Performative Conservatives Are Mad That A Search Engine Wants To Downrank Disinformation
from the you-want-what-now? dept
DuckDuckGo, of course, is a popular “alternative” search engine, using Microsoft’s Bing as its underlying search engine but then doing a bunch of generally good stuff for the wider internet/public, such as not trying to collect as much information on you as possible for tracking based ads, but focusing instead of intention based ads around your search (like Google did in the early days). I regularly use it and appreciate the more privacy protective approach.
Like lots of internet companies over the last few weeks, apparently DuckDuckGo has been trying to figure out how to deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the concerted effort by certain sources to push a Russia-driven narrative about the invasion. A few days ago, DDG’s founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced on Twitter that the company was rolling out a search update that downranked “sites associated with Russian disinformation.”
Now, there are (of course!) reasonable questions to be asked about what any particular company considers to be “disinformation.” As we’ve spent years detailing, defining disinformation is a lot more difficult than most people think. It’s also prone to abuse by governments looking to censor. And, quite frequently, disinformation flows are really more closely related to the issue of confirmation bias.
Still, the job of a search engine is to rank websites based on what that website thinks will provide the searcher with the most relevant information. It is, inherently, biased. It can’t not be. This is why the entire concept of “search neutrality” is nonsense. A “neutral” search engine is a search engine that just returns random results, rather than useful results. Every search engine is biased, because that bias is what determines what results will be ranked first, second, third, etc.
But… a whole bunch of overly performative Trumpists who must always play the victim, responded to Gabriel’s announcement by falling on their fainting couches to bemoan the fact that a search engine was downranking false information. This includes a Peter Thiel-backed Senate candidate, Blake Masters, who is shocked, shocked, shocked, that a search engine might try to minimize false information:
But there were lots more, and all seemed to be based on the idea that before this, DDG’s results were somehow… pure and untouched by any bias.
There are SO MANY more tweets like this, nearly all of which seem to think that there’s a divine set of search results that are perfect, unbiased, and untouched by human hands, and that somehow DDG’s latest search ranking modification (something every search engine ever has always done as they attempt to continually rank information in a more relevant fashion) is against the norm.
It truly is incredible how little people understand how any of this works.
Filed Under: bias, disinformation, search, search engines, search neutrality
Companies: duckduckgo
Comments on “Performative Conservatives Are Mad That A Search Engine Wants To Downrank Disinformation”
Pot and kettle
And how many of these people would leap at the chance to downrank things like BLM, trans rights, the Big Lie, etc?
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Re:
I’m concerned not because DDG is downranking Russian propaganda – but that it’s not downranking Ukranian propaganda as well. The results of selective downranking of misinformation is something I have a painful history with.
“It’s okay when it’s our side” does not sit well with me regardless of how much I want Ukraine to repel Russian invaders.
Re: Re:
What are you basing this on?
Re: Re: Re:
When Ukraine captured Russian soldiers, then beat the shit of out them in order to coerce them to repeat Ukraine disinformation about the war. We all cheered that. Rather than suppress that information, it was widely promoted.
This is war. Each side is promoting their own narratives in hopes of gaining political support for their side. This includes disinformation – yes, from the good guys too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6v3nnxOrh4
Re: Re: Re:2
Word to the wise – if your only resource to link to is a YouTube video, all that tells us is that you’re incapable of putting something in your own words and there’s no primary evidence to base the spouted opinions on.
Do you have primary sources, or only what someone else says happened based on “trust me”?
Re: Re: Re:2
This message brought to you by the IRA.
Re: Re:
If the answer to bullshit speech is more speech, then it’s a small leap to supply the answer to your dilemma – simply start your own search engine. This way, you get to set the rules of what responses are provided to queries from whomever accesses your engine… what could go wrong with that??
And that was my ‘nice’ answer. Continue to march, if you have the fortitude….
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Honestly, before I clicked the “unhide comment” function I was genuinely expecting to see that Lostinlodos made the comment.
Re: Re: Re:
Nice how you omitted the qualifier “selective” there in your quote. Really shows you engaging this in good faith.
Re: Re: Re:
“If the answer to bullshit speech is more speech”
Just a reminder to these people – the ranking of information on search engines is also speech.
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Embed tweets, not screenshots
Seriously. A screenshot can be manipulated, even a baby knows that. An embedded tweet cannot. Why should I trust you didn’t manipulate the screenshotted tweets, either in an image editor or with Inspect Element?
Also, when conservatives say “we don’t want biased results” they purely mean the political bias. The results, of course, should be relevant to a query, but when first page consists of purely left-leaning sources, there’s something wrong.
Re:
… said nobody capable of rational independent thought, ever.
Re:
Embedded tweets can also be deleted and/or edited in an attempt to make the speaker appear somewhat less of a moron.
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Re: Re:
Since when Twitter has an edit button? And I have yet to see a conservative deleting their own tweets. It’s usually the other side that does this sort of thing.
Re: Re: Re:
You must be new to the internet. People on both sides of the aisle delete tweets all the time.
Re: Er
Not sure if serious. If so, you’re wrong. If not, lolz.
FTFY
Re:
Look them up, then. Further, how do you imagine an embedded Tweet can not be manipulated? lol
Left-leaning what now?
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Re: Re:
Embedded tweets can’t be manipulated by the very immutable nature of them. Tweets cannot be edited after the fact, even by the person who posted it. Often I had to delete, then retype a tweet because I have made a typo or two because of that, but the pros outweigh the cons.
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True, they cannot be edited, but they can be deleted.
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Why did I just get a whiff of ‘covfefe’?
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I’ve seen various articles where the source tweets are deleted, and the embed is dead.
Really, they should post the screenshot and a link to the tweet.
Re: Re:
That would be an acceptable solution as well.
Re: Re:
How about text? What’s better about a screenshot? It ignores the user’s font and color settings and implicitly says “fuck the blind”.
Twitter was based on letting people write 140 characters of plain text that could be read on any device. Now their website won’t show a damn thing without running a shitload of javascript (and, apparently, when one does enable it, the site gets very pushing about forcing signups). But there’s no reason to repeat their mistakes when quoting tweets. A link in addition to the text would be fine; better to link to nitter.net than twitter.com though.
Re: embedded tweets
A screenshot can be manipulated, even a baby knows that. An embedded tweet cannot.
Tweets can be deleted. My hosted screenshots cannot. If you want to check, you can: none of those tweets have been “manipulated.”
Re: Re:
I think there is a race to the bottom – the social media’s ability to attract all sorts of “my every thought is special and no disagreement allowed”. /rant
Can you bring back blue in your posts. No hurry.
Re: Re:
Addenum:
One could edit tweets, but it’s way too much work, regardless of methods used to do so.
It’s not like Reddit, Discord or forum posts. There’s an inbuilt edit button there.
And I know for a fact that one can fake Discord convos easy.
Re: Screenshots are better in some cases.
Screenshots and quotes are better for archival. Embedded tweets aren’t. Of course screenshots and tweets can be edited. That’s why saving the originals is important. The more important thing: Do you think that Mike edits screenshots and attempts to pass the edits off as the originals?
Efforts to “fight disinformation” are often politically motivated in practice, especially when a government is involved. However, anti-disinformation efforts aren’t inherently political.
Re:
Why do conservatives assume that all attempts to moderate disinformation are politically motivated?
It could have to do with the tendency of far-right folks to reject evidence about the safety of vaccines, about the futility of taking hydrochloroquine, and about the legitimacy of the US presidential election of 2020.
Re: Re:
Because they’ve been led to believe that their enemies do the same thing. (See also: Conservative journalists who make shit up.) The phrase “every accusation, a confession” exists for a reason, and this is that reason.
Re: Re:
Because projection is in their MO.
Re: Re: taking hydrochloroquine
Mmmmmm. Hydroxychloroquine, bleach, colloidal silver, garlic, hot peppers and ivermectin smoothies. You can get them in your local “free thought” cafes. They must be taken nasally and as enemas simultaneously to achieve the best results.
Do your own research
How are they supposed to do their own research if the search engine downrank the results they want?
Re: Do your own research
If they want unfiltered responses all they have to do is spider the internet for them selves then search their own database meta data. Easy as pie..
Re: Re: There is an easier solution
They could go to the third page of search results and continue on from there. Search engines DO return more than one page of results, right?
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This is where I find the arguments and the tweets go wonky:
If someone asks me to give them a list of charities in the area and I return them a randomized list that I found, that’s search results.
If someone asks me to give them a list of charities in the area and I return them a list that has “verified charities with registered charity #” at the top, followed by a disclaimer, followed by a list of charities that are unverified: did those unverified charities suddenly vanish and/or prevent people from doing their own research?
That’s what DDG is doing here: adjusting the RANK of the results, based on how accurate THEY think the link is.
I agree that it seems to conflict with their original goal, but it doesn’t get in the way of obtaining results; they’re all still there, it’s just some that may have been on the first page due to SEO or people’s linking in anger are now placed later in the results.
DDG still provides unfiltered results; they just changed the RANKING.
Re: Re:
I don’t even think it does.
Their original goal was to provide search engine that doesn’t track you, which also means that it doesn’t personalize results. It said nothing about ranking in general, which is normal because it has always ranked results… for a reason.
Those who pretend otherwise (like that @halftwottered) just never understood the concept of search engine. Nobody has ever expected unranked results, they just didn’t pay attention to the ranking as long as they were satisfied. It’s basically “it isn’t broken, it doesn’t exist”.
Re: Results wanted
If you want something to support your viewpoint, be very specific in your query. If want what many, many other people accept as valid results, let the search engine find and present them to you. If you disagree with those results, then you are suffering from an outsized case of confirmation bias.
Like has been said already, there was no downranking, there was (and still is) only results as moderated by the denizens of the web, where the majority opinion is taken as more likely closest to the truth. After all, if you have to ask “what is truth”, then you’re already behind the 8-ball…. way behind.
Reminder that vaccine disinformation, holocaust denial, and terrorism are what officially constitutes “Conservative Values.”
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Well, if their side has spent years describing factual history, physics, chemistry, biology and math as “leftist propaganda” then it’s sort of understandable that they feel butthurt over their favorite dystopian crack fic writers not being given as much leeway as the history books or actual investigative journalism.
After all, the prophets of the invisible sky wizard must be given freedom to debate math and physics. Or it’s unfair. (/s)
The irony is lost on them that “The search engines are telling me what to think!” Is nothing more than propaganda they were told to think.
Says a lot about these chumps if they’re whining about a search engine merely trying to downgrade Russian disinformation. I wonder how many of them are trying to subtly kiss Putin’s ass so they can stay on Old 45’s good side.
Give them a setting for unfiltered results. Then see how quickly they complain.
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Well, it was there in the beginning and was called Altavista. Then Google started off with a dozen employees or so. People calling for unsorted results just don’t remember what actually getting them was like.
It’s like wanting to get your steak completely unprocessed just to end up getting gored by a cow, without even recognizing that animal.
Re: Re:
WebCrawler was apparently the first one. It would show pages matching the set of provided keywords, with no obvious method to their ranking (might’ve just been based on how many times the words appeared). If there were less than about 100 matching pages, as was often the case then, it worked fine.
Later, we got engines like Altavista and HotBot, which gave more control. One could exclude pages with certain words for example, and by then it was desperately needed for some topics. Still, I’d often have to go pretty far down the first page of (100) results to find anything useful.
Google popularized the idea of basing searches on “reputation” in some way. Pages that lots of other pages linked to were given priority, and that meant we could often find useful links in the first 10 matches—often even the first result, hence “I’m feeling lucky”. The web had grown to the point that this was difficult to live without, after seeing it. Shortly afterward, spammers figured out how to use link farms so their spam pages would have lots of inbound links, and ever since then, Google’s been making judgment calls as to what’s a “useful” link. If “unbiased search results” had ever existed, they died then, and can’t be resurrected.
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“Then see how quickly they complain.”
Especially when their kids searches pop up porn. Uncensored.
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Imagine my embarrassment when I did my first vanity search for a WYSIWYG Emacs plugin I titled “Preview-LaTeX” (capitalisation does not get preserved into search terms). Took some time before I prevailed in that search space…
Why are you assuming that people should know how any of this works? Care to take a guess as to how many people know how a car’s engine works? Trust me, the answer won’t be pretty, because the people don’t have to know, they only have to be able to start the engine and drive to somewhere else…. knowledge of how a motor works is not necessary.
Same thing here – knowledge of how a search engine works is not necessary. But worse…. far worse…. knowledge of how a society and a civilization works is required in order for each to function smoothly, but about the same number of engine-unknowledge’d people are also society-unknowledge’d people. The kicker? They vote. (That’s a punchline to a joke, but it just rolled off my fingers and onto the keyboard, sorry ’bout that.) The kicker is, they think they know just how society should be run, and they’re more than willing to tell anybody who will listen just how much they don’t know.
