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The Trump administration is "taking a look" at whether Google and its search engine should be regulated by the government, Larry Kudlow, President Trump's economic adviser, said Tuesday outside the White House.
"We'll let you know," Kudlow said. "We're taking a look at it."
The announcement puts the search giant squarely in the White House's crosshairs amid wider allegations against the tech industry that it systematically discriminates against conservatives on social media and other platforms.
Kudlow's remark to reporters came hours after Trump fired off a series of predawn tweets complaining about Google search results for "Trump News."
[...] Google, in a statement, said its searches aren't politically biased: "When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology.
"Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users' queries," Google said. "We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."
The White House has not responded to requests for further comment.
(Score: -1, Troll) by jmorris on Wednesday August 29 2018, @01:52AM (4 children)
What it probably reflects most is the elimination from all search results of any right of center news outlet. I was getting rollingstone, tmz, marieclair and all sort of dodgy crap when searching on "Donald Trump" and yet in ten pages of results never once saw brietbart, townhall, wall street journal or any right of center search result. (Other than as noted above in another post.) Others who have dug more say the only real way to get a search hit to foxnews.com on google is to site search on the domainname. That is bias and censorship. You might not like them but the latest ratings book has them exceeding MSNBC and CNN combined, simply blanking them out is going to lead to a reaction. If that reaction is an overreaction I really can't see giving a damn, Google is supposed to be the smartest people on the planet, if they can't see what is coming next perhaps they aren't so smart anymore.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday August 29 2018, @02:29AM
My search for Donald Trump brings up Fox News in the first 3 top stories [imgur.com].
Daily Mail [dailymail.co.uk] trump index on page 2, Washington Examiner [washingtonexaminer.com] and Fox News [foxnews.com] on page 3, and WSJ [wsj.com] on page 9. I did see TMZ, Rolling Stone, and Marieclaire. We have run stories from Rolling Stone.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29 2018, @03:06AM
Are you saying search results should be preferentially weighted to your personal political preferences? Breitbart isn't getting enough people actually wanting to see them so they need a boost to support their minority opinions?
Mmm hmm, I'll just bath in the sweet waves of hypocritical anger. So warm and uplifting.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Wednesday August 29 2018, @03:18AM
More likely, it reflects your own search history.
Perhaps you have a history of searching for negative stories about Trump and Google is simply responding to the signals you send.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29 2018, @05:22AM
No, that is journalism. This is not a popularity contest, it is not about ratings.