From a former San Jose Mercury News Reporter, now turned freelancer, we learn that it’s hard for even hunting bloggers. Apparently Google’s policies “doesn’t allow the promotion of … violent concepts” including “the promotion of self-harm and violence against people or animals.” with an exception that it’s just fine for “self-defense, hunting and sporting events.” To me that still says guns, knives, and weapons are a no no, but Google is OK with events related to lawful activities with these items.
Not that remarkably surprising for a company that has it’s two big US sites being in Mountain View and New York. There used to be a time when tech people were almost universally “leave me the hell alone” types, but with the Gen Y and beyond, it seems to have taken a turn for the left. I’m thinking that might have to do with computers becoming less about ones and zeros (the realm of engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists) into a creative industry, not all that remarkably different from arts and philosophy.
This is a problem with a search engine that decides what should and should not be searched for.
Errr, this has nothing to do with their search engine. They are fanatical about not biasing it and losing people’s trust in it. Aside from whining from people trying to game the engine or instances where that’s been successfully done (the so called Google bomb), I’ve never seen a credible report of illegitimately biased results.
(Which I should note is different from personalizing results. E.g. they “know where I live” so various results and advertisements are reasonably biased to give me local results and they know other things, so the results I get on a search might not match your’s. You can explicitly turn this off, BTW.)
Computers stopped being about just ones and zeros and Scientists when the Mac arrived and “socially conscious” graphic designers got behind the wheel…to engineer-up a pretty digital world with gorgeous fonts and lush typography and sell first-person shooter-gamez.
Also why I use Meta Crawler, you get results from several sources…..
All of my browsers are set to use Bing search. Suck it, Google!
If only Bing were any good. I’ve tried it in a serious attempt to replace Google. But I often find myself going to Google because I can find what I am looking for faster.
Well, you are certainly writing off all artists and philosophers. Are you only referring to their mass-market realizations, or did you mean to say that?
Yeah … but Google is the antithesis of such companies. From their building and running their own datacenters (a not so secret of their success) to the despair of designers who work for the company (but often not for long), since Google tests everything, including e.g. the width of a blue line, they’re very much a ones and zeroes company.
But irredeemably Left, as has been noticed by e.g. what they do and don’t celebrate in their custom one day logos.
Art today is the field of cashing-in graphically and musically on the latest trends, it’s a layer of fashionable but non-productive effort, and so is philosophy today with Deepak Chopra-Oprah and Wayne Dwyer – and after all the evidence of destruction is in, Socialism and Progressiveism are still popular philosophies.
In my experience as a Silicon Valley tech person, most tech people (engineers) still are ‘leave me the hell alone’ types. But these types of policies on ad revenue are made by the people in marketing.
http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Marketing
I should note that Microsoft’s Bing and related advertising (including Yahoo) also do not allow guns and firearms related advertising. The only difference between the two is that Google catches it up front before you submit the ad, whereas MS pulls the ads retroactively.
I mainly just figure MS isn’t as obviously in bed with Obama as Google is.