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President Trump Says Google Searches Rigged, DFW Expert Disagrees
- Yoric 8y agoSo, what's the worst case scenario? Let's assume that Google News is rigged against, say, Breitbart, either because Google has its own political views, or because Google is fighting fake news, or for some other reason. So that would make Google News... a news organization? That hardly sounds illegal.
- gamechangr 8y agoYou may have misread that last comment. The "illegal" reference at the end relates to immigrants. Trump doesn't say its illegal, though most would say that's unethical and a travesty if our information is delivered with Bias and in this case - delivered and ranked in such a way you may not find balanced results. How would you feel if every google result supported trump?
- craftyguy 8y agoGoogle never has been in the business of providing unbiased search results, why is this so shocking now?
- bhartzer 8y agoIt's only shocking to people because Trump mentioned it.
- gamechangr 8y agoAre you implying that google has always rigged their searches and trump is accurate? I was not aware google did that (nor am I sure that they do), but if they do actually rig searches - their business will become less viable all the time.
- setr 8y agoGoogle is only useful if you can safely assume that its returning what you searched for, ranking on your search. To a certain degree, google assuming what you meant rather than what you wrote (ie correctly typos, replacing with more common terms, etc) is fine, but if it starts to actively assume what you didn’t mean, it seizes to be a valuable service. You can no longer trust it to correctly look for anything you write, because it may very well search for exactly the opposite, for no better reason than some manager’s personal whim (trying to encourage anything from racism to international tragedy awareness).
- craftyguy 8y agoI don't understand the point you are trying to make, can you re-phrase? Google provides you results based on what they think you meant. They 'think' more strongly in directions that suit them (e.g. sites paying them for result priority rankings). I fail to see how this 'recent development' is anything other than a permutation of that. As another reply suggested, maybe it's just because a certain old man is yelling at clouds again that people are appalled all of a sudden.
- setr 8y agoIf google is altering search results based on what (it thinks) you meant, its sufficient up to a limit (if it makes too extreme assumptions, it would likely be incorrect, and useless). As for altering the ranking for non-search reasons (paid priority), this is somewhat alievated by google doing it transparently: forcing it to the very top, with a sponsered flag (or whatever it said) If google is altering search results based on what it wants you to mean (ie rigging it: “trump news” translates to “fake news”), and doing so non-transparently then its a completely different form of bias that would render the service useless: you can no longer trust any search, because the service could be feeding you bullshit based on any google employees personal whims. It stops operating as a search engine, and more importantly, its known to be actively working against you. Not with you (real results), not nuetral to you (transparent advertising) but now actively against you (non-transparent non-search-motivated alteration of your query/results). And that last one is not google’s business. At least, it wasn’t, or wasn’t publicly known to be.