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

I can't be the only one who notices the sharp decline in google search results quality, as well as their automated algorithms "predicting" behaviour being absolute dog shit. It seems like after they got in all kinds of hot water for "promoting" controversial search results and "Fake news", they cranked the liberal bias on their search so that if it so much as THINKS you are searching for a divisive or controversial topic, it hits you with a bunch of articles trying to sway you the other way.

For example, an example that stuck with me that I sent to my friend was results for a search "'"Terrorist attack statistics divided by religion'". The results that come back are "Muslims are not terrorists" and "white men in america are bigger domestic threats than muslims", when all I was looking for was empirical evidence and real stats and research papers to further my own research. Instead, I got answers to a question I did not ask from outlets like Vice et al, as if to say my question was too taboo to point me to actual answers that might "confirm" a derogatory viewpoint.

This also happens on YouTube. Almost every time without fail when I put on music that isn't current top 40s radio hits, the "Up Next" algorithm ALWAYS provides me with "Boney M - Rasputin" as if I want to listen to that song every time I feel like listening to music.

Does anyone else remember when search engines gave you what you wanted, rather than what it thinks you want? Nowadays, you get all kinds of promoted links, links from Pinterest, or things that are vaguely related because of interchangeable terms. Even the most detailed, precised, Advanced Search gives you loads of ads, results with one of your words or even vaguely related or popular stuff instead of your exact phrase.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the old wild west days of the net gone by, but I really think with all the aggregates and portals like Reddit, Facebook, etc., the net has become a bunch of interconnected walled gardens rather than a vast bastion of information to be explored at your will.

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

Search engines never gave you what you want.

You have to remember that above all, Google and YouTube are advertisers. Predictive results makes perfect logical sense for them to this end. If they give you what they think you want, they are more likely to achieve retention than otherwise.

Part of the complaints you describe are all symptoms of the internet that we all helped create.

If you want sources about terrorism, go to Google Scholar and find cited sources. You might find some direct paper links. More likely the papers are behind a paywall, but at least now you have a direct citation you can Google and from there you can find interpretations that use that citation.

If you don't want personalized results, use incognito mode or a VPN. Part of Google's "account" system exists so they can build statistical models about your preferences. They might even track by IP, I don't know. But there are countermeasures to this.

I can't comment if the liberal bias is explicit or implicit --- it might simply be the fact that mainstream media skews liberal and these outlets are simply more likely to contain factual information or interpretations. Maybe Google thinks you're liberal and is giving you more resonant articles.

You (general you) could probably run a statistical analysis on Google search results to make a model of Google bias if you cared.

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

Or use Bing.

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

google absolutely tracks IP
use disconnect.me or duckduckgo

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

Now that you mention it I am pretty sick of Youtube still thinking that I would like to watch RayWilliamJohnson for my next video

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

Going to what DaBackpack said, Google is a general purpose search engine. Google Scholar can help you locate research that you can cite for the statistics you're looking for about terrorism, and provide more filter criteria for more objective results.

Other sites such as Wikipedia can also help you start a search for more statistics by reading the Notes section. A helpful strategy is finding a page that lists several citations, and then you can find more citations from that (or other sources that may have more specific information you're looking for).

tl;dr you may need to use different tools depending on your situation.

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

Mfw using Google search engine for accurate research papers and statistics...

Other than the mentionned solutions (use actual research based engines, look for citations, etc), you Can use the normal engine but you have to use proper search queries (which sadly too many people dont know how).

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

as I see it, there are two issues here:

1. personalized search results. these give you what the engine thinks you want, but it's ultimately toward the end of making you more satisfied with the results.

2. politicized results. these are what the search engine thinks you should be reading, such as the case with the terrorism link. it also scrubs links it thinks are politically or ideologically bad, for whatever reason.

one example of #2 was when you could search on spanish google for "american inventors" and receive one list, but if you googled the same term on english google you'd get a list that looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-cbbVZkuY



personalized results are okay with me, as long as I can easily turn personalization off.

politicized results will never be okay with me.

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

if you wanna fuck with the recommendations other people get from google/amazon/other sites, when you're messaging them, add a word in white text. if this happens enough times then they'll start getting ads with that thing in white text. so like, maybe potato chips or a 2x4. or lube. these are all options

i made the thread about news source bias because facebook recommended me a political video that i agreed with, and then i realized that facebook knew my political leanings and i was like "oh im only gettng the info i wanna read"

not to call out a specific user or anything but arch0wl's feed on the other hand is full of stories that make me go "why is this important" "i've never heard about this" "why" and i suspect the same thing goes down with him

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

I have a pretty easy time imaginging why the stuff on your feed is important to other people and am usually familiar with the issues

except when it's related to princeton and then I'm like [meme with black guy squinting and tons of question marks]

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

yeah that's because i'm cool and have a well-rounded opinion alfredo big mac

edit: it's funny how you like memes with black people in them given how white you are

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

idk, black people are great at comedy

source: you

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

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

search "white inventors" in images lmao

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

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

for a black inventor, the fact that they are black is noteworthy, so mentioning "white" within the same page is almost sure to happen. something like "all the previous winners were white, making *insert black inventor here* the first african-american to win the award."
a search engine also won't find many mentions of inventors such as tesla or frank whitton being white. if you want to find them (or any other white inventor), you google their nationality, not their skin color. guess how many black inventors pop up when you look for "serbian inventors" or "english inventors?"
so no, the "white inventor" thing isn't a result of ideological or political scrubbing, it's a result of search engine optimization. hence why you get this result on nearly every english search engine out there.

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

Nice one, I wouldn't have thought of it this way.

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

did you even click on any of the images? did you scroll at all? the first one for me is Juan de Pareja, who is spanish, not black. most of the other paintings of black people near the top are all from an exhibit called "Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe" that ran a few years ago. and if you're so upset about paintings of black people then scroll your ass down because those results get really thin, really quick. it's almost like search engines aggregate more recent and popular results and puts them at the top.

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

it's the mayocide multiculturalism conspiracy

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

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.

and no, I am not

"""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.

politicization could go the other way, too -- forcing paintings of any kind into search results when they don't belong there would be objectionable. 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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

"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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

choof MVP

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Trump gets his news from Fox News and FFR

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

He's going to make FFR Yuuuuuuuuuge