Search is an intensely political issue, we're just used to ignoring that particular aspect.
Personally I disagree with that claim, but if you feel that search is a wholly technical problem, I'd expect you to agree.
And that doesn't even deal with the obviously political: laws like the right to be forgotten, or other forms of censorship like removals of content due to copyright. How to engage with those is inherently political.
As a user I want back the documents I’m looking for. If the engine has to adhere to local laws, fine but I want zero editorializing of results.
Of course! But converting from a search query to an ordered list of documents requires choices about ranking and filtering to be made.
If I search for "irs" do you include spam phone numbers attempting to steal my identity? There's distinct value to not returning garbage results, but how you do that is going to be called political by some people. And choosing not to do anything is going to be called political by others. There is no non-political choice, despite what you keep implying. Like, given a search query, you can't tell me the objectively correct set of results to return. If you could, you'd be very, very, very rich.
In the absence of that objective, perfect, "true" result, any choice is political in some way or another. Pick an algorithm and I'll happily explain to you a failure mode that is "political".
Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
It's common sense. Anything that revolves around government, elections, laws, etc.
> Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would you be allowed to debate what the latter should do but not the former?
I meant the exact opposite (I forgot that politics could be taken to mean "office politics" or "company politics"). Getting involved in government politics or activism is your role as a private citizen, not as a company employee. Regarding "company politics" (work hours, office arrangement, project management methodology, managerial decisions, coffee machine model, etc.), I guess it's up to your employer to decide what is up for debate.
Go ahead and google 'Taiwan' and then 'Canada' or 'Japan'. Taiwan (in the right sidebar thing) is listed differently compared to the others. They're listed as "Country in $X" - Taiwan is not.
That's political. Or is it not? It's "just search", sort of.
Taiwan being a country or not, and what shows up in a google search about it, isn't political for you, or for me, or for many people around the world. It may be very political for the people who live in Taiwan (or China).
Nearly everything is political to someone. So it's not very easy to draw a hard line between political or not. A "no politics" rule is very difficult to enforce in a meaningful way for that reason.
> Nearly everything is political to someone.
Saying that something is political to only a few people is an oxymoron. For example, there are some people who do not recognize Donald Trump as the US president. Is it political to state that the US president is Donald Trump? Absolutely not.
HN is an example of a community where a large majority of the content is apolitical. Drawing the line is really not that hard.
Search is one example, as is jury selection.