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There's a bit of mixing of correlation and causation here. Most reasonable people would consider Google to be an inferior search engine if it surfaced results

There's a bit of mixing of correlation and causation here. Most reasonable people would consider Google to be an inferior search engine if it surfaced results from the Daily Caller, Kos or Breitbart above those of NPR, BBC and the WSJ. Search engines therefore surface the more authoritative / linked to sources first. These smaller sites are trying to achieve through regulation a level of prominence that they can't get in the marketplace.

ryanmarsh 7y ago
Right, the assumption is that if Daily Caller, Kos, and Breitbart became more popular then Google would surface them as authoritative. First, there's a popular belief amongst their readership (for whatever reason) that this is not the case and that Google actively works against sites like these. Furthermore, if it doesn't currently work against these sites, it's taken for granted that if (for some reason) Zero Hedge became more popular than WSJ Google would work against it. Secondly, if it were the case that Google would surface Zero Hedge over WSJ purely because of popularity is that ok? Is that what should happen? If Google does want to curate rather than using a "blind" algorithm does that change the way it's regulated and what it's responsible for? I think this is something we haven't quite figured out as a free society. We recognize that an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people (please don't over index on who the quote is attributed to). Yes there are a multitude of media outlets on the internet which the citizenry can use to educate themselves. Are there moral hazards when the majority of the citizenry arrive at one or two doorsteps in-spite of the multitude of alternatives? What is the risk if what's served from that doorstep is detrimental to the republic?
- kristianc 7y ago
  > Yes there are a multitude of media outlets on the internet which the citizenry can use to educate themselves. Are there moral hazards when the majority of the citizenry arrive at one or two doorsteps in-spite of the multitude of alternatives? What is the risk if what's served from that doorstep is detrimental to the republic? As it turns out, we have figured a lot of this out. It turns out that a good way of deciding what is worth people's attention is to treat a link as a vote. We shouldn't be surprised or alarmed when that surfaces a few main choices, as most of everything is crap. However as happens in almost every sphere of life, there's a good chance that the good stuff rises to the top (that would be that meritocracy that right wingers say they're fond of). Outranking the BBC for news is hard - it should be. What its not for you to decide - even if you do suddenly start to decide to write in the style of John Stuart Mill - is that you like some ideas better than others and that you want to start forcing things on people that they neither want nor asked for in the name of 'balance'
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Unfortunately, that’s not a good system. It would be an okay system (the phrase “worst possible except for all the alternatives” refuses to leave my mind on this) except for the fairly major problem that links and clicks can be automated, turning that into a bidding war. Propaganda of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich… and whoever they want to manipulate. And that’s even without the problem that the people running the papers/channels are themselves both powerful and capable of having agendas that don’t need to be aligned with those of their readers. Unfortunately, “what is true (news|science|morality|politics|economics|history)?” is very much not a solved problem.
    - kristianc 7y ago
      > except for the fairly major problem that links and clicks can be automated, turning that into a bidding war. I mean no disrespect by this but I'm inclined to think Google knows more about the issue of link and click fraud than you do.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Oh indeed, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Most of what I know about it comes from their engineers explaining how they fight it — and that includes my awareness of how catastrophic it would be if they did nothing and only used the original PageRank algorithm without compensating for it.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Counting links isn’t a meritocracy, it’s a popularity contest. Those are not the same thing. There is a reason that publications in Nature aren’t decided by Reddit votes, and it’s not because nobody can figure out how to integrate the two. The question is: Is a simple popular majority a good way to decide what news all people should see? It’s a great way to see what the majority echo chamber wants to hear, but that’s not really a good way to have a well-informed population.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > Secondly, if it were the case that Google would surface Zero Hedge over WSJ purely because of popularity is that ok? Is that what should happen? Yes. Obviously discard any SEO trickery. But if Zero Hedge is being cited more frequently, being chosen from search results more frequently, etc. then people have found it more helpful, and presumably other people would find the same. The whole premise of democracy (both the form of literal governance and the general philosophy) is that most of the people are correct most of the time. There exist other algorithms to combine human opinion, but they are wrong more often. Yes, most political pundits were wrong in predicting Clinton wound win in 2016. But I don't think it makes sense for Google to try and "manually" curate that.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Zero Hedge is a conspiracy blog published by anonymous authors. If people are clicking it in search results more frequently than actual news sites, that is in itself a problem.
    - justinmchase 7y ago
      What's an "actual news site" though? Major news outlets also regularly publish unfounded conspiracy theories (e.g. russia gate, WMD in Iraq, etc). The question is do you like yours flavored with anonymity or government funding? The point is that its not a search engines job to make that determination. People will decide for themselves and whatever the algorithm is, it should seek to remove the personal biases of the implementers and be blind. It should seek to serve the asker not change the asker. I feel like there could be a term, similar to "uncanny valley" where instead of detecting the in-human traits of something attempting to appear human we see bias in something attempting to be unbiased.
