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That is literally what Google was founded on. Their core technology behind their initial success was pagerank, an algorithm whose sole purpose is to manipulate

That is literally what Google was founded on. Their core technology behind their initial success was pagerank, an algorithm whose sole purpose is to manipulate what people see. They have stayed dominant through a combination of market forces, and keeping their algorithm near (or, IMO at) the top of the market for generalized search [0], and have leveraged this competency in other markets (video, ads, etc). Beyond just Google, this is an inevitable result of having any which resembles the internet we know today. The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. While it is arguable if human gatekeepers are better from a consumption standpoint, it is clear that they are worse from a production standpoint, as it massivly increases the barriers to publication. [0] In actuality, I suspect that Google's "algorithm" involves a fair bit of "cheating" by having humans nudge the results. Political bias aside, I think not doing this would leave them too open to attack from other players in the market who do.

roenxi 8y ago
I value political neutrality in the workplace, so I have a lot of in-principle issues with what is being shown here right from the get-go. I didn't wind the video back to find the exact quote, but we now have publicised evidence of senior leadership at Google who stood up and said 'obviously our values are not the same as a big chunk of Americans'. Clearly a lot of them are specific Hillary supporters, a candidate so unelectable she lost to Trump. There is a practical difference between pagerank, which is a transparent algorithm, and a non-transparent magic algorithm that is controlled by a group who are clearly not engaged with the idea of corporate political neutrality. Taking the views expressed here as a starting point, logically why shouldn't they try to tilt the election result using their power? EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think search should be regulated, and part of that regulation should be some standard for political neutrality [0]. However, there is no neutral algorithm to this problem. Any algorithm favors certain sites over others. There is almost definitely going to be some correlation between the sites that are favored and the content of those sites, political or otherwise. There is simply no getting around that. The discussion we need to be having is how to do this in an acceptable way. [0] I do not have a good idea of what such a standard would even look like, and would err on the side of being too lax in this regard.
  - ryanobjc 8y ago
    Why should search be regulated? And I assume ALL search engines should be equally regulated. Also, you better be pretty specific about what politically neutral really means. For example, I just started a political party devoted to spreading obvious lies. Political neutrality means I should have top billing, right? Above the fold? Even though no one needs or wants what I’m selling?
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    If one or more parties is pushing misinformation, the only way to be politically neutral is to give misinformation the same standing as correct information. Society does not benefit from such a policy. It is better to have a policy of factual correctness at a minimum. Politicians should adjust to accommodate that.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Pagerank is just one factor in a much more complicated algorithm. The full algorithm has always been secret, because SEO is a thing. If you demand a transparent algorithm, you're giving up search that actually works. However, at a meta-level, there is some public information about how Google decides whether a change is making things better or worse. This doesn't tell you how the algorithm works, but it shows the goal they're optimizing for. Google has "over 10,000 human raters" that rate search engine results. I don't know how they choose the raters, but presumably it's a variety of people in each country. You can read about them here: https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-quality-raters https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-qu... Also, the guidelines that the human raters are supposed to follow are public, and you can read them here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
- panarky 8y ago
  > I value political neutrality in the workplace If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world. Changing things in the world is necessarily and inevitably political. If the workplace appears politically neutral, then one of two things must be true. Either what you're doing doesn't affect the outside world, or there are hidden, unstated political motives at work. I would much prefer my company's leadership to acknowledge the politics inherent in our work and openly state their motives and point of view. Doing otherwise is either meaningless or dishonest.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    > If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world. I don't accept that as a truism; most work is maintaining the historically unprecedented comfort that we enjoy as a society and I think that is meaningful. Providing food is meaningful, providing shelter is meaningful, extracting raw resources is meaningful, taxation and welfare are meaningful, taxation and government services are meaningful. I could go io but that covers the basic point. And since we are talking about a specific company, I don't even necessarily accept that the folk at Google are changing the world more than anyone else. I don't know anyone personally who's commented that 'wow Google has really changed my life' since the introduction of Gmail about 15 years ago. So, whatever they are doing it isn't very visible. Most of the improvement in the technological world is startups and the work of the circuit people.
