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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

#181

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…

I suspect they tested and tweaked what sort of format kept the most number of clicks and page views on Google owned sites.

Prominent attribution wouldn't help in that regard. These kg entries are great for Google. They present the most likely sought out info, so little reason to click through. As a bonus, the vertical space they use pushes down any organic results that might be better answers.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#182
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whitelist is sure to get them anti-competitiveness suits, and rightly so.

What is the difference between a whitelist and an algorithm with unknown but discoverable biases?

They're both undesirable, but a whitelist is easier to fight.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#183
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is a search engine for finding webpages, not facts. How can you justify that claim? It seems pretty obvious to me that it's trying to be both. Search for "current time utc" and tell me Google is just a search engine for finding webpages.

it's not just "current time" you can ask "(12+431)/42" or "how tall is a poodle" or "when does san francisco city hall close today" or "directions to nearest gas station." These are each totally different kinds of facts (compute something for me; answer a general question; tell me something specific and context/time dependent; give me directions to something context dependent). Google is way beyond just providing a l…

You don't have to convince me that Google has intentionally led people to become more reliant on them, that is their business model, where user is the product and Google becoming as integral to your day to day life as possible is important; as their business model is literally "people use us the most and we know them better so advertise to them through us".

But I think we should have a clear divide between responsibility of the user and the content aggregates. Just like with editorial news and Journalism we of course can differentiate between the two, and there are ethics and integrity issues we should hold news outlets to, but we need to be careful of confusing a search engine with a news outlet just because people use it to find news and facts from various places. That does not make them arbitrators of the truth. The responsibility lies on the end user to use their judgment and wisdom and research to come to informed decisions. And the responsibility lies on the news agency to report factual things. Google just needs to help me find relevant information, and let me decide what is good ethical journalism and what is fictional drivel.

You might think "But doesn't that mean that anyone can scream as loudly as they want and people will hear them and might listen to them?" Well yes it does. And it seems like everyone here has a problem with that, because they think people have terrible common sense. People have been trying to sway public opinion through media since there was written word. But you should criticize the work of the book author, or maybe even the publisher who is constantly publishing crappy books, but not the book store or library who is just helping you find whatever you are looking for no matter who you are or what you like.

I don't think you people know what you are asking for when you want to put it in peoples heads that because someone or something is popular or used by many people it somehow has a responsibility to curate the truth.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is a search engine for finding webpages, not facts. How can you justify that claim? It seems pretty obvious to me that it's trying to be both. Search for "current time utc" and tell me Google is just a search engine for finding webpages.

Right, google created what they call the "Knowledge Graph", which is explicitly meant for facts.

They have been pretty clear about their goal to have search respond to you as humanly as possible and use AI not just algorithms to find things for you, and I think they have been clear on where they are getting the data they dig up on things.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#185
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh look another "the moon landing was real" guy. ^ See what I did there? I made a comment on the Internet, and called into question the legitimacy of your comments. Anyone can do it! So what we really need is HN to moderate our comments to filter out comments like yours so that we can just read the truth without having to filter out the garbage. I don't want to hear about how you think the the earth is round just bec…

Edgy a.f., but what any of that wonderful rant has to do with my original point?

Sorry, I assumed a lot of things there I think. I gathered from what you were saying that you were falling with the popular opinion that Google should filter out "fake news" from its search results (or at least the focused results). So from that perspective, I was trying to draw parallels on how silly it is to demand such a thing.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#187
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#188

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

It uses the site title versus a URL/domain. Which tends to favor shady sources.

And, it's often below the fold.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#189
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.

Maybe there is a lot more junk then there was 10 years ago.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#190
post #4

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.

"breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources"

"reputable" news sources have generally devolved into being the ideological counterpart of breitbart.com so this makes sense.

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