5 ms·

I work at Google on ranking algorithms for Search. I'm aware of everything that controls how web pages are ranked. If I ever encountered a system that was desig

I work at Google on ranking algorithms for Search. I'm aware of everything that controls how web pages are ranked. If I ever encountered a system that was designed to alter the results for political reasons, I would resign.

word-reader 7y ago
Just as an example: a controversial political figure's popular website is buried on page 5 of Google results (underneath a mountain of criticism) when you search for his name, despite being in the top 3 results of page 1 for all of Qwant, DDG, Bing, Mojeek, and Yandex. Obviously, the website is being downranked for being full of "conspiracy theories and fake news" (I wouldn't completely disagree that it is). But who decided all this? Is this not "political"?
- moultano 7y ago
  I'd be happy to pass it along to debug if you have a specific query in mind. In the cases of this I've seen in the past, there's been a specific actionable bug that we were able to fix. (Lots of other search engines use each other as backends, so don't be too surprised when they return consistent results.)
  - word-reader 7y ago
    I think DDG and Qwant basically use Bing as a backend, potentially augmenting with their own crawlers. Yandex and Mojeek use all their own stuff, as far as I can tell. The query is "alex jones". At least put the garbage website at the bottom of page 1 where most people who aren't already looking for it still won't click it, page 5 is just lacking in subtlety.
    - moultano 7y ago
      Thanks, I'll pass it along.
  - bhk 7y ago
    Infowars being buried so deeply in the "Alex Jones" results is highly suspicious. How can Google's results be so ineffective compared to other search engines? The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to delivering actual results for that query while Google's appear curated. During the election some fuss was made over auto-completion for "Hillary" vs. "Trump" searches ... apparently embarrassing for Google because these were soon "fixed". I could go on and on. Do you at least admit that Google restricts searches for the Christchurch shooting video? Maybe your definition of "political reasons" is very narrow. I don't actually have a problem with burying Alex Jones. The only reason I have enough interest to engage in this discussion is that Google continues to deny these things.
    - moultano 7y ago
      Google does not curate web results, ever. The results for [pelosi drunk] are different certainly, but in what sense are DDG's better? Google has a policy about "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals" in autocomplete https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en which is often why you sometimes may not see the queries in autocomplete that you expect. It also has a policy about "violent or gory predictions" so it wouldn't surprise me if you aren't seeing autocomplete suggesting the Christchurch video, if that's what you mean.
      - oska 7y ago
        > Google does not curate web results, ever. Where is the transparency or independent third party oversight to back up this statement? Or do we just have to take it on faith?
      - bhk 7y ago
        I'm sure search results are not curated in the sense that a stock answer is provided for a given query, but I would expect that filtering and ranking of search results involves lists that are curated -- for example, "offensive" words or "disparaging terms", etc.. Since you work on search at Google, maybe you could explain how typing "hillary clinton cri" stopped suggesting the common search term "hillary clinton crimes" and instead suggested "hillary clinton criminal reform". https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=hillary%20clinton%20crimes,hillary%20clinton%20criminal%20reform https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... Apparently "crimes" a disparaging term when associated with "hillary clinton", but not when associated with, say, "jared kushner"?
- perl4ever 7y ago
  What if it's downranked because most of the people who search for him aren't looking for his site, but for commentary about him? I mean, maybe this sounds implausible to you, but I think you should be conscious of whether you're discarding it as a possibility and why.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
geargrinder 7y ago
Does your claim include the keyword "abortion"? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/abortions-near-me-google-search-results-anti-pro-life-groups-promote https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/abortions-near...
- geargrinder 7y ago
  There are complaints on both sides of this issue: http://christianresearchnetwork.org/2019/01/16/the-smoking-gun-google-manipulated-youtube-search-results-for-abortion-maxine-waters-david-hogg/ http://christianresearchnetwork.org/2019/01/16/the-smoking-g...
repolfx 7y ago
That's a very strong claim you're making there. Do you not consider mixins from News and YouTube to be "web pages"? I've also worked at Google. Things that are clearly the case: 1. There are blacklists of certain political query completions on web search, like "hillary clinton emails". 2. There is a controversial query blacklist on YouTube with political content. Go look at the file in google3 if you really think the screenshots are faked: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked-youtube-doc-appears-to-show-election-interference/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked... 3. Google News is quite clearly blacklisting Breitbart from ranking: it's indexed but in many years of using Google News I've never once seen it be selected. The Guardian, on the other hand, routinely makes it into nearly every selected story. The writing is clearly on the wall for you. Whether organic web index results are reranked politically or not, and for what it's worth I believe you for that specific subset of the system, other teams in the company that didn't inherit the same culture are doing politically motivated things with the full knowledge and acceptance of the executives. It's only a matter of time before web search falls to that new culture too. And when it happens you probably won't even realise it. Some team you've never heard of will quietly adjust a machine learning model in subtle ways you'll never detect, to "debias" it in order to yield "better outcomes".
- moultano 7y ago
  1. There are not blacklists of "political" query completions, as I explained extensively in this other thread. The policy is to not show "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with names" in autocomplete. This applies uniformly, and there's nothing political about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20530414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20530414 2. I can't speak to YouTube's policies, but there isn't any evidence there that this was designed to favor either side, rather than just to avoid the issue entirely. 3. The guidelines that Google uses to assess the quality of websites are public. 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...
DanZacn 7y ago
Ryan, your twitter is full of bias and fake news to destroy conservatives. Google is known to shadow-ban conservative content. #StopTheBias
einpoklum 7y ago
You sir, are a liar: https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i... That is by Google's VP of Search, Ben Gomes. That's your boss, supposedly. So, Human evaluators flag content in general ("low quality"); and particularly, remove or down-rate content which Google determines to be "fake news", as Gomes puts it. and some of the results: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html Consortium News, Global Research, Counterpunch, Truthdig, Russia Today, Truepublica, World Socialist Website and others - censored. Not entirely, but to a great extent.
- moultano 7y ago
  Those ratings are used to evaluate the search system, not to change it directly.