You and I, and the majority of Techdirt readers (excepting of course John Smith and his myriad wannabe’s) know what it takes, but until we’re collectively richer than Croesus, we’re not gonna get the attention we need in order to get the point across. All we can do is huddle together and pray that we don’t get trampled in the race to bring our current society and civilization down into a total mud bog.
Need I say more?
Spam and garbage for days
It’d be hilarious it if DDG responded by making an ‘unbaised’ option that completely randomized all listing order results from a search since any one of them could have the result being looked for and people need to ‘do their own research’ by wading through it all to find what they might have been looking for.
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I had a similar thought too.
Well.. my first thought was “Oh my. Here are NON critical thinkers believing (thinking) they are thinking critically.”
Then I wondered how you present search results in total, with no bias, no order, no filtering, etc. Random as you suggest would be good, but I don’t think the “critical” thinkers (tweeters) above will understand what random order means. I mean thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of results, all on one page. Can we use microscopic fonts to fit everything? To avoid displaying a biased order, how about a spinning wheel where each spoke is a result?
Any other ideas?
Re: Give them what they want
This comes in the already long list of “give them what they want until they beg us to stop”.
* Judging them by their own idea of what the law is. (e.g. judging conservative websites as if section 230 doesn’t exist)
* Even better, judge them by bible standards. Stone them to death when they say: “oh my god!” or stone their children when they disrespect their parents. Also, stone them to death when they say that Jesus is their god. These are all commandments from their own god. (Yes, straight in the top 10. 😀 )
* Quoting the Bible to their children. (e.g. Lot’s daughters)
* Not teaching their children actual science. This might take longer to see results though.
* Prevent them from using foreign knowledge or products. (e.g. made-in-China MAGA caps, arabic numbers)
And more. Let’s see how long they can live in such a world. Aside from mormons (maybe), I doubt even 10% of them would survive the experience, let alone enjoy it.
The quote tweets are truly something. a lot of:
“Stop using DDG and start using startpage.com”
No-one tell them that startpage.com is just a “privacy” front-end for Google.
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Did Gabriel really just post the same boilerplate text in response to everything, though? As corporate responses go, that’s kind of shitty, and in many cases has little to do with the tweet being responded to. Somebody asked, for example, ‘Who decides what is deemed “disinformation?” [sic]’. I’d say that’s a reasonable question, and replying what amounts to “we remove disinformation” seems disrespectful; it suggests Gabriel didn’t even read the question.
The accompanying suggestion, “Just show all results…”, is not workable, and anyone who used the early search engines would know that. Maybe Gabriel’s so entrenched in search technology that he assumes everyone knows this, and the question must be sarcastic and not worth a real response. But to me it seems like a dismissive non-response to a polite and potentially serious question. Google’s been around since 1997, when the Internet was mostly used by techies over slow dialup connections. Most current Internet users never used pre-Google search engines, and many weren’t even alive then.
Re: Re:
No, that “boilerplate text” was not a response to their tweets but the other way around. It was a quoted tweet that the people were responding to. Like how replying to an email usually includes the original email below it.
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Thanks. I see now that some of those tweets show an earlier date on Gabriel’s message. Some, however, do not, and just say e.g. “23h” and “Mar 9”. I’d say this is a bad user interface on the part of Twitter. Email replies are generally labeled as such with “Re:” and would say something like “On Mar 9, XX:XX, Gabriel wrote” (with a later date/time shown on the reply), whereas many of these Twitter screenshots don’t even hint at which is the reply vs the original.
It still seems unfair of Mike to be painting some of these people as “performance conseratives” and replying sarcastically. Unless there’s information he’s not showing. Asking who determines what’s disinformation is not “conservatism”. Mike’s gotta be in his 40s, as am I, and may not realize that most people never experienced the shitty “raw” search results that drove people to develop alternatives.
Someone else suggested DDG enable such a “raw” mode, basically in malice, but I think it could be legitimately educational (though maybe not possible if they’re just drawing data from Bing). As would DDG being a bit more open on how this filtering/ranking works, and Mike posting a link or saying something about why “biased” ranking is necessary now (the “search neutrality” link is similarly snarky with no strong rationale either). Did anyone save examples of disappointing 1990s search results vs early Google?
Re: Re: Re:2
The idiocy is not the part about asking who is making those decisions (though how they’re making them is a much more important question). It’s in demanding that they stop making any decisions and return search results without any curation or ranking. They’re asking for a script to fetch random pages from the internet and put them in a random order on a web page. Anything other than that is making decisions about which pages are more relevant.
Possibly, but that could also give propagandists tools to help escape their downranking.
Here’s the core point: “The whole point of search is to recommend which sites fit your query best.” I don’t see how anyone could disagree with that point. So the question is not whether a search engine is going to favor some sites over others; the question is only how useful do you find that search engine’s results. If you like Bing’s results better that DDG’s, then use Bing. But don’t pretend Bing isn’t biased. They’re biased towards useful high quality relevant links, just like all the rest of them.
Re: Re: Re:3
The quoted post didn’t ask them to stop ranking or “decisions”, only curation (i.e. algorithm tweaks involving much subjectivity). It’s likely more ignorance than idiocy. It’s easy to suggest for example that search engines rank sites according to how many times each search term appears, or how many inbound links match. They worked like that for years, and if one didn’t live through it one may not realize how hard it failed.
It’s a fine point, but doesn’t much explain how particular actions help that goal. And if I’m a researcher looking specifically for Russian disinformation, the sites being downranked might be those that “fit my query best”. So it’s not just about fitting my query, it’s about search engines trying to guess what I wanted, and possibly being wrong. Arguably that’s always been the case, and if the complainers understood the technology better they might not be complaining or might be doing so in a more nuanced way.
I’m not sure I fully agree, because I don’t really see that as an answerable question. I thought Altavista was useful till I tried Google, and then I almost never went back. Lots of people find Google useful now; but they don’t always realize how much “personalization” of the results happens, and there’s some disagreement on whether that’s good for society (cf. “filter bubbles”).
There’s no practical way to see whether DuckDuckGo’s changes have improved results, because they can’t be turned off. All we can do is choose from like 5-10 competitors, pretty much all of whom are frontends for Google and Bing. How can we therefore have any proper debate about whether any individual feature is useful or not? These decisions could actually have pretty major effects on all of us, and there’s no real public science around them, few research papers studying the impact of real or hypothetical changes (because how could anyone write them, without the code or the data?).
I’ll make a guess about what people are really bothered by (and I’ll therefore risk making the same mistake as search engines guessing what people really want). I never actually noticed till now that Mike misquoted Gabriel: Mike wrote “sites associated with Russian disinformation”, whereas Gabriel wrote: “sites associated with disinformation”. I suspect some people are similarly misreading it as a search engine taking a political side in terms of Russia vs. Ukraine, Conservative vs. Liberal, whatever—results being based on the personal views of those in charge, maybe based on what they think we should want rather than what we do want. We’ve seen similar apparent bias from large media organizations, after all, and the term “disinformation” does seem to be often used in politically motivated ways.
Re: Re: Re:4
The questions you raised are good ones. Are these search engines really working all that well? Could something else be better? What effect do they have on society? Could something be done to produce more competition? Even complaining that a search engine is ranking something in a way you don’t find productive or appropriate is fine. Complaining that a search engine ranks its results at all – which is really what most of these tweets boil down to – is stupid. And I would argue not just ignorant, but stupid, as in indicating that the poster wrote something without giving it any meaningful intelligent consideration at all. Could these people perhaps have subtle and nuanced arguments about the search engines that they had trouble distilling into a tweet? Possibly, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it.
Re: Re: Re:5
Do you think they could be interpreting the word “ranking” inconsistently with the normal definition? It’s pretty common for other words. E.g., I’ve seen people write things like “a number between 1 and 10, inclusive” (“between” and “inclusive” being contradictory) or “we don’t discriminate” (in the context of soliciting résumés for a job, when discrimination is literally the entire reason for collecting résumés and interviewing people). Or “bias”, which may be the most relevant word here; a literally unbiased search engine would have to ignore the query string (my transmission of a query string being an attempt to bias the results). We should want search engines to be biased toward utility, news stories to be biased toward truth, etc.
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So when you search for say a conservative views, that those from conservatives in your own country do not start to appear until page twenty of the results is an acceptable order.
Re:
Which conservative views are you talking about? Be specific.
Re: Re:
Every time I read a conservative talk about how his values or opinions are censored, I remember someone doing this little joke:
Conservative – I am censored for my values!
Random guy – Which ones? Family values? Community? Respect?
Conservative – No, my other values.
Random guy – Which ones? Small government? Lower taxes?
Conservative – No, my other values.
Random guy – Which ones? Religion? Morality? Humility?
Conservative – No, my other values.
Random guy – Ah, those ones.
Re: Re: Be specific
I’m not sure that matters.
The problem with algorithms is they don’t just manipulate generic searches. They disrupt specific searches too.
Take this example (results will vary).
+” john deere” +1998 +manual +deck
That works mostlY but there’s still right to repair results on the first page of results for both Bing and google. Logged in or logged out. Fresh search or with history.
Right to repair has nothing to do with that search.
And there is the concern with algorithms.
No matter how specific you make it, you wind up having to fight the algorithms sometimes!
So I’d have to append -“right to repair” and -“r2r” etc to eliminate things I didn’t search for.
And the problem is sometimes not/-/without etc are ignored and you still wind up with crap.
Now if I searched for
John Deere tractor 1998 deck manual
I get tones of articles on the whole right to repair debate. I click on page 20 and bam! Manual.
Ideally we would have an option. A /noalg search option. We don’t.
Re: Re: Re:
“Take this example (results will vary).
+” john deere” +1998 +manual +deck”
Wow… so what you’re actually saying is that you somehow missed the much discussed change Google made 10 years ago to deprecate the use of the plus symbol as a search operator.
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/google-kills-its-other-plus-and-how-to-bring-it-back/
I can’t speak to Bing’s results, but if you’re using things with the faulty assumption that they are what you imagine them to be instead of looking and realising facts in the real world are different to in your head, well you’re going to get the same results as usual.
But, your inability to ask Google the question you want in a format it understands is the problem here, not algorithms.
Re: Re: Re:2 Yep
Given google search isn’t my go-to, I did miss that. it’s not something I would have even put effort into reading about at the time.
I prefer Bing. Long have.
Re: Re: Re:
Not sure what search engine you used here, but I attemped the search on DDG.
“John Deere tractor 1998 deck manual”
First result: Manuals and Training | Parts & Service | John Deere US
Second result: JOHN DEERE MANUAL – John Deere PDF Manual
I looked for the first three pages and found nothing about “right to repair”. I also tested Google on this and got similar (though not identical) results. I’m not sure if you used the wrong search engine or are simply dishonest… I could make an educated guess though.
Re: Re: Re:2 History
Likely my history and cookies change results.
I tried doing so on a friends computer and it’s the 5th one down.
There’s also the issue that I didn’t turn off drive read access in trying to test it in a VM. Which also makes
Repeating totally sandboxed is quite interesting:
And some options to purchase manuals. Lol. Interesting indeed.
Re:
I find it interesting that i still get annoyed at how “conservative” has become synonymous with “reactionary” and “delusionary”. I mean, as an old fuddy-duddy, I would actually be rightfully considered comparatively conservative, but not that raving lunatic thingy half of the U.S. is suffering from. I don’t really want to find another word for describing myself: it was perfectly fine in my book before it got misappropriated.
Re:
Unfortunately, doesn’t work all that nice in Singapore, where “conservative” (read: yes, those opinions) are the norm, no thanks to the Kochs funding garbage thinktanks and orgs like Focus on the Family, who have effectively captured the bureaucracy and politicians.
Yes, even Facebook is not spared. They’re the ones who “opened” a “private” post after all.
Re:
Define “conservatives” and “conservative views”. Most conservative views on things like taxation, spending, regulations, etc. aren’t downranked. Fringe or extreme conservative views and stuff from fringe or extreme conservatives may get downranked, but then the same often applies to extremist liberal views.
Re:
This is where you give concrete examples of those views, as well as those countries and why this affects everyone and not just you.
Do you have such examples? This is easy to verify, if you provide the details.
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I’m concerned not because DDG is downranking Russian propaganda – but that it’s not downranking Ukranian propaganda as well. The results of selective downranking of misinformation is something I have a painful history with.
“It’s okay when it’s our side” does not sit well with me regardless of how much I want Ukraine to repel Russia.
Re:
Why do you assume they’re not downranking pro-Ukraine propaganda?
The Russian stuff is just more obvious because there’s more of it that’s easier to fact check.
The Ukranian stuff (and American stuff) is currently harder to verify because it’s more similar to the objective facts. But I’m sure stuff like the video game re-enactment bits and the “Ghost” articles are downranked every bit as much as the Russian stuff.
