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Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. I've noticed the straight sea

Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. I've noticed the straight search results making a marked decline in quality over the past few months. If one of the keywords within your search is anything remotely profitable, it will drown out all other terms. Then the search results ended after ~4 pages. Definitely changed from the Google I "grew up on."

jakecopp 8y ago
Might just be more web pages about profitable products?
- bigiain 8y ago
  Also the people selling things via their webpages are very much more likely to be investing effort in SEO than "non commercial" web pages... (And, as much as Matt Cutts might deny it, it seems inconceivable that Google do not use revenue generated by advertising as a search signal...)
  - skgoa 8y ago
    That's part of the issue, but Google also automatically extends your search terms with words that it believes are relevant to your search. I will also give certain words a higher relevance based on what ti believes you are really searching for. Unfortunately this often leads to search result pages full of entirely irrelevant results, while pages containing the exact words in your search term are few and far between, if they are shown at all. This is my biggest gripe with Google's search engine. It used to be that you could specify exactly what you want to get and it would find it for you. Now it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it refuses to show me things I know exist and that every other search engine will find with very simple, straight-forward search terms.
brandonjm 8y ago
> Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. That could have a very simple explanation: There is no Wikipedia page for "Gun Rights". There is however a Wikipedia page for "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" which is exactly what appears in the Wikipedia box on the right or as the first Wikipedia article when you search for "right to bear arms", "right to guns" and "arms rights".
- partiallypro 8y ago
  There is a "Gun Rights" page on Wikipedia (at least that's the slug,) Bing pulls it to the top of the results for that same query (along with advocacy groups.) While Google puts "Gun Control" at the top right. So, I see OP's point. I do have a hard time believing that is purely algorithmic.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    Or, it's a well-trained algo. Either way.
    - Covzire 8y ago
      "Well" "trained", indeed.
      - tumetab1 8y ago
        I think you, and others, seem to ignore that deep learning bots produce what the data contains. The data maybe be skewed in one direction or another, as in, it may be the case that most content is for gun control and most users seek gun control content. The philosophical question is if a search engine return what people want or should return return what is most biased for truth and informative.
        atypicaluser 8y ago
        > I think you, and others, seem to ignore that deep learning bots produce what the data [and the rules it uses] contains. The bot uses data, sure, but like the humans it also-- * Chooses what data it uses based on... * The rules that make up its processing which in turn are... * Influenced by the peculiarities of its creator(s). Those last two can't be emphasized enough. A subject matter expert, for example, will choose data differently from a layman, who will choose data differently from someone completely ignorant on the subject. Someone driven to keep certain data suppressed will choose data differently from someone driven to research the matter, who in turn will choose data differently than someone wholly disinterested in the topic. Unless a person builds a bot with a 'willingness' to question both its data and its own programming (and perhaps even its creator) to present the best linkage the web has to offer, all bots will be mere dummy proxies of the creator programming it.
gaius 8y ago
Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. It is known that Google employees have the capability to skew search results politically, just not whether they do it in specific circumstances (of course it would be robustly denied) https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041 https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041 (For those that say “good” remember that tomorrow this could be used against you. I am certain it was used against Bernie for example)
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > I am certain it was used against Bernie for example That would be important if it were true. Can you back it up?
  - gaius 8y ago
    Just a suspicion based on Eric Schmidt being so involved with Hillary’s campaign. But the link I posted shows that there are no technical barriers to doing it, and that doing it is openly discussed within Google
    - dagenix 8y ago
      You are certain? Or, are you suspicious? Those are pretty different statements. And it seems you lack evidence to back either one.
ehnto 8y ago
I'm not sure I could define it as intentional and nefarious but I definitely find Google search results to be markedly worse over the last few years. It used to be really competent at finding specialist/technical results but lately it's gotten more generic and less useful. It's possible that's actually the nature of content creation these days, with everyone hyper optimising to please the Google search algorithm. But it's resulting in a less useful web for me. Certainly a less interesting one. Same thing with Youtube, the algorithms seem to optimize for the lowest common denominator and all the interesting niche stuff is lost in thr noise. Some of the solution is to do a better job of actively searching for good content instead of waiting for the algorithms to recommend it. But that itself has gotten harder too. Finding good content curators is hard.
- garyclarke27 8y ago
  Agreed - Particularly infuriating, is Google’s habit of returning search results with many missing terms, implying that they know whats best for me- ignoring a large part of my precisly crafted search input. I know there is Verbatim option, but this is another slow step and does not work in combination with valuable time filter. Wish there was an option to always use Verbatim and more default time filters such as 3 months, 6 months.
