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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:53AM

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Saturday December 31 2016, @02:53AM (#447730) Journal

    That looks like it might be a mistake on Google's part somehow. Using Google's Transparency Report, I was able to find this on Lumen.org as the only complaint Google has received about vetusware: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/1847688 [lumendatabase.org]

    And that was in 2014, so I don't know what happened.

    Incidentally, the complaint was about an old version of SpinRite, which is a well-known snake oil scam. This guy Steve Gibson, a grandiose self-promoter who has much more marketing sense than programming sense, has managed to make a business charging $89 for a poor imitation of dd_rescue. The kicker is he uses the fact he was stupid enough to write an I/O-bound program in assembly language to market to rubes who think that will make it run faster. Philosophical question: is it still a scam if you believe your own bullshit?

    It doesn't surprise me at all he'd pay some company to harass Google about a site hosting software he wrote in the 80s. That guy is basically the Donald Trump of tech.

    Well ... a Donald Trump of tech. We have narcissists aplenty in our field, unfortunately. :-(

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