Why Google shouldn't clean up search

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 27 Sep 2010 at 16:19

An open, nasty but honest web is better than Google sanitising search, argues Nicole Kobie

The problem with having everything at your fingertips is you sometimes end up with nasty stuff on your hands.

Type the most innocuous phrase into Google’s search box and there’s always the chance something terrible will come bounding back to shock you. Enter “kittens” and you’ll not only get adorable photos, but Flash games letting you bloodily slaughter them.

But when truly offensive or repulsive websites work their way to the top of the search results, rather than staying buried unnoticed on page 54, users start flinging mud at Google, begging it to do something to protect our delicate and sensitive minds.

On the other hand, when Google censors Chinese search results – or rival Bing drops pages with sexual content in Arabic countries – they also get slated.

Is it really up to Google to manage the web for us? The point of a search engine is to find information, not hide it

It’s clearly a fine balance, but is it really up to Google to manage the web for us? The point of a search engine is to find information, not hide it – to give us more understanding of the world, not less.

At a recent Google event, one attendee mentioned that the search engine serves a racist site third in the rankings when searching for Martin Luther King Jr. While the material is exceptionally distasteful, and disturbingly sells itself as a resource for students, isn’t the fact that racism persists despite King’s work a fact worth knowing?

Blocking sites isn’t always as clear cut as racism, as Google fellow Amit Singhal noted. Consider Scientology. The space-religion of choice for Hollywood’s elite has attracted much mockery from online pranksters, a fact followers would rather not see publicised.

Would you rather Google intervened or have the information there so you can decide for yourself? “You have two sides. Both sides decide they are right,” Singhal said. “Should we actually suppress anti-Scientology sites?”

As Singhal notes: “We don’t induce our subjectivity into our searches, because my subjective opinion – although always right – is just my subjective opinion.”

Of course, sometimes Google’s algorithm is clearly a bit daft, suggesting sites that aren’t as relevant as the ones they’re ranking ahead of, regardless of the sanity of the content – a great example is Googling “search engine”, which all but ignores the top ranking site itself. But instead of sifting through mountains of content and fixing them by hand, Google rightly prefers the tactic of improving its algorithms to better judge content.