Google has developed advanced NLP algorithms, so it should be easy for them to corroborate such data before it gets pushed to featured snippets. On second thought, maybe they're already doing it and sites including authority are just copying off each other.
Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
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Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#12This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
Ya, I really don't see how they can justify displaying other people's content. They did the work, but they don't get the clicks or ad revenue or even a chance to keep the user on the site. I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
There are sites like that. Startpage.com is an example.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#13This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
I suspect most of those history questions are answered via Wikipedia. From what I've seen if the snippet isn't using Wikipedia it's not useful and/or accurate.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#14The "why are firetrucks red?" one is really interesting as the page result itself is great, but Google is pulling the wrong snippet of the page to feature as the answer.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#15This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
I suspect most of those history questions are answered via Wikipedia. From what I've seen if the snippet isn't using Wikipedia it's not useful and/or accurate.
Now, that you point it out, I think that is the situation. When the answer were not easily verifiable it has been websites I wasn't familiar with.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya, I really don't see how they can justify displaying other people's content. They did the work, but they don't get the clicks or ad revenue or even a chance to keep the user on the site. I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
There are sites like that. Startpage.com is an example.
I always thought that services like Startpage or DDG paid for access to search databases, it maybe some form of revenue sharing. It's not that they're stealing the search results from Bing or Google and repackage them.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#17While hiring a ton of people to fact-check would be one solution, that obviously wouldn't be very scalable. I think the problem lies in google's algorithm. They seem to be pulling answers from well-visited sites that may purport to have an answer to these questions. Quantity of visits does not equate to truthfulness. What Google should at the very least do is whitelist certain publications for answers to pretty simple stuff like encyclopedia britannica or wikipedia. More complex stuff maybe they could source academic journals and certain newspapers. But throwing caution to the wind and hoping that the web crawler knows best really will hinder their ability to be a source for gaining knowledge.
What's weirder to me is that it seemed like they were going with my proposed route for a pretty long time and only recently starting providing dopey answers. Maybe its part of a grander experiment they're doing to vet question answering AI?
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#18Google has developed advanced NLP algorithms, so it should be easy for them to corroborate such data before it gets pushed to featured snippets. On second thought, maybe they're already doing it and sites including authority are just copying off each other.
What makes you think that "advanced NLP algorithms" can distinguish true statements from false ones? They're not even close.
You'd have to dramatically simplify the scope of the problem to make it not require artificial general intelligence.
The "Fake News Challenge" [1] is the first attempt I know of to seriously evaluate NLP that could eventually be able to fact-check real-world statements, and the current task is about stance detection, because the goal of fact-checking is not considered attainable yet.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#19This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
Ya, I really don't see how they can justify displaying other people's content. They did the work, but they don't get the clicks or ad revenue or even a chance to keep the user on the site. I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
It is funny you say that.
I remember when you would search for an answer, and a small answer would be included in the description under the link, so you wouldn't have to click on it.
Then they started to go away, because no one was clicking on them because they didn't need to.
Now you rarely get the answer without clicking on it.
So Google has made the internet worse.
Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
#20While hiring a ton of people to fact-check would be one solution, that obviously wouldn't be very scalable. I think the problem lies in google's algorithm. They seem to be pulling answers from well-visited sites that may purport to have an answer to these questions. Quantity of visits does not equate to truthfulness. What Google should at the very least do is whitelist certain publications for answers to pretty simpl…
I feel referring to (or hiding behind) scalability is a bit salt in the wound. These huge companies are destroying so many jobs (by scalability) - ok unavoidable - but they should do sometimes things that are not scalable and give jobs back to people in trouble. Im not sure how long they should be allowed to go away with it. [just dreaming...]