Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 559)
THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER 2006
GOOGLE
Q540 Rosemary McKenna: When you talked
about people creating their own videos, as a former teacher I
can see the potential for that, it is wonderful, and children
have for years been making their own little videos, being able
to actually let others see them, whereas in the past it has just
been themselves. What concerns me about the whole issue of that
is the concern about the people who would use it for their own
purposes, people who would use Google and YouTube for pornographic
reasons. How do you monitor that and how do you deal with that?
Mr McLaughlin: We take that very
seriously. Our policies are very clear; we do not want to be hung
for the kind of stuff you are referencing. Let me give you an
example of how this works in practice. As Nikesh was mentioning
earlier, one of the big advantages of the internet is that for
a site like Google Video or Google in general or YouTube, they
have an enormous community of users, millions and millions of
users. Our strategy is to try to harness the power of those users
to find and flag inappropriate content, so if you go to Google
Video and you look on the screen, on every video there is a little
flag on the upper right-hand side that says "flag as inappropriate".
When you click on that flag you get a menu and it says "porn
or obscenity", "graphic violence", "racially
or ethnically hateful content" or "other content inappropriate
for young viewers". We ask you to tell us what kind of content
this is, and when it is flagged we then act very quickly to review
it, see if we agree and then take it down. I have to say that
at the scale, that seems to work pretty well. People in the YouTube
and the Google Video worlds in the Google universe in general
actually they do not want this stuff. They are eager to kind of
help us police the system and we find that this system works awfully
well. It is scaled of course and we have got literally millions
of videos, billions of web pages in our index and to be able to
harness the power of the broad community of millions of users
to help us is very powerful.
Q541 Rosemary McKenna: So you would
just simply remove it from the site. You do not follow that up,
do you, to find the people who are actually putting it on?
Mr McLaughlin: We should distinguish
between different categories. Our policy is to co-operate with
law enforcement; we do co-operate with law enforcement. I think
you are all on this Committee familiar with the Internet Watch
Foundation; we are enthusiastic members of, and participants in,
that process. We report, as legally required and for our own policies,
child abuse imagery, and any time that the law enforcement comes
to us with a proper legal process to try to investigate some video
that we might have hosted, we co-operate very aggressively, very
actively.
Q542 Rosemary McKenna: And what about
the ones that are not offensive, but are just a nuisance, like
the spam e-mails that Members of Parliament are subject to, massive
numbers of them, how do you deal with those?
Mr McLaughlin: Technology is our
friend on these kinds of issues actually. We try to build technology
that allows us, if you take GMail for example, which is our e-mail
service, we try to deal with the spam problem and the nuisance
offensive e-mail problem with technology, so we have developed
awfully sophisticated ways to try to flag the stuff—and
I will not even mention what it is because you know what it is—but
that comes into your inbox and to keep it properly off to the
side and out of your view.
Q543 Helen Southworth: You have identified
how you flag things up, that depends on people knowing how to
use your systems. Can you just give me a little about how you
advertise that? My local newspaper has just done an investigation
recently about offensive home videos that have been put on to
sites that are things like harassment of vulnerable adults or
bullying, the kind of things that are not cut-and-dried criminal
activities, but are very unpleasant and influential in a very
bad way with young people. What are you actually doing to make
sure that people can police that process. There is so much there
and unless people know quite clearly how to deal with it, they
just feel bad themselves about it, they do not feel they can action
it.
Mr McLaughlin: You are asking
an incredibly interesting question actually and I think, for us
as a company, for you as legislators, for society in general,
this is really an important issue for us to try to struggle through
now in these earliest days of this technology. You are right,
the criminal content is easy, it is easy to deal with that, easy
to identify it and easy to flag it. There is a considerable grey
area of content that people find obnoxious, offensive. In some
cases it is obnoxious to one particular group and other things
are kind of offensive to large groups of people. Our policies
go beyond what is simply illegal. As I mentioned before, you know,
graphic violence, racially or ethnically hateful content, this
is not illegal everywhere in the world. You are familiar with
the First Amendment traditions in the US. In that country in particular
we go beyond what is simply illegal because we just do not want
to be a home to it as a business, but we are constantly fishing
for ideas. Our best idea so far has been to put right next to
every single video that we have got a button that people can push
to report content. Does everybody know how to do that? Probably
not. It is pretty well flagged for those that are kind of savvy
internet users and a lot of people do use it, but I am with you,
I think that in thinking about how we educate children and thinking
about how we educate parents, as an industry, as society, we could
probably do quite a bit better. From Google's standpoint, like
I said, we are always on the look-out for interesting ideas, we
are participating with a number of different kinds of industry
groups around child protection. I mentioned the Internet Watch
Foundation, there are similar groups in the United States.
