[horseLOGIC]

The headline is of course wrong, they didn't remove it fully, they removed it from one paragraph.

More interestingly, they removed another sentence from that paragraph:

"[...] providing our users unbiased access to information."

In other words, Google wants to crack down on wrongthink without violating their own code of conduct.

[userbinator]

Or more mundanely, wants to "personalise" search results and de-emphasise more obscure (but very valuable to the right people) information.

It used to be that Google would show you lots of very diverse, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising results which would mean learning new things became almost "accidentally" easy. Now it seems more interested in finding things people already (mostly) knew about.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840

[Jyaif]

I damn sure want some of my search results to be biased, e.g. when searching for "string".

That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.

[horseLOGIC]

Do you, really? When do you ever search for just "string"? You're going to add some context, like "split string C++".

Now maybe you'll say Google should know you're programming in C++ all the time, so having learned that, Google should be able to infer that when you type in "split string", the results should all be for C++.

Except then somehow Javascript comes into your requirements and now you need to retrain your Google to give weight to that.

I'd much rather be able to use the Google, not my Google, so that I get more predictable results. It's already annoying that I can't tell people to google something and be sure whatever I'm talking about is in the top ten results of their Google.

> That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.

Nothing about that sentence was stupid and it's frightening that you don't seem to understand the ideal of being "unbiased" (as in "unbiased reporting"). We're going to be heading in the direction where's there's "liberal" and "conservative" search engines, causing even more polarization of our collective world views.

[fermienrico]

Gizmodo is doing this for clicks - intentionally.