Cmon now. Try to get a result for "UFC stream free" on Google. Now try that on Yandex. Live sports streaming is just one subject you can easily see Google actively censoring the organic results the web would give you if your search engine was information agnostic. Now try to search for anything politically related on Google that is not center-left/coastal US/mainstream power forces aligned, and you will stop believing in any result the corporate american search engines approve you to see.
I think the person you're responding to meant search quality, whether you're getting relevant results for a combination of programming terms for example.
Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.
And what the heck are you talking about with center-left? You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.
Indeed, to the contrary -- isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?
> Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.
Au contraire, it's extremely common for measures designed to suppress illegal or disfavored content to have a high false positive rate and disappear from the results the very thing you're looking for even though it isn't illegal.
> isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?
Google search and YouTube recommendations are different things entirely.
> You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.
It has a heavy mainstream bias. Fox News is right-leaning but it's the mainstream media. See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.
> See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.
Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.
But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for. But you can find whatever you want with the right libertarian or communist search terms. Google's not hiding political viewpoints. Again, especially as evidenced by the fact that YouTube will start recommending that stuff to you if you like it.
> Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.
Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS. Somewhat amusingly one of the results is the South China Morning Post, which is based out of Hong Kong and blocked in mainland China.
For "libertarian news" it at least gives Reason and Cato (which are fairly major outlets) but then proceeds with all the mainstream media outlets. No hint of anybody's blog or social media account anywhere.
> But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for.
It feels like the problem is that all the results are the same. Even if you search for some more specific subset of the news, all the results will just be the pages for that topic on each of the major media outlets who are all writing the same stories. Whereas better results might be e.g. the first three results are major media outlets but then it starts giving alternative outlets with varying perspectives.
Nobody is looking at the search results page and finding the coverage from CNN, BBC, MSNBC and CBS inadequate but finally finding satisfaction with NBC. These results are redundant with each other, or might be better served as an info box with a list of major outlets and a "more" button instead of constituting the entirety of the search results to the exclusion of anything else.
Essentially the problem is that it makes the search engine useless for discovery because the only things it will give you are the things everybody already knows about.
> Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS.
Trying this now. The second result is "People's World – Continuing the Daily Worker – Founded 1924", and the fourth is "Communist Party USA – cpusa.org".
Doesn't seem like Google's trying to censor anything authentically communist to me. But it is giving a wide range of results, from actually communist-written material, to mainstream news coverage of communism.
Yes absolutely. If your only argument is that Google won't show you hitmen for hire when you search for hitmen for hire, maybe you don't have an argument.
