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Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

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Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#101

Post by throwaway2048 »

abandonliberty wrote: post #25
TheGRS wrote: post #17

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…

Metrics are destroying the web. Once upon a time it was possible to identify "good" pages by how often they were linked - effectively crowd-sourcing the problem. Natural selection: sites have learned to manipulate the game and the crowd. Under pressure to optimize metrics that lead to SEO and better valuations, the internet is getting less useful from a user perspective. I don't want to watch a video/slideshow, downl…

A good example of this is mailing list archives. Pages and pages of google links searching for mailing list posts are filled with maximum ad-cram (often dressed up like a fake forum) garbage, meanwhile the clean, no bullshit mailing list achive everyone links to (marc.info) is nowhere to be found at all.

This is likely because marc.info isn't playing the SEO game, and spamsite #43254 is.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#102

Post by Sharlin »

maxerickson wrote: post #82
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #76

Yikes. More of this "People only want to be told what to do" stuff. I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be correct -- the language is simply too fuzzy. For many, many things, this is a good idea. The date of Easter is the date of Easter. But the glaring danger here is that for many things this is a freaking evil dystopian nightmare. Why? Because Google will keep tweaking…

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

Plus, of course, it depends on which year you're talking about, in a very nontrivial fashion. Googling "when is easter" gives the date of the current year's Easter, which is reasonable, but might lead to an incorrect assumption that the date of Easter is fixed.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#103

Post by noxToken »

bigbugbag wrote: post #53
hobofan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

Google stopped providing relevant search results more than 10 years ago. It used to be several pages of relevant search results, now you are lucky if you have more than 2 or 3 somewhat related results in the first page and that's about it. You can tell there was a paradigm shift at some point and the search engine became a second (third? fourth?) class citizen.

I think there are two things at play here.

This first is that you were probably a power user back when good search results required you to be good at search syntax. Back when Google wasn't the only search engine on the web, you could ask Google questions. Your results would be limited in relevance. If you tailored your searches by ensuring specific words or phrases were included, excluded irrelevant phrases, and added wildcards where necessary, you'd get pages and pages of great results. Google takes your search history and tries to predict what you're actually looking for.

The second is how Google filters your results to try to tailor what is relevant to you. Most people who hang out here on HN or StackOverflow would probably get results for the software framework filtered to the top when searching for "electron". Chemists, physicists, and other scientists of the like are probably going to get results for the particle filtered to the top. Adding this type of customization probably has ramifications beyond simple terms like electron. I don't have any evidence whatsoever, but I imagine that this customization would give biased results when searching political, economic, or social topics based on the sites that are visited.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#104

Post by NoGravitas »

TheGRS wrote: post #17

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…

> 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.

I feel like the article addresses this. Google has basically two different products that produce those top of the page, set-aside answers. One is "Knowledge Graph", which basically does what you are suggesting - grabs straightforward answers to simple questions from Wikipedia and similar. The second is "featured snippets", which is the one causing the outrages that the article highlights.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#106

Post by findateamfirst »

TuringTest wrote: post #51

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…

The attribution comes at the end

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#107

Post by tyingq »

Some more fun ones.

What foods cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+foods+cure+cancer%3F

What spice cures diabetes? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+spice+cures+diabetes%3F

Which presidents are rapists? https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+presidents+are+rapists...

Can carrots cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can+carrots+cure+cancer%3F (apparently this one is fixed, try the search below)

Can carrot juice cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can%20carrot%20juice%20cure%...

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#108

Post by pjc50 »

TuringTest wrote: post #51

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…

http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumps-wiretap-claims-what-we-...

"White House sources acknowledge that Trump had no idea whether the claims he was making were true when he made them."

Here we have great attribution and a high-profile source (Trump, the source of claims about being wiretapped by Obama). It's just that the source doesn't care whether the claims are true or not.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#109

Post by DougWebb »

interpol_p wrote: post #88
TuringTest wrote: post #51

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…

Prepending the source won't stop people from giving weight to the answer. Because it's the first and only one. You would probably risk giving more credibility to sites like Breitbart by crediting them with the top result, as people will come to associate those site names with answers given "by Google." If Google gives you a top search result, it means Google trusts that result to be a good one. There's no getting aro…

If Google gives you a top search result, it means Google trusts that result to be a good one.

Google doesn't "trust". That kind of thinking is the problem. Google has computed a ranking of the search results based on a bunch of factors, none of which involve any kind of cognitive analysis or judgement.

The rest of your statement is absolutely right; people trust Google's ranking to imply an authority that it simply can't provide, because it's magic to them.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#110

Post by theseatoms »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #86
maxerickson wrote: post #82

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…

Google should report a probability distribution for each truth claim.
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