Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen
The world’s most influential information-gateway — GOOGLE Search — has recently made the decision to abandon its long-standing primary corporate policies: 1) “Don’t Be Evil” and 2) Provide internet search results based upon neutral algorithms, not human judgment; unbiased and objective.
Some may object to the charge that they have abandoned their oft-repeated mantra “Don’t Be Evil” — but to be clear, this has always meant, as Eric Schmidt (Executive Director of Google at the time) stated in a Wired profile in 2003, “Evil,” he said, “is what Sergey says is evil” (referring to Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google together with Larry Page).
As for the second point,
“As Stanford’s Terry Winograd, Page and Brin’s former professor and a consultant on Gmail, explains to Ken Auletta, “The idea that somebody at Google could know better than the consumer what’s good for the consumer is not forbidden.” He describes his former students’ attitude as “a form of arrogance: ‘We know better.’” …..
“[Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin designed Google to avoid human judgment in rating the relevance of web pages. Recounting Google’s original design, Steven Levy describes the founders’ opinion that “having a human being determine the ratings was out of the question,” not just because “it was inherently impractical,” but also because “humans were unreliable. Only algorithms — well drawn, efficiently executed, and based on sound data — could deliver unbiased results.”
— Alex White, in “Google.gov”
In Alex White’s long discussion of the links and affinity between the Obama administration and Google executives, he notes “The common theme [as expressed by Obama and Google execs] is that we [the general public] make wrong decisions not because the world is inherently complex but because most people are self-interested and dumb — except for the self-anointed enlighteners, that is.” Like Obama, Google has appointed itself to be The Great Enlightener.
In a conference at MIT earlier this year, Obama said that tech companies such as Google “are shaping our culture in powerful ways. And the most powerful way in which that culture is being shaped right now is the balkanization of our public conversation,” contributing to the nation’s fragmentation — “. . . essentially we now have entirely different realities that are being created, with not just different opinions but now different facts —different sources, different people who are considered authoritative. It’s — since we’re at M.I.T., to throw out a big word — it’s epistemological. It’s a baseline issue.”
Let’s dive into that statement just a bit to make a point. President Obama said “…different facts —different sources, different people who are considered authoritative.”. What he says here is correct — it is a matter of which facts, what sources and whose expert opinion. There is not only one fact or one set of facts about any complex topic affecting society today. [ I wrote about this in the essay What’s Wrong With Alternative Facts?] Obama acknowledges that Google (and other technology companies) “are shaping our culture in powerful ways….” contributing to “the balkanization of our public conversation” and the nation’s fragmentation. I will point out, needlessly, that is a bad thing.
Bal·kan·ize [ Balkanized, Balkanization ]
To divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or groups.
What exactly has Google done?
Google has decided, under the false flag of fighting “fake news” to “think of itself as a genuine public good in a manner calling upon it to give users not only the results they want but the results that Google thinks they need, the results that informed consumers and democratic citizens ought to have”. “Google, that is, has long aspired not merely to provide people the information they ask for but to guide them toward informed choices about what information they’re seeking. Put more simply, Google aims to give people not just the information they do want but the information Google thinks they should want. As we will see, the potential political ramifications of this aspiration are broad and profound.” [quotes in paragraphs above from Google.gov.]
I would add, there are also profound social and scientific ramifications as well.
According to The Guardian, Ben Gomes, vice-president of engineering, Google Search, said in a blogpost in 2017: “We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content … “
What they have done appears to be a public good. They’ve moved “authoritative sources” to the top search results. The question we need to ask is: “How does this play out in the Real World?” In the real world it means that the worldview, the political bias, the social preferences, the positions taken in various ideological and scientific controversies — as decided by top Google Executives — have been virtually hard-coded into Google’s search algorithms. No longer is Google returning “unbiased and objective results”. Google search returns now, at the top of search results, only what Google’s executives think you should be able to find, only what they want you to see, only what they think all “right-thinking” people (like themselves, of course) would want. Google has created a reality in which search results reflect, exactly, the opinions and views held by top Google executives on important societal issues. One side of each issue will dominate the first few pages of searches on these important issues.
Amanda Ripley of Solutions Journalism Network, recently wrote “Once we get drawn in (to a polarized issue), the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others,” …. “The lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict: complicate the narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the odds that your work will matter — particularly if it is about a polarizing issue. When people encounter complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information. They listen, in other words.” Attempts to simplify complex issues by exposing the public to only one side of an issue leads to more, not less, conflict and Obama’s “balkanization of our public conversation”.
As far back as September last year, the New York Times was reporting on Google’s apparent tampering: “Accusations that Google has tampered with search results are not uncommon and date back to the earliest days of its search engine. But they are taking on new life amid concerns that technology behemoths are directly — or indirectly — censoring controversial subjects in their response to concerns over so-called fake news and the 2016 presidential election.”
