| > 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? |
“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.