Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by john_moscow 2139 days ago
Because Google has a skin in the game. It is a de-facto monopolist in the online advertisement business, and online search. And it's only the political goodwill that keeps it safe from antitrust scrutiny.

So, it's a kinda wink-wink nudge-nudge pact, that Google politically aligns with the Democrats, and the Democrats turn a blind eye on Google's monopolistic state.

There are plenty of examples, just try searching "Newsom Estate" on Google [0] vs DuckDuckGo [1] and count critical vs. approving articles out of first 10 results.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=newsom+estate

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=newsom+estate
1 comments
rubyn00bie 2139 days ago
Critical vs approving articles is a very weak proxy for antitrust. In this case most of them come from the same source (a conservative media company). It seems to me Google is better about removing useless results, or that which are regurgitated (copied) content, than DDG.

I'm not saying Google at this point doesn't have a monopoly. I am saying that the comment above reads more like a conspiracy theory than truth. Doubly so when you read the sources listed as they're all regurgitating the conspiracy-fodder into one another.

link
john_moscow 2139 days ago
I would agree with it if Google results showed one page from that conservative media company, while dropping others as redundant.

Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap').

So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.

link
joshuamorton 2139 days ago
I'm confused, the two main headlines, one about property tax, and one about being gifted the estate, appear on both engines.

DDG cites redstate for both. Google cites the californiaglobe for the first and rightondaily for the second.

The root of the issue seems to be that RedState isn't considered high quality by Google, which is reasonable since it's about as partisan and reliable as OccupyDeomcrats is.

link