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the manipulation of political data is really obvious if you're looking for it. I see this time again when I'm searching for politically hot topics like Charlot
by at-fates-hands 9y ago
the manipulation of political data is really obvious if you're looking for it.
I see this time again when I'm searching for politically hot topics like Charlottesville, both of the riots in Berkely, BLM protests, ANTIFA activities, etc.
I started doing multiple searches when I googled, "ANTIFA is a hate group". On the first page of Google were several articles and blog posts titles, "Why ANTIFA is NOT a hate group."
Doing the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo returned a combination of articles, with several at the top talking about why ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group and a few other blog posts about why it shouldn't. The interesting part was all the pro-ANTIFA blost posts on other search engines weren't in the top ten results on Google. There were very specific authors in the top results in Google that didn't show up in other SE's. It was obvious to me the Google results were being manipulated to push a different narrative on the notion ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group. It was a real eye opener that I've been able to repeat with some success for other political topics when I'm searching.
Bottom line is that I can't trust them anymore; for either political or non-political searches. It makes me wonder what else they're manipulating to push a certain narrative that if I don't actively compare with other SE's, I won't know is happening.
- ams6110 9y agoI haven't used Google for search in quite a while. I use DDG as my default. When google first came out it was great, but now it just seems to be all about their ads and their point of view.
- timlod 9y agoWhen I read this (and many other people commenting about how they find certain search results biased) I always wonder how much search personalisation is at play. Google records everything you do that can be connected with their services and creates your profile based on that. Now, if you receive seemingly biased search results, are those Google's 'raw' results or results that Google thinks you'd prefer based on your profile?
- at-fates-hands 9y agoI was thinking about this after I made the comment and should've clarified whether I was logged in or not, since you're right, you will get different results if you're logged in or not. For the record, I wasn't logged into my gmail account when I made the searches.
- caconym_ 9y agoI Googled "ANTIFA is a hate group" and my results did not match yours. Throughout this thread there seems to be a theme of "my Google search for X returned Y biased, disturbing results" and yet in all cases Google seems to have corrected their results to make it appear that nothing was ever out of the ordinary. Funny how that works.