  - ehnto 8y ago
    Absolutely. That is one of my biggest pet peeves. There must be a threshold where it would rather give you well ranked but worse matching results over low-ranked but well matching results. That threshold seems to be too low hence the generic garbage results for really specific terms.
- fetbaffe 8y ago
  It has become harder & harder to find videos on YouTube you know exist. Feels like the algorithm i geared to find new content rather to find what I'm looking for.
  - mfukar 8y ago
nadont8 8y ago
Search for "american inventors" if you want to have some laughs.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  wtf whyy EDIT: To clarify, why is that list so bad?
  - nadont8 8y ago
    It's not organic; Google has editorialised it in a racist way.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Imagine you were searching for 'american basketball player' and the selected individuals were predominately white. And on top of this you had guys like let's say Mike Dunleavy Jr. placed ahead of Michael Jordan for no apparent reason. Do you think this would be appropriate?
- DenisM 8y ago
  Apparently this has been going on at least since 2016: http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-inventors/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...
- tzs 8y ago
  If you search for "United States inventors" you get the list you were probably expecting. Google seems to like to include results appropriate for common phrases if you include only part of the phrases. My guess is that the "american" in "american inventors" brings in results for "african american inventors" too.
nl 8y ago
Regarding the "Gun Rights" fact box, the different results Bing and Google use here looks to be the results of an edit war[1] over how the page should redirect. Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid=847454893 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...
- int_19h 8y ago
  I don't see a redirect to "Gun Control" in the page history. It is currently a redirect to "Right to Keep and Bear Arms", yes; but before that, it was a disambiguation page that had a brief explanation of various meanings, and links to several other, more detailed pages. So if Google captured that, shouldn't it be linking to that disambiguation page? Even then, one could imagine that the Google could somehow detect that it is not a particularly informative page, and pick the most likely disambiguation link out of it. Logically speaking, that would be first link in the list. But before the page was changed to be a pure redirect, it had the following blurb at the very beginning: The term "'''Gun rights'''" may refer to: * The legal concept of the [[right to keep and bear arms]] * [[Gun control]], the set of laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms by civilians. ... So, why would the algorithm pick the second link, specifically? And why hasn't it re-indexed the page since? FWIW, I don't think this is the case of deliberate changing of search results. But I suspect that their algorithm is inadvertently picking up bias from somewhere else, and applying it here.
- brightball 8y ago
  Is there a good site out there to analyze "edit war" pages of wikipedia? I've always been curious of locked topics to see some type of analytics breakdown. The most hotly edited items are generally the things I'd most like to see surfaced.
fetbaffe 8y ago
Yes, I have noticed that google search result are much worse the past three months, even for non political stuff. Top ten results are usually from big media corporations.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
This will mostly depend on whether your geoip returns a blue swamp or a red swamp.
Const-me 8y ago
Also, google shows the "Right to keep and bear arms" wikipedia article on the second place, however it adds "Jump to Gun violence and the politics of the right to bear arms" link. When asked "gun rights", google added the link to the only section of the article discussing gun violence. They obviously manipulate their search results pushing political BS :-(
rb666 8y ago
Gun control = gun rights. Just a different, and more popular and common, way of looking at it.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Perhaps in Europe, but not in the US. If someone is searching "gun rights" in the US, it is very unlikely they are wanting to know about gun control.
eudora 8y ago
I was searching for an exact phrase in quotes the other day, which happened to be close - but not the same - as a popularly monetisable phrase. The entire results were full of the other phrase and not the one I searched for. I kinda hate AI. (Because it's dumb. Do what I told you, not what you think I want)
eudora 8y ago
I wonder if you're in your own filter bubble. As in, if some full blown NRA guy searched gun rights, what would he get?
- minitel 8y ago
  Logged out of any Google account from a work IP address (not used for much personal searching) and I get the same result. Info cards are not influenced by your account's history as far as I know. They are purely programmed by a combination of bots and hand tweaked responses. The hand tweaked responses come from a combination of user complaints/requests and internal pushes by engineers.
scruffyherder 8y ago
I thought I'd try it.. https://imgur.com/a/7GHeVZM https://imgur.com/a/7GHeVZM 槍枝管制 "gun rights"的圖片搜尋結果槍支管制是指任何對定義、限制或限制擁有，生產或改裝，進口，運輸，銷售和／或使用槍械的法律，政策，實踐或提案。槍支管制的法律和政策在世界各地有很大的差異。有些國家，如英國和中華民國，擁有非常嚴格的槍支限制政策，而其他國家，如美國，有相對溫和的限制。槍支管制的支持者普遍認為，普遍民眾擁有槍支會導致危險性。維基百科 / Gun control Search results for "gun rights" Gun control refers to any law, policy, practice or proposal that defines, restricts or limits the possession, production or modification, import, transportation, sale and/or use of firearms. The laws and policies governing gun control vary widely around the world. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, have very strict gun restrictions, while others, such as the United States, have relatively modest restrictions. Proponents of gun control generally believe that the widespread possession of guns can be dangerous. Wikipedia
prawn 8y ago
Aren't these two statements a bit contradictory? e.g., the suggestion that they've editorialised "gun rights" to something (control) that would lead to less profitable results, but the statement that they doctor their setup to favour commercial enterprise?

