
Google Is Listing “Nazism” as the Ideology of the California Republican Party - mudil
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq38d/google-is-listing-nazism-as-the-first-ideology-of-the-california-republican-party
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repolfx
It came from Wikipedia. Here's the edit that undid it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=California_Republ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=California_Republican_Party&diff=843698358&oldid=842714790)

Someone also added "Authoritarianism" which was also reverted.

It's tough being Google, but this sort of thing was inevitable as they started
lifting more and more answers provided by random people into authoritative
sections of search results. Copy/pasting a section called "ideology" into
their own results page was especially naive. If they'd just listed the
wikipedia page at the top like they used to, they wouldn't be in this mess.

And it is a mess. This one doesn't reflect any particular issue with Google
employees, apparently, but I just searched California Republican Party and hey
look at that - the top result is a news story from Politico with the headline
"California Republicans hit rock bottom". Right, that is absolutely _the_ most
relevant and useful result someone searching this phrase might be looking for
- in what universe?

Also, they're pretty much manually editing SERPs for political reasons at this
point. They suppressed the "ideology" line for the Wikipedia box on the query
Vice reported, but they're still importing them in general and the democrats
SERP still has "ideology" present in the box.

In fact the SERP for "California Democratic Party" is significantly better for
the Democrats in general. Then tweets about them are inlined as the second
result - the republicans don't get at all. Then there's three news results
with images, all from friendly publications like CNN and the WashPo (although
the news stories are all about the Dems not having good luck in the race
apparently?).

~~~
pfarrell
I got the same "California Republicans hit rock bottom" result. Political
views aside, Google are publishing libelous content and they should own up to
it. In fact, the instant they "manually" altered knowledge boxes, no matter
the intention or content of the edit, they put too much of their thumb on the
scale and (imho) lost any "safe harbor" protection they may have enjoyed.

~~~
nostrademons
AFAIK Google News does not editorialize story selection. It's all done
algorithmically, largely based on what people click on.

I would bet that most of the people searching for [california republican
party] today are drawn there because of this story about Nazism being listed
as its ideology. They see a click-bait headline about how the CA Republican
Party has hit rock-bottom, and they click on it. That pushes it higher in
Google's algorithms, so it's shown to more people, and so on.

Supporting this is that the #3 headline is currently a Fox News story about
how Google is under fire for listing Nazism as the ideology on this query,
which wasn't there when I checked a couple hours ago. People click on click-
bait, particularly click-bait relevant to the reason they made the search in
the first place, and that makes the click-bait rise higher in the rankings.

~~~
repolfx
We actually don't know what Google News' algorithm is based on. I don't think
they've ever said it's simply counting clicks.

Heck I worked there for years and I have no idea how News ranks things.
Ranking one was one of the few parts of the Google codebase not accessible to
all engineers.

It'd be a much more trustworthy product if they did explain how they rank news
stories. Newspapers aren't general websites, there are far fewer of them, the
risk of gaming the algorithms is much lower.

~~~
nostrademons
I actually do know - in broad strokes, not the specifics - how it ranks
things. I was ex-Google-Search, several years ago, and worked with News
engineers on a couple projects. Plus it's sorta the poster child for their
internal machine-learning course.

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tyingq
Try "what is a nickle worth?" on Google. I get an answer that is mostly about
pennies.

~~~
DonHopkins
It depends on if you're European or American. Europeans pronounce it the right
way "Nick-louse Veert", but Americans mangle it into "Nickel's Worth." This is
to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.

...Oh, wait -- never mind. I thought you said "Niklaus Wirth".

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth)

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pfarrell
AFAICT, Google has addressed it as "ideology" does not appear in info boxes.
Anyone else seeing it?

