[joshuamorton]

So you would agree that since search is entirely technical, then search results by definition cannot present political bias?

Personally I disagree with that claim, but if you feel that search is a wholly technical problem, I'd expect you to agree.

And that doesn't even deal with the obviously political: laws like the right to be forgotten, or other forms of censorship like removals of content due to copyright. How to engage with those is inherently political.

[malvosenior]

Search should be entirely technical. Sadly it’s currently not.

As a user I want back the documents I’m looking for. If the engine has to adhere to local laws, fine but I want zero editorializing of results.

[joshuamorton]

> As a user I want back the documents I’m looking for

Of course! But converting from a search query to an ordered list of documents requires choices about ranking and filtering to be made.

If I search for "irs" do you include spam phone numbers attempting to steal my identity? There's distinct value to not returning garbage results, but how you do that is going to be called political by some people. And choosing not to do anything is going to be called political by others. There is no non-political choice, despite what you keep implying. Like, given a search query, you can't tell me the objectively correct set of results to return. If you could, you'd be very, very, very rich.

In the absence of that objective, perfect, "true" result, any choice is political in some way or another. Pick an algorithm and I'll happily explain to you a failure mode that is "political".