A story in the Register portends to expose Google's willingness to manipulate its own Algo generated results with people generated editorial.
..technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. "
For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.
But this is not anything new. Google has always used its human power to correct huge mistakes in its algo. However, it has also always preferred to see manipulations and tricks as algo errors and something that needed to be fixed not by its people but by its algorithm.
More interesting however, is the shift of journalistic power from the papers to Google as reporters follow Googles lead instead of leading the news:
...it's becoming all too clear at The Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centered on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in.
So who is creating the news then? The Register says in the end it could be Google leading to a very Orwellian news feed.
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