[dragonwriter]

It's only disturbing if you reject the premise of the question in advance—that the concern is addressing inaccurate factual information. Connecting users with good information is literally the function on which Google wad founded, and applying AI to that mission has been a Google vision from very early on.

It would be weird and worrying if Google selectively choose not to do that with information that might have political salience.

[Digory]

Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd. If not the world, at least of American computer users. That’s some signal about invariably qualitative judgments on facts.

“Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank, whether or not you agree with the subjective assessments about the importance of Hillary’s emails. Silently substituting the pagerank of New York or the subjective judgment of a room of Googlers undercuts the signal. If you give me the option to filter by DC or LA pagerank, that’s fine. But there should always be some free, unfiltered pagerank available.

[wyldfire]

> Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd.

Actually, I don't think that's the case. Google has for a very long time considered a web site's reputation as part of a page's weight among search results.

IMO Google wasn't a primary transmission medium for fake news -- not like Facebook et al. So if you got to a fake news article from Google.com, you probably went looking for it.

To your point -- if you go searching for unique terms from the fake news articles, it seems reasonable/appropriate to show you the fake news websites from whence they came. It would be odd for Google to omit those sources that are likely the best/primary source of those terms. It might be reasonable to highlight the search results as coming from a source known to publish falsehoods. Like the "This site may harm your computer" warnings, it could be a clear flag for people to be skeptical. Unfortunately, it seems like they would be inheriting a morass of subjective or difficult to maintain criteria.

[dragonwriter]

> Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd

No, it's never been that; it's always been that it's algorithmically selected to promote the best information, whether the best answer to your question or, more recently through some of their mechanism, the information most likely to be useful in the absence of a specific request, considering a wide variety of general, (and, for very many years, location-based, and personalized) indicators of quality and likely utility. “Unfiltered” is exactly the opposite of what has always been Google's value proposition.

> “Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank

PageRank is the oldest and most primitive of the algorithms used in Google's rankings.

> Silently substituting the pagerank of New York or the subjective judgment of a room of Googlers undercuts the signal.

Neither of those things is suggested in the response given to the question.

> But there should always be some free, unfiltered pagerank available.

Are you seriously suggesting that Google is obligated to offer a version of its search engine using only its 1998 link ranking algorithm with none of the additional filtering and ordering criteria that have been developed I the last 20 years?

[Digory]

> it's always been that it's algorithmically selected to promote the best information

“Best” being the word doing the work here. There’s been some expectation that Google gives you “best” based on the wisdom of a very large, diverse group. The more it diverges from that, the more it risks losing trust as an impartial assistant.

>Are you seriously suggesting (pagerank)?

I might pick a more precise example after Google tells me the algorithm. I’m using pagerank as shorthand for the early period in which Google assessed “best” mainly through the wisdom of groups. It’s impossible to erase all subjectivity, and it’s never been perfectly objective, but that doesn’t make the goal less important. I wouldn’t object to later versions that address SEO gamesmanship, gives me local mobile results, etc.

Google’s problem is that the video shows people who most Americans would not trust to tell them what’s best, or how to find what’s best. People might trust Google to find out what most people say is best. Google risks making their judgment the product; but what got them this far was a sense they are skilled in reporting back something about the world.

[ehsankia]

Right, anyone who finds this offensive is implicitly agreeing that removing unfactual results would skew the results to be politically biased.

[LanceH]

What's offensive is that if their candidate wins, they don't raise that question.

[lern_too_spel]

If the candidate who isn't spreading fake news wins, then fake news isn't a big deal. There's nothing offensive about that.

[axlprose]

So it's wrong to be offended at the possibility of mass-scale censorship just as a matter of principle?

Search results are always going to be biased the same way that any media is always going to be biased. Have the regimes of the 20th century not taught us that it's naive to think we can objectively correct for that without opening the possibility for significantly worse repercussions?

[dragonwriter]

> So it's wrong to be offended at the possibility of mass-scale censorship just as a matter of principle?

Mass-scale censorship other than that already implicit in algorithmic link ranking wasn't suggested, improving the quality of the algorithms already in use and intended to provide he best information (which false propaganda is emphatically not) was suggested.