> into a spot that many users believe is fairly authoritative

I mean that's the real issue. You can't be unbiased while trying to be a source of truth. You can be impartial and return results based on relevancy or you can intervene in an attempt to return the truth. Google has ventured into dangerous territory by mixing the two -- especially with their automatic snippets that answer questions.

> There is only figuring out ways to filter and sort the firehose

But it's an unsolved problem for how you put the control of this filtering into the users hands. The best we have right now is to just return everything and let the users choose what to pay attention to.

> You can be impartial and return results based on relevancy

I don't think that's possible. Take a search for "Las Vegas shooting". What is the impartial process for deciding the most relevant result for that? Relevance is inherently editorial.

So first "top news spot" means that if you searched for the name of this person who got falsely accused on 4chan, you found the false accusation on 4chan (as the first result). That's all.

Calling this a "top news spot" ... I have no words. Perhaps we should say that this complaint is "fake news" ? I get that newspapers and even journalists have their existence threatened by Facebook and Google, but ... this is a low and very thin argument.

I don't understand what they want either. Censorship seems to be the real issue. The article is not so much taking offence at the information available, they're just angry that the information wasn't filtered through the "normal" channels. They were very unhappy various things didn't get suppressed. That Google had the gall to surface "unauthorized" information.

Never mind that if I was said falsely accused person, I would definitely have wanted that information surfaced. Including to a lawyer, and later to a judge. At issue are the person starting this rumour, and the publisher (ie. 4chan).

Their point is that in this case, things should have gotten suppressed, like naming a person as a culprit that had nothing to do with the incident. Now keep in mind that this is hyperbole: any searches related to the Las Vegas shooting never named anyone, but if you searched for that person's exact name it would surface a "fresh" result ... from 4chan, claiming he had something to do with the shooting.

I would argue that newspapers have done much worse than this. Much worse. Often repeatedly and in cases where there was an obvious financial or political motive for them to spread misinformation. I'd rather have all information, knowing that some may be wrong.

And the newspapers' "right" to filter all information I may see ? Screw that, if I want to see your filtered info, I'll go to your site. I may want to do that, for verification and because I think your filter is useful, but I do not want you or anyone filtering everything I see.

Absolutely right. 4chan is a discussion board not a news site, and does not 'report' the news and is self-contradicting on virtually every issue (because it's a discussion board). Now observe the media try to pull a fast one by drafting off of Facebook and Google's algorithm issues. Their real beef is that heated discussion leads to a more organic narrative rather than the one they've loosely tried to script.

Also it should not be news that a website largely devoted to conspiracy theorizing heats up in page rank after an event like this. Even if the discussion is bogus, let's face it people deep down want to entertain the possibility of conspiracy after every man-made disaster event- so it's relevant, especially in those first few hours before official sources have commented.

This is entirely a blown-up issue that is being used as a cover to start censoring and monitoring our communications on a far worse level.

Calm down! Nobody mentioned children yet!

We’re almost certainly witnessing the endgame to the 1990s boom of Silicon Valley. Google, Facebook and other content platforms will be regulated for impartiality, particularly around political speech. It doesn’t make sense to let Twitter, Facebook et al become private censors, and it’s clear that people retweet faster than they think.

> Take a search for "Las Vegas shooting". What is the impartial process for deciding the most relevant result for that? Relevance is inherently editorial.

In that case, the search should be done on the NYT site (or similar).

Or perhaps Google should add a "Use Edited Sites only" preference as a category of SafeSearch.

> In that case, the search should be done on the NYT site (or similar).

Huh? I'm saying the act of putting one site over another is itself a decision based on opinion.

Should machine learning be used to determine if the site has a summary of the situation...or is that even what the user was asking for? Should it just have those exact words in it? Should it be the most cited link? From the most cited source overall or on this particular topic? Should it instead be based on the clicks that links to that site gets? Was the most relevant site even in the sites originally in the list of sites to crawl for an index?

