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Google cranks up the Consensus Engine
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Manufacturing isn't dead - it just went to Mountain View
By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 12th December 2008 19:38 GMT
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Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.
A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. "



http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/12/googlewashing_revisited/