51–60 of 192 posts
If every Google's featured snippet started its reply with "Breitbart says..." or "Trent Online, the leading Internet Newspaper in Nigeria said...", it wouldn't matter so much for those inevitable cases when the reply is taken straight from a white-supremacist or radical anarchist forum. The problem comes when the same reply is provided as "Google's true answer to the question" without further caveats.
While 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…
> will hinder their ability to be a source for gaining knowledge CAUTION: subjective experience ahead I feel like in the last few years Google's utility for knowledge discovery has decreased. Instead it seems to be geard more and more to drive you towards purchase and shallow content sites. I think the growing popularity of "awesome" lists and other forms of curated content discovery is also driven in part by Google'…
You can tell there was a paradigm shift at some point and the search engine became a second (third? fourth?) class citizen.
Whenever there's a measure of something, people will optimize for that measure. But trust is not directly measurable.
But even then Google should have been better than weighing fringe sites the same as Wikipedia as an example
This is all mostly because google went from search engine indexing other people's stuff to site that you go to to get answers (whether those answers are based on copyright infringement or not is another matter). A similar thing happens in Google news where stuff from sites like breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources making it look as though they are of a similar degree of quality.
On Google Now, "news" sites like infowars, globalresearch.ca and on reign supreme, unless you manually filter them out. This hoax about "staged" MH17 crash is on my newsfeed why.. oh right "because you displayed interest in Ukrainian conflict". Fair enough then! It is scary how much the default app on Android serves to legitimize the fringe.
While 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…
people trust Google, which IMO makes them responsible here. IANAL, but if they would for example be caught giving Holocaust-denying answers in Germany, where that's illegal, could they not be sued?
Usually when in that kind of situation google plays the "it's an algorithm that did that not us so we're not liable" also known as we don't read your gmail emails it's an automated algorithmic process so there's no privacy issue here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, and that's the heart of the problem. Something like Google news needs more than just algorithms.
OTOH, that's also a problem, because any editorial choice is politically debatable... I'm afraid there is no easy solution.