Will Search Get Political?
March 4, 2008 – 2:45 pmI was reading an article about Barack Obama and happened to take a glance over at the AdSense ads by Google. While the article was fairly pro-Obama, the first link was for “Barack Obama Exposed”, a “free special report” by the conservative HumanEvents.com. There’s nothing wrong with that (other than perhaps Google’s relevancy algorithms), but it did get me thinking about the political implications of what shows up in search, in targeted ads, and so forth.
Suppose you Google “Barack Obama Muslim”. As it stands right now, the first result if a page dispelling the urban myth that Barack is some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate — but what if you got a right wing propaganda page alleging the exact opposite? Google would then be in a position where they were spreading a false rumor. It’s certainly not that hard to see happening — if a lot of right wing bloggers decided to push it and link to each other, their articles would probably move up near the top. And your casual searcher only clicks the top two links or so before declaring themselves Satisfied that this is the Truth.
The problem is that there’s a divergence in how Google (or at least its search algorithm) and most Internet users see it. For Google, the purpose of search is to provide information. For the casual Internet user, Google presents the truth. Information, however, is not truth. You can have false information, misleading information, and uninformative information — but the truth is, well, the Truth. The mainstream media has had to deal with this for some time (e.g. does “fair and balanced” imply stating what you believe to be true or both sides of the story, even if one side is positively ludicrous?). Wikipedia obviously faces these issues (popular consensus does not always equal truth and has, on occasion, been overridden by a smaller group of editors). It’s really only a matter of time before someone looks at the political affiliations of well-known Googlers and start drawing connections that aren’t necessarily there.
Tags: Barack Obama, Google, information, search, truth