Re: Re:
When you make an assumtion, you make an ass of … er…
well… I wouldn’t necessarily make any assumptions about what does and does not get downranked. If builders built buildings like programmers build programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Well if disinformation got downranked, then they wouldn’t be able to hear the latest breathless lies about how the election was stolen, the virus is a hoax, and Ukraine is just a bunch of crisis actors Soros is using to raise gas prices on us poor americans.
All this outrage over search engines, imagine how they could change the world if they cared about real things.
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If I’m searching for information about cars, and the search engine refuses to display any results about Ford, I’d be pissed, and you should, too, since the search engine is deciding for you what you can and cannot see.
Re: Google is not the Internet.
You could go to another search engine and look for results there. Or you could go to a car enthusiast forum of some kind and ask for what you’re looking for. No search engine is the alpha and the omega of the Internet; thinking otherwise won’t change that fact.
Re:
Agreed. Which search engine is doing this? Because DDG isn’t refusing to display results, it’s just changing the order.
So, let’s say you’re looking for the MSRP on a Ford truck. Some scammer has created thousands of portal pages with insanely low quotes on Ford trucks, and seeded linkbacks through a bunch of social media pages and SEO portals.
You search for MSRP on a Ford truck, from your computer in the UK.
Which do you want to see: page after page of “FORD TRUCK MSRP ONLY $9,000!!!” followed by ford.com and vehiclemsrp.com, or a sidebar answer with the actual MSRP in the UK, with a linkback to vehiclemsrp.co.uk, followed by ford.com as the top hit, vehiclemsrp.co.uk as the second hit, vehiclemsrp.com as the third, a bunch of other legitimate sites mentioning Ford MSRPs, and THEN the page after page of spam sites?
Re:
Given the goal is to crack down on misinformation the comparable example would be more like the search engine ‘downranking’ results of pages talking about how Ford vehicles can literally fly, blow up if you run over a leaf or both. You can still find those pages but they’re going to be lower on the list than legitimate ones from the company/dealers.
Re:
Down ranking does not equate removing the search results. The search engine isn’t refusing you results about Ford products, but you might have to go through pages about Acura, BMW, Chevrolet, Dodge, first. The search engine has to figure out a useful way to present the results.
Re: Re:
Or search for Ford cars.
Re:
If you’re looking for Ford, why not include that in your search terms?
If you’re looking for more general information, why do the articles that are returned that cover the subject you’re searching for not include Ford?
Sounds like the problem is not the search engine.
Re:
If I also didn’t a thing, that didn’t happen, but pretended I did and it did, to make a really stupid argument I would be pissed too.
A common thread seems to be that they think that downrating the results is the same as removing them entirely. No, you can still find all the Russian bullcrap if you really want to, so there’s absolutely nothing preventing you from “deciding for yourself” whether you agree with it or not and doing your own research. You may have to dig harder for it, but it’ll still be there, and DDG will still show it to you. Just because it’s not in the top 10-20 search results and you have to wade deeper doesn’t mean they’re not going to show it to you if you want it.
Re:
And even if the search results are removed, it’s not as if the websites themselves are gone. (Doesn’t anyone use bookmarks these days?)
Re: Re: Doesn’t anyone use bookmarks these days?
Piffle. Come on Stephen. Who uses paper methods these days? Besides, I find it too hard to write all those odd characters down on scraps of paper and keep them next to the computer. I tried sticking them across my screen to keep them in order, but I couldn’t read the text underneath them.
Then, when I got tired of writing them by hand, I used my typewriter to neaten up the text, but I can’t seem to buy ribbons for it anymore.
I have found that stringing tickertape across the screen is a handy alternative.
Re:
See, that involves clicking and reading, and more clicking and more reading. This is too much work for the “do your own research” crowd.
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Mike's article - Performative Conservatives Are Mad That A Search Engine Wants To Downrank Disinformation
Mike, your statement “…a whole bunch of overly performative Trumpists who must always play the victim, responded to Gabriel’s announcement by falling on their fainting couches to bemoan the fact that a search engine was downranking false information…” is not supported at all in the tweets you referenced. How you made that leap is obvious–liberals always try to attack with very little proof-just unsupported allegations. Search engines should stick to their core algorithms, ranking by clicked results to similar questions instead of interjecting political filters. Just my opinion.
Re:
If Dale’s post above doesn’t demonstrate a humor-deprived individual, I’ll eat my internet connection!
Holy Jeebus, Dale, I lean to the conservative side (as defined in my father’s day, not as #45 has re-defined it in NewSpeak), but I thought both the tweets and Mike’s take on them was some funny shit.
What you just said was that search engines should not be permitted to have their own voice and the freedom of speech that you just enjoyed in this comment section of someone’s private blog. That’s grossly ironic of you. At the same time, you also said that firefighters should stick to their core compentancy, and forget all about being first-responder medics. After all, they don’t have a doctor’s degree, so why are they straying out of their field, right?
Bah, a pox upon thee.
Re:
Every accusation, a confession…
Re:
So you clearly have an issue with the First Amendment.
Which part of the First Amendment do you have a problem with? The right to associate whoever you want to? That might be a you problem.
Have you looked at what you’re talking about? Maybe you’re spouting nonsense no one wants to associate themselves with.
Re:
Does it ever embarass you trolls to make gaslighting so pathetic that it can be easily debunked by scrolling up?
Re:
This has been done before.
Most “naive” algorithms (like the one propose) have been exploited to death by spammers and bots. Google topped the search market because they introduced less naive ranking that gave more relevant results.
To relevant quotes here:
* Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
* Only the fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistake of others.
Re: Do you not know how hyphens work?
“obvious–liberals”
That’s not a word.
‘proof-just”
Neither is that.
Re: Re: assumptions
I think they intended — as a replacement to ; and got – by accident?
But not all phones or OSs make that easy.
It comes to me that....
Those who say “do your own research” are asking you to admit that you don’t yet have enough knowledge to form an educated opinion. I find that the far greater majority of those folks are looking to make converts to their way of thinking, than they are to making society work better because people have made the conscious effort to become better informed. This is easily demonstrated when one or more links are provided as a starting point, instead of simply letting the reader figure out for themselves where to look for that ever-elusive “more information”.
Full disclosure: I myself have sometimes done this, but I make it point to only offer search terms. I figure that a reader can modify those to suit, rather than have them simply hit “click here”, and provide Microsoft with yet another datum point as to what scam site a dumb user visited, and will need to be protected from in the next version of Windows.
Re:
Barring instances of dishonest people who don’t want to back up their claims ‘do your own research’ often strikes me as shorthand for ‘keep looking until you agree with me because clearly if you had learned as much as you should you already would’.
The idea that maybe people don’t agree with the person issuing that ‘challenge’ is because those others have ‘done their own research’ never seems to cross the mind of such people.
Re: Re: dishonest people
“dishonest people who don’t want to back up their claims ‘do your own research’ often strikes me as shorthand for ‘keep looking until you agree with me”
+1 for you TAG. This has been my experience everytime I hear that phrase. And I seem to have personally observed a high correlation between anti-factsers and pro-fossil-fuel people.
Re:
Have been taken in by a charlatan, who claims that they have proof but never actually offer any. They therefore say ‘do you own research’ because they are sure that the proof is out there, or other people will be convinced by charlatans.
Re:
“Do your own research” is entirely intentional as a bluff that serves a few purposes. It places the burden of proof on somebody else. It is a subtle method of talking down to someone else by insinuating that they, not the person making the demand of “doing your own research”, have not been sufficiently broad in their scope. Perhaps most importantly, it underlies the hope that people won’t ask what research that the requester has actually done, or asks to check the research (read: hearsay) that was done.
Re: Re:
“Do your own research” is shorthand for 2 things.
One is “I can’t explain it myself and I know that the YouTuber I link to will be recognised as a charlatan immediately”.
The other is “if you search and find something different to what I found, then I can claim you didn’t do it right rather than defend the wrong position I hold”.
Anyone who came to a position honestly will at least be able to put it in their own words, and not demand that everyone else in the thread waste hours of their own lives watching the same crap I did.
Re: Re: Re:
This is exactly what I see when arguing with flat earthers and creationists, but I repeat myself…
Re: Re: Re:2
Someone being a Flat Earther doesn’t necessarily make them a Creationist; same goes for the other way around. The two do overlap more than either group would probably be happy about, though.
Re:
I think they just disregard any source of knowledge or opinion that they are not already biased towards. Hence if you do your own research but never quote the Bible or Fox News, it’s “obvious” that you didn’t research enough.
They don’t want you to do your own research, or make your own opinion. Their idea of “freedom of opinion” is “the right to have the same opinion as them”. Any dissenting opinion is necessarily wrong, and knowledge is just an opinion so it’s subjected to the same standard.
Re: Re:
Also, if you “do your own research” by their definition, you have to stop at whatever confirms their opinion. If you find a study that confirms their opinion, you must absolutely not search for the fact that this study has been misinterpreted, proven wrong or outright fabricated.
“Do your own research” is really just “do the exact same research I did, no more no less”.
Re: Re: Re:
A lot of the time “do your own research” just means “do the same research I did”. Which is fine in a neutral area among people with the same level of expertise, but it becomes problematic when it means someone listening to a Joe Rogan podcast vs someone listing to an epidemiologist while pretending they’re both of the same value and at the same level.
Plus, on some subjects people need to realise they’re just not able to do the research on their own. It’s not a bad thing to defer to someone who spent 40 years researching a subject if their track record indicates they’re reliable.
A “neutral” search engine is a search engine that just returns random results, rather than useful results. Every search engine is biased, because that bias is what determines what results will be ranked first, second, third
what crack are you smoking? what result will be ranked first, second, third being determined by how closely they match the terms the user searched for rather than by a person manually deciding to push certain websites lower on the page or some awful ‘popularity algorithm’ like google uses isn’t “random”
every search engine used to be neutral, and they were better for it. it is not the search engine’s job to evaluate the quality of the results and whether i deserve to see them
Re:
[Spammers, Malware purveyors and Con-artists Liked That]
Re:
When search engines were “neutral”, the number of web pages were small enough that the order didn’t really matter.
Also, you “deserve” to see whatever results you want for the most part. Just because the search result doesn’t appear on the first page doesn’t mean it’s not there. Search results are generally only removed at the request of the page owner or in order to comply with local laws. The “biased” part is primarily in the order of those pages, not just which pages show up.
And when it comes to how closely a page matches your search terms, most search terms are pretty short (relatively speaking) and will return a ton of results that all match more or less exactly the same amount to the search terms (at least as far as a computer can tell). Not to mention that “closely match” can be subjective as well. So, yeah, it’s basically random without some additional parameters included.
But really, that you can’t be bothered to go past the first page or two of search results to get the less “valuable” results is not the fault of the search engine. That’s on you.
Re: Re:
Or at the request of angry copyright holders, who as far as I know never got a law passed in the USA requiring search results to be removed (the DMCA would require search engines to stop distributing copyrighted material when a proper notice is filed; search engines do not generally distribute the material being complained about, but most remove the results anyway).
Job?
You might think that a search engine’s job is to be “neutral” (and that term needs a lot of closely descriptive nuance), but the vast majority of internet users think otherwise. The very definition of popularity is repeat visits, and the engines that provide the best-ranked results are the ones that get re-visited the most often. To the point of becoming the 800lb. gorilla, to quote more than one source when describing Google.
No, search engines are not better for being ‘neutral’, they are much harder to use. Even DDG sometimes goes bonkers and returns results that are way off base (page after page), and I have to start narrowing my search terms to the point where it would’ve been easier to just use Google in the first place. Very occasionally, I do just give up and go to Google, but that’s the fault of DDG, not me. If it were me and my search terms at fault, then why does Google get it right within the first three results?? Every time. Let me repeat that – every fookin’ time.
That’s why Google weighs 800lbs. and DDG is still the size of a soaking wet rat terrier. I don’t like it any better than you do, but sometimes the needs of the mission outweigh my personal feelings.
Besides, if you don’t like search engines that rank results, then go out and build your own! There is a lot of free and paid software available to spider the web, all you need is a few petabytes of storage space, a couple dozen blade servers, and an OC-12 line going to the nearest Level 3 or Cogent connecting point, and Voila!, you’re ready to start answering queries with “neutral” responses. All you need to do now is to put your money where your mouth is… what’s holding you back?
Re:
… Voila!, you find yourself blocked by Cloudflare et al. for being a “malicious” bot. Maybe if you solve a CAPTCHA every few pages, they’ll let you in. A hurdle Google and Bing don’t have to deal with, being “too big to block”. I don’t think even DuckDuckGo run their own crawler.
Re: Re: Cloudflare blocking...
Not necessarily. If you can afford the kind of hardware and engineers required to spin up and run such an engine, you can afford the kind of deal with cloudflare that would get them to add you to their good guys list.
Re:
Google also builds a profile for each user and tries to find results that are “relevant” to them. It might help sometimes, or it might trap someone in a bubble of confirmation bias. If you don’t mind being traced, use Google.
