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[Editor's note: This story has an interesting viewpoint given the proliferation of "Deep Fake" videos we recently covered here. I see it as a portent of discussions to come. How much can we trust reporting? How much slanting and posturing of "reports" and "studies" are going to be promulgated in the lead-up to the next presidential election? Is this item all a bunch of crap or an indication of things we can expect to come? How much can we trust, and how to we go about assessing the veracity of what is presented to us by not only the main-stream media, but also social media, too? We hereby disclaim any assurance as to the credibility of the accusations made here and present it solely as an example of what may be coming -- and an opportunity to practice techniques at validating/corroborating or challenging/refuting it. The story submission appears after the break.]
NOTE TO READERS - this is scummy content and scummy journalism, at best. That said, it is news, as the story has been commented on by two congressional questionings and the president. Ugh.
Congressional testimony and comments by the president are being made on a Project Veritas video/report, which details how Google biases their search results to favor certain political narratives. REP Dan Crenshaw (TX) and SEN Ted Cruz (TX) have made comments on the Google reports (link below). President Trump made the comment "they're trying to rig the election".
Basically, Project Veritas had an internal whistleblower at Google who detailed how they bias content against conservative sources. The leaked internal project documents (which may be fake) present a relatively technical discussion on how to bias existing trained neural networks. These are somewhat correlated with leaked internal E-mails (which may be fake) describing how the algorithms are modified to create more 'fair' results as part of "search engine fairness". The whistleblower was interviewed, but their face was masked and voice changed (may as well be fake). This is then correlated against a certainly-illegally-obtained-and-selectively-edited interview with a Google executive, which appears to be at a hotel bar from Project Veritas "undercover" agent. This was all combined into a report from Project Veritas that indicates that Google is politically biasing search results as a byproduct of algorithmic tampering and human influence. Ugh.
Predictably, the Project Veritas video was banned everywhere (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter), with accounts suspended/banned from certain platforms. Some people would say that it is an attempt to silence the "report". Some other people would say that this "report" is dubious at best. I think reasonable people would say, at a minimum, posting illegally-obtained material to the internet warrants a ban. Personally - if Veritas wants to do this 'reporting' then it needs to *report* - and not produce material that is illegally obtained or fake.
Original Source: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/
Summary: https://thinkprogress.org/trump-believes-google-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-project-veritas-video-cb82f03caee3/
Washintgon Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/24/google-exec-project-veritas-sting-says-only-big-te/
Congressional Testimony: (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueCMWBixP4Y (2) https://youtu.be/ik_kzn3etsE?t=44
Final note:
Among other things, the "leaked internal E-mails" indicate that Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager are Nazis. At the time of writing, this "story" was picked up by Fox News, TheBlaze, and the Washington Times, according to duckduckgo News ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jordan+peterson+nazi&iar=news&ia=news ). This "story" doesn't exist according to Google News ( https://www.google.com/search?q=jordan+peterson+nazi&source=lnms&tbm=nws ). The combination of the report, its details, and my own observations when comparing against DDG results have influenced me to switch my search engine to DDG rather than Google. Something is going on.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SunTzuWarmaster on Monday July 01 2019, @02:43PM (9 children)
It doesn't seem weird to you that the general Google Search results and the Google News results differ? That the Google Search returns results including the Washington Examiner and Fox News, but that Google News returns neither of these? For news that is already week old?
And that, when you use Google News to specifically search for news, specifically within the week, the result whose title *literally includes* all of the words is relegated to position 6? This is specifically what you are searching for... that is quite a few hoops to jump through to actually get your result, which, I remind you, is the first result from DDG.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday July 01 2019, @03:06PM
Nope. Be it for the reason I don't actually expect whatever happened a week ago to be still classify at news and to find it on the Google news section.
No, really mate, you may call me weird for it, but I don't even expect that whatever makes the S/N front page is current news or even actual news. Do you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 01 2019, @05:09PM (3 children)
Have you used Google in the past 15 years or so? Yes, it used to do things like return results with the literal terms you searched for. It hasn't done that in a very long time. Its algorithms are supposed to be "smart," but I fight them all the time, because verbatim search is broken (and has been for nearly a decade) and any attempts to get Google to pay attention to your actual search terms -- rather than what it thinks you mean -- is futile.
Look, I use search engines for actual research. Anyone who does knows these systems don't behave the way you apparently think they should. It's NOT because Google is trying to hide something by putting down at link #6, rather than #1. It's because the vast majority of people using the internet are morons who type in BS queries and never learned how to use a full-text literal search. So Google has tweaked their algorithms to serve the stupid masses -- guessing that you probably just meant to search for a cat video rather than an intellectual topic -- while making its results useless for people who want to do real research.
Now, it is possible that in tweaking these AI algorithms, they also put in some sort of bias? Sure, I suppose. But you haven't produced any evidence of that. And generally whenever someone claims this sort of thing, by trying a dozen different ways of searching, you can easily show Google pops up all sorts of different orderings and highlights different sorts of articles. I have yet to see evidence of consistent bias.
