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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023
  • lily33@lemm.eetoTechnology@beehaw.org•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
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    3 days ago

    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.