How many issues?
We don’t know yet — but Climate Change results have been tampered with in a glaringly obvious manner — all web sites even slightly contrarian have been “de-ranked” and “demoted” apparently as “low-quality” (read instead — “containing Google-unacceptable points-of-view”) and are browser-pages down the list, if they appear at all.
Suspected tampering includes, but is not limited to,: Abortion, Gun Control, climate change/global warming, US Illegal immigration, Gender issues, feral cats (an tiny issue for which Google was dinged in the press), health and sugar…these were found with a very quick check. It will be a major undertaking requiring a massive Citizen Science project to determine just how many, and which, controversial topics have been tampered with, topics into which Google has injected their own executive’s human judgement on which ideas, which opinions and which facts should be considered authoritative and which should be actively suppressed by “de-ranking” and “demoting”. Once the extent of the damage is known, it will take a broad-based social movement to get Google to take its fingers off the scales and let the Internet decide for itself.
A recent New York Times article, titled “The Case Against Google”, quipped “Google has succeeded where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide. ….. …When does a mega-company’s behavior become so brazen that it violates the law?”
Just this week, actually. The New York Times carried the story “E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case”. This case was not about tampering with Search Results — this case was about Google “abusing its power in the mobile phone market”.
“Google has used Android as a vehicle to cement the dominance of its search engine,” said Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s antitrust chief. “These practices have denied rivals the chance to innovate and compete on the merits. They have denied European consumers the benefits of effective competition in the important mobile sphere.”
The European Union fined $ 5.1 billion (4.34 billion euros) in this case. Last June, the EU fined Google “$2.7 billion for unfairly favoring some of its own services over those of rivals.”
“Google’s search engine has played a decisive role in determining what most of us read, use and purchase online,” said Shivaun Raff, a co-founder of Foundem, a British comparison-shopping site that was the first company to file a complaint against Google. “Left unchecked, there are few limits to this gatekeeper power.””
For a full version of Raff’s saga, see here.
Yes, Google dominates the Search engine field. By how much?
The charts above show that Google Search, worldwide, has over 75% of the total search traffic market share and over 90% of the mobile search traffic share. These figures are distorted — Google is banned in China, thus searches there by necessity shift to the Chinese-language-only Baidu. For rest-of-world figures, add Baidu’s share to Google’s share for a clearer picture.
Note very well, please: there is very little to be gained by comparing search results between the available search engines. Where search engines are not owned outright by Google, many/most depend on ”Google Ranking” as part of their own search algorithms, thus Google’s “de-ranking” of a web site or a whole social viewpoint affects all of them. Microsoft’s bing has long been known to “sneak a peek” at Google rankings and include them in its search algorithm. Yahoo! has a deal to use Microsoft bing’s output in its search results (“Bing will continue to provide the underlying non-paid search results and technology for Yahoo.“) So it reads like this: Google tampers with its algorithm, bing peeks at the Google results and quasi-mirrors them, Yahoo! uses bing’s results. The remaining big English-language player is Ask.com, who’s market share is so small it doesn’t even make the chart. They license someone else’s search results for general web searches, but don’t disclose who that is.
Questions for discussion:
Is it important that Google has tampered with it’s search algorithm on social, political, and scientific issues?
Is it socially significant that Google has tampered with it’s search algorithm on social, political, and scientific issues?
Is it politically important that Google has tampered with it’s search algorithm on social, political, and scientific issues?
Is it important to Science and Science Education that Google is tampered with it’s search algorithm on social, political, and scientific issues?
What are the implications for Freedom of Expression? for Free Flow of Information? for Democratic Values? for the Ethos of the World Wide Web?
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Attribution: The featured image is adapted in part from a book cover for the Orwell title “1984” designed by nusentinsaino.deviantart.com.
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Author’s Note:
This is a Commentary, meaning that it contains my personal opinions about a topic being raised in the press about Google’s behavior and changes it has made to its search algorithm over the last year or so.
I strongly suggest reading as many of the linked news articles as you have time for…I consider this to be a very important and significant issue for all users of the World Wide Web.
This is a follow-up to my recent piece: “NEWS FLASH: World’s Library Sabotaged”. The next installment in this series will cover the specific effects and implications for the topic of Climate Science — and why it matters for WUWT.
I expect that many will disagree with my viewpoints expressed above — that’s good, it means I have hit on something that readers can engage with.
Let me end with a conclusion by Adam White (his piece linked above) “… the pressure for Google to adopt ever more expansive interpretations of “exploitative,” “authoritative,” and “what people are looking for” will doubtless rise.” The pressure did rise and we are seeing the results above….Google as Arbiter of Truth, Google as Big Brother Knows Best.
