(stock comment about 1984)
Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#32Halfway down that piece: A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Alternative WSJ: Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly…
That's absolutely the wrong way to go about looking at it. Not all facts are of equal importance. 97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system.
If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time. In fact, being right 97.4% of the time is worse in many ways, as it lulls people into a false sense of security about how much they can trust the system. Get 97/100 obvious answers correct, then give someone wildly inappropriate advice when they ask something more "off piste".
And let's not delude ourselves here, Google isn't doing this out of an altrustic desire to help people. They're making sure fewer people leave google.com, in the process starving the very sites they're getting information from of revenue. That should worry all of us.
> we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.
This feels like an absurd criticism. Couldn't it apply to absolutely every negative thing written about Google, ever? Why should Google be immune from criticism?
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#33Halfway down that piece: A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Alternative WSJ: Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly…
97% accuracy is abysmal for something you are presenting as "answers".
What you/we need is a healthy dose of taking things with a grain of salt and not just blindly trust what we read/hear.
This goes not only for results in search services today, but was also valid in the time before this, when we used encyclopedias, or asked someone.
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#34My favorite example is "are lemons acidic?" It's full of "alkaline diet" sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they're an alkaline. It's become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy. Then again the answers are so consistent and I'm so used to trusting the first page of Google that I'm almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.
I'm not even sure Google's behaviour is wrong in this instance. The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that is probably actually more interested in the woo-answer, and I don't neccesarily think it's Google's job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it's risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job). To illustrate with another example, if I ask Google where the government is hiding t…
A correct answer is better than an answer someone is interested in. For example "Is Obama a Muslim?". Someone googling that might be interested in hearing something that reaffirms their preconceived notions, but we as a society would be better off if they were provided with correct information.
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't neccesarily think it's Google's job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it's risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job). Aside from my general disagreement with your statement, wouldn't that actually be pretty bad for business? If I'm looking for a factual answer about something, and Google continually gives me garbage, I'll just stop using Google.
Google isn't limited to factual information, in fact most content on the internet is not 'factual'
If they're presenting it as a factual answer, then it should be a factual answer.
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#36Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#37Halfway down that piece: A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Alternative WSJ: Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly…
Google used to be a place (when it was really new) where you would always find what you were looking for within the 10 first responses because of the power of it's "Pigeon Ranking". I'm not claiming 97.4% in all cases but really often "I Feel Lucky" would be the right answer. Slowly this got gamed by people that wanted to have their sites there and this magic disappeared.
I imagine these selected answers will either come for a dwindling amount of sources of "truth", turning Google in a sort of Yahoo! with lots of handpicked results or again these algorithms will be gamed and we get the same mess as Google turned into where it was constantly fighting new waves of spam.
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#38My favorite example is "are lemons acidic?" It's full of "alkaline diet" sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they're an alkaline. It's become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy. Then again the answers are so consistent and I'm so used to trusting the first page of Google that I'm almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.
What is the purpose of a search engine? To present answers, or to preset pages that mention a specific subject? It's hard give correct answers; sometimes there isn't one. I think it's better to point to pages (the classical search engine philosophy). But that requires 1) knowledge about how to search, and 2) critical analysis of pages you visit.
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#39Halfway down that piece: A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Alternative WSJ: Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly…
That's absolutely the wrong way to go about looking at it. Not all facts are of equal importance. 97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system. If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time. In fact, being right 97.4% of the time is worse in many ways, as it lulls people into a false sense of secur…
And that’s a ridiculous standard because there is no such thing as 100% when talking about knowledge. Humans and experts wouldn’t agree 100% of the time so it’s impossible for computers to get there.
Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
#40Paywall-free archived copy: