> Secondly, if it were the case that Google would surface Zero Hedge over WSJ purely because of popularity is that ok? Is that what should happen?
Yes.
Obviously discard any SEO trickery. But if Zero Hedge is being cited more frequently, being chosen from search results more frequently, etc. then people have found it more helpful, and presumably other people would find the same.
The whole premise of democracy (both the form of literal governance and the general philosophy) is that most of the people are correct most of the time. There exist other algorithms to combine human opinion, but they are wrong more often.
Yes, most political pundits were wrong in predicting Clinton wound win in 2016. But I don't think it makes sense for Google to try and "manually" curate that.
Zero Hedge is a conspiracy blog published by anonymous authors. If people are clicking it in search results more frequently than actual news sites, that is in itself a problem.
What's an "actual news site" though? Major news outlets also regularly publish unfounded conspiracy theories (e.g. russia gate, WMD in Iraq, etc). The question is do you like yours flavored with anonymity or government funding?
The point is that its not a search engines job to make that determination. People will decide for themselves and whatever the algorithm is, it should seek to remove the personal biases of the implementers and be blind. It should seek to serve the asker not change the asker.
I feel like there could be a term, similar to "uncanny valley" where instead of detecting the in-human traits of something attempting to appear human we see bias in something attempting to be unbiased.
If you pre-suppose that news orgs are the same thing as conspiracy-mongers, you're going to have a hard time defining news sites as distinct from not-news sites. Most people don't start from that assumption and find the distinction useful, though.
That's not evidence of anything, it's just an outline of someone's screwball opinion. Just like 'NASA is a hoax-making organization (Moon stuff)' does not contain any evidence but simply outlines, in shorthand, a screwball opinion.
They're not the same thing but sometimes they do still peddle conspiracy theories that turn out to be false. Many are susceptible to delivering fake news as if it was real due to a conflict of interest related to their funding model.
It is useful to make a distinction between news organizations and non-news organizations but it is not useful to apply any sort of value judgement of either based on that fact alone.
Again, you're trying to conflate getting things wrong or inadequately accounting for bias or expectations with 'peddling conspiracy theories' or 'delivering fake news'. These things are not the same and that's one of the key distinctions between real news organizations and ones that aren't.
If Google detects more engagement towards "Yes" and flatearther conspiracy websites, should their search engine prioritize results that say the Earth is flat?
> If Zero Hedge is being cited more frequently, being chosen from search results more frequently, etc. then people have found it more helpful, and presumably other people would find the same.
> The whole premise of democracy (both the form of literal governance and the general philosophy) is that most of the people are correct most of the time.
1. Google's clickthrough metrics are subject to severe sampling bias.
2. The premise of democracy is seeking compromise across diverse opinions. American democracy has explicit protections against tyranny of the masses.
If NYT is regarded as an authority by a diverse audience across broad search domains and cited by other similarly broadly authoritative sites, while ZH is cited and viewed by a high-engagement but narrow and isolated audience, then NYT should be ranked above ZH. As it is.
> If Google detects more engagement towards "Yes" and flatearther conspiracy websites, should their search engine prioritize results that say the Earth is flat?
Yes.
Realize however that this is entirely hypothetical, as there is enormously more round earth information with extremely popular sites like wikipedia.org, nav.gov, etc.
My faith in democracy is strong that I believe this will always be the case, so long as the earth remains round.
Yes.
Obviously discard any SEO trickery. But if Zero Hedge is being cited more frequently, being chosen from search results more frequently, etc. then people have found it more helpful, and presumably other people would find the same.
The whole premise of democracy (both the form of literal governance and the general philosophy) is that most of the people are correct most of the time. There exist other algorithms to combine human opinion, but they are wrong more often.
Yes, most political pundits were wrong in predicting Clinton wound win in 2016. But I don't think it makes sense for Google to try and "manually" curate that.