5 ms·

I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth". Moving from an era of media oligopoly into the internet age was very hopeful IMO, and no

I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth". Moving from an era of media oligopoly into the internet age was very hopeful IMO, and now it's bottlenecked by even fewer companies.

that_guy_iain 5y ago
> I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth". Well, OP was the one that defined the info they were looking for as misinformation as far as I can tell. And then I stated I could find offical sources for politcs and COVID. These are not Google's opinions but simply a fact. WHO, RKI, CDC, etc are all offical sources of information for COVID, etc. This is not them define what is true or false but merely providing me with the offical information so I can educate myself.
- yonaguska 5y ago
  Nope, I'm not looking for misinformation. I said that Google's attempts at combatting misinformation often hinders my searches. Oftentimes, I'll be looking for a pre-print or something from a scientific journal that is tangentially related to Covid, but Google will basically spam the official CDC, WHO, and news articles urging people to get vaccinated. For any political news, sometimes I'll be looking to verify a story I remember reading from a few days or weeks past, or I'm looking to do my own fact check of a claim...and I'll find that several mainstream news sources will have republished the same story(not the one I'm looking for), unrelated to whatever claim I'm checking- similar only in sharing a keyword or person of interest- and Google rewards this behavior by pushing the trusted organizations to the top of my searches. It's like forum sliding, except it's search. Then using ddg or brave, the story that I'm looking for will often be the first result. It's a very insidious antipattern, because it's hard to even know if your perception is being actively screwed with.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Trying to look specifically for research papers on regular Google search is always a bad idea, covid or not, which is why https://scholar.google.com https://scholar.google.com is a thing.
  - crocodiletears 5y ago
    This is what drove me off the platform. Searching Bing (primary), Yandex (rarely turns up gold), and DDG (generally useless for the news) each seems to mitigate these issues. But you really shouldn't have to check three different search engines to not feel like you're being denied information. And yes, Yandex is a Russian operation, something to keep in mind.

that_guy_iain 5y ago

> I read this as "Google is perfectly capable of determining the truth". Well, OP was the one that defined the info they were looking for as misinformation as far as I can tell. And then I stated I could find offical sources for politcs and COVID. These are not Google's opinions but simply a fact. WHO, RKI, CDC, etc are all offical sources of information for COVID, etc. This is not them define what is true or false but merely providing me with the offical information so I can educate myself.

yonaguska 5y ago
Nope, I'm not looking for misinformation. I said that Google's attempts at combatting misinformation often hinders my searches. Oftentimes, I'll be looking for a pre-print or something from a scientific journal that is tangentially related to Covid, but Google will basically spam the official CDC, WHO, and news articles urging people to get vaccinated. For any political news, sometimes I'll be looking to verify a story I remember reading from a few days or weeks past, or I'm looking to do my own fact check of a claim...and I'll find that several mainstream news sources will have republished the same story(not the one I'm looking for), unrelated to whatever claim I'm checking- similar only in sharing a keyword or person of interest- and Google rewards this behavior by pushing the trusted organizations to the top of my searches. It's like forum sliding, except it's search. Then using ddg or brave, the story that I'm looking for will often be the first result. It's a very insidious antipattern, because it's hard to even know if your perception is being actively screwed with.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Trying to look specifically for research papers on regular Google search is always a bad idea, covid or not, which is why https://scholar.google.com https://scholar.google.com is a thing.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  This is what drove me off the platform. Searching Bing (primary), Yandex (rarely turns up gold), and DDG (generally useless for the news) each seems to mitigate these issues. But you really shouldn't have to check three different search engines to not feel like you're being denied information. And yes, Yandex is a Russian operation, something to keep in mind.