      - pvg 7y ago
        If you pre-suppose that news orgs are the same thing as conspiracy-mongers, you're going to have a hard time defining news sites as distinct from not-news sites. Most people don't start from that assumption and find the distinction useful, though.
- zaroth 7y ago
  > First, there's a popular belief amongst their readership (for whatever reason) that this is not the case and that Google actively works against sites like these. Breitbart in particular has run a long series of articles featuring leaked discussions from within Google where there are calls internally to remove or penalize Breitbart from organic listings, and deactivate their AdWords. They also discussed censorship on Facebook and Twitter amoung others. They run these under the umbrella “Masters of the Universe”: https://www.breitbart.com/masters-of-the-universe/ https://www.breitbart.com/masters-of-the-universe/
  - tptacek 7y ago
    They should do so. Breitbart isn't really a news site; if you wanted to dignify it, you'd compare it to Salon, which also doesn't belong in news summaries on Google.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      That wasn’t meant as an endorsement of Breitbart, to be sure. But parent raised the question of why people think this, and trust in media is a crucial point these days. Breitbart articles discussing Google censorship aren’t radical alt-right preaching. You can strongly believe that Google is making informed and conscientious decisions about censorship and rankings on their platform, and then read a different perspective on Breitbart to understand the other viewpoint. For example, in response to a question as to why when doing an image search on Google for “idiot” that Trump is the result (Currently he is 3 of the top 10 results. I mean, that is pretty funny actually) Sundar Pichai swore to Congress that Google does not manually intervene on any search result. Is that really credible? Maybe it’s a little hard to quantify what is a “real” news site anymore. Some people assume this is self-evident, but I am skeptical of everything I read. I sometimes find it entertaining to see what slant opinionated news sites will put on a story and compare it against the MSM.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        Real news sites post reported news. Breitbart digests news from real news sites. It's essentially a glamorized group blog, like Daily Kos. In fact, Breitbart is basically the right-wing version of Talking Points Memo, another group blog dressed up to look like a news site. Fox News is a sharply right-wing news site with a very strong editorial bias. I don't like Fox News, but I can't argue that it doesn't belong in the same bracket as CNN. Breitbart does not.
briwisbgb 7y ago
Yeah, Infowars may have the best coverage of a story, but that doesn’t do Google any good if it’s abrasive to profitable users’ expectations. By pushing good content down they can keep the users happy who 1) click ads, 2) shop more online, 3) subscribe / engage on platforms. The algorithms aren’t designed to find the best content, but that which aligns with Google’s goals (eg profit).
- kristianc 7y ago
  > The algorithms aren’t designed to find the best content, but that which aligns with Google’s goals (eg profit). And it so turns out that finding and surfacing the best content aligns well with the number of people who link to that content, which creates a great product for Google, which aligns with Google making a profit. You can't argue from a hypothetical where Infowars offers the best content, as Infowars doesn't offer the best content. If Infowars started offering better content than BBC, people would start linking to Infowars, and Infowars would rise in the search results. It's not Google's fault that a lot of Infowars content is low quality that people don't link to.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > And it so turns out that finding and surfacing the best content aligns well with the number of people who link to that content, which creates a great product for Google, which aligns with Google making a profit. The lines between Google "watching the market" and Google "commanding the market" are very blurry. If you don't get featured, nobody knows that you exist, nobody links to you, you don't get featured. Otoh: if you get featured, everybody sees you, people link to you, you get featured.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      This is a hugely important point. Google’s algorithm was genius at the size they were 10 years ago. Today Google is the tail that wags the dog and a purely popularity based algorithm is more concerning. However it’s also unquestionably true that Google results are not purely a popularity contest, and then the question becomes whose hand is on the tiller and which way is it steering? Clearly in this case it is steering towards mainstream media outlets which all slant a particular way. This does not have a small impact.
colordrops 7y ago
It seems though that they now surface "authoritative" sites over clear user intent in their search. For instance, search for "has Infowars ever been correct" on Google and then Duck Duck Go. For Google, you will see results that have nothing to do with the clear intent of the query, such as Wikipedia and mainstream news articles trashing Infowars. For Duck, you will get several results that actually answer the question. Since Google pioneered natural language processing for search queries, and these sorts of queries worked fine years ago, the only conclusion is that Google is actively burying certain results to manipulate the narrative. Why does their natural language search break all of a sudden when I want to find out something that is unpopular?
- rat87 7y ago
  Infowars won't actually accuratley answer of it's been correct so Google is following the users clear intent and giving them good answers
- agentdrtran 7y ago
  Doing that search gave me a Quora link as the first result, and then two links to infowars...which is an awful result.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    I'm seeing 2 out of 10 links as Infowars, links #3 and #4. The top two are Quora. mediamatters and rational wiki are examples of other front page results. They all directly address the query. Why exactly are they "awful"?
