10 ms·
Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms
- macspoofing 9y ago>The WSWS has been blacklisted in searches dealing with history, and in particular historical topics related to the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century. These include the terms “Russian revolution,” “Bolshevik revolution” and “October revolution,” all of which returned results in the top 50 in April That's probably ... correct.
- tanilama 9y agoBlaming their own SEO failure to censorship. Sounds pretty left to me.
- virgil_disgr4ce 9y agoWhy?
- tanilama 9y agoInflating self-inflicted problem makes it look like serious institutional flaws then take chance to act like victims, without sufficient evidence to back one's own claim.
- dang 9y agoIdeological flamebait is against the HN guidelines, so would you please not post it here? If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
- virgil_disgr4ce 9y agoWhat do you mean?
- macspoofing 9y agoBecause they are an ideological advocacy group so they have a revisionist perspective on certain parts of history. What it means is that they don't speak objectively on those periods - so they shouldn't be returned as a search result if neutral terms are used.
- ReadEvalPost 9y agoWhy is that correct? Looking at their website they're currently running a lecture series/look back at the Russian revolution: http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/chronology.html None of it seems to be conspiracy theory or low-quality material.
- markbnj 9y agoIt may not be but if Google's goal is to promote authoritative sources there's no reason to consider WSWS to be authoritative for those search terms, imo. I'm not saying I agree with their goal, just that this seems consistent with it, and I imagine that's what the reply was getting at.
- thesmallestcat 9y agoWhat does "authoritative" mean anyway? I don't want my search results to be authoritative, I want them to be relevant, varied, and interesting. Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article, a load of the same blogspam from sites like Guardian, Atlantic, or Daily Mail, and then the same 1-2 paragraph article repeated 15 times on content farm websites. It used to be a lot easier to find weird corners of the web.
- adventured 9y ago> Google is not an encyclopedia. Google fails recently at providing varied results, on any topic you get a Wikipedia article That's not recent. Google has been returning Wikipedia as a near universal top result for a decade. Regarding content farms, they overwhelmingly smashed the content farms with their panda & penguin updates years ago and have refined the destruction of content farms since then. Very few remain, much less sustain, outside of temporary niche corners.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
- leereeves 9y agoWhen Google, Facebook, and others announced that they were banning "fake news", many on the left cheered. But it was probably naive to assume Google would limit itself to censoring political opinions with which one disagrees.
- evolve2017 9y agoI don't quite understand the snark in your response - were you, unlike the purported cheering liberals, fond of the purveyors of fake news?
- ww520 9y agoFake news is just the Bogeyman of the day, a pretext to exercise censorship.
- leereeves 9y agoI don't believe it was ever about "fake news", rather it's about establishing "acceptable opinion". As the article said: > In a set of guidelines issued to Google evaluators in March, elaborated in April by Google VP of Engineering Ben Gomes, the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning “conspiracy theories” or “upsetting” content unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.” The changes to the search rankings of WSWS content are consistent with such a mechanism. Notice how Google said "alternative viewpoint". Alternative to what? Google seems to be establishing a new orthodoxy.
- dc_gregory 9y agoIn this context, I read "alternative viewpoint" as a polite way of saying "complete bullshit".
- KekDemaga 9y agoWhy not say "factually inaccurate information" if that is what you mean?
- oh_sigh 9y ago> These findings make clear that the decline in Google search traffic to the WSWS is not the result of some technical issue, but a deliberate policy of censorship. Quite a claim.
- dibujante 9y agoIt would be very interesting to prove this, but their argument is mostly circumstantial so far.
- thisrod 9y agoThe fact that Google is refusing to deny it is, in my view, pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
- yeahsureokay 9y ago??? I'd be shocked if anyone who could comment was even were aware of the claim (until it hit the HN front page).
- skj 9y agoThat is... a really silly position to take. (I work for Google but on nothing remotely related)
- dibujante 9y agoNot necessarily. Google may not comment on these things as a matter of policy; for example, let's say that Google is required by some law to censor a particular search result. If they are in the habit of announcing their censorship decisions, then their silence on that one site would be non-silence. They would have to lie about the site instead. So, from a company liability perspective, Google is cautious about revealing information.
- thisrod 9y agoThat's true. But this isn't about Google releasing a whole class of information by policy. It's about them responding, or not, to a specific question of the form, "We run a legitimate website on the topic that the American government has censored more often, and more harshly, than any other topic. Could you please confirm that our recent drop in search rankings is not the result of deliberate action by Google employees?"