    - thwy12321 8y ago
      the open source technologies they have created, Map/Reduce, Tensorflow... they essentially invented large scale cheap computing. This has had massive effect on the technology industry and the world.
      - roenxi 8y ago
        Do you feel that Map/Reduce or Tensorflow are somehow tools of some sort of convoluted leftist, rightist or centerist agenda? Do the communists have an ideological position on large scale cheap computing? Those technologies do not require Google to be politically active in any way. Saying they are inherently political is like saying a supermarket is inherently political. Might be true in some technical sense, but practically most people are happy to call it a public good.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  How do you maintain political neutrality when the two sides of an argument consist of climate change vs denial? Vaccines vs anti-vaxx? Being pro gay marriage vs against? There is almost no such thing as polititcal neutrality. Every site, every piece of media and every search engine is likely to have some sort of bias you need to be aware of. There is an argument to be made that Google is a monopoly and should be reigned in, but coming at it from the stance of 'they have a political slant' seems ill-advised.
- stanleydrew 8y ago
  I'm interested in why you believe it shouldn't be acceptable for leadership to express "dismay at the outcome of a democratic process." I assume you feel it is appropriate for leadership to express dismay about some things, so what makes democratic processes special?
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Well, my position on the subject is complicated and it is a struggle to condense it down into something reasonable. Basically, there is no way whatsoever that being a capable and talented corporate leader makes your opinion somehow right. If anything, the comforts of great wealth and power make it less likely that their opinion actually represents the best interests of ordinary folk. So my starting point is that the opinion of Google's leaders is not more valid than anyone else's. Then the second aspect is that they are on that stage in official capacities as leadership of Google. So they are representing the company's views to their employees. Combining those two, why should republican voters in Google have to experience what is basically a public condemning of their vote? It isn't professional to publicly condemn the views of half your customers and potentially a large percentage of your workforce for no legitimate business reason. Obviously, the concerns about possible immigration issues I would accept as completely relevant. I'm not sure if that has actually affected Google's business operations - but that aspect wasn't the main focus of the all-hands. The focus of the all-hands was clearly dismay that an unpopular Republican candidate had taken office. It wouldn't have happened had the alternative, an unpopular Democratic candidate, taken office. So with these thoughts in mind, I don't think it is an acceptable situation. If this were a more traditional public company I'd like to believe professionalism would have been maintained.
    - Pimpus 8y ago
      I agree with you. Bringing up politics in the workplace is rarely appropriate, and the way Google does it here is not only inappropriate but very offensive. I definitely wouldn't want to hear mud slinging about my political views in a corporate environment. This whole meeting is simultaneously childish and deeply disturbing.
- slg 8y ago
  >I value political neutrality in the workplace Political neutrality is just political support of the status quo. That is a perfectly acceptable political stance to take, but you should recognize it is still a political stance.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    Granted, most people say political neutrality and they mean a homeostasis for what they like, but some people can say the word and mean it -- such as a YouTube platform that really just doesn't look at what gets posted.
  - dingle_thunk 8y ago
    By definition, neutrality is not support of anything.
    - slg 8y ago
      Imagine you are a parent of two children, one 10 years old and the other 7. The two children are fighting with each other. What is the result of staying neutral in that argument? If you don't intervene the 10 year old is almost certainly going to win because they are likely stronger and more mature. By not intervening you are tacitly endorsing the 10 year old's power of the 7 year old. The same thing applies in any fight/conflict/argument/debate when there is a power imbalance including in politics. This is most obvious in debates about civil rights. When it comes to those issues if you don't support an oppressed people you are endorsing the continue oppression of that people.
