I'm tired of Google's algorithms thinking they know what I want and ruining the net

[choof]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

yes, well, the mona lisa and whatnot should be toward the top of what someone searches for "european art", or at least that seems self-evident to me and it's odd that this would be toward the top of search of this kind.

search engine optimization is fine, but this appears to go beyond that.

no, it appears that how SEO works goes beyond you. if I were to walk up to a person who has even a tiny bit of interest in the arts and just straight up say "yo, european art," some of the first things that come to their mind are probably going to be paintings such as Starry Night, Mona Lisa, and the Creation of Adam. a search engine is not a person interested in the arts. it is a set of rules and thousands of lines of code designed to pull websites based on metrics such as popularity. if Mona Lisa isn't one of the first things that pops up when you feed "european art" into a search engine, this is because the Mona Lisa isn't being talked about as much in recent times, at least on the internet as a whole.
you get these results on nearly every search engine because the discussion about "european art" has, at least in recent times, shifted from The Classics to more obscure paintings from more obscure artists.

had google been populated by 2006-era republicans, the search results would probably prioritize christian artists over all else.
politicization is bad. optimization is fine.

it has nothing to do with the politics at google, or any search engine for that matter. the politicization is coming from the people creating content on the internet. search engines just give you what's popular.
what kind of code would you even need to negate this assumed politicization in a search engine?

[choof]

you seem to keep mentioning google explicitly and not taking into consideration the hundreds of other search engines who all use practically the same form of SEO (or who just use google's direct results (cough cough bing lmao cough cough)). look up "european art" or "white inventors" on duckduckgo, or yahoo, or bing, or jeeves. don't look it up on yandex tho, instead of getting pictures of black inventors, you get screenshots of the google image search of "white inventors" because the dudes in russia who know their tech shit keep laughing at idiots like you.

[Arch0wl]

"it appears that how SEO works goes beyond you."

yes. I will readily tell you that I am an idiot in this area, and make no pretensions otherwise. this is why I used language like "appears to", to account for the possibility that other things explain what I am seeing.

the explanations you gave make sense, and sufficiently explain the search results for european art. however, this sort of thing has been talked about by enough people that it's hard to use that explanation to explain the results for "American inventors", which displayed different results on google.es and has been documented by enough screenshots and youtube videos even after the google.es results were changed to reflect this.

and while I don't mean to diminish your credibility here, brushing this off as conspiratiorial while also saying something extremely speculative like "russian tech dudes are laughing at you" comes off as contradictory. if you could elaborate on that, I'd appreciate it.

[choof]

the "russian tech dudes laughing" was a bit of a joke lol

I would need to be at home to test this out. I'm at work at the moment and can't vpn into a spanish speaking country or access a spanish tor node to get legitimately foreign results. right now if I try to search the phrases "white inventors" or "american inventors" in google.es, it gives me english results. I'm not sure if this is due to google detecting that the language is english, if my IP is coming from an english speaking country, or a combination of the both. however, if I translate those into spanish, I get some pretty interesting results. "white inventors" translates into "inventores blancos" (which is almost certainly not the correct way to contextualize the idea of white skinned inventors in spanish), those results are kinda interesting. the first three results are in regards to the english meme, just on a page in spanish that talks about it, then a few legitimately white skinned inventors, then a bunch of garbage.
using "inventores americano" returns way more legitimately white skinned inventors, however it looks like a vast majority of these images are attached to spanish webpages. the few black inventors that pop up are, for the most part, still on english pages.

it's apparent to me that if you were to filter out all english results, the spanish results would be exceedingly white. I believe that this is due to the fact that the phrases "white inventors" and "american inventors" don't translate linguistically all that well into spanish. obviously "inventores blanco" is more akin to transliteration, which is why you get garbage when looking for it. as far as "inventores americano" is concerned, a search engine will parse "african american" as two separate words, even if you use a hyphen (even with quotes). google translates "african american" into "afroamericano," which indicates that it parses "americano" and "afroamericano" as two completely distinct words. hence, "inventores americano" gets you a load of white people, and "inventores afroamericano" gets you a loads of black people.

[rayword45]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

"""upset about paintings of black people"""

that's... clearly not what I'm objecting to. if it was, my dating history would leave a lot to be accounted for.

This is an even dumber answer to a deliberately dumb fake argument

[Arch0wl]

yes. it warrants a dumb reply, not a serious one.

as an aside, to what degree can people shit on me before this qualifies as "insulting" me in the eyes of the moderators? (for the record, I don't think saying my comment is "dumb" is insulting, but "you're an idiot" probably qualifies, and I'd like to know where the line is.)

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by choof

the "russian tech dudes laughing" was a bit of a joke lol

good, lol. I really appreciate you taking the time to type out that explanation.

it's easy to see motivated reasoning on part of people talking about this, but I legitimately want plain/pragmatic explanations to explain the results of this kind. if google isn't politicizing results, and this is just how the algorithm actually works, then that's one less thing to worry about.

[xXOpkillerXx]

I don't think Google's SE's implementation has any public documentation (?), but you can probably get some of their policies. Other than that, it's pretty much hypothesis; the engine must be quite complex tbh

[aperson]

Originally Posted by xXOpkillerXx

I don't think Google's SE's implementation has any public documentation (?), but you can probably get some of their policies. Other than that, it's pretty much hypothesis; the engine must be quite complex tbh

Ya that's the joy of opaque nonlinear correlation algorithms. Even if they show you what all the categorization features are they are also probably similarly opaque and unclear. Gives you lots of wiggle room to do questionable stuff.

Same deal with insurance markets using correlation algorithms that take stuff like zip code as features. Oops, accidentally made the network racist.

