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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.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:09AM
If you wanted to get pedantic about it, there are copyright violations just about everywhere, so you might as well just pull the plug on the entire internet.
But there are hundreds of other sites that host abandoned/vintage software. Should Goolge also pull the plug on Bitsaver's or archive.org? What about small personal pages that host, for example, someones personal 8" disk CP/M software collection with the hope of helping other with the same machine? What about history sites that let people see and try out vintage software? Will they de-list soylentnews just for mentioning it? Really, where does it end?
I actually suspect that the de-listing may not even be because of the content, but rather their mis-use of multiple domain names. But Google isn't saying the reason.... as far as Google and most Google users are concerned vetusware simply no longer exists!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:11AM
> If you wanted to get pedantic about it, there are copyright violations just about everywhere, so you might as well just pull the plug on the entire internet.
Ugh. Typical reductive geek logic used to define away the question rather than address it. Its not insightful, its deflection. If you don't want to understand why google did what they did, that's your prerogative. But don't make your ignorance into a cause for righteousness.
> I actually suspect that the de-listing may not even be because of the content, but rather their mis-use of multiple domain names.
That's not true, all you gotta do is type ventusware into google and the .org site comes up.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday December 31 2016, @05:01AM
Lets really go for blood here. Youtube was explicitly built on rampant, massive, pervasive copyright violation. They encouraged and facilitated random users on the Internet to upload content all parties knew was copyrighted by someone other than the uploader. Then Google used its size to simply bully the much smaller (in market cap) content producers into signing deals to turn all that illegal content semi-legal. They have zero moral ground to stand upon.
And they, along with the bigots at SPLC have zero moral ground here as well. Google has built its reputation on using computer algorithms to generate the page rankings with minimal human intervention. That is their 'elevator pitch', it is as neutral as they can make it, only intervening to manually punish people who try to game the system and even then only until they can iterate a better algorithm to automatically punish attempts to get spam into the rankings instead of content users actually want to see. If they actually do this it will destroy them, and if they are stupid enough to be played by the narrow minded bigots at SPLC they will deserve to suffer.
Funny, somehow I doubt we will see zany conspiracy theories favored by the left getting memory holed. Bush blew the levees and drowned New Orleans. Bush blew up the WTC. The moon landing was fake. Bush lied us into a war. Chemtrails (crazies on ALL sides), The Russians did it!, Valerie Plame was outed by Dick Cheney. Need I continue?