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posted by on Friday December 30 2016, @11:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the meet-the-google-police dept.

Last week an article from the BBC said:

Google has said it is 'thinking deeply' about ways to improve search, after criticism over how some results - including ones discussing the Holocaust - were ranked.

[...] Google - which processes five billion searches a day - was keen to come up with a solution that was broadly applicable across all searches, rather than just those that have been noticed by users.

"It's very easy to take a search here and there and demand Google change something," explained Mr Sullivan, "and then the next day you find a different search and say, 'why didn't you fix that?' "

This week we see the results of their efforts: Google has modified PageRank to surface "more high-quality, credible content on the web":

Google's technology was changed again after people spoke out about how typing in "are Jews evil" in the autocorrect function resulted in offensive terms. Also, when people searched "who runs Hollywood?" the result, "Jews," was scrubbed last year. Google said its algorithm incorrectly gave "authority" to a site that suggested so because it was linked to over and over again.

But Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Tuesday that Google has a long way to go to "clean up its act." While searching for "did the Holocaust happen?" no longer shows one white supremacist site at the top, searching for "is the Holocaust real?" still provides a site up high that claims it's a hoax.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:29AM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:29AM (#447708)

    These developments are really interesting because they are revealing the true power of google (alphabet).
    Until now, google has been able to claim that their algorithm is an innocent one, without bias or hand picking. This is blatantly false, search results are edited by hand at Google (even though the majority of ranks are returned by the algorithm).
    But google is desperate to avoid any sort of "editorial" function as it would result in it being considered a media company. More regulation applies to media than to search companies and it may make them liable for false/slanderous content.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 31 2016, @03:01AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday December 31 2016, @03:01AM (#447732) Homepage

    Google have it pretty rough, because their 'hood is run by weenies who are offended at everything. That runs counter to being an impartial search engine, and as their bias increases, the quality of their searches degrades. I'm guessing it started with the "Michelle Obama Monkey" debacle and went steadily downhill from there.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday December 31 2016, @08:59AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday December 31 2016, @08:59AM (#447800) Homepage

    >This is blatantly false, search results are edited by hand at Google

    Do you have evidence for this?

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