Google News prominently displays quote from RP saying election can't be won

[adam1mc]

I just did a quick Google News search for "Ron Paul" and check out what appears a the very top of the screen.

Why would Google post that quote? I've never seen Google News post quotes for other individuals when I search for their names. And why this quote? Why not something from the book?


http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/5733/rpyc4.jpg

[Sandra]

I saw that too.

[Sandra]

Look at all the satire sites that have first page return results for "news". Satire sites are classified as entertainment, not news. Google is sooooo manipulating this.

[adam1mc]

Look at all the satire sites that have first page return results for "news". Satire sites are classified as entertainment, not news. Google is sooooo manipulating this.


All of my front page news stories are actually news... well excluding the stupid quote...

LATimes
NolanChart
NationBuilder
American Chronicle
News 8 Austin
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Indymedia Málaga, Spain

[Sandra]

Now it's down to one from The Spoof (UK). I was getting two from the Spoof and one from Wonkette.

From The Spoof: Ron Paul names new campaign manager! Gary 'Bullwinkle' Wilson!

[kahless]

Clearly Google has endorsed Obama. F Google.

[brandon]

Must be something new. Check out the quote from McCain. lol "oldness"

http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLR_enUS204US204&q=John%20Mccain&um=1&sa=N&tab=wn

[rpfan2008]

Now it's down to one from The Spoof (UK). I was getting two from the Spoof and one from Wonkette.

From The Spoof: Ron Paul names new campaign manager! Gary 'Bullwinkle' Wilson!

Exactly that happens to me..everyday.2spoofs ...on front page..daily...its very insulting imo

And regarding that quote...google always displays ..the most quoted sentence from all the news stories on that particular day related to searched words. But so far I have seen negative only quotes from only four personalities..Ron Paul/ Ahmedinezad/Chavez/Wright....

maybe we should start collectively documenting all the lies/bias of MSM...for future revolutionaries and us.

[tonyr1988]

Google is not manipulating the quotes, they are not doing anything anti-Paul. Their news service categorizes news articles that have quotes from Ron Paul, and displays one of them. They've got lots of Paul quotes:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&qsid=Xhn4NW4xUQMJ

No conspiracy, no intentional evil, nothing. If anything, it's the Columbia Missourian's fault for using that particular quote, not Google's.

[RonPaulwillWin]

Google likes Ron Paul....does everybody here really have that short of a memory?

[dannno]

Google is not manipulating the quotes, they are not doing anything anti-Paul. Their news service categorizes news articles that have quotes from Ron Paul, and displays one of them. They've got lots of Paul quotes:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&qsid=Xhn4NW4xUQMJ

No conspiracy, no intentional evil, nothing. If anything, it's the Columbia Missourian's fault for using that particular quote, not Google's.

How do you know? It's Google's private property, they can change the content of their site however they want.

[kahless]

Google is not manipulating the quotes, they are not doing anything anti-Paul. Their news service categorizes news articles that have quotes from Ron Paul, and displays one of them. They've got lots of Paul quotes:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&qsid=Xhn4NW4xUQMJ

No conspiracy, no intentional evil, nothing. If anything, it's the Columbia Missourian's fault for using that particular quote, not Google's.

Google has been known to manipulate Google News results. Just compare the selected quotations of conservative commentators to that of liberal-Democrat commentators on Google News.

Is Google Purging Conservative News Sites?
http://newsbusters.org/node/5477

Google dumps news sites that criticize radical Islam
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50323

[tonyr1988]

How do you know? It's Google's private property, they can change the content of their site however they want.

1) The burden of proof lies within the "lesser miracle." Given Google's track record with web searching, I would be much more likely to believe that they would not manipulate results. You need proof that Google is manipulating results, beyond posting a quote that you don't like.

2) Be mad at the newspaper that originally had the quote, not Google News.

3) Or, be mad at Ron Paul for saying it in the first place. If he didn't say it, it couldn't be quoted, right?

[maiki]

Google news is not editorialized in any way. It is random/based on algorithms. They do not hire people to be on news squad. Really.

[kahless]

Google news is not editorialized in any way. It is random/based on algorithms. They do not hire people to be on news squad. Really.

If you believe that then you believe that Samual Adams is the best beer in America since it says so on the bottle.

Results are based on algorithms that the staff manipulates. They remove pages from the crawler based on content. Read their TOS and the blogs of their tech staff. They will tell you all about it along with the Conservative webmasters that are pissed off that their content was blocked or removed from Google News based on content.

[rpfan2008]

Google news is not editorialized in any way. It is random/based on algorithms. They do not hire people to be on news squad. Really.

oh really!!

take an experiment

google Iran..go through first 10 pages or so, you will find that almost every news agency in the world has something to report on Iran; military, oil, other business , cultural, sports etc. from Washington Post,CSM, Reuters down to Novosti or Xinhua and most of the stories you will find in the mainstream press are not balant rhetoric and they are almost talking from a (more or less) neutral pov or at least trying to appear so. But if you look carefully starting from page 2 you will find only negative reportings have got pictures featured and stories from Israeli media sometimes just 'too obvious' propaganda are selectively highlighted over and over and over, everyday. That something I always notice. These ISraeli papers never get such prominence in any kind of other news(unless exclusively related to Israel).

Google is fueling the next war, its the same Fox News tactic, injected gradually and systematically on us.

And you are right about that algorithm, so you want us to believe that anything that can be called an algorithm is always trustworthy and will always do the just. There can't be any algorithm that can be skewed by the programmers, right?
This was your surrogated argument, isn't it?


