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Comment by the_omegist | Hacker News Reader

I can "understand" this from a legal perspective. I can "understand" that ads appear higher in the results.

What is less forgivable and more dangerous, and what pushes me more & more toward other search engines, is their socio-political biases.

I stopped expecting google to show me the "most popular" results but a distorted view of reality of what they decided is good for me to see.

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Do you have any examples of socio-political bias relevant to the discussion at hand?

so called piracy is bad according to what western society's moral and legal values are. That should be sufficient clear to anyone remotely familiar with the topic. It is a bias compared to technical discussion on where the result showing in the ranking of specific search engine on a purely technical view.

At first I misread "piracy" as "privacy" in your comment. It still checked out.

I think the key here is that it is bad according to society's legal norms, rather than any "socio-political norms". I think it is absolutely justifiable that Google filters based on legal norms, given that it is a company operating under a given legal system (or multiple). If the result was purely "technical" it would need to show a lot of content that you don't want it to show.

The legal norms obviously originate from socio-political norms and moreover law is literally political, so the scare quotes are quite unnecessary.

It's subjective.

I made the point that you can focus on many things "google does bad" or "google removes". But the root of the problem is that google is not a perfect and unbiased representation of the web.

While it's not so bad when it's about movies availability, it can get dangerous if people have an incorrect view of reality .

> But the root of the problem is that google is not a perfect and unbiased representation of the web.

This is an unreasonable expectation for any product of any company, let alone the biggest general purpose search engine of the web. The reason spamming / SEO gaming doesn't work much right now (there is a ceiling to the effectiveness) is because Google actively biases their results against what they consider abusers.

I would argue there are other search engines that have attempted an "unbiased index of the web" and Google was a superior experience.

I don't deny that there are problems (I wish Google stopped preventing email address searches and lots of classes of Google Dorks from working), but I don't think your prescription improves anything.

Sure, I agree that's not an easy thing to do, perhaps even too idealistic. But what you mention (counter-SEO gaming) isn't the type of "bias" I was referring to. Correcting their algorithm to make it better at filtering spamming, etc is part of making their product useful in the first place. Otherwise their search engine would be as useful as a car without wheels.

But, to keep the analogy, it would be like a car maker tweaking the speedometer to make the drivers go slower "to save lives" without telling its clients. If Google clearly showed its list of "socially acceptable" search terms , I would have no problem with it. But it's the fact they pretend (or that it's generally admitted) that they don't tweak their search results that I dislike.

For example: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...

The phrase “incorrect view of reality” makes it sound like I’d be exchanging one set of biases for another. I think it’s time to question belief in a single objective reality.

Not the op but I was using a mixture of DuckDuckGo and Google for searching recent news this past week and got very different results from the two. I don't think this is intentional on Google's part, I suspect it's tied to keyword expansion (given a keyword like "Chaz" expand it into "seattle protests") but the result was that Google consistently returned a small result set of the same few news sites across multiple different searches compared to DDG giving me a much wider swath of results.

I've noticed this is an issue on medical terms too. I wanted to look up the claimed health benefits of spirulina (tldr, it makes you go) and consistently got bogus sites that had successfully gamed Google's SEO practices while academic and government sites were rather buried. DDG seemed to have a better representation of sources.

> Google consistently returned a small result set of the same few news sites across multiple different searches compared to DDG giving me a much wider swath of results.

That sounds like it'd be because Google's results are personalized and DDG's aren't.

Well, sure some part of it may not be intentional but i think I've seen mentioned (here?) that Google tweaks its search results so that they conform to some "company principles".

A quick search gave me this :

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...

For at least the last year I have been DDG first, and it is getting better slowly, I find myself using !g less and less

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