- diogenescynic 9y agoMeh, I have a hard time caring about this because I want Google to block propaganda and misinformation. From my experience, socialist websites and forums tend to ignore, rewrite, or white wash the history of communism in Russia/USSR, Venezuela, and even North Korea. So much so that the No True Scotsman fallacy should just be the No True Socialist fallacy. Go check out /r/socialism if you want your head to spin. According to that sub, there were no famines in the USSR, Stalin never killed anyone, and everything bad we hear about Venezuela is just media bias. And then when it's objectively true and can't be dodged, they aren't really socialists.
- dibujante 9y ago...how far does "propaganda and misinformation" go? Political parties also put out propaganda and misinformation, as do businesses and individuals.
- diogenescynic 9y agoMarketing is not the same as propaganda and straight up lying about historical facts. If you claim there weren't famines in the Soviet Union, you're either a liar or a fool. I am fine with those being removed from Google. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the entire point of Google search. They should ban all disinformation sites, Fox News, Breitbart, and InfoWars would be a good start to add to WSWS. Salon and Huffington would be up there too.
- mark_edward 9y agodid this website do this?
- dibujante 9y agoBut what if someone, somehow, through some extraordinary bit of research, does find evidence contradicting a widely supported claim? Not the soviet famine claim, but e.g. David Glantz did research and found that the early years of the USSR's involvement in World War II had been substantially misrepresented due to the USSR censoring many of those records to save face. Prior to his publication of that work, it was the "truth" that the USSR launched no major offensives until 1942-3. After the publication of that work, that was no longer the "truth" (the USSR had in fact launched many offensives and then purged them from the historical record in order to appear infallible).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- edco 9y agoah yes the delightful irony in socialism being censored loving every moment
- yeahsureokay 9y agoThis has been fairly thoroughly debunked: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/0YippLN0KoA;context-place=topicsearchin/webmasters/category$3Achit-chat%7Csort:relevance%7Cspell:false https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/0Y...
- leereeves 9y agoIf it's merely an SEO problem as that page suggests, why does WSWS rank so highly for "socialist news"?
- quickben 9y agoOf course, support.google.com opinion on this matter is entirely unbiased :P
- joatmon-snoo 9y agoWell, considering it's a support forum and none of the people who have answered are affiliated with Google, yeah, it's unbiased.
- ue_ 9y agoI don't have any particular say on this issue in particular, but what about the fact that Google can silently remove replies without telling you (which gives the image of non-bias) and further that people may be biased in favour of Google without actually being affiliated with Google?
- ma2rten 9y agoThey just pointed out a bunch of SEO problems with the site, that doesn't proof or disprove that they have been censored. Especially if their ranking only dropped on specific terms and it dropped suddenly.
- edco 9y ago>Stop this censorship! Stop undermining democracy! it's a private company they can do what they please.
- edpichler 9y agoUnfortunately, some companies are becoming too powerful. Concurrency must be encouraged, it's always good.
- thephyber 9y agoAt first glance, this looks extremely ironic. Don't Socialists advocate for a centralization of economic capital (among others like political and news) or do I misunderstand? If purist socialists had there way, wouldn't there only be one search engine? Obviously it would be great if others could compete, but I think it's simply a market gap (innovation, capital investment, etc) at this point and not for lack of competitors trying. Many died out (Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista), some survive as niche (DuckDuckGo), some still exist (Bing, Ask/Jeebs), and some are still massive but serve other markets (Baidu, Yandex). Google has become so successful that their search is very advanced compared to upstarts. The more Google learns from their massive index corpus and userbase, the further ahead they get. Baidu might have a comparable dataset and userbase, but they specialize in different markets with different languages and cultures.
- etplayer 9y ago>Don't Socialists advocate for a centralization of economic capital (among others like political and news) or do I misunderstand? Not necessarily (distributed economic planning, comumnal planning and indeed some (though not I) advance market Socialism), and further, things like search can be decentralised, as I'm sure mosts Socialists would agree with if aware that such technology exists. >If purist socialists had there way, wouldn't there only be one search engine? No, I see no reason to think that. This is largely stemming from the myth that "everyone has one car under Socialism"; it neglects that aside from seeking profit, different cars have different uses and advantages. It's probably the same with search engines and GNU/Linux distros. >Google has become so successful that their search is very advanced compared to upstarts. I agree, and I think that in a world where there is less incentive to keep secrets (though of course there is always incentive, such as personal pride, mastery, or even embarrassment over how your code looks!) because profit doesn't need to be protected from "theives", such research might even be public for others to benefit from. The learning technology can be free. Google would not have to collect data "on the sly", perhaps. However the response to this is - would people willingly (and by this I mean when properly and fully informed of what they are doing) give over this data that Google uses to learn in such a way? If the answer is no, perhaps it's time to consider the ethical ramifications of such 'learning'.
