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Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company's search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.
The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to "leverage" search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be "islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam', 'Muslim', 'Iran', etc." and "prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms 'Mexico', 'Hispanic', 'Latino', etc."
The email chain, while sprinkled with cautionary notes about engaging in political activity, suggests employees considered ways to harness the company's vast influence on the internet in response to the travel ban. Google said none of the ideas discussed were implemented.
"These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology—not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump's executive order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies."
wsj.com/articles/google-workers-discussed-tweaking-search-function-to-counter-travel-ban-1537488472
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday September 26 2018, @09:32AM
I don't know the answer, but all I can say is that Google's results have for me become worse than useless over the last few years. I hardly ever find what I am looking for in the sea of crap sites that all seem to just link to one another. I've come across sites that basically ripped off the original site of content, yet that is nicely in the top results, and I can't find the original source anywhere.
Even worse, Google "Helpfully" replaces and "corrects" my search terms to things it thinks I am searching for (because apparently I don't know what I am doing, and need to be patronised).
Don't even get me started on the fact every search result page for the same terms is radically different depending on which device/IP is doing the search. So I can't tell people to "search for 'terms'" and it will be in the first five results on the first page. I can't even get the same search results from my office PC and my workshop PC, or I get different results based on whose WiFi I am using at that point in time.
I switched to duckduckgo, but they use Google's search engine tech underneath, so while they are better for privacy and consistency of results across systems, they still inherit all the problems of Google search.
Seems a lot of third party search engines are just wrappers around Google anyway, so far the only "non Google" engines out there that I have found is yacy (open source peer-to-peer search engine) and Microsofts Bing. I might give Bing a try, and try setting up Yacy and see how it performs.