Google’s top results for “Did the Holocaust happen” now expunged of denial sites

Several days after Google put a search ranking change into place, the first page of results for “did the holocaust happen” now appears to be entirely free of denial sites.

The algorithm change happened earlier this week. As we covered, it caused the Stormfront denial site that was ranking tops for that search to slip to the second spot, bumped behind the authoritative US Holocaust Memorial Museum site. Now Stormfront is entirely gone while USHMM remains:

Stormfront has not been banned from Google. It still has listings in the search engine (as is the case at Microsoft’s Bing search engine). It’s just no longer in the top results for this query. It does appear about midway down on the second page of results.

By the way, these are the results I see when logged out of Google and using “incognito” mode in Chrome, as to avoid any search history influencing them. I see this on both desktop and on my iPad. Using my iPhone, going through my mobile provider and using private mode in Safari, I see slightly different results but ones that still omit Stormfront.

These are signs that the results aren’t just unique to me. However, they could vary for other people, especially for those outside the US.

The fix that didn’t fully work

Right after the change, Google’s results were inconsistent. Stormfront occasionally would return to the top spot. Often, it was in number two spot, bumped only because our own story on the situation pushed it down. As often as not, the USHMM site was showing up behind Stormfront. It’s not what would be expected, if Google’s fix was working as promised. 

Debate over whether the fix is real

The failure for the promised fix to stick several days after Google confirmed it suggested that it wasn’t actually real. Indeed, our own news editor Barry Schwartz wrote on his personal Search Engine Roundtable blog that he didn’t feel like there was a change, something that the Guardian picked up on. It quoted him saying that it seemed like a Google PR stunt:

Barry Schwartz, the founder of Search Engine Roundtable, a long-standing industry site, said: “There is no evidence of any change to the algorithm. We track these things very carefully and there’s nothing to suggest they have done anything.”

When asked why he thought Google had made the announcement at this time, he said: “It just seems like it must be a PR thing. That’s the only explanation I can see.”

I have immense respect for Barry, but no, I don’t think it was just a PR stunt. And yes, there are other explanations. Nor will my view be a surprise to him, as we had our own discussion internally earlier this week in a Slack thread. I’ll repost my view that I gave to him:

This is absolutely not because there’s just new news articles going in. I’ve been looking at this query for over a week now. The core sites in it fluctuate, sometimes radically and by platform. And that wasn’t the case before. Moreover, there’s absolutely no reason for them to play a PR game here. They already said they weren’t going to change it quickly. So why on earth claim to do something they didn’t actually do on the back of normal fluctuations? That just leaves them vulnerable for all the other yet-to-be-discovered queries. I do think they’ve done something. It’s just pretty weak.

To be clear, Google is playing a PR game in pushing a fix for this, assuming you believe they really did make a change. But they’re also pushing a fix, again if you believe they did this, because they are honestly disturbed at very high levels about the results, as I previously covered.

What they’re not doing, in my opinion, is just saying they fixed something because the natural flux of listings for this search have changed. It would be a stupid thing to do after they largely bought time for themselves by saying they wanted to solve the issue but wanted to do it in a comprehensive manner that works for a wide variety of searches, something that would take time.

Claiming a fix when there isn’t one just makes the PR issue worse, especially when the Guardian reporter who first brought attention to the issue, Carole Cadwalladr, isn’t going to stop the pressure if this particular search changes. She (and others) are going to keep looking at range of problematic search results, such as one she tweeted earlier this week:

View image on Twitter

This is not the answer you’d expect from Google if it was, as so many news reports have now said, skewed toward supporting some strange alt-right or right-wing or anti-minority view of the world. It’s also not the site you’d expect to be in the top two answers if Bing were perfect, which is the impression you can also get reading some articles:

Instead, what explains both of the examples above is what I’ve been saying: search is hard. That’s not as clickbaity as dashing out a fast article that Google (and solely Google) has horrible results for whatever will be the hot topic of the day. But that’s the situation as I see it, as a 20-year veteran of covering the search space.

Dealing with the rise of fake news and the post-truth world isn’t easy. It’s not going to be a fast fix. I think Bing’s done a better job than Google in the examples raised, but both have issues. Both will continue to have issues especially when cherry-picking infrequent queries. But I hope both really do find substantial ways to make change in the weeks and months to come.