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      You seem in your answers to be prioritizing "direct answer to the question regardless of reliability" rather than "useful information about the question's subject." I suppose there's an argument to be made for that, but it's an argument that leads to prioritizing a search engine that will return the answer "orange pinstripe" to the question "what is the color of the sky" over a search engine that returns a scientific article about how sunlight behaves in atmosphere. (In any case, this all seems a bit orthogonal to whether Google is right or wrong to prioritize widely-recognized news outlets over smaller ones when it surfaces searches for news articles, doesn't it?)
malandrew 7y ago
> Most reasonable people -> Most ideologically progressive people Not that there is anything wrong with being ideologically progressive, but both sides of the political spectrum view themselves as reasonable because they are starting from different set of axioms.
- jpfed 7y ago
  WSJ is not progressive.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    WSJ historically has not been, but these days it's a bit of a mixed bag.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Kos is not right-wing.
  - justinmchase 7y ago
    It is if you go far enough to the left
vibrato 7y ago
What about the fact that if you search: "The donald reddit" then reddit.com/r/the_donald is not in the first page (or 10) of results? edit: I do see it first if I search "donald reddit"
- detaro 7y ago
  Top result for me.
  - grandmczeb 7y ago
    Interesting, for me the top result is r/TheDonald. The trump supporting one (r/the_donald) doesn’t show up at all.
- giarc 7y ago
  You have to remember your search results are personalized for you.
TomMckenny 7y ago
And it's not remotely attempting to use legislation to surface all sites. It's a push for a narrow set of extreme sites who are extremely unpopular because they are conspicuously fact free misdirection toward scapegoating. They naturally fall behind reality based sites. Nor is it unusual for that group to try to use the force of law to elevate, legitimize and eventually mandate particular propaganda. The only variation is which countries go down this route and which don't.
fethu 7y ago
You are claiming “reasonable people”, which is a legal term, and googles algorithm, which is a computing term, are the marketplace. Neither of these are the market. The whole idea of googles algorithmic approach is wrong and it’s real purpose is to let google manipulate what people see, rather than letting them choose for themselves. People should be able to dictate to google how to find information, but instead, google wants to dictate to them how to find information. As has been mentioned already in this thread, and can also be seen on YouTube, google actively overrides users own specified preferences. A clear example on YouTube is the “trending” section. It is basically googles “we want to present a Disney like site, with a focus on mainstream media”. This goes against the actual marketplace. Actual videos that are trending but not advertiser friendly or whatever else, will not be shown in this section. Google wants everyone to see “authoritative” sites, because it is a propaganda model. The ministries of truth, even though they are clearly not even valid news sites. Most of what cnn puts out is politically-motivated propaganda. I still remember “the stock market will crash if trump is elected”. Hah..
tus87 7y ago
This is totally fake. Google has to MANIPULATE it's search results to put NPR first. The smaller sites are linked to more often but Google doesn't want you to see them for political reasons. The smaller sites don't want regulation - they want and end to manipulation and censorship. And most reasonable conservative people see NPR,BBC at least as garbage extremist left wing outlet, and would not want to see them at all.
- hnra 7y ago
  Reasonable conservative people see NPR and BBC as extremist left wing?
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    I am told I am annonyingly centrist. While not 'extremist' in the casual sense, I very much see a hard bias to the left that often seem unfettered by the facts by NPR. BBC seems to have its own agenda, however not quite 'left' by american standards. Read any recent Brexit coverage to see the worrying doublespeak that seems to be de rigour today nevertheless. Before you ask, I honestly am unaware of any news org without bias, although many have enough writers and/or a soft hand to obscure systemic detection by casual readers. Everyone who works hard to publish something, by proxy seems to have an agenda beyond factual reporting. If they well-meaning or not seems almost a bygone conclusion. Information has never been more weaponized.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > The smaller sites are linked to more often but Google doesn't want you to see them for political reasons. Google has never claimed to order search results by the number of links to them. Otherwise the Flash installer (or whatnot) would be at the top of every search results page. :)
  - tus87 7y ago
    Err...that's the exact basis of the original google search algorithm, and what made it so good. You should read up on it, you might learn something.
rjf72 7y ago
You're setting up a straw man. Google's 'favorite' site was CNN, ending up as 11% of all impressions, nearly twice as high as any other single site. Quantitatively CNN has seen their viewership plunging to the point that they now have well under a million primetime viewers. [1] Their results on Alexa [2] show a similar online trend, and that is very much in spite of the fact that Google is constantly 'recommending' them which provides is providing a major inorganic boost to their traffic. [1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2018/05/30/fox-news-steamrolls-cable-news-competition-with-big-win-in-may-ratings/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2018/05/30/fox-news... [2] - https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com
- Elidrake24 7y ago
  It's almost as if there is a discrepancy between an audience that uses television as their primary news source as opposed to searching for it via Google. As if they might not be the same people
  - rjf72 7y ago
    And you are also straw manning. > "Their results on Alexa [2] show a similar online trend, and that is very much in spite of the fact that Google is constantly 'recommending' them which is providing a major inorganic boost to their traffic."

