[Search-l] NPOV for Search?

[Jimmy Wales]

Bryan Bishop wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 January 2008, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> Relevance and neutrality are not opposed goals at all.  The problem
>> with the Google results in this case is that they fail to cover the
>> wide range of what the user might be looking for.  That is to say,
>> their lack of neutrality gives rise to a lack of relevance.
> 
> Wait, wait, are you suggesting that the users should be forced into 
> neutrality when making a search? I don't know how practical it is to 
> want every user of a search engine to change just for the interface. :) 

:-)

No no, I don't think I am saying that.

I am saying that I think users want neutrality as a key factor in what 
people consider to be quality search results.

My guess is if we went out and polled people in the following fashion, 
we would see overwhelming support for neutrality as a guiding principle:
(I changed the example company from Google to Yahoo because I am not 
picking on Google!)

Agree or Disagree with the following statements:
-- Yahoo should return positive websites about political candidates that 
Yahoo management likes and negative websites about candidates they don't 
like

-- Yahoo should return only positive websites about Barack Obama, and 
push all the criticism to the next page, because Barack is popular and 
people like him

-- Yahoo should return a balanced set of options for searches on 
political candidates, including some which are positive, some which are 
negative, and some which are neutral.  The important thing is that they 
be of good quality: informative in some fashion to the end user.

My guess is that for almost everyone, the third option is more what we 
think about, when we think about quality search results.