Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>The WSWS has been blacklisted in searches dealing with history, and in particular historical topics related to the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century. These include the terms “Russian revolution,” “Bolshevik revolution” and “October revolution,” all of which returned results in the top 50 in April

That's probably ... correct.

View on HN

Why is that correct? Looking at their website they're currently running a lecture series/look back at the Russian revolution: http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html

None of it seems to be conspiracy theory or low-quality material.

It may not be but if Google's goal is to promote authoritative sources there's no reason to consider WSWS to be authoritative for those search terms, imo. I'm not saying I agree with their goal, just that this seems consistent with it, and I imagine that's what the reply was getting at.

What does "authoritative" mean anyway? I don't want my search results to be authoritative, I want them to be relevant, varied, and interesting. Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article, a load of the same blogspam from sites like Guardian, Atlantic, or Daily Mail, and then the same 1-2 paragraph article repeated 15 times on content farm websites. It used to be a lot easier to find weird corners of the web.

> Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article

That's not recent. Google has been returning Wikipedia as a near universal top result for a decade.

Regarding content farms, they overwhelmingly smashed the content farms with their panda & penguin updates years ago and have refined the destruction of content farms since then. Very few remain, much less sustain, outside of temporary niche corners.

"...what Google, working with the highest levels of the state intelligence apparatus, does not want them to find."

I'd classify that as conspiracy theory.

It is a conspiracy theory.

Do you have a better explanation?

I think you mean that it's a conspiracy, and I think there are plenty of better explanations than Google working secretly with governments to promote capitalism.

Yeah. The NSA and the CIA doesn't care about WSWS, and Google simply made an editorial decision that these guys don't have a credible or objective view of history and shouldn't be a search result for neutral terms on history. How's that for a non-conspiratorial version?

Since when is Google making "editorial decisions"?

Bad choice of words. "Tuning their search engine" is more apt. Search is intrinsically a subjective domain.

But this "editorial decision" (ahem, "tuning") is in fact a political decision to downgrade results for a site that by any objective measure has a wide, international readership (Alexa global rank, 30-40k). It is also an objective fact that Google has close relations to the state (top federal campaign contributor, regular visitor to the White House, Eric Schmidt book praised by Michael Hayden, etc.). So it is a "conspiracy theory" that Google's actions might be motivated by political considerations? Of course, Google might think so... As for the WSWS, it was recently the subject of editorials throughout the German media for its campaign against Jorg Baberowski, a right-wing historian at Humboldt University who is attempting to whitewash the crimes of the Nazis. If you think that the WSWS is not getting the attention of the state, then you aren't following developments closely.

>But this "editorial decision" (ahem, "tuning") is in fact a political decision to downgrade results for a site that by any objective measure has a wide, international readership (Alexa global rank, 30-40k).

WSWS has a skewed view of history that is outside of what mainstream historians would accept. For that reason displaying them for neutral historical search queries is dishonest. So it seems reasonable that whatever version of search algorithm they updated to might assign them a lower priority.

>It is also an objective fact that Google has close relations to the state (top federal campaign contributor, regular visitor to the White House, Eric Schmidt book praised by Michael Hayden, etc.)

So? Doesn't mean regulatory bodies are interfering in day-to-day operational decision or in this specific instance.

>So it is a "conspiracy theory" that Google's actions might be motivated by political considerations?

Anything is possible but there's no evidence - so yes, it is a "conspiracy theory", especially considering there's an alternative explanation that is more reasonable and doesn't necessitate invoking sinister shadow governmental actions.