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LINKS IN THIS ESSAY: [added 22 July 5:28 pm ET]
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/googlegov
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/19/news-flash-worlds-library-sabotaged/
https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/technology/eu-google-fine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/google-eu-android-fine.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/technology/google-cats-owls.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html
https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-the-narratives-b91ea06ddf63
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/25/google-launches-major-offensive-against-fake-news
https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/26/whats-wrong-with-alternative-facts/
https://www.wired.com/2003/01/google-10/
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I like it when things suck — at least to some people — that’s when I can do the best research in the shortest time. The greatest challenge these days are the too-obvious results like corporate name matches, and especially, returning clickbait pages that rank highly if your topic is not too popular. The Internet has become weighed down with pages without conversations in them. And yet one of the best ways to learn about something is to listen to people discussing it.
My suck trick is to add ‘sucks’ … both as two unquoted words, then in a quoted phrase. Ex,
tesla – the bare word tesla brings up the who’s who of official sources, positive reviews (because they’re more often linked to) and variations, page after page. Interesting reading maybe but you’ll be led down the garden path because 🙂 this IS the garden path.
tesla sucks – the two bare words. Still on the garden path, though we’ve taken another branch into corporately sponsored mega-unpopularity. But it’s still dominated by major media players. You wouldn’t catch many reporters actually saying anything as crude as “Tesla sucks”. That’s an advantage…
… because it allows us to search “tesla sucks” – the “quoted phrase” uncloaks pages where everyday humans are speaking. As opposed to fancy frilly kind. We have left the garden path and it’s not all negative, in fact, strongly expressed negative sentiment brings defenders out of the woodwork with their best arguments, and these people often have more interesting and accurate things to say than any defensive press release.
Limit your “X sucks” phrase to a website where people routinely gather an argue and you hit solid gold. “tesla sucks” on Reddit gives an amazing variety of topic. And if you know Reddit, for negative sentiment you can expect the staunchest defenders.
You can also catch a glimpse of Google’s bizarre and somewhat disturbing index purging. Oddly, “tesla sucks” at slashdot.org brings up only TWO result for me, from June+July 2018. For a site that has hosted hundreds if not thousands of Tesla topics… Is Google sending Slashdot down into the memory hole?
Google’s great, but it also sucks.
In my professional opinion gaggle is worse than Hitler and Stalin and Satan combined. The earth has never experienced an evil so pervasive
I think I’m out. Thanks for the fish.
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=CohTW-XtOeTM6ATp_4vIDQ&q=much+ado+about+nothing&oq=much+ado+about+nothing&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
This is really a discussion about the hypothesis that Google is a neutral player.
A filter can be a valid addition to any system to reduce dross.
However, did the silicon valley players contribute funds evenly to each political grouping if not then they are disqualified and I think that is what happened.
I do remember Obama very early on in a speech stating that if you earn a million dollars per year and if he is president you will pay more tax.
So what actually happened he received very substantial support from the valley and they literally were able to continue paying in round terms zero tax. Where I live this is a kick back and earns jail.
They are not politically neutral and they should not be the “values keepers” of the world.
How does anyone fix this, that is a very big problem.
Bill T ==> You’ve got this “they should not be the “values keepers” of the world.” exactly right.
Set your “home page” as “Start Page” at Cnet and you won’t have these problems….Ad Block Plus helps too..Unless you have Win !0 (then your screwed !)
I’ve said this elsewhere: a lot of this seeming control of search results has to do with the laziness of the people who are doing the searches themselves. I do very little random net searching, because I know exactly what I want to find.
If I find that a book I’m interested in buying has a cheaper price by a direct order to the publisher, where do you think would I go? I’m certainly not being blocked from finding what I want to find. I have never been bounced out of a site that was low-rated on Giggle’s rankings.
If anyone can prove incontrovertibly that Giggles is blocking access to certain areas of information, then what are you going to do besides complain?
If the EU is fining (twice now) Giggles a truckload of money for using algorithms that provide only what The They think web surfers should find, then why is there such a wealth of pornography of ALL kinds available on Giggles instead of more wholesome stuff??? I think they should be sued just for providing a venue to porn producers and traffickers for that evil crap.
Just glad right now that I have only a modest need for the net’s usefulness, and a nice, fat library of real books in a spare bedroom, not the tripe that passes for information on the internet.
Hubris as inflated as the cloud that Giggles’ operates in has a load-bearing limit, at which point, it will likely implode when someone is unable to find the bank where her accounts are held because Giggles decided it’s not a necessity and should be somewhere at the bottom of the search list ranks. The inflated egos of the people who run Giggles have a load limit, too, you know.
Sara,
Laziness or ignorance? “Ignorance” is just a lack of knowledge. Not everyone knows how to fine tune a search. They’re not “lazy”, they just don’t know.