TROLL 2.0

[Jeremy]

Clearly Google has endorsed Obama. F Google.

Google has not endorsed anybody. They don't do that.

[kahless]

Google has not endorsed anybody. They don't do that.

Just like:

Foxnews has not endorsed neo-conservatism and John McCain.

Keith Olbermann, Chris Mathews and pretty the NBC division (except for maybe guys like Pat Buchanan and some Hillary commentators) have not endorsed Obama.

At least have not done so with any official statement of endorsing any specific agenda or candidate but we all know where they stand.

[adam1mc]

Well regardless... I have sent google a short email using this form:
http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_news


I encourage others to send quick (POLITE) comments as well.

Doing a search of George Bush doesn't show any of the lame quotes that he has stated. Why is this 'quote' feature only showing on search results for "Ron Paul"?

[rpfan2008]

Well regardless... I have sent google a short email using this form:
http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_news


Doing a search of George Bush doesn't show any of the lame quotes that he has stated. Why is this 'quote' feature only showing on search results for "Ron Paul"?

"There are rumors in the Internets" - Dubya on Draft

[Knightskye]

Yeah, they're doing it with everybody now. I searched "John McCain" on Google News and it came up with this quote:


"They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another"

I'd say Dr. Paul's sounds logical, and Dr. Doolittle's sounds militant.

Oh, and I just found this one by searching for Joe Biden (http://www.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B2DVFC_enUS239&hl=en&ned=us&q=Joe+Biden&btnG=Search):


"This is bullshit. This is malarkey. This is outrageous. Outrageous for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset:and make this kind of ridiculous statement"

:D

[tonyr1988]

People are claiming that Google News is skewing media in favor of the liberal agenda, right? (otherwise, why would people claim Google is endorsing Obama, and that conservative "newspapers" are being unfairly removed?)

I did some searches. Here are the #1 results:

Iran: "McCain toughens attack on Obama's Iran stance"
Iraq: "Iraq army targets area near Sadr City as truce holds" (Iraq War is working != Obama)
Obama: "Clinton camp warns Obama against victory lap"

Speaking of Obama, here's the first Obama quote on Google News:


Obama's racial stereotype of the 'typical White person' and his view of the 'typical small town person.quoted as disparaging residents of small towns in Pennsylvania as being "like a lot of small towns in the Midwest" where "it's not surprising then they...

Back to searching:

John McCain: "McCain toughens attack on Obama's Iran stance"

Hey! That's the same article that first shows up when searching Iran! Those guys that are manually going through and editing all of these search results sure know how to make it look like a humanless algorithm is doing the searching...

-----------------------

The only argument I've seen so far is that "correlation = causation" (which is flawed in the first place), claiming that certain searches show obviously skewed results. Despite the fact that that isn't enough to prove you're right, I proved that even the correlation itself is wrong, because many searches bring conservative postings to the top.

So....what other (logical) argument is there that Google News is filtering search results (which is what the point of this thread seemed to be)? I'm willing to accept it if it's true, but no one has given proof of it.

[maiki]

And you are right about that algorithm, so you want us to believe that anything that can be called an algorithm is always trustworthy and will always do the just. There can't be any algorithm that can be skewed by the programmers, right?
This was your surrogated argument, isn't it?


The algorithm can be skewed, of course. I never said it was not a skewed algorithm... Or as another poster alluded to, that certain things aren't banned or whatnot on occasion. I said it is not editorialized, in the sense that one person/committee is picking an choosing individual quotations or specific news pieces for every query. It is automated, even if the automatization is not to your liking, and I don't think they picked this particular quote for RP.

Why are you calling me a troll? For reporting back to you what I have heard people at google tell me about how their different apps are handled? Google, as any corporation, is concerned with 1 thing: their bottom line. Which is advertising, in their case. Advertising based on accurate data queries. Or people would switch to a different search engine. If you don't like google, be a good free-market capitalist and go use yahoo! news or some other news aggregator of your choice.

ETA: I didn't actually have an argument. I was actually just reporting what Google employees have told me about how News works: they do not editorialize it. They don't hire people to do that and the individual programmer is too busy don't other crap to bother. If anything, I was saying that complaining isn't going to do any good since: the quotation is true, and nobody is going to change a whole algorithm on one search query pissing you off.

[maiki]

Plus, the original poster was *asking* why did google pick that quotation. My post was replying: they didn't. An algorithm that picks quotations for everything picked that quote, and regardless of what "bent" the algorithm might have, they weren't doing it to return that specific quotation on that specific query.

[dannno]

maiki and tonyr1988...

You keep asking for proof.. what makes you think Google would offer up solid proof of their bias? Wouldn't that destroy the entire point?

It's like saying the people involved in the 9/11 attacks didn't leave any proof that they were behind it, so it must not be them. Why would they leave the evidence behind? That's what the cover-up was for. You can't look at this like a 2D object, it is multidimensional. You also have to look for patterns, and you have to look at multiple pieces of evidence at once. If you focus on one piece of evidence like you are... well you know the saying.. you can't see the forest through the trees.

[maiki]

maiki and tonyr1988...

You keep asking for proof.. what makes you think Google would offer up solid proof of their bias? Wouldn't that destroy the entire point?



Proof? What? Google doesn't need to offer you proof of anything because they do not owe you anything. They are a search engine, and if the results don't suit your needs, go use another one. You are free to do so.

I was sharing information friends of mine at google offered in goodwill in a casual conversation. You can choose to believe or reject that information as you please. :) I was trying to be informative towards the OP.