Search ranking is based on many things, British politics isn’t one (Summary)
The internet has taken over many aspects of our society including politics. It affected the 2016 election with Facebook’s algorithm pushing political rhetorics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Search engines and social media algorithms are responsible for curbing the spread of propaganda and misinformation.
Ronan Harris, the vice president and Managing Director of Google UK and Ireland, wrote a blog post about the relationship between Google search and UK politics. This was a response to politicians (of all affiliations) inquiries about why their articles aren’t ranked higher. They stipulated that there were biases between different political leaning and affiliations.
Harris assures that there are none, through the blog’s title “Search ranking is based on many things, British politics isn’t one” and the actual article. He refers those concerned to read how Google’s search works which I will further discuss in this blog post.
A relevant concept that we learned in lecture is PageRank. PageRank is the value or importance of a website calculated based on the number of incoming links it has. The creator of this concept was a co-founder of Google, Larry Page. The logic is that the more incoming links it has, the more referenced it is and the more reliable and essential it is. This algorithm still is one of the main algorithms that Google uses to sort its results.
Also stated in lecture, there are three main “ingredients” of current search ranking. The first is classical information retrieval. According to Google, this accompanies the headings, pictures, and text content. The second is link analysis which is essentially PageRank. The third and final ingredient is usage data, clicks, and user responses to search results. Google has Search Quality Graders that check pages for trustworthiness, relevance, and expertise. But above all, these search engines reflect the user and so it reacts to how you behave when searching things up.
To conclude his article, Harris references the results of Google and independent studies done about Google searches. They all concluded that Google showed no political bias and prioritized results based on their criteria.
Source:
- https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/united-kingdom/search-ranking-and-politics/
- Networks lectures