Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

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If you've ever read Larry Niven's Fleet of Worlds series, there's a Bussard Ramjet with an AI programmed to hide any information that could help a hostile enemy/force find their way back to Earth.

A small cadre of humans who were raised by an Alien Race who came across a human seed ship cross paths with this Ramjet, and one of the protagonists realizes something is off when they do a query on the size of presentable search results in the astrographic/navigational dataset, and realizes that the number of starmaps the AI will produce is far smaller than the amount of space the system actually dedicates to storing said maps.

Point being, you can't trust any system that restricts results to a subset to not actually being designed to leave out results. and it furthermore makes a great, plausibly deniable way to drop search results... Force ranking to 10001+.

You'll forgive me, I'm sure, if I question a company well known for cooperating with an anti-humanitarian regime (Project Dragonfly) and that regularly black holes other undesirable datapoints, of engaging in less than up front search result presentation, I hope?

This isn't the revelation you act like it is. Because of course Google hides results. They don't pretend not to, and they even inform webmasters when it happens. The Search Console calls it a "Manual action" when they do so.

More importantly, the people asking for a "censorship-free search engine" are expressing an incoherent desire. The whole point of a search engine is to take the zillions of web pages that have matching keywords, push the crap to the bottom, and leave the gold on top. A system that does this is inherently censorious. We're just quibbling over what the criteria should be.

What our world lacks is a reasonably-quick way to hold Google accountable when they fail to represent the interests of the public who searches with them. The real-world consenquences of their filtering decisions need to filter back to the people making these decisions. Because "just don't make any filtering decisions" isn't going to result in a usable information retrieval system.

> "censorship-free search engine" are expressing an incoherent desire

That's not really true. `grep` is a censorship-free search engine. It just reports every matching result.

Of course that wouldn't generally be useful over the web, however even with sorting it is possible to be censorship free. You just need to include every matching result eventually.

Of course you would find that generating later pages likely also becomes expensive, so you may also add a page limit and ask the user to refine the query instead. Of course then you are back to this problem of it can be very difficult to find every result because you need to guess what words are on the page.

But all of this is basically moot because Google doesn't claim to be censorship-free so they have much simpler way of hiding results.

> even with sorting it is possible to be censorship free. You just need to include every matching result eventually

Do you honestly think that the people who complain about their favorite website being censored by Google would be satisfied with showing up on page 200*? I wouldn't.

It's only "not censorship" in the same sense that having your emails sent to the Spam folder isn't censorship. The spam folder, and low-scoring SERP results, are so full of items that every reasonable person acknowledges to be crap that getting banished to that area is pretty much equivalent to having someone blast your roadside protest with strobe lights and a sonic cannon. Surrounding you with so much garbage data that nobody can see or hear you any more is only "not censorship" on the dumbest technicality.

* Ignore, for sake of argument, the fact that page 200 won't even load in our universe. I'm imagining a parallel world where Google pretends to be censorship-free because they only push things far down in the results instead of removing them entirely.

"Do you honestly think that the people who complain about their favorite website being censored by Google would be satisfied with showing up on page 200*?"

My complaint has nothing to do with my favorite website. My complaint has to do with not being able to discover information and websites because Google won't allow me to dig very far into their search results. They're spidering the vast majority of the internet, and all I get are crumbs.

They're doing more than "push the crap to the bottom". They're pushing the crap to the bottom and then limiting how far you can dig into the pile. I am sometimes interested in that crap.

I agree. If you really want to see every result for a topic this system hurts you. However I think that use case is vanishingly rare. Most users would be better served by refining their query for what they are interested in than paging through hundreds of pages of results.

Google isn't designed to be a archive of every webpage matching a search result, it isn't what their infrastructure is optimized for.

"Google isn't designed to be a archive of every webpage matching a search result, it isn't what their infrastructure is optimized for."

I believe that's exactly what Google is. Limiting search results probably has to do with being able to serve more queries and respond quicker.

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