[Search-l] [canonizers] Fwd: Re: NPOV for Search?

[Jimmy Wales]

Bryan Bishop wrote:
> Somewhat. It struck me immediately that when they started talking about 
> NPOV, or neutral point of view, that search and NPOV *do not* go 
> together. There's no way that you can be neutral when you are 
> searching. You're crawling contexts, you have opinions, you want to 
> find other opinions. 

I wonder if my explanation in the previous email was helpful in terms of 
explaining how I think NPOV works for search.

> After all. The scoring algorithm on the search engine *demands* that it 
> is no longer a neutral point of view. That's the entire idea of ranking 
> in the first place. So they can't say they want NPOV. ;)

I don't think this is true, really.

We can understand this with some really simple hypothetical cases.

Suppose I go to a search engine and I search for "Barack Obama" and I 
get all positive or neutral pages.  And then suppose I search for 
"Hillary Clinton" and I get all negative pages.  I think we can say that 
neither of those search results is good and, intentionally or 
unintentionally, this search engine as a whole has a bias.

Rather, neutrality would mean that I get good quality pages from all 
reasonable perspectives in a debate.  Yes, crackpot opinions might show 
up further down (page 2, page 4, lower still perhaps).  But I want to be 
given a balanced selection of good web pages.

--Jimbo