
Google is profiting from Holocaust denial, says Jewish museum - oneeyedpigeon
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/google-profiting-holocaust-denial-jewish-breman-museum
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greydius
Google profits off a lot of stuff I disagree with too. I don't really blame
Google, though. They're just a search engine, right? The real problem is that
people can say things I don't agree with on the Internet. Something needs to
be done about this. We should really look to China for leadership in this
area.

Ok, enough sarcasm. What is really interesting about this is that the old
saying "history is written by the winner" may have to be changed to "history
is auctioned off to the highest bidder".

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kafkaesq
_The real problem is that people can say things I don 't agree with on the
Internet._

I'm sure you know this already, but Google's search rankings !== "the
internet".

Not only that, but they've been downranking all kinds of content -- including
spam of all sorts; and most assiduously (and famously), virtually all forms of
pornography -- for nearly as longs as they've been in existence. Which no one
calls "censorship", or "blocking stuff I disagree with"† -- because of course
it isn't. It's simply a matter of editorial discretion -- of the kind that all
mass media companies have always engaged in, since mass media became a thing.

Got a problem with that? Start your own search engine.

† As if holocaust denialism were a simple matter of "stuff I disagree with".
But it isn't of course -- which again, I'm sure you knew already.

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disruptalot
Oh please not this again. The internet is not the united nations. Any step
away from serving users free from external pressure in ORGANIC results is a
step towards censorship.

If you want to sway people's opinion from results that match their demographic
and search behaviour then you better pay for it because that's an AD - no
definite representation of truth or relevancy.

If you really want to provide the most relevant result for those queries,
produce the content and make it trusted enough for it to rank first. If you
can't then you are not relevant.

Google works on trust and relevancy (government links mean a lot for example).
There's no devil behind the screen deciding to rank neo Nazi material at
Google.

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onion2k
Searching for "did the holocaust happen" in Bing brings back the Wikipedia
article for "Holocaust Denial" first, followed by a BBC article about why the
holocaust happened, and then the results from neo-nazi sites who have SEO'd
their way to (nearly) the top. The difference is small, but it's better than
Google.

If people start thinking Bing is actually better at finding relevant things
than Google's search engine then Google should be _very_ concerned.

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dogma1138
If I Google: "Is the earth..." the first suggestion is flat...

That said when you Google "Is the earth flat" the first result is a wikipedia
entry frame.

"The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of the Earth's..."

If you Google "did the holocaust happen" the first result is from Stormfront
"Top 10 reasons why the holocaust didn't happen"

Am Jewish; Parents were born in 1942 in Europe don't have a specific objection
or a strong (or any at all) opinion about this; I don't think Google should
tamper with results but as they already do I don't think showing the wikipedia
entry as the first result rather than Stormfront is a horrible breach of
freedom of expression.

After all they do that if you Google ways to kill yourself and similar bad
things, and Google does tamper with political search results as it seems.

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tomhoward
Related discussion from 10 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153086)

