Google Allegedly Manipulates Search Algorithm
WSJ: How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results
The Wall Street Journal did an investigation on Google’s search algorithm. Google consistently claim that they do not interfere or manipulate their search algorithm. They claim that they have a ” hands-off, the algorithm-knows-best” approach to their search algorithm. For instance, Google says “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” However, the WSJ recently did an investigation on their claims. They concluded that wasn’t completely true. The WSJ claims the following: Google favors big businesses (eBay, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) over smaller ones, Google blacklists sites (outside of those required by law and spam), auto-complete results are curated to not have controversial suggestions (abortion, immigration, politics, etc.), and Google hires low-paid contractors to assess rank quality and adjusts the algorithm accordingly.
The problem here is that Google consistently defends against regulators that they do not have people manipulating with the algorithm. However, nowadays, there are a lot of social pressures for Google to do. For instance, if a search is related to self-harm, people believe Google should have the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has a high ranking search result. This would be a socially accepted manipulating on the organic search results, but this could become a slippery slope where more and more results become manipulated in favor of otherwise. For instance, specific ideologies could be essentially censored by Google. Additionally, Google’s favoring of big business not only drastically negatively impact small businesses that have trouble staying alive in the first place, but also could indicate private financial deals between Google and those deals. For instance, in 2014, eBay’s internet traffic dropped, because Google lowered their page ranking. eBay lobbied and fought their decision. In the end Google improved their page ranking. This shows how much financial pressure Google is under and how that heavily influences their actions which in turn could negatively effect the consumer. Since Google is a business, they do have an incentive to keep users on their website and looking at ads. Knowledge panels and featured snippet are not organic results from the algorithm. They’re on the search page to keep users on the search page which is where ads are displayed.
In our class, we do simple models of page ranking with disregard of social implications. Which a large and respectable search engine like Google, it is their responsibility to keep their organic results and organic as possible, but also hold a standard of quality results. Their algorithm is extremely complicated to keep those high standards, but due to social implications, they must manipulate their results in a way to keep users safe. However, this leads to a very gray line between hiding poor content and censoring thought. Although the math and logic behind page ranking can be easily taught and mastered, it is important to remember that the results dictate what people learn about the world.
One interesting fact that the article noted was that one important signal that they use for page ranking is how much time a user would stay on a page they clicked from Google before going back to the results page. This means if a user stays on a page for a long time, it would boost the page ranking. If they quickly go back to the results page, it would indicate that the page was not relevant to the user so it would decrease the page rank for that page.