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Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

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Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#61

Post by stouset »

jstanley wrote: post #33
jakobegger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with a query like that, and I think autocomplete is fine once you typed "muslims are vege...". But I don't see why you'd autocomplete a sentence that could go anywhere. Just because many people type that isn't a good reason.

Why isn't that a good reason? It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.

Can we please stop wildly exaggerating every attempt to remove graffiti and trolling from the Internet as equivalent to invoking the “thought police”? Nobody is sending the authorities after you for entering overtly-racist searches into Google.

Keep in mind that you are currently enjoying the benefits of discussing this topic on a highly-moderated discussion forum. How relevant do you think Hacker News would be if such moderation was ended entirely?

Have you learned literally nothing from the utter disaster that was Tay[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#62

Post by threatofrain »

dorchadas wrote: post #59
threatofrain wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants? And if individuals want to understand Google Search Trends, as noted already, it's there but I don't think many people are going there, because it's not what they want.

> When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants? That's exactly what I want, at least. It'd make much more sense for them to just work on autocompleting individual words instead of queries. That way it's useful to the person who's searching and it doesn't matter what everyone…

Does that include things like React, Rust, or Ruby?

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#63

Post by dragonwriter »

gear54rus wrote: post #48
ubernostrum wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see Yes, that's what a suggestion algorithm is. There is no pure Platonic ideal neutral objective suggestion algorithm. Every suggestion algorithm is going to have biases based on both its training data and the goals (explicit or otherwise) of its creators. You've gotten as far as, apparently, noticing that tweaking the algorithm after the public has se…

when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for, not "what people search for, except...", this talk about suggestion algos has nothing to do with the issue I think

> when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for

That's never been the point, though it's sometimes been an implementation method because it's easy: the point is to provide a useful guess of what you might be searching for.

Some search engines do provide tools for exploring patterns of other people's searches, but recommendation systems have never been that except as a matter of leaky implementation details.

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#64

Post by gear54rus »

dragonwriter wrote: post #63
gear54rus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for, not "what people search for, except...", this talk about suggestion algos has nothing to do with the issue I think

> when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for That's never been the point, though it's sometimes been an implementation method because it's easy: the point is to provide a useful guess of what you might be searching for. Some search engines do provide tools for exploring patterns of other people's searches, but recommendation systems have never been that except as a matter of leaky implementa…

it was just an example, you can choose another if you think it's more appropriate, my point is that this idiotic censorship has no place in search

if it has something to show me regarding my search (and it certainly does), it must

Re: Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine

#65

Post by anonytrary »

jakobegger wrote: post #57
jstanley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't that a good reason? It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.

Because it's a stupid thing to do. It makes sense to complete a query once it is obvious what the user wants to write. That's helpful, you saved me from typing a few characters. But if you suggest completions for queries at a point where it isn't yet obvious what the user wants, you are no longer just helpful. You are steering people in a certain direction, whether that's your intent or not. You are effectively telli…

Okay, I see your point now. Content discovery can be decomposed into "push" and "pull". In the 90s, searching was typically associated with pull. Over time, engines started providing a push component (e.g. autocomplete). It sounds like you want search engines to be mostly pull with less push.

You want the push to be more local to what you specifically choose to pull, which means greatly reducing the current scope of the push component. I guess that's fine, but a lot of people really like the push component, especially if they don't quite know what they're looking for. I think the whole of the two methods is more valuable than the sum of the parts.

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