DDG’s original goal was to avoid tracing its users, for privacy purposes, which makes for less relevant results for individuals but can also provide less biased results overall. Which is not to mean it’s better in absolute.
Re:
“Even DDG sometimes goes bonkers and returns results that are way off base (page after page), and I have to start narrowing my search terms to the point where it would’ve been easier to just use Google in the first place”
whereas google does that all the fucking time. returning results that are way off base because it prioritizes the website’s popularity over whether it actually has any content that match my search terms. narrowing my terms doesn’t help because google literally just ignores those terms, even if put them in quotes or click the “showing results without [term], would you like to see only results that include [term]” it sometimes goes ahead and fills the page with results that don’t contain what i typed
nor is it a matter of just looking at more than the first page. if there even IS more than 1 page. i’ve seen it become more common over the past years for google to only have 1-2 pages of results, and sometimes it gives me a completely blank page claiming “nothing matches those terms” (yet typing the same thing into any other search engine gives me exactly what i’m looking for)
"Just show us all the results..."
There’s the solution right there. People who want all the results can click a checkbox on the search screen and DDG will then return every single weblink on the internet in no particular order on a single page. The results might take 50 years to load, but you’ll get what you asked for.
For a slightly more nuanced solution, I’d like to note that if you’re too lazy to hit the next page button at least once in your search results, that’s not necessarily the engine’s problem. But it would be convenient if users could select a “Number of Results per page” to make it slightly less laborious. I doubt that will happen because fewer pages mean fewer ads.
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It is worth some thought
When the story broke it wasn’t “right wingers” that first jumped to complain. It was long time tech users of the site!
I read the story on ZDnet as it happened.
Whatever political actors added their thoughts did so long after the initial concerns were voiced.
And there’s a line here that many of us open web users simply disagree with.
Um, no.
The job of a search engine is to search!
Ideally without any bias.
The idea of ranking didn’t really become a thing until the mid 2000s (no)thanks to Google. Who spent the previous years buying up all sorts of failed or ignored algorithms and methods.
And made a business out of it.
Sure, in many cases it could be helpful. But not always.
DDG was one of the less manipulative sites. That changes drastically with this move. And they, like all the rest, are unlikely to stop with one thing.
Search is for seeking a term. If you search for car you should see a Wikipedia link page one. Not 5 pages in after news and sales sites.
Once upon a time searching the web was like searching in finder or file explorer.
Today, you’re unlikely to find anything outside of algorithmic confirmation bias.
Joke or not, there’s some truth to the adage.
Google it. Click on the last page for the best results.
Re:
“When the story broke it wasn’t “right wingers” that first jumped to complain. It was long time tech users of the site!”
Source? Most comments I’ve seen are people commenting that it was bad marketing when DDG tried claiming they had unbiased / “truthful” results and not people looking for basic tech info.
“The idea of ranking didn’t really become a thing until the mid 2000s (no)thanks to Google.”
Not true. PageRank’s patent was filed in 1998.
“And made a business out of it”
Yes, most people remember how superior it was to the types of results you got out of Lycos, Yahoo and AltaVista in the late 90s. Businesses do tend to be born out of successful products, even if you disagree with how they developed afterwards.
“Sure, in many cases it could be helpful. But not always.”
Either you weren’t online in the late 90s or you have a severely different experience of things compared to a lot of people.
As ever, your position seems to depend on a complete misrepresentation of verifiable truth and subjective claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
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Re: Re: Re:
The first notice I read was in Thursday or Friday’s feed from OperatingSystem Daily.
I’ll link to it later when I’m at my desktop.
Followed by ZDnet. Both just generically stated there was backlash.
Funny you mention AltaVista. That was my default for a LONG time.
You miss the key aspect of page ranking, it manipulates the results.
Honestly I prefer traffic or alphabetic. Not how some algorithm decides what is or is not best.
And not what some person decides is or is not acceptable.
Maybe you’re more interested in immediate satisfaction. But I prefer multiple views on a subject.
I don’t want the top choice. I like deep cuts. Alternative opinions. In-depth review.
Maybe it’s the old hacker ethos or the memory of the Wild West Days of the internet. Maybe. But every time something like this happens o see one more gatekeeper added and one more open option closed.
When I search I want to search, not classify or categorise.
But the quotes I read early in the story break made sense to me. What’s next. How is this implemented.
Maybe I’m just old enough to wish modifiers still worked and were used. Because
car Dodge Avenger alternator used “+”
Is a proper search string.
This is one more case of open freedom becoming controlled and modified.
Re: Re: Re:
“Followed by ZDnet. Both just generically stated there was backlash.”
So, you jumped to a conclusion based on what you assumed was being said. How unusual…
“Funny you mention AltaVista. That was my default for a LONG time.”
Mine too. Then, I noticed that Google returned far better results and started using them instead. Then, I try out other search engines and see how they compare at times, especially if I don’t get what I’m looking for early, or the results are clearly biased to one type of result.
“You miss the key aspect of page ranking, it manipulates the results.”
Yes, which is clearly necessary. All that seems to be controversial is how they’re manipulated.
“Maybe you’re more interested in immediate satisfaction. But I prefer multiple views on a subject.”
Depends on the subject. If I want to remind myself who directed a movie or find out what an error code means, I’m not going to trawl through pages of results. If I want to find opinion on a complicated political or social issue, I might go further.
“When I search I want to search, not classify or categorise.”
But, by searching you’re asking someone to do that. By definition.
“Maybe I’m just old enough to wish modifiers still worked”
They do still work. Google have changed the syntax is recent years, but you can still filter the results if you wish.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
Only partly. Modifiers are treated as a suggestion. +/- not without etc, don’t guarantee inclusion or exclusion.
No. Somewhere along the way it became the default understanding. But I have never asked for any sort of classification beyond “does it include” or “does it exclude” what is typed.
When I search for *.plist I don’t expect to have .app or .jump files.
Nor should I see plist.jump! Or “plist” or pls or anything I didn’t search for.
When I search for something I want every possible result containing what i searched for.
And nothing that does not include that.
Then I expect to further refine or result search or sort.
That level of option is long lost to us today.
Take that idea of a memory fault error.
Type in the error and get tons of pages that do NOT have the string in the page anywhere.
How does looking up …C00 and getting results for …F05 help me?
Show me the three pages with my search. Not the 50 pages with the more common one that doesn’t cover mine.
Re: Re: Re:3
“Modifiers are treated as a suggestion. +/- not without”
See above – you’re using modifiers that haven’t worked for over 10 years, as per their announcements at the time.
“When I search for *.plist I don’t expect to have .app or .jump files.”
If you specifically need a word or phrase, put it in quotes. But, it will still return articles that contain all 3 terms if they’re higher on the results. If you don’t like this, make your search more specific to exclude those terms.
“How does looking up …C00 and getting results for …F05 help me?”
How many times have you put the full code in quotes, and/or included other text from the error, specifying the OS or system it appears on, etc.?
“Show me the three pages with my search. Not the 50 pages with the more common one that doesn’t cover mine.”
But, that’s on you for not making the search specific enough. If you include enough required detail, you may not even get 3 pages returned in the first place.
Re: Re: Re:4
How, given that you said in the previous paragraph that modifiers have been unsupported for a decade?
Re: Re: Re:5 sites
Most of the modifiers I use are supported outside of the google bubble.
Even google supports a large number of them.
However Google has moved so much to “natural search” though, that the modifiers often fail.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:flat out wrong
According to google at
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
Most of those modifiers like quote and minuse, site/type followed by :
All still work.
Only plus is missing. But it rarely works. And I don’t use google at all so here’s the page for Bing.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/advanced-search-options-b92e25f1-0085-4271-bdf9-14aaea720930
Oh look! All those modifiers work!
Maybe…because they predate the internet and generally are well known by anyone who used a computer before 2000?
Bing’s problem is you cannot remove the “relevance” removal filter.
I get it, you’re one of those instant gratification, consequences be damned.
But do you not understand that there is a reason for being able to turn those filters off at times?
Or that it would be a good thing to have the choice to do so?
Re: Re: Re:5
“Only plus is missing”
Cool. So why are you explicitly using the plus modifier then whining that it doesn’t affect the results shown?
“And I don’t use google at all”
So why are you whining about them at all?
“I get it, you’re one of those instant gratification, consequences be damned.”
No, that would be the dense prick saying stuff like his cat’s name isn’t coming up on a search about the most common form of private transport. People like myself see a less than optimal set of search results and think of a way to better specify my search query. You apparently react by attacking the very foundation of the notion search engines because they haven’t psychically determined the intent of your vague search terms.
Re: Re: Re:
No, it manipulates the order of the results.
Ummm… That’s still an algorithm deciding what the order is.
And you still can get it. Just scroll through the results more thoroughly. I don’t see the problem. If it’s about Google filtering results for “relevance”, it lets you turn that off, or you can use a different search engine.
Seriously, if you aren’t “more interested in immediate satisfaction”, the order shouldn’t matter to you.
Re:
“Joke or not, there’s some truth to the adage.
Google it. Click on the last page for the best results.”
Oh, and just a thought here – that’s not really true. Usually, that’s a signal that you need to refine or specify your requirements better.
For example, if you just watched the new Texas Chainsaw film and you want to find out who plays Leatherface in that film, if you just search for “actor who plays Leatherface” in Google and the first 20 pages say “Gunnar Hansen”, that doesn’t mean Google is wrong. It just means that you failed to give it enough detail about what you’re searching for, and that since there’s several decades worth of history talking about the original movie, that’s what you’ll get. Instead of complaining that Google isn’t working correctly, all you need to do is add the details you’re actually looking for.
It’s not always as obvious and clear cut as that, but generally speaking if you don’t see anything relevant on at least the first 2-3 pages, it’s a sign that you need to be more clear about your search, not that Google is wrong in any objective fashion.
Re: Re: watcha looking 4
A more realistic example is searching for Las Vegas Shooter and not finding a Vegas news source for 3-5 pages. Or more.
NYT, WaPo, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNN, … USA Today, …
All interspaced with adverts for visiting beautiful vegas!
It’s that sort of thing.
But as I said above it’s more along the lines of being served unrelated info in what I searched for.
Pages that fail to include the terms at all.
Top ranking pop news over a generic search.
It’s the all augmented all the time approach.
What you called unuseful I miss. I didn’t leave AltaVista as default until it became a shell for Yahoo.
But none of this is the point.
What has happened is DDG has added a filter to results.
And once again the public has another filter they can’t turn off.
Results are not show in the order recorded. Or by popularity. Or by some choice the user makes.
However implemented, you’re served what the site thinks you should be looking for regardless of what you actually asked for.
Re: Re: Re:
And you think it would be better if the search engine didn’t attempt to order the results by how useful it thinks they will be to you?
Re: Re: Re:2 there was a time
It’s my personal opinion: but yes! Absolutely!
Or more precisely: allow me, the user, the option to chose what modifiers to apply or not.
An option every quality desktop search offers.
If I want the top traffic hits, let me specify that.
If I want the most “relevant” as determined by some algorithm let me specify that.
If I want alphabetical, or number of instances per page, or reverse “value”.
Because as a pre-internet user all I’ve seen is a move towards little group-speak pods.
The internet has become less free and more controlled with each “advance”.
I understand that the use of a directory is no longer feasible. But the days of quickly searching for a generic list based on term is long gone. And IDGAF if you disagree with me: we’ve gone from open, free, and un-classed to tightly controlled distribution.
When I search for “car” I shouldn’t see something on the bottom of the page that says results were removed for “relevance”.
Fuck you. I’ll decide what’s relevant! Based on options and filters that I apply.
If I search for car there’s no reason to remove pages about the cat named Car unless I chose to remove cat from my search.
Re: Re: Re:3
“When I search for “car” I shouldn’t see something on the bottom of the page that says results were removed for “relevance”.”
When you search for “car” you’ll get millions of results, with some filtered out because the average person doesn’t want 5,000 links to the same website when searching for something generic. If you don’t like this, stop being a fucking idiot and help Google narrow down what you’re actually working for. Preferably by using search syntax that actually works, not the stuff that was removed a decade ago.
“If I search for car there’s no reason to remove pages about the cat named Car unless I chose to remove cat from my search.”
There’s also no reason for anyone except you to see your cat anywhere near the top results when they’re looking at vehicles.
Re: Re: Re:3
What you are demanding is a search engine that most people would find useless. Besides which you have shown that you are a classic example of a Pebcac.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:asking
What I’m suggesting is a method to turn off algorithms and filters.
A choice.
That’s not efficient by modern standards. But it worked that way for a long time.
It’s still the way every desktop search program uses. So it’s hardly worthless.
Re: Re: Re:5
“What I’m suggesting is a method to turn off algorithms and filters.”
