Is Google friendly to CAF in search queries?

[Athanasiy]

Previously, in past years, many factors underlying the authenticity of the search object played a role in search queries.
Authenticity and truthfulness, quality content, and many other “truthful” factors played a role in the search for information in Google.
Did any one tried to conduct research on the integrity and truthfulness of Google in the presentation of information? Is there not discrimination against Christians and religion in general in presenting truthful information in search engines?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Google is a secular system out to make money. Of course Google results don’t purport to put the best most correct Catholic answer first.

If it did we wouldn’t have to be constantly explaining to people that the Sisters of Carmel are in schism from the Catholic Church because every time someone googles “Brown Scapular”, Sisters of Carmel with their wrong information pop up first.

Not to mention that “Got Questions”, a known anti-Catholic site, often comes up in the first set of results when looking for a Catholic answer.

Catholic Answers, especially the forum, does come up a good number of times; however, the forum is not absolutely correct on everything since a lot of what’s posted here is driven by people’s opinions and agendas.

In short, no, Google isn’t reliable about bringing up "correct’ information for anything…that is why teachers presumably still teach students how to research a topic.

And anyone who would believe that Google would automatically put up truthful info on anything is incredibly naive and needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

 

[Athanasiy]

The main thing is that the adequacy, truthfulness and authenticity of the search should not be neglected in favor of dedirable propaganda or view.
Of course, I understand that in political staff, it is possible that for example the Arabs, Chinese, Russians have their own Internet resources that indulge their propaganda( though it is not fair to do that) but I really want that such a giant information assistant of a human beings, like Google still would not forget about the veracity of its information platform in search engines.

 

[Athanasiy]

Perhaps the Internet also needs a good Catholic lawyers, for it seems that the time comes when the Catholic/Christian Internet heritage is not at the top of the search, but somewhere at the end, and instead of truthful information, the reader will first have to get acquainted with criticism and attempts at denial.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Um, once again, it’s Google, a private company. It’s not the government.

Private company doesn’t owe us anything. If you don’t like the results Google puts up, don’t use it. And don’t buy its stock.

 

[angel12]

Did any one tried to conduct research on the integrity and truthfulness of Google in the presentation of information? Is there not discrimination against Christians and religion in general in presenting truthful information in search engines?

I often see CAF come up in the results when I do searches on any Catholic subjects. There seem to be a lot of unproven assumptions in this thread.

 

[Athanasiy]

I’m happy for you. I asked a question to read the opinions of others.

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

If I have a question about life, the universe or anything, I’ll put the word “Catholic” as my first word and CAF usually comes up in the first five choices.

 

[Athanasiy]

If you remember the fruitful forum discussion of past years, and for example you decided to see if it is indexed in the top of Google?
Do you see this discussion in the search top, or is it not on the first search page at all?

 

[ZMystiCat]

Disclaimer: I work for Google (though not Search), but this is merely my personal opinion.

With that said, I find Catholic Answers to appear a lot. It helps if I’m specifying that I want a Catholic position, and EWTN is probably the most common of all Catholic websites, but CA and CAF still come up enough that for a while I only knew of the site through Google searches.

Did any one tried to conduct research on the integrity and truthfulness of Google in the presentation of information?

I’m not aware of any hard research on actual statistics, and that would also be hard to do. If someone could get an assessment on how accurate the top sources are, then certainly Google would already be providing entirely reliable results, since they’d know how to do that. At best, you might be able to target a very limited subject, like results on an election during that election. However, I’m pretty sure that, in a general sense, the ones with the best numbers on Google’s reliability are the Search team, since they’re the ones bugs get sent to.

With that said, Google serves more as a portal to information, not a source itself. It’s there to make the world’s information available to you, and it tries to present the best* sources as early as possible, but you still need to be able to employ basic research principles, like critically reading multiple sources.

* And note that “best” doesn’t necessarily mean agreeable to you. I don’t know exactly how it works, but my guess is that for anything that doesn’t have a clear-cut answer, they’d try to provide the best sources for research, and that might include sources you disagree with. But at the end of the day, there’s absolutely no algorithm currently existing that can answer questions like, “Is God real?”

Is there not discrimination against Christians and religion in general in presenting truthful information in search engines?

