Do Google’s Search Results Represent Your View of the World?

On a recent drive to work, I heard an article on the Today programme about a article in the British Medical Journal that said that people Googling for articles on suicide were more likely to find sites that advised the reader how to take his own life, as opposed to ones from the Samartians and other similar organisations.

When I first heard the speaker on the Today programme discuss this, but first reason was, “Well, this is easy – Google can just increase the PageRank on the Samaritan’s site so that it comes top.” But on reflection, I don’t think this issue is anywhere near that easy.

In this article, I’m not intending to advocate any particular viewpoint – rather my intention is to lay out some of my thoughts on this. I will refer to “pro” and “anti” sites. Generally can pick your “pro” and “anti”, whether it’s about smoking, reducing carbon emissions or the Easter Bunny, I believe the arguments are the same.

There has been a recent trend in the IT community of starting to think of Google as some sort of deity-like entity that has enormous power by virtue of the fact that it controls information. Moreover, it controls how that information is presented based what should be roughly representative of the audience. Although there are some tricks that you can work on Google to get your page listings higher, generally the organic listings (i.e. the ones that are not sponsored) are based on how many links are pointed at a particular page.

If you assume for the moment that half of the pages related to suicide are pro-suicide and the other half or anti-, the fact that the pro sites appear top would imply that Google’s audience would rather read about pro than anti sites. This isn’t quite this easy because Google’s PageRank is based on how many people write, not how people read. (In order to create links in, you have to write something – even if it’s just a simple “Hey, read this page” comment.) In essence, if pro sites appear on top, pro should be representative of the population’s view. Google artificially changing the ranking to so that the anti sites appear top would appear to turn their back of representation of the people’s view in favour of the view that they felt was politically expedient.

Google has in the past changed a site’s ranking based on what they felt was best for their own organisation. There was a time when searching would yield a lot of blog comments on a topic of varying quality. Google came under fire for this quite badly. Their solution was to artificially boost the PageRank of Wikipedia with the aim that Wikipedia’s editorial structure should increase the quality of results.

My knee-jerk reaction to the pro-suicide site issue ignored the rights of people looking to take their own life for whatever reason. Whatever my personal views were, if I had been someone listening to the Today programme on that morning would have gone to work and filled out whatever form I needed to fill out to give the Samartian’s site a PageRank of 10? The point is that I might have done, and where does that leave Google in terms of its responsibility to the public?

What seems like an eternity ago now in the dotcom days people used to talk about the Internet as a frontier and users as a community looking to make their own rules. What we have today within Google could by some be regarded as “judge, jury and executioner” of access to public information. I wonder if as we mature as a society where the gateway to most information is through the Internet and at the moment particularly through Google whether some legislation is required to ensure some public visibility whenever Google changes organic listings to suit whatever and whosoever ends it’s trying to suit.

- Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

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