Re: Solomon''s curse and search Bias

Hi Paola,

Do you mean Solomon's punishment? His punishment is well-documented. A key
problem here, which explains why Sherman didn't get anywhere with his
efforts and why Andy's search terms won't work, is that your phrasing is
somewhat idiosyncratic. It's not clear that "Solomon's curse" is actually a
thing (if it is a thing, the curse was very immediate, splitting Israel
with the next generation). And I didn't follow your statement "not in
relation to a specific race, but more in relation to the history of the
modern world to see if anyone is following up the courses and recourses of
history". The link that you gave doesn't mention anything about Solomon, or
anyone's curse, so I'm not sure what you meant.

As Thad noted, Solomon is a biblical figure, not necessarily a part of
*history*. His historicity is widely disputed, meaning we have little
evidence that he actually existed. Solomon was supposed to have lived 3,000
years ago, so we depend on archaeological evidence and/or independent
accounts (non-Biblical) of his existence. To give you some context, here
are the key figures and events of the 10th century BC
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_century_BC>. With Egyptian kings like
Amenemope, researchers have actually discovered their tombs, and there are
independent accounts. For Solomon, we lack that sort of evidence. So
children aren't really missing out on established history here.

In any case, his historicity doesn't matter much for his searchability. If
you search on Solomon's punishment, you'll get decent results. A search on
Solomon's *curse *is dominated by not one, but two novels: *The Solomon
Curse* by Clive Cussler (which is about the Solomon Islands, not King
Solomon) and *King Solomon's Curse* by Andy McDermott (which may be
creatively inventing a curse on or by Solomon for the story).

It's also not clear, in general, what Google is optimizing for in its
search results. Algorithmic approaches like Google's seem not very useful
much of the time, since they result in so much repetition and redundancy,
where a novel or two can dominate several pages, not just the first page.
If you want to narrow down your search, try:

*"solomon's curse" -cussler -mcdermott -kilimanjaro*

(after you eliminate Cussler and McDermott, a lot of musical results
dominate, including many named Kilimanjaro)

You can also add *bible *to the search to good effect. One of the
challenges is that some communities aren't necessarily great at SEO, and
first- or second-gen search engines like Google are heavily influenced by
SEO. This creates asymmetries toward commercial and other SEO-heavy results
(e.g. the first three hits, without using *bible*, are for Amazon,
including two for the same book, then a bunch of other commercial results,
including B&N and the iTunes store for the audiobook).

It's also worth trying DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Bing. I know DDG had some
relevant results.

Cheers,

Joe Duarte


On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 7:11 PM Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I wanted to share a concern, as I know posts gets read and issued picked
> up and addressed in time
>
> I searched Google today for Solomon Curse, trying to find some references
> to some historical cause and conditions in the first house of David - not
> in relation to a specific race, but more in relation to the history of the
> modern world
> to see if anyone is following up the courses and recourses of history
> https://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/
>
>
> Well, I was shocked to see that the first page of results were all about a
> book and its author, and nothing
> about history came up at all.  I had to add additional words to create
> some context to dig up some
> historical references.
>
> Just wanted to point out that I am very concerned about future generations
> receiving a distorted
> version of history by heavily commercially biased search results when
> typing some search terms and
> getting only/mostly the results from one entity, rather than a
> representation of the plurality of meanings and contexts
>
> Bias is a known problem in searches, however I was hoping that by now we
> would have
> some mechanisms to reduce this bias? Doesn't look like it.
>
> I hope that schema.org could help that by creating metaschemas for
> disambiguation
> or other mechanism, such a representation of context which should include
> at least
> two perspectives: the domain a search term is present, and the
> time/chronology (to show which came first)
>
>  Just a sunday morning note before digging in more confusing knowledge
> from search results
>
> PDM
>
>
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