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Elevating original reporting in Search

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Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#111

Post by dmg826 »

dunkelheit wrote: post #66
dmg826 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human raters are used to assess the performance of the algorithms (i.e. do human opinions align with algorithmic ones), not to rank content directly. A recurring theme with Google is that they always want to solve problems algorithmically.

And what do they do with these human assessments then? Of course they feed them back to the algorithm so that it can improve. In effect it is still humans influencing the search rankings albeit indirectly. So it is a bit duplicitous to say that "it is the algorithm that decides" when there are humans providing learning data for it.

It's still algorithm-first. It's not "learning data" in the sense that human ratings are used to train the algorithm.

It's more of a check step. So, for example, if humans think one website is vastly more (or less) authoritative than human raters, the engineers might dig in to see which aspects are causing the algorithm to evaluate it differently and, potentially, test tweaking the algorithm accordingly.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#112

Post by toasterlovin »

ebg13 wrote: post #76
specialist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd probably pay for a filter that distinquished editorial from reporting.

You'd end up with an empty reading list.

No, you wouldn't. There is actual reporting that takes place in the world. Like all things, what is and isn't reported or investigated is slanted by whoever is doing the reporting. But pure editorial is a very different beast.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#113

Post by toasterlovin »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
SalmndraCrypto wrote: post #2

Google made some pretty serious moves in the last year. Their recent algorithm update is forcing news sites to improve their overall content quality and by now highlighting original reports it will force news sites to write original content and not just rewrite each other articles. It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism

> It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism It really isn't. That sort of 'cool' is what got us AMP, Chrome and search results mixed with advertising as well as Google products that are promoted at an unfair advantage compared to established products by competitors. Monopolies have their occasional upsides but they also have structural downsides which is why they should be avoided.

I'm generally pretty right wing and I generally think that the tech companies have a heavy left-wing bias. That said, Google already has a massive influence on journalism. From where we are, today, in the real world, this feels like a good change.

In my opinion. For what it's worth.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#114

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

Medicalidiot wrote: post #54
wtallis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed over the past year that a Google search for almost any medical term will bury the wikipedia article on the third or fourth page of search results. The first three pages are all sites with extremely watered-down content and little to none of the cross-referencing links that make wikipedia a good exploratory tool (and a natural fit to PageRank). Google has obviously decided that anyone searching for a medi…

As someone in medicine, this drive me up the wall. I don't want to go to uptodate every time I have a question and want the basics of a disease or drug. Where Wikipedia fits my requirements perfectly, Google constantly feeds me nonsense WebMD, blogs, and hospital systems. Now, whenever I search for anything medically related I add wiki at the end.

I feel like more people would have better search experiences if they knew about/used custom search. For example for wikipedia I've got my browsers set up so I can type "wiki and have that powered by wikipedia; why hit google at all. You can set up the same thing for anything else that implements the open search standard (youtube is the other one i use regularly). To me searching the web for a wiki page seems pretty irrelevant.

Instructions for setting up wikipedia's : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching_from_a_web_brow...

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#115

Post by specialist »

ebg13 wrote: post #76
specialist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd probably pay for a filter that distinquished editorial from reporting.

You'd end up with an empty reading list.

You're thinking of gossip.

Anyone quoting sources and showing their work (published data) is reporting.

Even if you disagree with the interpretation, conclusions. Especially if you disagree.

--

Sadly, I continue to be embarrassed, surprised when geeks proclaim it's all just opinion. This anti-intellectualism is how cults and hoaxes fester and grow.

It's not helping.

Is it too much to ask that the primary beneficiaries of our modern, technical, scientifically advanced society also defend the foundations of our society?

How about just part time? A few hours per week. Take a breather from the cynicism. Just pretend the world is knowable and that we can work to improve stuff. Think of it as a new hobby.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#116

Post by bogdanoff_2 »

icebraining wrote: post #91
bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"thesaurus that organizes words by category" - gives a bunch of online dictionary pages. I was trying to find a specific physical book I remember using in high-school. "techniques for interpreting statically typed languages" - gives a bunch of super basic articles/questions about statically vs dynamically typed and compiled vs interpreted languages. DuckDuckGo actually gave better results for this. I feel what's happ…

> "techniques for interpreting statically typed languages" - gives a bunch of super basic articles/questions about statically vs dynamically typed and compiled vs interpreted languages. DuckDuckGo actually gave better results for this. But is there any good result that includes all those words and which Google failed to find?

I don't remember the exact phrasing I ended up using, but I think I remember finding through DDG a StackOverflow question that was essentially "how to make an interpreter for a statically typed language" and it did not appear on Google.

To answer your exact question: I don't know, perhaps not.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#117

Post by SquareWheel »

journalctl wrote: post #70
SquareWheel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a giant list of websites in alphabetical order? (joking - we don't need another DMOZ)

That would at least make SEO easy: “How do we appear at the top of the results?” “We’ll call our website ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - Wikipedia’”

That's how it worked in the Yellow Pages. "AAA Plumbing" and such.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#118

Post by fucking_tragedy »

wtallis wrote: post #45
enlyth wrote: post #32

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this afte…

I've noticed over the past year that a Google search for almost any medical term will bury the wikipedia article on the third or fourth page of search results. The first three pages are all sites with extremely watered-down content and little to none of the cross-referencing links that make wikipedia a good exploratory tool (and a natural fit to PageRank). Google has obviously decided that anyone searching for a medi…

> The first three pages are all sites with extremely watered-down content and little to none of the cross-referencing links that make wikipedia a good exploratory tool (and a natural fit to PageRank).

Those pages are littered with Google ads. It's no wonder that they're prioritized over relevant and information rich results like Wikipedia.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#119

Post by fareesh »

wtallis wrote: post #77
fareesh wrote: post #57

Okay let's give this a try news.google.com -> Democratic debate Websites: BBC, Vox, Guardian, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Slate (wow), The New Yorker, USA Today Absent: National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT So basically the news algorithm considers these kinds of stories high quality: 1) Stephen Colbert plays Democrat Drinking Game (NYT) No Greg Gutfeld sketch ? 2) Funniest one-liners at the Democrat…

> No Greg Gutfeld sketch ? Who? > I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations For a search specifically about a left-leaning organization? > National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT Two of those publications have much stricter paywalls/adwalls than any of the other publications you mentioned. One is a foreign outlet that's decidedly not known for quality in…

> Who?

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/445898-fox-newss-greg-gut...

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#120

Post by wtallis »

fareesh wrote: post #119
wtallis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No Greg Gutfeld sketch ? Who? > I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations For a search specifically about a left-leaning organization? > National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT Two of those publications have much stricter paywalls/adwalls than any of the other publications you mentioned. One is a foreign outlet that's decidedly not known for quality in…

> Who? https://thehill.com/homenews/media/445898-fox-newss-greg-gut...

So, do you see how that article explains why a Colbert sketch is more likely to make the news than something from Gutfeld? Colbert's audience is more than twice the size of Gutfeld's, and Colbert has been in this business far longer and is better-known among people who don't regularly watch either show. Other things being equal, Colbert is simply more newsworthy. So unless Gutfeld had an especially good segment about the democratic debate, there's no reason to expect him to be included in a top news listing that only has one or two comedy/satire items.

And that's all ignoring the fact that Gutfeld's show has not yet aired an episode since the last debate, so it's quite impossible for a sketch from his show to be ranking in the news about that debate.

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