Newly obtained documents show Google maintains a “news blacklist” and manipulates its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials.
The Daily Caller reported one of the documents shows the “XPA news blacklist” is governed by two official policies, the “misrepresentation policy” and the “good neighbor policy.”
Google’s Trust & Safety team is “in charge of updating the blacklist as when there is a demand,” reads one of the documents shared with the Daily Caller.
“The deceptive_news domain blacklist is going to be used by many search features to filter problematic sites that violate the good neighbor and misrepresentation policies,” states the policy document.
The document notes the policy was approved by, among others, Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, who reports directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.
The policy also was approved by Paul Haahr, a software engineer whose bio on Google’s internal network Moma indicates he is also involved in “fringe ranking: not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.”
“The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product. It will not cause a demotion in the organic search results or de-index them altogether,” reads the policy document obtained by the Daily Caller.
That means targeted sites will not be removed from the “ten blue links” portion of search results. But the blacklist applies to most of the other search features, including “top news” and videos.
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2019/04/documents-show-google-manually-manipulates-search/#MC86kis4vMhWelex.99