[cyrusshepard]

For additional context, Google has "disappeared" 100s of alt-health sites - some bad, but some very good. The site Self Hacked was one, and detailed it here: https://selfhacked.com/blog/google-censorship-of-health-webs...

Some, like Mercola, peddle highly-controversial, near anti-vax content.

But on the other end of the spectrum, Examine.com should be the gold standard. Quality Raters should use it as an example of a site to emmulate. Much higher quality content and informative content than WebMD, IMO.

[Scoundreller]

I’m very happy to hear about mercola being disappearing.

It always rank so highly for so many terms, with complete nutjob advice.

[scottlocklin]

When I google for astaxanthin, the suggestion in the original post, Mercola ranks higher than Examine. Which is bloody tragic, as examine gives legit information.

Someone at Google doesn't like them.

[helij]

Nah, it's not that someone at Google doesn't like them. Mercola is much more 'SEO'ed' than Examine.

[qwerty456127]

IMHO the mere fact a page links to relevant (to its subject) papers in reputable scientific journals should be considered a positive factor in a page rank computation.

[sh1mmer]

Based on this link I wouldn't trust the critical thinking of the content of this site.

> We also know about Google firing James Damore and their ideological echo chamber.

They are already displaying their own bias based regardless of what they think Goolge's bias is.

Damore was fired because he violated California labor law. But the post continues with lines like:

> Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist

...

> But it seems like they decided that there’s no way to algorithmically penalize certain sites — so instead they do it manually, behind the scenes, without telling anyone.

Without any evidence of this what-so-ever.

It's one thing to say "Google are not doing a good job of filtering out mis-information/commercialization without penalizing high quality information from smaller sites/institutions" it's another to say that this is a conspiracy from the "echo chamber bias" of their employees to suppress the speech of people who don't agree with them.

[gamzer]

> Damore was fired because he violated California labor law.

From Wikipedia[1] referring to a Guardian article:

> The company fired Damore for violation of the company's code of conduct.

Which is correct?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

[qwerty456127]

Besides SelfHacked and Examine, what are some other good sites that have been censored?

[cik2e]

Google health related results are straight garbage these days. I noticed the change that dropped examine in the rankings as I frequently search for supplements. At the same time l, Wikipedia also tanked in my queries which is one of the sites that I’m almost always going to have a look at if they have a page on the topic. This seems tied into google’s expansion of their built-in snippets. That would be ok if they linked to the source but it feels like that’s true for only 1 in 20 of these boxes.

I’m actually really frustrated with these changes and would like to start using an alternative. I like startpage but they use google search results so that’s not a viable alternative. Guess I’ll have to check out duck duck go’s Bing powered performance.

[zuuow]

So... Google is openly editorialising their results?

They were already doing it with the carousel (google "american inventors") but if they are doing it with what seemingly is the list of organic results this is very, very troubling.

[yifanl]

I mean, Google always was, even in the PageRank days. Even if you can perfectly recreate the numbers as to why so and so site is ranked higher in your system, its still your system choosing to rank so and so site higher.

[zuuow]

I see your point, but in this case they are blacklisting domains by hand because of their content, which they don't agree with. And that is very bad. Maybe it was my mistake, thinking that their organic search was holy, which no longer is the case it seems.

[basch]

I dont understand this point of view. Googles literal mission since inception was to rank results based on how good google thought they were. Their purpose is to editorialize results through the order they appear. Quality is defined buy googles subjectivity.

Where did the idea of google neutrality come from? Google would be useless if they didnt blacklist what they perceive to be spam.

[luckylion]

> Where did the idea of google neutrality come from?

From Google. They've stated time and time again that it's a magic algorithm and they don't hand-pick winners and losers. And it's a good thing, too, otherwise you're just inviting corruption. Top spots are literally worth millions, and if there's an small army of people that decide who ranks where, they are an obvious target for bribes.

This doesn't look that hand picked, though, more like somebody didn't check what would happen if they rolled out some algo change and targeted way too broad.

[basch]

they pick losers by identifying losers, or who SHOULD be a loser, and then modifying the algorithm to derank them and their tactics. believing they can target spam, without first identifying spam, doesnt make any sense.

in this case, some better sites resemble spam enough that they were also hit. a basic false positive, collateral damage.

[sixothree]

They have certainly peddled the idea that "the algorithm" is what drives page rank.

[yifanl]

See, I don't think there's much difference between writing a deterministic mathematical algorithm to have X site on top, hand-curating a list to have X site on top or writing a magic spell that consults 4 neural nets, a space dragon from Jupiter and the Canadian Prime Minister for weightings that results in X site on top.

That's all implementation details, at the end of the day site X is on top and site Y is not, and Google decided that.

And as mentioned in the sibling thread, that's the value of Google Search. If you disagree that X should be on top, then find an alternative search engine that has some different ranking algorithm, but there's no such thing as an objective search engine.

[stordoff]

My way of looking at it has always been there is no such thing as organic search results (other than that the organisation in question did not have a hand in choosing to put it there). The aim is, presumably, to return quality sites, which always involves a subjective judgement - there is no intrinsic or natural ordering of a set of sites (other people could choose to rank them differently). Whether it's writing an algorithm that results in those sites being at the top (which _must_ be rewritten if returns certain sites otherwise it will be gamed), a more direct choice, or a combination of the two, there doesn't seem to be much difference. The algorithm serves to scale Google's subjective opinion, and they will always boot out sites they don't think are of sufficient quality - it enables them to return sites that they may not have hand-judged, but I've always assumed it is trying to approximate what would be returned if they _did_ check every site.

[ceejayoz]

> They were already doing it with the carousel (google "american inventors")

Maybe.

There's a chance you're seeing an unintentional side-effect of inclusion-oriented school projects getting hordes of people to Google stuff like "African American inventors".

[vxNsr]

Try googling "black inventors" and then "white inventors" it appears they are directly editorializing.

[ceejayoz]

That potentially shows the same phenomenon - kids given a Black History Month assignment to write a paper on a black inventor - and it's fairly clear there's some sort of automated threshold at work.

As evidence, I really doubt this difference is editorial-based:

https://www.google.com/search?q=purple+musicians (shows the carousel)

https://www.google.com/search?q=purple+inventors (no carousel)

[asdf21]

>(google "american inventors")

LOL, pretty funny results there.

Nice job though, Edison.

[nadezhda18]

Many similar websites have suffered from a so-called "Medic" update. Some of them recovered (through fixing their website), some did not. The SEO community is full of such stories, for more than a year I think.

How is it news? :thinking:

[tyingq]

"How is it news?"

Recently piqued interest in antitrust actions for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.