“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” Will Rogers
For them, Google is happy to steer them, rather than just show them, what they wanted to find.
“Not everyone knows how to fine tune a search. They’re not “lazy”, they just don’t know… Google is happy to steer them, rather than just show them, what they wanted to find.”
How To Google Like A Pro! Top 10 Google Search Tips & Tricks …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0DQfwc72PM
Wot came up for me when searching on “how to search on google”. Note especially Tip 10.
“why is there such a wealth of pornography of ALL kinds available on Giggles instead of more wholesome stuff???”
Turn on Safe Settings in your search preferences.
Sara et al. ==> “Pornography” is NOT available on Google Search. Google search does not do content, it does links — it is a searchable index (more or less….) Can one search for pornography on Google? I don’t know, never tried but I suppose it is possible — the content is not Google’s in any case.
Kip,
” but Climate Change results have been tampered with in a glaringly obvious manner”
You say this over and over, but never give an actual worked demonstration. Let’s see it! I gave my own example here, responding to something that was claimed to show tampering.
But it comes back to the old – one man’s tampering a is another’s guidance. Search is all about organising output in a way that users want. And people like what Google produces. That is why Google is at the top. Your complaints just sound like Yogi Berra – no-one eats there because it is too crowded. The fact is that if you don’t like the way Google orders things, you just have to find another engine that does. And if you can’t find one, you have to make one.
Nick, It’s been a while since I commented here, but something has definitely changed. I’m agreeing with you! Whoda thunkit?
Nick ==> You have, I’m afraid, simply missed the whole point. “Guidance?” … you actually want “guidance” from Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, etc? From unseen Google employees? You WANT their worldview imposed on the index to the world wide web? You are happy to abandon your own intellectual free-will to Google?
Intellectual masochism — why not just have your brains sucked out?
Read the background material linked to see why people serious about the Internet are very concerned by this issue.
Er Kip… You want me to believe that The Environmental Defense Fund, The Daily Intelligencer and TakePart you claim are unfairly elevated to page one of a Google search when that is patently untrue. Sounds to me like you want your worldview imposed on the rest of us.
Dude srsly?????
Kip
I just did a search on “failed climate predictions”.
Pages and pages on every article you can think of on the subject, some specifically mentioning WUWT.
I’m sorry, but for many reasons other than this, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.
It’s simply not in Google’s interests to get involved in censoring any but the most offensive of sites, even then, offensive is a matter of culture. And I’m sure they know that.
Investors in Google are not interested in political imperatives, it restricts their route to profit. Advertisers are not interested in political bias, they sell to anyone. If Google sided with socialism as is frequently maintained, they would likely alienate the vast majority of their devoutly Capitalist investors.
Is there a clandestine management group at the top of Google with a socialist imperative? Hardly likely as Google is well invested in Capitalism and knows what side it’s bread is buttered on. Drive a socialist agenda and Google risks being nationalised, or banned altogether as a subversive influence were socialism to swamp us.
Are they squeaky clean? Of course not. What organisation is?
Money is a shadow, a shadow of power. Power, authority over others is the goal, whatever it is labeled.
Enter burning books or hiding them and Google.
Gunga Din
Power is a route to money. Money itself isn’t the problem.
Hard work is a route to money also, but it’s a long way around. Power is frequently perceived as the shortcut but brings with it many more problems than money itself.
A little story from my past. I worked in communities that included the inherited wealthy, the working wealthy, the working middle and lower class, and the inherited poor.
The most agreeable of those to deal with was the inherited wealthy, who had never known a moment in their lives when they couldn’t afford something, and would never be in that position in their lifetime because they had money, were used to it, and valued what it could do for them and others. They were also thrifty to the point of misery.
The other, equally agreeable folk were the inherited poor. They struggled from day to day to feed themselves. They barely knew what money was and freely admitted that had they any, they would probably just spend it. They never had money, nor was there a prospect of them getting any, and they were resigned to that.
The problem people were us lot in between. Money grabbing spendthrifts who used money to exhibit social standing, with houses and cars on credit, clothes on the never never and holidays in exotic rabbit hutch resorts that were as cheap as the chips they served. Aggressive, rude, defensive and thoroughly unpleasant people.
Money is meaningless unless it provokes a positive virtue, and that can be with, or without money. The inherited poor would surrender their last penny to help someone in need, a family member, a friend, a work colleague. Which is probably why they had no money.
The inherited wealthy would find a means of helping people on a larger scale, perhaps not risking their own money, but instead establishing a charity, or organising a fund of some description, even a church fete. They usually contributed handsomely.
The inherited wealthy frequently had power they never overtly wielded and, almost unwittingly, and unbidden, engendered respect. The inherited poor had nothing but self-respect.
