Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

In fact, they should change their entire search result layout so as to add an "epistemological" (ie. related to how the presented result was obtained) knowledge dimension in the visual presentation, and enrich the search result with eg. links to employees, parent companies, and other known affiliations.

That would be a strong move and help fight fake reviews, astroturfing, and fake news campaigning. And it would be much easier to implement compared to strong AI, if the latter is possible at all. In any case, it would be much more useful than the "searched 3.123e8 pages in 0.3 ms" non-information we get now.

Not sure whether posts by verified/accredited people (real names) should be ranked higher in search results. Traditionally, hackers have preferred pseudonyms, and there are very good reasons to stay anonymous in oppressive regimes. OTOH, using pseudonyms/fake accounts at scale got us into the kind of political and other mass manipulation we have now.

You might be right if Google wants to answer all questions ever, but they can just limit this feature to situations where they do know what the answer is (you already see this when you type in math, conversions between different units, etc).

> and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message").

That's not how I converse with people around me at all, I only talk about the source if there is some disbelieve about whether it is true.

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When someone asks me for some information, I will answer and that is the context the person places me in. I won't tell that person "I heard this from Craig, he heard if from Judy and she was told by Bob, etc..". Google wants to become this person / context.

The whole idea is that you don't have to click / verify / think about the potential webpage, because Google has already ranked all webpages that mention your query, and it will only snippet the top one (which is the result Google thinks will most likely answer your question).

Adding the source is:

- extra noise (the user now needs to look at the text & look at who said it and determine whether it might be true or not). - easily spoofable: you either rely on some meta tag for an Author, which websites can spoof. Or on a URL, which will lead to people doing stuff like "nytimes.com.quotefromgoogle.com".

> The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control.

Below the snippet are the 10 links that you can still click, functionality available since the mid 90s.

> The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result

Just click the top link?

Interpreting a grey box as "truth" is entirely on you.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...

I would have liked the prof to push back on the student and say Why do you want to know?

The answer is yes. Now what?

The answer is no. Now what?

Are you asking for what reason? What will you do with a yes answer and a no answer?

Then I would break into a short lesson in decision making. That decisions are just based on future probabilities. Future probabilities are based partially in the questions you answer.

If the question is academic?purposes only then good... But I believe we ask dumb questions just because we can and get an answer.

Start by not asking questions where the answer is useless.