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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 f

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 8y ago
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.
- pfarrell 8y ago
  Agree with your line of reasoning on how this may have occurred, but I think there's a difference in perception on between the infobox and current headlines. I think the infobox's information should be more objective. If Google's algorithms aren't capable of being configured to prevent distributing misinformation, intentional or not, I think the entire dynamically generated practice should be abandoned.
- repolfx 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

nostrademons 8y ago

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.

pfarrell 8y ago
Agree with your line of reasoning on how this may have occurred, but I think there's a difference in perception on between the infobox and current headlines. I think the infobox's information should be more objective. If Google's algorithms aren't capable of being configured to prevent distributing misinformation, intentional or not, I think the entire dynamically generated practice should be abandoned.
repolfx 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.