word-reader 7y ago

Just as an example: a controversial political figure's popular website is buried on page 5 of Google results (underneath a mountain of criticism) when you search for his name, despite being in the top 3 results of page 1 for all of Qwant, DDG, Bing, Mojeek, and Yandex. Obviously, the website is being downranked for being full of "conspiracy theories and fake news" (I wouldn't completely disagree that it is). But who decided all this? Is this not "political"?

moultano 7y ago
I'd be happy to pass it along to debug if you have a specific query in mind. In the cases of this I've seen in the past, there's been a specific actionable bug that we were able to fix. (Lots of other search engines use each other as backends, so don't be too surprised when they return consistent results.)
- word-reader 7y ago
  I think DDG and Qwant basically use Bing as a backend, potentially augmenting with their own crawlers. Yandex and Mojeek use all their own stuff, as far as I can tell. The query is "alex jones". At least put the garbage website at the bottom of page 1 where most people who aren't already looking for it still won't click it, page 5 is just lacking in subtlety.
  - moultano 7y ago
    Thanks, I'll pass it along.
- bhk 7y ago
  Infowars being buried so deeply in the "Alex Jones" results is highly suspicious. How can Google's results be so ineffective compared to other search engines? The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to delivering actual results for that query while Google's appear curated. During the election some fuss was made over auto-completion for "Hillary" vs. "Trump" searches ... apparently embarrassing for Google because these were soon "fixed". I could go on and on. Do you at least admit that Google restricts searches for the Christchurch shooting video? Maybe your definition of "political reasons" is very narrow. I don't actually have a problem with burying Alex Jones. The only reason I have enough interest to engage in this discussion is that Google continues to deny these things.
  - moultano 7y ago
    Google does not curate web results, ever. The results for [pelosi drunk] are different certainly, but in what sense are DDG's better? Google has a policy about "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals" in autocomplete https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en which is often why you sometimes may not see the queries in autocomplete that you expect. It also has a policy about "violent or gory predictions" so it wouldn't surprise me if you aren't seeing autocomplete suggesting the Christchurch video, if that's what you mean.
    - oska 7y ago
      > Google does not curate web results, ever. Where is the transparency or independent third party oversight to back up this statement? Or do we just have to take it on faith?
    - bhk 7y ago
      I'm sure search results are not curated in the sense that a stock answer is provided for a given query, but I would expect that filtering and ranking of search results involves lists that are curated -- for example, "offensive" words or "disparaging terms", etc.. Since you work on search at Google, maybe you could explain how typing "hillary clinton cri" stopped suggesting the common search term "hillary clinton crimes" and instead suggested "hillary clinton criminal reform". https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=hillary%20clinton%20crimes,hillary%20clinton%20criminal%20reform https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... Apparently "crimes" a disparaging term when associated with "hillary clinton", but not when associated with, say, "jared kushner"?
perl4ever 7y ago
What if it's downranked because most of the people who search for him aren't looking for his site, but for commentary about him? I mean, maybe this sounds implausible to you, but I think you should be conscious of whether you're discarding it as a possibility and why.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

