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Is Santorum's "Google Problem" a Google Problem?
theodp writes "Fortune contributor Dan Mitchell argues that GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum's 'Google problem' isn't Google's problem at all. 'The fact that searching for 'santorum' puts the profane, anti-Rick Santorum site SpreadingSantorum.com (NSFW) at the top of Google's search results,' insists Mitchell, 'is not an example of a "Google bomb," despite the widespread use of that term to describe the result.' In the same camp is Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan, who also says that Santorum has a search engine problem, not a Google problem. 'It's just that everyone fixates on Google,' Sullivan adds. Which is perhaps to be expected, since Google is the King of Search and also has ties to SpreadingSantorum creator Dan Savage, having featured the sex-advice columnist in Google's The-web-is-what-you-make-of-it Chrome ad campaign (for Savage's admirable It Gets Better Project, not SpreadingSantorum). So, considering Google's vaunted search quality guidelines, is some kind of change in order? Sullivan, while making it clear he opposes Santorum's views, nonetheless suggests Google is long overdue to implement a disclaimer for the 'Santorum' search results. 'They are going to confuse some people,' he explains, 'who will assume Google's trying to advance a political agenda with its search results.'"
...they should try winning over hearts and minds (and clicks) instead of censoring something they find politically inexpedient.
I think no one should take Savage's opinions when it comes to anti-bullying because of what he has done here. It just spreads the message, "Be tolerant of my views, but I will be completely intolerant of yours and harass you if I disagree with you."
He's a political figure with public presence, he has exposed and his being chastised and lampooned was really well-deserved, based on statements made in public meant for the public.
The website exposes neither his private life nor anything else that would make it bullying.
Simply put, poltiicans have to put up with criticism, and if they're total bastards, they will get really harsh criticism...
Or maybe it's just the google algorithm at work.
I find it interesting that a Christian-Taliban like Santorum would cry about cyberbullying when he thinks raped women should see a resulting pregnancy as a gift from god and that the Catholic Church paedophile priest is primarily a Homosexual problem rather than one of opportunity.
I see one bully here and the top google result is what I would term "blowback". If I felt sorry for anyone, it would be for his children and anyone else with that name who has nothing to do with it.
And if you read up on Santorum's bizarre beliefs it becomes event more disgusting. What the hell is wrong in the US that an obvious wingnut like Santorum can gain so much support?
It sounds as though his issue is with the site, not with Google. Google is just presenting information that exists -- it is the site that is the problem for him.
So....doesn't he know a lawyer or two to address the site in question?
Santorum's biggest issue is not Google but his political policies. He appeals to a very small population of rural conservative religious voters. He has zero appeal to moderate republicans which means he could never get elected. I mean the fact that a washout like Mitt Romney is leading just lets you know how awful the Republican candidates are.
Rick Santorum has chosen, for whatever reason, to make gay marriage a centerpiece of his campaign. That's fine, and it certainly gets him a lot of mileage with the far right. But it also comes with a downside. When you chose to single out a particular group as your enemy, you're going to have to deal with them fighting back. And if humor is one of the few weapons they have, you can expect a lot of jokes. So man up and get over yourself. It's not like Dan Savage was the one who started this fight.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It is not a search engine's responsibility to police our neologisms. Santorum is a word now used by the common public, and it requires no editorializing by third parties. As the original article points out:
The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum's full name, rather than just the word "santorum." In that case, his official site ranks tops.
So in other words, if I'm looking for a person, I write the person's name in and find the person. If I'm looking for a thing, I type said thing in and find it.
For example, would anybody be annoyed if a google search of the word "houston" showed Houston, TX as the first hit, instead of Whitney Houston?
Now as to why Santorum and santorum came to be connected is another matter. But that's something for a different conversation, which the columnist fails to grasp.
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It's more an example of Internet Bullying.
A good case could be made that Santorum started it by preaching intolerance.
Santorum wouldn't be in this situation if he hadn't pissed off the online community. His hateful, provincial views are completely at odds with most of the younger generations who are able to freely spread ideas and news about villains like him. Santorum caught on as slang to publicly shame this man. As most here know, Savage had his contest to fit a proper insult to the guy. He deserves no sympathy and should realize how rational the hatred and criticisms of him are. The Google results are purely symptomatic. Conservatives in America should realize how viscous people outside of their base are growing to their views outside and stop making excuses.
