Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> Google Search is arguably just a mirror. And ideally, that's what it should be.

I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way.

Google original mission statement was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Being a mirror of web content would only partially solve that mission, and that's assuming webmasters/producers are acting in good faith. Would it really be ideal for Google to be a "mirror" of link counts for "miserable failure" [0] and "Did the Holocaust Happen?" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-holocaust-denial-site-go...

View on HN

No, Google does not try to mirror content. It tries to provide the best results for users. Results the user wants to click on and are relevant. Searching for "professor style", nobody wants it to return a minority professor style. Even she doesn't, at scale. If she and others did, they'd be Googling "professor style", not clicking, then Googling "professor style for black women" and results would improve/personalize.

Ditto for "black girls": either your looking for porn or for stock photos. What other intentions do you have with such a query? (Besides making a point?)

Google changing results for Holocaust "denial" is likewise wrong. Someone searching for such things probably wants to find all such sites and not just a PC version of history repeating what they've already heard. Otherwise they wouldn't need to be searching in the first place. Same for someone searching "Is the moon real" or "is the earth flat".

In a great market, Google might start "cleaning" up their results to the point of annoying people, who would then switch. Unfortunately no one comes close to Google search, let alone overall lock-in. So we're stuck with whatever Google decides reflects their brand, including fixing up well-publicized queries for people that want to be offended and complain about stuff.

Edit: I search for "best basketball player" and all I see are black guys -- way over-represented. Why doesn't Google bump up Larry Bird to 4th place so there's some more diversity and fight the stereotype? Even worse, Yao Ming is nowhere to be found, what's that say?

Sorry, just to clarify, I (and I believe the GP did as well) meant "mirror" in terms of reflecting reality and the state of things -- not "mirror" as it's commonly thought of in content/data online distribution.

I think you misread the Holocaust denial situation. The reason why "Did the Holocaust happen?" was so problematic was because that literal string of text is something that you'd never find on a mainstream site, such as the NYT or the Holocaust museum. And yet sites like StormFront would get bonus SERP for using that literal text in a page's title, url slug, and <h1>. StormFront benefited from a blind spot in Google's heuristics that had little to do with whether or not StormFront was actually a legitimate researcher into the question of the Holocaust's historical reality.

Same problem with Google Bombs. A law student with a blog was able to get enough people to link "waffle" to 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry [0]. Presumably, the average person googling "waffle" wants the food item, not info about Sen. Kerry. But the reality was that the metrics Google had long used to measure quality and credibility were all saying "waffle => Kerry".

Staying true to the algorithm assumes that the algorithm (and its inputs) were pure and complete to begin with. This is not necessarily the case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_...

> Sorry, just to clarify, I (and I believe the GP did as well) meant "mirror" in terms of reflecting reality and the state of things -- not "mirror" as it's commonly thought of in content/data online distribution.

Yes, I did. But I don't want to see the parasitic SEO-driven copypasta linkfarms. Or perhaps have them, but including such flags.

> Ditto for "black girls": either your looking for porn or for stock photos. What other intentions do you have with such a query?

Consider the possibility that the user is a black girl, or her parent. Generally, I'm careful not to assume I can anticipate the perspectives of everyone else.

Do white boys ever enter the query "white boys" into a search engine? I assume some HN users could speak to this...

To answer your immediate question, "white boys" is not uncommon in popular usage. People might look it up in the process of looking up a lyric or obscure title/name for a song/group.

The phrase "white boys" in general seems to be mostly desexualized. You can call someone a "white boy", either as a mild insult (like describing something as "vanilla") or a term of endearment. I think that's predicated from most people (in the U.S.) realizing that white boys/men are the status quo.

I'll ignore race and just say that I think the word "girls" in general has far more of a sexual/gendered connotation in U.S. usage. "Boy/Man" is considerably more generic and all-purpose. I use "Boy/Man/Guy" in casual conversation regardless of audience gender, e.g. e.g. "Boy, that was fucked up!" or "Man oh man that's got to hurt". I can't think of a single time in normal conversation where I would ever say "Girl" or "Lady" without referring to a female.

