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Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

theoutline.com

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Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#91
post #62

Why is it that hard for engineers to rely on good old attribution? 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 tr…

Because prepending that doesn't solve the problem Google wants to solve: once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question. Not tell you what other people think the answer is. (I agree that it is broken in a lot of cases now, but prepending that is a very bad workaround).

> Not tell you what other people think the answer is.

Actually google and pagerank started like that.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#92

Why is it that hard for engineers to rely on good old attribution? 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 tr…

Why does the source where the reply is taken from matters?

I only see a few ways this works.

The answer is correct. In this case, the source doesn't matter.

The answer is incorrect. In this case, the source doesn't matter, there is a flaw in the entire concept.

The answer's correctness depends upon the source. In this case, we have a deeper problem with the entire meaning of what a fact is.

Personally, I actually go with option three, but I think the deeper discussion needs to happen before we begin to even consider if something like featured snippets is worth doing. The best way for me to sum up on feelings on this is that while facts are absolute, any piece of information is either true or false (at least within the realm of normal human interactions), it is impossible to separate any fact from a human's perception of the fact which will automatically introduce biases.

An example: A few weeks ago I read online that did . (I'll leave out the details because it only detracts from the point.) This is a factual statement, I did read it online, as did many others. But if many people who read it online states they read about it online, it creates a perception of truth to it, when the original post and the original replies were all showing how easy it is to create a false character assassination story. Regardless of how factual the statement is (it is true that I did read it online), my stating of such would still be an attempt to mislead even though I was using 100% factual statements.

I do not see any automatic truth determiner being possible until our society realizes the biased nature of human known facts.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#94
post #14

The "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.

For the lazy: https://snag.gy/b9Zvlw.jpg

And for those outside of the US (like me) who don't get this result even if they try to go to google.com: https://www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect)

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#95
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question And that's the problem that the article rightfully denounces. Having the answer to every question is not something that you can automate, not without strong AI. > Prepending that is a very bad workaround I strongly disagree; for me it's a very sensible thing to do - and in fact is how we do it in a social context…

They do always append a link below their answer to the site where they got it. Personally I find this to be the exact same solution as yours (not literally). The problem is some people don't clicks links anymore. It's a problem people are stupid, but its not googles problem, even if idiots uses google (like everyone else).

> Personally I find this to be the exact same solution as yours (not literally).

It may be the same for you (if you remember to follow the link for every single result that you get from Google, ever), but it's not enough for a mass-targeted product; the way in which the information is laid out and its relative prominence is essential to the way it will be perceived by the majority of the people using the service.

This is not people being stupid, is how people's brain is hardwired to be efficient and only care about information that looks important from the way it's presented - rather than having to make a rational analysis of the relative importance of every information snippet that you find in your way.

An upfront warning "this fact is brought to you by..." will have much more impact than a small, semi-hidden link that you have to remember to press, even if both convey the same information. (Moreover, the link is not available in the voice interface.)

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#96

Why is it that hard for engineers to rely on good old attribution? 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 tr…

Why does the source where the reply is taken from matters? I only see a few ways this works. The answer is correct. In this case, the source doesn't matter. The answer is incorrect. In this case, the source doesn't matter, there is a flaw in the entire concept. The answer's correctness depends upon the source. In this case, we have a deeper problem with the entire meaning of what a fact is. Personally, I actually go…

> I only see a few ways this works.

> The answer is correct. In this case, the source doesn't matter.

> The answer is incorrect. In this case, the source doesn't matter, there is a flaw in the entire concept.

> The answer's correctness depends upon the source. In this case, we have a deeper problem with the entire meaning of what a fact is.

Again, why is it so hard for engineers to grasp the concept and importance of graceful degradation?

A service doesn't need to be perfect to be useful, but if it's not perfect, it shouldn't burn your house when it fails.

> The best way for me to sum up on feelings on this is that while facts are absolute, any piece of information is either true or false (at least within the realm of normal human interactions)

People from Humanities would like to have a talk with you.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact is, nobody is even near having one ;)

Fact is no one wants a strong AI, skynet leading to matrix future is not that desireable. On the other hand soft AIs are everywhere and replacing humans in many jobs.

> Fact is no one wants a strong AI, skynet leading to matrix future is not that desireable.

I want a strong AI, because I'm more a fan of the depictions along the lines of Iain Banks' post-scarcity Culture Minds.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#98
I was going to share this story on facebook but when I pasted in the URL, the headline that came up was "Why does google think Obama is planning a coup d'etat?" (screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/keXTz ) I'm assuming that it is theoutline.com that is feeding facebook this headline. I think twice about sharing a story with such a linkbait headline - especially when the actual site doesn't have that headline.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#99
post #78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was senior engineer with Autonomy ( before being bought by HP ) and we did really good projects for some big companies, it worked well. Lucene comes a long way, with enough time, some cool stuff would emerge. But if you need to replicate google, you need bootloads of user data and in generally data to operate on ( i.e. to be able to extract the equivalence of certain terms and expressions, and so on ). And generall…

Pardon my ignorance, but would such a service need to be specific to a site? I'm wondering if there is a business (or perhaps better yet, non-profit) opportunity to provide data to drive something that can be tacked on to individual sites. Would an organization like Mozilla have an opportunity here?

It depends. Organizations have different data, so you need a lot of abstractions in order to fit into a certain search pattern (meaning, what are the users looking for).

For example, current solutions implies there is a "document" with some metadata. But what is a document in wikipedia or SO context? So is quite hard to get a an answer which satisfies both cases and you end up with cramming all kind of data together just to make a fit. So in the end, you still have to use the google model, of using the URL as a key for (data, metadata). So in this case, just let google/bing/yandex do it's job.

On the other side, I saw Google Search Appliance fail spectacularly in enterprise, because the google model couldn't fit and you end using real custom search solutions. There are quite a lot of companies filling this niche at this moment and so I think Mozilla wouldn't make a dent, if decides to enter this market.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The date of Easter depends on which calendar you use. The second largest christian church uses a different calendar than the largest one.

It's a great point. It shows how easy it is for somebody to think wow, that question obviously has a clear answer when the opposite is true. Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was. But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of…

Yeah, that was my intended meaning.

There probably is an argument to be made that in most English speaking countries "Easter" refers to the date calculated using the Gregorian calender, with some qualifier being used to specify the other date (Google answers searches for "eastern easter 2018" and "orthodox easter 2018" with the correct information).

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