A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.

The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.

  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Crazy how self regulation always winds up like this. By crazy I mean predictable of course.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You’re supposed to move to a different search engine for the market to work. I already have, have you?

      • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        This approach is doomed to fail, so long as the general public isn’t aware of the problem or its scale. Government regulation is the only way.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It’s enough if an alternative reached even 1%. That would still be billions of searches a year, enough to keep them running

      • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        I did years ago when Google started censoring my search results even with safe search off.

        Unfortunately Bing is doing it too now and I can’t find a search engine that isn’t, though I would love to learn about one that isn’t.

        • Fungah@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          This is the issue. they’re all shit. Even kagi often fails to deliver useful results. Its the best of the bunch but AFAIK their own crawler is very reliant on google.

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      This doesn’t have anything to with regulation. This is mainly a bunch of SEO and marketing people whining that Google hasn’t been honest with them in telling them exactly how to game their search engine.