Don't be evil
Just in case you thought Google's arselicking of the butchers of Tiananmen was as low as they could go, try googling "shoah film"*. The first of 654,000 results is a bilious piece of shit by a Holocaust denier (which I have no intention of linking to).
$1.26 billion = Google's revenue last year.
$50000 = Approximate cost of employing someone to check their search results aren't disgusting and offensive
*"Shoah", by the way, is a long and extremely distressing documentary about the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann.
$1.26 billion = Google's revenue last year.
$50000 = Approximate cost of employing someone to check their search results aren't disgusting and offensive
*"Shoah", by the way, is a long and extremely distressing documentary about the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann.
posted by Disintegrating Clone at 12:26 pm
5 Comments:
1. Google is evil for censoring their search results!
2. Google is even more evil for not cesoring their search results the way *I* want them to!
No. Google is evil for censoring their search results, ie China.
Google is also evil for ranking a Holocaust denier as number one (out of six hundred thousand) search result for +Shoah +film, thereby directing people to a Holocaust denial website. They could easily have placed it at, say, rank 300000 where no-one would find it. They are (doubtlessly inadvertantly) colluding in the propogation of views which are not only morally repugnant, but which it is illegal to express in several European countries.
Google is a ranking service. They rank this site as number one. That is wrong.
But if you don't see anything wrong with google funnelling traffic towards Holocaust deniers, then there's not much more to say.
The Independent gave Google a severe dissing today. Didn't take long for the Internet heroes to dropkick their principles into touch. Clearly business is business...
Google is a ranking service. They rank this site as number one. That is wrong.
Google doesn't have employees ranking each site individually. They have an algorithm that ranks sites based on who links to those sites and what terms they use to link to them. So yes, you're arguing that Google should be censoring its search results.
Google's cannot disassociate itself from the results which its algorithm produces, since its algorithm is the product of decisions it has made. A manual checking phase would become part of the algorithm in its widest sense, and in this case would produce a much more accurate search result.
But that is a moot point. There is no absolute freedom of speech, and censorship exists in all societies. If you want to classify thinking Google should stop helping Holocaust deniers as being pro-censorship, then fine, I'm pro-censorship. It's much better than what that site stands for.
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