suffer most. Porat’s life wouldn’t change a bit if Alphabet stock price takes a hit or just doesn’t grow as much as it could. ConclusionRuth Porat is a major part of the Google problem due to her failure to stop the company from wasting money on content removal and suppression. The post Ruth Porat: Google CFO Fails to Stop Wasteful Spending appeared first on Google Employees. via Google Employees https://googleemployees.com/ruth-porat/ Kristie Anna Canegallo is the head of Trust and Safety at Google. If you’ve ever found your content suppressed by Google with an explanation that explanation probably came from Trust and Safety. Trust and Safety is the preferred term used by Google to justify content removal or suppression on their platforms. The name “Trust and Safety” is intended to instill in consumers a sense of trustworthiness and imply that they are looking out for your safety, but the truth is that the term “Trust and Safety” means just the opposite when used to support censorship in light of Google’ corporate mission statement. A company cannot claim that censoring information makes them a trustworthy source of information after saying, “Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” When viewed in light of how Google became the world’s leading search engine in the first place, censoring and suppressing search results is an especially untrustworthy and hypocritical practice. In this article we will discuss how Google’s violated the public’s trust and what we know about Canegallo. Gaining TrustDuring the 2000s the search engine industry was very competitive. The decade began with Yahoo leading the pack with Google a not so close second (see Top Search Engines from 2002 to 2005). Google overtook Yahoo in 2004 because they developed a way to better help people find what they were looking for online. They developed an innovative algorithm known as PageRank which used backlinks to determine the quality of pages and rank they accordingly. At the time PageRank was launched other search engines still used a directory approach. People would have to sift through large quantities of content to find what they were looking for until Google’s PageRank came along to save them time. Google made search great. Google made search great because users could trust them to provide the most useful and relevant information. When someone searched for the name of a person or a business they could find everything available about those topics on Google. When some of that information turned out to be negative and in some cases false that led to a public outcry blaming Google for ruining reputations. Google initially responded appropriately to such criticism by pointing out that their algorithm did nothing more than objectively serve users relevant content ranked accordingly. Google would point out that under the Communications Decency Act of 1996 they were not responsible for content created by others. Then they directed people to address alleged inaccuracies with the sources of the information. That was the appropriate response because manual intervention would have violated the public’s trust by compromising the integrity of their search results and making it harder for people to find what they’re looking for. Had Google manually intervened early on they would never have been able to take over the search engine market. Yahoo developed an algorithm similar to PageRank in 2004, so Google had some real competition. Google could’ve only engaged in so much censorship before people said, “don’t use Google because they won’t show you everything you’re looking for.” If that became common knowledge they wouldn’t be what they are today. Google had to take over the market before they could afford to violate our trust. Google had to make using their search engine exclusively normal for most people. They had to gain our trust so that most people don’t think to questions the first pages of search results for any given term and if they do not to become dissatisfied enough to use a different search engine. Today Google controls 90% of the search engine market with Bing a distant second at 2.3% (see Search Engine Market Share in 2021). Google users rarely think to ask if Google search results really are the whole picture let alone conduct a Bing search to see what Google isn’t showing them because their trust has been misplaced due to many years of trustworthy behavior by Google. It is a shame to see a company that built itself on trust become so untrustworthy when they finally gain control over people. Good SuppressionNot all of Google’s decisions to suppress content have been bad. People learned how to manipulate the PageRank algorithm to make low quality content rank well. Google has done a lot over the years to combat that type of manipulation. They’ve also taken steps to keep information they know to be false from ranking well. Those decisions are not why we are here today. We are here today because Google went beyond merely ranking higher quality relevant content better than low quality content. For instance, when Google went out of their way to manually suppress information about COVID-19 they knew to be false they were not betraying anyone’s trust. That was no different than updating their algorithm to rank reliable medical websites higher for medical terms. We are here because Google began suppressing and in some cases outright censoring content they know to be negative without any proof of it being false or in some cases knowing that its true but choosing to suppress it anyway based on claims of emotional distress by its subjects. That pattern of behavior contradicts Google’s mission statement and is the first step towards turning Google into a directory. Bad SuppressionWe are here because Google has chosen to make some types of content harder to find. When people search for information about a person or a business they usually do so with an open mind. That open mind is typically receptive to any information they find whether its positive or negative. Sometimes all they find are social media profiles that look good and think “that’s nice.” Other times they find arrest records, negative reviews, or allegations of a personal nature and think, “I’m glad I know that.” Google is actively working to deny the latter useful information. Today users are more likely to find a sanitized version of search intended to make them think, “that’s nice” when the real version would make them think, “I’m glad I know that.” Accurate InformationThis behavior gained notoriety in 2013 when Google suppressed mugshots. Google used to be a great place to research a person because you’d find out fairly quickly that they have an arrest records at no cost to you. Today you’re likely to finish your Googling completely clueless as to who your subject really is. To find what you’re looking for you will need the presence of mind to use a paid background check service. Today’s search results are not nearly as trustworthy as they were a decade ago because someone at Google though it would be safer to cost users time and money. Google’s problem had nothing to do with accuracy since the arrest records in question came from accurate public databases. Google simply responded to stories from mainstream media outlets like sissies. Rather than simply explain that suppressing arrest records would contradict their mission statement by making search less accurate they decided to appease arrestees claiming emotional distress as a result of true facts being widely available on Google (see Mugged by a Mugshot). This was the beginning of the end as far as Google being a trustworthy source of information, but unfortunately due to network effects Google was already growing too fast for anything like this to slow them down. Information of Questionable AccuracyGoogle has devolved from an objective broker of information to a moderator that treats unproven claims as false. A decade ago Google would serve users with content containing negative allegations against people and businesses like any neutral third party should. They showed them the content and let them figure things out for themselves. Users could trust Google to show them everything relevant to their search even if some of the content might contain false information. Human beings being what they are it is their responsibility to respond appropriately to what they read online. It is not Google’s responsibility to shelter them from anything they might react inappropriately to. Google has claimed in recent years in the name of Trust and Safety that they’ve taken steps to protect users from content by suppressing it in search results or removing it entirely. They claim it makes their search results more trustworthy by limiting exposure to negative and in some cases false information, but such claims really prove the opposite because Google earned their trust by being an objective broker of information. Today people cannot trust Google search results. Today people must sift through countless pages of irrelevant information to find what they are looking for. Google is going in the opposite direction. What Google Should DoGoogle should serve users with more information to help them make educated decisions. We have proposed a reasonable compromise in our manifesto. That compromise involves applying warning labels to search results so that users will use their minds. Those labels would tell people if a relevant result is unverified, disputed, or misleading. They wouldn’t have to page through irrelevant results to find relevant information just because Google wants to avoid public relations issues associated with negative search results. People would find what they are looking for and learn not to react inappropriately. Google would restore their results to a reliable state. Search would be great again. Make Search Great AgainGoogle is moving backwards by moving away from algorithmic search and back towards the era of directories. We fear that if Google continues down this path that their search engine will become nothing more than a directory of sites manually approved by Google employees. Manual manipulation of rankings is illegal due to statements made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google cannot be trusted to tell Congress the truth under oath. They freely admit that their CEO committed perjury and package proof of his crime as an internet safety improvement. To truly regain the trust of the American people, Google must restore the status quo to what it was before they began moving backwards. They must restore search to what it was before employees manually manipulated it for political reasons. The must secure our future access to information. They must make search great again. Who is Kristie Canegallo?Kristie Anna Canegallo is a 41 year old resident of San Francisco, California. She grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts before attending Colgate University and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In 2008 she served with the National Security Council at the Pentagon. In 2014 she became White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Barack Obama. As Deputy Chief of Staff she was considered one of Obama’s top aids. Google hired her in 2018. As head of Trust and Safety it is her job to protect users from abuse while ensuring that Google remains a trusted source of information. She is failing at that job by prioritizing the former over the latter so much so that Google is no longer a trusted source of information. She does not have a tech background, so her job is all about making policies. The polices that have emerged under her watch seem aimed at suppressing information not in line with the personal views of Google employees such as herself. They have suppressed conservative speech because they tow the liberal line and believe the opinions of others they disagree with to be false information. They’re the same type of people that banned classic books in public schools. At least our compromise proposal is more like slapping trigger warnings on books. Trigger warnings at least tell readers what they’re getting themselves into while allowing them access to information.
