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I expect it to look like other Google search results, which it did not, I just searched Obamacare on Google, and I got the following blurb, a link to the Obamacarefacts.com website, and a link to healthcare.gov. That was everything that showed on the screen without scrolling down.
Quote:
The official name for “ObamaCare” is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Affordable Care Act (ACA) for short. The ACA was signed into law to reform the health care industry by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010 and upheld by the Supreme Court on June 28, 2012. ObamaCare Facts: Facts on the Affordable Care Act
obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-facts/
Obamacarefacts.com claims to be a group of private citizens setting the record straight about Obamacare. Why is Google recommending them in their blurb at the top? And why did Google choose to make them the first search result?
There is a clearly finagling going on at Google to help support Obamacare.
And the anti-trust lawsuit is exactly why the Google execs should never have been anywhere near the WH during the investigation. Looks like a mutual backscratching. Good search results for Obama's pet issue, and Google gets their anti-trust suit dropped.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gungnir
What would you expect to come up in the top results for a search on "Obamacare"? Pictures of cats?
Look all the big search engines provide algo results, except for a few instances where (because of lag in webcrawling, because of web "noise", or because someone nefariously link shares, linkjacks etc. to promote content that is either not relevant [or not the original owners] to the search terms for traffic purposes, traffic can be monetized) specific logical results do not return as the #1 result. This can be enforced using what's known as a definitives list, a list of specific keywords that will always (while it's there) return a specific link to a specific site. For instance if you type "Microsoft" into Google today, the #1 result is Microsoft ? Official Home Page, if it's not then Google have screwed up (and I'll let 'em know), or you even type in Google into Google it will return Google as it's first result, same exact principle applies to Bing, Yahoo, Ask (if they're still running their own engine) etc.
There is also exclusion lists that block content from certain sites, because the content provided is not valuable (link exchanges, click bait, phishing etc), or illegal in the market that it is being searched in, this does not block access to that site, just makes the site not locatable by common search engine.
So there is some human involvement which does directly contravene some SEO's opinion, but then I just developed webcrawlers and neural network ranking algorithms for search engine companies, not actually getting those crawlers to my site, and highly ranked.
Now can an exclusion list and definitives list be abused, sure, are they, not to my knowledge, it's not like Sergey Brin can check in a definitives list to return www.sergeybrinrocks.com for every common keyword search then prop it out to the clusters. There are a lot of people of different political persuasions who work at these places and who would object to skewing results towards or away from any political position. I'm sure that at times people think that something is not correct, oh well, they can file a complaint.
Back to the actual title, search engines don't rank on truth, because for something to be true you would have to know exactly what the statements made are, and what they are made about to know it is true or not (consider every web page, and all of the events that have occurred to result in those pages, there aren't that many people working at Google or Bing to cover even 1% of it).
Even then suppose that was possible, would it make a good search engine if it excluded all false results? Given the propensity I've seen on the internet for many years it would likely destroy the whole search engine business. Where would it leave reviews, and opinion pieces, and forums, a review about a product may not be one persons experience of it, but is another persons experience of it, which one is true and how can you know without an independent observer observing their use of that product? Opinion is opinion, is it true, it is in the opinion of the writer, it may not be in the opinion of the reader, the only truth is that the person voiced their opinion. What about forums that are just people voicing their opinions or correcting the opinions of others?
Well until 2012 they were subject to an FTC antitrust investigation, then there's the NSA bulk records warrants they've been very active in resisting, and Net Neutrality too. There are a LOT of reasons for Google to be sitting in the WH, as there are a LOT of reasons for Microsoft to be sitting there too. Not to forget of course that corporate lobbying would have little benefit of achieving executive action on some issue by sitting anywhere but the White House. (sometimes a cigar, is just a cigar)
If I had to make a call between Google/MS executing Washington's agenda, or Washington executing Google/MS agenda's it wouldn't be the software giants doing the execution, they can shut up shop in the US and move tomorrow if they really want to which would be bad for most of their employee's and the US, but would only be a small blip on their balance sheets. This is something that I'm sure that the US government is highly aware of, after all where would PRISM be if they could not access Google/MS/Facebook/Yahoo in the way they currently do because the corp HQ and primary servers are outside of the US, under the control of non-US law?
Ahhh yes. The terror that a business could supply facts rather then lies. Got it. Soo....what does the op want exactly? That we regulate them? Control their message?
This is what I fear is coming with the FCC taking over the Internet. That is why Obama wanted his "Net Neutrality" rules adopted and instructed the FCC to do so.
