Google Argues With Russia About Website Rankings
April 10, 2018
Amidst its employee petitions and the increasing concern about YouTube videos for children, Google is annoyed with Russia.
Google fiddled with its ranking algorithm to stop the dissemination of fake news and Russia believes it is biased against two of its news agencies. Reuters describes more of the argument in the story, “Google Seeks To Defuse Row With Russia Over Website Rankings.” Roskomnadzor called out Alphabet Inc. and its popular search engine Google, when it claimed that Google pushed Russian media sites Sputnik and Russia Today into lower search results.
Eric Schmidt claimed that Google would not be deleting those links, instead they would be pushed lower in search results. Russia claimed Google discriminated against Russia Today and Sputnik, also saying they would take action if necessary. Google responded:
“ ‘We’d like to inform you that by speaking about ranking of web-sources, including the websites of Russia Today and Sputnik, Dr. Eric Schmidt was referring to Google’s ongoing efforts to improve search quality,’ Google said in a letter posted on Roskomnadzor’s website… ‘We don’t change our algorithm to re-rank,’ it added. A Google spokeswoman confirmed the letter had been sent by the company but provided no further comment.”
Years ago Mr. Brin’s trip to space fizzled. Now the search giant is finding fault with a country known to use interesting methods to solve problems.
Whitney Grace, April 10, 2017
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