[amluto]

Forget porn. I don’t want my search engine to return specifically the results that one company thinks it should. Look at Google right now — the results are, frankly, crap.

A search engine that only returns results politically aligned with its creator is a bad search engine, IMO, even for users who generally share political views with the creator.

[8note]

Political affiliation is a weird description of SEO spam. The biggest problems with Google is that they're popular, and everyone will do whatever they can to get a cheap website to the top of the search results

[klabb3]

All major tech companies participate in “regulation” of legal speech, both implicit and explicit means. This includes biases in ranking and classification algorithms, formal institutions like Trusted News Initiative, and sometimes direct backchannel requests by governments. None of these are transparent or elected to do that. SEO spam is mostly orthogonal to the issue of hidden biases, which are what people are concerned about.

[amluto]

I don’t think it’s quite orthogonal.

There are hidden biases in the sense that the provider (Google, etc) would probably prefer that its users don’t think about the bias. These can be political (e.g. much of what you’ve mentioned), but they can also be economic. For example, Google has a strong incentive to direct its search users to view paid impressions of ads served by Google. As an extension of this, Google might not want to directly favor results monetized by Google, but they could (and, I assume, do) favor the kinds of results monetized by Google. This, of course, includes the kinds of sites that might get people to buy things.

So I suspect that a lot of what we perceive as spam is related to a bias for the kinds of sites that are monetized in a way that benefits Google. And sites that generate viewing patterns that result in many ad impressions.

Of course, spam is also a thing from a spamminess perspective. But Google’s incentive to reduce spam is, as far as I can tell, primarily an incentive to make its users think that Google Search is useful. Which is also a bias!

[klabb3]

For sure. It’s not like market conditions aren’t contributing to bias, of course they are! Monopolies always suffer from perverse incentives, and Google is no exception.

OpenAI is predictably pushing the narrative that they should police themselves, and they need to keep the sauce secret for everyone’s safety. New tech comes with challenges, but the opaque moderation and corporate self-policing is more dangerous than the tech itself, imo.

[redstonefreedom]

To clarify for conversation, did you replace SEO spam as a conversational shorthand, or because you actually thought that OP meant that when he said “frankly the results are bad”?

Put another way, were you just trying to say “I don’t think politics is the main issue of google’s crappy search results, I think it’s the likes of differencebetweendotcom”?

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It's unclear to me how LLMs are gonna solve this though. LLMs are just as biased, in much harder to detect ways. The bias is now hiding in the training data. And do you really think a company like Microsoft won't manipulate results to serve their own goals?

[redstonefreedom]

To clarify for conversation, did you mean to say that google’s results-crap-ness is mostly to do with political stuff, or was the next sentence on political alignment just an unrelated additional point?