I'm aware of how the term is used, but your comments seem more like a tangent than an answer.

My question was whether there is any connection between being a white boy and Googling the search term "white boys".

It was prompted by the parent post suggesting that not seeing a connection between being a black girl and Googling "black girls" might be kind of a blind spot.

I think the implication was pretty clear that if you don't imagine someone Googling the search term "black girls", it's because they occupy the position of the "other" in your mind. However, I gave a reason to doubt it - contemplate whether and how often white boys Google "white boys".

I note that somehow, I already knew the connotations of the term "white boy" that you mentioned without Googling it. So you are not bringing anything to the point I was making.

I am not a laissez faire fanatic about much of anything, including Google search results - I just think that when people criticize such results, the search terms (and the subsequent reasoning) often seem contrived.

Ok so why is she searching for "black girls"? I don't search for "Canadian guy". Outside of wanting a generic/stereotype photo, what're the reasons?

Same for "professor style" and expecting to get something other than that stereotypical brown sweater with elbow patches look.

Well, I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there. If there's content out there about somebody being a "miserable failure" or Holocaust denial, I want to see it. I mean, what good is a search service that doesn't show what's there?

If I don't want to see whatever results are useless or offensive, I'll do my own filtering.

But then, I grew up on searching the scientific literature using Science Citation Index. And other stuff in LexisNexis. You don't expect stuff to be missing because it isn't cited much, hasn't been replicated, or whatever. You can filter by how well stuff has been cited, of course.

Where are the filters that show which search demographics contributed to a result being relevant? I could use that to filter out SEO's, googlebombs, racist results, etc., if I wanted.

> I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there

What does that mean, to accurately depict what's "out there"? That could be as nonsensical and unproductive as completely killing the spam filter in your email. Do you feel that that GMail and other modern-spam-detecting solutions have given you an inaccurate view of the "real" mail you are getting?

By the late 2000s, content farms such as Demand Media were churning out clickbait that followed the best practices with SEO. Demand Media [0] consistently beat out the NYT on SERP, thanks in part to a store of 1 million domain names used to serve up ads and links for topics ("howtomakeasandwich.com" would like to junk articles about sandwiches). By 2010, DM had 105 million unique visitors a month [0] and reached a market cap of $2B. The NYT, by comparison, had about 32M unique monthly visitors [1] -- across all of its properties (BostonGlobe.com, etc), and its market cap in 2011 was about $1.5B [1].

Demand Media beat the living shit out of NYT and every other quality media site by playing to the the known heuristics of Google's SERP. Every other media company had the opportunity and resources to play spamlord. Apparently they didn't, and by 2011 no other media company was positioned to create content (of any quality) with the scalable efficiency of Demand Media.

Google could have just accepted that "might makes right", but that is not an objective/neutral decision, nevermind a rational one.

[0] http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/it-cost...

I don't like spam filters. Because I've been burned too many times, missing important messages that got flagged as spam. So I end up having to look through all the spam anyway.

I did hate the Demand Media bullshit, however. But as I've said, I'd rather that Google flagged that stuff, and let me filter it out. I mean, maybe I'm researching an article about Demand Media. How could I do it if Google is suppressing it? Could Google perhaps have an "expert" option? Analogous to "family friendly" or whatever it's called.

The Science Citation Index and LexisNexis already do most of the filtering for you by not including absolute unmitigated garbage that happens to be perfectly optimised for your search keywords. You might find the odd David Irving article in there, but you haven't got Stormfront trying to citation-bomb all holocaust related terms for the lolz, never mind commercial blogspam. And Google also works on the assumption most users won't do their own filtering.

I can't imagine that Science Citation Index excludes stuff from the literature. But it's been a while since I used it. Perhaps they drop "absolute unmitigated garbage". Or that they neglect to index obscure journals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com