Page Rank and Bias Concerns
In September, President Donald Trump accused Google of abusing their dominating “online search” power and showing bias again his administration and republican media by suppressing good stories about his administration and promoting news sources that go against his administration in their search engine. The NY Times Article, “Trump Says Google Is Rigged, Despite Its Denials. What Do We Know About How It Works?” aims to explore how Google’s algorithm actually works in order to show that there is actually little evidence behind Trump’s claims for unfair suppressing/promoting of his administration. The specific component that we have talked about in class is something that Google has made public, and that is the PageRank formula. But this is not the only component that goes into Google’s search results, and that a big reason behind that is that they do not want to allow what is known as “search engine optimization” by companies to rig and gain a higher Page Rank, and therefore visibility. After Trump’s accusations, despite the falsity, Google decided to change some of its algorithm to produce more “authoritative” news results, meaning less “fake news”, where the authoritativeness is determined by 10,000 human raters across the globe to try to minimize bias and flag bias in the algorithm. But despite these efforts, Google still got even more backlash from companies who deemed that it decreased their page’s traffic. Other arguments include that there is still bias that is self-promoting in the Google search and that it may even promote bias against different minority groups as most of the engineers are of a specific race and gender (mostly white, asian males).
This is a very interesting topic in relation to our topic of Page Rank, as it shows the more social side of how the rank of a page may actually be deduced and influenced, as well as what sort of social implications Page Rank, as well as other technology algorithms can have. It also shows that Page Rank alone is not all there is that determines what shows up on a google search, as it is only one of the components. Another interesting point that was mentioned in this article that hasn’t been mentioned in class (but would be a very interesting thing to discuss) is that Page Rank can be manipulated specifically to make a page rank higher for a specific company, which again points to ways in which page ranks can promote bias.