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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#271

Post by airstrike »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #171
airstrike wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but even "Google sometimes gets things wrong" isn't entirely accurate. So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what? Google is not in the business of providing the most accurate search results. It's in the business of generating ad revenue. If popular links make Google more valuable, then favoring them is "getting things right" from the perspective of a private company.

I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy. Actually I think that is a seriously editorialized take as well, not in keeping with the spirit of HN. I think it would be more correct to say that much of the time popularity is accuracy, in that it's what the searcher is looking for. When there are a variety of interpretations of a query, the most popular interpretation is the rational prior…

> I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy.

I'm not the one making that claim, I'm just starting from that assumption since the parents are claiming as much

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#272

Post by anoncake »

airstrike wrote: post #263
anoncake wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that for-profit companies by nature don't provide value?

They provide value in a specific form, which is aligned to their goals, and it may or may not overlap with what's optimal for society. But they're not in the business of providing what's best for society. That's a byproduct of competition, not a goal from the outset.

Either way, an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#273

Post by basch »

s5ma6n wrote: post #231
basch wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously a harder problem than I want to believe it is, but considering the terrible quality of results as of late, I don't think this would be worse. First, start with a whitelist. Hand pick high quality publications, and rank them towards the top. This may tilt results back towards institutions, and away from blogs. Second, punish similarity. If everybody is reposting AP or Reuters without any additional info…

How would you pick the options by hand? This way you would introduce the thought and point of view bias of the people working at Google to the results. Additionally how would you pick who is the winner? For example how would you compare a technology article is more correct coming from various sources? They also have their own bias introduced to their content.

>This way you would introduce the thought and point of view bias of the people working at Google to the results.

Correct. I would do that.

.

>They also have their own bias introduced to their content.

Yes. Good.

I'm not necessarily saying they hand pick the best article for every single story. Although techmeme.com and hn do that to an extent, when they notice a better version of an article, they replace the top link with the better version.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#274

Post by miked85 »

Avamander wrote: post #120
miked85 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always seems odd to me when owners of a domain don't use their own domain for email.

Why bother?

1. portability, you are not locked into a provider like gmail

2. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#275

Post by Razengan »

Google has been emphasizing click-baity results for years now. A moderately complex query for X will usually be filled with "Top 10 X" or ignores the context. Their results (on web search as well as YouTube) also seem to be biased against Apple and Microsoft which feels a bit scummy.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#276

Post by airstrike »

anoncake wrote: post #272
airstrike wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provide value in a specific form, which is aligned to their goals, and it may or may not overlap with what's optimal for society. But they're not in the business of providing what's best for society. That's a byproduct of competition, not a goal from the outset.

Either way, an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.

But that's the thing. Any single actor can only provide sub-optimal results, but competition and regulation create a competitive game which provides society with optimal results.

Google isn't wrong – it's actually doing its part really well. It's either competition or regulation that need tweaking. Probably both.

In other words

> an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.

The economic system can provide optimal results. Individual actors can but don't need to in order for the prior statement to be true.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#277

Post by tcbasche »

miked85 wrote: post #274
Avamander wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother?

1. portability, you are not locked into a provider like gmail 2. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address

It's not overly expensive either to get a custom G Suite domain if you enjoy gmail, but don't want the domain name.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#278

Post by devinplatt »

rob74 wrote: post #225

One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk capacity" ( https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity ), you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density…

You can provide feedback on the answer card. I've had a few answer cards fixed after providing feedback. Notably "https port" used to yield the http port.

Edit: I think you've actually managed to find a really terrific example of a case where modern ML systems are going to have trouble, because of how that Wikipedia page is worded in relation to the query.

* There isn't a single phrase that answers the query directly, so the ML model would need to make very good use of context (attention), both within multiclause sentences and between paragraphs.

* There are many different numbers on the page, so the model has to determine the right one. It can't just get lucky by guessing here.

* A wrong number (1.7MB) has close proximity to literal keywords in the query (floppy, disk). (The right number [880KB] does too.)

* The model has to understand and properly make use of "most" vs "unusual" in its decision.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#279

Post by JJMcJ »

JJMcJ wrote: post #70
dzonga wrote: post #29

which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend. I recently ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please don't recommend ddg | bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.

No they use other search engines and have their own web crawler as well.

That is, they use other engines besides Bing. They are not simply repackaging Bing.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#280

Post by anoncake »

airstrike wrote: post #276
anoncake wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.

But that's the thing. Any single actor can only provide sub-optimal results, but competition and regulation create a competitive game which provides society with optimal results. Google isn't wrong – it's actually doing its part really well. It's either competition or regulation that need tweaking. Probably both. In other words > an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is brok…

It very much doesn't. Unless there is a working search engine right now that I just don't know about.
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