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Blekko Launches a Search Engine With Bias
Pickens writes "Previous specialized search engines including Cuil, Hakia, Powerset, Clusty, and RedZ — each had a special trick, but they've all faded from memory, some after crashing in flames, some after making their founders rich. Now Rafe Needleman reports at Cnet that along comes Blekko, whose claim to fame is that you can tilt your search results in the direction you like by using a category of bias, like 'liberal' or 'conservative.' Categorization lists are applied by appending a 'slashtag.' The query, 'climate change /conservative' will give you politically slanted results, for example. 'Climate change /science' will restrict your results to hits from scientific Web sites. Blekko won't have a real, Web-wide impact unless its concept — that bias is good and more aggressive search filtering is needed — gets some traction, writes Needleman. But 'Blekko is a solid alternative to Google and Bing for anyone, and more importantly it's got great potential for researchers, librarians, journalists, or anyone who's willing to put some work into how their search engine functions in order to get better results.'"
This has been my home page for a while. (You can get invites from their twitter). What sold me was kittens /liberal vs kittens /conservative
it's under construction
Massive failure on that example unless you consider the top three results (newscientist.com, livescience.com and physorg.com) to be more than just news sites. And (of course you new this was coming) the gold standard does a better job with the same search.
Of the first page of Blekko results, I'd argue that only half of them have any business being on there. The other problem is that a lot of things like date ranges or news that this slashtag hopes to fill is already covered by Google's advanced notation. People who need these have probably already learned to use them (for instance the site:slashdot.org term helps me see if a story has already been up on a topic). If you want a bias other than range restrictions, just add it as a search term.
I spent a lot of time playing around with this and nothing I tried really jumped out at me as "useful." Of course I was just fiddling around and not really looking for anything in particular.
My work here is dung.
Bias is inherent in everyone, this engine included. Who decides what fits a category? It is up to individuals to interpret the bias. Who decides whether something should appear in /terrorist or /freedomfighter ?
I can't see how this is a good idea.The people who hate NPR (liberal) or FOX (conservative) without ever listening to either, already have plenty of places to get their bias quota. We don't need any more mind numb drones for the political classes.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Obamacare fiscal implications /liberal = Will save us trillions!
/neo-con = We'll find them on every street corner!
/catholic = Condoms don't prevent AIDS
/bloomberg = We need tougher gun laws because criminals follow them
/howard dean = YEEEEEEAAAAAAH!
/conservative = Fox News
/liberal = MSNBC
WMDs in Iraq
Sex education
Gun control
How to give a concession speech
Unbiased news
Unbiased news
Unbiased news = No results round.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This looks like a professional heavyweight cousin of Left-Right.us, a relatively simple Google hack I posted some weeks back. Very cool.
(though I still like seeing the results side-by-side.)
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
If I want to further specify search keywords to add bias to my search in Google, I can. Unless Blekko is *really, really* good at this, I'm not sure I see how it will end up better than google with the same keywords without the slash?
I suppose it's an interesting *idea*, but the devil will be in the detail of getting the filtering to be really good, better than bing, yahoo, or google with similar searches.
What if you have a liberal/conservative government? In the UK liberal is becoming conservative
Political factions are not siloed. They come together, mix, mutate and spread apart under a variety of circumstances, personalities, etc.
For example, I've known many religious conservatives who social views are "reactionary," but are functionally libertarian in their politics. Likewise, many liberals claim to be about individual freedom, but the policies they support (non-discrimination laws, speech codes, gun control, high taxes) when applied to individuals are extremely illiberal.
Most people cannot even get Fascism right. They think it's just "totalitarianism" or "corporations owning the government" (I've even had teachers say it is just "militant nationalism") rather than understanding that it is a fusion of right-wing and left-wing thought into a more advanced form of Socialism which attempts to achieve Socialist ends through a more market-oriented system (where the state generally directs, but doesn't explicitly own, private business through regulation).
In order to even train some sort of AI to figure this out, the developers would have to have an incredible level of domain knowledge of politics and history that would rival the level of knowledge that hardcore game designers typically have of Physics and Geometry.
I suppose they could do something like PageRank where they just assume that certain similarities imply a position in politics, but that won't be accurate for obvious reasons.
Google changes your results in that regular use of Google will filter out and make things have higher rank depending on your search history.
For example, searching a lot about Linux and their distributions will make Wine the software the top result instead of the beverage.
Yet another reason not to accept JS or cookies from Google. The feature itself may not be so terrible. It's pretty bad though that this would be turned on by default, which is the same problem with lots of features that try to be "helpful" without clearly explaining up-front what they are doing and why. It goes counter to the common-sense expectation that a give set of search results is based on only the keywords entered. It really sounds like a way to put a pleasant spin on all of that data collection and retention: "See, it's just so that we can better serve you, honest! No, we won't delete it upon request."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
politics /retarded:
Impressive.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
More confirmation bias.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I mention this in another post.
So Fox news is NOT biased. No, really, they aren't. The reason is they know exactly what they are doing. They don't think they are perfectly in the center, they don't think they are trying to be equal. They know they are supporting republican causes and agendas. They may not admit as much, bu they know it. It is an active, purposeful stance. It is not bias.
Bias is when you are trying to do something, but don't (at least not completely) because you are predisposed for or against something. So bias in the media would be something like a story not getting reported on because the editors decide it "isn't news" because it tells a narrative they don't like. They aren't actively working to suppress it, they just don't like it and thus decide it isn't news worthy, not realizing what they are doing.
You do discover bias in new media, no surprise it happens in all human endeavors. Fox News just isn't a good example because they are actively working towards a stance. It isn't bias if it is your actual goal.