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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

As an illusory example only, and definitely not as an endorsement, and chosen only because it is the extremes of acceptable speach that are most likely to be censured; consider these search results for "Daily Stormer"

https://www.google.com/search?q=daily+stormer&oq=daily+storm...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=daily+stormer

DDG provides the link to the site as their first result; Google provides links to information about the site.

Again, I am not endorsing the site; it is simply an obvious example of search result differentiation between DDG and Google.

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Google knows that when I type 'rails' into their search box I mean Ruby on Rails and gives me relevant results, instead of railroad tracks or hand rails.

It's not a big leap to think they'd do that globally for extreme results like DS where most people want to know about them and not actually visit the site.

So at what point will Google look at your search history and decide that you are looking for racism when you search for a racist term?

I don’t think anyone on here will admit if it’s happening to them, but if the answer is never then that means Google is suppressing the “best” search results due to political reasons.

For a less charged example, Google won’t show pornography as the first result for a fetish term, ever. It will always show a clean page with Wikipedia as the first result regardless of safe search.

How do you even get it to show non safe for work results?

> decide that you are looking for racism

Given that there are definitely people that I have personally met that keep complaining "they keep getting racist results" in Google and Youtube, I'm guessing we are already there. As for how they build up this profile, I'm sure the people that actually know aren't allowed to tell us.

It's a website. Shouldn't your first stop be visiting the site itself to form your own opinion?

You still can, obviously.

It's simply more probable that I would prefer a site that contains expert analysis of a topic/subject first.

Yes but in many countries this can get you into legal trouble.

A stark difference. Is Google on the record about what their view is on this sort of thing?

I suppose the two scenarios that leap to mind are (1) Google is social engineering or (2) they have good reason to believe that nobody searching for the Daily Stormer actually wants to see the website. It'd be interesting to know if there is a 3rd.

I wonder if the rank is based on which options are clicked the most... I wouldn't put it past google to keep track of which link is clicked the most for each search and use that to 'improve the links'

It could be a massive conspiracy to keep people from seeing some third rate website.

You notice that the results aren't direct links, but redirects through Google first? That seems to support your first alternative.

They don't need to reroute through a url to do tracking, they could do that in JS. The rerouting probably is used for tracking but it also serves the purpose of flushing your search terms out of the referer header.

Maybe they have an AI that ingests thinkpieces and twitter feeds lambasting them for insufficient censorship, and based on the strength of sentiment and number of retweets apply additional censorship to the specific examples listed, with the cost function being something like f(likelihood_of_negative_public_opinion) + g(impact_on_search_quality).

If I were to do this I'd allow penalized results to resurface from time to time, and leave it up if nobody tweets too hard.

this is why https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/1...

The first thing I see on DDG is the Wikipedia page describing their site. They must be reading this.

I know that website has been heavily censored, so it's possible there is fool play here, but it's also possible that it's simply different algorithms.

If Google weighs links to a certain page, it's not a stretch to imagine that fewer websites would directly link to that particular website, and refer to its name instead. But maybe Bing has some rule that gives priority to the domain name.

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