      - dingle_thunk 8y ago
        So you disagree with the actual definition of a word? This is absolute nonsense. From a legal and a linguistic perspective, neutrality is well defined. Sometimes people just don’t want to hear your crap, and the particular flavour of crap is of no relevance. Sometimes people just do not wish to be disturbed. It’s not a power struggle, it’s basic human decency. It’s understanding that you don’t necessarily know what other people at work are going through, and it’s also none of your business.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process. The majority can still be wrong, or make immoral democratic decisions. It is our job as citizens, all citizens (even business owners), to rally against unjust law and public policy. It is the very rights that US foundational documents express as inalienable that allow workplace leadership to express pain and dismay at democratic decisions.
- jlebar 8y ago
  > EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process. Isn't this exactly what they do whenever they lobby to change an existing law?
  - toofy 8y ago
    Yeah, companies make political statements all the time, on a regular basis, on all political "sides". -- Whether it is a hunting accessories business advocating for 2nd amendment rights, -- An enormous craft supply store (hobby lobby) using religious beliefs to decide what their employees insurance will cover, -- A shoe company (Nike) hiring a controversial spokesperson (Kaepernick), -- A coffee company (Starbucks) choosing to say holiday rather than pander to a religious sect, -- A bakery refusing to sell cakes to lgbtq folks, -- Enormous corps spending massive money to disrupt any employees attempts to discuss whether or not they wish to unionize, -- A software ceo donating sums of money to groups trying to ban lgbtq marriage, -- Fossil fuel spending billions to support candidates who support their business interests, -- Renewable energy industries supporting candidates who support renewable energy projects, -- A famous software ceo providing substantial funding for lawsuits to bring down popular liberal media sites he disagrees with, I find it incredibly confusing why people pretend like this is a new thing, or that silicon valley is alone in this, or that the left shouldn't be allowed to use the same tools. To be clear, I think all business interests and influence should be severely limited from politics, but that just isn't the world in which we live. The world we live in allows a disproportionate amount of influence from all industries, with plenty of real world examples from across the entire political spectrum. If we want to have a conversation about removing corporate interests entirely, I'm game, but I'm not willing to entertain some false notion that only liberals use these tools and certainly not willing to say only conservatives can use those tools as cudgels.
wyldfire 8y ago
> That is literally what Google was founded on. Hooray! Pre-Google search sucked. It was really bad. > The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. I don't know what this means. Humans have never audited/controlled what gets indexed by crawlers. It's always automata unleashed on the data. It would be terribly unproductive to prune or tune the index with humans. However, using humans as a part of a feedback loop to tune an algorithm is a good idea [presumably all search engines do something like this].
- unsatchmo 8y ago
  The post you’re replying to is talking about pre-internet means of distributing information like magazines / newspapers and television which are 100% controlled by human decision makers.
  - wyldfire 8y ago
    I see. Yes, that's clear to me now.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Digital computers aren't even 100 years old. Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. We have been able to curate and distribute information without computers, and it involved human gatekeepers. Even in the early days of the internet, there were manually constructed listing of pages. Then, as the internet grew, there were manually curated listings. Then, these manually curated listings started to compete with crappy search engines. Eventually, as these search engines improved, the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market. We could, in principle, go back to manual curation as the dominate method. That has been the status quo for almost all of human civilization. Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).
  - wyldfire 8y ago
    Yes, I misunderstood the point. > Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason). IMO this is what renders this part of the discussion moot. Given this conclusion, it's not a valuable thread to pursue.
liftbigweights 8y ago
> That is literally what Google was founded on. No it wasn't. Google was founded on being agnostic and giving you the most objective and representative view of the internet. If it didn't, it wouldn't have survived. Pagerank was not politically driven. It didn't care whether the links went to webpages that catered to larry page or brin's political ideology. > [0] In actuality, I suspect that Google's "algorithm" involves a fair bit of "cheating" by having humans nudge the results. We know it is. We know that they changed google news to appease large media companies. We know google seearch has been changed to appease large media companies. We know youtubee has been changed to appease large media companies. The "do not evil" google of the 2000s died a long and slow death. The google of the 2010s has been quite biased. No longer is google objectively representing the internet as it is. It's representing the internet as page and brin wants it to be. I don't know why people are celebrating it just because they are anti-trump. We know that there are tons of saudi, chinese and israeli money and influence in silicon valley. Do we really want a monopoly like google to be politically driven? Do we really want search and youtube to be politically driven? Just because google is being manipulated in your favor today doesn't mean it is going to be manipulated in your favor tomorrow. It just surprises me so few people here seem to understand that.

