Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me [Updated]The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance. The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record- breaking $2. That post was briefly taken down, then republished. Soon afterward, Anne- Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me: Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job.

Luke Plunkett. Luke Plunkett is a Contributing Editor based in Canberra, Australia. He has written a book on cosplay, designed a game about airplanes, and also runs.

Catch up on all the latest TV news, photos, videos, and opinion. · Horrible Bosses, a comedy about three corporate hamsters who aim to kill their oppressors, opens this weekend. Early reviews are solid: Rotten Tomatoes. If you’re currently relying on your smartphone, laptop, or some kind of monitor setup for your TV time, you can still get your red carpet fix by streaming the 69th. Directed by George Huang. With Kevin Spacey, Frank Whaley, Michelle Forbes, Benicio Del Toro. A young, naive Hollywood studio assistant finally turns the tables on.

In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then- new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers. This sounded like a news story to me. Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network. I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer?

The answer was yes. After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google. With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting. The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked. Universal’ was the answer.

So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2. 01. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting.

Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non- disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher- ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. I thought it was an important story, but I didn’t want to cause problems for my employer.

And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story. Given that I’d gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down—a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly.

And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know- how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google.

Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet. I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google. Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep- sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non- disclosure agreement.

Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending. People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the piece’s disappearance and wroteaboutit, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today. As for how effective the strategy was, Google’s dominance in other industries didn’t really pan out for Plus.

Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it. But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network. Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as it’s grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself. Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields.

Lynn and the rest of the team that left New America Foundation plan to establish a new nonprofit to continue their work. For now, they’ve launched a website called “Citizens Against Monopoly” that tells their story. It says that “Google’s attempts to shut down think tanks, journalists, and public interest advocates researching and writing about the dangers of concentrated private power must end.”It’s safe to say they won’t be receiving funding from Google. Update, September 1, 1: 5.

Yesterday, we asked Google’s communications team for a response to this story.

Modern Games WAY Better Than Critics Say. For one reason or another, there are many games out there that have been unjustly dissed by critics. Sometimes, the bad reviews arose from poor marketing that manipulated critics’ expectations. In other cases, critics’ complaints were legitimate but the numerical scores awarded were illegitimate. A critic’s job is to provide consumers with a general impression of the latest game. Usually, reviewers get things more or less right. Occasionally, however, even the most dependable game critics slander a masterpiece.

Who knows why this happens? Maybe they’ve got a conflict of interest.

Perhaps, for whatever professional or personal reason, they didn’t give the game their full attention. Further still, they could be just plain bad at video games. It’s hard to appreciate a difficult but great game fully if you can’t get past the first mini- boss. The causes can be numerous, yet the result is always the same: a great game gets a bad reputation. The problem is complicated and not easily solved. You might boot up the same game a week later and find an annoying bug has been patched out (or introduced) while you were away. Modern games evolve post- release, yet review aggregators still treat them like stagnant products, making a game’s review score at release more important than whether the game improves with updates.

The score- based game review system has yet to create meaningful incentives for companies to provide continuing support. Unless a game update is shipped and sold as a separate product, review aggregators like Metacritic will treat version 1. Here are the 1. 9 Modern Games That Are WAY Better Than Critics Say. Dark Souls II (2. Is 2. 01. 4’s Dark Souls II the best entry in From.

Software’s celebrated series? Probably not, but it’s a thrilling ARPG nonetheless. Its combat is more varied than its predecessor’s and its story more accessible. Although Majula and its surroundings do not transform in the way that the world of Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition does, the world of Dark Souls II is fully realized, atmospheric, and fun to explore. Yet, some critics would have you believe this fine, albeit imperfect game is an abominable trash fire, a plague upon the gaming community at- large.

For instance, Michael Thomsen of Forbes asked in his review whether Dark Souls II was the worst game ever made. Even for the buggiest build of Dark Souls II, the question is insulting and inappropriate. To the magazine’s credit, in 2.

Forbes contributor Erik Kain wrote a more even- handed review of Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, the redesigned, re- balanced, expanded, and more player- friendly version. Morning Glory Full Movie. Lawbreakers (2. 01. First- Person Shooters rarely require instructions. Boss Key Productions’ Lawbreakers is an exception to this rule, however.

