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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it will show when Google has manually edited the ranking of results to suit their agenda (US election, COVID?). Another interesting example of this is the image result for “European art”. The image results have been modified to the increase diversity of the skin colours of people portrayed. I don’t have a problem with it, but they definitely surface specific results to fit their political/ideological leanings. It would be nice if they were at least transparent about it.

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> Another interesting example of this is the image result for “European art”. The image results have been modified to the increase diversity of the skin colours of people portrayed.

One of the first results I get on Baidu is the cover of a book called European Art and the Wider World: 1450-1550 [1]. It shows what I assume are the three kings/magi presenting baby Jesus with gifts. Each of them has a different skin color and style of dress, demonstrating how European art portrayed people from the wider world. I don't think a Chinese search company has any particular motivation to try to influence people's perception of European racial makeup, so I would guess that these results occur naturally because the phrase "European Art" is mainly used to contrast with non-European art or people, as in the book cover. When people are writing about European art in a generic context, they'll usually be more specific and say "French art" or "Dutch art" or whatever rather than "European art," so that phrase is less likely to associated with images of European art that aren't showing such a contrast.

[1] https://m.360buyimg.com/mobilecms/s750x750_jfs/t8641/58/7295...

I think they would avoid doing that at all costs - their defense in court has always been "it's our algorithms", because if they had to admit "it was one of our employees" they would be liable.

There's ongoing antitrust lawsuits about them pushing their own services (e.g. Docs) in front of competitors, and some fuckery with Shopping. Their defense leans heavily on the statement that they didn't do it on purpose or manually, but that their algorithm considers their services the best. For that they need to lift the veil a bit on their algorithms (and iirc there is an outstanding court order for that one already).

There was the hugely, erm, coincidental timing of Winston Churchill's image going missing in Google's search results while there were calls from "progressives" to have his statue removed.[1]

Whether or not any of the specific instances are Google actually interfering or not the slew of evidence is all in one direction, hence I'm not sure why anyone doubts that these huge media companies are interfering in what we see, huge media companies have always done that, it's just that the newest ones have even more power to do so.

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/google-removed-churchill-image/

Is yours a genuine concern?

To me it seems a rehash of this years old controversy:

https://www.tweettabs.com/googling-european-people-history-t...

I did mention that I don’t have a problem with them altering the results as they see fit, I just think it would be ethical to mention that they have done so.

Underlying point I'd say is a concern, even if the specific example might not be applicable.

Thanks for the article on that!

interesting query when compared to yandex.com image results

European art query: nice spot!

Agree with the edition of news results.

It becomes very hard to find information about specific topics. Most often you find articles with "theory X has ben deboonked!" at the top

More fun ones to compare Google with Bing/DDG/Yandex/Baidu:

White Family image search (hilarious)

Hillary + anything autocomplete - Google shows nothing negative

various certain outlets article titles verbatim don't appear

Google bias has been on display for quite some time. And Yes Dang, I'd be honored to show evidence if you give me a forum.

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