[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.

[basch]

I dont understand this point of view. Googles literal mission since inception was to rank results based on how good google thought they were. Their purpose is to editorialize results through the order they appear. Quality is defined buy googles subjectivity.

Where did the idea of google neutrality come from? Google would be useless if they didnt blacklist what they perceive to be spam.

[luckylion]

> Where did the idea of google neutrality come from?

From Google. They've stated time and time again that it's a magic algorithm and they don't hand-pick winners and losers. And it's a good thing, too, otherwise you're just inviting corruption. Top spots are literally worth millions, and if there's an small army of people that decide who ranks where, they are an obvious target for bribes.

This doesn't look that hand picked, though, more like somebody didn't check what would happen if they rolled out some algo change and targeted way too broad.

[yifanl]

See, I don't think there's much difference between writing a deterministic mathematical algorithm to have X site on top, hand-curating a list to have X site on top or writing a magic spell that consults 4 neural nets, a space dragon from Jupiter and the Canadian Prime Minister for weightings that results in X site on top.

That's all implementation details, at the end of the day site X is on top and site Y is not, and Google decided that.

And as mentioned in the sibling thread, that's the value of Google Search. If you disagree that X should be on top, then find an alternative search engine that has some different ranking algorithm, but there's no such thing as an objective search engine.