I expect it to look like other Google search results, which it did not, I just searched Obamacare on Google, and I got the following blurb, a link to the Obamacarefacts.com website, and a link to healthcare.gov. That was everything that showed on the screen without scrolling down.
Obamacarefacts.com claims to be a group of private citizens setting the record straight about Obamacare. Why is Google recommending them in their blurb at the top? And why did Google choose to make them the first search result?
There is a clearly finagling going on at Google to help support Obamacare.
Help support what the ACA? It's the law, it does not need the support of Google or anyone else, all things being equal it's not going to change at all, only if someone brings a bill to congress will it change, it's kind of the way the law works.
What you got was ads (one or two) and what's called an "inline answer" which is an explanation of what it is because Obamacare is vernacular for the PPACA, about link 3 or 4 was healthcare.gov and then news items (top one being obamacare still failing after 5 years from Real Clear politics).
Given that the top news item (directly under healthcare.gov) is about Obamacare failing from Real Clear Politics, one suspects that Google is finagling nothing, or finagling so poorly that RCP's article on Obamacare is not being suppressed. Given that Google are pretty good with providing search results (and by inference discarding poor results), Occam's razor leads me to believe that the issue is not conspiracy, it's very easy to drop web pages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NLVgal
And the anti-trust lawsuit is exactly why the Google execs should never have been anywhere near the WH during the investigation. Looks like a mutual backscratching. Good search results for Obama's pet issue, and Google gets their anti-trust suit dropped.
Or perhaps they were there because they were meeting about things that were completely unrelated to the FTC investigation (I don't know I wasn't there), Google assisted with the Healthcare.gov repair work, they and Microsoft have both been consulted on patent and copyright reforms, Google was consulted on self driving cars (since they have one), the list goes on and on. They, Microsoft, Comcast, and many others consult with the WH on technical issues.
Their results aren't much different from Microsoft's powered Bing Obamacare - Bing
Do you think they're all colluding? If they are then why, what commercial advantage can be gained by the top 3 search engines colluding with Obama on the ACA that's already law?
Do you think they're getting paid off for it? How much of a Bribe do you think Google, or Microsoft would need, Billions? How many Billions? Does the US even have enough cash available to pay off a bribe that size? Microsoft have cash reserves of $86B, Google have cash reserves of $62B they exceed the cash reserves of most countries, how do you bribe a company with that much cash?
What Google presently displays on it's first page (ignoring the paid ads, which are clearly marked as such at the top of the page) is based on their algorithms, which look at keywords (the words people use when searching for a certain product, service, or subject), relevancy (how closely the content matches the search request), and other factors (they actually do look at the h1 headlines, the page Title, internal and external links, etc. These are not controlled by humans but by the "Web crawler." There is no human decision involved.
I am a Webmaster. I build and host Websites. I know something about these things as it is my job as a Web designer to try to get my sites to rank well (preferably on the first page if I can). That's called, "Search Engine Optimization," (SEO).
Sorry, I forgot the link in the original post. Google is the one who currently uses 200+ factors for its algorithms to determine site ranking for search results.
"Google says that in the future, its determinations about what is true and what is untrue will play a role in how search-engine rankings are configured."
"Google lobbyists have been pushing for implementation of “net neutrality” regulations, particularly a “Title II” provision that would benefit Google. President Obama helpfully came out in support of the plan, including Title II, which was slightly embarrassing because Obama’s FCC chair, Tom Wheeler, had favored a different approach. Wheeler promptly reversed course and backed the Obama-Google plan. Right before the FCC report was due, but before it was made public, the FCC pulled another odd reversal, removing 15 pages of policy Google apparently found out about but didn’t like.
Google ranked second for corporations whose employees donated to the Obama campaign."
...How would you feel if the search engine purveyor of truth turned out to have strong ties (not just campaign donations) to the political party that is not your own?...
Okay, I could never get this worked up over a search engine, but if I did, what difference would campaign contributions and ties to an opposing party make?
Ahhh yes. The terror that a business could supply facts rather then lies.
You know as well as I do the "truth" is very problematic especially when you are talking about what should be an automated and blind process. Obviously improving their search results to provide relevant sites over what is popular and/or have gamed the search engine should be their goal.
I believe that the people who did not want net neutrality are those who have made billions on an open web and now wish to close down that open web so they can continue to earn billions. Thereby keeping the next Gen. from this ability.
Its all about greed, goes back a long time. Best case is TR and his fight against the trusts which tried the same things. They of course used train lines and shipping to try and control.
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