I disagree. Mr Savage's actions are no different than a group of kids in the playground deciding to equate some unpopular kid's name with something clearly distasteful. Santorum's political opinions may be offensive, but they're out there as part of a public discussion. Relabeling Santorum's name to mean something vile is childish and does nothing to help open communication between rival factions on the playground. You wouldn't put up with this sort of behavior in Elementary school, yet somehow because it's gotten the attention of Stephen Colbert and Google, it's okay? If you don't like Santorum (I personally don't) then talk to his issues, don' t resort to immature nonsense like deliberately attempting to skew search engine results.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
No, it isn't.
1. Rick Santorum is a public figure. A high school kid (which is usually what "cyberbullying" refers to) is generally not. If he wanted to avoid criticism, he could have simply retired quite comfortably to his home in Pennsylvania.
2. The website and Spreading Santorum campaign were created in response to things Rick Santorum has said in his official capacity as a United States Senator on the floor of the US Senate. If you're a public official, statements like that are clearly fair game for criticism and/or satire.
3. Bullying is typically done by somewhat powerful people to a powerless or marginalized person. Rick Santorum is neither powerless nor marginalized.
4. Rick Santorum's stated position regarding homosexuality is that he would use the power of the government to try to force homosexual people to either not be gay or not exist. That a prominant gay man responded by trying to prevent him from taking power seems like self-preservation as much as anything else.
Sorry, the claim along the lines of "poor widdle Ricky getting bullied by mean Dan Savage" is simply ludicrous.
I am officially gone from
At least, that's the basic idea behind both Google and other engines: show results that aggregate the opinions or outlook of many people. Authoritative links are ones which many people use, useless links are one that no one uses.
The whole thing with Santorum is that, actually, there is a very large segment of people that despise what he stands for. This group is at least competing with (if not more powerful than) the population of people that think he's a sane politician worth listening to.
The disconnect here is mass media. According to the rules they have adopted, candidates are to be taken seriously when they hit a certain (small) proportion of support, at least if they are right-wing candidates, and open mockery or confrontation are simply not done. Hence, Santorum is a "real candidate" and shouldn't have this level of opposition.
But that's not reality. I agree: a disclaimer would implicitly say that the voice of the people is political... which is rather obvious and useless, since it's always true.
Namecalling != criticism.
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I'm not really a fan of Santorum, but whether or not you care for his views, it's a terrible way to make a point for someone who wants to make a thoughtful decision about who they should elect. It's the equivalent of schoolyard name calling. While I can understand how it got there in Google's search, and I understand why Savage did it (it's amusing and does appeal to the bathroom humor crowd), I wouldn't mind at all if it went away.
And really, there may be people in the US who actually act like the equivalent of the Taliban, but if you believe that any candidate currently running on any major, and most minor, party tickets is like the actual Taliban, you're either displaying ignorance or a complete lack of perspective. Knowing what the real Taliban does to people makes me borderline disgusted when I hear the term used flippantly like that.
If we would prefer to not have the government in the bedroom, perhaps we should help by taking the anal sex jokes out of the political equation.
Santorum is the bully.
He tried to use his political power to dehumanize gay people, and did things like comparing gay sex to having sex with dogs. Dan Savage's response, as a gay person, one of the people Santorum was bullying, was to fight back.
Santorum was never not one of the people with power. And God forbid if he were to become President, he would have more power than anyone. He is not a victim. He is a victimizer.
If we would prefer to not have the government in the bedroom, perhaps we should help by taking the anal sex jokes out of the political equation.
If you take the anal sex out of politics....
There has GOT to be a great line in there somewhere. It's just too damn early for me to think of it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
deliberately trying to game the search engine to have your results on top
No gaming involved. Google's search results are based on how popular a particular link is. People find the sexual meaning of santorum to be worth linking to. As pointed out in the article this isn't a Google bomb like linking "miserable failure" to "George H. W. Bush" was.
However, a person's name definitely belongs to them.
