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Google killed me

amywilentz.tumblr.com

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Re: Google killed me

#21

Post by DanBC »

bbrizzi wrote: post #14

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.

> What a bad article...

But a good reminder of just how little understanding most people have of The Internet.

Re: Google killed me

#22

Post by Ensorceled »

bbrizzi wrote: post #14

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.

Actually it's a great article for exactly the reason you give for it being a bad article.

She has no idea how to tell Google to stop saying to the world she is dead. There are "this is wrong" buttons that she clicks that don't do anything, apparently.

This is actually the point of her article. She doesn’t know how to fix the problem and Google (the robot) isn't providing tools to fix it.

Yes, you and I know that if she goes to a high traffic site such as wikipedia, google will scan that very quickly. But that's a hack, albeit a very simple one, but still a hack requiring a lot of knowledge of how Google, and the web, works.

Re: Google killed me

#24

Post by namank »

jere wrote: post #5
sp332 wrote: post #2

Here's the edit history for the page, where you can see all the edits user Amywilentz made over the last few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amy_Wilentz&a...

It's not too surprising that google dropped the ball. This entry that she describes doesn't even have her birth year shown, but instead lists a dozen other years. That's rather odd for a short bio. Maybe Joel was trying to be polite... never ask a lady her age? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amy_Wilentz&o... >An error in a Google search “factbox” can only be corrected when Google re-indexes (whatever that…

Wikipedia has to have sources.

Re: Google killed me

#25

Post by leephillips »

nathanb wrote: post #20
bbrizzi wrote: post #14

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.

Yes, the fact that a reasonably well-respected writer and English professor doesn't understand the inner workings of Google's infobox means that her blog post is terrible. 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…

"Wikipedia's policies frown on editing one's own page, even to correct factual errors"

Indeed, Wikipedia editors have informed notable people that they are not authoritative sources for information about themselves and should not correct mistakes on the site about their own lives.

Re: Google killed me

#26

Post by protomyth »

bbrizzi wrote: post #14

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.

No, this is what a normal person would do because they don't understand google indexing.

Normal people look at the piece of the world that is wrong. If given the opportunity, they click on that same piece of world (the "infobox" in this case) to fix it. Google doesn't provide an indication in the infobox where they are getting their "facts". Other than talking to people (something not available to everyone), how would a person know what to do to change this?

Second, it was my understanding that editing your own wikipedia entry is not acceptable.

Re: Google killed me

#28

Post by IvyMike »

danso wrote: post #12
EwanToo wrote: post #3

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…

Taking your analogy to its logical conclusion, Google should have hired a looper to kill Wilentz in the past.

Re: Google killed me

#29

Post by ajross »

RyanZAG wrote: post #6

Natural language parsing is not 100% accurate and can make mistakes - breaking news! All kinds of automated data collection such as this will have errors that need to be fixed manually by a human. This will be taken care of if/when we eventually have real artificial intelligence. The data parsing scripts Google and others use are fairly advanced, but they still break down to a couple rules and finding words in close…

> This will be taken care of if/when we eventually have real artificial intelligence

Considering that "non-artificial intelligence" makes the same kind of mistakes, I find that an odd claim.

Mistakes happen. Quite frankly far fewer of them happen in the modern world, due precisely to technology like this. What has changed is actually the converse: automation has become so good that we expect it to be flawless. No one would have found it "surprising" (annoying, sure, unless it was in the context of a zazy madcap comedy film) in 1962 to be mixed up with someone else's biography based on a name confusion.

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