Google's NOT AT ALL BIASED fact check service

[ProdigalHorn]

I watched some of the hearing
Our political people are not well-equipped to deal with Big Tech
It's embarrassing

In fairness, he may have been saying that metaphorically, and I suspect he was. In that case, it's a pretty fair question. How much is human judgment playing in? Is someone on the back end "tweeking" the results or hand-selecting certain aspects? Is that possible? It may be that the system doesn't allow it, but asking the question for the record is certainly not a dumb thing to do.

 

[Seattle Husker]

In fairness, he may have been saying that metaphorically, and I suspect he was. In that case, it's a pretty fair question. How much is human judgment playing in? Is someone on the back end "tweeking" the results or hand-selecting certain aspects? Is that possible? It may be that the system doesn't allow it, but asking the question for the record is certainly not a dumb thing to do.

Humans design the algorithm. You may be able to argue bias in the algorithm but this idea of "hand-selecting certain aspects" isn't realistic.

Conservatives consistently argue that the media is biased heavily in favor of progressive viewpoints. If that is true, wouldn't Google be reflective of the heavy bias? To think conservative viewpoints get an equal weighting is actually advocating Google tip the scales to weigh a minority media viewpoint, content volume and viewership MORE.

 

[ProdigalHorn]

Conservatives consistently argue that the media is biased heavily in favor of progressive viewpoints. If that is true, wouldn't Google be reflective of the heavy bias?

To some degree but that's a simple view, because the issue with Google isn't just what comes up when you search "Hillary Clinton FBI" or something. What answer shows up when you search for "Did Hillary Clinton break the law" or something like that. Typically that's not going to return an MSM news article - although it sometimes will. It invariably brings up blogs or opinion pieces, and there's a lot more balance in terms of the number of blogs that are conservative versus liberal. It also has to do with the initial post here - some questions get fact-checked and some don't. Some sources are considered trustworthy and some aren't - who decides that and why? Which studies are viewed as trustworthy and why? From an SEO standpoint, a lot of that is opaque and there are blogs and blogs by people who experiment and THINK they've come up with keys to what makes a post rank well for a specific combination of keywords. What determines when a question gets an answer box? And who gets to populate it? Plenty of people have ideas of generally how you can position yourself, but no one knows definitively because Google won't say.

I've heard complaints about search results but don't know that they have any validity based on what I know about how complex the whole question of SEO is. But clearly when a company has that much control over information and so little visibility, isn't it incumbent on overseeing bodies to try and understand the situation?