Is Google Playing Defense?
May 31, 2018
The Search Engine Roundtable reports, “Google Has a Bias Towards Scientific Truth in Search.” Great! Now what about reproducible scientific studies?
This defense of a slant toward verifiable truth was made by Google engineer Paul Haahr on Twitter after someone questioned the impartiality of his company’s “quality raters guidelines,” section 3.2 (reproduced for our convenience in the write-up). The guidelines consider consensus and subject-matter expertise in search rankings, a position one Twitter user took issue with. Writer Barry Schwartz lets that thread speak for itself, so see the write-up for the back-and-forth. The engineer’s challenger basically questions Google’s right to discern good sources from bad (which is, I’d say, is the basic the job of a search engine). This is Haahr’s side:
“We definitely do have a bias towards, for example, what you call ‘Scientific Truth,’ where the guidance in section 3.2 says ‘High quality information pages on scientific topics should represent well established scientific consensus on issues where such consensus exists. […]
‘It’s the decision we’ve made: we need to be able to describe what good search results are. Those decisions are reflected in our product. Ultimately, someone who disagrees with our principles may want a different product; there may be a market niche for them. […]
‘I think it’s the only realistic model if you want to build a search engine. You need to know what your objective in ranking is. Evaluation is central to the whole process and that needs clarity on what “good” means. If you don’t describe it, you only get noise.’”
The write-up concludes with this question from Haahr—if Google’s search results are bad, is it because they are too close to their guidelines, or too far away?
Cynthia Murrell, May 31, 2018
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