Google and Its Search Results: Objective or Subjective
December 1, 2016
I love the Alphabet Google thing. The information I obtain via a Google query is spot on, accurate, perfect, and highly credible. Run the query “dancing with the stars” and what do you get? Substance. Rock solid factoids.
I read “Google Search Results Tend to Have Liberal Bias That Could Influence Public Opinion.” The write up informed me:
After analyzing nearly 2,000 pages, a panel rated 31% pages as liberal as opposed to only 22% that were conservative; the remaining 47% pages were neutral that included government or mainstream news websites.
And the source of this information? An outfit called CanIRank.com. That sounds like a company that would make Ian Sharp sit up and take notice. Don’t remember Ian Sharp? Well, too bad. He founded IP Sharp Associates and had some useful insights about the subjective/objective issues in algorithms.
The methodology is interesting too:
The study conducted by online search marketer CanIRank.com found that 50 most recent searches for political terms on the search engine showed more liberal-leaning Web pages rather than conservative ones.
But the Google insists that is results are objective. But Google keeps its ranking method secret. The write up quotes a computer science professor as saying:
“No one really knows what Google’s search engine is doing,” said Christo Wilson, a Northeastern University computer science professor. “This is a big, complex system that’s been evolving for 15 years.”
Hmm. Evolving. I thought that the Google wraps its 1998 methods and just keeps on trucking. My hunch is that the wrappers which have been added by those trying to deal with the new content and new uses to which the mobile and desktop Web search systems are put are add ons. Think of the customization of a celebrity’s SUV. That’s how Google relevance has evolved. Cool, right?
The write up points out:
Google denies results are politically slanted and says its algorithms use several factors.
My hunch is that CanIRank.com is well meaning, but it may have some biases baked into its study. CanIRank.com, like the Google, is based on human choices. When humans fiddle, subjectivity enters the arena. For real objectivity, check out Google’s translation system which may have created its own inter-lingua. That’s objective as long as one does not try to translate colloquial code phrase from a group of individuals seeking to secure their communications.
Subjective humans are needed for that task. Humans are subjective. So how does the logic flow? Oh, right. Google must be subjective. This is news? Ask Foundem.
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2016
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