ryanmarsh 7y ago

Right, the assumption is that if Daily Caller, Kos, and Breitbart became more popular then Google would surface them as authoritative. First, there's a popular belief amongst their readership (for whatever reason) that this is not the case and that Google actively works against sites like these. Furthermore, if it doesn't currently work against these sites, it's taken for granted that if (for some reason) Zero Hedge became more popular than WSJ Google would work against it. Secondly, if it were the case that Google would surface Zero Hedge over WSJ purely because of popularity is that ok? Is that what should happen? If Google does want to curate rather than using a "blind" algorithm does that change the way it's regulated and what it's responsible for? I think this is something we haven't quite figured out as a free society. We recognize that an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people (please don't over index on who the quote is attributed to). Yes there are a multitude of media outlets on the internet which the citizenry can use to educate themselves. Are there moral hazards when the majority of the citizenry arrive at one or two doorsteps in-spite of the multitude of alternatives? What is the risk if what's served from that doorstep is detrimental to the republic?

kristianc 7y ago
> Yes there are a multitude of media outlets on the internet which the citizenry can use to educate themselves. Are there moral hazards when the majority of the citizenry arrive at one or two doorsteps in-spite of the multitude of alternatives? What is the risk if what's served from that doorstep is detrimental to the republic? As it turns out, we have figured a lot of this out. It turns out that a good way of deciding what is worth people's attention is to treat a link as a vote. We shouldn't be surprised or alarmed when that surfaces a few main choices, as most of everything is crap. However as happens in almost every sphere of life, there's a good chance that the good stuff rises to the top (that would be that meritocracy that right wingers say they're fond of). Outranking the BBC for news is hard - it should be. What its not for you to decide - even if you do suddenly start to decide to write in the style of John Stuart Mill - is that you like some ideas better than others and that you want to start forcing things on people that they neither want nor asked for in the name of 'balance'
- ben_w 7y ago
  Unfortunately, that’s not a good system. It would be an okay system (the phrase “worst possible except for all the alternatives” refuses to leave my mind on this) except for the fairly major problem that links and clicks can be automated, turning that into a bidding war. Propaganda of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich… and whoever they want to manipulate. And that’s even without the problem that the people running the papers/channels are themselves both powerful and capable of having agendas that don’t need to be aligned with those of their readers. Unfortunately, “what is true (news|science|morality|politics|economics|history)?” is very much not a solved problem.
  - kristianc 7y ago
    > except for the fairly major problem that links and clicks can be automated, turning that into a bidding war. I mean no disrespect by this but I'm inclined to think Google knows more about the issue of link and click fraud than you do.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Oh indeed, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Most of what I know about it comes from their engineers explaining how they fight it — and that includes my awareness of how catastrophic it would be if they did nothing and only used the original PageRank algorithm without compensating for it.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Counting links isn’t a meritocracy, it’s a popularity contest. Those are not the same thing. There is a reason that publications in Nature aren’t decided by Reddit votes, and it’s not because nobody can figure out how to integrate the two. The question is: Is a simple popular majority a good way to decide what news all people should see? It’s a great way to see what the majority echo chamber wants to hear, but that’s not really a good way to have a well-informed population.
paulddraper 7y ago