Yes, you’re asking for a way to make search engines utterly useless. Which is why everyone else is responding by laughing at the idiot.
Re: Re: Re:6 Really?
How does user applied filtering, rather than corporate algorithms, make searching useless.
Re: Re: Re:7
By requiring the user to download, temporarily store, and filter several million results for most searches. Back in the simple days a search was likely to return less that 1,000 results, and so filtering and organizing by a search engine was not needed, now it is.
Re: Re: Re:8 Not how data transmission works
Nobody is downloading millions. They download a few dozen kilobytes. The first page. Click a drop down menu and select a search method.
When you search for videos, you don’t download millions of pages. You download one. Then use a drop down box to search by length, or date posted.
The provider then reshuffles the results to display with the new filtering.
When you search in shopping you can narrow by date, price, location, popularity… etc.
you didn’t download 5 billion results to your computer first. And then sort locally.
Re: Re: Re:9
What you want is a search engine Interface few people would, or could use effectively, and you are still reliant on the search engine implementation, and you would still be complaining that the results are not what you wanted.
Re: Re: Re:9
The number of downloads per page wasn’t the important part.
Re: Re: Re:5
And in what order are the results returned?
Oldest first is usually the worse order.
Newest first just give a means for spammers to keep their pages at the top of results?
Random, you cannot find the same result twice.
Re: Re: Re:
“All interspaced with adverts for visiting beautiful vegas!”
Yes, one of the common tourist activities in and around Vegas revolves around shooting guns. So, if you’re not specific about what you’re looking for, it will try and guess that as well as the shooting that happened a few years ago. If you specifically include details like Mandalay Bay, 2017, Stephen Paddock, etc. then it will exclude results relating to gun ranges. Assuming you’re referring to to mass shooting, if you’re just after general crime stats then you can choose other terms.
Once again, you think there’s something wrong with algorithms, but it’s just the asshole in front of the computer not asking a specific enough question then whining when its guess about what you’re trying to search for it wrong.
“What has happened is DDG has added a filter to results.”
Yes, and you can still bypass that filter.
“Results are not show in the order recorded”
Good, because that would be a fucking useless search engine.
Re:
And then what?
Not even a bias toward useful results?
I thought you said a search engine isn’t supposed to rank results. Wouldn’t you want the wikipedia article placed in a random spot in the list?
If that’s what works for you, then great, do that.
Re: Re:
“I’m not a conservative but I will fight to the death for them if their fee-fees get hurt” – Lostinlodos
Re: Good grief....
Lost, you’re not lost just in Lados, you’re lost everywhere!
Here’s your problem: you believe that a search engine is a black box that has no connection with humanity, i.e. users of the internet. News flash, Sparky, it’s not. It’s an automation of what a real live human being could do, if he/she were infinitely faster than a speeding bullet….. which computers are, by the way.
You don’t ask a search engine for results, you ask a human who is assisted by a computer for results. In essence, you’re asking someone else to do something that could conceivably shorten the time you would otherwise expend on some given task. But wouldn’t you know it, that human’s bias is present in the returned results, plain and simple for all to see. I personally have never encountered a human who thinks that everyone should have everything not just at their fingertips, but right in their faces. Talking about clogging up the works and bringing civilization to a complete standstill, that would do it right there.
Wait…. that **is*** what you’re asking for, isn’t it. Looky here:
What I’m seeing is that you’re asking someone else to subsume their bias in favor of your bias. Your’s simply happens to be ‘everything’, instead of ‘useful’. It’s still a bias, period. Or do you believe that you are somehow “above it all, and totally without any human bias”?
No, you can call it filtering or whatever, but it’s not only useful, but mandatory, if you’re ever going to accomplish anything. You yourself “filter” your daily life, minute by minute. When your car needs gas, do you go to every gas station on your route and buy some? Do you travel down every route available (before you rund out of gas), buying some at each station? No, you got to your preferred station. You just used a specific filter, aka bias, to cut down on wasted time in your life. Didn’t you…..
Now, why in Gawd’s name would you ask another human, just because they are assisted by a computer, to waste his/her time for you?
tl;dr:
Let me paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in John Grisham’s first novel, “Now imagine that you’re the human who is being queried for some answers”.
Re: Re: Re:missing options
You miss the call for an option.
To return to the way it was once.
To search a web search like a database search or a file search.
A box in settings for do not sort or filter.
A search for car on a web search engine would then return every single page that contains thaw word car. In the order in which the page was recorded in the database.
A method of then refining and filtering based on my choices,
Eg “search in results”
Or “refine results…”
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Cookies
DuckDuckGo offered a chance to step outside of my cookies and history and scripts and see unbiased results.
When I want that.
Bing tracks me (and pays me for that right with rewards).
So if I want something generic I go to DDG.
The problem with filters and ranking etc is it’s not generic. It’s not non-biased. It intentionally adds a bias.
Someone or something decides what is or is not a better result.
That’s bias. Not organic.
Re:
“unbiased results”
Surely, you realise there’s no such thing, right? Literally, any search engine that returns anything related to your search terms is applying bias. The only question is whether or not you agree with that bias, in the same way that journalism is inherently biased, it’s just a question of whether you agree with the bias in reporting.
One of the many reasons that while searching for an explicit error message you’re seeing in your logs should return an unbiased result, that’s not always true (for example when I’ve searched for an Linux related error, Bing sometimes returns a page of Windows results)
If you’re asking a search engine for a result, you’re asking it to guess what’s most relevant to you.
Re:
Why do you think there’s some natural order to the search results for a query, and a search engine has the choice to return the results in that divine order, or reorder them in some way?
Re: Re: natural
I never said natural.
In most cases an unmanipulated result should be the order in which they were recorded. Which would make the older pages first.
The order retrieved from the database. Etc.
If you load up an unsorted database or spreadsheet in chronological order, alt-F and type in car:
The filter removes anything without that word in it.
A static chronological list of results.
What algorithms do is sort and filter those results in some defined order.
Or remove results based on whatever bias the filter has for removal. Be it legal, political, visit rates. Whatever.
Your pushing that a method or option to turn off filters and use generic raw ordering is somehow bad?
I didn’t suggest it should be the default. But should definitely be an option.
Re: Re: Re:
Because it makes no sense. There is no reason to think the earliest page to have appeared on the web containing a keyword is the one that will be most relevant to your search on that keyword. That’s why no search engine does that.
Re: Re: Re:
“In most cases an unmanipulated result should be the order in which they were recorded. Which would make the older pages first.”
Again, you’re asking for search engines to be utterly useless for any piece of information that develops after it’s first recorded. Which is virtually everything.
Re:
DDG is not using filters, which would remove results entirely, and ranking is something every search engine does. Otherwise, you get them completely randomly or from the first added to a given database, and that simply is not useful to anyone.
Here’s the deal: if anyone wants the “less relevant results”, you can just comb through the results to find it. Anyone who doesn’t want to do that will also not be satisfied with unsorted results.
Re:
DuckDuckGo still doesn’t use filters, so you’re fine there.
As for sorting, every search engine has always done that. You have never been able to turn off sorting. Your problem is that you don’t like the way the sorting is being done, or you would like the ability to select sorting methods.
Re: Re: For now
The issue is that’s for now, on filtering.
Sorting has always been an option in searching, to some extent. Ranking on the other hand was an “advancement” that followed on.
Right or wrong: DDG had an aura of being less censored. Less up/down ranked. Less manipulation.
Question here is as the original reports’ replies cried out. What constitutes misinformation and who decides?
Because the story of American funded and supplied bio-research in Ukraine was fake news until people were beat over the heads with a decade of evidence. Like various members of the government announcing the agreement way back when, or admitting to congress now they’re concerned about Russia getting access.
In war, both sides produce propaganda. The truth is often in the middle. Propaganda is a general part of politics overall!
And…!
What’s next. Once a company begins such a process, historically, it doesn’t end at the first and only time.
Re: Re: Re:
They’re neither censoring nor being censored.
There’s no such thing. The results from any search on any search engine are ranked from the result that the search engine has decided is most likely to be the one you want, to the least. No search engine is any more or less ranked than another.
What does that even mean?
Good. They’re going to get left behind if they stop trying to improve their search results.
Re: Re: Re:
The story of US funded bio weapons research in the Ukraine was and is probably fake news. US funded medical research in Ukraine is a different story. You failure to understand differences makes you an easy target for conspiracy theories.
Re: Re: Re:2 Read
I didn’t say weapons, I said research.
There’s a very fine line between weaponisation and weaponisable.
And a mistake like you just demonstrated could be the difference between important and honest news, vs misinformation. You clearly would have downranked inaccurately.
Keep in mind the claim that ‘there are no bio weapons’ comes from a less than honest government in the first place: Ukraine.
And it’s unlikely they would readily admit they had made bio weapons as they continue to seek NATO admission.
Re: Re: Re:3
I said weapons research, not weaponisation, and while the US is happy to spread medical knowledge, I do not think they want to spread biological weapons knowledge. Besides it was the Russians claiming bio weapons research, and they have an agenda and reason for spreading fake news.
Re: Re: Re:4
Lodos only believes news if it’s fake.
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Re: Re: Re:5 Fake?
Funny…. You really think the bio-research labs don’t exist?
I can’t help you then.
Re: Re: Re:6
Nothing but strawmen from you. So boring.
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Re: Re: Re:7
https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-biolabs-why-become-focus-063216897.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJyV-9ywn7IpjVACbFTNl0ffL9AnCoNSpMs4v1cQiOsMicUhFmTTwhioCmn7nYFyC8mRH4-Cr7I4u5JDhbpN7DqM0VL2sOcow4DZNJPZGN1RKNsIYuD9QVkP746gN_ojbxSGWtRh6ttx637KzOGDTrjIhIvzGav6WOiASX3LDMXe
Ohkay that’s a longer link than I expected
There are definitely bio research labs in Ukraine. The house/hold deadly viri and bacterium.
There’s definitely a concern that those materials could escape.
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/05-829-Ukraine-Weapons.pdf
There’s no straw man here. Only fact.
Ukraine has dangerous bio-material.
This material is at risk from both shelling and direct assault.
if you deny the existence of biolabs and bio storage in Ukraine you’ve got your head so far out of reality there’s nothing anyone can do to help.
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Re: Re: Re:4
And again I didn’t say anything about weapons. Threat didn’t even come into my thought. There is bio material in Ukraine that is extremely dangerous and has the potential to fall into either Russian hands or be released with no control at all.
Re: Re: Re:5
That is true for any country that engages in medical research when they come under attack, especially by the Russians who seem to think that reducing cities to rubble is the way to win wars. From a research perspective, it is reasonable for suitable labs to have pathogens, like SARS, Ebola and other dangerous disease causing organisms.
Re: Re: Re:6 Correct
So why is the media here (US) so against discussing what it there and the dangers involved. Why did so many declare (lie) that the labs were fake propaganda?
And before you jump on the ‘fake weapons’ backtrack no, initially the story was no labs, no research, no nothing.
There are labs. This labs and research come from soviet era bio-weapons. The labs exist as a side-effect of decommissioning soviet bio weapons.
As per the government pdf recording the agreement I posted.
Or the fact that nobody outside of Ukraine, and likely most inside, has any remote verification or evidence regarding what state any of this equipment is in.
If these specimens are released uncontrolled,
There are key facts that make this situation more dangerous than than “other” nations.
Others:
Are not being invaded nor were they facing invasion
Did not source their materials from weapons (it’s usually the opposite)
Do not potentially still have old stocks not yet fully demilitarised.
Did not start study with militarised variants
And why is it acceptable to call discussion on this fake news, propaganda, and treason????????
Which brings us back to the original question.
How is “fake” news and “disinformation” and “misinformation” determined. When our own White House couldn’t be honest at first (or even worse, didn’t know).
Well sure, ranking results by relevance is the whole point of search engines...
But then, ‘missing the point’ is the whole point of today’s Trump “conservative”.
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Re: missing the point
Missing the point is just human nature when someone thinks their way is the only way. Or the right way. Or whatever.
It’s part of our biological building to make us less likely to change our mind in a flight or fight situation.
Re: Re:
Fuck me to tears, but considering who just said that, I’m going to nominate it for the Most Ironic Statement Of The Year!
Re: Re:
“You can’t tell me what to do! I’m a big man who can make decisions for myself without any influence, because I can’t help it!”
Censoring, removal of results. Something both google and bing so.
Up ranking. Google is on record as elevating some sources over others.
Down ranking. Something we know is done (beyond the premise of up ranking) based on leaked agreements with the MPA.
Manipulation. Presenting results outside of classical sorting methods.
This could be anything from political bias to sponsorships to partners. Etc.
Good? Only if you agree with burying anything you don’t like or want and pretending it doesn’t exist. And that people wish to find it.
That feeding results based on some personal/company bias is a good thing. That information should only be distributed in one method.
