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Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
One of the things that I find interesting about Google is that when they were making (and now they are making) a ton of money, they didn't split the profits between investors (either via buybacks or dividends) and staff, they just hired orders of magnitude more people.
In finance, things are very different. If the bank is making a lot more money, as much money as possible gets used to pay everyone (those at the top much more than those below, of course) a lot more. As Warren Buffett famously noted, banks are run as much for employees as for shareholders, and indeed more for the former. Investment banking teams hire, for the most part, the minimum possible number of people they can get away with without making shorter decks/worse pitches than the next bank. That's one of several reasons behind the 100 hour week. Everyone is mostly happy with this, nobody wants to halve their bonus so they can work a few fewer hours.
Google is also famously a company that many have declared is run more in the interests of its employees (engineers described as coasting, practically retired, etc) than its shareholders, and the only two of the latter who matter are off in Hawaii on the beach anyway.
But at Google, they've spent 15 years printing money, and instead of just paying all the engineers $5m a year each, they decided to hire 25,000 more engineers to make failed products. It seems like such a weird failure of incentives. Were the early employees just so rich from their equity stakes that they didn't care about money anymore? Why did they agree to hire so many more people instead of just paying themselves from the unbelievable rents they extracted from the rest of the economy? Did Sergey and Larry really want that many more people on payroll?
It's finance that's weird here. The finance people are in it for the money as an end in itself. Most management types are in it largely for power, and that means more people under them. They certainly don't want to pay individual contributors more; there's no upside, and the ICs (who also aren't finance people in it for money as an end in itself) might take the money and retire early leaving them scrambling for more workers.
Managers that want to deal with less bullshit from low quality employees would like to pay as much as possible to attract top talent. Since it’s not their money, they don’t really care that they might be able to get away with lower tiers of talent.
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