The Impact of Google Searches
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/28/heres-what-we-really-know-about-googles-mysterious-search-engine/
This article gives an overview of Google’s algorithm that determines search results in light of Trump’s claims that the search engine is “rigged” against him. Google claims it does not bias their results based on political ideology, and rather bases results on an algorithm that shows users the most relevant and authoritative search results based on factors that include PageRank, location, and previous computer usage. The Washington Post article describes how companies and media outlets can try to “game” the system, or algorithm, to show their results. One such method is to use key or buzz words to compete for visibility in Google’s search results. However, if Google can bias search results toward newer or fresher content, there is also the potential to censor content. Eric Schidt, the chairman of Alphabet, publicly considered demoting content that is “hateful or extreme” and making it more difficult to find.
This article relates to our class discussion on search engine results and PageRank. PageRank is an algorithm that measures how important or authoritative a website is, based on the number of in-links the page has. In particular, the article discusses how PageRank is an important factor in Google’s search algorithm that assign authority to sources, but how search results are also based on other factors, such as geographic location and previous search history. This goes beyond the ranking algorithm discussed in lecture, and points to the sophistication of search algorithms today. Although the algorithm is extremely useful in determining the relevance and authoritativeness of web pages, there is still the chance that the search engine highly ranks information that users may not believe to be the most relevant, particularly if the user has a certain political ideology, based on PageRank and other factors used by the algorithm. This also poses the issue that the top results could potentially be extreme or not relevant based on the algorithm’s ranking, which demonstrates that search algorithms are not perfectly personalized in their function despite being immensely useful and increasingly accurate.