- pmarreck 9y agoGee, wouldn't it be great if we could just look up the open-source code for the most popular search engine on the "open" Internet? Given the amount of power and money they now have, effectively having "won the game," it seems ethical to me to open-source their entire search algorithm.
- laser 9y agoBut if it's open, people will game it...
- adbge 9y agoBuy Google from Alphabet and have at it.
- tyingq 9y agoGiven the heavy reliance on ML Google has for search these days, I'm not sure that would help much. They would have to open source the indexed data and training data too, assuming you wanted to know why site A doesn't rank well for term X.
- samplonius 9y agoBullshit. A Google search for "socialist news" returns wsws.org as the #2 response. #1 is socialistworks.org, a competing site.
- leereeves 9y ago> the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning “conspiracy theories” or “upsetting” content unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.” "Socialist news" would be one of the searches that "indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- immanuelcan 9y agoThe relevant search terms that have been downgraded are "socialism", "socialist", etc. Obviously, if you search WSWS or socialist website or socialist news you will get the WSWS. It is the more general terms that are at issue. These used to (up to April, just before the new policy was unveiled) return the WSWS very prominently. Now they do not.
- exikyut 9y agoEDIT: I've noticed all the replies and I'd like to acknowledge them. Unfortunately I feel very stupid for not screenshotting what I saw when I searched one hour ago. I now see 62,900 results, and I can load up to page 6. I can't prove that I was not able to load page 2 before, but it's true. My original comment remains unedited below. -- For a concrete demonstration of pathological de-ranking, do a query for "site:web.archive.org". I get "59,000 results" on page 1, but page 2 will never load! There are a few results, which proves that a) web.archive.org are not using robots.txt or other blocking techniques, and b) that Google's infrastructure is inhaling content. But it's invisible. Think about how sad this is - once a site goes dead, it's offline, even though the content is still publicly accessible. If only that context was indexed using a decent search engine. Practically speaking, I totally acknowledge that archived content is complex to surface; sites can be pulled offline because content needs to be disappeared for any number of reasons, etc. I recognize the general difficulty of getting this right. So I'm not _really_ arguing "if only this were surfaced", because it's unfair to - I'm more saying "hey look, this is what it looks like when something has been completely killed," as a demonstrable and extreme datapoint.
- leereeves 9y agoPage 2 loads for me, though there's a slight delay.
- jasonlotito 9y agoPage 2 and on loaded just fine for me without any issue.
- cjhopman 9y agoYour comment says more about you than about Google. That search works just fine for me.
- adventured 9y agoPage two for "site:web.archive.org" loads immediately on Google, no delay.
- redm 9y agoGoogle adjusts its search results all the time for business reasons but also for political or legal reasons. The PC description is "tuning the search algorithm". That may encompass any number of effects to the search results or Google interfaces. While I hate the idea of regulation, Google Search is such a basic utility in the US that it really should be regulated by the government. Regulation is done on utilities like cell providers, cable/internet providers and consumers are usually aware of multiple choices. If I ask a non-tech user to name a search engine other than Google, they likely can't. So users do their search and interact with the results they are presented. Edit: Removed my personal experience. Added thoughts on regulation.
- beambot 9y agoHow would that work? You want Congress to determine SEO rank?
- redm 9y agoI expect it would prevent making changes that are not firmly based organic search quality; not changes that benefit Google's other businesses including advertising, maps, plus, etc. or political views.
- beambot 9y agoSo every algorithm change would require congressional approval. That seems very untenable.
- fulafel 9y agoWould you have the US regulation to apply only to results served for US users, or everybody?
- guelo 9y agoFWIW, searching on Bing "russian revolution" wsws.org shows up on page 5.
- diego_moita 9y agoSearching on duckduckgo, "russian revolution" shows wsws.org on 80th place. Didn't show up for "proletariat". The irony: they prefer to cry wolf instead of doing SEO and don't want to be called a conspiracy theory site.
