Google says it cannot change results

Google says it cannot change results: "What 'manual changes to the results' are depends on the precise context of the statement. It wouldn't necessarily include deleting spammy sites from the index.

Agree 100% - the key word is 'results' By 'results', they mean the sites that make it to the pool of sites to be displayed to the public - they say nothing about what goes on before that happens. "

Google Guy:(same forum)
I walked over to see David Krane and asked him about it, because I had a hunch that David was talking about the results for this particular search (the word "jew") and not our overall system. And that's the correct explanation.
To give some background: people write us all the time to say that they dislike or disagree with a particular set of search results. For example, at one point someone wrote in and claimed that one of the search results for Martin Luther King was a revisionist history and wasn't accurate. Should Google go and remove that result by hand? Who gets to decide whether a result deserves to be in the top 10? You can see where the slope gets slippery really quickly when you start bringing value judgments about the content of the site into the mix.

So historically Google has very strongly tried to follow a policy of letting our algorithmic search results stand as they are; we put our efforts much more into improving search by writing better algorithms instead of trying to fix a smaller set of searches by hand. We have a quite small set of circumstances that can result in taking manual action: things like a valid legal request (e.g. a DMCA complaint), spam and things outside our quality guidelines (e.g. off-topic porn for a person's name), and a very small amount of security-related stuff (e.g. credit card numbers on a web page). Other than that, we do our best to let our algorithms work out the results on their own. I think that's the right approach, and I think most of our users would prefer that instead of lots of hand-editing.

Does that mean every search is perfect? Of course not. With 200+ million searches a day, there will be some searches that aren't as good as they can be. But when a bad search is pointed out to us, we look to how to improve our algorithms instead of doing some one-off change.


"Isn't the traditional method of dealing with web sites containing such material (race hate) to contact the hosting company / owner and take it from there?

I'm sure that this site shows up in Yahoo! and other search engines, so why put all the emphasis on Google to sort it out?

It's like telling one tv station to stop reporting on the conflict in Iraq. It doesn't stop the others and it certainly doesn't stop the conflict."