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Google Tweaked Algorithm After Rise In US Shootings (theguardian.com) 190

A senior search engineer at Google revealed that the company had to tweak its algorithm to combat misinformation after mass shootings. The Guardian reports: "In these last few years, there's been a tragic increase in shootings," Pandu Nayak, who joined the company 14 years ago to work on its search engine, said. "And it turns out that during these shootings, in the fog of events that are unfolding, a lot of misinformation can arise in various ways. "And so to address that we have developed algorithms that recognize that a bad event is taking place and that we should increase our notions of 'authority', increase the weight of 'authority' in our ranking so that we surface high quality content rather than misinformation in this critical time here."

Authority, by Google's definition, means pages that comply with the company's search quality evaluator guidelines, a 166-page document (PDF) that the company distributes to its 16,000 search quality raters. Those employees are responsible for checking tweaks to Google's algorithm to ensure that they give the best results, rating search results on two scales: one that marks whether the searcher's needs are met (if the search is for "Google Jobs," for instance, a maps result showing the location of Google's head office "fails to meet" needs, while the company's career's page "fully meets"), and a second that marks the page's quality, defined over 80 pages of the guidelines with "very high quality MC" (main content), "very high level of E-A-T" (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) and "very positive reputation."

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Google Tweaked Algorithm After Rise In US Shootings

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    benis.

  • Same old Google (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Ashthon ( 5513156 )

    What they're saying is, in the event of a shooting, Google will direct you to CNN and other left wing news sources so they can tell you how evil guns are. Google has long stopped being a search engine and is now a project for manipulating public opinion. They want to control the narrative, they want to you to see only one side of the argument and not the other, and they want to tell you what you should think and who you should vote for.

    Since Google now shows edited content, rather than the most relevant s

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      1. CNN is not "left wing" by any measure.

      2. "anyone who is harmed by this misinformation should be able to sue Google"

      Sue away. You'll lose because you've got no grounds.
      • Re:Same old Google (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @08:07PM (#58864270)

        CNN is not "left wing" by any measure.

        Any measure.

        Are [allsides.com] you [mediabiasfactcheck.com] sure? [adfontesmedia.com]

        "anyone who is harmed by this misinformation should be able to sue Google"

        Sue away. You'll lose because you've got no grounds.

        There are grounds in limited situations both within the US [upenn.edu] and the EU [euagenda.eu]

        Do you or the person that gave you a positive mod have your own citations or is this a situation of DogDude's opinion versus authoritative facts?

        • Are you sure?

          After reading your links I am. Two of your links rate CNN as "left leaning" or "skews left" (barely), and the third gives it a solid "left" rating on the page you linked. But if you look at their methodology [mediabiasfactcheck.com] page, they go into more detail about how they rated CNN specifically and call it a "moderate left bias" rating.

          For both All Sides and Media Bias Fact Check, they suggest that this situation is relatively new: CNN was rated "center" on All Sides until 2018. All Sides also said this: "CNN is, without a

      • Re:Same old Google (Score:5, Informative)

        by _Sharp'r_ ( 649297 ) <sharper AT booksunderreview DOT com> on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @08:50PM (#58864446) Homepage Journal

        First, the summary is wrong. Shootings in the United States haven't been increasing.

        Second, your statement that 'CNN is not "left wing" by any measure.' is also factually inaccurate. Here's a measure [mediabiasfactcheck.com], CNN is rated "left wing" on it. Here's another [adfontesmedia.com], and another [washingtonpost.com], with CNN to the left of the center point of Americans on all of them.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Brett Buck ( 811747 )

        CNN is *insanely* obsessed with phony Trump conspiracies 24/7 and routinely engages in over-the-top PC behavior. Those are hallmarks of the hard, lunatic, left.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        CNN spent two flippin' years telling everybody Trump "colluded" with Russia. Their anchor, Cuomo, is the leftist brother of the leftist governor Cuomo of New York who has said Republicans are not welcome in his state.

        Their other two big talking heads are Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper, both of whom are leftist homosexuals who have long been on a misson to trash conservatives.

        They have had an endless supply of Trump haters and Republican haters on their channel as "experts" commenting on nearly everything tha

      • by Agripa ( 139780 )

        1. CNN is not "left wing" by any measure.

        Sure, CNN just "accidentally" gave the debate questions to Hillary. It happens all the time.

    • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      Google should therefore be held responsible for any misinformation it presents, and anyone who is harmed by this misinformation should be able to sue Google. They can't have it both ways, and if they want to be a publisher, rather than a search engine, they need to take full responsibility for the content they publish.

      Please provide your name and address for service of process, so that I may sue you for the misinformation that you have presented. After all, if you want to be a publisher you need to take fu

    • Re:Same old Google (Score:4, Insightful)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:24PM (#58863908)

      CNN and other left wing news sources

      /facepalm

      Have you ever seen an actual left wing news source? [alamy.com]

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:30PM (#58863932)

      Given this sort of intervention, how would the notorious Michael Brown - Ferguson riots incident of 2014 [wikipedia.org] be reported today?

      For those who don't remember, that incident involved a white police officer shooting a black man named Michael Brown.

      The initial reports placed the blame on the police officer, and portrayed Michael Brown as innocent. There ended up being damaging riots, and the Black Lives Matter group got lots of attention.

      Then as the investigation into the incident continued, it became more and more obvious that the police officer had apparently been attacked by Michael Brown, and the officer was acting in self defense. So much of the original narrative was then seen as being totally nonsensical. Witnesses had lied. There was clear video footage showing Michael Brown engaging in violent behavior at a store just prior to the shooting incident. The forensics clearly showed that the police officer acted very reasonably considering the situation.

