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Is Google Objective? Manual Edits in Search Results

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Google claims that their search results “are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.” Elizabeth Van Couvering, at the Berlin search engines workshop Monday, argued however that Google didn’t find their search engine “on the road.” It’s true that every ranking algorithm for a search engine at one time was written by a necessarily subjective human engineer – so how objective can a search ranking be? I think we can break up this question into 4 different levels of “objectivity.” (These levels may overlap more than they are clearly separate entities.)

Perceived results relevance without manual edits

When I’m saying “perceived relevance” then I mean that an engineer at Google, or any other search engine, is trying to rank the “best” pages on top for a particular search query (the more relevant a search result to its query, the better for the user), and that what’s relevant or best is a highly subjective issue to begin with. An engineer/ programmer/ developer must come up with a basic concept for ranking pages, like “let’s think of web links as votes on pages, and call this thing PageRank.” An engineer must then evaluate the search results for different queries (with the help of feedback by external quality testers, actual usage data and so on), and fine-tune the algo again, for example to battle search result spam.

Now, I don’t think there’s a way to get around the subjectivity on this level, because there is no such thing as a truly “objective” result ranking. Any ranking must reflect the human values of the team who came up with the ranking algos (or of those who judged the result through feedback polls), unless indeed we find the source code on the road... nothing too desirable either if it would be realistic. At this level, we can however argue that to some extent, “all individual pages and search queries are equal.”

Perceived results relevance through manual edits

On top of trying to rank pages solely automatically & algorithmically, manual edits consider certain pages or search queries to be “unequal,” meaning they receive special treatment (we can still talk about algorithms, but these algorithms are peppered with data):

• A Google engineer might try to create an adult filter for search rankings, removing adult websites from the listings; for this, some manual evaluation, or a database of adult words or sites is needed to seed the system (e.g. “sex” or “sex.com”). Adult filters may help to avoid “shocking” results from turning up for kids. At the same time, an adult filter must make sure all the “porn-googling adults” still find their stuff, so there’s usually a setting to turn it off.
• A Google engineer might code an annotation in reaction to protests related to a specific search result. This happened when people started to complain about an anti-Semite website being on top for the search query “jew.” After Google saw these protests (and the accompanying Googlebombs) escalate, they put a little link on top of organic results reading “We’re disturbed about these results as well. Please read our note.” I’m not arguing that these annotations are bad, I’m arguing that this is a manual edit that’s not objective, for better or worse (if you think this is objective, then think about all the search results you feel are harmful but for which there is no such disclaimer).
  Also, one might think of ads next to search results as a type of paid annotation.
  Another type of future annotation system might include putting an “unsafe” icon next to spyware, as the SiteAdvisor plugin does today.
• A Google engineer might determine a set of seed sites which are deemed positive. This way, you can algorithmically generate all sorts of other data about the web based on this initial value of what’s a good seed site. E.g. if you choose Slashdot.org as a “cool” site, then you can create an algorithm saying “the further away a site is from Slashdot in terms of degrees of linking, the more uncool it may be.” (I actually don’t believe Google uses seed sites, but of course no one outside of Google knows.) The obvious subjectivity included in this approach is the selection of seed sites; who’s to say Slashdot is really so cool?
  (The concept of seed sites works in reverse too, seeding the system with bad apples to then write algos to down-rank sites in that neighborhood; it’s likely Google does indeed use penalized spam sites as bad seeds, the so-called “bad neighborhood.”)
• The Google death penalty “googleaxes” spam sites. Or to put it less colorful, sometimes websites trying to game their own search engine ranking are removed from results (or they are ranked on the deep bottom of results where mostly no one ever sees them). This happened with e.g. BMW.de at one time because they used keyword-stuffed doorway pages to lure the searchers onto their site. Obviously removing spam from search results is a good thing, and as search spam tries to skew results, battling it is actually a step towards objectivity or neutrality.
  Now, the Google death penalty may be exercised manually or automatically. In the case of the German BMW site, the edit was obviously manual as the site’s doorway pages stayed untouched for years, and were only removed after a public discussion on this erupted from blogs. We can imagine that Google engineers in general prefer to automatically determine what’s spam and what’s not, simply as this is more effective with the galactic number of websites.
• Copyright laws defend a web author’s work from being copied all over the place, unless the webmaster freely shares the content. With the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you can snail mail Google Inc when you feel your copyrights have been violated. As an example, try searching for site:xenu.net... on the bottom of the result page in Google.com you’ll see: “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page.” (Who pressured this particular site out of Google result? The Church of Scientology did.)
  Whether or not a search result is the right place to “manually edit” copyright infringements is another issue – you may argue Google only uses “fair use” even when it links to unfair-use websites (the republished Google cache feature aside for the sake of argument).
• A search engine of the future may also have its creators manually edit results based on privacy issues. When the world becomes more and more digital and transparent, there may be a stronger concept of “fair privacy” and not just “fair use.” At the moment, when you google a name of a stranger you may dig up old stuff about them that even they had forgotten about, from rants made in a newsgroup in 1994 to images posted on some exotic web forum in 2002.
• Engineers may manually adjust results for popular searches. E.g. search engine creators might decide that their engine’s results for the frequent query “dating” isn’t too good, and it can’t figure out a way to improve this algorithmically at the time, so it just injects a list of manually selected URLs to rank on top. While from what we know Google doesn’t do any of this “short-tail,” manual reorganizing of rankings – other search engines might – they do have semi-automated “onebox” results on top (semi-automated as they’re only triggered for certain searches, and that they’re also often restricted to certain content providers). For example, when you enter age of george bush the top “result” will be a onebox reading “George Bush – Date of Birth: 12 June 1924.”

