Posted on 03/18/2010 12:02:39 PM PDT by chuck_the_tv_out
Reports of bias in Google results are coming in very fast recently. Microsoft has filed lawsuits alleging that Google favors its own websites. And conservative commentators have accused it of anti-freespeech bias for many years.
Contrary to popular belief, Rush Limbaugh is usually very reserved in saying such things. He has often been quoted on his radio programme as saying that he is aware of the responsible position he has, and is thus considerate about what he says.
But Rush directed some very harsh language at Google on Tuesday, noting that Google has developed an oddly close relationship with the current White House, and reserving particular criticism for Googles results for his website, offering that the results were from "obscure places you never knew existed", and by implication had an artificially-inflated Google ranking.
Big news: Rush on Google, this Tuesday
As a longtime user of alternatives to Google, I'm not surprised by this. The Veterans day problem was what made it clear to me that Google had the classical signs of a leftist, America-hating organization - honoring every trivial day, but never anything that is rooted in good, traditional America. A lot of conservatives don't like to talk about such things as what holidays Google chooses to honor, saying that it's their business, they can do what they like - and they're absolutely right. But that kind of thing can be a tip-off to the underlying organizational culture. Google does something for veterans' day now, after so much publicity, it's clear they are only doing it to placate people, rather from any belief. And last year's 'honor' was cartoonish, and I thought rather trivializing.
An Internet with many popular search engines is a better Internet for freedom,
(Excerpt) Read more at newsnmax.com ...
B U M P
Google is scum
but they own the world with their search engine.
For more info: http://www.nraila.org/toolbar/
Its a little off topic... but I prefer for the NRA to get the money instead of google.
I’ll give you a prime example of this:
When the climategate scandal broke, it took Google almost 30 DAYS to register the term ‘climategate’ it into their auto-completion system....even though the term was returning 30,000,000+ hits.
Around the same time, GE announced they were selling NBC. This made it into their auto-complete system in a day...despite returning less than 1,000,000 hits, for several weeks after.
Bias? Not only that - I’d say Google is actively ‘patrolled’ to eliminate anything in terms of results that would run contrary to the majority of its employee’s political agenda.
Funny - I hadn’t heard Rush discuss this and sent him an e-mail today wondering why the search results for ‘deem and pass’ seem so skewed.
Found it curious that so many results - that appear to be negative toward deem and pass - are marked with the warning that ‘this could be harmful to your computer’. Being on a Mac, I felt brave and continued on to read some of these results. So you click on the link. You go to a google page that again warns you. But then there’s no link for the actual page. So I copied the url and pasted the address direct. What immediately loads? The CNN homepage. Next one I tried loads the google search page. And so on.
Many of the ‘deem and pass’ results are marked with warnings and from the few I tried - you can’t get to them - they just send you somewhere else
(CNN? really?). Very curious. But, by the way, no problem clicking on links to liberal sites that discuss deem and pass (like HuffPo).
You can set up a lot of default options on Google as long as you keep cookies. (But, using Firefox in its maximum-privacy so called “porn mode,” for example, makes that impossible.)
One would think you’d get some flavors of user to specify, such as whether you’re most interested in politics, cooking, travel, etc. without actually having to include “politics”, “cooking”, etc. in the search. But as far as I know you don’t.
That being said, I’m trying to grok Rush’s beef. I search on “rush limbaugh” (without quotes) and the first result is his web site. Among other prominent sites are Wikipedia’s article on Rush. That’s exactly what I would expect to see. Are people having problems spelling Limbaugh? It would help if he said what people entered — and also if clearing their cookies from google.com resolved the problem.
If you research Scroogle you find that they are run by 60s radicals with a strong anti-US past “exposing what America did in Nicaragua” & “exposing the results of American policies around the world” & things like that.
It’s run by “Daniel Brandt”.
All you have to do is look at their Board of Directors....flaming libs...all of them! Vin Cerf is a good man but becoming a multi-millionaire feeds their guilt and they become liberal to save mankind and stop any others from becoming rich like them.
I’m on Linux right now. I put “deem and pass” in the search form (no quotes) and nothing appears on the first page with such a warning. I did not look further. Since the browser generally tells Google what OS you are using, you’d think that it would not flag “harmful to your computer” results if you are not using Windows. You said you are using a Mac, though.
The Senate warned its members NOT to go to Drudge because of the "possibility" of viruses infecting Senate computers.
I’m just relating my empirical results. I don’t see any Rush Limbaugh mangling now (but Google could have fixed it). In fact, autocomplete (I do have this enabled on my Linux boot) offers rush limbaugh to me pretty quick upon typing rush.
Oh, one thing to watch out for is that Google does try to adapt based on your past searches, again only if you are keeping cookies. I’ve only done virgin searches.
Was kind of curious - first pass at that search yielded warnings on the first page. Next search and result had that same link on the 2nd page. If I type ‘deem and pass’ (no quotes) in now, the 3rd page has 10 results - eight of which are marked as ‘harmful’. I don’t think you can actually get to any of those results.
Well, I guess they’re just looking out for us. :p
Yes, it’s annoying with Google that it doesn’t exclude results that appeared on previous pages. (That probably speeds their results provision though.) Specifying more results in a page lessens the number of repeats you have to look at.
Does clearing cookies then searching again alter the results for you?
The Senate needs to get Ubuntu!
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.