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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. Shopgirl Full Movie Online Free. 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 In my case, the post stayed unpublished.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. 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. Watch Britney: For The Record Putlocker#. 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.

How to Use The Princess Bride as a Relationship Guide. Ethan Nichtern was 9 when The Princess Bride hit the big screen 3.

He saw the film back then because of a family connection—Nichtern’s father was best friends with actor Christopher Guest, aka Count Rugen, aka the Six- Fingered Man. Though it did poorly at the box office, the Rob Reiner film has gone on to quotable cult classic status. And for Nichtern, a teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, it became a lifelong passion, and the basis for his new book, The Dharma of The Princess Bride: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships. Nichtern says he’s had a lot of people tell him they have no idea how to be in relationships, and look to him as though his Buddhist studies mean he knows how to do them well.

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His last book, The Road Home, published in 2. Buddhist path.) What he hoped to do with this book is not only be transparent about his life, memoir- style, and give it a recognizable cultural narrative through the film, but also “un- code this notion that there’s a kind of expertise or mastery, when, really, I think the people who are great at this just are willing to practice.”“I don’t argue that it’s a Buddhist movie,” adds Nichtern, “but one of the things that I think is very Buddhist about it is it’s a deconstruction of a kind of clichéd genre, the fairytale fantasy. And so it’s undercutting, it’s poking fun at that in pretty much every way it can, but it also totally works as a fairytale … Most deconstructions have a much more cynical air to them, much more apathetic or negative, like that everything we believed is kind of myth, there is no good guy, et cetera. But this is a deconstruction that really makes you think of true love.”At the beach where I go in the summer, a gaggle of other mothers and their kids set up camp in the…Read more Read“I would argue that The Princess Bride is an example of an optimistic deconstruction and that that’s what Buddhism is,” he adds. It’s a deconstruction of a sort of set narrative but that leads you towards greater open- mindedness or compassion and, in this case, it’s a deconstructive that says true love is the point of everything.”In light of this, Nichtern offers ways to improve all of the important relationships in our lives through his book. As You Wish — Start with Yourself“The founder of my tradition […] said the purpose of meditation is to make friends with yourself,” says Nichtern.

I updated that for the Facebook era in The Road Home and said meditation is about accepting your own friend request. It means you’re actually spending time with yourself.”Nichtern explains that if we don’t have a process of making friends with our own mind with some aloneness (such as meditation or other mindfulness practices), we are always going to be entering relationships defining our self- image based on what we think other people think about us. Finding Your Inner Fezzik — Focus on Friendship. Nichtern is partial to the character of Fezzik (played by André the Giant), because he describes him as “an ideal bodhisattva, which is an incredibly compassionate person in the Buddhist tradition.” Fezzik throughout the film is just there to help, as a loving friend. But the other friendship component that Nichtern says is notable in The Princess Bride comes along with the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Viewers think when he gets paralyzed that this will play out as a “kind of libertarian Batman narrative where the lone hero has to rouse himself and win on his own, but he’s actually completely incapacitated and has to rely on his wacky friends.”Self- reliance and self- awareness are great, Nichtern says, but one tip he gives regarding building the types of friendships seen in The Princess Bride is to view time with friends as a practice. I think a lot of times, we view time with friends as the unimportant time,” he says. Instead, we should view it as the same importance of any kind of spiritual or yogic practice that’s helping you build a sense of trust and inspiration. Love and “Mahwage” — Don’t Forget Romance.

When desire gets into the relationship, pushing it into romance status, Nichtern says one tip is to recognize that while desire can lead to all kinds of fixations (control, grasping, addictive behaviors), it is an element that allows us to see beyond our own perspective. My wife is a great flirt. With me, with her friends, with an audience.

She knows that flirtation…Read more Read“If we’re going to enter the arena of romance or sexuality or partnership, [we need] to really make friends with desire and not vilify it, to treat desire like a high- maintenance plant,” Nichtern explains. So, it is a friend, but it’s a friend we need to be careful with and aware of.”As he writes in his book, “Anyone who has ever gotten their Buttercup […] knows that the Buttercup you pursue is never the Buttercup you end up with, because your point of reference continually shifts as you dance with desire.”‘Fred Savage Is a Jerk and I Am Fred Savage’ — Focus on Family. Nichtern tells us, “I really love this quote by Chögyam Trungpa: ‘It’s possible you could be enlightened everywhere, except around your family.’”Nichten thinks that The Princess Bride’s story transmission (in other words, the grandfather reading this story to his grandson) shows how we can develop gratitude for our life story as we receive it and develop gratitude for our lineage before we try to get into the more painful places, “’cause chances are there’s gonna be a fair amount of painful places.”“The realization that family is the most important, and often the hardest, could really, to use a maybe overused term these days, trigger reactions that are shockingly strong.”.