Stormy Daniels
Gold Member
- Mar 19, 2018
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Of course they have the ability to do anything they want:
So Google is omnipotent? Are they God?
Come on, now. They don't have the ability to do whatever they want. Obviously they have the ability to manipulate search results, just like a baker has the ability to manipulate cake results. Google is the one designing their own search algorithms. What I'm saying is there isn't any effective way to intentionally program algorithms to yield biased results based on latent biases expressed in the content, compared to other biases expressed while talking about the same subject matter. They would, instead, have to program their algorithms to apply weighted favor (or disfavor) to the entire source.
In other words, it would look something like this:
if source(FoxNew) {
rank() = rank*0.8};
If source(Msnbc) {
rank() = rank*1.2};
Nope. I've often heard Google spin this and being a techie, I've caught the nuanced "lie". Their claim is that their "search products" do not have any inherent political bias built into them.
Well of course, most large S/W efforts don't have "built in bias" either. BUT -- most every FEATURE of these platforms is "user configurable". Meaning that it can be INSTANTLY tuned to guide preference in listings. Simply by "retraining" the algorithms by offering sample listings and JUDGING the resultant listing. The system LEARNS to be biased based on humans "correcting" it's choices..
There may also be TONS of "user settings" and "filters" that can be "customized" and changed on a whim by literally 100s of people maintaining the product.
No doubt the game's in play. Compare your Google searches for political topics to Bing and you'll see the diff.
I don't think it's really possible to configure your own search results--at least, not in the conventional sense of the word. I agree that Google is generally slippery with the way they communicate, but the suggestion this started with was the idea that Google is weighting content based on the interlaced biases that might be reflected by specific content. And that just isn't possible, because those biases are things that exist in human minds. Spiders can only deal with text, not your own brain waves. However, Google could easily program their algorithms to present favoritism for specific sources.
Yes, Google does allegedly "learn" from you, but that has to do with your search history and web browsing habits. So supposedly, if you make a habit of reading msnbc.com then Google will assign stronger weight to results from that site. But that is the opposite of what Ray was suggesting (that Google is suppressing political bias the user might like in favor of bias Google wants).