Mr Arora: We are a big supporter
of the NSPCC.
Mr McLaughlin: The National Committee
for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States. I feel
like we are in a sort of early-stage dialogue about the best way
to do this. The good news is that I think the sensationalist view
of what is confronting people out on the internet is significantly
over-exaggerated. On the other hand, it is the case that there
is bad stuff out there and so, you know, as a company, I think
the best thing I can say is that our commitment is to be a very
serious thoughtful participant in conversations about what we
can be doing collectively to address those problems.
Q544 Helen Southworth: Google is
the classic example of how an idea can grow and spread like wildfire.
Can I also ask you about advertising and transparency in advertising.
You have spoken earlier about how long it takes you, you spend
hours trying to find the best flight, the cheapest flight, whatever,
that there is a huge volume of information on the internet and
then you explored with us about how you get financing in from
your advertising and the click-on process. What I do not understand
is how the prioritisation happens; does the prioritisation have
any relationship with how much people are paying, because if I
get three things up there and I am going to click on one of them
and there are another 10,000 out there, what is the relationship
and how transparent are you?
Mr Arora: There are two sides
to our site. If you look at the traditional Google page there
is what you get right in front of you which is what we deem as
natural search, which is purely based on a series of algorithms
which determine what is relevant, what is more popular on the
web and the algorithm has hundreds of variables, and that is a
pure natural search. Even our founders cannot decide whether one
should come above the other. What we call advertising which shows
up on the right and in some cases will show up as the top two
links, clearly identifies sponsored links. That is where clearly
what people pay has a relevance on which advert shows up on the
top, so the natural search is updated, it is what we deliver through
our algorithms. The advertising part is actually based on an option
mechanism where various advertisers can try and compete for key
words amongst themselves. We take that price as well as other
variables about the advertiser in terms of relevance, so we also
see how many people have actually found that advertising relevant
when they have searched for something, and we take the combination
of relevance and a whole other series of factors and the price
people pay to determine which advertisement ranks above. The financial
side is purely based on a series of variables which is developing,
which has since been announced by others in our business.
Mr McLaughlin: On the transparency
fact I should say it is crucially important to us to label advertising
as advertising and the search results as search results, so we
do. The ads have a somewhat different font, they are in different
colours in the background and the top and they are labelled as
sponsored links rather than search results. For us the core of
Google's utility to people in the world is relevance. If we are
not offering the most relevant results that we can come up with
in our vast network of computers and all that stuff that lives
behind the scenes, people, as Nikesh said, will go one click away
and go to another search engine. So for us it is kind of a cardinal
principle of the company that the search results are driven by
natural search, not by money, not by advertising dollars or pounds,
not by any pay-offs from partners, they are pristine and it is
almost like a newspaper with the editorial side of our business,
in this case the mathematical, non-editorial side is walled-off
from the advertising side.
Q545 Helen Southworth : How would
the consumer know that that is your policy and how would the consumer
know if your policy changed?
Mr McLaughlin: Well, they can
tell now because all of our advertising is labelled as such, it
is all flagged, and if our policies changed on that score I would
imagine that every A1 front page of every newspaper would be beating
us up over it in the future. Like I said, it is fundamental to
our business to focus on relevance and if we jeopardise that you
could imagine that there would be a significant appropriate outcry.
Q546 Mr Hall: I think my constituency
office uses Google every day. When I send my correspondence up
to them there is always a question mark over, "Where is the
address?" "Who is the Chief Executive?" Google
is a fantastic search engine. My particular needs, I actually
do not like reading newspapers, I only get the news off BBC Ceefax,
despite all its shortcomings in being badly written, biased, leading
in its interpretation, and probably giving publicity to the Taliban
which I do not think is what the public licence fee should be
used for. Could you tell us a bit about the Google News service
which is a fascinating tool, is it not?
Mr Arora: As part of our quest
to try and organise the world's information and try and make it
useful for the consumers, Google News effectively looks at over
5,000 news sites and tries to, when you search for something,
look at various algorithms which are unclustering and what stories
seem to be relevant and to be similar. It tries to give you a
result in a clustered set of news articles that very, very carefully
only give you the headlines and a very brief snippet so when you
actually click on it you go back to the original content owner
of that site where you can actually read the full article. We
believe that is a hugely useful service and it is part of our
view in terms of as more and more information comes on-line it
is a critical way for you to be able to access news information
for that matter.