jakecopp 8y ago

Might just be more web pages about profitable products?

bigiain 8y ago
Also the people selling things via their webpages are very much more likely to be investing effort in SEO than "non commercial" web pages... (And, as much as Matt Cutts might deny it, it seems inconceivable that Google do not use revenue generated by advertising as a search signal...)
- skgoa 8y ago
  That's part of the issue, but Google also automatically extends your search terms with words that it believes are relevant to your search. I will also give certain words a higher relevance based on what ti believes you are really searching for. Unfortunately this often leads to search result pages full of entirely irrelevant results, while pages containing the exact words in your search term are few and far between, if they are shown at all. This is my biggest gripe with Google's search engine. It used to be that you could specify exactly what you want to get and it would find it for you. Now it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it refuses to show me things I know exist and that every other search engine will find with very simple, straight-forward search terms.

brandonjm 8y ago

> Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. That could have a very simple explanation: There is no Wikipedia page for "Gun Rights". There is however a Wikipedia page for "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" which is exactly what appears in the Wikipedia box on the right or as the first Wikipedia article when you search for "right to bear arms", "right to guns" and "arms rights".

partiallypro 8y ago
There is a "Gun Rights" page on Wikipedia (at least that's the slug,) Bing pulls it to the top of the results for that same query (along with advocacy groups.) While Google puts "Gun Control" at the top right. So, I see OP's point. I do have a hard time believing that is purely algorithmic.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Or, it's a well-trained algo. Either way.
  - Covzire 8y ago
    "Well" "trained", indeed.
    - tumetab1 8y ago
      I think you, and others, seem to ignore that deep learning bots produce what the data contains. The data maybe be skewed in one direction or another, as in, it may be the case that most content is for gun control and most users seek gun control content. The philosophical question is if a search engine return what people want or should return return what is most biased for truth and informative.
      - atypicaluser 8y ago
        > I think you, and others, seem to ignore that deep learning bots produce what the data [and the rules it uses] contains. The bot uses data, sure, but like the humans it also-- * Chooses what data it uses based on... * The rules that make up its processing which in turn are... * Influenced by the peculiarities of its creator(s). Those last two can't be emphasized enough. A subject matter expert, for example, will choose data differently from a layman, who will choose data differently from someone completely ignorant on the subject. Someone driven to keep certain data suppressed will choose data differently from someone driven to research the matter, who in turn will choose data differently than someone wholly disinterested in the topic. Unless a person builds a bot with a 'willingness' to question both its data and its own programming (and perhaps even its creator) to present the best linkage the web has to offer, all bots will be mere dummy proxies of the creator programming it.

