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CrispinS | 3 years ago

> The second link returned on him was from ADL. No way that's an organic result.

It might be, actually. I understand why you'd think that, but look at the results for other search engines.

Kagi: ADL in 2nd place

Bing: ADL in 3rd place

Yandex: ADL not on the first page, but SPLC[1] is the the 6th result

[1]: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

discuss

dukeofdoom|3 years ago

This logic kind of fails quickly. I bet you wouldn't use it to show that Tiananmen Square did not happen, by showing all Chinese Search Engine are in apparent agreement on it not happening.

CrispinS|3 years ago

Well, no, which is why I threw in Kagi and Yandex as well. I can imagine Google and Microsoft altering rankings for certain results for political reasons, but Kagi seems too small to care about that, and Yandex isn't operating from the same political playbook as western corporations.

Now, in defense of your theory, I did double check Kagi and found out that they use Bing and Google for some queries, so the only truly "untainted" one is Yandex, which doesn't have ADL on the first page, or the next five that I checked.

That said, as I mentioned they do surface SPLC, which is similar in tone and content.

Limited sample size, but I think it's still plausible that ADL is an organic result.

I also checked Yahoo, and it has ADL as the third result.

I checked Baidu and Naver, and didn't see ADL, but I assume they're prioritizing regional content.

IAmEveryone|3 years ago

Does it often happen to you that you talk about Ai and, three minutes later, find yourself arguing with every search machine on the planet that it’s impossible that someone would say nasty things about your favorite fascist?

jimmygrapes|3 years ago

Guess it depends on the "algorithm" but if we were still in the PageRank era there's no way in hell ADL or SLPC would be anywhere near the top results for "Alex Jones", considering how many other news stories, blogs, comments, etc. about him exist.

hedora|3 years ago

The PageRank era ended almost immediately. Google has had a large editorial team for a long, long time (probably before they were profitable).

It turns out PageRank aways kind of sucked. However, it was competing with sites that did “pay for placement” for the first page or two, so it only had to be better than “maliciously bad”.