The "dangerous precedent" you're talking about was set by the Google web spam team a long time ago.
Yep. If you wanted to look at one particular event, several years ago a major Nazi site ranked #1 for [Jew], because the people who care about [Jew] and were early adopters on the Internet happened to be Nazis. Google, at the time, refused to hand-edit that, and instead put PSA AdWords ads against the SERP for [Jew] saying "While we're certainly not Nazis, the algorithm decrees that the most relevant result for this search is, regrettably, a Nazi site." [Edit to add: Wow, the page did not linkrot: http://www.google.com/explanation.html ]This was a deeply controversial result internally and externally at the time.
Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.
Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.
I disagree. We certainly like to fix bad results, but not manually. There's a very narrow range of things Google is willing to do manually in search. One of them is taking action on sites that are found to have violated the webmaster guidelines, but banning a result from a query just because it's embarrassing isn't something we do.
For instance, in that example you cite, jewwatch.com is still at number 2 for [jew].
I concede immediately that I'm oversimplifying the issue. Google doesn't keep the "problem" Santorum result at the top of the SERP simply because they don't like Rick Santorum.
They're also (perhaps mostly) doing it to keep themselves out of the news, since the prevailing meme about that SERP now is "oh well, that's how the Internet works" and the result of a manual intervention would be a flood of news stories about an intervention Google probably doesn't want everyone knowing they do regularly.
I'm not sure whether he is right ,but I think that's his point(ie he believes that most similar problems get special tweaking and Santorum doeesn't for whatever reason)
Yep. If you wanted to look at one particular event, several years ago a major Nazi site ranked #1 for [Jew], because the people who care about [Jew] and were early adopters on the Internet happened to be Nazis. Google, at the time, refused to hand-edit that, and instead put PSA AdWords ads against the SERP for [Jew] saying "While we're certainly not Nazis, the algorithm decrees that the most relevant result for this search is, regrettably, a Nazi site." [Edit to add: Wow, the page did not linkrot: http://www.google.com/explanation.html ]This was a deeply controversial result internally and externally at the time.
Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.