gaius 8y ago

Search for "gun rights" in Google, and the Wikipedia feature box on the top-right of the results page is the Gun Control article. It is known that Google employees have the capability to skew search results politically, just not whether they do it in specific circumstances (of course it would be robustly denied) https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041 https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUKKCN1M1041 (For those that say “good” remember that tomorrow this could be used against you. I am certain it was used against Bernie for example)

forapurpose 8y ago
> I am certain it was used against Bernie for example That would be important if it were true. Can you back it up?
- gaius 8y ago
  Just a suspicion based on Eric Schmidt being so involved with Hillary’s campaign. But the link I posted shows that there are no technical barriers to doing it, and that doing it is openly discussed within Google
  - dagenix 8y ago
    You are certain? Or, are you suspicious? Those are pretty different statements. And it seems you lack evidence to back either one.

ehnto 8y ago

I'm not sure I could define it as intentional and nefarious but I definitely find Google search results to be markedly worse over the last few years. It used to be really competent at finding specialist/technical results but lately it's gotten more generic and less useful. It's possible that's actually the nature of content creation these days, with everyone hyper optimising to please the Google search algorithm. But it's resulting in a less useful web for me. Certainly a less interesting one. Same thing with Youtube, the algorithms seem to optimize for the lowest common denominator and all the interesting niche stuff is lost in thr noise. Some of the solution is to do a better job of actively searching for good content instead of waiting for the algorithms to recommend it. But that itself has gotten harder too. Finding good content curators is hard.

garyclarke27 8y ago
Agreed - Particularly infuriating, is Google’s habit of returning search results with many missing terms, implying that they know whats best for me- ignoring a large part of my precisly crafted search input. I know there is Verbatim option, but this is another slow step and does not work in combination with valuable time filter. Wish there was an option to always use Verbatim and more default time filters such as 3 months, 6 months.
- ehnto 8y ago
  Absolutely. That is one of my biggest pet peeves. There must be a threshold where it would rather give you well ranked but worse matching results over low-ranked but well matching results. That threshold seems to be too low hence the generic garbage results for really specific terms.
fetbaffe 8y ago
It has become harder & harder to find videos on YouTube you know exist. Feels like the algorithm i geared to find new content rather to find what I'm looking for.
- mfukar 8y ago

nadont8 8y ago

Search for "american inventors" if you want to have some laughs.

MrEfficiency 8y ago
wtf whyy EDIT: To clarify, why is that list so bad?
- nadont8 8y ago
  It's not organic; Google has editorialised it in a racist way.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Imagine you were searching for 'american basketball player' and the selected individuals were predominately white. And on top of this you had guys like let's say Mike Dunleavy Jr. placed ahead of Michael Jordan for no apparent reason. Do you think this would be appropriate?
DenisM 8y ago
Apparently this has been going on at least since 2016: http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-inventors/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...
tzs 8y ago
If you search for "United States inventors" you get the list you were probably expecting. Google seems to like to include results appropriate for common phrases if you include only part of the phrases. My guess is that the "american" in "american inventors" brings in results for "african american inventors" too.

nl 8y ago

Regarding the "Gun Rights" fact box, the different results Bing and Google use here looks to be the results of an edit war[1] over how the page should redirect. Judging by the text in the box, Google appears to be using a snapshot possibly around June 2018[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_rights&action... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid=847454893 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gun_control&oldid...

