
President Trump Says Google Searches Rigged, DFW Expert Disagrees - bhartzer
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/08/28/president-trump-google-searches-rigged-expert-disagrees/
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Yoric
So, what's the worst case scenario? Let's assume that Google News is rigged
against, say, Breitbart, either because Google has its own political views, or
because Google is fighting fake news, or for some other reason.

So that would make Google News... a news organization? That hardly sounds
illegal.

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gamechangr
You may have misread that last comment. The "illegal" reference at the end
relates to immigrants.

Trump doesn't say its illegal, though most would say that's unethical and a
travesty if our information is delivered with Bias and in this case -
delivered and ranked in such a way you may not find balanced results.

How would you feel if every google result supported trump?

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craftyguy
Google never has been in the business of providing unbiased search results,
why is this so shocking now?

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setr
Google is only useful if you can safely assume that its returning what you
searched for, ranking on your search. To a certain degree, google assuming
what you _meant_ rather than what you _wrote_ (ie correctly typos, replacing
with more common terms, etc) is fine, but if it starts to actively assume what
you _didn’t mean_ , it seizes to be a valuable service. You can no longer
trust it to correctly look for _anything_ you write, because it may very well
search for exactly the opposite, for no better reason than some manager’s
personal whim (trying to encourage anything from racism to international
tragedy awareness).

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craftyguy
I don't understand the point you are trying to make, can you re-phrase?

Google provides you results based on what they think you meant. They 'think'
more strongly in directions that suit them (e.g. sites paying them for result
priority rankings). I fail to see how this 'recent development' is anything
other than a permutation of that.

As another reply suggested, maybe it's just because a certain old man is
yelling at clouds again that people are appalled all of a sudden.

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setr
If google is altering search results based on what (it thinks) you meant, its
sufficient up to a limit (if it makes too extreme assumptions, it would likely
be incorrect, and useless).

As for altering the ranking for non-search reasons (paid priority), this is
somewhat alievated by google doing it transparently: forcing it to the very
top, with a sponsered flag (or whatever it said)

If google is altering search results based on what it _wants you to mean_ (ie
rigging it: “trump news” translates to “fake news”), and doing so non-
transparently then its a completely different form of bias that would render
the service useless: you can no longer trust _any_ search, because the service
could be feeding you bullshit based on any google employees personal whims. It
stops operating as a search engine, and more importantly, its _known_ to be
actively working _against you_.

Not with you (real results), not nuetral to you (transparent advertising) but
now actively against you (non-transparent non-search-motivated alteration of
your query/results).

And that last one is not google’s business. At least, it wasn’t, or wasn’t
publicly known to be.

