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Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

wsj.com

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Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#41

Post by untog »

pesenti wrote: post #39
untog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So why create a feature that pretends such a thing is possible, and promote it as heavily as Google does?

In many ways, "I'm feeling lucky" was a great middle ground - by clicking it you're implictly saying "I know this might not actually be what I'm looking for, but I'm willing to compromise". Google has taken that compromise and stuck it at the top of the search results page.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#42

Post by yathern »

maxerickson wrote: post #14
dontnotice wrote: post #9

Halfway 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".

If there was someone I knew who I could ask a question, with a 97% chance they were correct, I'd consider them to be a phenomenon, and an extremely valuable resource. For some definition of correct, I'd be happy to be 60% accurate.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#43

Post by maxerickson »

retSava wrote: post #33
maxerickson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to comment on how credulous I might be.

Anyway, the 97% is an impressive result, it just isn't so impressive as to be beyond criticism. My comment is a little over the top, in response to the other comment that sets the bar at effusive praise being the only proper analysis of the system.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#44

Post by anon1385 »

dogruck wrote: post #24
anon1385 wrote: post #3

I'm generally very critical of Google, especially the search results page, but it's important to remember the background context to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch... >Rupert Murdoch say News Corp is not looking to expand its newspaper empire, conceding digital advertising “has been tremendously damaging to print” and some of his papers were struggling. Over the next few yea…

You are unjustifiably attacking conservative politics. First, before he got busted for grabbing women, liberal Senator Al Franken was rallying the troops to against Google and FB: https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/09/al-franken-facebook-goog... Second, liberal rags like the New York Times are scrutinizing the tech industry. Here’s a recent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/opinion/academia-tech-alg...

Sure, liberals have been criticising Google and Facebook recently over the Trump/Russia stuff and about their ability to influence elections, but only once Trump and Brexit happened. I'm not sure they cared all that much before, at least not beyond specific issues that were mostly confined to the tech sections of sites like the NYT or Guardian, or generic 'big corp' stuff like tax avoidance. The Daily Mail and the Sun have been running sensational front page stories about things like David Cameron having close links to Google or Google making it easy for terrorists to build a bomb for something like 5 years.

The reason I mention right wing politics is firstly that they are the ones in power at the moment in the US/UK/Australia - Trump and May aren't going to care what the Guardian or NYT say and don't have any ideological reason to care about things like the immorality of online advertising or the affect of social media on mental health. Secondly, in the UK at least, the press as a whole is much more closely aligned to the conservative political parties. The UK press is divided roughly into right wing (Sun, Mail, Express, Telegraph, Times, Spectator), liberal (Guardian, New Statesman, FT, Economist) and left wing (Mirror, at times). The right wing outlets have vastly higher readership and reach. So if the media does have an influence on politics, it's going to be in one direction.

But my point really was that it's interesting to me to see how much the papers are working for the right wing parties or how much the right wing parties are following the agenda set by the newspapers. That's probably not so much a thing in the US (although the same question about Fox might be), but it is in the UK, especially at the moment.

E: also, to be clear, the same financial inceptives apply to the NYT and Guardian - online advertising is killing their revenue streams as well. It's just that as I said they have limited power at the moment (and it's arguable how much power they ever have - neither seems to have the ability to set the news agenda outside of the liberal middle class bubble, unlike the UK tabloids for example).

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#45

Post by k2xl »

With my Google Home, I often ask it, "Can my dog eat X" and it'll answer usually from the single answer from Google.

While Google Home usually says the source, "According to WebMD..." or "According to ..." it would be horrible if it gave the wrong answer - saying something was safe to eat but it really wasn't.

I hope they take extra precaution with answers related to medicine/safety.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#46

Post by RyanZAG »

untog wrote: post #41
pesenti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So why create a feature that pretends such a thing is possible, and promote it as heavily as Google does? In many ways, "I'm feeling lucky" was a great middle ground - by clicking it you're implictly saying "I know this might not actually be what I'm looking for, but I'm willing to compromise". Google has taken that compromise and stuck it at the top of the search results page.

For profit corporations require that the senior employees they hire for impossibly high paychecks are constantly providing benefits that can be brought up in quarterly board meetings. This means taking an already functional product and making changes to it -- any change -- that can be spun as being a positive improvement worthy of a promotion.

Google Search is already where it should be. Yet Google Search employs thousands of incredibly expensive engineers. Something has to be done, and that "something" is rarely going to be good, and almost guaranteed to be something nobody actually wanted.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#47

Post by anon1385 »

saas_co_de wrote: post #19
anon1385 wrote: post #3

I'm generally very critical of Google, especially the search results page, but it's important to remember the background context to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch... >Rupert Murdoch say News Corp is not looking to expand its newspaper empire, conceding digital advertising “has been tremendously damaging to print” and some of his papers were struggling. Over the next few yea…

The NYTimes and Guardian have been as aggressive in attacking Google and Facebook as anyone (subjectively I would say more so) so I don't think this is just right-wing. It is more like the entire world has realized that having these monopolies control the flow of information is incredibly dangerous.

Yes, it's fair to say that there's an increasing level of concern about social media and the influence it has from across the political spectrum (well, maybe not from the populist far right…). As well as the beginnings of an application of the impact on mental health. Those are things that certainly warrant concern.

What I'm talking about is more things like the Sun (Murdoch tabloid in the UK) printing front pages about how Google helps terrorists build bombs.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#48

Post by VonGallifrey »

k2xl wrote: post #45

With my Google Home, I often ask it, "Can my dog eat X" and it'll answer usually from the single answer from Google. While Google Home usually says the source, "According to WebMD..." or "According to ..." it would be horrible if it gave the wrong answer - saying something was safe to eat but it really wasn't. I hope they take extra precaution with answers related to medicine/safety.

I personally would hope that you take extra precaution with answers related to medicine/safety. Why would you trust google with something like this? If you ask Google "Can my dog eat X" and blindly trust the answer then it is your fault and not google's if your dog gets sick. Google isn't responsible for your dog, you are!

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#49

Post by mtgx »

untog wrote: post #32
dontnotice wrote: post #9

Halfway 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…

Yes, this is just as misleading as NSA saying "we only intercept 1% of the world's traffic."

Yeah, because 99% of the traffic is not communications, and most of it is video content and torrents.

Re: Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

#50

Post by JadeNB »

dTal wrote: post #28
muzani wrote: post #20

My 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…

> 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).

Eek, does it really sound appealing to you to have Google aspiring to do a 100% accurate job of deciding what information it's right for me to see?

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