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Google Responds On Skewed Holocaust Search Results (bbc.com)
Google says it is "thinking deeply" about ways to improve search, after criticism over how some results -- including ones discussing the Holocaust -- were ranked. From a report on BBC: Searching for "did the Holocaust happen?" returned a top result that claimed it did not, as Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr reported. Now, the ranking has changed for US users. The page -- from white supremacist site Stormfront -- remains top in the UK. "This is a really challenging problem, and something we're thinking deeply about in terms of how we can do a better job," said a Google spokesman. "Search is a reflection of the content that exists on the web. The fact that hate sites may appear in search results in no way means that Google endorses these views."
The issue isn't with showing the result, it's with the ordering of the results. You would hope that more trustworthy results are ordered above less trustworthy ones.
Google's stated goal has always been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Which in the past has always meant returning the results that people were looking for. They now face the problem of truthiness which has disproven the fundamental theory behind Google, that feedback loops from users selecting links will correctly identify which information should be returned. In short, Google has to figure out how to counter the self-delusion of the internet and it's users. It's no wonder they are thinking about it deeply because they are going to need create something like IBM's WATSON to sort reality from delusion.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Due to echo chambers and Dunning-Krueger, it's easily possible for this scheme to automatically result in such sites becoming highly ranked as a bunch of ignorant neo-Nazi shitheels jerk one another off in a sticky downward spiral of arrogance and hate.
This is true, but I think it understates the problem.
It's not just that fringe viewpoints are likely to generate lots of interlinked content, it's that they generate more content, period. Of all of the articles on the web that directly address the question "Did the Holocaust happen?" what percentage of them take the affirmative position? And how widely-linked are they? It's very low, because on this question the world is basically divided into two camps, one which knows that it did and doesn't see any need to argue the case, and one that believes it didn't and is highly motivated to prove that position precisely because it is not accepted by the vast majority. Although the former camp is dramatically larger, the latter is dramatically more prolific regarding the question. The more extreme the fringe viewpoint the more likely this is to happen, as long as there's a community dedicated to churning out support for it.
Of course, when you widen the scope to include all content that references the Holocaust, the mainstream view is overwhelmingly represented... but hardly any of that content addresses this specific question.
Ideally, search ranking on questions like this should consider the fact that the overwhelming content of articles that reference the topic assume the mainstream view, and then ranks content that takes the mainstream view over content that takes the fringe view, even though the mainstream view content may not seem to address the question directly. For example, in this case it would be good to give the top slot to the web site of one of the excellent Holocaust museums, which clearly provide a tremendous amount of evidence to support the reality of the event. The problem is that doing this in the general case almost requires that the search engine actually understand the question and the mainstream and fringe theories, and search engines simply aren't yet that smart.
This is an easy problem for a human, but a hard one for current AI. Because Google et al don't want to try to hand-tune responses to lots of questions, they want to find ways to get the AI to give the right answer. The average user of a search engine, though, doesn't understand that their question falls into a sort of "search uncanny valley" where the AI is smart enough to give highly on-topic responses, but not smart enough to understand that those responses are from crackpots. Instead they just see that "Google says the Holocaust didn't happen!".
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It's not just that fringe viewpoints are likely to generate lots of interlinked content, it's that they generate more content, period.
My four year old son and I were talking about the moon, and he was shocked to learn people had been there. I wanted to show him the moon landing, so I went to youtube. But when you search "moon landing" you get the official footage and then pages and pages of "MOON LANDING HOAX" results. If you just went by the volume of material one would conclude the moon landing must be faked.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
As a boomer I've met both Holocaust survivors (the grandparents of friends) and Germans who weren't Nazis, but supported the regime as patriotic citizens. I've even seen sat at the dinner table with Jews and Germans who lived through the era as they discussed their families' experiences. There was no agenda other than to make sense of an almost unimaginable catastrophe.
And what you don't understand, because you've probably never paid attention to the testimony, much less witnessed it, is how personal that catastrophe was. The Holocaust wasn't some political abstraction, it was having everything your family worked for and stood for stolen; it was having your parents and siblings ripped away; it was experiencing personal suffering, deprivation, and exploitation.
At the hands of smug, self-righteous bureaucrats who had the gall to write "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the gates of the labor camps.
And on the flip side for ordinary Germans it was going along because patriotic gullibility was easy. Hoping for the best was a the path of least resistance. It was also a path to a national catastrophe:
Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her. -- Bertolt Brecht
What we are losing is the personal memory of the banality of evil, of how ordinary people can enable and empower the depraved. We flatter ourselves we are better than those Germans who maybe didn't vote for the Nazis, but allowed themselves to be swept up by the vicious, inane bigotries of Nazi propaganda. We assume that we are smarter. Or at the very least nicer people.
We're not. We're not better, and I can tell you from personal experience we aren't nicer or smarter than the Germans who let the Nazis shove their nation's hand into the meat grinder of WW2. The people who went along were pleasant, cultured, educated people who read the papers and loved their families and were good to their neighbors, but in the end let the hope that Nazis weren't really that bad turn them into suckers.
We aren't better or wiser than them. But what we should be is forewarned. And there people who'd prefer we weren't.
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