int_19h 8y ago
I don't see a redirect to "Gun Control" in the page history. It is currently a redirect to "Right to Keep and Bear Arms", yes; but before that, it was a disambiguation page that had a brief explanation of various meanings, and links to several other, more detailed pages. So if Google captured that, shouldn't it be linking to that disambiguation page? Even then, one could imagine that the Google could somehow detect that it is not a particularly informative page, and pick the most likely disambiguation link out of it. Logically speaking, that would be first link in the list. But before the page was changed to be a pure redirect, it had the following blurb at the very beginning: The term "'''Gun rights'''" may refer to: * The legal concept of the [[right to keep and bear arms]] * [[Gun control]], the set of laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms by civilians. ... So, why would the algorithm pick the second link, specifically? And why hasn't it re-indexed the page since? FWIW, I don't think this is the case of deliberate changing of search results. But I suspect that their algorithm is inadvertently picking up bias from somewhere else, and applying it here.
brightball 8y ago
Is there a good site out there to analyze "edit war" pages of wikipedia? I've always been curious of locked topics to see some type of analytics breakdown. The most hotly edited items are generally the things I'd most like to see surfaced.

fetbaffe 8y ago

Yes, I have noticed that google search result are much worse the past three months, even for non political stuff. Top ten results are usually from big media corporations.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

This will mostly depend on whether your geoip returns a blue swamp or a red swamp.

Const-me 8y ago

Also, google shows the "Right to keep and bear arms" wikipedia article on the second place, however it adds "Jump to Gun violence and the politics of the right to bear arms" link. When asked "gun rights", google added the link to the only section of the article discussing gun violence. They obviously manipulate their search results pushing political BS :-(

rb666 8y ago

Gun control = gun rights. Just a different, and more popular and common, way of looking at it.

partiallypro 8y ago
Perhaps in Europe, but not in the US. If someone is searching "gun rights" in the US, it is very unlikely they are wanting to know about gun control.

eudora 8y ago

I was searching for an exact phrase in quotes the other day, which happened to be close - but not the same - as a popularly monetisable phrase. The entire results were full of the other phrase and not the one I searched for. I kinda hate AI. (Because it's dumb. Do what I told you, not what you think I want)

eudora 8y ago

I wonder if you're in your own filter bubble. As in, if some full blown NRA guy searched gun rights, what would he get?

minitel 8y ago
Logged out of any Google account from a work IP address (not used for much personal searching) and I get the same result. Info cards are not influenced by your account's history as far as I know. They are purely programmed by a combination of bots and hand tweaked responses. The hand tweaked responses come from a combination of user complaints/requests and internal pushes by engineers.

scruffyherder 8y ago

I thought I'd try it.. https://imgur.com/a/7GHeVZM https://imgur.com/a/7GHeVZM 槍枝管制 "gun rights"的圖片搜尋結果槍支管制是指任何對定義、限制或限制擁有，生產或改裝，進口，運輸，銷售和／或使用槍械的法律，政策，實踐或提案。槍支管制的法律和政策在世界各地有很大的差異。有些國家，如英國和中華民國，擁有非常嚴格的槍支限制政策，而其他國家，如美國，有相對溫和的限制。槍支管制的支持者普遍認為，普遍民眾擁有槍支會導致危險性。維基百科 / Gun control Search results for "gun rights" Gun control refers to any law, policy, practice or proposal that defines, restricts or limits the possession, production or modification, import, transportation, sale and/or use of firearms. The laws and policies governing gun control vary widely around the world. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, have very strict gun restrictions, while others, such as the United States, have relatively modest restrictions. Proponents of gun control generally believe that the widespread possession of guns can be dangerous. Wikipedia

prawn 8y ago

Aren't these two statements a bit contradictory? e.g., the suggestion that they've editorialised "gun rights" to something (control) that would lead to less profitable results, but the statement that they doctor their setup to favour commercial enterprise?