Also, not sure if you were just making a rhetorical point, but you'll note that your

> on the NYT site (or similar).

just kicks the can down the road. Why NYT? What similar sites are a good match instead? How do you even determine that some piece of writing is an editorial? Does it have to call itself that to qualify?

Even if you manage to put the control of filtering in people's hands, it doesn't solve the problem. Social science convincingly shows people don't want to be told the truth if it runs counter to prior beliefs, and will use all the tools at their disposal to avoid or discredit it. In fact, forcing the truth on them will convince them even more of their false beliefs (see: the backfire effect). Give people more control over their filters, and they will create even tighter filter bubbles.

Maybe the solution to what news to let through the filter bubble is to apply a very simple answer: none at all. Google shouldn't show anything that's more recent than a few weeks.

The unfiltered results ARE the truth. 4chan is the truth. In the sense that "Someone posted this thing on 4chan." And that's the only truth there is in internet-land: Someone posted something.

Is it real? Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know, and you probably shouldn't try to take it that far. Or if you do, at least be able to handle the cognitive dissonance of believing it and not-believing it at the same time. The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person. Or perhaps what you hear from trusted parties, but even there, your trust may be misplaced, or they may report something false in good faith that was the result of their having been deceived or mistaken. And you can misperceive and twist reality even all by yourself in the presence of supposedly non-subjective and "real" stimuli.

Regardless, from the vantage point of "looking at a computer," all you know about anything you see there, is that someone put it there. And even the "someone" part isn't necessarily true... it could be AI-generated like some sports and financial news is now.

The good news is, that which you can't witness with your own eyes, rarely has any real effect on your life. I'm experimenting with that. The sun still comes up, and it's still time to get some shit done. Sure sure, of course there are myriad ways someone or something far away can have an influence on me. What I'm saying is, what if you ignore that? What if you construct a mental model of the world where it's actually not one big joyous tapestry of unity and interconnectedness, but just a fragmented patchwork and you have your own little square and that's it. Neither view is right per se, but they're both equally valid, which is to say, bullshit, yet incontrovertible to those who believe it. I'll say one thing though, take the fragmented view and suddenly you don't especially find yourself immersed in news of shootings and Google can't "fail you" because you don't rely on it as a window to the world - you only use it for what it's actually good at: looking for shit on the internet.

> Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know

What nonsense. There are degrees of trust you can put in claims, based on a variety of factors. And you don't really believe it, either, as further on in your comment you say "The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person". If you could know something is true from personally witnessing it you could know that a claim contradicting it is false.

> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.

That's not true, either. Just because you "see" something doesn't mean what perceive is an accurate picture of what is actually there. Your brain is doing a huge amount of inference, based on expectations, to build the details you perceive. This goes up from basic things like the shapes and colours there, to what objects you individuate, to recognition of things like the expression someone is making or their body language, or perceiving what activity someone is undertaking. On top of that, when you talk about what you've witnessed, usually this is what you remember that you witnessed, and memory is notoriously unreliable.

I'd put far more trust in an experiemental "fact" that has been tested many times over in the lab, or in a body of knowledge that has been tested many times over in engineering (whose accuracy is "proved" by the fact that the machinery, such as a plane, actually works), than what someone thinks they saw for themselves a week ago.

I already said all that a lot more efficiently in my comment.

> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.

> The good news is, that which you can't witness with your own eyes, rarely has any real effect on your life

Not only anti-rationalist and anti-Enlightenment, but you're even disagreeing with object permanence!

> Not only anti-rationalist and anti-Enlightenment, but you're even disagreeing with object permanence!

And not even "not only" that, it also veers into the dirty movement of muddying the waters of responsible reporting, into a discussion of "what is truth really?". When "nothing is true", every venue from 4chan to infowars is equal in its non-truth to AP/Reuters/WaPo/NYT/Atlantic/etc.

When all media is fake, listening to Alex Jones talk about water supplies making children gay is somehow legitimized.

Yeah no it doesn't. Just one more thing to ignore. Unless I personally saw someone turn gay from drinking water, but even if I thought I saw that, I wouldn't totally believe that either.

