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Elevating original reporting in Search

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Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#121

Post by luckylion »

specialist wrote: post #115
ebg13 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beneficiarie…

> Anyone quoting sources and showing their work (published data) is reporting. Even if you disagree with the interpretation, conclusions.

Interpretations are commentary, not reporting. Reporting is strictly facts. Even opinion pieces contain some reporting ("X did Y, and here's what you should think about it"). I don't believe it's "anti-intellectualism" to ask for more reporting and less commentary.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#122

Post by chimi »

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…

Yes, this is because Google isn't optimizing their search results to return you the information you want, but rather to optimize their revenue. Showing you regurgitated spam sites like wikihow and pinterest means you go back to the search results to find something relevant, which increases the probability you click on an ad.

Furthermore, if they show you spam sites, which also have google ads on them, then you're more likely to click on an ad and give google money than if they show you wikipedia, which doesn't have ads.

They don't want you to go to wikipedia, because it won't make them any money.

They are sacrificing their product quality for profit. This is the general trend in corporations with a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, rather than their customers.

In this case, the customer is the ad buyer, not the searcher, so those of us looking for things are actually 4th in line for prioritization, as it's like this:

  Shareholders come first
  Ad buyers come second
  Ad real estate providers third
  Searchers forth
We need a search engine where the search results are the product, rather than the people searching. We are the product being sold to the Ad buyers.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#123

Post by persistent »

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…

These results are neither hermetic nor repeatable since the ranking will be polluted by searches and clicks coming from your browser in the past, you account on other browsers, other people using your IP, other people in your region, etc. There is no pure function mapping a search term to a result list, and the desire for such a thing is too silly to take seriously.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#124

Post by Hermitian909 »

specialist wrote: post #115
ebg13 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beneficiarie…

I think the point of the parent is that any story you read is editorialized to some degree, even if all it's doing is listing facts.

Every time you read a report on a topic, mountains of facts are omitted for the sake of disseminating the points the authors and editors thought you should know to build your opinion. It is thus vital that you trust their judgment to do so in a way that's beneficial to you.

Knowing things is just really hard and we tend to fool ourselves into believing we know more than we do and that we can know more than is reasonable (yours truly included).

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#125

Post by rdtwo »

Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Anytime you search for a game guide/faq/hint you get drivel from the big name sites that are super short on content and have bad advice. Almost in all cases the content I’m looking for is in some tiny blog that barely ranks but matches all the search words.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#126

Post by fareesh »

wtallis wrote: post #120
fareesh wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wasn't making a specific argument about Gutfeld though. The broader context is that it's favoring partisan sources and messages.

That's an outcome.

By explaining why that outcome is reasonable and giving a list of valid claims to support it, it does not address the stated problem which is the fact that this search engine presents a slanted view of American politics.

Why is it ok to have this kind of search result? We all don't owe our media corporations any kind of loyalty, and we all know that they have an interest in a particular point of view.

I'd think that in this kind of situation we are all best served by knowing what the folks at CNN are saying and also what the folks at Fox are saying (not those two specifically, but as stand-ins for multiple points of view).

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#127

Post by wtallis »

fareesh wrote: post #126
wtallis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wasn't making a specific argument about Gutfeld though. The broader context is that it's favoring partisan sources and messages. That's an outcome. By explaining why that outcome is reasonable and giving a list of valid claims to support it, it does not address the stated problem which is the fact that this search engine presents a slanted view of American politics. Why is it ok to have this kind of search result?…

> I wasn't making a specific argument about Gutfeld though.

Yeah, you were. Your overall point wasn't about him specifically, but you most certainly did attempt to use him as a (completely invalid) supporting argument. You're generally doing a very bad job of supporting your position. That's understandable to an extent because showing convincing evidence of systematic bias requires gathering a non-trivial amount of data, but you could at least do us the favor of not bashing Google for suppressing stories that don't exist.

And there's still the issue that you chose a partisan search term as your example. Given that, it seems very reasonable that Google's news results would include more results from left-leaning sources, because they have more to say on that particular subject. It almost seems like you're arguing that Google News should be biased toward equal time/prominence for different factions even if that's not accurately representative of what news and commentary is out there.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#128

Post by fareesh »

persistent wrote: post #123
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…

These results are neither hermetic nor repeatable since the ranking will be polluted by searches and clicks coming from your browser in the past, you account on other browsers, other people using your IP, other people in your region, etc. There is no pure function mapping a search term to a result list, and the desire for such a thing is too silly to take seriously.

If most folks are getting similar rankings then the impact of the pollution is minimal though.

Are you getting different results?

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#129

Post by MiroF »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #60
sseagull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways that might be true. But I also wonder if google is using tracking/profiling as kind of a crutch. A while ago, I had google forget about all the things I had searched for. I then wanted to look up some features of C++17, but google kept coming up with info about the C-17 Globemaster instead. Rather than just searching for my terms explicitly, it tried to interpret what I wanted, and failed miserably witho…

> I then wanted to look up some features of C++17, but google kept coming up with info about the C-17 Globemaster instead I did the search just now and every single result on the first page was about C++17. (I am logged-out with Noscript, Ghostery, adblock enabled). They might have fixed it?

how do you know what the search was?

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#130

Post by binarybits »

sverige wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

Absolutely, but they have that influence and so far they've mostly been using it in ways that make journalism worse (creating powerful incentives for shallow articles with clickbait headlines). This seems like a step in the right direction.
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