I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages.
Definitely changed from the Google I "grew up on."
That could have a very simple explanation: There is no Wikipedia page for "Gun Rights". There is however a Wikipedia page for "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" which is exactly what appears in the Wikipedia box on the right or as the first Wikipedia article when you search for "right to bear arms", "right to guns" and "arms rights".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_rights is a valid link, and seems like the obvious wikipedia page to deem relevant for that phrase. And Bing gets it right.
I have no reason to think it's some dark conspiracy, but it's certainly a pretty silly failure of their vaunted algorithms. Are there a lot of searches for common phrases where a Wikipedia page exists and Google returns a different Wikipedia page as the top item?
It's a bit like searching for "USA" and getting a result for "Canada"; just because the canonical wikipedia URL is "United_states" doesn't mean that a page about a different country is more relevant. :)
Put a finger on the scales, show us how it’s done.
Modeling this behavior, without tilting the scales completely is perhaps impossible.
I’m interested in seeing how such code could work, while scaling and not creating artifacts. I can’t think of anyway for such code to be deployed without breaking search and letting attackers gain even more
I totally agree, it could be as simple as the algorithm finding more usages of 'gun' and 'rights' on the Gun Control page than on the Right to Bear Arms page and basing its decision solely off that. However it could be as complex as skewed data in a deep learning model that takes in every users search term and subsequent selected result. No one really knows exactly how its decided except Google's own engineers.
The fact that most other, very similar search terms provide the expected results suggests to me that it is not an intentional misdirection, otherwise the other search terms about guns would also show the Gun Control page.
The philosophical question is if a search engine return what people want or should return return what is most biased for truth and informative.
The bot uses data, sure, but like the humans it also--
* Chooses what data it uses based on... * The rules that make up its processing which in turn are... * Influenced by the peculiarities of its creator(s).
Those last two can't be emphasized enough. A subject matter expert, for example, will choose data differently from a layman, who will choose data differently from someone completely ignorant on the subject. Someone driven to keep certain data suppressed will choose data differently from someone driven to research the matter, who in turn will choose data differently than someone wholly disinterested in the topic. Unless a person builds a bot with a 'willingness' to question both its data and its own programming (and perhaps even its creator) to present the best linkage the web has to offer, all bots will be mere dummy proxies of the creator programming it.
This is coming right up when you look for "gun rights" on DuckDuckGo.
I don't see the issue.
Same thing with Youtube, the algorithms seem to optimize for the lowest common denominator and all the interesting niche stuff is lost in thr noise.
Some of the solution is to do a better job of actively searching for good content instead of waiting for the algorithms to recommend it. But that itself has gotten harder too. Finding good content curators is hard.
Google has been doubling down on this direction progressively--their justification being that people game the long tail by producing a lot of low quality, highly niched content.
There may be no real solution to this within the context of Google's PageRank-inspired algorithm and this may be an opportunity for disruption.
It's bizarre to see "video you watched 4 times 5 years ago" on your homepage. Every day.
Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...
Even then, one could imagine that the Google could somehow detect that it is not a particularly informative page, and pick the most likely disambiguation link out of it. Logically speaking, that would be first link in the list. But before the page was changed to be a pure redirect, it had the following blurb at the very beginning:
The term "'''Gun rights'''" may refer to:
* The legal concept of the [[right to keep and bear arms]]
* [[Gun control]], the set of laws or policies that regulate the
manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use
of firearms by civilians.
...
FWIW, I don't think this is the case of deliberate changing of search results. But I suspect that their algorithm is inadvertently picking up bias from somewhere else, and applying it here.
I've always been curious of locked topics to see some type of analytics breakdown. The most hotly edited items are generally the things I'd most like to see surfaced.
When asked "gun rights", google added the link to the only section of the article discussing gun violence. They obviously manipulate their search results pushing political BS :-(
Google seems to like to include results appropriate for common phrases if you include only part of the phrases. My guess is that the "american" in "american inventors" brings in results for "african american inventors" too.
EDIT: To clarify, why is that list so bad?
The entire results were full of the other phrase and not the one I searched for.
I kinda hate AI.
(Because it's dumb. Do what I told you, not what you think I want)
槍枝管制 "gun rights"的圖片搜尋結果 槍支管制是指任何對定義、限制或限制擁有，生產或改裝，進口，運輸，銷售和／或使用槍械的法律，政策，實踐或提案。 槍支管制的法律和政策在世界各地有很大的差異。有些國家，如英國和中華民國，擁有非常嚴格的槍支限制政策，而其他國家，如美國，有相對溫和的限制。槍支管制的支持者普遍認為，普遍民眾擁有槍支會導致危險性。 維基百科
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Gun control Search results for "gun rights" Gun control refers to any law, policy, practice or proposal that defines, restricts or limits the possession, production or modification, import, transportation, sale and/or use of firearms. The laws and policies governing gun control vary widely around the world. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, have very strict gun restrictions, while others, such as the United States, have relatively modest restrictions. Proponents of gun control generally believe that the widespread possession of guns can be dangerous. Wikipedia
As in, if some full blown NRA guy searched gun rights, what would he get?
Info cards are not influenced by your account's history as far as I know. They are purely programmed by a combination of bots and hand tweaked responses. The hand tweaked responses come from a combination of user complaints/requests and internal pushes by engineers.
(And, as much as Matt Cutts might deny it, it seems inconceivable that Google do not use revenue generated by advertising as a search signal...)
This is my biggest gripe with Google's search engine. It used to be that you could specify exactly what you want to get and it would find it for you. Now it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it refuses to show me things I know exist and that every other search engine will find with very simple, straight-forward search terms.
It is known that Google employees have the capability to skew search results politically, just not whether they do it in specific circumstances (of course it would be robustly denied)
https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041
(For those that say “good” remember that tomorrow this could be used against you. I am certain it was used against Bernie for example)
That would be important if it were true. Can you back it up?