So from my perspective, money isn’t the problem, the desire for money is the problem. The shortcut to money, being power, is more of a problem.
Trump has more money than he can ever spend. So why would he take a job that pays a lousy wage and causes him more problems than he ever had building hotels?
I would suggest that it’s his desire to do something for his community. He is, perhaps, the most peaceful POTUS ever, because he would rather see people wealthy through hard work than by killing people. I may live to eat my words, but so far he’s done pretty well.
HotScot ==> The issue is with the hard-coding of “authoritative” labels to sites whose view points — social, political, scientific — are “approved by Google”. And the downgrading, demotion, de-ranking of sites that contain ideas contrary to the worldview of Google execs.
On some topics, you might be pleased with the result. On others, you will be offended and angry.
If you know what you are looking for and how to find it, this will not have as much of an adverse effect. Detailed search string like your example still return sensible results….imagine that you didn’t know or think that there was any such thing as “failed climate predictions” and were a high school student — you look up “climate predictions” — what’da’ya get? Not a single mention of the known fact that long-term climate prediction is not possible (even the IPCC acknowledges this — even if they then go on to make lots of “projections”). You will see no mention of “failed” climate predictions at all……
It will stultify students of topics — where they do not yet know what to look for, they will only find what Google thinks they should know.
Kip:
Not a single mention of the known fact that long-term climate prediction is not possible (even the IPCC acknowledges this — even if they then go on to make lots of “projections”). You will see no mention of “failed” climate predictions at all……
I get your complaint here, but all for the sake of one missed word, “failed,” the results are satisfactory.
I wonder if you’re not asking Google’s algorithm to do what climate modeler’s are asking their software to do, i.e., the impossible. How can Google know what’s in the mind of the individual conducting their search? Shouldn’t some responsibility be placed upon the individual conducting the search?
If I search for “Ford” when I’m looking for information about Mustangs, I’m probably going to have to wade through some unwanted info before I get to where I wanted to go. I get what you’re saying, i.e., if I didn’t know anything about Mustangs I might never know anything about them, but still…
And given the fact that when the correct term(s) are input into the search box the results are satisfactory seems to lessen (at least in my opinion) the idea of nefarious purposes here. Not that I wouldn’t put it past Google to do such a thing, however, the evidence would be much stronger if one couldn’t get satisfactory results ever, no matter what you did.
There are gigabytes of forum discussions regarding how to effectively search with Google to attain the desired results.
Kip
Sorry mate, that doesn’t wash.
First off, unless one has sight of Google’s algorithms, how can you possibly maintain they are abusing them. This is like saying I suspect CO2 causes AGW, but I’m not sure, and there’s no proof, but I’ll build a case anyway.
There’s a whistleblower desperate to make a buck somewhere in the ranks but to my limited knowledge, none have presented themselves. Why not? In every walk of life, whistleblowers are popping up. Just not at Google it seems.
And I think you do our high school students, and their parents a disservice. OK, there are bozo kids, like there are bozo parents of bozo kids, and they don’t think further than the end of their nose. They probably won’t bother even thinking about climate change, or GMO, or vaccinations, or the Milankovitch cycle, or the meaning of life. But the world is occupied by many intelligent parents who talk to their kids about stuff. They teach them how to work things out. The bozo parents have always been, and will always be with us. Google doesn’t make that any worse, in fact, it probably makes it better as the kids have access to information on a second by second basis you and I could not have conceived in our youth.
What you also ignore is that our kids have never known anything but an internet era. Whilst we old codgers are still making sense of it, it’s an intrinsic part of their lives, like colour TV, pirate radio and CB radio were part of ours.
Our parents thought TV would rot our brains. Remember when they used to fret about us longing about all day watching TV? Then video recorders came along, well, that was just the worst, more time in front of the telly. Kids were banned, fights were had, relationships fractured, “You’re the worst Dad in the world EVAH” complete with stomping feet and slamming doors. That was you and I. And now we’re in our late middle ages doing what our Dad’s did.
Our children are far savvier than you give them credit for. Their lives will be shaped by their experiences on, and offline, just as ours were. They’ll smell an online rat faster than we will. Unfortunately, they’ll figure out how to get the answers they want, just like we sceptics do, and the alarmists as well.
And our kids talk to each other, one kid’s parent is a climate sceptic (substitute any subject you want here) another kid’s parents are alarmists. They’ll do the same as us, go scurrying off to their mobile phones to find evidence to win the debate. The debate will deepen, they have to do more research to create the winning argument, they search Google in more creative ways, they must win the debate, that’s imperative.
That’s the intelligence of humanity. It’s why the machines will never prevail, nor the operators of those machines. The intelligent kids in China don’t bother about government restrictions, they subvert the establishment by using proxies etc. Or at least the clever ones do. The bozo kids just trundle along, as they always have, as they always will, along with their bozo parents.