      If the incident happened today, would this kind of intervention by Google have helped prevent the what happened in Ferguson? Would Michael Brown have been highlighted as the aggressor, like the investigation eventually indicated, right away, possibly preventing the riots and the attention that BLM undeservingly obtained as a result of questionable initial reports?

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        I'm not sure the 'authority' sources were any better than the rumour mill in that situation. I mean, their sources were the rumour mill.

        Take something even more newsworthy. On 11th September 2001 mainstream media sites all went down. Only non-authoritative sources could handle the traffic, and they handled it superbly.

        So fuck Google and their censorship.

      • To ask it is to answer it. Of course Google would not have done anything to undermine the delicious initial Michael Brown narrative. And everyone knows it.
      • If the incident happened today, would this kind of intervention by Google have helped prevent the what happened in Ferguson?

        We can be sure that contradicting an authoritative source like CNN [youtube.com] will result in being downranked as "conspiracy" or "fake news". Therefore the next Ferguson will probably be even worse.

        Google News itself is a great example of how Google applies its "fairness" doctrine towards shaping the reality it wants people to believe. Vox and Vice as sources for top headlines would also seem to be decent evidence for this.

    • by vix86 ( 592763 )

      What is the "right" algorithm then that doesn't make them a "publisher" anymore?

      Your complaint is simply that they have chosen to weigh things differently from what you would. Half the reason Google became a better search engine than AltaVista, Excite, AskJeeves, and more; was that they were able to sift out the crud websites and bring better quality websites to the top. Nobody had any issues with this until just 3-4 years ago, but now they're suddenly a "publisher" and "editing the internet."

      They've been d

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Oh come on. Google blatantly manipulates the results to fit into their left-speak extreme ideological mentality. Google has been filtering out the crud for a long time and they became very good at it, but you cannot deny that lately their internal mandate has changed from filter the useless junk crud to filter out and/or manipulate search results to display results that fit into their very narrow belief system.

        A perfect example is to search for "white couples" and look at what images you get. Over half th

        • by Cederic ( 9623 )

          There's a feedback link on Google search results pages. Use it.

          Every time they return bollocks as you've described, I'm giving them feedback that their search is shit and they've just forced me to use bing.com.

        • A perfect example is to search for "white couples" and look at what images you get

          It's because "white couples" matches the phrase "black and white couples" which is something that is more often searched. Why would I be interested in searching for "white couples?" That's a weird thing to search for. I could just look in my own house to see that. But Black and White Couples.. well, that's more unusual. That's something different to look for. Doesn't mean that it's actually more prevalent as an image subject.
          Same for "White people." That's a phrase that's more often used by non-white people

      • I've heard it said that Google is now on their 4th generation search algorithm. The 2nd generation algorithm - the one that was really good at searching for what you asked - is what made Google's reputation for search.

    • Re:Same old Google (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tyler Durden ( 136036 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:16PM (#58864106)

      What they're saying is, in the event of a shooting, Google will direct you to CNN and other left wing news sources so they can tell you how evil guns are.

      Nah. It's probably to prevent directing people to the numerous right wing "news" sources that will baselessly claim the shooting didn't happen and is instead a vast conspiracy to take away the people's right to bear arms. Resulting in fun stuff like fools hounding [theatlantic.com] the parents of victims of said violence for being a part of the "hoax".

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Nah. It's probably to prevent directing people to the numerous right wing "news" sources that will baselessly claim the shooting didn't happen and is instead a vast conspiracy to take away the people's right to bear arms.

        It's only school shootings they report as not happening.
        With other shootings they make sure to claim that the shooter is a Muslim before it turns out to be "yet another independent right wing lunatic".

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It happens with alarming regularity too. You can be sure that after any mass shooting there will be claims that it was a leftist false flag operation, that the shooter was a Muslim or an immigrant, or as you say that it didn't happen at all.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'm sorry that your personal brand of politics is defined by lies.

      Also, you can't determine relevance without some editorial control.

    • "Google will direct you to CNN and other Establishment news sources so they can tell you how evil guns are."

      FTFY

  • Google is 1,000 times worse than Microsoft in 1998.

    • All it would take is a better search engine.
  • Google/Alphabet has gained far too much monopoly power; has become brazenly intrusive into people's private lives; and has repeatedly abused its power to manipulate search results. It's time for Uncle Sam to step in and break up Alphabet.

    At very least, each of the units below needs to become a fully separate company that is legally barred from exchanging data with the others.

    Android
    Search
    Surveillance ("advertising")
    Gmail
    Cloud platform
    Maps
    Media content (play music, play books, etc)
    Chrome browser
    ChromeOS

    • At very least, each of the units below needs to become a fully separate company that is legally barred from exchanging data with the others.
      Android
      Search
      Surveillance ("advertising")
      Gmail
      Cloud platform
      Maps
      Media content (play music, play books, etc)
      Chrome browser
      ChromeOS

      Depends on what they're allowed to still exchange.
      Because they could still exchange money (flow "Surveillance" -> everybody else) and links/includes (every other webpage on your list relies on "Google Analytics"'s surveil^H sorry "Marketing research").

      Which is more or less how everything is financed nowadays already, even for members which are not part of the Alphabet family (e.g.: Chrome isn't the only browser that Google is financing. Google is also financing Mozilla. Because when you look down to it,

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