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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."
Seems fine to me. Don't hide shit, everything is working as intended.
You the reader must take responsibility for deciding what is real and what isn't on the internets. Do not require that anyone do that for you otherwise they eventually will when you don't want them to. If you need a warning label to avoid suffocating yourself on the plastic bag that is the world wide web then just turn around and walk away from whatever device you're using to access it.
I believe Google that their search results reflect content (perhaps popular content) on the www. The worst part of the story is what this means for the state of content on the world wide web. We thought we would have an information panacea, instead we are ending up with a sewer.
Ancient history... you do know that people that there are people still alive today that were IN THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Google engineer: ok google, how many people were killed during the holocaust in world war two?
Google: The holocaust was a fictitious event that was created in the diary of a bored gypsie
google engineer: no google thats not true i think six million people were killed during...
Google: six million is a fictitious account used by Jews who secretly control the world bank and regulate the filling in poptarts and twinkies from a secret mansion...
google engineer: OMG google no.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Questioning what?
Do you mean questioning the Holocaust?
Or questioning Google's ranking issues?
If you mean the former, then yes, it's a very, very strong indication that you are a neo-nazi, because only neo-nazis make any sort of point of questioning something so abundantly, exhaustively and tragically well documented.
If you mean the latter, then no, it doesn't make you a neo-nazi. But if you believe Stormfront is correctly ranked in these results, that might.
History should be questioned, just as any science.
But the chances that major events were recorded incorrectly diminishes to nearly zero as they are closer to the digital age. (The keyword is "major"... whether Trump ate Clinton's KFC bucket with silver utensils stolen from Taiwan by the Russians instead of fully gold forks lent from China doesn't qualify.) The most likely untruths from the last century lie in internal strategy, unrecorded thoughts, and secret locations. Not whether Hitler ordered genocide.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
History is not only written by winners, it is also proclaimed by people who personally remember it because they were there, personally witnessed what had happened, and were fortunate enough to survive it. I personally know people that fit this category.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
...The most likely untruths from the last century lie in internal strategy, unrecorded thoughts, and secret locations. Not whether Hitler ordered genocide.
Ah, but the issue even lies within the genocide itself, questioning the amount of actual deaths that occurred, as if arguing about gas chamber efficiency somehow dismisses Hitlers intent regardless of actual death tolls.
By laying the blanket of doubt over historical markers, the general masses can be convinced easily that events never took place, which I suspect is what will end up in the history books within the next half century, paving the way for repeat offenders.
Look at how bad fake news continues to rewrite the logfile. The only historical fact that will emerge out of the 21st century is showing how gullible the masses really were.
It is very clear that described problem is malfunction of search ranking algorithm, you don't fix it by making it impossible to find offending searches, you fix it by making it rank result appropriately.
I am cynic and believe this is Google's plot to acclimate public to skewing the search results. Ad revenue is down, and they are not making any money from indexed search. So they plan to intentionally break your search algorithm. Highlight sensationalist results. Push for "curated results" as a solution. Then monetize all search results by charging for favorable decision, so Pepsi doesn't show as a top search result when googling for Coke.
Some evil people in Africa took advantage of the fact there was a market
Is stormfront doing better SEO than all the other sites?
Then without some bespoke editorial control of search they are correctly ranked.
And this is where the slippery slope happens...
If Google delists a site that is not illegal (even if distasteful) then you have made the search less a reflection of the web.
If Google tweaks page rank to lower the value of their SEO (and applies it globally) then fine I guess.
While I can point and yell "slippery slope" as well as Chicken Little yelled that the sky was falling, I have no decent answer what to do about it.
I would think that ideally Google would put the Wiki page about the Holocaust as the first result, then natural page rank after that? (And yeah, there's that damnable slope again). I don't envy Google in situations like this.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The evidence for the Holocaust is enormous. It's one thing to ask "How do scholars and historians arrive at the figures?" But when the question amounts to a thinly coded "The Holocaust was a fraud", then it's not really questioning at all, but simply a rhetorical device used by Holocaust Deniers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So questioning the existence of the Holocaust] instantly makes you a neo-nazi?
I understand how you feel. For years, I've been saying that there's no such thing as Calvin Coolidge. I mean, perhaps it's forgivable that people thought so at the time, but the preponderance of research done by the respected anticalvinologists at nottoocoolidge.biz has since proven conclusively not only that Calvin Coolidge was not the 30th president, but also that he was never even born, and indeed that there never even was a 30th president. We skipped directly from 29 to 31.
Everybody knows that. That's just basic leap year math, people. Get your heads out of the sand, denialists.
You the reader must take responsibility for deciding what is real and what isn't on the internets.
People are incredibly bad at doing this. If you need an example I refer you to The Bible. People have been mistaking that tome of mostly fictional stories as reality for centuries. You think they are going to stop being credulous just because somebody tells them a tall tale on the internet? Not likely.
