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

[choof]

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

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

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.

[xXOpkillerXx]

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.

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

[choof]

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

uhhhhh

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.

[rayword45]

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

uhhhhh

it's the mayocide multiculturalism conspiracy

[Arch0wl]

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

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.

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.

[choof]

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.

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]

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.

[Arch0wl]

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.

[choof]

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.

[rayword45]

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

"""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]

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.)

[Arch0wl]

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

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]

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

[aperson]

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

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.

[benguino]

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.