Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
by mirimir on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @07:15PM
(#16702960)
> Sorry, just to clarify, I (and I believe the GP did as well) meant "mirror" in terms of reflecting reality and the state of things -- not "mirror" as it's commonly thought of in content/data online distribution.
Yes, I did. But I don't want to see the parasitic SEO-driven copypasta linkfarms. Or perhaps have them, but including such flags.
I think you misread the Holocaust denial situation. The reason why "Did the Holocaust happen?" was so problematic was because that literal string of text is something that you'd never find on a mainstream site, such as the NYT or the Holocaust museum. And yet sites like StormFront would get bonus SERP for using that literal text in a page's title, url slug, and <h1>. StormFront benefited from a blind spot in Google's heuristics that had little to do with whether or not StormFront was actually a legitimate researcher into the question of the Holocaust's historical reality.
Same problem with Google Bombs. A law student with a blog was able to get enough people to link "waffle" to 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry [0]. Presumably, the average person googling "waffle" wants the food item, not info about Sen. Kerry. But the reality was that the metrics Google had long used to measure quality and credibility were all saying "waffle => Kerry".
Staying true to the algorithm assumes that the algorithm (and its inputs) were pure and complete to begin with. This is not necessarily the case.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_...