What you are presenting here is the version of the future you have designed. You are modelling behaviour and anticipating results. Guess what that reminds me of.
And whilst I accept it’s fair warning, a bit like Orwell’s 1984 (I was so pissed off when the socialist movement didn’t swamp us so I could hide in the woods and fight it out!) It’s not a prediction.
Like Amazon, Starbuck and Microsoft, Google has a certain commercial lifespan. It will die off or at least withdraw, the way IBM did when Bill Gates pitched up. Someone will crush Google in a similar fashion, more likely Google will fragment. Indeed, the process has already started as the parent company is Alphabet now, and Google is a bit part player already.
In ten or twenty years time, there will be no more Google. Our children will see to that.
“It’s simply not in Google’s interests to get involved in censoring any but the most offensive of sites, even then, offensive is a matter of culture. And I’m sure they know that. Investors in Google are not interested in political imperatives, ….”
That focus is too narrow. Google and social media sites are under strong pressure from “the good and the great” among European politicians like Merkel to make it harder for nonconforming, populist-type sites to spread what they regard as misinformation and mistrust. Fines are openly threatened, and laws have been passed in Germany making sites liable for what appears on them or even (I’m unsure) what they link to. It is in google’s interest not to be liable, not to have governments angry at them, and not to anger the “clerisy” of mainstream opinion leaders.
Roger Knights
Google and the rest are conforming to the laws of the countries they operate in. That’s not political.
And quite rightly, they are under pressure to stop violent fascist adherents like ‘the far right’ (which has nothing to do with the far right. I’m far right politically but I don’t identify with swastika’s, uniforms, masks and mob violence, that’s fascism) and ISIS.
I mentioned the following example before: I struggled to find any reference to atmospheric water vapour when I was first interested in climate change. I couldn’t find any reference to it on any reputable site when I queried the composition of earth’s atmosphere. That had nothing to do with Google, it was entirely absent from almost every website either by their unwitting neglect, or willful exclusion.
Nor do I believe the ‘Google algorithm’ is a single entity. It must conform to every law, in every country, in every language it straddles. The task of implementing all those variations must be mammoth. Are all these manifestations of the algorithm being constantly tweaked? I suspect so. Is error involved, or even individual bias included somewhere along the line I also suspect so.
And the search landscape is constantly shifting with minute by minute global events. Do a search for the Boxing Day Tsunami on the Christmas Day before, and you would have found nothing. 24 hours later every search engine across the planet was swamped (no pun intended) with every reference imaginable. The Brexit referendum momentarily changed the dynamic, as did Trump’s election, nothing is sacred in the world of search, nor do I believe it’s controllable because no one can anticipate global events. Trump might do something tomorrow that endears him to the entire western world. If Google favours the anti-Trump sentiment as exists now, how would they explain that to their newly converted Trump supporters? The fact is, no one knows what’s in the future so second guessing it is a fool’s errand, especially when investors demand an explanation.
And as I said elsewhere, investors have an inherent distrust of political and social interference, it dilutes their profits. They don’t care who buys their products. Alienate the right by favouring left-wing rhetoric and Google cuts its advertisers market by 50%. A crude description but I think you’ll get my drift.
If investors and advertisers start to look for alternative opportunities because Google is reducing their market by internal political bias, that gives someone the opportunity to set up their own search engine and erode Googles market. That’s similar to what Google did to Yahoo although I don’t recall there being a political element involved. Google just presented a more attractive commercial opportunity to investors and advertisers.
Blow yourself giggles bot
I use Norton Safe Search. Their focus is to flag sites with known or questionable security issues.
I don’t know what “main-line” engine they bounce off of and then filter.
I just opened a new tab and searched for “WUWT” and the first page was all links/sublinks to this site.
Of course, my history may have something to do with that. I am careful to clean up what’s stored on my PC but I don’t know how to clean what’s been stored elsewhere. ie “the cloud”.
PS I wonder if Mann’s and Hillary’s emails are floating around out there. 8 -)
Goood Mooorning Vietnaaam
I use “https://duckduckgo.com/” as a browser. It does not track u with cookies. It also does not have any political affiliations to the MSM or elitist establishments of the western world.
DuckDuckGo for a general purpose search engine. Look to your professional group for specialized SE.
Eschew Alphabet and all things G00gle as you can. ProtonMail.ch!
When I got my new phone and did a search for WUWT…instead of the page itself an ad came up describing WUWT as a site promoting Climate Denial’!
So no bias there.
Wow, Kip Hansen.
big performance.
Just now I searched with ‘ glaciers advance retreat ‘
DuckDuckGo had as #1 an ad to buy a glacier from zoro dot com.
