Google to ruin their algorithm even further

[Darth Executor]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ght-fake-news/

Google has promised to alter its search results to punish websites promoting extreme views, conspiracy theories and fake news.

Somehow I doubt that includes the incompetent reporting and outright lies of garbage news sources like CNN.

The internet giant said it would demote “low-quality” websites and let users report offensive results after criticism that neo-Nazi groups and hoaxers were “gaming” the company’s search engine.

Online marketers have been gaming Google for years. Every attempt they made to "fix" this has made searches worse and worse for me. By far the worst "innovation" has been for google to shove garbage manstream news stories in my face when I'm looking for older, progressive-critical stuff that were about an entirely different issue or event.

Like everything else that gets infested by SJWs google's productivity will grind to a halt as the zombie-host rededicates all its resources to spew progressive bile into the atmosphere. What made google a great search engine originally was the fact that it seemed to, like magic, quickly find you exactly what you were looking for. I think Google is dangerously close to becoming what Yahoo/altavista were before there was a google. The only thing they haven't screwed up is the minimalism, though even that has been getting dangerously close to bloat as they try to pimp all their online services on their web page.

[Sparko]

so basically liberals can force conservative news down in the rankings just by reporting it as "fake"

Or heck, any news agency can do that with their competitors to make them rank lower than themselves. I can see a flood of bots trolling google now, reporting "fake" news sites.

[Mountain Man]

I suspect their "algorithm" is going to be like the one Facebook uses which effectively blacklists conservative sources and gives liberal sites a free pass irrespective of the merits of their actual content. There's a reason I stopped using Google as a search engine -- I hate how a search for anything slightly political or controversial gives you a wall of biased, liberal sources on the first page -- although I still use Google's other services like email, calendar, and Android. I've actually had my Gmail account since it was in beta.

[Cow Poke]

Al Gor is a white dude - he has no rithm!

[Darth Executor]

I suspect their "algorithm" is going to be like the one Facebook uses which effectively blacklists conservative sources and gives liberal sites a free pass irrespective of the merits of their actual content. There's a reason I stopped using Google as a search engine -- I hate how a search for anything slightly political or controversial gives you a wall of biased, liberal sources on the first page -- although I still use Google's other services like email, calendar, and Android. I've actually had my Gmail account since it was in beta.

My problem is that I don't know of a less bloated search engine that's even remotely good. Bing seems to have gotten slightly better from inception (I remember a huge parade of image links all over it, now they're just scrolling on the bottom) but still too bloated for my taste.

[Mountain Man]

I've been using DuckDuckGo. It's essentially what Google used to be.

[Teallaura]

I like Duck Duck Go.

[Starlight]

Google has promised to alter its search results to punish websites promoting extreme views, conspiracy theories and fake news.

Google's done similar idiotic things in the last month regarding its Youtube algorithms for determining whether to put ads on a video. Someone wrote a hit piece for a couple of newspapers where they managed to dig up a single alleged instance of an ad being played on youtube in front of a video on some neo-nazi channel with almost no views, and the big advertisers panicked and irrationally pulled all their ads off Youtube. So Google panicked and said "we'll turn our bad-stuff detection algorithms up to super-ultra-paranoid to make sure they filter out every last video that might even remotely have any bad stuff on it (and mistakenly filter out 1000 times as many okay videos in the process) so that no ad ever, ever, plays on any neo-nazi videos or even on anyone who ever mentions the words 'race' or 'politics' or 'Israel' or who says a swear-word, and basically anyone whose channel isn't limited to videos of fluffy bunnies will get no ads at all and thus no revenue for their videos.

So all Youtube channels covering news and politics and commentating on it (my own preferred way to get news) had their revenue reduced to zero overnight. Naturally this has been a gigantic nightmare for independent news outlets that depend on Youtube as their revenue source... which was probably the goal of the people writing hit-job piece in the mainstream newspapers to begin with.

[Mountain Man]

So all Youtube channels covering news and politics and commentating on it (my own preferred way to get news) ...

That explains a whole lot.

[Darth Executor]

That explains a whole lot.

I don't watch youtube much because I prefer text but I don't really see the problem with that, it's a lot better than watching TV.

[Mountain Man]

I don't watch youtube much because I prefer text but I don't really see the problem with that, it's a lot better than watching TV.

There are all sorts of nutjobs on YouTube commenting on the news, and judging by his posts, he's found most of them.