I'm referring to my college friends. I work for Google, and my Googler friends are understandably biased; I don't include them in this sample. But I also went to a liberal arts college, and my friends there are fairly representative of educated young people in non-technical fields, and the same 2:1 ratio in favor of Google seemed to show up.
A non-Googler replying with the same take I was worried that was biased simply by being a Googler, rules out that the take can only be had if you have bias due to being a Googler (as does your take: we're both Googlers and have different opinions!)
Not bias, but rather a prior. If you know someone quit Google, finding out they disliked a lot of things about Google doesn't give you much more information.
That is extremely far from the case. These biases are in the eye of the beholder. People with opposite feelings about Google (or whatever the corp of the moment is) see exactly the opposite bias.
Nope. News.yc individuals have biases, often quite strong. Some are very pro-Google, and some anti-Google. It depends on the time, the article, etc. Definitely goes both ways.
And how much bias you see depends on where you are on the spectrum. You naturally tend to see the unbiased opinion as closer to your own POV.
This is what you said, and it's clearly biased because you work for Google. That is the definition of bias.
> Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information
There is no pro-Google bias. What is observable is passionate people who downvote any comment they disagree with, sometimes downvoting comments from the same author.
Search results by definition are quite biased - it's returning an ordered list not an unordered set. Googlers' personal biases can and do enter into those results, often in a subtle way where they feel they are being (from their perspective) unbiased. It's an automated system but it's still written by subjective humans.
I agree that every Googler will tell you that impartiality of search results is an overriding priority. It's the crucial tenet underpinning the entire edifice.
I think google should take a bit of its own advice here. Google "american scientists", "american mathematicians" and tell me how these are not hugely biased results. I work in NLP and there is no way you get this without forcing your data/algorithms to return these types of results.
This isn't a normative statement, just descriptive. Whether or not google should bias its results is a completely different discussion.
I guess that implicit in the article is the assumption that this self-selection effect hasn't changed much in the last 4-8 years. The author is careful to stick with like-to-like comparisons.
If on the other hand there is a trend away from Google among certain groups then that would seem to be a problem for Google's branding team! Perhaps there is a market here for a left-wary search engine, say DDG hooked up to conservapedia instead of wikipedia at the backend?
If you got all your information from this article you would be surprised that, for example, 82% of Americans have a favorable view of Google. It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school.
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