I’m not a regular user of DDG the lack of tracking makes it more difficult to build on my history stores for targeted advertising and cross site tracking.
so I don’t really know how much this action would or would not change results.
But from my standpoint it equals more regulation of the internet.
Re:
That’s not censoring.
Right, every search engine makes a decision on what order to show the results in. Otherwise they would have to print them all on top of each other and you wouldn’t be able to read or click anything. You can disagree with their decisions about how to order results, but demanding that they not be in any order is nonsensical. And as mentioned there is no one objectively correct order.
There hasn’t been a “classical sorting method” search engine in a long time, because techniques that result in more useful results have been developed. That is never coming back.
I have no idea how you even think that is what I’m in favor of.
Regulation is by government. This is a company deciding how it wants to run its operations.
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Re: Re: Symantecs
It absolutely is within the confines of that service/tool.
Order; which boils down to if the order is scientific or meta
Is open to debate. As we are doing. Not coming back? They never left. If I can’t find what I want on Bing in a relatively short amount of time I go to the software multi-spider package Zen.
If that fails I go to dark crawler.
Both services offer classical sorting. Such as visit rates. Date of recording.number of matches per page. Etc. And many other options.
As a side effect of not caring they have the “down side” of including a ton of spam, STO, and illegal crap as well. But such services are out there and used
in favour of: well, you are defending down ranking of sites that otherwise clearly fit the search parameters.
• Regulation
That’s naive! While the term means literally ‘to make standard’ in popular use it means rul, or method, or law.
On of the reasons I never spent time on prodigy beyond D&D was their regulations. I will never subscribe to Angle TV or Wings or order from PureFlix because of their regulations.
Regulation comes from any entity with authority. From the IN to state governance to companies supplying “rules and [gasp] regulations”
Such as my house rule: if your take a shite on the floor you can not leave without cleaning it up!
Re: Re: Re:
What we mean is specifically regulation by the state. Stop splitting hairs.
Re: Re: Re:2
You are. I wasn’t.
I’m talking about the regulations of materials within the confines of specific private tools that are made public facing.
Re: Re: Re:
No, it isn’t. That doesn’t even rise to the level of “you can’t say that on my property” of social media moderation. It’s “I’ve decided not to put up a sign on my property directing my users to your content.” If that’s censorship, then every decision to not talk about something is censorship.
Re: Re: Re:2 Mistake?
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
As I said “ removal of results” is censorship.
As opposed to downranking.
Which is commentary.
There’s a difference in removing recorded links from results for “relevance” and removing recorded results because…!
Your comparison here doesn’t work. This isn’t about you allowing a sign or not. This, in equivalence, is a service designed to record all publicly visible signs of any means or reason or message. Then deleting any sign they don’t agree with.
There’s the difference in what is claimed and what is provided there.
And here’s exactly my issue with these tech bills. The problem isn’t 230 or moderation or any of that.
It’s bait and switch advertising.
And a prime example of that is Truth. You can’t claim to be something and do something else.
Re: Re: Re:3
There’s your error. This is a service designed to give you pointers to resources it has decided are relevant to a query you submit. So I think the erroneous conclusion that not reporting some pages in search results is censorship stems from the erroneous categorization of what a search engine is.
Except they never claimed to be what you described. And in fact I challenge you to find any advertising that says so.
Re: Re: Re:4
I do agree here with you. There’s a difference between is and was.
Here, though you are wrong.
“ See it through our eyes” may be one of today’s slogans and is quite accurate. And “do the right thing” gives a Defense for their ranking.
But what happened to “your gatway to the internet”?
Or “you search we travel”?
This has now become three extensive discussion topics
A) My initial statements: who and what describes misinformation.
Because all to often what is classed as misinformation turns out to have truth to it.
B) why hide it
The claims of targeted abuse hold up no better than open source software. When targeted abuse of a “flaw” occurred you fox the aspects of the flaw, rather than close source the algorithms.
C) localised censorship and free speech.
This debate would be much less hostile if people just admitted what they did.
Private local censorship is absolutely legal. And to protect individual liberty must be so. But you won’t get far on claims of equality or justice when you censor one group but allow others and pretend your not censoring.
The focus is wrong. It’s not the fact that censorship exists but how it’s an important tool. And how such actions/choices should be disclosed.
Because such an approach would cut the fighting off at the knees.
For someone like myself who is against the choice of censoring anything, preferring moderation by where as opposed to what; the act is personally liberty. What I don’t stand for is saying your not doing something you are.
I’ve said before many of us castle doctrine libertarian types should fall on our swords to protect someone’s right to censorship if they’d just admit they were doing it.
A theatre (should) be able to chose if they wish to run a film or not. That’s local censorship. And personal speech in choice.
A government actor should not be able to. That’s state censorship.
Cnc. All three topics are related and part of the larger aspect of freedom of information.
Decisions should be direct and open. Reasons should be given.
And when the rules are trolled you rework them.
Re: Re: Re:5
How does any of those advertise “a service designed to record all publicly visible signs of any means or reason or message”?
Re: Re: Re:6
Your gateway? As opposed to gate keeper? Maybe.
Simply, you shouldn’t hide the algorithms because of optimisation trolling any more than you should hide source code because of exploit trolling.
Re: Re: Re:7
I don’t see how downranking results (as opposed to removing them) qualifies as gatekeeping.
Re: Re: Re:5
“There’s a difference between is and was.”
Indeed, and despite your claims there’s been no fundamental shift in that since Google disrupted the market. How results are returns has evolved over time, but this is at least as much due to them having to react to how SEO and other types have tried gaming the system to return results that are more profitable rather than more useful.
“Because all to often what is classed as misinformation turns out to have truth to it.”
Yet, there’s usually more truth in stuff that isn’t misinformation. I’ve seen plenty of articles that, for example, talk about some fairly reasonably verifiable facts about the Ukraine invasion, but quickly go down a rabbit hole of unverified and completely unsupported claims about their implications. The fact that they chose basic facts as their launchpad does not make them equal to sources that just report the facts. Another example – many COVID deniers base their wild claims on VAERS, but completely miss the context of both what VAERS is, how the information is gathered and the implications of the data.
Discussion of these ideas may have some value, but if someone looking for the actual facts, then people shouldn’t be trawling through the ones that misrepresent them. Although it seems to be a popular claim from people who believe the exaggerated and misleading sources, they’re not all equal and should not be treated as such.
“A theatre (should) be able to chose if they wish to run a film or not. That’s local censorship. And personal speech in choice.
A government actor should not be able to. That’s state censorship.”
Yet, here you are claiming that the online equivalent to the theatre is doing it. Until search engines become government entities, they’re free to filter results as they see fit – and in fact, when you go to a search engine that’s what you’re asking them to do.
Re: Re: Re:6
Exactly. And the complaint isn’t the action but the lack of communicating the how and why.
When a theatre refuses to show an NC-17 film they dictate that. When they bar an unrated film it usually comes with a because….
Here we simply got misinformation. What is that and how is it determined?
Re: Re: Re:7
“Here we simply got misinformation. What is that and how is it determined?”
DuckDuckGo have made several announcements about that, which include suspending its relationship with Russian search engine Yandex and downranking sites know to spread disinformation.
If you ant more granular information that that, you’ll be out of luck because no company is going to explain everything to you, in pretty much any industry. It’s down to you to use the tools you still have at your disposal – such as evaluating the supposed bias of every search engine the same way you should be doing with the news sources it returns to you, or simply by using known reliable news sources to begin with rather than depending on whatever a search engine returns to you.
If this is more complicated than a theatre making a decision on a handful of movies that are released in a particular week, well that’s because in reality it’s a hell of a lot more complicated.
Re: Re: Re:8
If true than that’s a good thing. It shows a company that listened to the complaints and concerns and made an effort to be more open about their decision processes!
To bad more companies don’t do that.
Re: Re: Re:9
“If true than that’s a good thing”
So, in all your whining here you didn’t even do a basic fucking search about what they’d announced, when your entire complaint is that they hadn’t announced anything.
Pathetic.
Re:
And just how do you keep the spammers and trolls from taking advantage of those methods. The problem is that your classical methods, at least the ones that return useful results, can be easily gamed by spammers, trolls and other bad actors. That is why Google have moved away from ranking by links to a page.
Re: Re:
Plus, “classical sorting methods” don’t really work. Sorting by date as he suggests would simply guarantee you get out of date information on pretty much any subject, and would quickly become useless on the majority of searches (and you already have the ability to restrict the search to a certain date range).
Alphabetical sorting is useless when you’re dealing with thousands of returned articles and is easily gamed by article writers looking to score cheap ad impressions. Ditto size – whether he’s wanting a long in-depth report or a short summary, this is easily manipulated to the point of uselessness and you’d probably end up with the same situation you have on YouTube (long videos with less than a minute of relevant information in order to adhere to monetisation rules). Let’s remember that the reason why Google have made so many changes to the way results are sorted is because SEO operations were exploiting loopholes to the point where actual useful results were being drowned out by clickbait and pages that were filled with elements that served no purpose other than to fool Google’s crawlers.
I can’t think of any other “classical” sorting method that would be applicable, and certainly not one that can be applied to a data set as massive as the internet. I’d be happy to evaluate a suggestion if he has one, but given that his genius idea presented so far is the date one, which would ensure that regularly updated articles are overlooked in favour of long-outdated first takes on a subject, I somehow doubt they’ll be of much value.
To use his example above – he whines that he doesn’t get anything other than major national and international news services and results not relevant to his needs when searching for “Las Vegas shooter”. But, the real problem here is that the search is to ambiguous and he didn’t specify that he wanted local news stories on (assuming I’m thinking of the correct shooting he’s asking for details on, since he doesn’t specify) a major incident that was reported on extensively worldwide. The problem here isn’t an algorithms being biased, it’s him not asking the right question, and the answer to that is to reword your query, not demand that search engines don’t try and return relevant results to a vague query.
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Re: Re: Re: As was my point
You made the point for me here.
Why would a national or international source be ranked above a local source where it happened?
Re: Re: Re:2
Because it’s not really a local story. If you want local sources for an incident that garnered international attention and wide implications well past the location where it happened, then you should ask for that. If you don’t ask for that, then you’ll get results for the story that’s developed for years over time in other places.
But, given that you’re also whining that you didn’t get results on the exact story you wanted even though you didn’t specify which shooting you wanted results from, let alone the other results you would get from that search term that have nothing to do with guns (you know that a shooter is also slang for a type of drink served in vegas a type of drink, right?), then the problem is that you’re not asking the question properly.
But, this is you problem for not dealing with the real world in a logical sense, not Bing not giving you useless filters that nobody else wants. Sensible people see broad search results and take the cue to narrow their query, not whine endlessly about how search engines use filters.
The bottom line, if you want specific results then funking ask for them, don’t whine that Bing’s psychic readings are a little off.
Re: Re: Re:3
Heh, the perils of editing on mobile… Anyway, it should be obvious what I mean from the repeated phrases – “Las Vegas shooter” not only doesn’t specify the incident you’re searching for, but doesn’t even indicate that you’re looking for a gun shooting, since “shooter” can relate to alcohol, tourist activities or TV/film production (among other things) depending on context. If you present a vague query and you find the results inaccurate, it’s on you to ask a more specific question, not on others to change the way they operate to allow you to avoid taking responsibility.
If you’re going to make it impossible for anyone to even know which Las Vegas shooting you’re thinking about, then certain assumptions need to be made, and it’s on you if you didn’t provide enough detail to allow that to be done accurately. Ditto sources – if you want specific sources then ask for them, don’t complain when the results relate to how the story developed after the initial reports. If you want the initial reports, you can specify dates or sources in your search query.
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For those interested
The feed I first read the DDG story on was from
https://www.osnews.com/
Ala operating system daily or OSD.
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Maybe
Bing works well enough for me. I rarely complain about it.
And when it doesn’t I move try more directly modifiable sites as I mentioned. Unfortunately they crawl very little of the “general” internet by comparison; so I’m again in a bias box.
The days of wild and wide open are past and for a number of reasons, unlikely to return.
And some of us are a dying breed of seekers and searchers that have been passed on for the large world of now-now-now hand-feeding and bias that is today’s compartmentalised on ramps that reflect what the walled communities of pre-internet clouding was.
But this article ignores that there is a real question that was asked before it was turned political.
how is misinformation decided
What are the criteria.
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PaulT
It’s easier to reply this way for the multiple replies
I was pointing out Google’s lack of original location evidence in a generic search. Not complaining.
Even generically a search for Las Vegas should bring up local stories near the top. When algorithms are intending to bring relevance.
Bing at least has a link to the local police department crime page in the top 20.
And multiple LV sources in the first 5 pages.
Which ultimately points to a bias towards big media coverage vs the more localised results of Bing.
But to say user filters are useless only covers your usage pov.
Someone looking at crime statistics for Las Cegas shootings could easily use that search and then sort by date. Giving a long chronological list. With sites like the IA and ALA and the NA finding a reliable source and then sub-searching is easy that way.
