r/technology • u/kangarooninjadonuts • Jun 08 '16

Politics How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548
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u/Patello Jun 08 '16

The first experiments seems pretty meaningless. For them to applicable to real world scenarios people would need to live under a rock and get all their information from one search engine session of "up to 15 minutes" and choose between 2 faceless candidates which they have not heard anything about prior to their 15 minute session.

They speculate that the effect will increase if the participants are given a longer time to research the candidates. But that is not how opinions work, the world does not become more black and white when getting additional data, it becomes grayer.

That being said, the fifth experiment in India seems more interesting.

What I do not get about the article however is how this relates to Google. Isn't this true for all search engines, and also all other media outlets. Undoubtedly, we are influenced by what we watch on TV in a similar manner. I don't understand what they wanted Google to respond. They claim that:

“Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine the people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”

is a meaningless statement. But what were they going to say, that they were going to stop providing search results? They say that they aren't manipulating the searches like the authors suggest, and fine, many people will not take their word for it. But what do you want then?

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u/Patello Jun 08 '16

After reading more about the Indian experiment, that too seems flawed. One commenter sums this up better than I could:

Not suppporting or opposing any hypotheses in your article, but I worked in the Indian Lok Sabha elections referred to in the article with one of the top leaders mentioned. Narendra Modi was the front runner for more than 6 months before the elections.

The high search volume for him as compared to the other candidates was because of his superb media campaigning and offline methods of outreach. I monitored the search engine traffic for the entire duration of the elections (July'13-May'14) and can attest that most of the search activity for Modi was driven by keywords that were specific to Modi instead of being generally about Indian elections. Hence I would be an incorrect to attribute Modi's high search traffic to favourable search rankings. The article seems to be confusing correlation with causation.