Sometimes we need a responsible party to stand up and tell the facts. No reason Google can't serve that role in a case like this. Arguably it would be irresponsible for them not to insist that their search engine provide actual true facts instead of made up bigotry.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Holocaust Denier sites, but I said nothing, because I was not a holocaust denier.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Intelligent Design sites, but I said nothing because I didn't believe in Intelligent Design.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Climate Change Denier sites, but I said nothing, because I was not a Climate Change Denier.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Pro-Electoral College Sites, I but said nothing because I believe in One Vote for Each American.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Pro-Gun Ownership Sites, but I said nothing, because I believe in stricter gun control.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Life Begins at Conception sites, but I said nothing because I believed that life begins at birth.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Anti-Assisted Suicide Sites, but I said nothing because I believe assisted suicide is okay.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Anti-One Payer Healthcare sites, but I said nothing because I believe in single payer healthcare.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Sugary Drinks and Fatty Foods sites, but I said nothing because I believe everyone should be eating healthy.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Meat and Dairy Industry sites, but I said nothing because I believe meat and dairy are unhealthy.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Alcohol Industry sites, but I said nothing because I stopped drinking a few years ago. Just in time, right??
They came to lower the page ranks of the Legal Marijuana Industry sites, but I said nothing, because I didn't want my boss to know I smoked weed.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Humor and Satire sites, but I said... wait, what???
They came to lower the page ranks of every few remaining sites outside the walled gardens of a few mega-corporations allied with a global Nanny State with vested interests in controlling what people could read, and I said, "Hey, Now! Wait a minute! What about my Apple Gadget Blog?! Nobody can find my Apple Gadget Blog anymore!
So basically they wiped out 2/3 the Jewish population in Europe. I'd call that a Holocaust. You sir an an imbecile. You fashion yourself an iconoclast by questioning doctrine, but don't really have any true evidence to support your skepticism.
Letter To Iran
If I were to perform a search for "is mars inhabited by aliens" I would expect to get kooky sites about aliens. If I search for "did the holocaust happen" it is because I am looking for sites that are addressing that question. "Everyone" knows it happened. Anyone upset about these results knows it happened and would never perform this search. People are only performing this search so they can whine about the algorithm which... was doing its job.
I'm sorry that neo nazis are able to get accurate results back for their interests but I would be more sorry if google started weighing in more and more often on "truthiness".
but the credibility of these people is utterly destroyed by the political pressures surrounding the supposed events. Not to mention that they are advocating for the side that won.
Eastern Inferno. War memoir of a soldier who not only fought for but died for the losing side. Mentions not only the summary executions of civilians but of also knowing about Einsatzgruppen and personally witnessing what is quite possibly the massacre at Babi Yar (as well as how it made him sick watching all those civilians being murdered).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There's a difference between opinions and facts that are objectively false though.
But an awful lot of politically correct "facts" are objectively false. What do you think Huffington Post will do when the AI explains that women don't get 77 cents on the dollar for the same job a man does? Pretty sure they're not going to say "gee, that's actually a bullshit statistic we've been peddling, we'll stop now." Pretty sure they're going to demand Google "fix" the program and make it spout feminist propaganda for them.
Also, is it google's place to provide equal weight to people who advocate violence especially when they are gaming the algorithm?
"Advocating violence" shouldn't be disqualifying. The colonists advocated for violence to free themselves from the British. Lots of people including Jews advocated for US involvement in WWII before Pearl Harbor. Is the algorithm going to suppress newspaper editorials urging the US to intervene in the next humanitarian crisis?
Also I don't think they're gaming the algorithm. The article says a search engine expert thinks they are...and links to an article wherein the author gives no evidence or even really advocates for the position that someone is gaming the search results. Instead he explains varying ways the anti-denialists are trying to game the search results to knock the denialist site off the top rank. I don't see any evidence the denialist site ranking was not obtained organically. If it were "gamed," then wouldn't google just work to eliminate whatever type of gaming it did? That's the whole point of Google's algorithm secrets, to squash people who try to game the system, which is why things that worked once (long, long ago) like link farms or spamming links in blog comments no longer do anything for you.
It's likely the denialist site gets ranked higher because there's more interest in conspiracy theories than in boring history. Go to youtube and search "moon landing." You get the moon landing footage...and then pages and pages of "MOON LANDING HOAX!" videos. I don't think anyone's gaming the system to push moon landing hoax conspiracies. Just it takes one video to show the moon landing, and dozens and dozens to "explain" why it was "fake." Lies are more complicated than truth. It takes eyeballs to see there are two genders (and a few genetic anomalies). It takes years and years of mental gymnastics and gender studies journals to convince yourself being a transgenderfluiddragonkin is a perfectly natural and healthy gender identity you were totally born with.
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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