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Comment by miroljub | Hacker News Reader

People complain and call censorship when Google pulls down or removes some results. People complain when Google doesn't hide or pull down some other results.

This may be the first time in a while that I defend Google, but it can't be Googles fault that people seem to want both freedom and censorship at the same time. And those same people usually have entirely different, if not totally opposite, definitions of freedom and censorship.

What's the solution? A search profile customized to every single individual based on personal preferences and a TikTok-like personality learning and profiling algorithm that would display only results that person wants to see. What a wonderful world would that be.

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Incompetent censorship is the worst of both worlds. Filtering out unambiguous spam and low quality algorithmic content and viruses, I don't think that's been a generally controversial idea. Some people may think they want Google to index everything, but it's like saying there should be zero law enforcement, it's transparently impractical.

I'd rather Google simply index the content without using AI to funnel us all into our personal content bubbles. (While using the same data to profile us for countless avenues of profit.)

I actually don't think Google should "remove" results, including malicious or spam links. I only think that Google (a 2 trillion dollar company) should have the resources and capability to not show spam/malware as the top result for a popular two word query. The link would be fine in the middle or bottom of the page even. But the top result is a very important area and people assume (even if its wrong to) that the top result is safe, because it's from Google and they should have the resources and engineering effort to not surface obvious malware to the top.

Google is misleading people with their advertisements and redirecting users to malicious locations. This has resulted in several hundred intrusions that led to ransomware deployment.

Google is taking a cut in organized crime and malware distribution. How this is "okay" is beyond me.

I am not calling for censorship in any way, and they certainly shouldn't redact/censor results. But, they are running a criminal operation with the displayed advertisements and lying about the location. The average users (especially elderly) are being harmed by Google advertisements.

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