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Bill Heath's avatar

Anyone who cannot acknowledge that shutting down public discourse damages us all has my pity. You are correct, this isn't a left-right issue, it's an authoritarian-liberty issue. And probably the most significant issue of the past hundred years.

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Alistair Penbroke's avatar

I used to work at Google, albeit not on web search. I wish people wouldn't use the word censored to talk about search rankings, it dilutes the term and makes it less useful for actual censorship.

Firstly, there is no real investigation or fact checking going on in this piece, Matt is just repeating the non-profit's claims. As noted by others the screenshot doesn't seem to actually show search traffic (you can't know impressions for that) but rather an ad campaign which could be affected by many things, most obviously budget reductions or competitor budget increases. The story is just not credible and could have used some double-checking.

Second, rankings whether for ads or organic results are a zero sum game. Someone's loss is someone else's gain. To show this is "censorship" by Google you'd have to find the queries where they lost traffic and go look at what's being returned for them now. For all you know there is an even bigger, better left wing charity making exactly the same claims but more effectively and they are now out-ranking RTK, which would cause the same effects on RTK but render claims of censorship totally meaningless.

Thirdly, yes the ranking algorithms are opaque. They have to be, because there's a whole planet of people trying to game them to get to the top. This is not nefarious or evil behaviour by Google. Literally no search engine publishes their ranking algorithms in full. Google DID do this in the very early days because it came out of a PhD project so the PageRank algorithm was described in a published paper. It resulted in SEO spammers gaming the algorithm as hard as possible in all kinds of creative and destructive ways. There are way more factors now and they aren't widely known even inside the company to stop this happening again.

Now all that said, there IS a real story here, but it's a more general one and much harder to write than just finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update. The firm's ever increasing emphasis on E-A-T content (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) assumes a dystopian and highly hierarchical society in which only "experts" should be allowed to receive attention about any given topic. This is inherently a dead end because academia produces an infinite stream of institutionally approved "experts" who have no actual expertise in their area. The decay inside academia, Google's inability to see it (due partly to their heavy reliance on hiring from top universities), and the leftist focus on rule-by-publicly-funded-expert will inevitably lead to endless situations in which Google genuinely *does* censor people who are correct but arguing with academics. However, this situation is most easily observed today at the periphery of the company in places like YouTube or the Play Store, not core web search which at least for now appears to be the least corrupted part (I'm not saying it's uncorrupted, just that it's not as open and obvious as in those other sites).

Finally, I really skeptical this left/right balance is going to work out. The reality is the left is the group doing the censoring today and trying to paint it as a bipartisan "people against the corporations" issue probably won't work as a consequence. To the extent corporations are censoring, it seems to invariably be with the goal of boosting social justice theory and academic pronouncements. The right will be the victim 9 times out of 10 and trying to present it differently will lead to a succession of weak stories like this one.

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