It all comes down to ideology

Posted April 1st, 2009 at 12:01 am by Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Labs

 15 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Tired of being inundated with the contradictory and offensive beliefs of others? Today, the scientists at Yahoo! are releasing a groundbreaking new search filter that keeps controversy out of your search experience. I’m extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ideological Search, which allows you to control the ideology of your search results.

Our research found that web searchers are regularly affronted by articles, blogs, facts, and pages that contain perspectives directly contradicting their own personal beliefs and values –- whether political, religious, economic, scientific, philosophical, etc. If consumers have the freedom in whether they navigate to the HuffingtonPost.com or FOXNews.com, why not extend that same choice to search? Until today, no other search engine could provide this level of personalization –- ensuring that consumers can search with the utmost confidence, knowing that they won’t be antagonized by their results.

Ideological Search, built on Yahoo! BOSS, is the result of extensive research conducted by virtually every scientist at Yahoo!. The team applied the latest research from the fields of sentiment analysis, intent detection, eye tracking, clustering and empathic reasoning to create this revolutionary service. We also found that adaptations were required within existing technologies to ensure ideologically-biased results. For example, Pig, the large-scale data processing environment, was not compatible with all beliefs, particularly among vegetarians. As a result we developed a sister codebase called Tofu, which proved to be more flexible and gelatinous, albeit less optimized.

To give Ideological Search a test drive, type in “global warming” or “stimulus package” and see for yourself. For more background on how we developed Ideological Search, visit the Yahoo! Labs site.

We hope this is the start of a more peaceful, conflict-free Yahoo! Search experience for you.

Try Ideological Search today!

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

Tagged: yahoo! labs, yahoo! search

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15 Comments Add your own

Jacobo Villegas | April 1st, 2009 at 12:03 am

haha great

james | April 1st, 2009 at 12:10 am

nicely done!

and your post is well timed ;-)

Raju | April 1st, 2009 at 1:05 am

LOL!! Happy fools day ;)

Sam | April 1st, 2009 at 3:12 am

When you click the “democrat” button, the ONLY results are from the Huffington Post. Republican button works much better. Why don’t you at least add NPR to the democrat side?

Bruiser | April 1st, 2009 at 3:50 am

Good one!!

Have a great day!

Doug | April 1st, 2009 at 6:07 am

This is creepy. Soon we will no longer hear any voice but those we like to hear. This is living?

CasinoDelSol | April 1st, 2009 at 10:22 am

Happy day to all!!!

Ted | April 1st, 2009 at 10:54 am

This is a kick-ass idea: no kidding. Yahoo should really offer this, NOT for the reason stated, but so people could quickly and easily view how different sides perceive the same issue (it would also be a great tool for research staffs, candidates trying to monitor their press, etc.). This could be *really* useful!

BenBowiel | April 1st, 2009 at 4:54 pm

I agree with Ted…

Gene | April 2nd, 2009 at 4:34 am

“Why don’t you at least add NPR to the democrat side?”

Because NPR is not democratic but rather middle of the road. Unless you’re an out of touch extremist.

Mark | April 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 am

I agree with Ted…great idea to help someone (me!) understand how each “side” feels about an issue. Obviously, you could mature the idea to include other viewpoints (libertarian, religious, etc).

Dave | April 2nd, 2009 at 10:28 am

Ted: try it: it actually works, despite the April fools framing.

DCPowerball | April 3rd, 2009 at 9:17 am

very good one.

Elna | April 4th, 2009 at 1:14 pm

With the slow death of ink-on-dead-trees news, and the rise of people getting their news on the Internet, it seems to me that Yahoo could do the universe a huge service by offering as nearly unbiased news as possible as an option. Major news magazines, under cost pressures, are slimming down and replacing news reporting with entertainment and opinion pieces, which means it’s getting harder to find straight news. Newspapers are losing ad revenue, which means smaller papers and fewer of them, which in turn means less space for news. Yet there’s a global hunger for good, unbiased reporting, as readership (both online and hard copy) statistics for the NY Times and Washington Post illustrate. And I don’t mean news about Kelly Clarkston’s “prom dress” either. (Such a waste of space!)

Ramamoorthy Srinath | April 13th, 2009 at 7:38 am

Sounds like the best horse blinds till date !!!