> The purpose of the tool is primarily to help you find and navigate the strange parts of the internet. Where, for sure, you'll find crack-pots, communists, libertarians, anarchists, strange religious cults, snake oil peddlers, really strong opinions.
and
> If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool.
Second result: "Ivermectin, a miracle drug against Covid
Ivermectin, a miracle drug against Covid. 100% effective as preventative and for early stage Covid. Over 90% cut in fatality rate for late-stage cases.
Yes, google returns results from the FDA, American Journal of Therapeutics pro Ivermectin study, WebMD, the CDC, the NIH, Wikipedia, the WHO, and New York Times.
Marginalia returns results from Wikipedia, a faculty member’s university blog regarding river blindness, a website called truthsummit promoting it as a miracle cure, a website called vaxxchoice promoting it as a cure, vitamindsstopcovid, etc.
I’d say the quality of the results are quite different.
The Google results tell you why Ivermectin is not a good replacement for vaccination against Covid, the Marginalia results tell you that Ivermectin is a miracle drug for treating Covid 19. Really shows how much technology has the power to change reality in today's world.
Part of what I wanted to show with this project is that there is no such thing as an objective search engine. Even seemingly irrelevant technological decisions drastically impact the narrative.
It's definitely not irrelevant. My first search time covid related because I knew the non-official, random person on the internet blog wouldn't have the money to create flashy sites.
Well the focus on text content isn't the only technical difference here. Google is obviously weighing hundreds of signals in its search results that your engine is not accounting for. These omitted signals are also relevant.
Google is actively fighting the spread of disinformation. You can see this clearly in the forced row of COVID PSA links on the YouTube front page that's been up for the last year regardless of whether you have any history viewing such content. There is manual intervention going on to prevent the garbage their normal algorithms will automatically surface. This is the greatest tragedy of the internet in that it allows people with crazy notions to find each other and build echo chambers with the aid of unbiased ML.
Certainly. And sometimes they're relevant in a good way, sometimes in a bad user-hostile way. Every search engine rquires discrimination and intelligent usage by the person doing the search, just in different areas.
Right, but that is still a technical decision on their side. They presumably don't sit down and have a meeting about what world view they should present. Well I hope they don't.
Ivermectin (Google): https://www.google.com/search?q=ivermectin
The difference in the overall _thrust_ of the results is remarkable.
Very interesting! Thanks for building it.