> Secondly, if it were the case that Google would surface Zero Hedge over WSJ purely because of popularity is that ok? Is that what should happen? Yes. Obviously discard any SEO trickery. But if Zero Hedge is being cited more frequently, being chosen from search results more frequently, etc. then people have found it more helpful, and presumably other people would find the same. The whole premise of democracy (both the form of literal governance and the general philosophy) is that most of the people are correct most of the time. There exist other algorithms to combine human opinion, but they are wrong more often. Yes, most political pundits were wrong in predicting Clinton wound win in 2016. But I don't think it makes sense for Google to try and "manually" curate that.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Zero Hedge is a conspiracy blog published by anonymous authors. If people are clicking it in search results more frequently than actual news sites, that is in itself a problem.
  - justinmchase 7y ago
    What's an "actual news site" though? Major news outlets also regularly publish unfounded conspiracy theories (e.g. russia gate, WMD in Iraq, etc). The question is do you like yours flavored with anonymity or government funding? The point is that its not a search engines job to make that determination. People will decide for themselves and whatever the algorithm is, it should seek to remove the personal biases of the implementers and be blind. It should seek to serve the asker not change the asker. I feel like there could be a term, similar to "uncanny valley" where instead of detecting the in-human traits of something attempting to appear human we see bias in something attempting to be unbiased.
    - pvg 7y ago
      If you pre-suppose that news orgs are the same thing as conspiracy-mongers, you're going to have a hard time defining news sites as distinct from not-news sites. Most people don't start from that assumption and find the distinction useful, though.
zaroth 7y ago
> First, there's a popular belief amongst their readership (for whatever reason) that this is not the case and that Google actively works against sites like these. Breitbart in particular has run a long series of articles featuring leaked discussions from within Google where there are calls internally to remove or penalize Breitbart from organic listings, and deactivate their AdWords. They also discussed censorship on Facebook and Twitter amoung others. They run these under the umbrella “Masters of the Universe”: https://www.breitbart.com/masters-of-the-universe/ https://www.breitbart.com/masters-of-the-universe/
- tptacek 7y ago
  They should do so. Breitbart isn't really a news site; if you wanted to dignify it, you'd compare it to Salon, which also doesn't belong in news summaries on Google.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    That wasn’t meant as an endorsement of Breitbart, to be sure. But parent raised the question of why people think this, and trust in media is a crucial point these days. Breitbart articles discussing Google censorship aren’t radical alt-right preaching. You can strongly believe that Google is making informed and conscientious decisions about censorship and rankings on their platform, and then read a different perspective on Breitbart to understand the other viewpoint. For example, in response to a question as to why when doing an image search on Google for “idiot” that Trump is the result (Currently he is 3 of the top 10 results. I mean, that is pretty funny actually) Sundar Pichai swore to Congress that Google does not manually intervene on any search result. Is that really credible? Maybe it’s a little hard to quantify what is a “real” news site anymore. Some people assume this is self-evident, but I am skeptical of everything I read. I sometimes find it entertaining to see what slant opinionated news sites will put on a story and compare it against the MSM.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      Real news sites post reported news. Breitbart digests news from real news sites. It's essentially a glamorized group blog, like Daily Kos. In fact, Breitbart is basically the right-wing version of Talking Points Memo, another group blog dressed up to look like a news site. Fox News is a sharply right-wing news site with a very strong editorial bias. I don't like Fox News, but I can't argue that it doesn't belong in the same bracket as CNN. Breitbart does not.