No it doesn't unless they have a unique name and have trademarked it. Plenty of Santorums, and santorum, in the world apart from one ludicrously anti-gay presidential wannabe.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I think, if I were the Santorum Campaign, that I'd be far less worried about the fact that some smartass linked the candidate's name with $upleasantact, than that apparently this linkage is apparently far more popular than my official campaign pages. Google results report, essentially, what is there, not what we want to be there. Apparently Sanatorum's Internet presence is so extensive and effective that a random parody get's more links that his actual site.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I don't think a lot of the posters here realize what Dan Savage is doing. As a disclaimer I think Santorum's views on homosexuality are horrible I disagree with a lot of his platform, I actively discourage people from considering him. What Savage is doing goes above and beyond what is reasonable. He's not just bashing him for his narrow minded views he took his named and turned it into a juvenile sex term. That's what goes to far. That's what takes it from political discourse to childishness. Bash Santorum, rip him apart for what he says, he deserves it, but don't go down that immature road. The trivializing of his name does more then just affect him. He has kids who have to deal with it and there are other people with the same name that have to deal with this as well. What if a conservative said I disagree with Obama on X, let's come up with a derogatory sex term for Obama and plaster it all over the web. I would bet most of the people here saying it's something he should deal with would be changing their tune, of course I think a lot of people on Santorum's side would change as well, and that's the problem. We need to hold a level of reasonable treatment whether we like a candidate or not. Treat the opposition the same way we treat our candidate of choice. Hammer them when they say something stupid, hold them to task, fight against their spread of ignorance, but don't descend into childish name calling and what is essentially bullying.
I'd imagine that google has considered tag clouds far more deeply than Fortune's Dan Mitchell, well frankly I'd imagine they prototyped it even.
I'd further expect they vetoed tag clouds on the basis that any tag cloud they might produce can be better implemented by assigning the correct weighting for results.
In fact, you'll recall that google once offered "similar" results, which provided exactly what Dan Mitchell wants, but I'd imagine Google has good reason when they removed it.
In short, Google has already spent millions on the algorithm exploring exactly this algorithm via their similar button, which they ultimately discarded.
Btw, you'll also notice that Rick Santorum's wikipedia page comes up fairly high no matter how hard we try creating additional frothy content top push it down. Isn't this indicative that google has done a very good job identifying the two meanings of Santorum?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
That has always been the way with bullying. Everyone ignores it until the little guy successfully fights back. Then all of a sudden it is a problem that has to be dealt with.
Bullying requires one entity that is more powerful than another using its power to abuse the weaker entity. Santorum, by definition, can't be bullied by gay people, at least not in this context.
Republicans do that shit all the time. They are all about controlling the language of politics, with terms like "entitlements", "welfare queens", "big government", "tax and spend", "family values" (my personal favorite), "illegals", etc. They are all about name-calling and implied or explicit insulting of large swathes of people. Why does that get a pass, but when one of the marginalized fights back, all the sudden it's "bullying" and "childishness"? Isn't it childish of Santorum to say the terrible things he said about gay people? That gets a pass. You seem to want the opposition, which is marginalized and has less power than the establishment, not to get all uppity and try to fight back. They should just respectfully disagree and politely educate people. Of course, they should. How dare they be able to use the same weapons that the establishment gets to use! Look, this isn't some dinnertime argument about whether Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, it's the real world, where these powerful people get up and make laws and statements that *directly affect* the lives of millions of marginalized people, and they get away with it. You ask the marginalized people to use a much smaller arsenal, when they are already at a disadvantage. That is simply unfair and unreasonable and frankly, makes you look kind of like a bigot.
You are exactly the type that promotes bullying. You ignore and endorse bullying over and over, and then when the little guy picks up a tool to fight back with, you declare foul. Santorum attacked Savage. He beat him down. He used his Senatorial position of power to call Savage a dog fucker. That's right. Santorum called Savage a dog fucker. You are all for letting that slide when the cool kid does it. As soon as the victim has enough and picks up a 2x4 to fight back with, suddenly name calling isn't fair anymore.
Your position is one of hypocrisy and is in direct support of bullying.
The thing Santorum is being criticized over relates directly to the derogatory term used by Savage. Santorum doesn't like buttsex, so a definition was chosen which deliberately highlights this area of contention, and is shocking enough to make people pay attention. Fair enough if Dan Savage had a problem with Santorum over some tax returns he filed back in 2002, that wouldn't make sense, but calling out a homophobe in a way that makes homophobes uncomfortable is fucking GENIUS, hence the site being ranked so highly.
We were dragged down the "immature road" the moment this Santorum jackass decided the Bible was fo' reals. He and his hate-filled views are to blame for this, no-one else.
This is all true to an extent (though an incumbent President can loose, but they do have a solid advantage).
