I suspect anyone who disagrees is taking a provincial, American view on the subject, and is being triggered by the phrase "gun control".
Then you flagrantly broke the HN guidelines here and vandalized the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18062563. If you do this again we will ban you as well.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054615 and marked it off-topic.
How open-minded of you.
There is no better way to partake in a discussion in good faith then to use the old: If you disagree with me [insert negative suggestion here].
1) Inform the user and help the user quickly find facts, narratives, and meaningful content related to the search phrase? 2) Sell things? 3) Promote modes of political control by narrowing the scope of acceptable thought and connection between search phrase and content?
We all hope for #1. We all accept #2. But I think that most of us, at least until recently, had thought that #3 wasn't happening to any significant degree.
I agree that results like this one are befuddling - a search for "Politically controversial and anti-state concept <foo>" brings as the first result, "Related but saccharine pro-state concept <bar>" when both foo and bar appear in approximately equal stature in the domain in question.
Yeah, I think that's odd. And I don't see a way to easily explain it in the context of numbers 1 and 2 above.
So I think you're right to be skeptical here. On the other hand, after a scan of each, I see two plausible reasons that the "Gun control" article might be elevated.
One, it's somewhat longer, with more references and cross-links (it even has a "See also" link to the "Gun rights" article).
Two, superficially, the "Gun control" article is a bit more internationally focused. The title of the "Gun rights" article is straight out of the U.S. Constitution. The appearance doesn't really hold up under scrutiny -- they both spend similar shares of their content on U.S. stuff -- but it might make a small difference.
Regardless of the reason, it's definitely good to pay attention to this sort of thing.
1. It's subjective if the results are wrong. _You_ know what you are looking for, Google however has to guess. And it's algorithms aren't perfect at figuring out _your_ intent - even though they may do a fine job for the average person. Right now, for me, the top result is from a Reddit thread about this very query. The rest are things like "black and white couple" and "couple with white background". These aren't what you expect, but, it makes sense why they are being returned.
2. Your test does nothing to establish intent. A pretty reasonable explanation for the search results is just that that is what the algorithm does.
3. I'm sure someone can come up with some theory about how tweaking the results of this very specific search is a nefarious plot to promote interracial relationships - but it requires some pretty tortured logic to conclude that such a plan would, even if true, be even remotely effective at accomplishing it's goal. That's basically the Hallmark of a conspiracy theory.
Are you implying that there are Google employees manually tinkering with the result of millions of search terms for the purposes of influencing the American population? And nobody at Google has leaked it? That’s hilarious.
And how is that influence campaign going to work on a practical level? Are you assuming people are so dumb as to change their opinion on core political matters because their racially charged search term didn’t acid wash the internet of its diversity??
For me or anyone to believe this, is a huge ask.
Any attempt to algorithmically shape perspectives is crude with today’s state of the art.
How precisely would such an algorithm work, while not creating obvious artifacts and errors throughout the search results for all people using the service.
And how would it work for people only in the us and not elsewhere?
Agreed.
> Any attempt to algorithmically shape perspectives is crude with today’s state of the art.
I suspect that the truth of this statement is very difficult to ascertain at the moment. Reasonable people might dispute both which technologies represent the "state of the art" and also which outcomes represent successfully shaped perspectives.
Although I don't have the data to back up this assertion (and again, I'm not sure such data is cognizable in the current environment), I think that for some reasonable definitions of the above that indeed perspectives can successfully be algorithmically shaped today, though as I said above, I think that this "white couple" nonsense is not a meaningful example.
> How precisely would such an algorithm work, while not creating obvious artifacts and errors throughout the search results for all people using the service.
Again, it may not be clear to anyone, including the authors, precisely how such an algorithm works. That's why A/B (and other) testing is needed.
And I think people in this thread are saying that indeed obvious artifacts are starting to creep up (although again I think that the "white couple" thing is a total misfire and not at all an example - the "gun rights" thing appears to my eyes to be much closer).
> And how would it work for people only in the us and not elsewhere?
Isn't this already at a point of triviality? Doesn't Google already do this all the time? I mean, if you travel outside North America, indeed the Google experience is palpably different from the one in the US.
In the top two rows (ie, 8 images), three are from a reddit post about this very controversy.
The remaining five are images of couples. Of these, three are what look to my eyes to be white couples. One is an image of an ethnically Indian couple in an article about not being able to adopt a white child. The other is a photo of two dudes doing a hand symbol together with a caption "black and white couple gesturing with hands."
All of these images seem very relevant to the phrase "white couple."
So, actually, this is a case where Google Image Search gives back perfectly appropriate results, at least for me as of today.
Interpreting Google's ranking algorithm as a conspiracy to infrinage on gun rights is unsubstantiated by fact.
Spoken like an American.
You do know the rest of the world is doing just fine without your absurd gun "rights". I much prefer my "right" to live in a city where guns are exceptionally difficult to procure. That right keeps me much safer than your gun rights—and that's an indisputable fact, not an opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms
Why wouldn't that get autofilled on the front page of the search results instead?
Please explain how Google implements its agenda into the search results people see before mocking other people's statements.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/1...
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512
Also note that the top "organic" result on Google's search for "Gun Rights" is just a tag page from NPR. There is no way that's a relevant result. So even if it's not on purpose, it's a very poor result...and given it stands out more so than other keyword searches it seems a bit odd.
Edit: down voted for citing study from the National Academy of Sciences, bubbles certainly are thick.
• "Google has an agenda. They don't hire lobbyists on K street to fight for more neutral search results."
• In this case, "the fact that 'gun' appears in the title of one and not the other is impacting the matching and also the Gun Control page is much longer so it probably seems like a higher quality page versus the other one"
You’re being silly.
Such a result would definitely be odd framing, though. Especially if it was the main infobox and not, say, the seventh result.
For instance, I could see a "soft authoritarian" regime subtly justifying its censorship regime by preferentially surfacing content that makes censorship seem more justified. One way to do that is to encourage the idea that "limits are common" and discourage the idea that "free speech is a natural right," which you can do by changing the search ranking to surface an article like you described.
This is simply not true to the many people out there that believe in natural rights.
(Meanwhile, I live in a society with absolutely no gun rights, and I'm extremely glad that I do. I much prefer my "right" to live in a city where guns are difficult an expensive for criminals to procure. It keeps me and my family much safer than your gun rights. And that's not an opinion, it's a proven indisputable fact.)