roenxi 8y ago

I value political neutrality in the workplace, so I have a lot of in-principle issues with what is being shown here right from the get-go. I didn't wind the video back to find the exact quote, but we now have publicised evidence of senior leadership at Google who stood up and said 'obviously our values are not the same as a big chunk of Americans'. Clearly a lot of them are specific Hillary supporters, a candidate so unelectable she lost to Trump. There is a practical difference between pagerank, which is a transparent algorithm, and a non-transparent magic algorithm that is controlled by a group who are clearly not engaged with the idea of corporate political neutrality. Taking the views expressed here as a starting point, logically why shouldn't they try to tilt the election result using their power? EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process.

gizmo686 8y ago
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think search should be regulated, and part of that regulation should be some standard for political neutrality [0]. However, there is no neutral algorithm to this problem. Any algorithm favors certain sites over others. There is almost definitely going to be some correlation between the sites that are favored and the content of those sites, political or otherwise. There is simply no getting around that. The discussion we need to be having is how to do this in an acceptable way. [0] I do not have a good idea of what such a standard would even look like, and would err on the side of being too lax in this regard.
- ryanobjc 8y ago
  Why should search be regulated? And I assume ALL search engines should be equally regulated. Also, you better be pretty specific about what politically neutral really means. For example, I just started a political party devoted to spreading obvious lies. Political neutrality means I should have top billing, right? Above the fold? Even though no one needs or wants what I’m selling?
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  If one or more parties is pushing misinformation, the only way to be politically neutral is to give misinformation the same standing as correct information. Society does not benefit from such a policy. It is better to have a policy of factual correctness at a minimum. Politicians should adjust to accommodate that.
skybrian 8y ago
Pagerank is just one factor in a much more complicated algorithm. The full algorithm has always been secret, because SEO is a thing. If you demand a transparent algorithm, you're giving up search that actually works. However, at a meta-level, there is some public information about how Google decides whether a change is making things better or worse. This doesn't tell you how the algorithm works, but it shows the goal they're optimizing for. Google has "over 10,000 human raters" that rate search engine results. I don't know how they choose the raters, but presumably it's a variety of people in each country. You can read about them here: https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-quality-raters https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-qu... Also, the guidelines that the human raters are supposed to follow are public, and you can read them here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
panarky 8y ago
> I value political neutrality in the workplace If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world. Changing things in the world is necessarily and inevitably political. If the workplace appears politically neutral, then one of two things must be true. Either what you're doing doesn't affect the outside world, or there are hidden, unstated political motives at work. I would much prefer my company's leadership to acknowledge the politics inherent in our work and openly state their motives and point of view. Doing otherwise is either meaningless or dishonest.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world. I don't accept that as a truism; most work is maintaining the historically unprecedented comfort that we enjoy as a society and I think that is meaningful. Providing food is meaningful, providing shelter is meaningful, extracting raw resources is meaningful, taxation and welfare are meaningful, taxation and government services are meaningful. I could go io but that covers the basic point. And since we are talking about a specific company, I don't even necessarily accept that the folk at Google are changing the world more than anyone else. I don't know anyone personally who's commented that 'wow Google has really changed my life' since the introduction of Gmail about 15 years ago. So, whatever they are doing it isn't very visible. Most of the improvement in the technological world is startups and the work of the circuit people.
