Do not use Google Search anymore. (Conspiracy)

submitted ago by Jop

Google has introduced their "truth rankings" algorithm a while ago.

It checks what most websites say about a certain subject to know what's "true". Then, all websites that contradict "the truth" are pushed down in the search results. This means that Google Search has turned into a propaganda machine. Use DuckDuckGo or ixquick instead.

EDIT: Apparently Google isn't actually planning to do this. But they still manually censor[1][2].

zoetry ago

Let me ask you this.

If I ran a book store, would you claim that I'm censoring the books that I place at the back specifically because no one wants them?

Some of them have to go back there, you know, and it's just good business to put the bestseller upfront or in the window.

zoetry ago

So you've based your conclusion on arguments from 'authorities'.

One of the authorities is a climate change denier whose making a financially driven argument. And the other makes no claim outside of 'I personally believe that certain groups are less likely to attempt to verify the claims of any given web page'.

zoetry ago

so feel free to prove me wrong

That's not how this works. You're making the claim. It's your responsibility to provide the evidence.

Specifically, I was wondering if you'd read and fully understood this paper which explicitly details how KBT works, and then arrived at your conclusion that 'google is now a propaganda machine', or whether you read an article stating that Google was switching to 'truth rankings' and based you conclusion solely on that.

xeemee ago

We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.

The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors made in the extraction process from factual errors in the web source per se, by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model.

We call the trustworthiness score we computed Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). On synthetic data, we show that our method can reliably compute the true trustworthiness levels of the sources. We then apply it to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimate the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. Manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method

sure looks like it can be used to censor to me

the problem here is that it is google that is going to decide for the rest of us what is 'trustworthy' and what is not

given that the facts of many historical events have been altered to suit an agenda, and it is the falsified version that is the mainstream version, what do you think is going to happen to the work of those who disagree with the mainstream, even when their work is meticulously researched and well-referenced?

this is censorship, at least to some degree, whether intentional or not

...

as to the OPs recommendation to use DuckDuckGo or ixquick, while they will protect your privacy, i believe they are both powered by google, as are many other alternative search providers

Good Gopher/Fetch looks like an interesting alternative however, at least for researchers

zoetry ago

sure looks like it can be used to censor to me

No part of any of their proposed design includes the elimination or suppression of information.

the problem here is that it is google that is going to decide for the rest of us what is 'trustworthy' and what is not

Google already decides what is relevant to your query, and that's not an accurate assessment of what's going on. Google is just employing a new search ranking algorithm. Everyone gets to decide whether they trust google's ranking.

given that the facts of many historical events have been altered to suit an agenda, and it is the falsified version that is the mainstream version, what do you think is going to happen to the work of those who disagree with the mainstream, even when their work is meticulously researched and well-referenced?

If it's well referenced, it should move up or remain where it is in the search rankings.

this is censorship, at least to some degree, whether intentional or not

Censorship is a destruction or suppression of free speech. Where google decides to rank search results is not censorship. If you think it is, all search engines enact censorship, as they all decide what to show you based on your query.

as to the OPs recommendation to use DuckDuckGo or ixquick, while they will protect your privacy, i believe they are both powered by google, as are many other alternative search providers

Do you have any evidence for your claim that DDG is powered by google? As far as I can tell, they've zero relationship with Google, and it's not like Google provides public access to their raw database.

xeemee ago

Censorship is a destruction or suppression of free speech. Where google decides to rank search results is not censorship. If you think it is, all search engines enact censorship, as they all decide what to show you based on your query.

when relevant search results are ranked lower than those containing untruths and propaganda, that is effectively censorship because it is putting inaccurate results at the top and the user is less likely to dig past the first page or two to find the relevant results

for example, search google for "holocaust" and look at the top results - for me they are wikipedia, the USHMM, and history.com - all of these sources provide a laughably and provably distorted view of Germany's role in the 2nd world war

Do you have any evidence for your claim that DDG is powered by google? As far as I can tell, they've zero relationship with Google, and it's not like Google provides public access to their raw database.

DuckDuckGo - wikipedia: "DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors." - from 2012: " ... is about as small as a company can be — it has one full-time employee ..." - there is little doubt that DDC is using google

Startpage/ixquick - "StartPage offers you Web search results from Google"

Disconnect - uses google, bing, yahoo

from what i've seen, most of these alternative 'search engines' are not indexes at all and instead use google, yahoo and/or bing

zoetry ago

So, do you know anything about KBT, or are you just making baseless accusations?

NSAOfficial ago

OP is making baseless accusations. The truth algorithm is completely objective. It takes into account the source, the the values compared to similar sources, and various other variables.

zoetry ago

/v/conspiracy <3's baseless accusations.