Q547 Mr Hall: To use it, do you have
to be a subscriber?
Mr Arora: Not at all, you can
actually just go to Google and there is a tab called "news",
you click on the tab and you search for something and you will
see all the articles which we think you are looking for relevant
to what you searched for which have appeared in any on-line publication
in the world.
Q548 Mr Hall: But part of the service
it has got an automated e-mail, I think that is subscription,
is it?
Mr Arora: No, you can actually
just sign up and give us your e-mail address and we will send
you an alert any time that anything shows up with your name in
it.
Q549 Mr Hall: How do you make any
money out of this?
Mr Arora: We believe as we launch
services which people like and they use, it helps our rank. It
also helps them to come back to us to search because we believe
that Google is a place where you can search for anything, so we
believe it enhances our core business of search and therefore
which is paid for by advertising.
Q550 Mr Hall: But this particular
news service is advertisement-free, is it not?
Mr Arora: Yes, it is.
Q551 Mr Hall: Have you got any intention
to put advertisements on it?
Mr Arora: We are constantly exploring
different business models to see if there is an opportunity.
Q552 Mr Hall: Can I urge caution,
because one of the things I hate is advertisements which is why
I have stuck with BBC Ceefax rather than ITV.
Mr Arora: We will take your input
as highly valued in our decision-making process.
Q553 Paul Farrelly: Just following
on from the question on Google News, you are clearly the market
leader in general information search, in maps and directions,
price comparison, now there is news, and as long as your shares
ride high you have paid a knock-out price for moving pictures
and YouTube. Is there any category of popular search information,
entertainment in which you wished Google had a bigger presence?
Mr Arora: That I did not anticipate;
I will have to think about it. If you think about it, when lots
and lots of information started coming on the web and it certainly
came up with the idea that we need to go find a way of making
information more useful and accessible, they were able to look
at all the websites out there and find a way of searching through
that information. Subsequently we have seen the trend of blogging
or things like MySpace where people have used us as an opportunity
for self-expression. Clearly there we are not the biggest player
in the market, it is MySpace and Bebo and Facebook who are, and
we have partnered with them to see if there is a way that we can
help to monetise that by advertising, so there is clearly a whole
plethora of content out there in the blogging world. We do have
a log and search capability but there are other people who actually
host the blogging sites. To your comment about the on-line video,
we believe that some of the video searching capabilities are still
rudimentary because you rely on tagging by people or some form
of subtitling to search through it. Over time with the new technology
we will provide opportunities to make that even more efficient
and somehow hopefully we can look at the pictures and find a way
of searching for that stuff. We believe that there is lots of
work that needs to be done in making more and more sense out of
the information that is already out there, but there are other
people who offer vertical searches in the areas of real estate
or finance or certain specialised search verticals. We have a
different view, we believe that people should be able to search
for everything with that one Google search box and our attempt
is to try and bring them back to that search box whether they
are looking for news, video or information.
Mr McLaughlin: If you will indulge
me turning the question round just a little bit, one of the things
that I think we would like to get up on the internet more is government
information. Governments are sitting typically on massive piles
of data that they have gathered through their censuses, election
results, crime statistics, environmental data, you name it, and
we would love to be able to get that information to the one search,
in a Google search box away from the citizens of that country.
One of the areas where we are most interested in unlocking data
is in finding this information; it is either not public, either
it is on paper from a government printing office or all of the
debates in Parliament throughout all of the centuries, we would
love to get that information up on-line and kind of instantaneously
accessible. We also have this platform called Google Earth which
is basically, you know, like maps and images of the world and
it is a fantastic way to display geographically relevant information.
You can look at it now and get every three hours updated cloud
coverage at various levels of elevation above the earth, you can
see earthquake activity over the last 24 hours around the world.
All of the information that governments have we would like to
see accessible.
Q554 Mr Sanders: Is it actually about
having a one-click search on Google and Google presents that information,
or is it actually about where that information is available, that
is, a click says, "Ah well, you need to go to this government
department", or, "You need to go to the parliamentary
web site"?
Mr McLaughlin: The latter is generally
what we do, we point people to the information wherever it lies.
