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Comment by reroute1 | Hacker News Reader

They are classifying results as featured or news. That is a judgement call. Those other sites still return in organic search results. You are mad because they didn't judge your political leanings to be news? It feels ridiculous to expect Google to not make judgements like this and they cannot please everyone. Sure some people won't like it, but in general their news results are solid and don't have an agenda.

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Not the OP and I’m not directly involved with this as I’m not an US citizen, but this is straight up censorship. The Republicans are going to have a field-day with this come election season and they would be right. As metioned in the article, I think Brin was right when he fought behavior like this back in the day.

I think it's nothing like censorship. They aren't restricting anyone's free speech. It is Google's platform and within their right to control the content displayed outside of organic search, in fact it's necessary. That's like saying the Wall Street Journal is censoring all my articles I submit to them they don't publish.

The WSJ it’s not the only place in town when it comes to Internet search, while Google effectively is the only search engine that counts. To go back to your metaphor, it’s like not being published by Pravda, which back in the day was the only newspaper that counted in the Soviet Union. That’s why a guy like Brin was correct in his value assessment.

Internet search isn't Google News, there are countless news outlets. Google News is still not radically political leaning and just an aggregator. None that implement any sane blacklisting could be completely bias free anyhow... It is logical and not censorship

The article just mentioned they are blacklisting material based on political views (as far as I can tell the great majority of the censored stuff is right-wing), can’t see how they’re not “politically leaning”. The Republican-led backlash will come back hard on them.

"Some of the websites Google appears to have targeted in Google News were conservative sites and blogs, according to documents reviewed by the Journal."

That is so vague and unsubstantiated. I don't come to that conclusion from looking at this article. How easy is it to replace conservative with liberal? It seems very likely.

> as far as I can tell the great majority of the censored stuff is right-wing

Don't mistake the majority of the whining for the majority of the censoring. The left-wing equivalents of Gateway Pundit aren't included in Google News, either (and they shouldn't be, to be clear). You just don't see Democratic Congressional reps complaining about that fact in bad faith.

It's fine if you believe their blacklisting improves the results, I agree there. But here's where they are going to have a problem with the AGs:

>Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.

How do you feel about Google lying to you?

They're specifically scoping things to search results.

The supposedly blacklisted sites like Gateway Pundit are still in Google's search results. They're just not deemed news outlets included in the News tab.

Same reason my small business doesn't show up in the Finance tab. I'm not blacklisted, I'm just not eligible for inclusion.

If they were referencing organic search doesn't that hold true? They are blacklisting separate curated services such as google news. Either way if they lied about it of course that is bad, transparency is the way to gain public trust. I'm not sure if it was violated by that hearing in particular, but if they aren't blacklisting organic results I don't really see an issue.

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