I was listening to the Kim Komando show today on my car radio.
A conservative woman came on, and said she had a large following on Pinterest, but received almost no hits from Google. She said she thought she was being discriminated against by Google because she was a Conservative, even though her articles were not political, but were about food.
Kim listened, commended her on how much of a following she had, then explained that she was probably not getting hits because she was not linked, to use Kim's term, to 'credible" sources. Sources like the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Huffington Post, and Yahoo!
If I would have had coffee, I would have choked on it. Half the country finds those sources to be completely biased to the left.
Does Kim know something we do not? Probably. She is the self proclaimed "Digital Goddess".
Consider, if your blog or website is limited in the hits it can get, by Google, based on how many leftist sources you link to, can it become much more biased?
Not much. This effectively blocks Google customers from the thoughts of half the content creators on the Internet. It is a way to gatekeep using algorithms. Google controls about 70% of the searches on the Internet.
This is thought control that is invisible and insidious.
If anyone has access to a transcript of the Kim Komando show from 26 August, I would love to have exact quotes rather than use my faulty memory.
Others likely know much more about this than I do. Is it widely known? Has Google always discriminated on political ideology rather than on the number of hits? Is it based on the advertising dollars it brings in? Special deals with the New York Times, Huffington Post, Yahoo?
All of the above?
©2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
Gun Watch
Thank God for Leo LaPorte!
ReplyDelete(The Tech Guy)
If you're knowingly ignorant but try to "act" as if you're wise, eventually your act will fail you because of your ignorance.
ReplyDeleteShe's referring to Google's original PageRank algorithm, which counts the number of other pages that link to a piece of content. It doesn't count the number of other pages a piece of content links to.
ReplyDeletePageRank is not a score an author can directly manipulate by linking out to lots of other references. It depends upon other authors discovering the piece and referring to it by linking to it, thus indicating those other authors thought it was a significant enough contribution to cite.