alopecoid

Oh, this whole "Boycott Facebook" movement is such a load of feces. Facebook isn't the problem. "Social Media" is such a misnomer; this is really just "people interacting" and where people interact, there's going to be arguments and different points of views and, yes, unfortunately some racism, hate speech, etc. Boycott human nature, not Facebook.

As for "profiting from hate speech": If some asshole decides to chant racial slogans in your town square and it draws a crowd and there happens to be a Geico ad on the bus stop behind him, does that mean that the town is profiting from hate speech (because the town sold that ad space) or that Geico supports hate speech (because it rented that space)?

Verizon is a bunch of hypocrites. They sell internet service (Fios and/or wireless) and devices (phones) that are directly used by people to post hate speech. By their own extension, they should boycott themselves.

Then you get these "guns don't kill people, people kill people" folk who don't apply the same argument to social media; "a communication platform doesn't propagate hate speech, people propagate hate speech".

If anything, Facebook is thoroughly impressive in its "genuine" content. A platform where, for the most part, Grandma and Neighbor and Classmate and Colleague and Teacher and 2 billion other people of all flavors can generally interact with minimum animosity. Name another commination platform at that scale that hasn't just essentially reduced to porn, prostitution, drugs, and selling body parts. We should be thanking Facebook for even attempting to connect people, against all odds.

Nothing about this problem is new or unique to Google Maps. This was a problem in old phone books too (literally thousands of fake locksmiths, etc). And the yellow pages profited there too. Just because it's fashionable to hate on "big tech" these days, it doesn't mean that they've created problems like this. These are the same old problems, evolved to modern medium. What's the alternative? That we don't have services like this?

There is: Use something else.

I don't mean this in a snippy way, but truly. If it's that bothersome, why not try something else? It seems that most people instead think that they have the privilege to change the product to their desires.

You should see how I defend Facebook or Apple.

Sorry, but I think you are missing the point (please see my follow-up post). The point is, search results are not static even for the same inputs (search string, location, etc), even in privacy mode.

That's great that you use DDG and find it useful! If Google was a true monopoly, as the current media blitz would have you believe, then you would not have been able to so easily switch to DDG (or Bing, or...).

A contrived example to clarify further: Let's say that there is a link, foo.gov/taxes_in_retirement. Locations with a high concentration of retirees might click on the link more frequently compared to other locations. In privacy mode, from this location, a search for "taxes" might rank that link higher in results based on this activity (even though the search didn't contain the word "retirement"). This shows how a link might be ranked differently depending on search location even if the link itself is not inherently location-specific (as oppressed to, say, a local-news link).

Also, search engines can play with inconsistent ranking of results to see how click-throughs might be affected. For example, if moving a link from first to third in the result list has no effect (people continue clicking on the same link even though it's now third instead of first), then it's a pretty strong signal that the link should continue to be ranked first in future results. This experimentation of search results is even more important the more uncommon a search is because there is less confidence in the current ranking until there is more activity to base the ranking on.

Just as stores shift around product placement (front of the store, back of the store, etc), a search engine is free to shift around search results. Keep in mind that product producers might pay for better in-store product placement too, just as customers pay search engines for ad placement in search results.

Google can and should customize search results based on location, and it's not just about "local articles" as the article suggests. If enough people from the same general location click on certain results more frequently, then those results should rank higher for others who search from that same general location.

We use Google because the results are useful, not because they are "unbiased". Ranking implies some sort of "bias" and is what makes search results generally useful. We don't want a search engine that does nothing clever and just spits back unranked results. Otherwise, we would be inundated with results containing credit card scams, porn, Bitcoin scams, Viagra ads, etc, when we search for... pretty much anything.

In privacy (incognito and not logged in) mode, all of the above still applies. What would NOT apply is something like: You are a vegetarian and suddenly all of your restaurant searches rank vegetarian restaurants higher in results while in privacy mode. Unless, of course, for some reason people in your general location happen to mostly eat vegetarian.

In any case, if people don't like it, stop using Google and go use some other search engine; there is absolutely nothing holding you back. More times than not, I think people will switch back to Google because they find the results more useful, even in privacy mode.

Note that the original title was too long for submission:

"Poor news curation at Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters creating misleading iPhone supply chain panic"

You and your theories... :)

If violence is organized through a phone call, is that the fault of the phone manufacturer or the phone service provider? If violence is organized through the use of protest signs, is that the fault of cardboard and marker manufacturers? Heck, why not just go a step further and say that it's the fault of "language" and ban all forms of that.

Ironically, when someone goes and shoots up a school... we defend the gun manufacturers as simply producers of a tool. I see, but Facebook, which is clearly just a tool for communication, is surely at fault here. I don't get people.

> Kind of funny how the NYT publishes the original story to generate outrage [...]

It's not just this; I think there's a clear agenda here by releasing this on the day of Google's earnings announcement.