I don’t use google enough to care to go into settings and help files and find out. I don’t know if they have the ability to sub-search results like some other SEs can.
You bring up key word spam. SEO
Yet that could also just as easily be dealt with by user moderation.
When 500k people flag a page as spam…?
It gets downranked an option you can use on may sites.
The problem with so-called optimising algorithms is they’re hidden away. Not open. Making it difficult if not impossible to comprehend how they are being implemented.
There’s no transparency.
Granted this is yet another case of my nostalgia. My belief that users, not business, should be the arbitrators of what is offered and how.
The twitter and TS reach concerns are a good example. The right to do something doesn’t necessarily make that correct.
When your an on-ramp to information having the right to play gatekeeper doesn’t necessarily mean you should be one.
Do note my initial premise here. Down rankings are not necessarily bad. It’s the “some results were removed” action that bothers me.
Removing for legal reasons is one thing but google does so “for relevance” as well.
And there we find the concern.
Step out of political bubbles.
How about religion and philosophy.
Try searching for nephilim and see how far you need to dig before you find an “expert” vs a report.
Neither Bing nor Google bring up sites about aliens on the first page of results.
Yet they remain a cornerstone of UFOlogy.
Try searching for Nemmah. Google ignores the demon entirely!
Bing at least offered to search for the author (no H) and the town.
But 6 results down it brings up the name Nemah which in its preview shows a discussion on spelling including ee and MM with the h.
Page one we find a useful link.
—unfortunately Bing here pulls a Google and clicking on ‘show results only for’ fails to sort the alternative spellings out.
For a biblical or philosophical scroller, fine. But the spelling fits just one being in Persian myth.
Interesting enough, the first page for ‘only’ results with the correct spelling searched for is actually in Arabic. Apparently Bing cached the translation of the page and linked to the original, finding the term in the translation!
And down the rabbit hole we go.
Which boils down to: the algorithms pick a stance and only display that stance. All others are downranked or outright excluded.
That ‘makes sense’ in looking for “Joe Bidn” the sailor/mariner and seeing Joe Biden the president. Though again both services fail in using -“Biden”
The mariner is pronounced Bæ‘don fwiw.
Minority or not, there are still many by count, who would benefit from extended search options.
Even if it brings up “less desirable” results
Re:
“I was pointing out Google’s lack of original location evidence in a generic search”
Yes, because you didn’t specify you wanted that, and the volume and relevance of news from outside of the local Las Vegas area is of vastly more import than the original reports. But, again, you didn’t even specify which shooting or what type of shooting you were looking for, which is why you got the tourist pages you whined about.
If you can’t even provide enough information to specify exactly which story you’re looking for, then how the fuck are they supposed to return the exact sources for that specific story? Edit your query to make it more specific to what you’re looking for, and then Google’s psychic abilities will be less in question and you will get something closer to what you want. You already have to power to do this – you can specify location in your search, you can specify date ranges in the results, you can specify that you’re looking for the 2017 Mandalay Bay shooting committed by Stephen Paddock instead of expecting the search engine to guess correctly. This is on you.
The issue is simply that, yet again, instead of examining what you do and adjust your actions appropriately, you expect everyone else to change what they do to address your desires. Sorry, but the onus is on you to learn how to use the tools properly, not on everyone else to provide tools that only one person on the planet is asking for, or would even use.
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Re: Re:
Depends on if you trust the national or international sources.
You have a funny way of taking a statement of fact and twisting something out of it that isn’t there. I didn’t whine about it. I found it funny. Interesting.
You sure took to a specific shooting. I had long forgotten the who and where aspects of it. How ironic that you returned more information in this thread than google did at first glance.
The limit of my memory and care was that not long after there was a keyword leak from google that showed major bias in term black listing.
A story I didn’t follow either because I don’t use google outside of trying to research google itself.
Re: Re: Re:
“Depends on if you trust the national or international sources.”
If you don’t, then specify in your search query that you want to local news. Most people looking for that particular story in 2022 are going to be interested in the full facts of the story, including the national and international implications of what happened since. By the time it reached the point of Trump ordering a federal ban on bump stocks as a direct result of this incident, it had long since ceased to be a local story (if it even was to begin with – it pretty much instantly became a story of global significance given the tourist industry there and how many people were affected)
If you were search 30 mins after the story broke you might have had some kind of point, depending on what was actually being returned. But, there’s 5 years of history and context to look at today, and you’re not going to get that by asking what the Las Vegas Sun was reporting when the story broke, even if that’s what you had specifically asked for.
“You have a funny way of taking a statement of fact and twisting something out of it that isn’t there. I didn’t whine about it. I found it funny. Interesting.”
You made a search that’s vague enough to include tourist information rather than a news story from 5 years ago, then you complained about these being returned. There’s nothing too interesting or “funny” about that, unless you want to pretend that your query was specific enough to make it clear you didn’t want these (it wasn’t).
“How ironic that you returned more information in this thread than google did at first glance.”
Yet, I didn’t. I mean, I definitely had more to work with than the 3 words you provided to Google. But, I’m willing to bet its results had way more information than I typed. You just didn’t want to look at the results it provided because they didn’t correctly guess filters you never provided.
“A story I didn’t follow either because I don’t use google outside of trying to research google itself.”
Let that sink in. Google’s only purpose in this scenario is to return links for you to follow. But, you didn’t do this because you were testing Google for it’s ability to… return links within restrictions you didn’t specify.
I agree that extremely few people actually care about free speech. Those in power will use every chance they can to punish and censor their enemies.
The author uses this truth to argue that censorship is all well and good. The justification in this case being ‘disinformation’ which just means ‘anything going against official Washington pronouncements’
Its disheartening how people blindly accept the narrative that what is being censored is ‘disinformation’ when there have been countless examples of what was called ‘disinformation’ being sleepily accepted as truth mere months or even days later.
Hunter Biden’s laptop, the US airstrike killing civilians outside of the Airport, syria ‘chemical weapon attack’, covid Lab theory (not proven true but they claimed it was ‘proven’ false), you can’t get covid if you get vaxed, just to name a few.
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Re:
For me it’s the act. Not the effects of it.
I use political news because most people understand it. Look how fast everyone yawned when I brought up a historical/mythological example.
The underlying aspects are where I focus. WHY is national news considered more important than local stories.
Why is something considered misinformation. Who decides. How is it decided.
And bigger questions
Like why does only include, or show only, rarely work.
Re: Re:
“Look how fast everyone yawned when I brought up a historical/mythological example.”
Which one? If you mean the Las Vegas shooting example, where you gave a vague query then complained that most of the results relating to the 2017 results were stories that reflected the wide international discussions and national legislation that covered the effects of the shooting and not initial local results that would cover neither the implications nor the full measure of facts of the case – yet are easily filtered for by making a more specific search query – you’re not making the point you think you are.
Re: Re: Re: Wrong example
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/11/performative-conservatives-are-mad-that-a-search-engine-wants-to-downrank-disinformation/#comment-2017176
As for
That’s in line with the Vatican fallacy.
The Vatican will allow any researcher access to any document in their archives—so long as the researcher specifies exactly the document they are requesting.
So without extending to first find a list of local news papers separately. Then individually searching each paper,
And you’re still assuming I was looking for one specific shooting you thought of. I happen to like Vegas. Which actually wasn’t what I first thought of and god sidetracked when nearly everything was about that Bay hotel shooting.
But you make my point.
I could easily replace it with Toledo, Chicago, Detroit… and again, only the large nationally covered ones show up first.
Though i wonder if changing my two-location to vegas etc and researching from a clean system would change the level of local coverage displayed.
Back to the Vatican fallacy. That’s exactly what the main search engines are becoming.
A lot of this could be ignored if search modifiers actually worked but as other’s have also commented, they don’t. Not on google anyway.
Try searching without YouTube.com and you still get .be.
Remove Reddit and still ge .it. Remove twitter and on and on. Prioritised partners will always show up. And preferred sites can’t be ignored.
The biggest problem here is removed sites for “relevance” and the claimed ability of “show all” always failing.
Re: Re: Re:2
OK, thanks for the clarification. Obviously, when a thread gets this large it’s easy to miss something, especially when there’s a problem with email alerts having the full summary of posts like they used to.
But, the problem here appears to be your search terms again. If you specify you’re after the demon, then searching for “nammah demon” gives you that immediately. If you then look at the results, you’ll notice that it’s actually spelled “naamah”. I’m seeing that if I search for that spelling I immediately get results on both the demon and Noah’s wife from wikipedia, search for the other spelling I largely get results on a musician named “Nammah Ohm” and a song named “Nammah”. So, Google is returning accurate results to the search query, it’s just that the query wasn’t specific enough to get the correct result until I clarified what I’m looking for. This is fine.
As for Nephelim, if I’m not mistaken the aliens are named after the biblical entity, and since biblical scholarship seems to be more common than alien talk using that word they’re the ones returned. However, specify “nephelim aliens” and every result is to do with the aliens.
In other words, you’re typing vague or incorrect search queries, and yet again complaining that Google didn’t guess the context you didn’t provide to it.
“And you’re still assuming I was looking for one specific shooting you thought of.”
Yes, you gave me various context cues that you didn’t provide to Google, and you haven¡t told me that the assumption was incorrect.
“A lot of this could be ignored if search modifiers actually worked but as other’s have also commented, they don’t.”
It’s not even about modifiers. It’s about you typing what you’re searching for. In the Las Vegas example, all you need to do is add an extra word or two. If you typed “las vegas mass shooter”, for example, you wouldn’t get the tourism results that result from Google trying to guess if you mean the type of drink or the tourist activity of shooting, or even someone with the last name Shooter. If you type “las vegas shooter local news”, you’ll get local news talking about shootings (largely in the last week or two unless you filter the results by date).
Again, nothing wrong here, Google are prsenting me with various option as to what i might be looking for, and I can filter or make the results more specific if it’s not what I wanted. This is fine.
“Which actually wasn’t what I first thought of”
You still haven’t told anyone which one that was. If you’re going to force everyone to try and guess what you’re blathering on about while giving zero information to guide us, it’s hardly our fault if we guess wrong.
Re: Re: Re:3
Interesting.
Not quite accurate results but interesting.
Naamah Is a Jewish daemon found most often referred to in Jewish mysticism. A daemon that may or may not be a reworking of Lilith.
Where Nammah, or Namm’ah’a is either a giant (angelic child) or a fallen angel herself. The name without the “‘“s being found in Sethian texts as a variant of the ‘ spelled proto-Persian goddess.
Neither related to Nemmah.
Not that you care. But it’s opened my eyes to something.
Google has gone for “most likely” vs most accurate.
It’s still unfortunate that -/not and ‘show only’ don’t work right.
Re: Re: Re:4
“Naamah Is a Jewish daemon found most often referred to in Jewish mysticism”
Yes, so why did you search for “Nammah” then complain that the results were related to a name that’s spelt that way instead of what you were trying to make it guess?
“Where Nammah, or Namm’ah’a is either a giant (angelic child) or a fallen angel herself.”
So, not a demon, which is what you claimed you were searching for. The spelling is one thing, but as I demonstrated to you, even that doesn’t matter if you use searches that consist of more than one word.
This is all you have – Google returns results on Las Vegas based on one word you typed in addition to the place name, and you whine that it didn’t guess what you were looking for (even though nobody else – including you – have been able to deduce what you were actually looking for in the ensuing threads). Then, you have 2 other single word queries, where you whine that Google guessed what you were looking for wrong, even though one of the words you searched for is spelled different to the results you were looking for.
Did you ever just consider not being a lazy twat and type extra words into your search query instead of wasting paragraphs telling people how stupid and lazy you are here? It would help all involved, even you.
You seem to have been trying to demonstrate the flaws in Google and its relevant bias, but all you’ve actually demonstrated is that it’s hard for anyone to understand what’ you’re looking for if you’re too arrogant and lazy to vocalise the full question
Re: Re: Re:3
Holy crap he was complaining about google results for a misspelled search term…
Re: Re: Re:4
Nope. I spelled it correctly.
Google just chose the more commonly searched “entity”. Not that any are going to be “common”.
Re: Re: Re:5
You gave a single fucking word search and complained that Google didn’t magically guess the context for it that you had in your head, while giving a different spelling to the ones in the terms you were actually looking for.
This is the extent of your com plaint – you did something incorrectly and demand that Google reprogram its service to allow for you to not have to type extra words as context.
Re: Re: Re:5
You know we can see your other comments, right? You just said that the demon is spelled one way, and you searched with a different spelling, and then whined that it wasn’t finding the demon.
Re: Re: Re:6
Yep.
My bad for going back and forth between terminology of the myths and general parlance. Most Christians just call the all daemons, or demons. Much like Islam lumps them under the generic term Jinn.
*And that further solidifies something you pointed out. *
Searching for Gabriel brings up millions of results.
