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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

> Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform

Reminds me that yesterday I tried googling around the topic of how covid affects fertility (eg. "covid fertility") and nearly every result that comes back is about vaccines not affecting fertility. Okay, thanks Google, but how about the actual disease? Results were a fair bit more relevant by adding "disease" to the query, but still got one or two about vaccines.

I don't think you can call that behaviour favouring left. It feels as though they're creating vaccine hesitancy.

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That's the type of thing that you'll have to search on the specialized Google Scholar site to find useful results.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=COVI...

That's exactly the poster's point.

COVID-19 is a special case. I think Google has intervened there to ensure that official sources are favoured due to concerns about the impact of misinformation in a pandemic specifically. This is not a common Google practice so far as I know.

But that's my point. If someone searches for "covid fertility" and Google unexpectedly decides to make it all about vaccines, in a way, they are a source of misinformation. Where someone was previously concerned with fertility as a result of covid the disease, Google makes them start considering fertility as it relates to vaccines instead, essentially going against their search intent & pointing them in the wrong direction.

Perfect example. Had the exact aame experience. As someone who leans more right wing, I call it left skewed, but yes you are right it is not necessarily purely left aligned, or even at all. It feels like just any controversial opinion just gets obliterated by their ranking algorithm (in the case if covid I would bet a million dollars there was manual intervention in the name of public health tho)

But in this case they're transforming a concern about covid into a concern about the covid vaccine. Doesn't even make sense in the name of public health.

Perhaps much of it is not ideological on Google's part but actually simply the machine learning about what people want to see.

It's entirely possible that such a disproportionate number of persons is more likely to access links about vaccines and such politics than what you searched for that the machine, not the man, has elected to favor those without having any real political motive.

Definitely the more likely scenario. Possible there is some gaming of the algorithms but yeah its just a popularity thing chiefly.

I wish google was more concerned with accuracy of matches rather than populatrity

That did cross my mind. If it's actually due to that, then Google is just going to become increasingly terrible & always directing you to the most searched thing.

Covid side effects -> covid vaccine side effects

Best burgers -> McDonald's

Best coffee -> Starbucks

Best way to sort a list -> bubble sort

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