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Is Google Our Puppet Master?
Incensed to have been taken hostage by Google’s 2015, “The Year in Search” during the previews for my first visit to the movies in years, I’m on a tear and a rant. I felt certain the ad was filled with items from Google’s progressive agenda — but unrepresentative of the most searched items.
I did an experiment with Google searches. I noticed the mind-reading autofill feature seemed inconsistent with the premise of the ad. Here are some ad phrases, followed by the Google autofill:
How can I help…
*Syrian refugees
*you in spanish
*you
*you to say goodbye
Google 1. Me 0.
Why can’t women be…
*priests
Army Rangers not on the list.
Google 1. Me 1.
What does the Confederate Flag
*stand for
*symbolize
*look like
*mean today
Google 2. Me 1.
How can we overcome
*sin
*temptation
*discrimination
*obesity
*racism
Discrimination is fed by prejudice, but #3 on the autofill. Why did Google leave sin and temptation out of the ad? I win.
Google 2. Me 2.
Why was there a Cuban
*revolution
*embargo
*missile crisis
Google 3. Me 2. (But this query is a sad commentary on a supposedly educated citizenry.)
What color is the
*dress
*milky way
*sun
*sky
*universe
I never knew what color that dress was. I helped feed that autofill.
Google 4. Me 2.
“How can the world find” brings no relevant autofills.
“How can the world find peace.” Zero.
Google 4. Me 4.
But the query, “How can I find” yields
*someone in the world
*my twin in the world
*my place in the world.
We are doomed.
The query, “Are you born…”
*gay
*with autism
*with freckles
*with lupus
Zero autofills for transgender.
Google 4. Me 5.
How can we rebuild…
*ozone
*trust
*our economy
*America.
A phenomenal zero autofills for rebuilding Nepal.
Google 4. Me 6.
I challenge the Ricochetti to search Google daily for “Will we ever defeat,” waiting to see if that query ever gets an autofill of “the progressives.” Anyone care to wager?
If I enter that query, the auto fill is:
*ISIS
*death
*cancer
Enter the entire query, “Will we ever defeat the Progressives?“ (Hat Tip to Arahant.)
#1 hit on google for that question.
#2 hit
#3 hit
Ricochetti unite, and carry the torch against Progressivism!
And someone help me find a different search engine.
Published in General, Science & Technology
?????
What I have found when I try to use other search engines is that whatever search engine I’m using first pulls up the Google results. In other words, I get nearly the same results. I spent many hours trying to find an alternative search engine, but I gave up because I might as well use Google.
Ummm, no. Doing a good job with search is an incredibly hard job, given the enormous scale and complexity implied by the size and variety of the Web, plus the number of users. Google has gotten very good at it by persistence over time. It’s the core of their enterprise value and an enormous barrier to new entrants.
Consider the one example given above: doing a better job querying Microsoft’s technical documentation than its own search product (Bing). That didn’t happen accidentally. Someone decided that having that task done well was worth the time of an engineer to write specific rules for MSFT tech docs. And that decision was probably correct, given Google’s market dominance.
On the other hand, we have Ricochet 2.0. Need I say more?
My solution is to use duckduckgo for routine searches, and then jump to Google only for ones where I’m having trouble or that I know in advance will be tough. But I have Bing as my start page, since it has pretty pictures. :)
That makes it pretty tough for any one entity to get a full picture on my interests. And if I’m feeling paranoid, I can use Tor as well.
Agreed.
I can run a better search with Google on the Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, and Ricochet–and most recently Netflix–than I can with the search engines these companies offer.
I did a little experiment of my own. I searched duckduck, bing, and google for “hillary can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized small business” and got pretty much the same results from each of the three search engines.
I did a 2nd search, for “hillary links talk radio abortion bombings oklahoma” hoping to find one of her McCarthyite-like quotes from the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but I got much more useful and relevant results from duckduck and bing than from google.
If you really want the broadstream media and social media to focus on this we need to have one of the Koch Brothers made CEO of Google. Then they will patiently and unendingly explain the threat to the public.
I preferred the older generation of business oligarchs who just wanted to make money and didn’t care what I did or thought.
Why can’t we just have fun with them? Everyone start running these searches repeatedly: “When did Eric Schmidt undergo sex reassignment?” “Is it easier to kick Larry’s or Sergey’s a**?” “Don’t all Google phones come with Chinese spyware?” “How can I hijack the party jet?” “Where is the nearest Google street view car right now and does it have run-flat tires?” “How do I access the loading docks at Google HQ?”
I somehow missed your excellent post. I couldn’t agree more with your concerns. This should be publicized and looked into!
“Does Google support oppression in China?”
Also, “Does the computer program that picks google news have a leftwing bias?”
