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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information.

The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?

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Ironically, this sort of pigeon-holing is mostly a problem with treating query text literally (or syntactically.) Language is full of shibboleths, and people indicate their worldview by the words they choose to use. The more naively a search engine treats the query, the more likely they are to find pages that only agree with them.

I honestly doubt the use of certain words are going to limit your search results more than the way google is 'personalizing' search results by looking at your history/interests and basing it's results around that, do you have any sources for your claim?

If you know the language to use, you can get into that world yourself. For instance [did dinosaurs exist]. Only creationists talk about dinosaurs that way, and so you only get creationist content returned. People with a conventional view of natural history never put "dinosaur" and "exist" together.

Contrast that with [did dinosaurs live] which has a mix of creationist and normal results, despite meaning the same thing.

Maybe. The naive approach definitely has a strong filtering effect, but there's more than one non-naive approach, though. Some of those are narrowing, and others are widening. Google seems to prefer the narrowing ones.

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