[reuben_tate]

I've also have found that the quality of the results that I get from Google doesn't appear to be as stellar as I remember them being. I find myself often having to go to the 2nd or even 3rd page to find something that addresses my query. It seems that Google has an easy time giving you relevant results if you're trying to purchase a product or are seeking very general information. It seems that anytime I try to search for anything that's somewhat specific within the topic of X, the top results involve trying to sell me products/services involving X and/or the results are just general information about X (and not the specific thing I'm looking for).

I will say though, that I'm certain that Google isn't entirely to blame for my experiences. I'm pretty certain that the types of things that I google nowadays are much more specific/obscure than the things that I googled 5 or 10 years ago. So it only makes sense that over the years that I'd have a harder and harder time finding the things I want since I've been searching for more and more specific/obscure things over the years.

[rayword45]

Moving away from this edgy white genocide nonsense but remaining in a realm that I think arch will find important

Compare "opiates and benzos" on Google to Bing. Google used to give good harm reduction results but that's no longer the case. Choof, SEO explanation?

[choof]

on my end I get roughly the same results on bing, google, and ddg. blame the war on drugs for that one

[DaBackpack]

choof MVP

[MixMasterLar]

It should be pretty well documented that doing the 2016 election Google absolutely was trying to skew any results to showing you pro Clinton articles. That might be a bad example considering she was the most liked in the media but even at the time people thought it was getting absurd.


- H O W E V E R -

As a Youtube Creator there's nothing stopping me from adding whatever tags I want to my videos. I can be a sick --ck and tag Boston Bombings to my videos and if I do that to enough of them/they start getting a little more then 20 views within a week you could start seeing me playing Bushido Blade 2 when you try to research your paper on the incident. Political Agendas At Their Finest

Applying this logic to something much more realistic/a little less shitty is if someone wanted to write articles defending Muslims from the perception of always being terrorist the writers could absolutely tag whatever phase they felt needed to make sure the people they feel need to read their argument the most get to see it. What makes this still shitty is that the writers are still assuming that if you're researching it then you obviously haven't agreed with them yet and need to be swayed. In principle this gets under my skin because it shows the writers are afraid for me to do my own work on a subject and if your point of view relies on me taking your word for it your point of view just instantly becomes garbage to me.

But then again maybe they're just trying to throw every tag on there to get as many views as possible because that's how money works. *Shrugs*

-

My take-away is that Google isn't so much as skewing things themselves as people are really good at manipulating where their pages are in results, along with the explanation that Choof gave. Unlike the impression Choof gave, I think there is something to point and ask questions about. The left tend to adapt to technology much, much quicker then the right, so maybe once people who hold other views start to learn how to internet right the results will start balancing out again.

[aperson]

Originally Posted by MixMasterLar

The left tend to adapt to technology much, much quicker then the right, so maybe once people who hold other views start to learn how to internet right the results will start balancing out again.

My man have you even ever seen a liberal try to run an astroturf campaign on twitter it's so fucking adorably bad.

[melonpapes]

https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/28/tec...google-rigged/

Look what just happened to be said by the Cheeto just now. Also Google promoted this in my Google now feed on my phone as a notification for me. Lol. Wow

[choof]

Originally Posted by MixMasterLar

It should be pretty well documented that doing the 2016 election Google absolutely was trying to skew any results to showing you pro Clinton articles. That might be a bad example considering she was the most liked in the media but even at the time people thought it was getting absurd.

this was proven to be false. there are countless articles out there that detail why this was false, using varying degrees of technical jargon and specificity. if you want a general overview of why this was false, however...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/go...llary-clinton/
ps if anyone sees the word "snopes" and discredits this explanation based solely on the domain name then there's really no reason for me to link you to other explanations, you're obviously too braindead to understand those ones

I can be a sick --ck and tag Boston Bombings to my videos and if I do that to enough of them/they start getting a little more then 20 views within a week you could start seeing me playing Bushido Blade 2 when you try to research your paper on the incident. Political Agendas At Their Finest

this is called google bombing, and it was a very big issue during the early days of google when algorithms were still very easy to manipulate. there was a notable shift in how this worked around 2011-2013, and it's extremely hard to do now.

Applying this logic to something much more realistic/a little less shitty is if someone wanted to write articles defending Muslims from the perception of always being terrorist the writers could absolutely tag whatever phase they felt needed to make sure the people they feel need to read their argument the most get to see it. What makes this still shitty is that the writers are still assuming that if you're researching it then you obviously haven't agreed with them yet and need to be swayed. In principle this gets under my skin because it shows the writers are afraid for me to do my own work on a subject and if your point of view relies on me taking your word for it your point of view just instantly becomes garbage to me.

you could tag an article like that with whatever you want, but that's one of the many hundreds of variables used to generate google searches. in the early 2000s, this could have worked. but today? if you're a relatively unknown blogger trying to manipulate google searches, you need to take into account way more shit than just a few contradictory keywords in your metadata.

The left tend to adapt to technology much, much quicker then the right

fucking lol. what do you mean by "adapt to technology?"

so maybe once people who hold other views start to learn how to internet right the results will start balancing out again.

learn how to use a search engine. more importantly, learn the kinds of language people on each side use, and use that in a search engine.

[devonin]

https://twitter.com/iD4RO/status/1034459626723532803

[MixMasterLar]

Well, I obviously didn't try any of my examples so if everything I said is extremely out of date then I guess you guys can disregard it. I stand by that from my experience the more conservative someone is the less likely they understand computers/new phones/ etc but maybe that's because I live in the South where most conservatives are really old and just gave up trying to keep up after the phone gained the ability to play a game of snake.

Also those Trump comments couldn't have better timing lol

[DaBackpack]

Trump gets his news from Fox News and FFR