- diogenescynic 9y agoI guess they'd rather play the victim and try to get free PR.
- gremlinsinc 9y agoI wonder if it'd be possible... (i know it'd be extremely challenging) - to have some sort of open-source-ai search engine that runs on the blockchain... -- something that anyone could use the API to make a frontend interface ala google, but all the rankings/etc... are controlled by the blockchain, and people using the sites could maybe thumbs up/down if it was a good search and then the AI could use those indicators to hone it's algorithms.
- soft_serve 9y agoSometimes sites are "punished" for aggressive / misleading "SEO" tactics.
- CurtMonash 9y agoI'm an anti-censorship extremist, but this doesn't feel to me like censorship. After all, the site is being discussed here on HN, and I'm sure it could also be found through many other search engines, portals, or whatever. Even if we get to the point that certain pages are only likely to be found via 10-20 year old technologies, so what? Those technologies were invented for text articles and still work well for them, and text articles are what matter most. Similar things are also true about the runners-up in "matter most", which in some order are straightforward image, sound and video files.
- mhermher 9y agoThen you're probably not an anti-censorship extremist. If (big if) what the post is alleging is true, then it is pretty egregious.
- rodgerd 9y agoSo not getting #1 is search results is censorship? The word is becoming meaningless dribble in the hands of axe-grinding cretins who believe that everyone must be forced to read their material.
- squarefoot 9y agoI have no way to tell if this was deliberate or not, but personally I lost any respect and trust in Google the day they removed the discussion search filter. Before that day I could find common people talking about a product or a political issue, now unless I'm prepared to jump dozens of pages I'm inundated by sites selling that product or affiliated with that political orientation.
- rand_r 9y ago> they removed the discussion search filter. Could you provide more detail on this search filter? I haven't heard about its removal before and it sounds interesting.
- squarefoot 9y agoA search for "google discussion search" brings lots of results. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/Psb6OmlLJTg/WOLoez6mUBEJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/Psb6O... https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_completely_removed_discussions_search_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_compl... http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f11-off-topic-discussion/130894-rip-google-discussion-search.html http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f11-off-topic-discussion/130... ...etc.
- captainlego 9y agoFor now...
- EvanDotPro 9y agoI had actually forgotten all about the discussion filter and hadn't noticed it was even removed until reading this comment. I never utilized it much back when it was available but in retrospect can definitely think of cases where this would've come in handy if I had thought to use it. I immediately thought there must be some clever combination of query modifiers that could roughly reproduce the discussion filter behavior... Of course I'm not the first one with this idea— there seems to be browser extensions[1][2] that accomplish this by appending your search query with: intext:forum "post"|inurl:forum|"posts:"|inurl:viewtopic It seems to work reasonably well after a couple tests and could probably be improved to catch more discussion sites with some additional piped modifiers if necessary. Anyway, just thought I'd share my findings. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button-for-go/igjiggoeheaondbmhmilpmbdkpgcjmdn?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button... [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-forum-search/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-forum-...
- nebabyte 9y ago> The physical censorship implemented by Google is so extensive that of the top 150 search terms that, as late as April 2017, connected the WSWS with readers, 145 no longer do so. > These findings make clear that the decline in Google search traffic to the WSWS is not the result of some technical issue, but a deliberate policy of censorship. ...or that they have not been keeping up with their SEO, are getting edged out by AMP sites, tripped over some other google rule, etc...
- immanuelcan 9y agoThis is partially addressed here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/08/goog-a08.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/08/goog-a08.html and here http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html The change has effected a broad array of left-wing websites, with different SEO methods. It has also happened directly after Google's new algorithm, which stated clearly what they were planning on doing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- therebedragons 9y ago> These findings make clear Where are these findings? It would be rather easy to show Search Console data with a decline, but that isn't the case. Do they have that sort of evidence? Also, was the "Fake News" thing about regular SERPs, or specifically news SERPs? I have no idea - it isn't an area I've looked at - but I'm pretty sure it was news based, no?
- yAnonymous 9y agoIf they haven't been blacklisted for spreading conspiracy theories, they now probably should be.
- eljee 9y agoThis is why http://levelnews.org http://levelnews.org was created. It is a place to find real-time independent, progressive public-interest news. If you would like to know more about the project, the blog is here: http://blog.levelnews.org http://blog.levelnews.org Much of the codebase is open source and can be found on GitHub if you'd like to contribute: https://github.com/levelnewsorg https://github.com/levelnewsorg