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by kevincox
1354 days ago
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> "censorship-free search engine" are expressing an incoherent desire That's not really true. `grep` is a censorship-free search engine. It just reports every matching result. Of course that wouldn't generally be useful over the web, however even with sorting it is possible to be censorship free. You just need to include every matching result eventually. Of course you would find that generating later pages likely also becomes expensive, so you may also add a page limit and ask the user to refine the query instead. Of course then you are back to this problem of it can be very difficult to find every result because you need to guess what words are on the page. But all of this is basically moot because Google doesn't claim to be censorship-free so they have much simpler way of hiding results. |
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Do you honestly think that the people who complain about their favorite website being censored by Google would be satisfied with showing up on page 200*? I wouldn't.
It's only "not censorship" in the same sense that having your emails sent to the Spam folder isn't censorship. The spam folder, and low-scoring SERP results, are so full of items that every reasonable person acknowledges to be crap that getting banished to that area is pretty much equivalent to having someone blast your roadside protest with strobe lights and a sonic cannon. Surrounding you with so much garbage data that nobody can see or hear you any more is only "not censorship" on the dumbest technicality.
* Ignore, for sake of argument, the fact that page 200 won't even load in our universe. I'm imagining a parallel world where Google pretends to be censorship-free because they only push things far down in the results instead of removing them entirely.