briwisbgb 7y ago

Yeah, Infowars may have the best coverage of a story, but that doesn’t do Google any good if it’s abrasive to profitable users’ expectations. By pushing good content down they can keep the users happy who 1) click ads, 2) shop more online, 3) subscribe / engage on platforms. The algorithms aren’t designed to find the best content, but that which aligns with Google’s goals (eg profit).

kristianc 7y ago
> The algorithms aren’t designed to find the best content, but that which aligns with Google’s goals (eg profit). And it so turns out that finding and surfacing the best content aligns well with the number of people who link to that content, which creates a great product for Google, which aligns with Google making a profit. You can't argue from a hypothetical where Infowars offers the best content, as Infowars doesn't offer the best content. If Infowars started offering better content than BBC, people would start linking to Infowars, and Infowars would rise in the search results. It's not Google's fault that a lot of Infowars content is low quality that people don't link to.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > And it so turns out that finding and surfacing the best content aligns well with the number of people who link to that content, which creates a great product for Google, which aligns with Google making a profit. The lines between Google "watching the market" and Google "commanding the market" are very blurry. If you don't get featured, nobody knows that you exist, nobody links to you, you don't get featured. Otoh: if you get featured, everybody sees you, people link to you, you get featured.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    This is a hugely important point. Google’s algorithm was genius at the size they were 10 years ago. Today Google is the tail that wags the dog and a purely popularity based algorithm is more concerning. However it’s also unquestionably true that Google results are not purely a popularity contest, and then the question becomes whose hand is on the tiller and which way is it steering? Clearly in this case it is steering towards mainstream media outlets which all slant a particular way. This does not have a small impact.

colordrops 7y ago

It seems though that they now surface "authoritative" sites over clear user intent in their search. For instance, search for "has Infowars ever been correct" on Google and then Duck Duck Go. For Google, you will see results that have nothing to do with the clear intent of the query, such as Wikipedia and mainstream news articles trashing Infowars. For Duck, you will get several results that actually answer the question. Since Google pioneered natural language processing for search queries, and these sorts of queries worked fine years ago, the only conclusion is that Google is actively burying certain results to manipulate the narrative. Why does their natural language search break all of a sudden when I want to find out something that is unpopular?

rat87 7y ago
Infowars won't actually accuratley answer of it's been correct so Google is following the users clear intent and giving them good answers
agentdrtran 7y ago
Doing that search gave me a Quora link as the first result, and then two links to infowars...which is an awful result.
- colordrops 7y ago
  I'm seeing 2 out of 10 links as Infowars, links #3 and #4. The top two are Quora. mediamatters and rational wiki are examples of other front page results. They all directly address the query. Why exactly are they "awful"?
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    You seem in your answers to be prioritizing "direct answer to the question regardless of reliability" rather than "useful information about the question's subject." I suppose there's an argument to be made for that, but it's an argument that leads to prioritizing a search engine that will return the answer "orange pinstripe" to the question "what is the color of the sky" over a search engine that returns a scientific article about how sunlight behaves in atmosphere. (In any case, this all seems a bit orthogonal to whether Google is right or wrong to prioritize widely-recognized news outlets over smaller ones when it surfaces searches for news articles, doesn't it?)

malandrew 7y ago

> Most reasonable people -> Most ideologically progressive people Not that there is anything wrong with being ideologically progressive, but both sides of the political spectrum view themselves as reasonable because they are starting from different set of axioms.

jpfed 7y ago
WSJ is not progressive.
- malandrew 7y ago
  WSJ historically has not been, but these days it's a bit of a mixed bag.
rootusrootus 7y ago
Kos is not right-wing.
- justinmchase 7y ago
  It is if you go far enough to the left

vibrato 7y ago

What about the fact that if you search: "The donald reddit" then reddit.com/r/the_donald is not in the first page (or 10) of results? edit: I do see it first if I search "donald reddit"

detaro 7y ago
Top result for me.
- grandmczeb 7y ago
  Interesting, for me the top result is r/TheDonald. The trump supporting one (r/the_donald) doesn’t show up at all.
giarc 7y ago
You have to remember your search results are personalized for you.