Instead, I see the same crap I always get from Google -- not returning what I literally asked for. That's no surprise. And most of my queries are not political in any way. Google's a crappy search engine if you actually know how to search -- you really didn't know that?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @05:16PM
Yes, there was a paper I was able to easily find a few years ago that found evidence that lung cancer rates increase immediately after people quit smoking.
I can no longer find it anywhere, all I find is anti-smoking propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @07:21PM
Google stopped returning what I was searching for in the past few years. None of it was political stuff or news either. Literally no way to search for exact things anymore. If its not mainstream, you literally get a sprinkle of relevant results and the rest filled with garbage or worse, no results found.
I've had to go back to other search engines like its 1998. On top of their terrible performance they hit me with captchas when using a VPN. Doesn't matter how many times I fill it out, next query I'm always a robot. As soon as the v3 captcha comes out I fully expect to be banned.. and at this point good riddance.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:51AM
I've said pretty much the same for years, but I think it's getting worse too.
A couple of years back I switched to DDG for search, and now every few months when I have to switch back to G for a specific search, it is ever harder to get decent results. It's like they aren't just nerfing results for the masses, but are actively trying to destroy targeted search.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 01 2019, @05:18PM (3 children)
Oh, and by the way:
Nope, not in the least. Again, I've spent a lot of time fighting Google's BS search algorithms. I first realized how broken Google was maybe 6-7 years ago when I was doing a Google Books search for a few very specific terms in the date range from 1910-1920. It returned maybe 6 hits. I don't know why but a little while later I tried a query from 1910-1915 with the same search terms. I got some NEW hits, and some of the ones from the 1910-1920 search were missing. I went back to the 1910-1920 search range, and it was the same list I got previously. Tried 1915-1920 and again got a different list. In any reasonable search engine, the 1910-20 hit list should obviously be a superset of the smaller lists of dates. Not in Google's world.
Google's algorithms are simply not literal anymore in any way. They don't behave consistently. They don't obey your queries, even when explicit. They decide what they THINK you want to see. Earlier this year, I specifically wanted to search for news stories prior to a final episode of a TV series to see what people were saying before the episode came out, and when I explicitly gave Google a range only BEFORE date X, at least half of the first page of results was actually from AFTER date X.
Bottom line: Google is an insanely stupid product that returns completely unreliable and inconsistent results. Noting the order of links is messed up or Google News results differ a bit from the search results is very minor compared to the BS you will see if you actually try to get Google to give you specific results. It's completely broken for real search, so never assume that it should give you results according to what any logical person would think. You'll be disappointed if you try.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Monday July 01 2019, @05:33PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 01 2019, @06:15PM (1 child)
No. At least not for general internet search. Obviously if you're doing real research, there are lots of specialized databases, many of which will actual restrict results to terms you literally search for (as well as the fields you want them to be in). Some internet search engines will "take instructions" better than Google. DDG does somewhat better verbatim results than Google, but it too will add things you didn't ask for.
If I could have back the Google of pre-2007 or so, I would take it in an instant, especially if it could be applied to new content that has come up since then. Anyone remember Google of that era? You could click on a "cached version" of the target website within Google, and get a version that was stripped of scripts and BS with the search terms highlighted, so you could see right where they were. Obviously this ran afoul of copyright law for Google, so they stopped allowing that. But that was sweet. Fast, smart, included all the stuff I wanted, took out stuff I didn't want when I asked... followed instructions to restrict queries, etc.
The problem is Google still seems to win on the size of the database and content front -- there's all sorts of cool stuff in Google Books that is difficult to find elsewhere, if you want older content. If Google Scholar worked with the pre-2007 Google engine configuration, it would probably beat out many academic search engines too. And despite Google's inclusion of nonsense results I don't want, its algorithm to prioritize results still often will put good hits on the first couple pages (when it actually listens to what I ask it for).
I don't begrudge Google for trying to optimize results for its largest audience. Ultimately, it wants to sell ads, and I'm sure its algorithm is also optimized sometimes to help do that too.
But if I had to pay a fairly large amount to subscribe to Google pre-2007 or so, I'd do it. Definitely worth $100/year, maybe several hundred per year for me even for personal use. It would pay for itself in just a few weeks of decreased frustration and less wasted time. Unfortunately, I don't have that option anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:45PM
Search all over the place sucks. Youtube has to be the worst. I've done a lot of legal research in my time -- always hated natural language searches and the waste of time they spit out. Give me boolean searches.
((get w/10 you w/10 want) and (roll* w/5 stone*) and lyrics) not ("[that stupid rap band that dominates the search results but I know I don't want]")
where w/x = number of words to span, so the first part of the above would require those three words to appear in a ten word span. Westlaw has an especially nice feature which will find words in sentences or paragraphs -- been awhile since I used Westlaw but I think it went like this: (get /s you /s want) for sentences, /p for paragraphs. Anyway, with wildcards, and, or, parens, not, and span limits, you can find the good shit fast.