Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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> You wouldn't want google manipulating search results and then claim to be neutral.

But Google does manipulate search results, so ostensibly they should also be put on par with newspapers?

examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274753

edit: Also your comment misleads on what the article reports. Twitter has not lost safe harbor because "they do gatekeeping and have accepted bias", but because they haven't met the staffing requirements imposed by India on large social media companies:

> The move comes as tension escalates between the Indian government and Twitter. Google, Facebook, and several other firms have partially or fully complied with the IT rules, which among other things, requires any significant social media firm (any firm with over 5 million users in India) to appoint a chief compliant officer, a resident grievance officer, and a so-called nodal contact person to address on-ground concerns.

> Twitter has not complied with any of these requirements, the court filing said. Twitter had no comment on Monday’s filing, but has said in the past that it intends to comply with the IT rules.

To characterize appointment of a legal compliance officer as "staffing requirements" is wrong. It makes it seem like India is forcing Twitter to hire local people.

If you are a global MNC with multi billion dollar valuation, and want to operate in a market that has a billion potential users, it is only fair that the company has a local presence.

> If you are a global MNC with multi billion dollar valuation,

What if you're none of those?

Is it still fair to require a local presence for every single site / app / network to have access to a population?

The regulations only apply to platforms with at least 5 million registered users.

Fastmail, Disqus and a good chunk of subreddits could easily have 5 million registered users in India, and they are not billion-dollar MNCs (not sure about the valuation of the first 2)

> ...they should also be put on par with newspapers?

Correct.

Google's time will come

how would one even sort search results without bias?

By removing user profile data as an input to the search query processing and result ranking.

That is not the topic being talked about.

Is Google allowed to filter results on any internal criteria they can come up with? It includes all avenues like political, censorship, fake news, low quality, competitor results etc.

So censoring a specific topic or viewpoint is fine as long as it's applied to everyone?

Did you even read what I said?

If you remove user related data as an input to the search query, the results will be purely based on algorithm efficiency, rather than feeding on the biases of the users.

Such feedback loops, of showing content that is suitable to the user, will lead to information silos and gradual radicalization of the user.

> the results will be purely based on algorithm efficiency

With much respect for those who have to hammer them out: The algorithms are full of bias, they have to be. They are essentially just a pile of hacks. Machines cant understand articles. Even if they could they would have the same problem a human reviewer would have when asked if article A is better than B. You cant switch off your own bias. Even if we could do all that you may end up with a category dominated by the writings of [say] 50-51 year old Caucasian males which forces you to ponder corrections that may or may not be terrible ideas if or if not applied. And then you have to chose which bias to apply and we are back to biased search results.

People are the sum of their experiences, if you remove that nothing is left.

I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased. Sure, any algorithm will have a bias towards a certain content length, or towards pages that contain the search terms at a particular density. But by doing that you don't arrive at algorithms that have an opinion on the holocaust or Tiananmen Square [1].

Of course Twitter somehow managed to implement the worst of both worlds, with a sorting algorithm that promotes controversial content (without bias regarding the actual content), but then does biased moderation on that content.

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57367100

> I think most would call the original pagerank algorithm unbiased.

I disagree: the point of the original Pagerank algorithm was its bias. In particular, its use of link weights gave the algorithm a strong bias for (a proxy for) relevance.

An "unbiased" search algorithm would need to return results based on simple criteria, readily explained and presented to the searcher, such as "date first crawled" or "number of keyword appearances."

You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years.

Please attempt a simple implementation with the methods you describe and see how it performs over even a non trivial amount of data and you will see the difference in results.

And I'm not even considering malicious results gaming the whole system.

> You are trivializing every bit of research and advancement gone into improving search engines in the last 20 years.

I disagree. If anything, I think I give this research more credit, because I appreciate it as imposing a normative view on what makes search results "good."

This is more than just "how do we sort a list containing billions of keys" or "how do we grab data from a distributed database;" it's also "how do we understand relevance or quality based on machine-interpretable signals?" The latter is a judgment call.

This is a conflation between the meanings of the word bias as “a weight” and “an ideological stance”. The thing that people take issue with is generally the latter, rather than the former.

It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink popularity measures relevance. Another sorting objective is that "more engaging results" are better.

Each is ultimately an expression of will, since there is no objective ranking of what makes something relevant or engaging. Everyone will agree on the order of names in a phone book, but nobody will agree on the "relevance" order of search results.

You see this every day in news-adjacent search topics, where popularity, relevance, and factual correctness can all give different "proper" orderings.

Ultimately, people dislike stances that give disagreeable results, but they think benign stances to be invisible. I don't believe a coherent, legal argument can work this way.

I agree with this line of argument in the sense that a choice of loss function is still a choice with implications that one cannot escape. All choices imply the expression of will and the exercise of power.

I think the essential disagreement isn’t so much about the choice of bias as it is about the exercise of power, specifically on who’s behalf do you exercise power? Do you do it for your users or for the greater good? Or for your customers? Or maybe your investors? Or maybe your ideals?

By returning the best match to a search first… second one second…

Defining best is a biased process. Is cost or quality more important? There is no objective criteria for such judgments it’s all based on personal bias.

So Google favoring low latency responses is saying latency (cost) matters when people browsing may not care.

What makes the best match? Highest number of back links?

Ideally you rate the person by his work. (Magnus is a great chess player because we wins games) If we cant rate someones work we can use opinions from those note worthy in their field.

But when those people got their respectable reputation by the same means you could have an entirely circular self-praising reputation machine that seems to work wonderfully but operates without reviewing any work.

At some stage of google the Nr 1 result for both "France" and "Paris" belonged to a blogger from NYC who had a single highly optimized page about France and one about Paris.

Similarly a high page rank page about cars shouldn't be an authority on anything else but if they link to your article about flowers it gains a lot of points. So much it would be attractive to pay them for it.

Back links were fabulous when the internet started then increasingly became a self serving loop.

Allow user choice. We all define "bias" differently.

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