"Don't be evil" is their unofficial company slogan...
Posted on 03/01/2015 9:29:16 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Google plans to bias its search engines in favor of the supposedly factual accuracy of the sites to which it links. From the New Scientist story:
THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.
Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.
A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.
As the old saying goes, there are facts–and then, there are facts. These days a lot of things are called “facts” that aren’t–often surrounding heated political and cultural controversies.
That is why I think Google’s plan will open the door for profound political, cultural, or ideological bias in what should be a neutral function. Perhaps that is the point.
Google filtering out the truth. That should be good.
"Don't be evil" is their unofficial company slogan...
I don’t use Gargoyle and never intend to.
Facts will be defined as the accepted dogma of the Leftist fantasy world. Anything challenging the orthodoxy will be banished. Google becomes Alice in Wonderland.
Fact #3a -- Obama was born in the United States.
I watched in mounting horror and disgust as google systematically and deliberately 'disappeared' over half a million hits on image searches for 'obama birth certificate' in mid July 2008, during the height of the debate over his bona fides.
this is not really new. they have been doing it for a long time.
Google as arbiter of “Truth”?
un....show me your yardstick!
Who do you use that isn’t “powered by google”?
Oxi-moronic title of the day.
Just in time for ‘net neutrality.’ Coincidence???
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Likewise there is Google’s motto:
Don’t be evil; don’t be really evil; don’t let them catch you being evil.
IOW, HuffPo, DailyKos, MSNBC, Media Matters, The White House, Russia Today...
I use DuckDuckGo and at work (where DDG isn’t an option) I use bing.
I’ve searched for years about an incident that has disappeared: Around 1986(?), HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce was pelted by AIDS activists throwing used condoms and tissues.
There are many, many searches that return Pierce’s indictment; far, far fewer searches that show that the indictment was bogus and that Pierce was not guilty of anything; and no search returns about those despicable actions by the diseased.
Hmmmmmm. For some reason I though they were merely a privacy shell over the google search engine.
Thanks!
No. But it won't happen too soon. Google always thinks long term and they will take their time taking over the semantics of society. But at some point the default web page about religion will be about the Crusades.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.