SourceFed - Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary?
39 replies, posted
If Google's algorithm filters out the defamatory then:
1) That's a terrible feature for a search engine, since it's intentionally obfuscating information which is exactly what a search engine is not supposed to do.
2) It's very impressive tech, considering that it's not as simple as just marking 'racist' or 'criminal' since they've got things like "david cameron pig" showing less inflammatory suggestions than with Bing and Yahoo!
It seems intentional since it'd be pretty impressive for the algorithm to identify a scandal and actively obfuscate suggestions based on it. Plus that'd be a very, very shitty feature for a search engine to have anyway, so I really doubt it.
[QUOTE=Killer900;50487552]You missed the point[/QUOTE]
The point was that some journalists reckon Google is manipulating search results. My point is that the way these journalists are testing this theory is flawed. There are so many things that go on behind the scenes of a Google search it's not even worth comparing results. It's bad enough searching different people and trying to measure how "negative" the results are, but when you throw in an extra term, or even start throwing in half-completed terms that you pick out of the blue then expecting to draw some conclusions based on what the autocomplete recommends - that's meaningless.
[B]It's like putting the Google self-driving car offroad to see how well it handles it[/B]. You put one on a gravel path surrounded by a river on either side, and you put another on a dirt track surrounded by grass. You find that on the gravel road, the car veers into the water. On the dirt track, it manages to keep on-track.
Then you run the same test with the Tesla and find that it handles both just fine.
THEN, through the power of journalistic science, you conclude that Google hates humans and wants to drown them. The reality is, of course, there's more to it than any of us know. Maybe the Google car sees water as an extension of gravel. Maybe even Tesla has been pre-programmed to cheat and work perfectly in both cases! Search engines aren't straightforward, otherwise AltaVista would still be around.
I remember hearing that Google recently tweaked it's searching algorithms in order to prioritize factual content.
Here it is:
[URL]https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-truth-algo-5-facts-know/129103/[/URL]:
[QUOTE]According to the title of an article in New Scientist, “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links.” The idea is to identify key facts in a web page and score them for their accuracy by assigning a trust score.
The algorithm researchers are careful to note in the paper that the algorithm does not penalize sites for lack of facts. The study reveals that it could discover relevant web pages with low PageRank that would otherwise be overlooked by current technology.
In current algorithms, links are a signal of popularity that implies authority in a particular topic. But popularity does not always mean a web page contains accurate information. A good example may be celebrity gossip websites. Getting past simple popularity signals and creating an algorithm that can understand what a website is about is a direction that search technology is moving in today, underpinned by research in artificial intelligence.[/QUOTE]
Any bit of web content that says something defamatory about anyone could be (unintentionally) placed further down in the list because the website it comes from is given a low 'truth score' due to containing a lot of unverifiable information. As the article points out, this isn't because they are deliberately hiding content that isn't factually correct, it's because they allow slightly less popular content to appear on the list if it has a higher score.
This means information from the washingpost.com is more likely to show up at the top than REAL-NEWS-THAT-THE-GUBERMENT-DOESNT-WANT-TO-SEE-OBAMA-IS-A-LIZARD-MAN.com
If you understand how the algorithm works, they didn't program it to support anybody and it definitely isn't nefarious and isn't (intentionally) biased towards any particular party, if anything it's (slightly) biased to the truth, whatever that happens to be.
It's a duck:
[QUOTE=Google spokesperson]Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how autocomplete works. Our autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name. More generally, our autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms."[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/10/11906912/google-denies-autocomplete-search-manipulation-hillary-clinton[/url]
Personally I don't think it's necessarily the right way to go about things, but it doesn't appear that there's any direct meddling involved. I mean, try typing "Pablo Escobar" and see what comes up.
[video=youtube;d6ki2QKVa_8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6ki2QKVa_8[/video]
They did a follow up btw. Might help clear up some issues.
"we found something that raised some red flags, so we did some research"
No you didn't. You didn't do anything that even vaguely resembles research. You just threw together a bench of nonsense and called it "research" or "evidence" and posted it as clickbait. And it worked, loads of people bought it without thinking. It's the same kind of stunt that led people to stop vaccinating their kids.
Then they post some "explanation" video in some attempt to relieve themselves of blame, whilst simultaneously advertising their own channel.
snip, misread.
[QUOTE=Rossy167;50495830][video=youtube;d6ki2QKVa_8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6ki2QKVa_8[/video]
They did a follow up btw. Might help clear up some issues.[/QUOTE]
"we did some research"
barely. the research that was presented was done in a completely backwards way and only focused on clinton rather than the rest of the candidates and missed out on what google actually does, even though this spurred from that one wired article.
"the results of which were worth sharing"
again, the results would've been worth sharing if they weren't so skewed in one favor. instead, much like a bar graph that's gone completely ballistic with how it displays it's data, you've created a bunch of false media off of misleading data that sparked a debate and yet failed to understand how much of an impact publishing a news article that presents misleading information would have on our society.
this is borderline slander towards the names of google, alphabet, and clinton's party. it's unjust to any of these parties, and this followup video does nothing but again toot SF's horn without fixing any of the issues regarding the former video, and continues to confuse the public about how search engine results work, and what companies have biases to whom. though I will admit google needs to restructure how they approach search auto complete ([URL="http://i.imgur.com/eSsaKio.png"]sometimes it doesn't work the way it should[/URL]), but this is not the way to do it.
this does everything opposite to what google set out to do from the beginning with this system, to offer a flat ground for people to research on without having any hands touch it for fear of bias. and it's absolutely ridiculous they would want to defend such poor writing.
[editline]12th June 2016[/editline]
the most common rebuttal for what i've said is "but Donald Trump racist works on google" but so does
[t]http://i.imgur.com/imiKYFc.png[/t]
so it's just a word they didn't remove from their system. lord almighty
It's Google proprietary search engine, they can do as they please.
But, as manipulation of masses, this is an issue.
If you check some major keyword aggregators that take the keyword data from Google's data servers, you will spot what Sourcefed actually mentioned in the video: plenty of people, either worried or curious, research about the candidates, for good mentions or crap (mistakes, public persona fails).
What Sourcefed failed to mention is the fact that Google manages to also 'censor' some YT video from the search feed.
Google with any bad keyword and check the video tab: if you see any of the mocking videos targeting Hillary, post a screenshot back, you won't find any. You only find the official statements (no vines, no comic video or rants on the issue) but if you search in YT itself, you will find all the keyword 'groups' obmitted in the Google search.
I swapped some proxies around: Google US vs Google UK. The UK search is a bit lenient, tolerable, while the US version is censored, which is pathetic.
And since Google recently agreed with the TPP, it looks like they're malleable to outside 'imput', preferential for more $$$ and coverage.
Sad!
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