
Google, democracy and the truth about internet search - intuzhq
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook
======
fleitz
I bet if Trump and Brexit lost the internet would be totally fine.

These articles are only to drum up support for FB and Google applying a
Guardian-like bias. It's not an article about all the ways Google is biased,
it's an article specifically about the instances in which google is biased
against their POV.

Seriously, if you can't convince people that jews aren't evil, just give up
your position as an editorial writer because you're totally incompetent at
your job.

Of course the media's position is not that we make weak and ineffectual
arguments, to people who have tuned them out long ago, it's that Google and FB
are biased which is why no one believes their POV.

If you're losing a debate it's likely because you made crappy points not that
the the debate stage is biased against you.

Jesus fuck Lincoln won an election 150 years ago being against racism, and you
can't win against fucking Trump and Farage 150 years later, and you think it's
because Google autocompletes, 'jews are' ... evil?

Is your position seriously that Google's bias has made people more hateful
than when Lincoln won on a platform of starting a civil fucking war over
slavery?

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colllectorof
Another post-Trump FUD piece about tech companies. Urgent call to "fix"
something that has been broken for many years and no one in the media minded
one bit.

Firstly, I don't get many of the mentioned autocomplete results, so the very
premise of the author (that Google actively peddles this stuff to neutral,
well-meaning users) is made-up. Go into private window mode, try it for
yourself. No, really.

Secondly, if you _do_ search for "are X evil" you will get what you asked for:
conspiracy websites and low-grade propaganda. This is not restricted to the
few Xs cherry-picked in the article. If you query is shaped for getting biased
results, why shouldn't you? That's the whole point of search engines.

This is not to say that Google is doing a great job at filtering out SEO-d
garbage. It's been getting worse in this regard for the last decade. But the
article's "analysis" is awful. It jumps around, it anchors, it uses name-
dropping. (Ironically, they name-drop China, which indeed "solved" the problem
with bad search results.)

~~~
puzzle
Furthermore, the article goes on and and on, but never does it mention the
little fact that Larry, Sergey and Mark are all themselves Jewish, AFAIK. I
was expecting to see it mentioned at least once to highlight the inherent
conundrum. It's possible that I might have missed it because, well, the
article never seems to end.

------
godmodus
> And 20 years ago it didn’t even exist. When Tony Blair became prime
> minister, it wasn’t possible to Google him: _the search engine had yet to be
> invented_. The company was only founded in 1998 and Facebook didn’t appear
> until 2004. Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are still only 43.
> Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is 32. Everything they’ve done, the world
> they’ve remade, has been done in the blink of an eye.

Facepalm.jpg

Yeah, google's flawed and its results are an interesting sociological
resource.

The fact "are Jews evil" is a top auto complete makes sense. I know large
portions of the population that think that way. And Google returning an echo
chamber result makes sense from a "these links may be of interest to your
query" since they are. Google isn't there to police society - it's use for
fake news and product pandering is bad enough - making it police ethics will
only hide the ugly bits of humanity - which will then go unfixed.

~~~
RyanZAG
Except Google does police the auto complete, which makes the one's they don't
police stand out.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/08/words_banned_from_bing_and_google_s_autocomplete_algorithms.html)

Article is from 2013, and they do routinely update which words they police.
They also now police searching for "Name+Crime", I'd guess to avoid lawsuits.

[http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/23/...](http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/23/andrew-
napolitano/did-google-adjust-its-autocomplete-algorithm-hide-/)

I think Google has opened themselves up to critique about allowing this
antisemitism by policing other offensive terms. They need to either set up a
forum for policing all offensive terms, or avoid policing. Otherwise articles
like the OP will continue to plague them.

~~~
godmodus
i wasn't aware of that.

talk about digging your own PC grave.

------
simula67
Here is Sergey Brin's response to some of this :
[https://youtu.be/zIx5F0vbjB4?t=230](https://youtu.be/zIx5F0vbjB4?t=230)

~~~
bgarbiak
His spin on how Google doesn't know who exactly uses their services got me
fuming. But well, it's an interview from 2008, so before Android, Google+, and
so on. So, let's give him benefit of doubt. But then he answers direct
question about anonymity of the collected data with this golden quote: “I've
never heard of any case of anybody's search getting expose by virtue of Google
Search lose”, and it left me speechless.

------
Animats
I'm not getting those results, but I'm never logged into Google and have their
trackers blocked. If you're logged into a Google account when searching, you
get "personalized search results" based on at least your previous searches.

~~~
ChuckMcM
For the most effect go to the county library and use one of the Internet
computers. Bring up Google and try a few short queries. It reflects the
searches of the people who regularly use the library's Internet access
computers.

The point of the article (as I understood it) was that perhaps Google could
recognize queries that were hateful (it already squashes queries that are
sexual) and either suppress them or proactively suggest counter narratives
that the searcher might not be aware of. It is the latter which is both quite
difficult and usually quite offensive to people, if you just suppress the
suggestions it generates less controversy.

------
return0
It's simpler to explain in economic terms. You get what you incentivize. The
google-dominated internet incentivizes page views for money. People are going
to post what makes people click - shock, hate, gossip. Posting feel-good me-
too stuff does not bring views. So you end up with an internet looking like
this. Does it matter? I m not sure, the yellow press was always there and we
did not end up with a new hitler every 4 years. Does google matter that much
to democracy? I'm not sure its propaganda can be that effective. I think the
best kind of propaganda is economy: give people the economic rewards they
asked for, and they 'll quit being racist.

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matt4077
The results for [are jews evil] are indeed terrible. It's not just the
ideology that's wrong, they're also just generically low-quality.

The only non-hateful results was RationalWiki(.com/wiki/Evil_jew), and its
effectiveness is blunted by google choosing the quality warning as the only
result.

Let's see if my edit sticks and indexing is fast enough to have some impact if
thousands of people try the search after reading the article.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Is she serious? Which internet is she using?

Because Google actually censored auto-complete search to be in favor of
Clinton while Yahoo, Bing, and Duck Duck Go did not. I've got screenshots I
can dig up and post if the HN bregade doesn't downvote me into grey.

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ComodoHacker
Someone at The Guardian have just discovered what Google bomb is?

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partycoder
If you have a search engine, you need to rank results. The autocomplete
feature uses those rankings to determine what is more likely for you to type
next. That's all.

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littleq0903
I never got results like "are Xs evil?", in modern search engine, there's
something called "personalized result" in the modern search engine.

well....are you evil?

~~~
mamadrood
If I search "are jews" I get a suggestion for "Are jews christians", so I
guess I'm not in the "evil" pool of people. Just in the dumb one.

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internaut
The moderators want to de-escalate the political clickbait stories (since the
upsurge with Trump's victory) for a week of political detox.

------
_coldfire
Without an actual sample of users auto-suggestions there's nothing but useless
anecdotes flying around.

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nippples
She compared Trump to Hitler? What an innovation!