  - thwy12321 8y ago
    the open source technologies they have created, Map/Reduce, Tensorflow... they essentially invented large scale cheap computing. This has had massive effect on the technology industry and the world.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      Do you feel that Map/Reduce or Tensorflow are somehow tools of some sort of convoluted leftist, rightist or centerist agenda? Do the communists have an ideological position on large scale cheap computing? Those technologies do not require Google to be politically active in any way. Saying they are inherently political is like saying a supermarket is inherently political. Might be true in some technical sense, but practically most people are happy to call it a public good.
fzeroracer 8y ago
How do you maintain political neutrality when the two sides of an argument consist of climate change vs denial? Vaccines vs anti-vaxx? Being pro gay marriage vs against? There is almost no such thing as polititcal neutrality. Every site, every piece of media and every search engine is likely to have some sort of bias you need to be aware of. There is an argument to be made that Google is a monopoly and should be reigned in, but coming at it from the stance of 'they have a political slant' seems ill-advised.
stanleydrew 8y ago
I'm interested in why you believe it shouldn't be acceptable for leadership to express "dismay at the outcome of a democratic process." I assume you feel it is appropriate for leadership to express dismay about some things, so what makes democratic processes special?
- roenxi 8y ago
  Well, my position on the subject is complicated and it is a struggle to condense it down into something reasonable. Basically, there is no way whatsoever that being a capable and talented corporate leader makes your opinion somehow right. If anything, the comforts of great wealth and power make it less likely that their opinion actually represents the best interests of ordinary folk. So my starting point is that the opinion of Google's leaders is not more valid than anyone else's. Then the second aspect is that they are on that stage in official capacities as leadership of Google. So they are representing the company's views to their employees. Combining those two, why should republican voters in Google have to experience what is basically a public condemning of their vote? It isn't professional to publicly condemn the views of half your customers and potentially a large percentage of your workforce for no legitimate business reason. Obviously, the concerns about possible immigration issues I would accept as completely relevant. I'm not sure if that has actually affected Google's business operations - but that aspect wasn't the main focus of the all-hands. The focus of the all-hands was clearly dismay that an unpopular Republican candidate had taken office. It wouldn't have happened had the alternative, an unpopular Democratic candidate, taken office. So with these thoughts in mind, I don't think it is an acceptable situation. If this were a more traditional public company I'd like to believe professionalism would have been maintained.
  - Pimpus 8y ago
    I agree with you. Bringing up politics in the workplace is rarely appropriate, and the way Google does it here is not only inappropriate but very offensive. I definitely wouldn't want to hear mud slinging about my political views in a corporate environment. This whole meeting is simultaneously childish and deeply disturbing.
slg 8y ago
>I value political neutrality in the workplace Political neutrality is just political support of the status quo. That is a perfectly acceptable political stance to take, but you should recognize it is still a political stance.
- threatofrain 8y ago
  Granted, most people say political neutrality and they mean a homeostasis for what they like, but some people can say the word and mean it -- such as a YouTube platform that really just doesn't look at what gets posted.
- dingle_thunk 8y ago
  By definition, neutrality is not support of anything.
  - slg 8y ago
    Imagine you are a parent of two children, one 10 years old and the other 7. The two children are fighting with each other. What is the result of staying neutral in that argument? If you don't intervene the 10 year old is almost certainly going to win because they are likely stronger and more mature. By not intervening you are tacitly endorsing the 10 year old's power of the 7 year old. The same thing applies in any fight/conflict/argument/debate when there is a power imbalance including in politics. This is most obvious in debates about civil rights. When it comes to those issues if you don't support an oppressed people you are endorsing the continue oppression of that people.
    - dingle_thunk 8y ago
      So you disagree with the actual definition of a word? This is absolute nonsense. From a legal and a linguistic perspective, neutrality is well defined. Sometimes people just don’t want to hear your crap, and the particular flavour of crap is of no relevance. Sometimes people just do not wish to be disturbed. It’s not a power struggle, it’s basic human decency. It’s understanding that you don’t necessarily know what other people at work are going through, and it’s also none of your business.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
> EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process. The majority can still be wrong, or make immoral democratic decisions. It is our job as citizens, all citizens (even business owners), to rally against unjust law and public policy. It is the very rights that US foundational documents express as inalienable that allow workplace leadership to express pain and dismay at democratic decisions.
jlebar 8y ago
> EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process. Isn't this exactly what they do whenever they lobby to change an existing law?
