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Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

google is an index of information sorted by what it thinks is most relevant to the searcher, and always has been. pagerank was a information quality and importance evaluater. pagerank is what made google google.

I would argue that dailymail fails the SPIRIT of the original pagerank, even if its heavily linked to, the information they hold is paparazzi stew. They have every right to choose to derank something so worthless.

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SOOOOOoooooo is google a publisher or a search engine? You're describing the responsibilities of a publisher.

im describing a search engine. search engines rank results.

i would expect publishers to make decisions more based on raw engagement and maybe their civic duty.

They're obviously a search engine and not a publisher since the content is already published by definition.

worthless to who?

seriously, who decides what I value? Should I decide for you what is worthless?

don't dismiss this is as a flippant comment because people with this belief will walk us straight into the hands of the political class who will jump at the opportunity to tell us what is and what is not.

You can be damn sure they will use all the marketed tested FUD to have people climbing aboard. Punch all the right buttons, have the correct statement to any challenge, and next were back the day of where the message is wholly managed. We already see regimes which operate this way but many just laugh it off "THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE", well this is how you get there , by giving the power to decide to someone else.

google does. thats literally the point of pagerank, was for them to decide. thats what differentiated them from other search engines, was evaluating link quality differently.

I know they have taken over the market, but it used to be, if a search engine didnt do a good job of sifting and ranking information, people would move to a new one. infoseek, webcrawler, yahoo, lycos, altavista, hotbot, ask jeeves, msn, alltheweb, teoma.

Youre arguing against the business model itself, which is that the company is RANKING content. It CANT be unbiased.

Think about it not as pushing things down, but choosing what to surface to the top. Hopefully cream. They have two tasks, find good content bring it to the top, and detect bad content impersonating good content and punish it for fraud.

Its not deciding what you value, its deciding what it values, and if you disagree you don't have to use google search. Searches like duckduckgo will probably be less opinionated.

Google's search is only valuable if it gives us the best results in response to our keyword. There has and will always be a degree of choice made by Google's algorithm in this, even for searches for things that have an objectively right/wrong answer. It has to prioritise somehow.

In this case, if a news site ranks high in metrics that Google's algorithm considers problematic --sensationalist, click-bait, heavily optimised, not mobile-friendly, whatever-- wouldn't you prefer it prioritised sites which didn't hit those metrics?

A search engine has to rank the results somehow. Given you cannot fit all results in one page, how do you propose they be ranked? Who will be the winners and the losers? Please include how you'll handle your algorithm getting gamed by every single person on the planet.

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