Google is RIGGED! – PageRank
The president of the United States is known for going after what he calls the “Fake News Media”, which supposedly includes Google’s PageRank algorithm. Is the president right that the Google searches are biased? Absolutely. And that is the point of PageRank. We discussed in lecture that the task search engines like Google are trying to address involve giving results that are most useful and relevant to the user. For example, if we type in ‘Cornell’, this blog is probably not the first thing that most users want to see. They would more likely want to see the cornell website first (cornell.edu). Hence, Google’s search function is supposed to be biased – against my blog post in this case.
In the United States, there is a principle called ‘Freedom of the press’, which means that communication and expression through various media should be considered a right to be exercised freely of the government. Given this right, it is no wonder that various publications express various political views, which at times disagree with the current administration. Google’s algorithm is not biased in the sense of it’s political affiliation, but instead it weighs hubs and authorities more. From lecture we know that the hubs point to various authorities. The more hubs that point to a specific authority, the more credible that authority is seen to be, and thus it will rank higher. Perhaps many of the media critical of the president have very high authority scores, but this does not suggest a political bias in PageRank.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/trump-says-google-search-results-are-rigged-hes-not-wrong.html