Google Changes Algorithm, Scrubs Neo-Nazi Site Disputing Holocaust in Top Search

[GMDino]

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/google-changes-algorithm-scrubs-neo-nazi-site-disputing-holocaust-top-n700506?cid=sm_fb

Quote:Google is weeding out the hate after coming under fire for allowing a neo-Nazi site to appear as a top result when someone searches for whether the Holocaust happened.



As of Monday, users reported that they no longer saw a white supremacist site appear at the very top of the results, mixed in with sites for Jewish museums and ones that show the Holocaust was real.


"Understanding which pages on the web best answer a query is a challenging problem and we don't always get it right," said a Google spokesperson, who did not explicitly mention the controversy.


Google has recently "made improvements" to its algorithm that will instead surface "more high-quality, credible content on the web," the spokesperson told NBC News, noting that the search algorithm will continue to be tweaked over time.


This latest change occurred after a report that the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, was relying on an advertising grant from Google to pay to have its site appear higher in Holocaust denial search results in order to combat the presence of a white supremacist site. The cost of the grant amounted to up to $2 per click to divert users to the museum's site, a museum official told The Guardian.


It's not the first time Google has altered its search algorithm, which uses different factors to determine which pages rank higher in the results — a trusted enough method to propel the site to become the biggest and most influential search engine in the world.


In 2010, Google said it changed its algorithm after a New York Times report found that an online eyeglass business was taking advantage of bad reviews that garnered it a high ranking, in turn giving it more business. Google at the time was hush-hush about how it changed its algorithm, saying it wanted to continue to make it hard for "bad actors" to find a loophole.


Google's technology was changed again after people spoke out about how typing in "are Jews evil" in the autocorrect function resulted in offensive terms. Also, when people searched "who runs Hollywood?" the result, "Jews," was scrubbed last year. Google said its algorithm incorrectly gave "authority" to a site that suggested so because it was linked to over and over again.
[url=http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2014_26/532151/140626-google-search-916_0bc2fe2176bdca17485e05a58edad556.nbcnews-ux-2880-1000.jpg][/url]
But Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Tuesday that Google has a long way to go to "clean up its act." While searching for "did the Holocaust happen?" no longer shows one white supremacist site at the top, searching for "is the Holocaust real?" still provides a site up high that claims it's a hoax.


Beirich said the center met with Google earlier this year after they were alarmed to find a site about Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a front for white supremacist ideology.


"Facebook is getting slaughtered on the fake news front, but in many ways, this Google problem is more insidious," Beirich told NBC News. 
"People might assume that what they're getting is vetted, and that certainly is not the case."

She suggested that Google not deal with these issues as one-off controversies but, instead, put together a task force that looks at the systemic problem of hate speech online.


"You can go down a rabbit hole of hate because they're going to keep providing it to you," Beirich said.


Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at Hunter College in New York specializing on racism online, said search engine companies are not under any obligation to give people unfettered results that uphold false and racist beliefs.


She added that the spread of birtherism, which falsely claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, was allowed to thrive online because of the propping up of certain search results.



"Google doesn't have to make the secret sauce of its algorithm public to make changes," Daniels said. "They can certainly say if your site promulgates hatred against an entire group of people ... we're not going to serve it up to users."

[Rotobeast]

I'm ok with knocking it down the list a bit, but I think removing it from the results is a slippery slope.

Liberty is a fickle muse.

[THE Bigzoman]

(12-28-2016, 12:06 AM)Rotobeast Wrote: I'm ok with knocking it down the list a bit, but I think removing it from the results is a slippery slope.

Liberty is a fickle muse.

This.
I was always told that government would shit on free speech and the Matketplace of ideas. Not Government, corporations, and their useful idiotic cheerleaders. Let shit stand on its own merit. If these people are doing anything, it's giving people like this MORE STEAM. not less.
The Streisand Effect is a very real thing people.

[GMDino]

(12-28-2016, 12:06 AM)Rotobeast Wrote: I'm ok with knocking it down the list a bit, but I think removing it from the results is a slippery slope.

Liberty is a fickle muse.