- toofy 8y ago
  Yeah, companies make political statements all the time, on a regular basis, on all political "sides". -- Whether it is a hunting accessories business advocating for 2nd amendment rights, -- An enormous craft supply store (hobby lobby) using religious beliefs to decide what their employees insurance will cover, -- A shoe company (Nike) hiring a controversial spokesperson (Kaepernick), -- A coffee company (Starbucks) choosing to say holiday rather than pander to a religious sect, -- A bakery refusing to sell cakes to lgbtq folks, -- Enormous corps spending massive money to disrupt any employees attempts to discuss whether or not they wish to unionize, -- A software ceo donating sums of money to groups trying to ban lgbtq marriage, -- Fossil fuel spending billions to support candidates who support their business interests, -- Renewable energy industries supporting candidates who support renewable energy projects, -- A famous software ceo providing substantial funding for lawsuits to bring down popular liberal media sites he disagrees with, I find it incredibly confusing why people pretend like this is a new thing, or that silicon valley is alone in this, or that the left shouldn't be allowed to use the same tools. To be clear, I think all business interests and influence should be severely limited from politics, but that just isn't the world in which we live. The world we live in allows a disproportionate amount of influence from all industries, with plenty of real world examples from across the entire political spectrum. If we want to have a conversation about removing corporate interests entirely, I'm game, but I'm not willing to entertain some false notion that only liberals use these tools and certainly not willing to say only conservatives can use those tools as cudgels.

wyldfire 8y ago

> That is literally what Google was founded on. Hooray! Pre-Google search sucked. It was really bad. > The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. I don't know what this means. Humans have never audited/controlled what gets indexed by crawlers. It's always automata unleashed on the data. It would be terribly unproductive to prune or tune the index with humans. However, using humans as a part of a feedback loop to tune an algorithm is a good idea [presumably all search engines do something like this].

unsatchmo 8y ago
The post you’re replying to is talking about pre-internet means of distributing information like magazines / newspapers and television which are 100% controlled by human decision makers.
- wyldfire 8y ago
  I see. Yes, that's clear to me now.
gizmo686 8y ago
Digital computers aren't even 100 years old. Human civilization has existed for thousands of years. We have been able to curate and distribute information without computers, and it involved human gatekeepers. Even in the early days of the internet, there were manually constructed listing of pages. Then, as the internet grew, there were manually curated listings. Then, these manually curated listings started to compete with crappy search engines. Eventually, as these search engines improved, the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market. We could, in principle, go back to manual curation as the dominate method. That has been the status quo for almost all of human civilization. Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).
- wyldfire 8y ago
  Yes, I misunderstood the point. > Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason). IMO this is what renders this part of the discussion moot. Given this conclusion, it's not a valuable thread to pursue.

liftbigweights 8y ago

> That is literally what Google was founded on. No it wasn't. Google was founded on being agnostic and giving you the most objective and representative view of the internet. If it didn't, it wouldn't have survived. Pagerank was not politically driven. It didn't care whether the links went to webpages that catered to larry page or brin's political ideology. > [0] In actuality, I suspect that Google's "algorithm" involves a fair bit of "cheating" by having humans nudge the results. We know it is. We know that they changed google news to appease large media companies. We know google seearch has been changed to appease large media companies. We know youtubee has been changed to appease large media companies. The "do not evil" google of the 2000s died a long and slow death. The google of the 2010s has been quite biased. No longer is google objectively representing the internet as it is. It's representing the internet as page and brin wants it to be. I don't know why people are celebrating it just because they are anti-trump. We know that there are tons of saudi, chinese and israeli money and influence in silicon valley. Do we really want a monopoly like google to be politically driven? Do we really want search and youtube to be politically driven? Just because google is being manipulated in your favor today doesn't mean it is going to be manipulated in your favor tomorrow. It just surprises me so few people here seem to understand that.