Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

The "crappy" google problem that only seems to plague republican candidates. When Michelle Obama was depicted as a monkey, it was taken out of the search results twice (once in an article and once in images.google.com a few months earlier).

It's funny how Google just seems to shrug its shoulders when it involves candidates it doesn't like. They have more control over their content than almost any company in the world. If they aren't removing it, it's intentional.

I for one, don't like corporations that use its media presence to control politics.

This, to me, is evil.

View on HN

While I agree Google's politics mean they are probably less likely to care if GOP candidates are slandered, I don't think it is as simple as "if they aren't removing it, it's intentional". They removed the Michelle Obama thing, but pretty quickly put it back when they got called out on how it was a clear violation of search trust. And like "miserable failure", the algorithms over time adjusted and fixed the problem.

I would agree it would be evil if it was intentional, but this a search problem across Google, Bing, Baidu, and many others. Google has been pretty good about responding via improvements rather than just straight banning, except with the temporary Obama thing. I mean, for the longest time they had to buy an ad over searches for "jew" and link to http://www.google.com/explanation.html despite the background of their founders.

Did they do the same thing for the word "nigger"?

> They removed the Michelle Obama thing, but pretty quickly put it back when they got called out on how it was a clear violation of search trust.

I don't remember the "put it back" part and I can't find the infamous photo any more on Google images unless I add "monkey" as a keyword. But I don't get the point of all this to begin with. Why not focus on real policy differences rather than name calling?

As one of those independent voters they're allegedly after, this doesn't help anyone's campaign. I'm going to decide based on what vote does the most good or causes the least harm both in this election and in the future, not based on someone's skill at manipulating Google into accepting slanderous definitions. They're much better off making the case that Romney's position on the issues is untenable, rather than pulling stunts like this.

As a counterpoint, the "miserable failure" ranking for Bush was removed by Google too.

No they did not specifically fix this. What they did was fix the general problem that Google-bombs exploited by changing ranking to not be so easily influenced.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-kills-bushs-miserable-fai...

I don't see why this comment is downvoted, it makes a valid point. The only problem with it is that it equates inaction (Google's) with deliberate intent, i.e. it may have been that nobody actually asked Google to remove these links.

That having been said, these two attempts at crude humor and the one for Michelle Obama are kind of different: In the Santorum case, it's nothing but a bit of high-school naughtiness, pretty juvenile stuff over a made-up word. I don't think it hurts him in any way. The Romney one is also juvenile but is much more damaging because it has a true story behind it that is quite damaging to Romney (you know, if you thought he was a warm, caring person before). In the Obama case, because of the racial connection the humor had deeply offensive harmonics.

People who +1 these should know that they're actually playing into the hands of the Rebuplicans, because for every casual +1 clicked with a smirk, you'll get 10 Rs who hate liberals' (their term) guts and totally believe in the Democratic bias in big media and Internet content companies.

>>> The Romney one is also juvenile but is much more damaging because it has a true story behind it that is quite damaging to Romney

Spreadingsantorum.com has a true story behind it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neo... Dan Savage started the campaign because of anti-gay comments Santorum made as a Senator.

While Romney clearly acted in a less than humane manner toward his dog, I think this re-definition of his name is trivial in comparison to how homophobic and anti-human rights Santorum's record is.

The odd thing about their refusal is that Google does now have a policy concerning for removing sites from the index where "My full name or the name of my business appears on an adult content site that's spamming Google's search results"

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/request.py?hl=en&...

I guess the question there is one of "spamming." Googlebombs have previously been considered to be spam, but that line is really blurry.

The real problem with the Santorum thing is that it draws attention away from the issue of how Santorum treats homosexuals and turns it into a juvenile prank. People don't mind that because they hate him, but it's a bad way to win over people who don't already hate him. The people disgusted by the term are going to want to vote for him, not against. That's not really what you want.

I'm not trying to defend either googlebomb. I just wanted to point out that there is a true story behind Santorum's site, and that this story is probably more telling of a candidates true nature than one anecdote about Romney and his dog.

> People who +1 these should know that they're actually playing into the hands of the Rebuplicans, because for every casual +1 clicked with a smirk, you'll get 10 Rs who hate liberals' (their term) guts and totally believe in the Democratic bias in big media

Are you claiming that there's no such bias?

> and Internet content companies.

Financial contributions are seen as proof of Repub bias. Is it evidence of bias if we find financial contributions in the Dem direction?

I would argue that a lot of people (at least pre-election season) that googled "Santorum" wanted to see what everyone was talking about: spreadingsantorum.com. When people google "Michelle Obama", a humorous photo comparing her to a monkey is probably not what people are searching for.

Google makes refinements to their algorithm to try to improve relevancy in the results. Michelle Obama's monkey meme never became relevant; Santorum's definition did.

I definitely see a difference with santorum, at least. Initially it was just a googlebomb, but now it's actually in common use as the term for the er, "frothy mix". I would not be at all surprised if some folks have only heard of that definition, and never of the man behind it.

Not sure what that means Google should do with the romney definition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com