Searching for Gabriel god does an actually good job of bringing up apocalyptic literature of mystical and Gnostic
Finding Jab’rl or Jab’el more difficult. Which is to be expected.
Typing any of these in Aramaic does a great job, applause for Unicode and scholarly transcription. Better yet for Coptic.
Which brings us back to filters.
You finding news about a local restaurant… blah to filters.
You pointed out that filtering is currently done within the single phrase search string. When it works.
When I search my drives for stat report star it brings up a nice list. That I can then filter. Date of creation, last access, last modification. Size. Location. Author. Etc.
Many sites still contain such fine grained searching. Even google allows filtering tabs based on video or image, etc.
**What I never see is “some results have been removed for relevance”. With no way to show those removals. **
This is where the disconnect comes from.
If a site wants to show me pages with the other spelling even when I click “show only” after the “did your mean” notice:
I have less faith in its ability to determine what is relevant to my search.
Re: Re: Re:7
“When I search my drives for stat report star it brings up a nice list. That I can then filter. Date of creation, last access, last modification. Size. Location. Author. Etc”
Yes, and a sensible person would understand the vast differences in the amount of information, how it’s gathered, etc. Some of that information isn’t even going to be available to the search engine in the first place.
Yes, Windows does a better job at telling you the location that’s been assigned through Windows itself than Google sometimes does querying data on a website that’s based on another continent or filtered through a CDN network with context information that a simple robots.txt file might prevent it from knowing. Well done. This is almost as impressive as your revelation that if you search for a single word and withhold all the context that might narrow down the search, Google sometimes doesn’t return the exact article you were thinking of. This is surprising to exact one idiot.
“You finding news about a local restaurant… blah to filters.”
I never have problems doing that. Why do you? Is it because I give enough information in my search for the correct target to be identified, and have no problem adding additional information to my search if I don’t immediately see what I was looking for?
Re:
Downranking search results by a privately-run business is not censorship. We’re also not “cheering” this but saying it is their right under the First Amendment, property rights, and §230. Oh, and saying that that is something everybody wants from a search engine because the whole point of a search engine is to find what you want based upon your input.
Also, no one said that no one who gets vaccinated has a 0% chance of getting COVID, and no one is covering that up. Of the other things you claim are being hidden, I don’t know which US airstrike you’re talking about (so I have no idea whether that is true or false), and the only other one that might be true is the COVID lab theory, and while not completely disproven, it appears unlikely at this point. And the stuff about Biden’s laptop is unlikely to be true and unimportant even if true. As for the thing about the chemical attack in Syria, I don’t know what you think is being hidden about that.
Re: Re: Oops
Well there’s little doubt the Biden laptop story was correct. Except to those who’s carrier or freedom are on the line.
And why are so many here ignorant of the premise of localised censorship?!? For 70 years films were censored in one state but not another.
The boards that decided were called, wait for it…—> censorship boards.
Cutting or refusing a film in New York didn’t change it in Chicago. Or wherever. But it was censored in new your. That’s localised censorship.
That is exactly what modern sites do.
I’m not saying it’s illegal. It most certain is legal.
But it’s censorship just the same.
Big tech censors
Big tech has every right to do so
Move on.
Re: Re: Re:
Ce: career
Re: Re: Re:
Oh, there is still plenty of doubt about that by people who aren’t involved in it.
Here’s the thing: I don’t consider that legal censorship, which is the only censorship that I categorically reject, so in discussions like this one, I only refer to legal censorship as censorship just to make the discussion flow better. I also don’t consider local censorship to be much of a problem or one that the government should be involved in, so it’s rarely worth discussing except to make fun of when it’s ridiculous or fails spectacularly.
I am willing to agree to disagree on the definition of censorship within the context of this debate. Is that satisfactory?
Note: in discussions that have nothing to do with the law or whether it’s right or wrong, I might use censorship differently, maybe, but not in the context of this sort of debate.
Re: Re: Re:2
Sound fine to me. At least you understand what I’m saying.
Nobody does. Especially if you click yea on “[blank] wants to use your location”.
except I wasn’t talking about windows or built in tools of any os.
I use a Quick fork which works on most OS. Searches across file systems the same, handles network volumes, FTP servers.
Even web sites.
It’s my default for searching large archive sites.
Re:
I’ll admit I don’t know the application you’re referring to, so I’ll take your work for that.
But, ultimately, if you’re doing an OS/filesystem search it’s a completely different beast to what online search engines do. What you seem to be referring to is concrete data, some of it immutable, some of it only having relevance to the scenario you’re using (size really has no relevance in the search engine space, and I can give you many examples as to how it an be a detriment), and you’re going to be querying directly or indirectly the OS or filesystem that’s responsible for that data.
That’s not how it works with an online search engine. Let’s forget for a moment that there’s ways in which sites can block any sort of indexing, and just focus on one example. You mention location. Sure, in the filesystem situation you’re describing, that’s relatively easy. Locally, the OS has to know where it is to access it, if you’re accessing a remote source the OS that responds also needs to know that.
But if you’re querying a website, Google doesn’t have that info. It can get the IP of the site it goes to, but there doesn’t need to be any relationship between that location and the location of the business that the page is about. Even if it’s located in the same country, GeoIP data is shaky at best. Then, if the hosting provider uses a CDN, you might not even get that. Realistically, even if a business has its own site and isn’t just depending on a Facebook/Tripadvisor/whatever listing, you won’t get its actual location from its IP because it’s not hosted at the same location as the business.
So, Google has to use context clues and other data within the site. If the business is registered with Google, has its address on Google Maps, etc., it can likely make an accurate determination. Otherwise, it’s going on info within the site’s text and tying that in to the data it already has. Even that determination can take time to resolve (for example, if a business changes owners and names, the old version will retain more popular search results for a time)
So, hopefully you see the issue here. If Google doesn’t return accurate location info, it’s not because you didn’t activate browser location services or because Google is trying to obfuscate something, it’s because the data is often incomplete and their algorithms have to return a best guess.
Same with your other searches – if you search for a single word without context, the guesses as to the context you meant might be incorrect. This does not necessarily indicate bias, other than there are perhaps other results that are way more commonly found online to the one you have in find.
The fix for this is to provide it with the details you withheld, not complain that the less ambiguous data you search elsewhere doesn’t have to face the same challenges. Your OS search function can find the location of the data, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to see it. Google can’t find the physical address of a business that doesn’t display it on their website and hosts behind a CDN from. provider overseas no matter how many times you ask them, nor can their competitors, because the data wasn’t provided.
Re: Re:
I think there’s a bit of a disconnect in discussion here.
You’re approaching search as an average user browsing the internets.
Where I’m looking at very specific results for specific terms to further filter.
The aspect missing from consumer use search engines is fine grained tooling that’s readily available.
And here I could point out use cases where it’s useful.
Searching standard template wikis, any page smaller than 4k is likely to be a short disambiguation page or a “this page has no text” page.
Up to about 25k they’re stubs. So a good place to start digging is likely those 500k and up pages. The longer the text the more likely to be 3p refd and linked elsewhere. “What links here”
Or searching PubDom books. Generally PDFs. Even titles being the same (or variations) a 500k pdf is likely a bare ocr. Where something in the few meg range is a compressed document. And those ones over a few hundred megs is going to be bare scans.
But let me return to “removed for relevance”. With no way to access those removed pages at all?
Makes studying KWS/SEI rather difficult.
Searching by date crawled gives us an idea what an engine is doing that day.
And older sites can show us a different perspective than newer updated ones on the same topic.
File date (metadata) can be very important in filetype: or filetype/ searches.
Date helps fibre new pages added to watched sites.
I don’t know about google but Bing has APIs for many of these aspects and user-based search software can make use of them. Many such filters are able to be input in PT in the search bar as well. But clicking a button or box is a bit easier than say
Mouse site:…/computerwiki type:htm\html\xml\xtml size:>500000 date:
Etc
Re: Re: Re:
That’s kinda the issue, actually: you are being too vague for the search engine to have any idea what you want.
Re: Re: Re:2
“That’s kinda the issue, actually: you are being too vague for the search engine to have any idea what you want.”
Yeah, that was the point. If you’re searching for a single word, and that word is not so unique as to be completely unambiguous (which rarely happens in the English language), assumptions need to be made.
Complaining that someone else made a different assumption to you, instead of actually correcting yourself and providing the required context, is just stupid.
If I searched on Google for “fresh” and the first results related to the new horror movie of that title and various skincare products and not the 1994 movie, I just clarify my search term. Obviously, the recent release of the new movie skews things toward what others are looking for. I don’t go on a rant about how Google hates Samuel L. Jackson and chess (to give a random example related to my recent viewing activity)
If someone chooses to go on that rant instead of adding more words to their search term, I suspect that’s a problem with them and not Google.
Re: Re: Re:3
Interesting. Bing.
While the first result for me is a skin care company and the second a local food market; the third is the film.
You appear to miss the idea of example vs use. Obviously I don’t do one word searches.
But: in the concept of metadata and content searching, etc, it does point out something we’ve lost in the mainstream.
Luckily for people like me that want results quantity over suggested contents… meta search and data directories still exist. I’d argue metsea probably has as many crawled domains as google if not more given how old it is. It also crawls beyond websites including sfs and ftp, atm, and lnk.
My point, more or less, was that search engines today have an implicit bias on that they are geared to making search easier for a majority of the target users.
This is compounded by human intervention making decisions on what should be considered more or less reliable. And ultimately some level of bias simply must exist in any process that comes from a human mind.
Or, in other words there’s a generation gap. I grew up having to put effort into finding results. And prefer topic and meta searching. Making indexes more useful to me over all. Search and sub search. Filter and divide.
That, and Bing generally gets me results ‘close enough’ to not need google. Which probably has more to do with my LONG use them and my lack of history trimming. With all cookies, tracking, history saved—and manually porting my entire profile for my web browsers on upgrades and system moves… I have an experience tailored to me more than a privacy concerned user.
If I want something fast I use Bing. If I want something different, or more random results, or more viewpoints, I use an index.
But I wonder, how many of those bored after 1990 could go to a major library and use a content catalogue terminal without a title destination?
Re: Re: Re:4
“Interesting. Bing.
While the first result for me is a skin care company and the second a local food market; the third is the film.”
I did say “if”, not that I’d performed an exhaustive search, and that was just the first term that I thought of as an example. Also, even if I had, the fact that it took 2 months to respond to the idea would likely mean that if I had done such a thing your results would be naturally different as a result of the different circumstances that time would apply to them.
“Obviously I don’t do one word searches.”
Yet, you chose to use those as the examples you gave for “faulty” search results in numerous threads. Most of those examples were easily remedied by narrowing your search, so the problem was with you and not the search engine you gave an ambiguous request to.
“My point, more or less, was that search engines today have an implicit bias on that they are geared to making search easier for a majority of the target users.”
They always have. By definition, by asking a search engine something you’re asking it to apply such a bias.
“That, and Bing generally gets me results ‘close enough’ to not need google.”
Absolutely not my experience, but this stuff can be subjective. Even if I’m searching for something as unambiguous as a server error message, I tend to find I get better results outside of Bing.
“If I want something fast I use Bing. If I want something different, or more random results, or more viewpoints, I use an index.”
Fast and accurate are two different concepts.
Re: Re: Re:5
Your too defensive! Calm down. I wasn’t implying anything. I went to my default and posted the result.
As a very raw easy process. Not as a literal example.
I believe most of my examples were, actually three or four words. Not one; such as “Las Vegas Shooting”. And not getting ‘last night’s’ police reports.
Partly true.
There’s a difference between filtering and AI/Augmented manipulation based on hit results, claimed of reliability, and timeframe. And simply listing all results in some computerised logical order, such as record date. Neither premise is wrong.
Personally this has gotten much deeper than I car for anyway. As I don’t actually search all that much in the first place on any generic site.
If I want film info I go to JustWatch or ReelGood. And if I must still, IMDB.
If I want an opinion I go to Taste or Criticker and see how others with my interests reviewed it.
Then return to the first two to track down a legal option. If that fails I move to individual site searches on the multiple services I use. Or watchlist it for returning to later.
I use those methods for any interest I have. I use Bing, my default general search, quite rarely beyond maybe clicking the “suggested” site as I type it in.
Re: Re: Re:6
A quick look at my history shows I used used Bing 3 times today. 4 yesterday. And 1ce Friday.
I’m more structured. Start at a known source I use (eg Wikipedia) and follow links and references backwards out of that. Further searching within those sites. Which may or may not be “powered by” Bing or Google, or DDG.
It is not Republicans who get upset at cracking down on Russian disinformation. It is the Democrats that throw a fit because the Dossier was not real info, DNC server was not hacked by Russia, and Russia did not interfere with the 2016 election, as per DOJ dropped all charges after letting it linger on the front pages for 2 years.
Misinforming works!