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The end result still remains: introducing bias.

Google is nothing but a collection of biases. Even in the early days, PageRank meant that Google was biased towards sites that get linked to more than others. That was a value judgement they made about what best served their customers. This is no different.

And in those early days, everyone knew that "citation clubs" were a way to attack Google's algorithm... just like how you attack academic citation indices or "impact factor". Then google defended against that, and then...

It only became a problem after the rise of unwanted political opinions.

It became a problem almost immediately. PageRank had issues because people got wise and formed link farms to cheat the system. So Google added more tweaks. Repeat this x10000 and you get to 2018.

The diversity of quality results has gone down. Page 2 use to have a few gems. Now one or two words will dominate and you see the same results for different queries that share two terms at the beginning.

This is a dangerous general-purpose justification which allows mega-corporations to manipulate global information flow in any way they like.

Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because hey everything is biased right?

It may sound good because they agree with you on this particular issue.

But this justification applies to any other government or corporation who can manage to seize the reins of technological power. You're making a memetic weapon that, soon, will be turned against you.

No. Neutrality is a real thing and it should be upheld as a serious goal and principle. Especially when we're taking about a group with such insane amounts of unjustified and undemocratic control over other people. We need to do everything we can culturally to make that influence less unequal.

You’re not wrong, but at the same time what’s the solution that isn’t just a matter of the people complaining manipulating global information flow in the way they like? Most of the time behind the flashlight-under-the-chin tales of potential doom, the solution seems to be a shift to whichever political pole the speaker prefers. I’d like a less restricted flow of information, but I don’t know how to get it, and no one seems to be offering good ideas. The best I can offer is that it’s important to fight for freedom to access any source, so you can compare and contrast and draw your own conclusions. Google can dominate convenience, it they don’t actually stop you from checking other search engines. A media outlet can have a major bias, but in a free country that doesn’t censor non-state media you can pick up other sources for comparison.

It’s messy, it’s work, but what are the alternatives that respects the 1st amendment? Just hand-waving some claims about “de facto monopolies” is a non-starter imo. How do we improve the situation without pretending that a given social medial or advertise company has to be regulated to death, and in a way that doesn’t just amount to, “Keep it biased, but it needs to be my preferred bias.”

I think this is a weird view of how bias works. statistical models are imperfect models and are always going to have lots of bias or variance. We typically want to bias models using domain expertise or other external factors.

This is like being mad at a company for using L1 regularization

The difference is how much practical diversity we'll have in models. With enough effective choice, the severity of biased models goes down, at least somewhat. Models biased in different directions can provide a variety of perspectives.

These are different uses of the word "bias". In the statistical sense there is an objectively true right answer and "bias" refers to the difference between a model's average answer and the average true answer. It has little to do with the lay use of the word to mean the application of an inappropriate subjective value judgement in a situation with no one true answer (unless you take an extremely anthropomorphic view of statistical formulas).

>Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because hey everything is biased right?

I'd argue the same thing about political parties that directly benefit from less educated citizens, defunding education. Or, political parties that directly benefit from less minorities voting, passing voter restriction laws.

Considering that the same party participating in both of the above is precisely the same party arguing for... Well I'm not sure exactly what, some kind of "fair time" thing for Google and Facebook? When we can't even get that for our talk radio shows anymore? Forget about it.

If we go capitalist free market, we go full fucking capitalist free market. If conservatives are worried Google is biased against them, they should make a conservative Google.

> I'd argue the same thing about political parties that directly benefit from less educated citizens, defunding education.

Where does that come from? America does not have a problem funding education. It loves to invest in education. It's the return on investment that seems to be missing.

>Under SALT, income that paid for public schools went untaxed at the federal level. Current law allows states that raise taxes to better fund public schools to receive a deduction through SALT. The Senate bill ends that ability. As states struggle to lessen the impact of the tax bill on citizens, there will be an outsized amount of pressure on the taxes that typically help public schools.

https://thinkprogress.org/taxes-schools-public-private-d89e5...

> The administration’s new “America First” budget, released Thursday, follows through on this promise by slashing funds for the Education Department by 13.5 percent, or $9.2 billion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/trumps...

Education funding at local levels can be pathetically bad. So sure, someone can look at the doe and say "that's a bloated budget!" But the local politicians sure aren't helping. Why do teachers have to buy notebooks for their kids out of their own pocket? Why do so many teachers scrape by with 30, 40k/year salaries in places where that's definitely not affordable? These problems are real and they are happening in this country. Time just did a great piece on it, I highly recommend it.

Right. We collect plenty of taxes (and private spending and donations besides) for good education. Some of the highest funding levels in the world. But we're not spending it on education or teacher salaries. The problem is elsewhere. At all levels.

I never mentioned taxes, I said education is underfunded, and it's mostly the fault of local politicians, and it's typically republicans that contribute to this issue.

Really, I recommend the times peice. A good fix would be to stop tying school funding to property values.

> Google is nothing but a collection of biases.

That's not the problem, we know it, they know it, everyone knows. What is upsetting people is the pretense of them being unbiased. Now in this case they just discussed and it seems never implemented these measures.

Come to think of it maybe they should have implemented those measures. Maybe they should stop pretending to be unbiased and embrace the bias. It's not like anyone would be surprised by it. People were shocked about that leaked meeting video where Google executive were crying after the election results and referred to the loss as "we lost". But it shouldn't have been that surprising, it was exactly what I expected would be in the video.

> This is no different.

They took a political issue wanted to insert themselves in the middle of it by manipulating what facts people see regarding that topic. Now most here agree here with their position, so this doesn't bother us too much. But I don't really this as "the same as PageRank".

Google's job is to return the result that the user is looking for. Certainly not results that come from manipulating the algorithm.

I'm guessing that users searching for "Mexico" are not overwhelmingly interested in diatribes of racial inferiority. An algorithm that heavily returns such results is obviously broken.

Yes. And I'm surprised by Google's insistence that they did not change their algorithm even though there appeared to be some algorithmic bias effect against Muslims and Latinos.

Wouldn't Google want to study that possible source of bias and fix it, or if not, explain it to the public or to the Googlers who saw it in the first place?

What about girlsinmexico? It's the most popular site related to Mexico. Should it come up first?

Google's job is in no way to provide you with the results you are looking for. If showing you sites you are not interested in, keeps you engaged longer/sells more ads they will.

There have been a number of complaints that Google has racially/sexually inappropriate results (i. e. people have reported that searching for "Jews" returns anti-Semitic results), so this could be seen as a way to balance the scales rather than introducing further bias.

Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/

I guess just sort results alphabetically then? Or what's your idea?

I’m sure they also are “biased” in de-prioritizing content from fringe conspiracy theory sites too, is tha a problem as well?

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