In some cases we host some information ourselves, like we can
host a video that someone uploads, or host a blog, but generally
speaking it is the latter, pointing people to where the information
lives and then they click through and go to that site.
Q555 Helen Southworth: One of the
things I wanted to ask about is in relation to government information.
You say that you would very much like to see access to government
information, data for the consumers. What about the other way
around, what about accessing consumers' information and giving
it to governments or censoring consumers' access to information
because governments do not want them to see it? That is something
that is certainly very pertinent for many UK users of Google who
have quite an interest in your responsibility in those areas,
specifically, say, with the American Government and the Chinese
Government.
Mr McLaughlin: Yes, well let me
give you a general answer to how we approach this, because it
is crucially important to preserve the future of the internet
for people to have a very clear sense of what governments are
doing in terms of restricting access to information. The way that
we handle this is we have got our search engine, it gathers copies
of web pages from all over the internet. There are occasions when
governments will direct us to take information out and make it
inaccessible. We comply with those requests because we are a company
and when we are present in a country we have to do that, but the
way that we try to handle it is to give notice to the users when
something has been taken out. For example, in the United States
one of the more common legal requirements on us is for copyright
infringement, so materials that infringe a copyright—an
image of copyrighted cartoon character let us say—we will
get a letter from legal counsel for that copyright owner and under
US law we then have to take that image out of our search engine.
We do that but what we also do is we take the information about
the request, post it up on a website and then on any search results
page where that website would have appeared. We put a notice at
the bottom of the page that gives you the number, it will say
two or three or whatever search results it then removed, and that
actually gives you a link where you can click through and see
the detailed information about it. We do the same thing in Europe.
In the UK it is sometimes libel or defamation claims that cause
us to remove things on Google.co.uk. As is well known, France
and Germany have restrictions on Nazi- related speech, on racist
speech and again we comply with those requirements on Google.de
or Google.fr, but we also give users information so that they
can hold their governments accountable. It may well be that everybody
likes the laws and in mature democracies, you know, this is not
really an issue, but users should be able to know. I should say
we do the same thing in China, a notice is put at the bottom of
any page from which a search result has been removed on Google.cn,
that is basically our approach. Governments have the right to
make these kinds of decisions, our obligation is to comply with
them, but we should tell the individuals and tell the users when
this is being done. Transparency, we think, is sort of our friend;
we do not want this stuff to be happening in the dark or behind
closed doors.
Q556 Helen Southworth: You have used
the examples about things that were challengeable through the
courts and within the laws of the land, what about issues which
are around politics and censorship that are not something that
is a clearly agreed legal process that is challengeable through
the democratic system, what do you think Google's responsibility
is within that?
Mr McLaughlin: That is a very
interesting question. I think, as you know, we have not been afraid
to go to court on occasion to try to defend our rights as a company.
We see our job as connecting people to information, that is what
we do and that is our role as a company and we want to do that.
Where governments put limits on that, we generally respect governments'
rights to make those decisions through the processes of government
and then we try to provide transparency. We do have a view that
access to information is a good thing and so our general orientation
is to act as defenders of freedom of expression and access to
information. It does not mean we file a lawsuit every time we
get an order from a court. We take a look at it, our lawyers look
at it and we see if we think it is consistent with the law, and
if it is we comply with it. That is our obligation as a company.
Q557 Mr Sanders: Is the issue where
the information comes from or where the request for the information
comes from? In other words, would you restrict access to where
the information is held or where the request for the information
is coming from?
Mr McLaughlin: I think if I understand
your question, if a legal request came in Germany, let us say,
then it is Google.de where that request is implemented, and the
same thing with France. That is the default version of Google
for Germany, the default version of Google for France. That is
basically our approach. I am not sure if I am answering your question
right now.
Q558 Mr Sanders: If a government
wants to restrict access to information to its citizens and somebody
uses Google's information, are you aware of where that request
is coming from?
Mr McLaughlin: Are we conscious
of where the user is physically located, is that your question?
Q559 Mr Sanders: Yes.
Mr McLaughlin: Well the Internet
does not really work on the basis of geography. I could give you
a long technical answer, but suffice it to say that there is no
way to 100% be sure where somebody is coming from. You can make
educated guesses, but the architecture of the internet is such
that I here on my laptop, if I had it here, could create an encrypted
tunnel from my machine to a machine somewhere in another foreign
country and then anybody would think I was coming from that other
foreign country. The short answer is you can make educated guesses,
but you cannot know for sure where an individual user is.
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