Re: <nettime> Wikileaks and Protocol

[David Mandl <dmandl@panix.com>]

On Dec 19, 2010, at 1:19 AM, Rory Solomon wrote:

> To end with a humorous counter-example, did anyone follow this recent
> drama around NY Times, Google, and Vitaly Borker?
> 
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-
> bad-for.html Basically, the New York Times reported on a Brooklyn
> ecommerce eyeglass merchant who got high google search results
> by being a jerk. Few days later, google publishes that blog post
> explaining how upset the article made them and how they re-worked
> their search algorithm(!) to exclude Borker and people like him.

The hilarious thing about that official statement was the fact that Google claimed the business owner in question--who, remember, terrorized and implicitly threatened the life of his customer--"provides an extremely poor user experience." When the only language you have is a hammer, every situation looks like a nail.

   --Dave.

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com
davem@wfmu.org
Web: http://www.wfmu.org/~davem
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmandl


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