Perceived results irrelevance through manual edits (for a perceived larger overall relevance)

In previous examples, we can see that while we can’t always tell if manual removals and such were fair, we can always argue that at least the search engine creators deemed them fair. E.g. removing spam sites makes the search engine return more relevant results on top. However, there’s another type of manual edit: the one where even the search engineers agree that results are made worse. I’m thinking of the thing we stop calling “filter” and start calling “censorship.”

For example, when Google agreed to self-censor German search results based on a manual blacklist of sites (e.g. those containing Neo-Nazi material), they did so voluntarily, but one might argue they didn’t really like to do that. They made the decision to react on semi-official German regulations, possibly trying to prevent further, stronger censorship, or at least trying to not stay out of the German market on principle. This was a very clear clash with Google’s principles – you just had to read their help files at the time, where they said they don’t censor*. This was also making results, taken on their own, more irrelevant; clearly entering stormfront.org and getting no results (on Google.de) is worse than getting the actual Stormfront.org site as result (on Google.com), at least measured by relevance.

Why might there be a potentially larger “overall relevance” for search results on this level? Well, for example when Google would leave the German market on principle, as they’re opposing censorship at least by their old standards, they might leave Germans with what they may deem less relevant results**. Yeah, Yahoo might be up to par with Google relevance, but I bet Google engineers think differently – it’s sort of their job to do so. So from their unique subjective perspective, any market without Google is a market with less relevant search results***, even when that market may have other search engines available****.

Results relevance not a top priority

Well, and then there’s the point when search engine creators do not even have results relevancy as top priority, mostly to replace them with money-makin’ priorities – we could title this level “plain vanilla evil” or “let’s care about the money instead of the user"***** or “Dilbert cartoon boss doing random stuff.” For example:

• Mix organic results with paid results, and don’t disclaim paid results as such.
• Just take whatever the local gov’t gives you in terms of blacklists so you can enter the market, or maintain your position in it (Yahoo used to do this in China from what we can tell). But the line between “we want to do a little bad to do overall good” vs “we just want to make money and we don’t care” is blurred; who’s gonna decide if Google is more noble than Yahoo in China? Certainly we can’t leave that decision up to Google.
• Push sites of your own company higher up in the organic rankings.
• Clutter search engine results with popup ads and a bunch of other “features,” or turn the whole thing into a portal (AltaVista made that error a couple of years ago before they lost their “geek approval” crown to Google).
• Accept payments by webmasters to allow them to rank higher (or be included faster) in search results.

*To quote from an official help entry that in the meantime has been changed, but was active for a long time: “Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.” At the time, Google also didn’t always disclose censorship in their German search results.

**It should be noted that a principled withdrawal from a country has the potential effect of escalating a conflict between that country’s population vs the censorship laws they’re governed by, which in the end could result in search engines being allowed to display uncensored results, thus increasing overall relevancy... but that’s a matter of debate and speculation. I’d argue that if e.g. Google in Germany would withdraw due to self-censorship objections, considering their 90%+ market share in Germany, they might cause more than just a public outcry – they might cause subtle but important changes in German politics and laws.

***Quote Google’s statement from 2006 on their self-censored Google.cn: “We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely.”

****This issue became more visible in early 2006 with Google’s self-censored Chinese search engine, because these “potentially more relevant” results censorship partly strengthens a repressive regime and its human rights violations. There are some important parts adding complexity to this specific case of Google.cn; for instance, Google.com was already 90% accessible from within China (by Google’s own records), so you might argue they didn’t even try to increase relevance but only speed. Still, there’s at least a theoretical issue where search engine creators may feel they’ll either be blocked significantly, or are “forced” to agree to make their results less relevant (by their own standards).

*****Of course, it may be an even smarter decision if all you want to do is make money to do care about the user first (just look at Google’s success partly based on their user-centric interfaces), but that’s another issue.

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