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Comment by ycombonator | Hacker News Reader

Fahrenheit 451 in real life. Instead of burning books they are suppressing links that don’t favor their political inclinations. Case in point, google ‘the gateway pundit’ https://www.google.com/search?q=the+gateway+pundit and search for the same In DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+gateway+pundit find out where they show the actual website.

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It's almost as if people were free to publish, or not publish, whatever they want to in America.

Thanks for the report, that looks like a bug. I've passed it along.

I'd like to think it is a bug, but I wasn't born yesterday. You were caught. The behavior is consistent.

Another interesting search is American inventors. Out of the first 16 featured with photos, only one (Thomas Edison at #5) is not black. It mostly continues that theme for all 56 featured, not even getting to the Wright brothers. It's been that way for a while, as seen in this article from 2.5 years ago: http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...

Another interesting search is for the_donald. It is pretty clear that the subreddit should appear first, probably followed by the old.reddit.com version. Right now it is fourth, mixed in with a lot of far-left hate and conspiracies. The second link is a conspiracy claiming that /r/The_Donald is run by Russians!!! It was even worse last week, being totally missing from the search results -- but that was starting to become a news story, so it got "fixed" to be subtle.

You have a bit of a PR crisis forming here. The idea to abandon Google is spreading. Once lost, trust is hard to regain.

The issue with the "american inventors" query is a well known issue in information retrieval called "compound intrusion." The phrase "american inventors" occurs most often in web documents as a substring of "african american inventors" and unless you specifically exclude that from the results, it tends to dominate, producing the list of people you see there. If you search for "US inventors" you get a more reasonable list, because "US" isn't a substring of "african american."

I can't figure out what point you're trying to make with those two search results. They are almost equivalent.

Seems pretty clear to me: Google doesn't show the website link in the top 3 results but shows a lot of fact-checking sites in the top 10. It definitely should show the site at #1. The number of fact-checkers shown seems a little excessive but as long as they do something similar for equivalent left-wing sites, I don't have much of a problem with it - The Gateway Pundit publishes a lot of made up bullshit

For me, the website link is literally the first link on Google.

Ah, personalization. It's #4 for me in the incognito mode.

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