It's fine if you believe their blacklisting improves the results, I agree there. But here's where they are going to have a problem with the AGs:
>Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.
They're specifically scoping things to search results.
The supposedly blacklisted sites like Gateway Pundit are still in Google's search results. They're just not deemed news outlets included in the News tab.
Same reason my small business doesn't show up in the Finance tab. I'm not blacklisted, I'm just not eligible for inclusion.
If they were referencing organic search doesn't that hold true? They are blacklisting separate curated services such as google news. Either way if they lied about it of course that is bad, transparency is the way to gain public trust. I'm not sure if it was violated by that hearing in particular, but if they aren't blacklisting organic results I don't really see an issue.
>Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.
How do you feel about Google lying to you?