Consider the concepts you are using. "skewed view of history," "mainstream historians." According to whom? Google? Amazon? The Hoover Institution? Who make this decision? If you search for "Russian Revolution," the works of Sean McMeekin will be very high, in part because the book is being heavily promoted by the New York Times, Amazon, large publishing houses, etc. And by Google. Yet McMeekin's book is based on largely discredited slanders about German gold financing the Russian Revolution. As soon as Google makes these decisions, it is in fact casting its large, well-financed, foot on the balance of historical truth--in favor of the established, "authoritative," i.e., state- and corporate-sanctioned version of events, whether historical or contemporary. As for "conspiracy theories," the problem is that history is full of conspiracies, and therefore theories based on conspiracies are often true. In any case, I don't believe you have given your "alternative explanation," unless it is the SEO explanation, which has not real factual foundation?

>Consider the concepts you are using. "skewed view of history," "mainstream historians."

The first line in their 'Russian Revolution' chronology uses terms like 'bourgeois' - a loaded ideological term used exclusively by Communists and Marxists. It's not hard to see what their spin is.

> I don't believe you have given your "alternative explanation," unless it is the SEO explanation, which has not real factual foundation?

But I did give you an alternate explanation - you just prefer your crazy tinfoil conspiracy. Flat-Earthers are the same. They ask for a picture of a round earth to prove to them the earth is round, and when you show them one, they say NASA faked it.

Again, you are inserting your own political prejudices. This is of course fine, but it is not Google to do. (Bourgeoisie is in fact a term that is broadly used in social scientific writing. While it is particularly associated with Marxism to refer to the class that owns the means of production, it is both more broadly used and arose prior to Marx). And to compare the analysis being made with flat-earthers is ridiculous. Google's new search algorithm had a direct and immediate impact on a broad range of left-wing and progressive websites. The VP more or less said what they were doing--combating "fake news," as part of a campaign supported by the state and the corporate media--and then the results came: a fall in search traffic to left-wing sites. The conclusion is fairly self-evident, in my view, but in any case it certainly is not unfounded.

Since they started trying to stamp out "fake news".

It's not low quantity but it seems very filtered. Recently finished reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Revolution-New-History-ebook/...

The Russian revolution was co-opted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were funded by the German foreign office and more than anything else were unscrupulous about who they murdered. 25 million people were dead by the end of the revolution (early 20s).

There's not so much as a hint of that just scanning though the titles.

Interesting, is there anywhere I can read about this aside from the book you've linked? Although I am a Communist, I am critical of the Bolsheviks and I have an open mind.

Wish I had more to suggest, but Wiki has some good articles on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution

I think there's a documentary on Neflix UK. The cover some of it. I would suggest looking at Ukrainian sources --but generally speaking, my understanding is you can find much of the information in Russian archives as the Soviets kept good records thinking those would never see the light of day.

incidentally, here's what WSWS has to say about McMeekin: http://intsse.com/wswspdf/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.pd...

Fox News, Russia Today, et al also feature no small amount of real news that provides a strong foundation to build their whole propaganda operation on. The SEP/WSWS are frequently described as a cult-like organization within the left, I have no problem with google penalizing them as a reliable source.

As an advocacy group for an extreme ideology do you think they have an objective view of history? If a person does a neutral search on, say, the history of the Russian Revolution, should they be up there?

What is an "extreme ideology"? The WSWS is a Marxist organization. Of course, it has a specific view of the Russian Revolution--namely, the view of those who led and organized it, opposed to both Stalinist and western interpretations. Who is Google to decide that this conception of the Russian Revolution should be removed from searches, that people don't want to have access to it, in favor of promoting the New York Times and other publications attacking the Russian Revolution and reviving old right-wing slanders (e.g., Lenin was paid with German Gold)?

>What is an "extreme ideology"? The WSWS is a Marxist organization.

You've answered your question.

"None of it seems to be conspiracy theory or low-quality material."

Even if it were, if it "wins" the pagerank contest it should be represented in the results accordingly.

I don't go to google for a human-curated yahoo-style directory service. I go to google for search - specifically for pagerank-style search results.

What do you mean?

Because they are an ideological advocacy group so they have a revisionist perspective on certain parts of history. What it means is that they don't speak objectively on those periods - so they shouldn't be returned as a search result if neutral terms are used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com