Then a BBC article of the topic.
Next was “Why do they move?” via NSIDC
With Google, the first link was “Why do they move?” via NSIDC
Next was also a NSIDC link.
Third was academic — Geophysical Journal International — with nearly an exact match to my search string.
Google did not have an ad, or the BBC link.
Had I actually been looking for information, I would have selected the “Why do they move” link from either of the searches.
So, in this case, Google seems to give a better or appropriate result.
Now, I think I’ll go to ‘zoro’ and buy a glacier! Cheers.
Kip,
Your entire article is based around a fallacy that there is an “unbiased and objective” search algorithm.
All algorithms are based on human judgement and as such all are biased towards what the person who writes them thinks is the optimal solution. Searching for abortion on google returns in excess of 150 million results. The number of different ways of ranking them is then (150×10^6)! which is a number with almost 40 million zeros. Now unless you are going to return a random ranking of all 150 million websites you are going to have to use your judgement to decide which ones of those sites are most relevant. And almost certainly the most relevant site for you is not going to be the most relevant site for me and similarly someone living elsewhere in the world will have a different preference.
Hence all rankings are biased and subjective. Google is not tampering with its algorithm it is changing it – something which it has a first amendment right to do so since code is protected as free speech according to US courts. Ultimately google is optimising its rankings to maximise its revenue. So if you take you and enough of your friends take your business elsewhere google will respond by changing its algorithm. Or you are free to write your own search engine and crawl the web for links you think are good.
Percy ==> Did you also appreciate AT&T when it controlled the entire telephone network of the United States, with virtually no competition, doing whatever it chose without regard to the real needs of its customers?
Do you favor cities where both daily newspapers are under the same ownership — owners who control the flow of information in the city?
Would you like Trump to establish a commission to decide what the proper indexing of the internet is and them enforce it by law or government regulation?
“AT&T when it controlled the entire telephone network of the United States”
AT&T had an actual monopoly. Google does not. It dominates because people choose to use it, when they are perfectly free to use something else if they want to.
Nick ==> You haven’t done your homework. You don’t seem to have read the essay either or you’d know why they have a monopoly.
Kip, you haven’t shown they have a monopoly. You have only shown that a lot of people prefer to use it, and you complain about what Google does for them.
“Managing search at our scale is a very serious barrier to entry.”
Erich Schmidt – 2003 (when Google was only a few years old)
What does the phrase “a very serious barrier to entry” mean to you, Nick?
It means you might have to be as clever as Google. But probably not; it’s easier the second time. Anyway, lots of people seem to have done it.
Nick, I think what Khwarizmi is hinting at is the cost. Google’s budget is surely greater than many small countries’ GDP. Certainly though we’ve seen several companies in the computer industry that were “too big to fail” do exactly that.
PG,
“Nick, I think what Khwarizmi is hinting at is the cost. Google’s budget is surely”
His quote was from 2003, when that certainly wasn’t true. But you don’t need a big budget to start a search engine. And if Google really is treating people so badly, you’d have a market.
you don’t need a big budget to start a search engine
Not sure how true that might be. A very close friend of mine (now deceased) was involved in a project developing something very similar and rather than try to continue attempting to raise funds independently, approached Google for funding. The Google executive scanned the proposal closely and after considerable questioning declared they really hadn’t done their homework. The estimated cost was at least an order of magnitude greater than my friend and his partners were asking for. He said that he had the distinct impression that if they had asked for the much larger amount of money, they would have had more success.
If Google has a “monopoly”, on which market is that?
Google’s “monopoly” is that people like it. If you have a better product, they’ll like yours. Then you have a market.
I’m glad you put monopoly in quotes Nick because of course Google have no such thing. Market dominance is very different to “Exclusive possession of the trade in some article of merchandise; the condition of having no competitor in the sale of some commodity, or in the exercise of some trade or business.”
There’s a certain element in society who hate both market dominance and monopolies. As a creative, I am granted a monopoly on my work under copyright law limited to a period of time after which that work enters the public domain. Until a few years ago, I was paid the princely sum of ~$AU100 a year of royalties collected from people photocopying my work for educational purposes.
These days freetardism has taken over and I no longer receive those royalties. The Copyright Council of Australia is taking the government of the State of New South Wales to court to recover the royalties they owe for work they have refused to pay for during the last decade or so. I doubt I shall live long enough to see my share. Of course when the amount is small there’s insufficient financial incentive to take legal action.
So it goes…
Kip,
When AT&T had a monopoly it was forced by the government to at least partly act for the common good. One benefit of which was Bell labs which for decades did groundbreaking research leading to multiple nobel prizes, transistors, discovered Black Body radiation, pioneered information theory through the work of Claude Shannon etc. Once it was broken up all of that dried up and the amount of research being done today is a tiny fraction of what it was and we are all the poorer for it – although mobile calls are cheaper.
