Google Interferes with Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results
wsj.com
wsj.com
"Expertise" is mentioned 99 times, "authoritative" 55 times, and "trust" 69 times. Of course, tweaks to generate search results favoring websites that show expertise, authoritativeness, and trust are going to favor larger, more established companies.
Seems like News Corp shot the arrow and then drew an 8,800-word bullseye around it.
[0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
Here's an excerpt from Section 3.1 which outlines the "most important factors" that influence Page Quality ratings. One thing I found particularly interesting is that raters are encouraged to search for external sources to determine a website's reputation (one example they provide in the PDF is that Kernel.org should receive the highest rating for term "Linux Kernel archives" because of Wikipedia's kernel.org page vouching for its authoritativeness).
---
- The Purpose of the Page
- Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: This is an important quality characteristic. Use your research on the additional factors below to inform your rating.
- Main Content Quality and Amount: The rating should be based on the landing page of the task URL.
- Website Information/information about who is responsible for the MC: Find information about the website as well as the creator of the MC.
- Website Reputation/reputation about who is responsible for the MC: Links to help with reputation research will be provided.
Sad to see once decent, thoughtful operations like WSJ, NY Times, WaPo, basically turned into conflict generation drivel producers.
Edit to add: I don't mean to ignore efforts like Pro Publica, but they are very small ops and don't really move the needle readership-wise.
Signs of a quality publication, surely? There's not a lot of papers saying nice things about a mafia oligarchy state unless they've been paid to do so, and the pro-Brexit arguments are mostly nonsense.
The economist has firmly located itself in an economic and socially liberal policy position, but they're willing to look at other cogently argued positions.
Could be talking about Russia, the U.S., or China at this point, really.
> the pro-Brexit arguments are mostly nonsense
Well, the Economist will assiduously avoid any examination of how the common currency & market are handmaidens for austerity imposed on the peripheral countries to ensure bondholders are always made whole in the EU financial core, that's for sure. Not sure what makes this point "nonsense" though.
Anyway, that has zero bearing on how Brexit has been conducted, and especially on the opposition to free movement of people.
There was one, called "The Economist in the year X" for all X such that whichever combination of oligarchs, mafia and security services are in power happen to be friendly to Western business interests.
> The economist has firmly located itself in an economic and socially liberal policy position
They are the voice of Empire and always have been.
http://exiledonline.com/exile-classic-the-economist-the-worl...
I have met some Brittain people yesterday and they also didn't have anything positive to say about that.
https://dominicfrisby.com/news/ten-reasons-im-voting-to-leav...
Then why are you sharing/promoting his viewpoint?
There are endless starting points for any debate, picking the right one is critical.
What's FT?
I'm not sure that's a fair description of news orgs. The world's fairly complex and you're going to end up with slant one way or another however you try to describe it.
No, that is analogous to Google setting a font and colour theme you like, which they don’t do, btw.
Of course algorithms can have bias too, but still.
Try these yourself to see how this can change public opinion: Google: "is abortion good or bad" returns almost entirely pro-aborion results. Do the same on Bing and you get actual results such as "Is abortion a good or bad thing?"
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_manipulation_eff...
I can't imagine any notion of neutrality applied to search results, except making your search algorithm public, but then, Google is not a public service, it's Google results you came looking for by using Google, if you don't like them, and more and more people are not happy with the results as well, something else will emerge and win.
The internet is a much bigger place than it was in the 90s when we last had multiple competing search engines (and even manually-curated directories!). It is much harder to effectively index "all the things" than it was back then. Google managed to get ahead of that scale curve.
I think any future competitor will have to be an extension of Dogpile or Jeeves, where you aggregate the results of individual engines and rank results based on relevance + domain specialty or credibility of each engine/indexer, like a revamped EBSCO or VirusTotal.
In contrast ddg is always giving the same result, changing only with the addition of new data to the web over time.
I'm curious what you find unusable about ddg in contrast?
For several years I have never had a situation where dropping into Google gave me the result I thought I could find. If ddg isn't finding it, it doesn't exist.
Could we be using search differently?
For many easy queries (where I really know where the thing I'm looking for is, but it's easier to just do a quick search and click the result) both are fine. But when I have an obscure problem and don't quite know what the right search terms would be, Google often guesses right and DDG doesn't try.
There is no contradiction.
No, no it won't.
That's capitalist spin not considering how monopolies or psychology actually work.
I used to have some favorite sites with different things, some recipes, some other technical things. I can’t surface those results anymore. They are buried by all sorts of uninteresting results.
The Vince update is interesting. Google characterized it as being about trust: https://searchengineland.com/google-searchs-vince-change-goo...
Google gets legal protections from claiming that they don't editorialize their search results.
Not that I defend Google by any means, but it's hard to get everything right with a system like this.
I remember it used to be easy for me to find obscure things on google using the advanced features. As they "improved" Google by giving it better results for the average user with sort of a "dumbed down" kind of feel, my ability to do that went way down. A few years after that, the personalized results started to get really really good, around 2014-2015 or so. Since then, it's gotten bad again, and I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has to do with $$. Basically it started with the Wikipedia article not being the first result and has continued to devolve. I never did recover the ability to get nuanced searches like I used to. It's kind of just a luck thing now. Although I actually am having better luck with duckduckgo now.
Given the large number of people such ranking algorithms affect I foresee regulations being passed to make them more transparent.
Companies should be required to publish audits about whether their algorithms are biased towards protected categories and other things like their competitors or big companies.
The first thing Google needs to do to improve their news and search engine quality is to hire and train people who have quality and integrity as their guiding principles. Leftist ideologues need not apply for these functions although they can contribute in most other parts of the company.
The American people arent this stupid. Really arrogant of google to think they can get away with controlling information at this scale. The forces of capitalism will eventually surface another search engine that will compete with them
Most of the complaints about the article are purely political.
The best argument I see in favor of the WSJ article is that many people actually do think Google has a magic machine. If so it's fair to publish stories about how that's not true. Yes, it couldn't work any other way if you think about it, but the point of a newspaper article is to get people informed enough to think about it.
Except Google claims they don't interfere, which is why this is news.
(The WSJ article does contain some claims that Google's interfering in ways they previously denied, and that part is unquestionably news if true, but it really doesn't seem like the main point they're trying to get across.)
This comment was marked dead but seems cogent and on point. The article being commented did not add much of anything to the discussion of search engine algorithms.