Google's Pichai denies any political bias in search results during lengthy Congressional t...

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  • Reply 81 of 86
    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac Posts: 11,421member

    In today's post-truth world, anything you don't agree with is "biased" (or FakeNews):

    -- "Hitler = evil"    -- Today that is considered fact by most, but not all.  To them it is biased.
    -- "Trump = idiot" -- Today that is considered fact by most, but not all.  To them, it is biased.

    It is why Time's person of the year are tellers of the truth.  They sometimes give their lives and their freedom to speak it.
    Nice projection here. Fact is when it can be confirmed independently. Fakenews cant be confirmed independently, since they are often custom tailored stories that fit a particular narrative that supports “half-truth” by either altering parts of the story, or by omitting part of the story, that otherwise would be crucial FOR TELLING TRUTH. Since that truth is not what the narrative needs, it will get omitted. 
    True -- IF your only source of information is that story or that news source.   And that's the motivation behind the FakeNews claims:  "You should only listen to me!   I, and only I will tell you what is true and what to believe" 

    But, strangely, truth remains true no matter how the individual facts are spun or cherry picked. 
  • Reply 82 of 86
    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac Posts: 11,421member
    Ted Lieu explained it clearly:
    "If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things"

    Why is that so hard to understand?
  • Reply 83 of 86
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,335member
    More fun finding unintentional inherent biases in the iPhone's predictive algorithms...

    In Apple Messages, try substituting a few different professions for the word “profession” in the following phrase and see what words are given as candidates for the next word.

    ”The profession said <space>” 

    surgeon -> that they he
    nurse -> that she they
    engineer -> that he it
    president -> that he it
    librarian -> that she they
    soldier -> he that the
    farmer -> he that the
    stylist -> that she I

    No conspiracy to see here, this is simply what gets generated by the algorithm based on the available data set. 

    philboogie
  • Reply 84 of 86
    steven n.steven n. Posts: 1,229member
    In response to an earlier comment, I did an image search on DuckDuckGo and here are the top results:


    On DDG, I got a picture of Trump (#5) and Barbra Streisand (#6). Appropriate I think.
    dewme
  • Reply 85 of 86
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member
    curt12 said:
    In response to an earlier comment, I did an image search on DuckDuckGo and here are the top results:


    Bing:


    DDG:

    What's Elfred E. Newman doing in there?  
    THIS IS BIASED!   NO WAY!
    Idially, you would need to run that from multiple IPs and count the number of first couple of hundred pictures.  That would be at least some kind of fair comparison.
    You bring up a good point, since we know Google does skew search results based on what they may know about you the end results for one person may be different for someone else. I have proven this over an over again. I personally have search Google with my direct IP address as well behind an anonymizing VPN connection and from different countries and the results are different each time. I even done the exact same search from my wife work computer and had different first page results come up over mine computer. This is generally true for general or non specific searches, If your search is very specific and there only a limited number of answers than the returned results are close to the same. In this case if Google knows you hate Trump may you will see more idiot Trump picture than someone who has no preference one way or another.


    In the end Google is controlling what you see based on what they know about you, and people who have any knowledge how searches are done and how google prioritizes things can make sure you see what they want you to see. Google could fix this, but will not, we know they can analysis pictures and knows what is in the picture, they could simple filter our the Trump picture from the search of Idiot based on knowing Trump is in the picture. For all we know they could be doing this and in fact are just including Trump as part of the idiot search. Unless you can see the code and the word mapping database you can not be sure.
  • Reply 86 of 86
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    maestro64 said:
    curt12 said:
    In response to an earlier comment, I did an image search on DuckDuckGo and here are the top results:


    Bing:


    DDG:

    What's Elfred E. Newman doing in there?  
    THIS IS BIASED!   NO WAY!
    Idially, you would need to run that from multiple IPs and count the number of first couple of hundred pictures.  That would be at least some kind of fair comparison.
    You bring up a good point, since we know Google does skew search results based on what they may know about you the end results for one person may be different for someone else.

    In the end Google is controlling what you see based on what they know about you, and people who have any knowledge how searches are done and how google prioritizes things can make sure you see what they want you to see. Google could fix this, but will not, we know they can analysis pictures and knows what is in the picture, they could simple filter our the Trump picture from the search of Idiot based on knowing Trump is in the picture. For all we know they could be doing this and in fact are just including Trump as part of the idiot search. Unless you can see the code and the word mapping database you can not be sure.
    In the end Google is sourcing the initial results it believes you are looking for, which is what nearly all of us expect. Otherwise you'd go looking for another search engine. Right?

    But no I don't consider Google to be controlling what I see since I very often will dig deeper if the first results aren't satisfactory, and far more often than not I can find just the document, or source, or quote, or word, or image or research paper, or whatever that I'm wanting. Generally quickly too as my previous search results that perhaps used obscure sites or resources now help surface the right search results that follow far easier. You can do the same. 
    edited December 2018
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