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Paul Haahr, a top lead Google engineer in search, said on Twitter that Google indeed has a bias, if you want to call it that, towards "scientific truth" in their search results. He said this is documented in section 3.2 of the quality raters guidelines where it says "High quality information pages on scientific topics should represent well established scientific consensus on issues where such consensus exists."
It is an interesting conversation had between Paul Haahr and an SEO named Josh Bachynski about the topic of Google and their featured snippets showing truth and what is the real truth. Let me share some of it here:
Lots in this, but, of course, we don't claim truth. We to aspire to provide good information and we explain a lot about what we mean by that in our Rater Guidelines; notably, section 3 on what page quality means, with details in the following sections. https://t.co/llmUQJbkQ8
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) May 23, 2018
We definitely do have a bias towards, for example, what you call "Scientific Truth," where the guidance in section 3.2 says "High quality information pages on scientific topics should represent well established scientific consensus on issues where such consensus exists." pic.twitter.com/AqtQ2nKjb5
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) May 23, 2018
It's the decision we've made: we need to be able to describe what good search results are. Those decisions are reflected in our product. Ultimately, someone who disagrees with our principles may want a different product; there may be a market niche for them.
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) May 23, 2018
I think it’s the only realistic model if you want to build a search engine. You need to know what your objective in ranking is. Evaluation is central to the whole process and that needs clarity on what “good” means. If you don’t describe it, you only get noise.
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) May 24, 2018
I claim no knowledge of “The Good.” But what I’d ask you is, when Google search results are bad, is it because they’re too much like our what our guidelines have us aspire to or because they’re falling short of our aspirations?
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) May 24, 2018
Fun topic one can debate on for days, so I will end it right here.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