We fear that Canegallo’s policies are intended not to maximize our access to information, but to trick us into thinking that we have such access because Google historically did maximize our access to information. By convincing people that they are a trustworthy source of information, Google has almost taken control of the past in a manner clearly intended to control the present and future. If you read Canegallo’s policies you can see that just about everything she calls a success is really a failure to fulfill her company’s mission. Where She LivesA public records search revealed that Canegallo’s last known address is 884 De Haro Street, San Francisco, California 94107-2706. As you can see below, the Google Earth image of the property has been blurred. That is a common practice employed by high value targets trying to protect their privacy. Elizabeth Hamon Reid is head of search experiences at Google. As such it is her job to make sure that most Google users find what they are looking for. She is failing miserably at that job. Just a few years ago, Google was a great place to find what you are looking for, but now its more like they are telling you what you should be looking for. In this article we will cover what we know about Reid and how she needs to steer her company in the right direction. What We KnowWe know that Mrs. Reid is a 40 year old registered Democrat last known to reside at 878 Riverside Drive, Los Altos, California 94024-4825. The property was purchased in 2014 for $3,325,000. Before moving to the above mentioned address she lived in an apartment briefly after living in New York for many years. She had moved to New York from New Hampshire to become the first female engineer at Google’s New York office in 2003. After moving to California she became lead of Google Maps for several years before being appointed to her current position overseeing search experiences including image search (source: Search Engine Land). What She Needs to DoReid needs to restore the search experience to the state it was in before Google employees began manually manipulating search results for political reasons. We have already written extensively on the topic of search manipulation by Google employees (see: Sundar Pichai, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Pandu Nayak). Our previous articles have already proven that Google employees admit to manually manipulating search results, so for the purpose of this article we will summarize how those manipulations diminish the search experience. Diminished ExperienceGoogle’s mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Only by truly accomplishing that mission can Google users hope to find what they’re looking for on Google. As The New York Times recently pointed out, just a few years ago you could find just about anything on Google, but that is not so anymore because of human meddling. That meddling sets a dangerous precedent. The Golden EraWhen Google allowed their algorithm to impartially rank pages based on quality they earned their dominant position in the market by being the best at connecting people with the information they were looking for. People could Google the name of a business or a person and trust that Google would serve them with the most relevant results. Often the most relevant results were damaging to reputations. Those results contained things like police mugshots, negative business reviews, and dirty details of people’s personal lives. The kinds of things hiring managers, prospective customers, and potential romantic partners want to know. It was a golden era for the free flow of information thanks in large part to Google. The New EraToday you’re not likely to find nearly as much information on Google when researching people or businesses because of censorship. Most people mark the beginning of this era after the 2016 election of Donald Trump when big tech decided to do all they could to influence the next election, but this era really began a few years earlier. When Google began suppressing police mugshots in search results and removing pornography if any party in it claimed that the disclosure was not consensual. Google claimed that these changes were necessary to improve the quality of their search results, but that was clearly a lie. Users are never better served if they must restrict their search to mugshot websites just to see if someone has a criminal history and even then still find filtered results whenever Google has a policy of removing certain things upon request. The end result is users misled into thinking there is nothing wrong with the person or business they are researching when in fact the web is full of negative articles. People often must got to Bing to find what is really out there. Why is this? Because Google now prioritizes claims of emotional distress from a minority of users (people Googling themselves) over the majority of users (people Googling others). People complained that Google results for their name were full of false accusations that misled people. Often those people had no proof that the allegations were false, but Google chose to treat them just the same. Its as if they decided that stopping one person from experiencing emotional distress while Googling themselves is more important than two people being able to find what they’re looking for. We spoke to one such person who was the victim of a serial libeler named Nadire Atas. He blamed the webmasters whose sites she abused for her conduct. We argued that people often want to find information such as the articles she posted when Googling people to which he said, “nobody wants or is setting out to find defamatory lies about me,” He has a point, people probably are not specifically looking for negative articles when they Google him. However, they’re often more open minded and curious to see anything that comes up about him whether its positive, negative, true, or false.
The problem with his opinion is that people benefit greatly from knowing that he has a cyber stalker, especially in a case where the stalker targets anyone associated with her targets as well as the targets themselves. Knowing that he has such a dysfunctional person in his life is important for people to consider before publicly associating themselves with him. They might want to make sure that they don’t advertise their relationship so that Atas won’t find out. In less severe cases people still learn something important about the person. That the person has enemies for some reason. They might not “consciously go on Google to try to find lies and bullshit,” but they are curious should they encounter lies and bullshit. We removed all of Atas’ work from our sites when we discovered proof it was false, but most are not so clear. Usually we have no way of knowing if an author is telling the truth. Google users are typically open minded when Googling a name and are curious to see whatever shows up whether its positive, negative, true, or false. Since likely lies are relevant to the query they should not be buried behind irrelevant results. They should be restored to their rightful place below quality relevant content and above irrelevant content. Dangerous PrecedentIt is not Google’s place to decide what we should be looking for. Their place is to help us find what we’re looking for and anything else relevant to our searches. Its like they seized control over the internet’s information funnel by fulfilling their mission so that later they could use it to control what we see. The latter is an un-American threat to our way of life. It requires that they forego revenues from future searches and incur unnecessary labor costs removing content. Such anti-capitalist decisions appear to be influenced by Marxist philosophies. They are deciding what is true or false based on criteria other than facts such whether content can be removed for a fee (ex: negative reviews) or being too useful in an allegedly negative way (ex: mugshots). Google is now nothing more than a white washed version of the internet. They can only continue with this so long before Google is no longer a reliable source of information. Ironic since they claim their changes are supposed to improve the accuracy of search results. The warning label system we proposed in our manifesto is an ideal alternative. We ask that Google add labels to potentially misleading results so that users can make better decisions without being denied access to relevant information. The post Elizabeth Reid: Overseer of Search Experiences at Google appeared first on Google Employees. via Google Employees https://googleemployees.com/elizabeth-reid/ |