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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:40AM (#447804)

    Exactly how do you know what you are looking for, such that you can identify biased results? If you can recognize "biased results", you already knew what you were looking for, so you were not in fact looking for something, you were looking for confirmation, as in "confirmation bias".

    Ehm, one can tell a result is biased by just having cursorary knowledge in a field.. For instance - search for :nuclear incident: and tell me how many of your results where about cracked fuel claddings, misplaced containers and maintance issues of safetysystems with no consequence (this is what a nuclear incident is [INES 2-3]); and how many was about TMI, Chernobyl or Fukushima (nuclear accidents [INES 4-7]) and how many highlighted :nuclear disaster: (not even a technical term).

    (And no, didn't know what I was looking for - ended up at an IAEA-page I hadn't read after putting in a few exclusions for disaster and accident)

    So, above was an example from yesterday about how I got a biased result without knowing what I was looking for that wasn't about confirmation bias (I was able to tell simply by knowing what the phrase I searched for means)