4 ms·

I don't mean the filter is personalized to you, I just mean that there is a filter! That is, Google doesn't believe every website is equally "good", they Rank P

by hsod 9y ago

I don't mean the filter is personalized to you, I just mean that there is a filter! That is, Google doesn't believe every website is equally "good", they Rank Pages based on subjective criteria. I just don't get why no one has a problem with Google trying to filter out spam (even though it can't be detected with 100% accuracy) but trying to prevent 4chan/GatewayPundit's blatant and obvious lies from being elevated is a place to take a principled stand. Where are the tears for the spammers and scammers who have been so unfairly censored by Google for so many years?

musage 9y ago
> I just don't get why no one has a problem with Google trying to filter out spam (even though it can't be detected with 100% accuracy) but trying to prevent 4chan/GatewayPundit's blatant and obvious lies from being elevated is a place to take a principled stand. What does this have to do with personal filters? Yes, there are filters, Google has to "make decisions", and parse language. That's a given. But that doesn't require showing different things to different people. With a personalized algorithm behind the curtain, googling for "Pizza" might show you where to get Pizza near where you are, and let's say "Pizza in general" would give the results that just typing "Pizza" without a personal filter would give. So you have "Pizza / Pizza in general" vs. "Pizza shop in $city / Pizza". Big deal? What was gained here? You trade some convenience for the impossibility to get the search results everybody else is getting. When I ask someone what they think is the X-est Y, and they first have a list of questions for me to answer first so they can tailor their response to me -- not to clarify the question, mind you, but so they can tell me something I might like to hear -- I won't be asking that person for their opinion again. > they Rank Pages based on subjective criteria. That's not how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
- hsod 9y ago
  I feel like we're talking past each other. Personalization of search results is orthogonal to this article and discussion so I'm going to pass on responding to your points there. As for PageRank, I really appreciate the Wikipedia link. Super helpful. If you're arguing that PR is not subjective because it uses an algorithm, my response is: the algorithm encodes subjective judgements about how to evaluate "quality" in a web page. For example, the subjective judgement that a web page is likely to be of higher quality if there are a lot of other high quality web pages that link to it.

by hsod 9y ago

musage 9y ago

> I just don't get why no one has a problem with Google trying to filter out spam (even though it can't be detected with 100% accuracy) but trying to prevent 4chan/GatewayPundit's blatant and obvious lies from being elevated is a place to take a principled stand. What does this have to do with personal filters? Yes, there are filters, Google has to "make decisions", and parse language. That's a given. But that doesn't require showing different things to different people. With a personalized algorithm behind the curtain, googling for "Pizza" might show you where to get Pizza near where you are, and let's say "Pizza in general" would give the results that just typing "Pizza" without a personal filter would give. So you have "Pizza / Pizza in general" vs. "Pizza shop in $city / Pizza". Big deal? What was gained here? You trade some convenience for the impossibility to get the search results everybody else is getting. When I ask someone what they think is the X-est Y, and they first have a list of questions for me to answer first so they can tailor their response to me -- not to clarify the question, mind you, but so they can tell me something I might like to hear -- I won't be asking that person for their opinion again. > they Rank Pages based on subjective criteria. That's not how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

hsod 9y ago
I feel like we're talking past each other. Personalization of search results is orthogonal to this article and discussion so I'm going to pass on responding to your points there. As for PageRank, I really appreciate the Wikipedia link. Super helpful. If you're arguing that PR is not subjective because it uses an algorithm, my response is: the algorithm encodes subjective judgements about how to evaluate "quality" in a web page. For example, the subjective judgement that a web page is likely to be of higher quality if there are a lot of other high quality web pages that link to it.