Google don’t like conservative people (channeling my inner Kayne)
Bottom Line: These are stories you shouldn't miss and my takes on them...
Excerpt: Political leanings don't factor into Google's search algorithm. But the authoritativeness of page links that the algorithm spits out and the perception of thousands of human raters do.
Google's bots index the entire web, ranking search results based on an algorithm that incorporates the opinions of human search quality raters.
Last year, Google engineers tweaked the search algorithm 2,400 times based on the results of more than 270,000 experiments, rater reviews and live user tests.
When it comes to judging the quality of the top news stories that Google displays, three major issues come into play, according to Google: Freshness, relevancy and authoritativeness. Google's crawlers scan pages more frequently if they change regularly.
Hot Take: Those facts are correct and point to exactly the issue the President has spoken out about. While Google maintains there isn’t bias that’s actually inaccurate based on the criteria that decides “authoritativeness” and the human programmers who create the algorithms. Frankly, it’s intellectually insulting in addition to being dishonest. I do believe that they aren’t intentionally going out of their way as a company to deliver overtly biased results, but they live in a world where CNN, the most liberal network in news according to researched findings by the Media Research Center, is the most “authoritative” TV news outlet and the New York Times and the Washington Post are the most “authoritative” newspaper and digital news organizations. That’s the issue here. It’s been proven that the same piece of content disseminated by CNN and Fox News will prioritize the CNN content ahead of Fox News. Fox News has higher average ratings than CNN, MSNBC and CNBC combined. Therefore, how could the “authoritative” rating be based on anything other the arbitrary and highly flawed criteria?
What’s worse than Google lying to us and assuming we’re stupid, is that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much during the mist of the newsfeed scandal they went through. Now, here’s the rub. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Google, a business run for its shareholders, to create a biased product if that’s what they want to do. Just as it’s any liberal digital company’s right to perpetuate whatever it is they what to perpetuate (this side of slander anyway). What’s wrong about this however, is that Google’s by far the world’s top search platform-built on a false premise of objectivity that they’re indignant about while refuting the truth presented to them.
Until Tomorrow...