11–20 of 99 posts
... except that you can't cite the subject's own blog as a reliable source-particularly when they apparently wrote it post-mortem.
Curiously, a couple of weeks since that post was made, Google have obviously updated their results, I no longer get a "Died:" record when I search for "amy wilentz". Perhaps another case of Google ignoring you until you get a bit of publicity, or just them finally catching up.
> But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn’t comfortable releasing Froogle: when the query “running shoes” was typed in, the top result was a garden gnome sculpture that happened to be wearing sneakers. Every day engineers would try to tweak the algorithm so that it would be able to distinguish between lawn art and footwear, but the gnome kept its top position.
> One day, seemingly miraculously, the gnome disappeared from the results. At a meeting, no one on the team claimed credit. Then an engineer arrived late, holding an elf with running shoes. He had bought the one-of-a kind product from the vendor, and since it was no longer for sale, it was no longer in the index. “The algorithm was now returning the right results,” says a Google engineer. “We didn’t cheat, we didn’t change anything, and we launched.”
The author talks about something (google indexing) she admits she doesn't understand.
She doesn't understand that by editing her Wikipedia article, the google crawler would update her infobox data pretty quickly.
Her birth data was added to the wikipedia entry today and the google infobox is fixed. It took less than 2 hours. Not something worth whining about.
Curiously, a couple of weeks since that post was made, Google have obviously updated their results, I no longer get a "Died:" record when I search for "amy wilentz". Perhaps another case of Google ignoring you until you get a bit of publicity, or just them finally catching up.
It reminds me of an anecdote from Steven Levy's "In the Plex" on a sneaker wearing gnome that was inexplicably making a mockery of Froogle results: > But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn’t comfortable releasing Froogle: when the query “running shoes” was typed in, the top result was a garden gnome sculpture that happened to be wearing sneakers. Every day engineers would try to tweak the algorithm so that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is interesting that google almost seems to take Wikipedia bio boxes as gospel, which is a questionable decision given that Google "rich snippets" in the search results now have such high placement. I wonder how much Wikipedia specific logic is used in the googlebot...I'm guessing that longevity of article and number of edits is a factor in taking an entry seriously.
> It is interesting that google almost seems to take Wikipedia bio boxes as gospel FTA, I don't believe the data was taken from a bio box: > So it’s not too surprising that my original Wikipedia entry, as conceived by Joel, was — let’s be honest — more about my father (a famous New Jersey judge) than about me. Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and th…
Seems like just an oddmatch caused by an overzealous relative that happened due to the incredibly large amount of data Google processes.
What a bad article... The author talks about something (google indexing) she admits she doesn't understand. She doesn't understand that by editing her Wikipedia article, the google crawler would update her infobox data pretty quickly. Her birth data was added to the wikipedia entry today and the google infobox is fixed. It took less than 2 hours. Not something worth whining about.
And she is raising an important point, and one that keeps recurring with Google: what do you do when their automated processes are not enough?
She should not have to edit Wikipedia to resolve this situation. That is not a reasonable expectation of anyone.
In fact, she chose the only solution that usually gets through to Google: blog/tweet about something and get enough exposure.
What a bad article... The author talks about something (google indexing) she admits she doesn't understand. She doesn't understand that by editing her Wikipedia article, the google crawler would update her infobox data pretty quickly. Her birth data was added to the wikipedia entry today and the google infobox is fixed. It took less than 2 hours. Not something worth whining about.
I might complain to my mechanic that it won't start. To him, diagnosing a bad spark plug and swapping in a new one is a simple matter of five minutes, but to me it might as well be heart surgery. That doesn't mean I was wrong to complain.
She knew something was wrong, but admittedly didn't understand all the details. She complained to bring it to the internet's attention, after which it was swiftly fixed. This doesn't mean she's done anything foolish or wrong - she was simply pointing out a problem.
What a bad article... The author talks about something (google indexing) she admits she doesn't understand. She doesn't understand that by editing her Wikipedia article, the google crawler would update her infobox data pretty quickly. Her birth data was added to the wikipedia entry today and the google infobox is fixed. It took less than 2 hours. Not something worth whining about.
This arrogant and dismissive response highlights the problem even better than her mild and humorous complaint (which, for the record, I didn't see as whining).
Perhaps she did understand that editing her Wikipedia page would correct the problem but also understood that Wikipedia's policies frown on editing one's own page, even to correct factual errors such as birth and death dates. Or perhaps she was entirely ignorant that she could even edit Wikipedia. Or perhaps she knew but didn't care and only wanted to write a humorous and potentially thought-provoking blog post.
Why are you so quick to defend an algorithm which produced a wrong answer and detract a reasonable and intelligent human being?