But we are also a nation which has a fundamentalist minority that drives the election process of one of our two major parties.
They aren't the Christian Taliban because the Taliban was actually in power, so could do what it wanted. The difference is these people can't. That doesn't mean they don't want to.
These people would be happy to criminalize sex that didn't conform to their view of Correct (all the while preaching of "personal liberty" and "freedom"). They would not stone the woman for being raped, but they'd call her a whore who asked for it because she didn't dress appropriately. They would teach only what is religiously acceptable in schools, including mandating prayer (except for the Jews, who are the only ones who would not have to go). They would go back to segregation at best (if not outright slavery, which was also in the bible).
Fortunately, most Americans are not this vile. Even most Republicans. Unfortunately, this minority has enthusiasm and a will-to-power like no one else, so is always out there on election day, always donating, always working -- so the Republicans have to kowtow to them. There is a certain subset of their beliefs-- fiscal conservatism-- which resonates with a lot of the sane Republicans, and a lot of moderates (and even some Democrats), and so lately they've been trumpeting that and getting a lot of support in the "Tea Party" movement.
But their fundamentalism, the ultimately theocratic Republic they actually want, the "social conservatism" that almost everyone outside of their minority rejects, is never very far away. They just don't say it too loud, and say only the least bigoted things they can get away with. Currently, homophobia is the most socially acceptable form of bigotry, so they're all about that.
That doesn't mean they wouldn't put the blacks in their place if they could. They are just sane enough to keep that talk mostly quiet (but its quite telling when someone brings a mic to rallies...).
Alas. Our parties are engines for elections more then ideological political groupings, and this minority has rooted itself very deeply into the engine of one of the them. That's scary as all hell, but they are a long way to becoming the Christian Taliban. That doesn't mean they don't *wish* they had that power.
Most Christians by far are still fair-minded, decent people who may even disagree with things like homosexuality and even vote against gay marriage -- but they don't long for the day before Lawrence vs Texas was ruled when gay sex was an actual crime. There's a huge difference between Fundamentalist Christianity and mainstream Christianity. Just like there's a huge difference between Fundamentalist Islam and mainstream Islam.
The fundamentalists in the Christian world are just not in actual power. (Thank God. History tells us what happens when they do get in power).
Google's search results are based on how popular a link is under the assumption that if a link is popular, it contains useful content.
Wrong.
The assumption is that if a link is popular, it is more likely to be what a person searching for that term wants to find. Which is a completely separate question from whether the content is "useful". Only a fraction of internet searches are for something "useful", and trying to restrict search responses to what is useful would be contrary to what the user wants.
For a great many people googling "Santorum", the hilarious take-down of his bigotted views is exactly what they wanted to find.
If you just google "Santorum" because you want to know more about the guy, then finding out what the Internet thinks of him is quite relevant.
If you are interested in "useful" information about his campaign or platform, then googling "Santorum campaign" or "Santorum Presidential Candidate" or so on would provide specifically that information.
That's gaming the search engine--that's what it means to game a search engine.
No it isn't. To game the search engine would mean to make a link appear more popular than it really is. If the link is legitimately popular, then that's not gaming the system, even if the link's popularity does not imply whatever else you might assume about the link.
The enemies of Democracy are
Of course by "publicly expressed his personal disapproval of homosexual perversions" you mean wanting to legislate discrimination into our laws and ram intolerance down our throats.
He said a bunch of stuff that offended people, and the offended people didn't just sit idle and take it. Why should he get protection from the consequences of his own speech?
"But this one goes to 11!"
I don't want my 12-year-old daughter to see that definition
Please don't perpetuate your prudery into the next generation.
Please do not dictate how I should raise my children.
Here is what is wrong with the country: The world doesn't revolve around you. You expect the rest of the world to censor things that you don't like. I don't like Rick Santorum. He is a bigoted asshole who isn't fit to lead a Sunday school kindergarten, let alone the most powerful country in the free world.
But you know what? I put up with his stupid bullshit, because that is the agreement we have here in America. He is free to say whatever he wants to. And people are free to mock his hateful views. That is one of the things that makes America a worthwhile country. We have room for everyone and their views. And it seems that a sizable number of people seem to think that Rick Santorum needs to be mocked. Don't like the content? Don't use the Internet. Nobody is forcing you to.
Also, is it that horrible to learn what anal sex is? Some people like putting their penis in other people's anus, oh no! Get over it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!