> “They don’t have manpower or time to tweak their searches for a political agenda.”
> I don’t know if they’re doing so or not, but that’s silly. It takes a minute to get into the database and say “please recommend that”. It’s not as if their code doesn’t have an “override” setting.
I do Search Engine Optimization and online ads for websites, so I know a little something about how Google and other search engines do what they do.
To put a single recommendation in there, or block certain keywords is simple, but to contextually move searches politically left or politically right is unbelievably complex and not worth the effort.
Besides, Google is in it for the search market share and resultant ad revenue. They’re not going to get return traffic if their search results aren’t relevant. That people think Google jiggered their search to make this happen is utterly dumb.
“To put a single recommendation in there, or block certain keywords is simple,”
Right,
“...but to contextually move searches politically left or politically right is unbelievably complex and not worth the effort.”
Not so. Let’s say they have a (keyword, rating) pairs storage they use to tweak relevance beyond their eigenvalues algo. Then it’s just a matter of seeding it with a few (”tea party”, -1) and so pairs. Bury the keywords just a 0.0001%, undetectable, cheap, still can further some agenda.
Again, I’m not saying that’s being done. I’m just saying it’s not really that hard to do.