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I understand that the term “unbiased” exists, and that this article was written promising a lack of political bias. I purposefully chose an anodyne example of “
by janalsncm 2y ago
I understand that the term “unbiased” exists, and that this article was written promising a lack of political bias. I purposefully chose an anodyne example of “cars” to illustrate that even in a context that’s not politically charged, promising “unbiased” results is a fool’s errand.
In particular, if you have any distribution of political opinion that is correlated with any other factor you consider in relevance calculations, there’s no way of avoiding accusations of bias. I’ll give two more examples.
If I search for “best baseball team” (or if you like, “mlb game today”) how many results should be from Red Sox fans? If I’m in Boston? If I’m in LA? There is obviously a desirable geographic bias to the query.
To take a more politically charged query, if I search for “Afghanistan war” there is a geographic bias (whether to show results for Soviet or American invasions depends somewhat on location), but also a temporal bias. Political support for American occupation decreased over time. So if your search engine favors recent results, it will have more negative sentiment than overall sentiment of all possible articles you may have shown.
The final point is that these are not systems which are easily interpretable. Aside from explicit filtering, it’s entirely possible to start from reasonable rules like timeliness, text matching, and location matching, but still end up with skewed results and be accused of bias, because they are biased, just not in the way people think.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoI'm not a sports fan, but if I search "best baseball team" I would expect to find the team with the most wins, or the best current set of players based on their historical stats, or the team most likely to win the current or next season. So maybe a time bias (want to know what team is best now, not 10 years ago), but not a geography bias. I want to avoid echo chambers. I don't want to be told the team closest to me is best just because it might make me feel happy.
- pickledoyster 2y agoThen why not search for "the baseball team with the most wins" or "best baseball team historically", "baseball team most likely to win in 2025", etc.? With a query like the one in your example, someone else might be completely justified in expecting to find the team with the best financials, the best little-league option for their child, etc. I believe such queries are a perfect case of GIGO, and the amount of effort spent on optimizing for them instead of giving users more agency is what's driving down both the experience (bad results) and usability (little to none operators and explicit filters) of search engines as tools.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago> With a query like the one in your example, someone else might be completely justified in expecting to find the team with the best financials, the best little-league option for their child, etc. They would be, yes. My point is don't optimize for emotions, optimize for most probable interpretation of the query, and then yes, if it can be misconstrued, give me options, and give me a boat load of filters. I've been using the time filter in Google recently, I didn't even realize they had it because it's so well hidden.
- pickledoyster 2y agoyes, sadly, hiding functions and ignoring search operators has been a trend for Google.