Googling "Idiot". A field test.

Google "Idiot."

Question, by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren: 

"Right now, if you Google the word  'idiot' under images a picture of Donald Trump comes up. How would that happen?"

The answer, by Google CEO Sundar Pichel: 

"Any time you type in a key word, as Google, we've gone out and crawled billions of pages and ranked them according to 200 signals, things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. We evaluate to objective guidelines."

I decided to do my own field test. I Googled "Idiot".  Up came Trump.

My results.

The question U.S. Rep. Lofgren asked assured that the search results would stay that way, with Trump's image. My own field test further perpetuates this result because I clicked on one link on the left side (as is shown by the fact that it is in red, not blue.) My little click confirmed that people were finding the association meaningful and apparently useful and were using the result--one of the 200 factors that put it there in the first place.

New events might change the result. If Beyonce were to release a new song called Idiot, about some former boyfriend, for example, and it were to become a hit, then the search results would change. Beyonce would come up. Or the old boyfriend. But for now, idiot equals Trump. 

We users create Google's results. We also create our own personal results.  

My results are different from other people's results. Google knows everything about me--or at least of my linked computers. When I click "Medford weather" I get the weather for Medford, Oregon, not the Medford in Massachusetts or New Jersey.  On my tenth day in Cambridge, Massachusetts (about six miles from Medford, Massachusetts), when I searched for "Medford weather" I got the weather for Medford, Massachusetts. Google knew my location, of course. I had used Google Maps to locate a Harvard building. It wasn't spying on me in a malicious way. It just wanted to be useful and relevant, and after nine days its 200 factors updated to think I would be more interested in the weather where I physically was, not where I was from.

That is apparently how Google works.

Heads up. Google knows everything. 

Whatever privacy we have comes from the fact that they don't care about us. They just want advertisements to be relevant, so when we make an idle search for "Toyota Camry" the auto dealers in our vicinity would know we might be interested in a car, so the people selling Toyotas, Honda Accords, Ford Fusions, etc. have ads next to me the next time I am browsing. 

Disney Pocahontas

The big danger is not bias. People intentionally choose bias, which is why some people watch Fox, others don't. Bias works in every direction. When I Google the word "Pocahontas" the seventh item that comes up is a story about Trump mocking Elizabeth Warren with the name. Trump's trolling comes in behind stories of the historical Pocahontas and the Disney movie of that name.  This isn't Google bias. Were it not for the movie, then Trump-Warren would get higher play. If Trump supporters want Warren moved up the ladder some Republican officeholder merely needs to call Trump a genius for teasing Warren with the name "Pocahontas" and Fox needs to put the word in a website headline, and the Trump-Pocahontas story would move up, possibly displacing Disney. 

The dangerous thing about Google is privacy. Google doesn't care about me, but advertisers do. I assume that local car dealers want to sell me cars. Google's business model is to make the fact that I might be interested in a car available to advertisers.

Still, it just seems weird and invasive. My browsing isn't private. I may start getting ads from car dealers. Or from Disney, wondering if I want to rent a movie.