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."

Comments

Re:Seems fine

[beelsebob]

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.

truthy results vs truthful results

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:truthy results vs truthful results

[Solandri]

This is the problem I've had with governments putting pressure on Google (and Facebook) to "remove" hate speech. Those two entities do not promote hate speech - they merely reflect what hate speech is already present in society. Forcing them to remove (hide) it is literally shooting the messenger. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem - the people who believe in and are spreading the hate speech are still out there and still spreading it. The garbage is still out there same as before; all you've done is ordered the carpenter to move your window so you can't see it from your living room anymore.

Fixing this requires educating the population, teaching them history, exposing them to different people so they realize that others are not that different from themselves. But that requires work and effort. It seems governments would rather take the easy way out and try to cover up the problem, rather than actually fix it. Even if you think hate speech doesn't deserve free speech rights, the solution is to go after the websites and individuals promoting hate speech. Knock them off the web or suspend their accounts. Then they'll disappear from the Google results naturally. No need to mess with the ranking algorithms.

Re:oh, great

[hey!]

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.