From the Wall Street Journal, November 15:
Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google,
prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or
breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump.
They
are arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global
economy, controlling how much of the world accesses information found on
the internet, and the starting point for billions of dollars of
commerce.
Twenty years ago, Google founders began building a goliath on the
premise that its search algorithms could do a better job combing the web
for useful information than humans. Google executives have said
repeatedly—in private meetings with outside groups and in congressional
testimony—that the algorithms are objective and essentially autonomous,
unsullied by human biases or business considerations.
The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to
collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge
details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in
a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by
gaming the system.
But that message often clashes with what happens behind the scenes.
Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with
search results to a far greater degree than the company and its
executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has
found.
Those actions often come in response to pressure from
businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world.
They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of
online misinformation, the Journal found.
Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy
of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active
in deciding how that information should appear.
More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:
•
Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big
businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on
behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position
that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some
major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to
people familiar with the matter.
• Google engineers regularly
make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is
increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features
include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and
“featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same
company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.
•
Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove
certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of
results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as
required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or
with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam
sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.
•
In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user
types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists
to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects,
such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory
results on high-profile topics.
• Google employees and
executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have
disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent.
Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including
on topics such as vaccinations and autism.
• To evaluate its
search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose
purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’
rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these
workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of
results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to
contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective
evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.
THE JOURNAL’S
FINDINGS undercut one of Google’s core defenses against global
regulators worried about how it wields its immense power—that the
company doesn’t exert editorial control over what it shows users.
Regulators’ areas of concern include anticompetitive practices,
political bias and online misinformation....
....
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