[zuuow]

So... Google is openly editorialising their results?

They were already doing it with the carousel (google "american inventors") but if they are doing it with what seemingly is the list of organic results this is very, very troubling.

[yifanl]

I mean, Google always was, even in the PageRank days. Even if you can perfectly recreate the numbers as to why so and so site is ranked higher in your system, its still your system choosing to rank so and so site higher.

[zuuow]

I see your point, but in this case they are blacklisting domains by hand because of their content, which they don't agree with. And that is very bad. Maybe it was my mistake, thinking that their organic search was holy, which no longer is the case it seems.

[stordoff]

My way of looking at it has always been there is no such thing as organic search results (other than that the organisation in question did not have a hand in choosing to put it there). The aim is, presumably, to return quality sites, which always involves a subjective judgement - there is no intrinsic or natural ordering of a set of sites (other people could choose to rank them differently). Whether it's writing an algorithm that results in those sites being at the top (which _must_ be rewritten if returns certain sites otherwise it will be gamed), a more direct choice, or a combination of the two, there doesn't seem to be much difference. The algorithm serves to scale Google's subjective opinion, and they will always boot out sites they don't think are of sufficient quality - it enables them to return sites that they may not have hand-judged, but I've always assumed it is trying to approximate what would be returned if they _did_ check every site.

[ceejayoz]

> They were already doing it with the carousel (google "american inventors")

Maybe.

There's a chance you're seeing an unintentional side-effect of inclusion-oriented school projects getting hordes of people to Google stuff like "African American inventors".

[vxNsr]

Try googling "black inventors" and then "white inventors" it appears they are directly editorializing.

[asdf21]

>(google "american inventors")

LOL, pretty funny results there.

Nice job though, Edison.