(12-28-2016, 02:25 AM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: This.
I was always told that government would shit on free speech and the Matketplace of ideas. Not Government, corporations, and their useful idiotic cheerleaders. Let shit stand on its own merit. If these people are doing anything, it's giving people like this MORE STEAM. not less.
The Streisand Effect is a very real thing people.

I was on the fence with it when I read it.

After a good nights sleep I'm fine with eliminating something false with the intended point of raising hatred.

People can be as dumb and uniformed as they want to be...private companies like Google (not a government agency restricting free speech) can do all they want to prevent deliberately false information.

I'm quite sure there are plenty of other sources of deliberately false information out there for like minded people to use to "prove" what they believe.

[Rotobeast]

(12-28-2016, 09:21 AM)GMDino Wrote: I was on the fence with it when I read it.

After a good nights sleep I'm fine with eliminating something false with the intended point of raising hatred.

People can be as dumb and uniformed as they want to be...private companies like Google (not a government agency restricting free speech) can do all they want to prevent deliberately false information.

I'm quite sure there are plenty of other sources of deliberately false information out there for like minded people to use to "prove" what they believe.

Oh, I agree that as a company, Google has the right to eliminate it from their search.
But... IF the nasty site were paying Google like the Anti-Anti-Semitic site, are we in a refusal to bake the cake scenario ?

Now...if I learn Google is blocking sites (other than one's solely existing to install malware), I will use another search engine.
I'm sure many will follow and Google would eventually revert.



Sent from my SM-S820L using Tapatalk

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(12-28-2016, 02:25 AM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: This.
I was always told that government would shit on free speech and the Matketplace of ideas. Not Government, corporations, and their useful idiotic cheerleaders. Let shit stand on its own merit. If these people are doing anything, it's giving people like this MORE STEAM. not less.
The Streisand Effect is a very real thing people.

Do you like to eat at restaurants with good food or shitty food?  Should a restaurant owner let shitty food stand on its own merit?  Or should the owner improve the quality of the food for his customers?

[Mike M (the other one)]

(12-28-2016, 10:17 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: Do you like to eat at restaurants with good food or shitty food?  Should a restaurant owner let shitty food stand on its own merit?  Or should the owner improve the quality of the food for his customers?

What's bad to you, might not be bad to someone else. I'm sure you've heard of balut.
You shouldn't use food to make a comparison.

[fredtoast]

(12-28-2016, 12:06 AM)Rotobeast Wrote: I'm ok with knocking it down the list a bit, but I think removing it from the results is a slippery slope.

Liberty is a fickle muse.

(12-28-2016, 02:25 AM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: This.
I was always told that government would shit on free speech and the Matketplace of ideas. Not Government, corporations, and their useful idiotic cheerleaders. Let shit stand on its own merit. If these people are doing anything, it's giving people like this MORE STEAM. not less.
The Streisand Effect is a very real thing people.

I don't think they are completely removing it


 "While searching for "did the Holocaust happen?" no longer shows one white supremacist site at the top, searching for "is the Holocaust real?" still provides a site up high that claims it's a hoax."

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(12-29-2016, 02:02 PM)Mike M (the other one) Wrote: What's bad to you, might not be bad to someone else. I'm sure you've heard of balut.
You shouldn't use food to make a comparison.

It's an analogy. Owners aren't going to purposely serve shitty food because they will go out of business. If Google regularly serves up false information people will use other search engines and Google's revenue will suffer. Thus it is in Google's own best interest to provide the most accurate information. 

If you want to make an analogy with balut; will you pay for real balut or imaginary balut?  I doubt people will continue to patronize the the place selling the imaginary balut. 

[THE Bigzoman]

(12-28-2016, 10:17 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: Do you like to eat at restaurants with good food or shitty food?  Should a restaurant owner let shitty food stand on its own merit?  Or should the owner improve the quality of the food for his customers?

How is food, in any way, analogous to ideas?

[THE Bigzoman]

(12-29-2016, 04:32 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: It's an analogy. Owners aren't going to purposely serve shitty food because they will go out of business. If Google regularly serves up false information people will use other search engines and Google's revenue will suffer. Thus it is in Google's own best interest to provide the most accurate information. 