geargrinder 7y ago

Does your claim include the keyword "abortion"? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/abortions-near-me-google-search-results-anti-pro-life-groups-promote https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/abortions-near...

geargrinder 7y ago
There are complaints on both sides of this issue: http://christianresearchnetwork.org/2019/01/16/the-smoking-gun-google-manipulated-youtube-search-results-for-abortion-maxine-waters-david-hogg/ http://christianresearchnetwork.org/2019/01/16/the-smoking-g...

repolfx 7y ago

That's a very strong claim you're making there. Do you not consider mixins from News and YouTube to be "web pages"? I've also worked at Google. Things that are clearly the case: 1. There are blacklists of certain political query completions on web search, like "hillary clinton emails". 2. There is a controversial query blacklist on YouTube with political content. Go look at the file in google3 if you really think the screenshots are faked: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked-youtube-doc-appears-to-show-election-interference/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked... 3. Google News is quite clearly blacklisting Breitbart from ranking: it's indexed but in many years of using Google News I've never once seen it be selected. The Guardian, on the other hand, routinely makes it into nearly every selected story. The writing is clearly on the wall for you. Whether organic web index results are reranked politically or not, and for what it's worth I believe you for that specific subset of the system, other teams in the company that didn't inherit the same culture are doing politically motivated things with the full knowledge and acceptance of the executives. It's only a matter of time before web search falls to that new culture too. And when it happens you probably won't even realise it. Some team you've never heard of will quietly adjust a machine learning model in subtle ways you'll never detect, to "debias" it in order to yield "better outcomes".

moultano 7y ago
1. There are not blacklists of "political" query completions, as I explained extensively in this other thread. The policy is to not show "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with names" in autocomplete. This applies uniformly, and there's nothing political about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20530414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20530414 2. I can't speak to YouTube's policies, but there isn't any evidence there that this was designed to favor either side, rather than just to avoid the issue entirely. 3. The guidelines that Google uses to assess the quality of websites are public. 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...

DanZacn 7y ago

Ryan, your twitter is full of bias and fake news to destroy conservatives. Google is known to shadow-ban conservative content. #StopTheBias

einpoklum 7y ago

You sir, are a liar: https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i... That is by Google's VP of Search, Ben Gomes. That's your boss, supposedly. So, Human evaluators flag content in general ("low quality"); and particularly, remove or down-rate content which Google determines to be "fake news", as Gomes puts it. and some of the results: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html Consortium News, Global Research, Counterpunch, Truthdig, Russia Today, Truepublica, World Socialist Website and others - censored. Not entirely, but to a great extent.

moultano 7y ago
Those ratings are used to evaluate the search system, not to change it directly.