No, at least not intentionally, and from what I’ve seen, they’d actually try to find ways to make Search more useful to Christians.

The very premise itself barely makes any sense. Google is a company that’s all about number of users and prides itself on having multiple billion-user products. It’s also the way that they make money. Given that, do you really think they’d want to alienate a religion that has over 1 billion followers among its largest branch alone?

If you remember the fruitful forum discussion of past years, and for example you decided to see if it is indexed in the top of Google?

In my experience, Google tends to aggressively prefer more recent results. The assumption isn’t without merit, but it does cause a disadvantage in that queries for stuff too old require a bit more work to get right, like explicitly filtering down to a certain time range, which Google supports.

Forums might also be a bit worse off since forums are generally not as reliable as primary sources or even more “official” third-party sources.

 

[Athanasiy]

In past centuries, for example, in order to defeat the enemy, armies and wars were needed, and now in the 21 century the authoritarian and totalitarian states pay attention to the influence of the Internet in their favor. The cost of propaganda is still less than the armament.
It is interesting to me that there are the worldviews competing with each other, and yet there is probably the invisible rivalry for truthful information even on Google.
For example, there are whole armies of information sources whose goal is to pursue a certain propaganda policy.
I think that in religious sphere the pro-gay movements compete with conservative views on human sexuality. There is world politics where people are more trying to learn about objectivity about presidential candidates, political blocs.
Objectivity and the ability to compare different opinions is really very important, but probably there is a force of influence that acts more spectacularly.
I mean that sharks (which easily devour small fish) exist not only in business and politics, but there are opinions in academic circles that are becoming more preferable.
Therefore, I was interested in the question of the “authoritative weight” of information in the search hierarchy

 

[Athanasiy]

I would like to add that I am not complaining about sharks in business. They are stronger, and they often have the best product, service, rating and feedback, but there are other factors under which a strong commerce absorbs fair enough/truthful but not solvent initiatives.

 

[Athanasiy]

Christians who have the honor to work for world brands are such a blessing.
On such a platform as Google, it became possible to identify the vices and depenndence of a person and expose( privately…by hints) or warn the human soul about porn addiction, game mania, perverse tendencies.
If trade brands collect information about a person in order to sell something, then Google’s algorithms in the case of a person’s corruption could be a teacher or a moral and ethical advisor, or a kind of a road signs for the driver on the road.
Yes, for example, representatives of the services of visual sexual entertainment defend the right to exist, but the “moral and ethical contribution of the Google algorithms” could, on the other hand, help a person to get out of the pit of vices and dependencies.

 

[ZMystiCat]

now in the 21 century the authoritarian and totalitarian states pay attention to the influence of the Internet in their favor

If you haven’t, you might want to look into Project Dragonfly, which was a Chinese-specific search engine Google considered. (Google pulled out of China years ago over concerns with the government’s censorship requirements.) While I know some people in Google who were in favor of it, a lot of employee outrage leaked to the press. Eventually, Google scrapped the project. (I think there’s been some conspiracy theories that it is ongoing, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it is.)

And if you really want something to keep you awake at night, consider that Google’s main competitor, Bing, was operating in China during that whole debacle.

It is interesting to me that there are the worldviews competing with each other, and yet there is probably the invisible rivalry for truthful information even on Google.

I think this is a given. As already mentioned, Google doesn’t present information of its own. It serves as a way to get at information, and that includes the major ongoing debates and all the digital ink spilled for their sake. It’s also not exactly clear how to present that information. Consider:

• How do you remain unbiased when the source is inherently biased (e.g. media bias towards liberal positions)? Do you act unbiased and let the results remain skewed, or do you act biased and hope it removes the skew?
• How do you address algorithms that have found offering more extreme views is preferable? What views are too extreme? Do you act in a biased manner against those views? Among Google products alone, I don’t think there’s a single answer. YouTube seems to let the algorithm have at it while Google News seems to prefer avoiding extremes entirely. (This is based entirely on my experience with the products, not anything I’ve seen at the company.)

These are a couple tough questions I’ve talked over with coworkers at times. Yeah, we’re not on Google Search, but they’re still interesting questions. They aren’t so much technical as ethical, and it doesn’t offer the easy solutions a math problem might provide.

Oh yeah, and I haven’t even gotten into how finances play a role in this, but that’s a whole other can of worms…