Trump attacks 'left-wing' Google search results

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45331210

by SmkyMt • 8 years ago

63 47 8 years ago

bbc.co.uk

ur-whale2• 8 years ago

Whatever trump may say, no one knows what Google's algorithm do because there is basically no way to check they haven't been gamed.

I'd even bet that most of the folks who work there don't have a clue themselves.

[Edit] And the fact that Google is a leftist company with strong ties to the democrats is a basic fact of life. It's therefore easy - or at the very least tempting - to add two and two.

dazc• 8 years ago

It's quite easy to add a penalty to some sites and, maybe, whitelist others though?

Politics aside, it's hardly the first time that search neutrality has been questioned?

creaghpatr• 8 years ago

I could see a SERP neutrality act in the near future, like net neutrality I expect it would be proposed but not passed.

ur-whale2• 8 years ago

it's hardly the first time that search neutrality has been questioned?

True, but since last year and the giant mess around FB, people are really starting to realize how deeply a site like Google can sway opinions, and without being noticed at all.

T'is a huge power that goes entirely unchecked. All we have is hollow-sounding "don't be evil", "we would never do that" type things.

The search engine needs to become decentralized.

Djvacto• 8 years ago

I went ahead and tried a search site I never use (DuckDuckGo) to search "Trump News".

I got results from:

1) trump.news

2) politico

3) huffington post

4) the guardian

5) cnn

6) donaldtrumpnews.co

7) dailymail.co.uk

8) nbc news

9) fox news

burgermanjensen• 8 years ago

I don't think there is any deep critique of the way Google operates here. If the majority of the "MSM" is against Trump then, wow, look at that, there's a lot of articles that critique him. Surprise surprise. Trump is whining that some people don't like him, as usual.

ta_egdhs• 8 years ago

see this is the difference between being a skeptic and a contrarian. The contrarian will call everything wrong and sometimes by pure happenstance they have a point. The opaqueness of google is immaterial given the same source decries a dozen things everyday as fake (irrespective of if its true)

amelius2• 8 years ago

I suppose the same can be said for DuckDuckGo. Not sure if there is an easy solution.

bovermyer• 8 years ago

I had to laugh when I heard this.

I had to, because if I didn't laugh, I would cry.

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

I'd be surprised if he wasn't seeing more left leaning results from his presumably DC area IP than from his Florida IP. Google tries to make results somewhat location based and the DC area leans lefter than Florida with the exception of a few particular cities.

malandrew• 8 years ago

If this is true, this has the deleterious impact of making red areas redder and blue areas bluer and increasing the disagreement and conflict between red and blue. This is one of the huge problems with Facebook.

VincentEvans• 8 years ago

This immediately comes to mind as relevant on multiple levels.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud

But this old man being the President, I am honestly concerned about an effort being made to "balance viewpoints" of Google results in a similar way to how media tries to present both sides of the given argument as deserving equal consideration, which leads to some interesting results when one side is represented by flat-earthers.

tzs• 8 years ago

I heard a discussion on NPR about this. One of their prominent hosts (I forget who) said that they had decided not to run a lot of the newsworthy but negative things they had on Trump during the campaigns, because Rubio, Kasich, Cruz, and the rest did not generate anywhere near as many negative things (and same for Clinton during the general election campaign).

If they just ran all the newsworthy items on all the candidates, they might appear to be biased against Trump. So, to avoid the appearance of bias against Trump, they ended up without realizing it introducing actual bias in favor of him.

throwaway57522• 8 years ago

It's disgraceful, obviously, but it's an entirely predictable pattern on some level. He embarrassed himself and was forced to take an action he didn't want with lowering the flags for his adversary, McCain. He's now lashing out to distract people and to raise his own self-esteem.

The idea that there is a left/right divide in Google search results probably says more about differences in today's American left and the right, rather than anything about Google.

dev_north_east• 8 years ago

Google don't provide neutral search results. Everyone knows that.

akmiller• 8 years ago

Neutral search results is not possible!

dvfjsdhgfv• 8 years ago

True, but what is meant by "neutral"here is "search results that haven't been tampered with from PC POV". Google has been heavily criticized for NOT messing up with the results, so they finally did. Whatever they do, they'll never make everybody happy.

https://www.distractify.com/trending/2018/05/14/16jlb1/googl...

brickmort• 8 years ago

He's right.

olavk2• 8 years ago

How do you know?

LyndsySimon2• 8 years ago

How do you know he's not?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he is or he isn't - my concern is that I don't see a way to prove or disprove either position.

Meanwhile, the entire firearms community is having trouble being demonetized, suppressed, and outright banned from YouTube - a Google product, obviously - for content that is legal and in most cases quite uncontroversial.

With no way of knowing for sure if Google is manipulating News rankings and firm evidence that they are using their power to harass and deplatform based on politically-charged issues elsewhere, why would you trust that they're not?

amelius2• 8 years ago

Perhaps he got caught in someone else's filter bubble.

ape4• 8 years ago

It takes in many factors (as we know). If it has profile of Trump it would have him as a senior citizen who prefers right-wing media.

endymi0n• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

Yoric• 8 years ago

Very much what I had in mind.

