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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Google's search rankings are based on opinions held by other credible sources. This isn't really blowing the whistle when, as you admitted, Google admits this openly.

And maybe your site doesn't get ranked well because it's directly tied to project veritas. I don't like being too political, especially on hn and on an account tied to my real identity, but project veritas and it's associates exhibit appalling behavior in duplicity and misdirection. I would hope that trash like this does get pushed to the bottom.

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In a political context, "credible" is often a synonym for "agrees with me". Anyone ranking "page quality" should be conscious of and try to avoid that, and yet the word "bias" doesn't even appear in the linked guidelines for Search Quality Raters.

Of course Google's own bias (and involvement in particular political campaigns) is well known, and opposed to Project Veritas, so it's quite possible that you are right and Google is downranking PV.

Would that be good? Well, that's an opinion that depends mostly on the bias of the commentator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas

I doubt this affected search rankings but Project Veritas does have a ton of credibility issues.

And so does wikipedia.

Project Veritas does not have credibility issues. They have never issued a single retraction.

If this surprises you, then welcome to the systematic bias of wikipedia.

> In a political context, "credible" is often a synonym for "agrees with me".

Not among credible sources.

Meta-comment, but this is partly why search and the internet is so bad now; there are a large number of political disinformation campaigns which are getting increasingly blatant, and getting better at finding believers on the internet.

People have a vested interest in destroying the idea that anything can be a non-partisan "fact". Anything can become a smear. Only the most absolutely egregious ones can be reined in by legal action (e.g. Alex Jones libelling the Sandy Hook parents).

(This is not just internet, of course; the British press mendacity towards the Royal family is playing out at the moment.)

His website contains gems like "Things got political in June 2017 when Google deleted "covfefe" out of it's arabic translation dictionary in order to make a Trump tweet become nonsense." (No, covfefe doesn't mean anything in Arabic.)

Here is someone who believes that a private company's open attempts to rank websites by quality amounts to "seditious behaviour" deserving of criminal prosecution, and the only people willing to pay attention were Project Veritas. Google has plenty of ethics issues, but this guy's claims are absurd.

Not only is it a word, but Google had to delete the word twice.

https://www.zachvorhies.com/covfefe.html

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