Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomerv | Hacker News Reader

> No search engine, not even the Russian based Yandex, returned an objective article that included the reasons laid out in Putin's invasion speech. [...] The level of disinformation I observed for this test was terrifying. Based on what I saw, I don't believe it is possible for an uninformed person to learn the actual reasons Russia invaded from a web search on any search engine.

Really, you consider Putin's stated reasons to be the actual reasons for the invasion? And the linked article in that paragraph is just a pile of misinformation (even calling it subjective would be a complement).

View on HN

a search engine is meant for searching text about whatever I ask it. I don’t need it to vet the result based on geopolitics. If I search for “Putin invasion speech” I want articles that show me what Putin said about the invasion ranked by various technical metrics but not by whether the world thinks Putin is a liar and then giving me articles with what others said about Putin’s speech

I do believe that Google’s ‘quality’ of results has been declining in recent years, but:

This article is biased, cherry-picked nonsense. Is anyone actually looking at the results of his example queries and evaluating the quality themselves before responding?

To go with your example: the first three results a Google search returns for me on ‘Putin Invasion Speech’ are two NY Times articles analyzing the speech, and then a full translated transcript from Bloomberg. It’s hardly hidden.

On the author’s own example, “Why did Russia invade Ukraine? 2022”, the first article is from the BBC and tries to lay out the full historical context - and mentions Putin’s speech.

The rest are from mainstream news sources of various descriptions, again laying out historical context.

The author may not _like_ that these are trusted, mainstream, popular sources - but that’s what Google has _always_ strived to return. Pagerank was never an ‘unbiased’ thing that searched solely for page content - and, wow, can you imagine the toxic SEO nightmare we’d be in if it was…

> The author may not _like_ that these are trusted, mainstream, popular sources

Because that's not what I'm searching for. Even if we all agree all the Russian sites are propaganda, I still want to be able to search through it. It's a political decision by Google to filter out these results. It's not algorithmic because no matter how precise your search query is, you will never get results from certain forbidden domains. Google just directly removed rt.com from results recently, so even if you search for "rt.com" you will not see it. I'm sure they have similar filtering based on certain keywords.

But that wasn't the author's search query, it was "Why did Russia invade Ukraine? 2022" - and Putin's speach is not a good answer to the for that, even ignoring the the inherent bias.

I specifically didn't call out the complaint about missing results when searching for direct quotes from an article (event thought they are also blatant misinformation), because that indeed is an issue. If I search for some pronoun X then I expect to find a known website with the name X. But if I search for a general term, then the only reasonable way to thing that a search engine can return is websites that fit the consensus view around that topic.

A Google search for “rt.com”, or ”Russia Today”, returns rt.com as the first result for me. On the google.com home page, starting to type ‘rt’ will have rt.com as the first autocomplete suggestion.

Did you try this out?

Yes, I found articles on the first page of DDG results providing Putin's own reasoning in his own words. The author just doesn't like the analysis and commentary surrounding it.

Take a look at who the author of this "comparison" of search engines is. His next post is describing Zelensky as a neo-Nazi. He claims Putin will exit Ukraine once these "Nazis" have been removed. He says he trusts Putin more than Biden and that the US was responsible for the invasion.

Actually, if you open the post and scroll down enough to see one of the other posts published by the author (look for the post titled "Why did Russia attack Ukraine..."), then you would realize that the entire website has piles of misinformation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com