Comment by bhk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhk | Hacker News Reader

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Infowars being buried so deeply in the "Alex Jones" results is highly suspicious. How can Google's results be so ineffective compared to other search engines?

The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to delivering actual results for that query while Google's appear curated.

During the election some fuss was made over auto-completion for "Hillary" vs. "Trump" searches ... apparently embarrassing for Google because these were soon "fixed".

I could go on and on.

Do you at least admit that Google restricts searches for the Christchurch shooting video? Maybe your definition of "political reasons" is very narrow.

I don't actually have a problem with burying Alex Jones. The only reason I have enough interest to engage in this discussion is that Google continues to deny these things.

Google does not curate web results, ever. The results for [pelosi drunk] are different certainly, but in what sense are DDG's better?

Google has a policy about "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals" in autocomplete https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en which is often why you sometimes may not see the queries in autocomplete that you expect. It also has a policy about "violent or gory predictions" so it wouldn't surprise me if you aren't seeing autocomplete suggesting the Christchurch video, if that's what you mean.

> Google does not curate web results, ever.

Where is the transparency or independent third party oversight to back up this statement?

Or do we just have to take it on faith?

I'm sure search results are not curated in the sense that a stock answer is provided for a given query, but I would expect that filtering and ranking of search results involves lists that are curated -- for example, "offensive" words or "disparaging terms", etc..

Since you work on search at Google, maybe you could explain how typing "hillary clinton cri" stopped suggesting the common search term "hillary clinton crimes" and instead suggested "hillary clinton criminal reform".

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Apparently "crimes" a disparaging term when associated with "hillary clinton", but not when associated with, say, "jared kushner"?

Isn't it explained by the policy I just linked? "Jared kushner cr" yields [jared kushner credentials] as a suggestion for me.

"cri", not "cr". I have two different devices that give different results; one lists "jared kushner crimes".

Since it isn't a matter of a single word (crimes) being flagged as disparaging, this blacklist can apparently be finely tuned to specific prediction results. (Maybe it's not a simple blacklist, but an ML model. Even scarier.)

I see: [jared kushner criticism] [jared kushner cries in closet] [jared kushner's father crime]

and so forth. Are you sure you aren't seeing your own search history as the suggestion? Another possibility is that you're seeing "... crimes" instead of the whole query? That can happen when the system isn't able to suggest a full query and starts suggesting individual word completions.

Do you really think that it simply excludes predictions with the word "crimes"?

Yes, I was seeing "... crimes" when typing for "jared kushner cri". But with other names it shows a complete prediction:

"julian assange cri" --> "julian assange crimes"

"jeffrey epstein cr" --> "jeffrey epstein crimes"

I don't know all the details of how that system works, I don't work on it, but surely you'd agree that they're both more appropriate suggestions, as both of them have been indicted. I don't get "trump crimes" for "trump cri" either.

I agree they are more appropriate. Surely you'd agree there's a lot of room for bias to manifest in a system like this.

Yes, and I definitely understand the argument that Google shouldn't be doing this, but note that we aren't talking about evidence of bias anymore. When someone sees confusing behavior on a political query, the tendency is to assume that political bias is involved, when it's just a very ordinary failing that search engines have all the time.

I don't know the basis of the decision to enact that policy around autocomplete, but I do know Google has been sued many times due to the queries in autocomplete associated with people's names. https://searchengineland.com/google-faces-autocomplete-lawsu... https://www.pcmag.com/news/326136/google-could-face-lawsuit-... http://www.dmlp.org/blog/2013/filing-lawsuits-united-states-...

I think he's talking about actual links to the Christchurch video. They exist, and I'm pretty sure that's what most people who search terms such as "Christchurch video stream" are looking for. I don't think I can believe that Google doesn't censor or re-rank certain "flagged" search results, that just doesn't the smell test.

There are a few situations where Google will remove urls listed here https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2744324 as well as for spam.

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