Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:09AM (#448036)

    Given modern search capabilities, we are probably just going to have to accept that these "bubbles" exist.

    But the point of the main story is that there needs to be a way to let users know they are in a bubble and have some way to get out of that bubble.

    Just a couple of generalized examples, if I click through 12 pages of search results to get to the one I want, a modern search engine should go "oh, THAT is what you were looking for, I'll try to do better next time".

    And if the bubble is as big as described above, I would hope to see some indication that I am getting personalized results and have an option to search without or perhaps "pop" that bubble.

    Usually Google SEEMS good about alerting users when links have been censored (such as by DMCA), but when they don't, that is a big problem.