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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

#111

Post by TuringTest »

DougWebb wrote: post #109
interpol_p wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> people trust Google's ranking to imply an authority that it simply can't provide, because it's magic to them.

More the reason to expose the relevant parts of the "magic" as much as possible, rather than working as a black box and presenting the result as appearing out from nowhere.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#112

Post by deong »

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…

It's not even limited to this kind of question for which there's no simple answer to give. Last week, my wife was joking around with our 9-year-old, leading to him trying to convince her that mermaids aren't real. Cue, "OK Google, do mermaids exist?" To which our Google Home announces, "According to Weekly World News...".

If "do mermaids exist" can't be classified as a thing you know, I'm not even sure you're at the point where epistemology is your most glaring problem. You know so little that you should stop volunteering to answer questions.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#113

Post by deong »

Sharlin wrote: post #102
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.

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.

That's true, but I don't think it's a problem. That's a question that just has two separate intentions, and even the world's foremost expert on Easter could give you the wrong one.

If Google were as good as the best human experts at answering any question, then I think we'd have to declare victory and live with the occasional miscommunication, just as we do today.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#114

Post by Ajedi32 »

findateamfirst wrote: post #106
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

And when you ask Google Assistant, it audibly credits the source up-front, just like the parent comment was suggesting: "According to ... "

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#115

Post by matthewmacleod »

Google's 'featured snippets' are universally fucking shit.

It's a bit of a rant I guess, but I'm annoyed but the extent to which Google has become less useful as a search engine while trying to do all of this 'extracting knowledge from the web' stuff. Because it's really not doing a great job of the latter.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#116

Post by deong »

DougWebb wrote: post #109
interpol_p wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Google isn't just an algorithm. It's a corporate entity with user-facing software, and while the algorithm has no notion of "trust", I would argue the company is demonstrating trust in any source that it presents as an answer in one of these bubbles. We're all agreeing that they shouldn't in many cases, but I do think they're doing so today.

I don't care what your internal reasoning is. If I ask you a question and you present your answer as a fact, you're either trusting your information is correct or you're willfully lying to me.

I think Google's defense here would be that they intend these answers to be interpreted by an intelligent adult. If it tells me that mermaids are real, I'll have a laugh about it and move on with my day. If it tells huge groups of apparently functioning adults that President Obama is instituting Sharia law, and those people believe it unquestioningly, well, I'm not sure Google is equipped to operate in that world.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#117

Post by jerf »

theseatoms wrote: post #110
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While an interesting idea in theory... and I mean that!... in practice that's saying they just shouldn't provide answers. Even saying for the sake of argument that Google could assemble a meaningful and correct probability distribution, itself a rather bold statement, the average Google user won't know how to correctly interpret such a thing.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#118

Post by DanielBMarkham »

deong wrote: post #112
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…

It's not even limited to this kind of question for which there's no simple answer to give. Last week, my wife was joking around with our 9-year-old, leading to him trying to convince her that mermaids aren't real. Cue, "OK Google, do mermaids exist?" To which our Google Home announces, "According to Weekly World News... ". If "do mermaids exist" can't be classified as a thing you know, I'm not even sure you're at the…

A common complaint that pg and many of us have about popular forums is that you always end up in some kind of semantics game.

That's true, and that's frustrating, but that's also the basis of shared human understanding, the dialectic. I wish I could just say "There are no mermaids", but the definition of "is" and "being" here is complex. In many other cases this definition is not complex.

We programmers get dissed a lot because we can tend to be on the arrogant side and think any problem can be fixed with more CPUs or algorithms. For many situations, like HN perhaps, if it works for 99% of the folks it's good enough.

But if you're the world dominant leader in answering questions? And you want to give the immediate, correct answer to anything somebody types in? Those little 1% cases pile up. There are a crap ton of situations where the minority opinion is the only thing that advances the species. Existence is much more than simply making the correct or best-guess decision based on a bunch of facts. Most times the facts and basis for definition of terms in the facts are in flux. Gad, I wish it were as easy as I thought it was when I was a kid.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#119

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

This is a really good example of the problem. We aren't just struggling with subjective questions or machine learning getting tricked by fantasy (e.g. mermaids). We're also up against the fact that even very simple questions can't necessarily be answered cleanly.

Does Google show different Easter results based on location? I'll bet it does.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#120

Post by ronack »

I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples:

Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi...

Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay

Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv

Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's question answering. Yes, they say "according to so-and-so" first, but if Google is responsible for "organizing the world's information", they are essentially endorsing that answer as the best response. They've gone too far in favor of recall over precision/reliability and need to dial it back. Otherwise you end up with crap like this:

Is Earth flat? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat

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