Google search ranking boss warns against algorithm oversight - 12h February 2019

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By Jennifer Duke

Search giant Google has warned that the Australian competition watchdog's proposal for a regulator to oversee its algorithm could increase risks from spammers.

One of the Google's top executives, vice-president of search Pandu Nayak, said the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s proposal to impose oversight on the way search engines rank information and news articles through a review authority could invite trouble.

“The more open you are about how the algorithm works the more tools you give spammers to mess with it and the very people you’re trying to support with your transparency are the ones who get hurt,” said Mr Nayak, who is visiting Google’s Pyrmont offices from California this week.

With this in mind he said he did not think algorithm oversight was a good idea, saying he wasn’t sure “what would be involved” in making the concept workable.

“I think [algorithm review authority] is exactly the kind of thing we want to be careful about. We shouldn’t do things that both don’t address the problem, if there is one, but also open you up to other problems.”

He said the search giant was committed to transparency to ensure publishers and the public could understand how rankings worked but warned too much detail about how the algorithms worked could result in spammers gaming the system and bad outcomes.

The criticism comes ahead of a Friday deadline for digital giants and publishers to provide feedback in a second round of submissions to the ACCC's world-first inquiry into technology platforms and their impact on journalism, advertising revenue, fake news and privacy.

One of the suggestions in a report released in December was for additional regulators that would, among other functions, have oversight of algorithms used in search and social media. Facebook has publicly criticised the suggestion as "unworkable".

On Monday, the competition regulator's chair Rod Sims was again critical of the global giants' impact on local publishers during a speech.

Mr Nayak said the search giant had made significant steps to improve the rankings for authoritative sources of journalism and to allow news organisations to better monetise their content. This included the removal of a controversial policy in 2017 that allowed users to bypass publisher’s paywalls the first time they read an article.

"If there was a piece of news that some news site did a lot of work on ... I would be the first to say this is something that should be ranked at the top."

Pandu Nayak

Instead, news organisations were encouraged to use soft paywalls allowing users to access some articles for free before being locked out.

However, he admitted there were still challenges to serving up the most appropriate news articles first particularly when it came to prioritising a news source that broke a story or provided in-depth reporting.

“If there was a piece of news that some news site did a lot of work on ... I would be the first to say this is something that should be ranked at the top because that is the primary source of this information. But having said that the reality is often a lot more complicated," he said.

In addition to regularly tweaking the algorithm to better organise news results, he said a major focus over the past 24 months since the US election has been targeting fake news.

Google aims to do this by ranking trusted sources more highly while social media giant Facebook has tweaked its algorithm and partnered with fact-checking units.

“The primary reason we didn’t [choose to identify specific fake news articles] is because I don’t think algorithms are up to the task to decide on the truth or falsity of a particular piece of content,” he said.

“I can’t say we have solved the problem [of fake news] only because this problem I don’t think we’ll ever 100 per cent solve it, but I think we’ve made a lot of progress and the commitment is we’ll continue to work on it and address it in the future.”

(The Sydney Morning Herald)