If you want to make an analogy with balut; will you pay for real balut or imaginary balut?  I doubt people will continue to patronize the the place selling the imaginary balut. 

Except Google has way more market power in its industries than any restaurant has in the restaurant business. Google is also heavily vested in other areas and products aside from its search results. You can reasonably expect a restaurant to go under if its food sucks; it's the restaurants' only source of revenue. You'd have a much harder time proving that googles' revenues would be harmed at all by not changing its algrothim, yet alone to the point to where it would lose out to the few competitors it actually has.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(12-29-2016, 08:06 PM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: Except Google has way more market power in its industries  than any restaurant has in the restaurant business. Google is also heavily vested in other areas and products aside from its search results. You can reasonably expect a restaurant to go under if its food sucks; it's the restaurants' only source of revenue. You'd have a much harder time proving that googles' revenues would be harmed at all by not changing its algrothim, yet alone to the point to where it would lose out to the few competitors it actually has.

So it is okay to provide a shitty product to your customers if you're a large diversified company?

Why don't you give me a breakdown of Google's revenue to see how much of it is generated by ads. 

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(12-29-2016, 08:02 PM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: How is food, in any way, analogous to ideas?

(12-29-2016, 08:06 PM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: Except Google has way more market power in its industries  than any restaurant has in the restaurant business. Google is also heavily vested in other areas and products aside from its search results. You can reasonably expect a restaurant to go under if its food sucks; it's the restaurants' only source of revenue. You'd have a much harder time proving that googles' revenues would be harmed at all by not changing its algrothim, yet alone to the point to where it would lose out to the few competitors it actually has.

How were you able formulate this response if you were incapable of a understanding the analogy?

[THE Bigzoman]

(12-29-2016, 09:01 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: How were you able formulate this response if you were incapable of a understanding the analogy?

I read one post before I read the other. I assumed you didn't elaborate on what you meant.

[THE Bigzoman]

(12-29-2016, 08:56 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: So it is okay to provide a shitty product to your customers if you're a large diversified company?

Why don't you give me a breakdown of Google's revenue to see how much of it is generated by ads. 

You don't seem to get how analogies work. Google's situation isn't comparable to that of any restaurant, so your analogy is ass. That's all I was trying to say. That doesn't carry the implication that any large diversified company can have a shitty product. Not even close.

Because again, google is different from a restaurant in industry, size, power, and scope.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(12-29-2016, 09:27 PM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: You don't seem to get how analogies work. Google's situation isn't comparable to that of any restaurant, so your analogy is ass. That's all I was trying to say.  That doesn't carry the implication that any large diversified company can have a shitty product. Not even close.

Because again, google is different from a restaurant in industry, size, power, and scope.

Jesus H. Christ.

http://literarydevices.net/analogy/

Quote:An analogy is a comparison in which an idea or a thing is compared to another thing that is quite different from it. It aims at explaining that idea or thing by comparing it to something that is familiar.

Explaining the definition of an analogy is really outside of the scope of this discussion. You obviously understood the analogy otherwise you wouldn't have responded with market shares and diversification. So you're feigning ignorance in an attempt to make me look ignorant. You should add that to your list of ironies. 

Restaurants provide food. Search engines provide search results. Restaurants and Google are businesses that provide a service to customers in order to make money. You understand no matter how much you feign otherwise. 

[hollodero]

(12-29-2016, 08:02 PM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: How is food, in any way, analogous to ideas?

Food for thought!

-
$1 I think the analogy works perfectly
$2 I think we have to admit that a too large portion of the population lacks either the intellect or the knowledge for a completely censorship-free community to work. Way too many people are too ignorant and naive in that we could assume utter stupidity or blatant lies would just reveal themselves in the eye of the consumer. Doesn't happen. 
Disputing the holocaust is not presenting a different critical view, it's plainly telling a horrendous lie. By all means, remove these sites from the top searches, otherwise we would just be naive sheeps to the lying wolves.
Now deleting the sites, that would be a different debate. But no opinion has the right to be granted a platform wherever they want to have one. That's not how freedom of speech works.