Google to reinforce 'conventional thinking'

[podfish]

my phrasing, not theirs! but they're tweaking their search engines in a way that supports the point of view of what many would call the 'fact-based' community. Many who might hold a different point of view about what the facts really are will see this as yet another attempt to suppress the truth. I see an opportunity for an app here!! someone could make the big bucks by resorting the results google returns:

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google's rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links
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.

https://www.newscientist.com/article...not-links.html

[Valley Oak]

Should be interesting to see what happens. Now Google has become a self-appointed guardian or referee of the "truth." And whatever the definition of what the truth is will now be, at least in part, defined by Google.

Do any scholars work for Google? When an article is "peer reviewed" or "refereed" (and is approved) it means that a small group of scholars, or at least one, read the material and scrutinized the methods used for conducting the research, and so on.

my phrasing, not theirs! but they're tweaking their search engines in a way that supports the point of view of what many would call the 'fact-based' community. Many who might hold a different point of view about what the facts really are will see this as yet another attempt to suppress the truth. I see an opportunity for an app here!! someone could make the big bucks by resorting the results google returns:

https://www.newscientist.com/article...not-links.html

[wisewomn]

I heard recently that Google is in bed with the Koch brothers--I think on KPFA.

FWIW.

Should be interesting to see what happens. Now Google has become a self-appointed guardian or referee of the "truth." And whatever the definition of what the truth is will now be, at least in part, defined by Google.

Do any scholars work for Google? When an article is "peer reviewed" or "refereed" (and is approved) it means that a small group of scholars, or at least one, read the material and scrutinized the methods used for conducting the research, and so on.

[podfish]

I heard recently that Google is in bed with the Koch brothers--I think on KPFA.

FWIW.

Benghazi.

oh, sorry, wrong political pole.. never mind.

[bill shearer]

Here is a good article about this by Dr. Steven Novella at

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/...ustworthiness/

Google Wants to Rank Websites for Trustworthiness

Published by Steven Novella under Technology

I like this idea, but it is certainly bold and needs some careful thought. Google wants to rank websites according to how trustworthy their factual statements are.

Google undoubtedly is a cornerstone of the internet, which itself is now a cornerstone of our civilization. We are rapidly evolving to having a worldwide network of shared human knowledge and communication. The internet is now the dominant medium of human ideas.

Google is not just a search engine – it is the dominant portal to this information. This makes Google rank a vital statistic for any website. In fact, there is an entire industry, search engine optimization (SEO), dedicated to improving one’s Google ranking.

Google’s big innovation, and the one that launched them to the top of the heap, was to rank websites according to the number and quality of incoming links. This turned out to be a useful proxy, and serves to reward users with a helpful ranking of the websites they are searching for. Specifically, it is not easy to game the system. You can’t boost your Google rank simply by repeating search terms in the coding. In fact, I have a couple friends at Google and they tell me that Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm specifically to make SEO ineffective. SEO is an attempt to game Google’s ranking algorithm, and Google doesn’t want that. They want the truly most valuable and appropriate sites to float to the top.

The current problem with Google’s ranking algorithm is that it is essentially a popularity contest. While this works for many types of information, it is problematic with subjects such as health advice. From what I understand (Google doesn’t exactly advertise the details of their search algorithm) incoming links from high value sites, such as academic sites or sites that themselves rank highly, count more than links coming in from small or personal websites. This helps, but is not enough. There is so much misinformation on the web that it can overwhelm reliable information, regardless of how the popularity rankings are tweaked.

As an aside, but one that demonstrates how Google’s algorithm affects our lives, I find it annoying that Google adjusts the ranking of websites according to my personal history. This is meant to tailor information to me, and may be useful when I am searching for an item I want to buy. However, when I am searching a topic sometimes I want to know what is most popular. I don’t want to see all my own articles on a topic. I know you can turn this feature off, but it is the default, and many people don’t realize how it is affecting their searches.

I do like the fact that Google is not resting on their laurels and they want to continue to push the envelope. Their new idea is very interesting – actually look at the factual statements on a website and determine if they are accurate by comparing them to a database of knowledge. According to New Scientist:

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

One quibble – if the web “unanimously” agrees on a fact how can any website contradict it? Obviously they are referring to a strong consensus. Immediately I can see the protest to this approach. This approach will punish minority opinions and reinforce the current dogma.

My answer to this anticipated criticism is...

Continues here.

[podfish]

....Google undoubtedly is a cornerstone of the internet, which itself is now a cornerstone of our civilization. We are rapidly evolving to having a worldwide network of shared human knowledge and communication. The internet is now the dominant medium of human ideas.
Google is not just a search engine – it is the dominant portal to this information.

there's something even more dangerous, because it's more subtle. Try searching for something, and at the same time have someone else search with the same string. It's quite likely that you'll get different results. They 'know who you are' most of the time, and tune results to what they think will work best for you.

It's not that I distrust them specially; I quite like Google and they're much less evil than a corporation in their position ought to be. But they clearly don't really live up to that motto (for those who don't know the tech industry, their explicitly defined corporate value was "Don't be evil"). But people are psychologically disposed to live in a self-reinforcing bubble as it is, hearing only ideas that support their pre-existing beliefs, so when such a pervasive tool as web-search makes it worse, that's a real threat to one's ability to maintain perspective. It's too easy to think that one's own point of view, or knowledge of the world, is one that's widely shared. We need to be constantly presented with evidence, even on trivial things, that each of us has a unique and very limited set of experiences.