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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:26AM
If Google doesn't want you on the web, there is precious little they can do about it.
If, however, Google doesn't want you in *their search listings*, then you don't show up there; that's how the game is played.
Thankfully, there [yahoo.com] are [duckduckgo.com] a [bing.com] few [facebook.com] other [yandex.com] popular [baidu.com] sites [twitter.com] that people widely use to publicize web sites either by search indexing or social-type sharing.
The web did fine before Google existed (Anyone remember Excite? Inktomi/Hotbot? Altavista? The December List? Yahoo's hand-curated index?) and will doubtless do fine in a post-Google world.
(Score: 1) by TrentDavey on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:49PM
... and don't forget Archie [wikipedia.org]. I would submit search queries and get results days later (if I'm recalling correctly). And I used Lynx [wikipedia.org], the text-based browser. And before that when I was younger, I had to get up off the couch, walk to the TV and change the channel via a knob. Get off my lawn! ... but I digress.