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by daveFNbuck 2705 days ago
If continuing to spread the falsehood after multiple corrections doesn't attach intent, what could Google possibly do for you to think they were lying in a search result?
1 comments

Google isn't a single person saying sentences who can immediately change what he says in his next sentence. Changing Google results is not trivial, the search engine has lots of quirks and is a complex code. If you ask Google to change something, you need to submit a ticket, which is in line with thousands of other tickets. That ticket needs to get evaluated by a customer support team, which sends it to another team, which sends it to another team. Google is a gargantuan entity and things take time. It is very easy to see how this lack of change can arise from something other than malicious intent. I highly doubt Google is intentionally trying to taint this one man's reputation.

TLDR: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

So there is no possible situation in which you would say Google was lying in a search result?
Any possible situation? Of course there is. This one? Highly unlikely. There's no way Google cares enough about this guy to lie about him. Apparently, they don't even care enough about him to fix the error in their search result. Poor guy, he's in the "famous but not famous enough" valley.
But the question that's been asked 3 times now in this thread is what it would take for Google to be considered lying. If I don't establish that, how can we discuss whether this qualifies?
I feel like we're beating a dead horse at this point. If someone at Google intentionally modified the result output to say X where X is false, then that would be considered lying.
Would you consider it lying if someone at Google reviewed his request, understood it to be true, and then did not change the incorrect information?