昨天WSJ的头条大字报,占了周六Exchange栏目的三页纸,好不容易读完了,分享一下我自己的摘要:
网络版本: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results-11573823753
Google用了编辑的方法改变用户的搜索排序
- 靠“人工”智能(真正的私人contractors)选择他们喜好的排序,以此为标准更新搜索(Zack Langley of Lionbridge Technologies Inc.的表述;“Mr. Langley was given hundreds of real search results and told to use his judgment to rate them according to quality, reputation and usefulness, among other factors.”; “Mr. Langley said it seemed like Google wanted him to change content on search so Google would have what he called plausible deniability about making those decisions. He said contractors would get notes from Lionbridge that he believed came from Google telling them the “correct” results on other searches.”)
- 靠内部的“go/bad reporting system”人工干预算法排序(“how do vaccines cause autism”的例子)
- 有一些网站在blacklists中 ("The Gateway Pundit" & "The United West");有一些网站被人工提高或减低排序(abortion的例子;conservative的网站和blog) ("Google’s shifting policies on interference—and its lack of transparency about them—inevitably force employees to become arbiters of what is acceptable, a dilemma that opens the door to charges of bias or favoritism.")
- 政府 2016年以后要求了大量的人工干预移除一些搜索结果 (“Nearly 78% of those removal requests have been since the beginning of 2016”)
- Google不再强调free expression (“Google’s culture of publicly resisting demands to change results has diminished, current and former employees said.”)
编辑的重灾区是“auto-complete feature”
- 因该是人工删除了一些联想词 ("less inflammatory than those of the other engines")
- 有人工制定的blacklists
Google的人工编辑更偏好大公司
- 这个其实有非常严重的anti-competitive的问题,以此为理由其实可以要求对google进行oversight或者拆分...(“engineers opted to tilt results to favor prominent businesses over smaller ones, based on the argument that customers were more likely to get what they wanted at larger outlets. ”)
- 大客户会收到更多的信息帮助他们提高搜索排序 (“Some very big advertisers received direct advice on how to improve their organic search results, a perk not available to businesses with no contacts at Google”)
- 对大公司的更新更快 (“Google updates its index of some sites such as Facebook and Amazon more frequently, a move that helps them appear more often in search results”)
- 也可以打压大公司, 比如Ebay,让他们屈服 (“Google told the company it had made a decision to lower the ranking of a large number of eBay pages that were a big source of traffic.”)
- 甚至可以不给理由地干掉小公司 (DealCatcher的例子)
其他:
- Facebook做得更过分(“have taken a more aggressive approach, manually removing problem content and devising rules around what it defines as misinformation. ”)
- 描述了怎么样可以提高google排序的方法(比如freshness,langurage,location,time staying,等等)