TomMckenny 7y ago

And it's not remotely attempting to use legislation to surface all sites. It's a push for a narrow set of extreme sites who are extremely unpopular because they are conspicuously fact free misdirection toward scapegoating. They naturally fall behind reality based sites. Nor is it unusual for that group to try to use the force of law to elevate, legitimize and eventually mandate particular propaganda. The only variation is which countries go down this route and which don't.

fethu 7y ago

You are claiming “reasonable people”, which is a legal term, and googles algorithm, which is a computing term, are the marketplace. Neither of these are the market. The whole idea of googles algorithmic approach is wrong and it’s real purpose is to let google manipulate what people see, rather than letting them choose for themselves. People should be able to dictate to google how to find information, but instead, google wants to dictate to them how to find information. As has been mentioned already in this thread, and can also be seen on YouTube, google actively overrides users own specified preferences. A clear example on YouTube is the “trending” section. It is basically googles “we want to present a Disney like site, with a focus on mainstream media”. This goes against the actual marketplace. Actual videos that are trending but not advertiser friendly or whatever else, will not be shown in this section. Google wants everyone to see “authoritative” sites, because it is a propaganda model. The ministries of truth, even though they are clearly not even valid news sites. Most of what cnn puts out is politically-motivated propaganda. I still remember “the stock market will crash if trump is elected”. Hah..

tus87 7y ago

This is totally fake. Google has to MANIPULATE it's search results to put NPR first. The smaller sites are linked to more often but Google doesn't want you to see them for political reasons. The smaller sites don't want regulation - they want and end to manipulation and censorship. And most reasonable conservative people see NPR,BBC at least as garbage extremist left wing outlet, and would not want to see them at all.

hnra 7y ago
Reasonable conservative people see NPR and BBC as extremist left wing?
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  I am told I am annonyingly centrist. While not 'extremist' in the casual sense, I very much see a hard bias to the left that often seem unfettered by the facts by NPR. BBC seems to have its own agenda, however not quite 'left' by american standards. Read any recent Brexit coverage to see the worrying doublespeak that seems to be de rigour today nevertheless. Before you ask, I honestly am unaware of any news org without bias, although many have enough writers and/or a soft hand to obscure systemic detection by casual readers. Everyone who works hard to publish something, by proxy seems to have an agenda beyond factual reporting. If they well-meaning or not seems almost a bygone conclusion. Information has never been more weaponized.
duskwuff 7y ago
> The smaller sites are linked to more often but Google doesn't want you to see them for political reasons. Google has never claimed to order search results by the number of links to them. Otherwise the Flash installer (or whatnot) would be at the top of every search results page. :)
- tus87 7y ago
  Err...that's the exact basis of the original google search algorithm, and what made it so good. You should read up on it, you might learn something.

rjf72 7y ago

You're setting up a straw man. Google's 'favorite' site was CNN, ending up as 11% of all impressions, nearly twice as high as any other single site. Quantitatively CNN has seen their viewership plunging to the point that they now have well under a million primetime viewers. [1] Their results on Alexa [2] show a similar online trend, and that is very much in spite of the fact that Google is constantly 'recommending' them which provides is providing a major inorganic boost to their traffic. [1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2018/05/30/fox-news-steamrolls-cable-news-competition-with-big-win-in-may-ratings/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2018/05/30/fox-news... [2] - https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com

Elidrake24 7y ago
It's almost as if there is a discrepancy between an audience that uses television as their primary news source as opposed to searching for it via Google. As if they might not be the same people
- rjf72 7y ago
  And you are also straw manning. > "Their results on Alexa [2] show a similar online trend, and that is very much in spite of the fact that Google is constantly 'recommending' them which is providing a major inorganic boost to their traffic."