And I did mention trusted parties, which could be a reporter. You guys are just not in the mood for philosophising tonight I guess. You want to be certain of things. Disappointing response. Should've avoided the term "fake news." It's Pavlovian.

That seems to be the inevitable result of an uncritical embrace of nihilism.

If nothing matters, 4chan is great.

If things actually matter, 4chan is an existential threat.

> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.

Why do you trust your eyes? Eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate.

Why trust your brain? How do you even know that the world you think exists is real? Maybe you are just dreaming right now.

You went part-way down the rabbit hole, then stopped. Better to go all the way, then decide on a rational basis for belief (which is probably more complicated than only trusting things you see firsthand), and build from there.

"I trust my own lying eyes"

> The unfiltered results ARE the truth.

No.

Using your structure - those are not the truth.

They are the first result thrown up out of a search engine. Just as much as "someone posted this thing on 4 chan".

This is not truth, any more than

"pull the trigger and kill Godot when he enters the room" are words in a sentence.

Truth is intriniscally lined to meaning.

You are implying that people are entering search terms into a search engine expecting the results to be a form of interprative art.

That is not what people are searching for - in this day and age.

Maybe during the days of alta vista or geopages, when most people knew the results were junk - and you were an advanced tech users, that would hold more on a probabilistic basis.

It would be trivial for FB and Google to allow tailoring of feeds. Even keyword exclusions or subject filters would be a huge step-up from the gamified engagement-getting monster that we have now.

Yes - which is why they won't do it. Like out-of-order feeds, where engagement conflicts with usefulness they'll pick engagement and ad views every time.

I'm ready to walk away from all algorithmically sorted feeds.

I'm tired of the ad tech kool aid that causes PMs + execs to consistently put UX and users in last place.

This is more of a political challenge than a technical one. One that I'd say is worth fighting for.

This is a very good point! I would also add that those with the resources to control filtering (Google, Facebook, China, Russia, the US, etc) will be the ones who ultimately control it.

The problem comes in our choice of who should be the "gatekeepers of information"? Certainly not The Altlantic, The New Yorker (as seen sited in this discussion) or any other traditional news outlet. They have shown time and time again that the peiple running these outlets, not only, have very biased stations when presenting the news (i.e. from MSNBC to Fox News and the rainbow of bias between), they have shown, for a very long time, that these same traditional news sources are easily bought and do not handle a 24 hour news cast well, at all (look at the reports of something as simple as Tom Petty's death, yesterday, a dozen hours or so before his death). While I certainly don't trust Google or Facebook to report the news, I have trouble relying on the "gatekeepers" (blech) of the news, as well.

> They have shown time and time again that the peiple running these outlets, not only, have very biased stations when presenting the news

That’s a really sweeping equivalence claim to make without any proof, much less a way to account for the mountain of evidence contradicting your assertion. Dismissing real organizations with editors, fact checkers, a range of viewpoints, etc. because they aren’t fun by dispassionate robots is simply an error — you might read a story in the NYT and expect them to favor a different side than the WSJ but most people know that both employ decent journalists, check sources, and print corrections when necessary.

I don't know if what I've read is actual proof and a lot of this seems to point to "opinion" pieces on news networks, I guess. I have not done the legwork, but here are some articles I've found going towards what I stated:

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505547295/fake-news-expert-on-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/business/media/what-weve-...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/...

https://www.alternet.org/story/154875/the_science_of_fox_new...

In retrospect, though, I probably think it's more prevalent than it is in actuality. To be completely honest, the sensationalism by media outlets exposing misinformation by media outlets "on the other side" of the news gets to me, sometimes. As for corrections, though, mea culpa's seem to be a mid page item, at best =/

Asking the rich and powerful gatekeepers of the majority news sources of the public to filter content for us in a way they have been relatively reticent to do, mostly out of pure altruism, is asinine. I have no love for Facebook or Google, but the world wouldn't be a better place if they cultivated news for us, at least not for long.