this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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The 'bias machine': Undecided voters in the US who turn to Google may see dramatically different views of the world – even when they're asking the exact same question (www.bbc.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by tardigrada@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Some experts say Google is just parroting your own beliefs right back to you. It may be worsening your own biases and deepening societal divides along the way.

[...]

"Google's whole mission is to give people the information that they want, but sometimes the information that people think they want isn't actually the most useful," says Sarah Presch, digital marketing director at Dragon Metrics, a platform that helps companies tune their websites for better recognition from Google using methods known as "search engine optimisation" or SEO.

[...]

"> What Google has done is they've pulled bits out of the text based on what people are searching for and fed them what they want to read" – Sarah Presch

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[–] lily33@lemm.ee 30 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Type in "Is Kamala Harris a good Democratic candidate

...and any good search engine will find results containing keywords such as "Kamala Harris", "Democratic", "candidate", and "good".

[...] you might ask if she's a "bad" Democratic candidate instead

In that case, of course the search engine will find results containing keywords such as "Kamala Harris", "Democratic", "candidate", and "bad".

So the whole premise that, "Fundamentally, that's an identical question" is just bullshit when it comes to searching. Obviously, when you put in the keyword "good", you'll find articles containing "good", and if you put in the keyword "bad", you'll find articles containing "bad" instead.

Google will find things that match the keywords that you put in. So does DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Yahoo, whatever. That is what a good search engine is supposed to do.

I can assure you, when search engines stop doing that, and instead try to give "balanced" results, according to whatever opaque criteria for "balanced" their company comes up with, that will be the real problem.

I don't like Google, and only use google when other search engines fail. But this article is BS.

[–] crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah but other than the search results there's also a big AI summary on the top, which I'm more concerned about

[–] halm@leminal.space 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah. Be very, very afraid of people using search engines or "AI" as some Magic Eightball oracle to give them answers.