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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:00PM
This is not something I think is smart. Hitting on Nazism is always a pretty safe target. Nobody is going to stand up against anything that damns them for fear of being seen as sympathetic to them. But nonetheless this sets a clear precedent for accepting Google's interpretation of what is right and what is wrong as opposed to simply acting as an aggregator of information. Nazism is largely derivative of eugenics which was a well espoused belief in the US and many countries in the world prior to Hitler. Imagine a world where speaking negatively of eugenics could have been seen as 'wrongthink' and thus censored by the powers that be. Our supreme court and political establishment, the Carnegies, Harvard, and other 'mainstream' sources were all huge fans of eugenics. I think censorship under almost any circumstance is something that should not be tolerated. It regressed us one step closer to our book burnings and wrongthink persecution of the past.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @12:09AM
The slope is a cliff these days. It's like
Okay!
Glad to!
Will do!
Wait, not everyone here is a Nazi. We'll have to sort through them carefully.
wtf.
wtf?
wtf!