It has a pretty major learning curve on account of its breakneck speed and antigravity acrobatics that the game immediately delves into. In a review subtitled “Fresh ideas overshadowed by terrible aesthetics,” Jeff Ramos of Polygon stated his frustrations. Giving the game a meager 6. Ramos criticized the “embarrassing dubstep soundtrack, gunmetal- on- everything design [which affects readability]… confusing hero design, poor tutorial system and unbalanced maps.”  However, fans of Cliff Bleszinski (Gears of. War, Bulletstorm) and his flair for off- beat one- liners and gun- toting tongue- in- cheek bravado will find a lot to like in Lawbreakers, even if the critics made a point of despising it. Tom Clancy’s The Division (2. At launch, Tom Clancy’s The Division had some serious issues in terms of balance and performance.

The third- person gun combat mechanics and sense of scale were first- rate. Critics complained that the story was disjointed and that the premise was strange. Watch Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Streaming here. The titular Division is a paramilitary death squad allegedly saving people from criminals trapped in a hellish snow- covered dystopian city, yet they shoot pretty anyone on sight who isn’t part of their vigilante gun club. So, this begs the question: who exactly are you supposed to be saving?) In the months following the debacle, continuing support from the developers improved and expanded The Division. Ubisoft revealed a Techland- like commitment to its game, with free content updates and bug fixes. 1. Mad Max (2. 01. 5)Reviews unfairly chided Mad Max for repeating the combat of Batman: Arkham and Middle- Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

The comparison is understandable, considering that the three games share a publisher. Watch Humans Online Full Movie. However, Mad Max‘shuge map, gorgeous and varied post- apocalyptic scenery, wanton destruction, vehicular combat, and, in Arkham Knight‘s case, flawless frame rate help it to stand out.

Sure, the control scheme’s a little weird, but you get used to it. Most open- world games catch flak for not having enough to do — not Mad Max, though.

Upon its release, Mad Max was criticized for having too many side activities. Mad Max is positive proof that, with some critics, you just can’t win. Neither Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa nor any other character from Mad Max: Fury Road makes an appearance in the game. Max Rockatansky is the only connection to the celebrated movie, but he isn’t voiced by Tom Hardy.

Are the story and world- building as strong as those of the Academy Award- winning film? Not really, but you won’t find Chumbucket, Mad Max’s madder “blackthumb” auto mechanic, in the movies. Chumbucket imbues the barren world with heart, soul, humor, and pathos, and his presence alone would be reason enough to keep playing.

Mass Effect: Andromeda (2. According to the reviews, Mass Effect: Andromeda is simply a good game in a series wherein greatness is par for the course. Erik Kain of Forbes wrote a helpful rundown of the critics’ gripes with Andromeda. The biggest complaints were minor performance issues. Alan Wake- like animations for characters’ facial expressions and generic MMO- style filler quests notwithstanding, Andromeda‘s failings are easily forgiven, thanks to its revamped gameplay and enormous worlds — as well as patches that were available soon after the game’s release.

Among the many changes this time around, you play not as series mainstay Shepard but as a new character named Ryder. Ryder’s jump jets make combat more fun, if less tactical, than it was in Mass Effect 2, still the best game in the original trilogy. You’ll be feeling like a boss as you vault over obstacles and surprise your enemies in ways Shepard never could. 1. Duck Game (2. 01. Two neo- retro indie masterpieces Towerfall and Samurai Gunn inspired a deluge of free- for- all pixel- art arena fighters. Many of them simply replicated mechanics from those games. Published by Adult Swim Games, Duck Game rides that wave to quacktastic glory. Duck Game is different.

At its zaniest, it is a digital form of psychonautical exploration. Up to four player- controlled ducks use a cartoonish assortment of weapons to obliterate each other. A point is awarded to the last duck standing at the end of each round. First duck to ten points wins. You can quack, you can play dead, and if you catch on fire, you turn into a roast duck dinner.

It’s a manic, pitch- perfect party game, and it’s very addictive. So why didn’t it garner better scores? Critics’ most common complaint was the quick- moving automatic camera. The zooming in and out can be jarring, for sure, but that’s part of the fun. It becomes yet another aspect of this delightfully disorienting party game. Another point of contention was the single- player Challenge Arcade mode’s differences from the main game.

As a training ground to prepare you for online competition, it’s super- effective. Yooka- Laylee (2.

As a Kickstarter- funded labor of love from former Rare employees, Yooka- Laylee set out to accomplish a specific task — to reimagine the quirky 3. D platforming of Banjo- Kazooie and Banjo- Katooie with modern tech, and it did just that. Yooka- Laylee delivers the retro thrills of N6. Banjo- Kazooie series.