Annegeles above mentioned Startpage which I use as my daily search engine. Although it’s “enhanced by Google” (I’m not sure I understand what that means), and I despise Google, it has two notable perks that I do like:
I’m running these as I read them. This is really a trip.
#41, Mike and Hydrogia, I left FB on 11/14/15 after my posts questioning the received wisdom on Paris and immigration just disappeared. I have no doubt that FB is co-opted into the authoritarian cause and so I see no need to keep exposing myself there.
“How many Yetis are visible on Google Earth?” “Can I Google this in Beijing?” “Does everyone feel this stupid when they say ‘Alphabet, Inc.’?” “How is this business all that different than a billboard?” “What do I do when my self driving car develops road rage?” “Alta Vista.”
Google Careers: Beijing
This is almost exactly what I do. Never pay much attention to pretty pictures.
As mentioned above, Google works best for me for all those annoying and obscure Microsoft error messages. It saves me loads of time. On the other hand, I rarely waste my time trying to Google anything re SAP.
Goodsearch
answers to query “how can we defeat ? NRA, ISIS, ISIS, ISIL. First one because it was the title of an article….
It is, and the only way its monopoly will ever be broken is with another major revolution in advertising. I can’t envision what it could be, but I certainly wouldn’t have envisioned Google before it existed, either.
That Google or Facebook could swing an election is absolutely obvious to me. What’s not obvious is whether we have any kind of constitutional or legal architecture that could stop that. These are private companies; their algorithms are proprietary; and political speech is protected by the First Amendment. If they felt like doing it, it wouldn’t be illegal. It would be bad for their reputations were they to be caught, of course. But I can easily imagine in this totally hysterical and polarized political climate that a number of people could convince themselves it was the right thing to do.
Certainly, if I were the head of a diligent foreign intelligence agency, I’d have teams working in Mountain View and Menlo Park, trying to figure out how many people it would take, how it could be done, and what the best way to persuade them to do it would be. I wonder how much background screening/counterintelligence training their employees get?
I promise you that the way this will begin is with “censoring terrorists.” But it won’t stop there. Facebook and Twitter — in fact, the whole Internet — look very different if you’re in Turkey, because both companies comply with the government to remove “terrorist propaganda.” And some of it is indeed terrorist propaganda. But a lot of it is just, “Stuff the government doesn’t like.”
And you don’t realize it’s happening. I was living in Turkey when Facebook became really big. I knew the news there, generally, was heavily censored — and knew that journalists who reported the wrong things would be arrested. But it wasn’t until about 2009-2010 that I realized how heavily Facebook and Twitter were censored there, as well as many other parts of the Internet. I flew from Turkey to Delhi, and when I started looking for news from Turkey, all of a sudden I saw a whole universe of stuff that I just never saw in Turkey.
Mouse over other countries and see which countries have submitted “removal requests” to Twitter — and how often they comply.
Back when the internet was balkanized, I suppose you could say just before it really was the internet, but was rather a loosely interconnected network of networks — UUCP, Bitnet, dial-up message boards, etc. — it was a lot harder for governments to patrol it. Those were the days of samizdat internet. Once the same protocol was used everywhere, government snooping and control became a lot easier. The current internet no sooner got going than the administration of Bush the Elder began pressing for backdoor access.
I offer no prescription for reversing the process that moves us toward uniformity. American conservatives are no help, because they love things that promote scaled-up business opportunities.
To Claire’s comment, can there be any doubt?
http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/
If you research Google’s swift rise on Wikipedia from search engine, to the purchases of information and companies in nearly every sector, it is astounding – and they are rolling out something else weekly – if I click on my stock app on my phone, they are always in the top five articles of new roll outs.
There used to be regulations in place where one company could not hold so much power and control – a monopoly, in any particular sector – for example in broadcasting. In this case, it seems no rules apply – truly astounding. Forget maintaining any sort of privacy – We are being taught a new “Alphabet”. It’s scary to me.
So that’s why they removed “Don’t be evil” from their company’s mission statement.
Very interesting article. The line “helping to elect yet another president could be incredibly valuable to Schmidt and to Google” really says it all, doesn’t it?
If there’s no law regarding this, it’s because once again our technology has outpaced our ability to deal with the ethics of it.
Yes it does – another odd scenario – I have 3 Google accts – general, business, writing/blog – it’s convenient to have under one quick umbrella – I unfriended all but a tiny handful on Facebook just to see pictures and updates of family and friends and I never post or update – – yet on New Year’s Eve, I got a “check Facebook for updates” notice – there were people that I never associate with as friends – asking me to add a friend – example – a builder I used to use for maintenance on my properties, but no longer – a picture of he and girlfriend with party hats on at New Years and Facebook says add a friend? Quite a few came up like that – we’ve never been friends, only contact is business email – how would Facebook know my business associates except through my emails?
Yes and as many religious leaders warn, without ethics and morals to balance technology, etc. leads to a not so desirable society.