Hacker News Reader

Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

Try this one : open google.com, bing.com and duckduckgo.com

type "George Soros is " (with the trailing space)

Compare and contrast

Google filters out negative auto-completes. Try the same thing with Trump or any controversial figure, like Martin Shkreli.

For example, when typing in "Martin Shkreli is a" on Google, the only auto-complete is "Martin Shkreli is actually good". Try the same on Bing and DDG, you will see all of the negative auto-completes you'd expect.

Google puts more positive search queries in all their recommendations...as was explained in the r/the_donald thread you got the idea from.

That's a form of censorship

No, it's not.

What is being censored? Maybe they should have a disclaimer about only putting forward non-controversial search recommendations to be transparent but, to my knowledge, you have no right to know what other people search for on google.

That's actually really interesting. I wonder how much of it is baked into the algorithm and how much reflects the demographics of each engine's users?

Edit: Wow you got a lot of downvotes fast. I honestly don't know if you're trying to advance a viewpoint or not, and I think you pointed out a very interesting split in the behavior of major engines that's worthy of taking a look at.

The comment is probably downvoted because it's a popular conspiracy theory that Google blocks bad suggestions about specific people the "liberal establishment" supports. In reality Google hides all bad suggestions about people. You can see the same difference in recommendations for "donald trump is a".

More importantly, you're on a site full of liberals, and people here downvote because they disagree with somebody, not because the content itself is low quality.

I, for one, think that regardless of your political views (I didn't even know who George Soros was), this comment was very high quality.

I disagree that that's the explanation in this case. I've definitely noticed the liberal bias in other comments, but this is just beating the dead horse of a conspiracy theory.

I downvoted because I spent hours looking into the related theory that Google was trying to influence the election by only showing positive autosuggestions about Clinton, only to conclude that the algorithm generally doesn't autosuggest negative things or allegations of crimes. (You can try with figures like OJ Simpson, Bill Cosby, etc.)

So, like the tired old discussions we have all the time (but Go doesn't have generics!, "if you're not the market, you're the product", etc), I downvoted since I don't think it was related to the discussion, particular interesting, or insightful.

Thanks for the explanation.

The comment is implying things that aren't true. This is why it's low quality and downvoted. The fact that you don't know who Soros is doesn't change that.

This sounds like a very bad reason for downvoting. The post didn't say anything regarding that conspiracy theory - so the most damning thing is the particular name used. That's a lot of interpretation, which might end up being correct, but answering as m3ta did is a much better response.

I'm not really getting significantly different results in any of them: a mixture of pro-refugee philantropist and nazi sympathiser links from websites with wildly opposing views, roughly 80% overlap in website links even.

Would it matter if one's filter bubble is more on the left or right here? I'm Dutch, living in Sweden and left-leaning - presumably the biggest contributors to any filter bubble that applies here.

Without getting into a discussion of politics itself, could people who do see a difference share their experience, and what they expect the search engines to infer about their political leanings?

The suggestions, not the results

The only difference is that I get some Swedish suggestions mixed in with Bing, and that DDG shows no suggestions at all (but without "is" they are similar again).

This makes me wonder: has anyone ever looked at per-country filter bubbles?

I just did this, the results don't seem very different.

Really?

Google gives me bland stuff like "..is how old" and "..is he dead."

Bing gives me "..is so evil" and "..is a convicted felon."

Duckduckgo "wins" with "..is the antichrist" and "..is satan."

DDG doesn't even show me any autocomplete options when I add "is"

Which is even stranger, shouldn't we all see the exact same thing with DDG?

Sure you got javascript enabled? Just asking.

Yep - note how I imply it does show autocomplete suggestions if I just type "George Soros" ;)

What are your (relevant) DDG settings? Country is set to "All Regions" and Safe Search is on for me, but changing either doesn't change anything for me.

https://duckduckgo.com/settings

"All Regions"

"Browser Preferred Language" (English-US in my case)

Safe Search "On"

Instant Answers "On"

Auto Suggest "On"

That is really weird, why don't we get the same results?

Interestingly, for me Google gave me "is dead", DDG and Bing gave me... nothing. The suggestions didn't even pop up. THis is in Germany, but for the .com domains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com