Delete comment from: Google Operating System
The notion of 'bias' is quite subtle, and all the commenters are right in some way.
I assume there's no isGoogleProperty variable in Google's ranking algorithm, so in that sense there's no deliberate bias at Google.
But bias can creep in from many sources. Google's 10,000 raters may represent a fairly broad population, but I'm still sure they have different biases than Microsoft's 10,000 raters. Unless Google and Microsoft have decided to randomly sample from the same pool of qualified candidates, the two groups' biases are unavoidable.
Or take away the raters, let's say the search engines have ranking algorithms than learn from the users' clickthroughs. It'd make sense that people searching for 'mail' on Yahoo tend to click on Yahoo Mail, and so its algorithm boost the ranking of that. Is this bias bad? It's just a statistical learning of the desires of the different user bases.
And there are other kinds of biases too. I've written a recent blog post on it. See Content creators and consumers have different biases
Jul 24, 2007, 4:34:00 AM
Posted to Search Engines and Favoritism