Climate skepticism was largely created by media attempting to balance out the point of view of nearly-everybody-including-everybody-who-had-studied-the-topic with that of that-guy-over-there-who-thinks-otherwise.

Showing the other point of view is generally good. Skewing the perspective to show things as balanced isn't.

amaccuish2• 8 years ago

I just wanted to thank you two for pointing me in the direction of the concept. :)

cascom• 8 years ago

I believe this is the original news story that trump picked up on

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...

kylnew• 8 years ago

He probably spends so much time looking at negative press on him that his own search results are skewed as such. I.e. for a guy who constantly says all these companies like CNN and NYtimes are failing and fake news he seems to always up to date on what they are saying

alphabettsy2• 8 years ago

Fox News features prominently, but other than stoking the fire why would anyone be surprised that a global news outlet like CNN features prominently?

Even though I don’t personally watch CNN it’s usually the first site I visit when I hear some major event has happened globally because I can usually be certain they will have it covered.

One thing I find bizarre about FoxNews.com is how prominently they tend to feature stories that would normally only be shared on Facebook, like crazy cat stories or what this cute animal did.

misiti37805• 8 years ago

I had a conversation with family member yesterday who also took this story and ran with it. I tried to explain to them that the google algorithm is a giant, multi billion parameter organism that is changing in real-time as it continues to spider new content and update it's weights as new content is posted on the internet. The training takes place across multiple countries, timezones, and data centers. I think it is safe to say it would be impossible for a team of evil liberals scientist working at google to surreptitiously bias the algorithm to only yeild liberal results, and penalize conservative content at the same time. The person said I was wrong (they have no experience in CS/Stats/ML, etc). I am not sure where we go from here, it seems like a nice example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

alphabettsy2• 8 years ago

It’s really difficult to convince someone they’re wrong, especially when it’s coming from their trusted source and something they’d like to believe anyway.

I can’t tell you how many times these last two years I’ve pointed out that what someone said or posted regarding politics was incorrect or completely untrue and their response was “well it seems true” or “I could see them doing that though”. Even presented with contradictory evidence from a source they trust, they still want to believe it.

repolfx4• 8 years ago

What makes you think your family member is wrong?

I used to work for Google, worked there for years. I am very familiar with how it works internally.

For standard web search the algorithms are indeed very complex and the core PageRank concept is pretty democratic. It wouldn't be easy to bias it politically without it being widely known to employees.

But Trump isn't talking about generic web search results. He's talking about news.

News is treated specially by Google. News-relevant queries trigger the Google News oneboxes (well, universal search mixins). Google News does not use PageRank to rank news sources. News sources are whitelisted and I believe it's not documented anywhere how it decides how to rank stories.

A simple test to decide whether News is biased or not is to look at its front page and see how often stories from Breitbart show up. Like it or not, Breitbart is (or appears to be) a popular and prolific news site:

https://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/06/newswhip-may-june-...

I have never, not once, seen News rank any story from Breitbart anywhere.

I just search [trump] on News. Here are the story sources it selected, in order:

The Guardian, CNN, CNN, WashPo, CNN, CNN, The Guardian, CNN, CNN, Business Insider, CNN, Fox News, NBCNews, Fox News, New York Times, the Independent, CNN, WashPo, CNN, New York Times.

Do you think that it's at least understandable, why a family member who observes such result lists might conclude that Google staff have an agenda? And do you agree that explaining this conclusion as stupidity (the Dunning-Kruger effect) is unnecessary given that neither you nor anyone else outside of a small team at Google actually knows what their news ranking algorithm is?

misiti37805• 8 years ago

I am saying my understanding of page rank is that it is basically impossible to bias - i do not work at google, but i have a background in math.

misiti37805• 8 years ago

maybe its not page rank, but as far as i can tell it is public information: https://www2007.org/papers/paper570.pdf. also, my family member was not talking about the news site, they were talking about google searches themselves being biased, as well as google search autocomplete being baised in favor a clinton (see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcvfNExG8kw)

amaccuish2• 8 years ago

Ok, so your argument seems to show that Google News has a bias towards generally accurate sources. I think it would be stupid and dangerous to rank Breitbart higher given its frequent inaccuracies. When Google is essentially curating this content, they've got their own image on the line.

jlkj90809• 8 years ago

Even if someone believes Google is biased, they are free to use another news aggregation service. However the President publicly stating that they might be breaking the law seems to me an clear example of a chilling effect.

kangnkodos• 8 years ago

Of the 100 largest newspapers in America, 57 endorsed Clinton, and just 2 endorsed Trump.

Google search results rely heavily on those top 100 largest newspapers.

paulddraper• 8 years ago

Why was this flagged?

Neither https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858906 nor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17859353 were flagged.

Trump attacks 'left-wing' Google search results

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