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'In a statement, Google said, “There is no merit to the suggestion that search results were manually edited.” But the company added that its algorithm would automatically adjust itself in some cases, shifting to rank trustworthy links higher than more relevant ones.'

TrUsTwOrThY > relevant

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“There is no merit to the suggestion that search results were manually edited.”

Right - the results themselves aren't manually edited. There's need to do so, and of course it wouldn't scale.

But if theirs is like any sufficiently featured search architecture we've ever seen -- the training data themselves have been almost certainly curated to favor certain baseline expected outcomes. It's quite likely a good portion of the metadata (read: allow/block lists, in GoogleSpeak) have been manually edited and ranked at some point in the process, as well.

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