And you still haven’t addressed my point that all rankings are biased and subjective and all rely on human judgement – codified into an algorithm. As stated before you are free to build your own search engine or use different ones. And if google notices that its ad revenue starts to drop because people are doing that then you can be fairly sure that it will tweak its
algorithm to get its customers back.
Trump or whoever might be president in the future has zero power since code is protected under the US constitution as free speech. Hence people are free to write whatever search algorithms they like.
Finally note that as a result of this latest change to the search algorithm search for information about the holocaust no longer brings up stormfront as the top hit. So it is not all bad.
Percy, you didn’t listen.
SED and AWK are not interested at all in the texts thei’re processing.
Because they’re TEXT PROCESSING MACHINES.
Johann,
SED and AWK are programming languages. SED needs a script to do anything.
You cannot feed a list of websites into either SED or AWK and get anything out.
You can give both of them a script and then they will transform the list into a
different one but the script is the algorithm and that will contain the biases of
programmer.
“all rankings are biased and subjective”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Even if computers really were intelligent as some seem to believe, the underlying algorithms would still contain inherent bias. The alternative is to present results unranked, that is as a randomised list. “Random ranking” is self-conbtradictory. Good luck attracting users to a search engine that randomises the results.
When I do a Google search I usually get the answer I expected.
Spell check can return interesting results.
Google is a private company owned by ultra leftists (ironic, huh?) peddling their marxist world view.
They own it and won’t change.
What is needed is an alternative that makes a BIG play of being completely unbiased.
It won’t happen.
Mardler
What is “unbiased”? A typical search on google would probably return over a million hits. You have to have some criteria to rank them which reveals your bias. There is no objective way to rank webpages.
+Percy, I believe you are wrong. Up through 2008, google was an excellent search engine that did not make it hard to find “politically incorrect” results. After 2008, that began changing rapidly.
I’ve long ago decided to collude with the Russians and prefer Yandex.com for my non-software-engineering search needs.
I’m using StartPage.com, basically the Euro-version of DuckDuckGo. It operates off Chrome, and you’re right, first 3 pages nothing but alarmist crap after top 2 hits–first was Wal Mart and the next some financial company, both paid listings. But you know what? VERY soon it isn’t even going to matter; check out this Gallup poll wherein “global warming” or “climate change” didn’t even make the top 36 of people’s concerns:
http://www.climatedepot.com/2018/07/21/new-gallup-poll-americans-do-not-even-mention-global-warming-as-a-problem-36-problems-cited-but-not-climate/
Linked from Drudge to Climate Depot, this afternoon.
+goldrider, it still matters very much for those of us who are trying to find actual and factual INFORMATION on the subject–AND on other subjects. AGW is far from the only topic that google distorts its search results for.
CommieBob (9.34am):
****
“The linked reddit article contains a comment that says when you google american inventors, you get a bunch of African American inventors nobody has ever heard about.”
****
(a really obvious example of Google’s political decisions at work)
****
HotScot
“Like most great inventors, Alexander Graham Bell was a Scot. His skin colour is less important as I believe we all evolved from the same stock. I also understand location influenced skin colour more than genes.” (12.24pm)
[…]
“I’m pretty certain it’s shareholders are Capitalists, through and through. Capitalist investors are inherently wary of getting involved with political movements, they inevitably fail.” (1.20pm)
[…]
Investors in Google are not interested in political imperatives, it restricts their route to profit. Advertisers are not interested in political bias, they sell to anyone. If Google sided with socialism as is frequently maintained, they would likely alienate the vast majority of their devoutly Capitalist investors.” (1.50pm)
****
I actually coined the phrase “Google it” and made it currency at the turn of the century when the new search engine still had a link to the beta version on the front page.
There’s 2 text processing machines.
Sole based on unix. two.
1 awk
2 sed – the Stream lined EDitor.
No forseeable life without 1, 2
Fight back by loading the extension from adnauseam.io that “clicks ads so you don’t have to”. It is an ad blocker but it fills their databases with garbage. It is an approach so threatening to Goolag’s business model that they banned it from the Chrome store.
Be the “GI in GIGO”!!!
I find that search engines are becoming progressively less accurate or useful. Numerous times I find that the first hit is completely unrelated to the subject I want, and contains NONE of the keywords I’d entered. – and that’s even true of a search of the page source.
i used it on my first pc a longtime ago2000’s
its been removed along with all the other common engines on every pc i use since then
ixquicks good
brave seems to be popular
duckduckgo is decent
wont touch any m/soft bings chromes whatever either
really nice program from ABINE stops tracking when you browse n removes most ads n muck, called Blur.