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Google turned me into a serial killer

hristo-georgiev.com

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Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#171

Post by krisoft »

bartread wrote: post #67
walrus01 wrote: post #65

If you want to see a terrible example of Google automatically finding a "best" search result for the #1 entry of something, google the following: "how many raccoons can fit"

For anyone who's curious but not enough to actually run the search themselves, the top results (using the string without quotes) all relate to how many raccoons can fit into a human anus. No, I am not joking, and this is the result of 20+ years of web search development and decades of cutting edge AI research, right here. Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days. It has close to zero clue abou…

> Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days.

Sorry, that is a bit over the top. What result would you expect for that query? Folks took a silly premise and made a joke about it and google in the absence of anything more relevant shows you their joke. While i was typing this query in I had to ignore the much more usefull suggestions: “How many raccoons in a litter”, “How many raccoons in the world”, “How many raccoons are in the us”, “How many raccoons live together”

And it provided reasonable looking lead to answer all of these question. And it did this while I was seriously mistyping the animal’s name!

If you don’t recognize how amazing this is then you left your blinders on. Let’s take this query for example: “How many raccoons are in the us”. This is a well formed human question, but it is not how one used to query a search engine. You were supposed to try to guess what words would appear on your imagined page and type those in. So for example you would type in “raccoon population us”. Except of course you were supposed to also know that the word “us” is ambigous, and appears too often in the wrong sense, so you would transform it to “United States” to help the machine. So by the expectations and conventions of the early google this is a badly formed query. A user error realky, yet now it can answer it! And it doesn’t just gives me a link where there might be an answer. Oh, no! It pulls the most important sentence out of the page and pasts it over the link.

This. Is. Freaking. Magic.

Are there mistakes? Sure. The linked serial killer thing is quite bad for example. But if you pick the raccoon example as your main argument then you lost me.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#172

Post by mcv »

nonameiguess wrote: post #58
dhosek wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a longstanding project where I rank graduate creative writing programs by their alumni's appearances in a selection of prize anthologies. This means I spend a lot of time googling authors. There are a number of authors whose internet presence is shadowed by criminals with the same name. Then there are those who are shadowed by more famous people of the same name such as the Australian poet Kate Middleton or th…

I was so happy to find out 15 years ago that I have the same name as multiple pro athletes, both about the same age as me, too. I very much want to be un-Googleable.

I have a pretty common Dutch name. At my current company, I'm at least the second person with my first name-last name combination. Same at a previous company. When I became freelancer and registered with the chamber of commerce, a company with my exact name already existed.

I can probably post all sorts of horrific crap on the internet without anyone ever being able to trace it back to me.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#173

Post by agumonkey »

gatorcode wrote: post #169
agumonkey wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> takes everything it reads on the internet at face value. it's terrible but a lot of people [0] think digital information, and thus internet, is truth [0] and if google itself falls for this.. no wonder if people do too

Google isn’t interested in truth, they are interested in information. They are provide a search engine not a truth engine. Sarcasm aside, how do we propose they determine what is truth? If we assume the internet is full of information and more truthful than not, then Google’s assumption could be accurate. Of course they do try and solve this with the knowledge graph and expert curation. Connections to verified inform…

I don't, I stopped caring about truthes, at least in a large scale social context.. now if someone could tell this to the world.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#174

Post by stordoff »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #43
dbalatero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen how bad people are at skimming things they read online though even when the facts are laying there in front of them, and I could easily see someone (hiring manager, dating app they matched with) just googling their name, seeing the same pic match, and instantly running for the hills.

Google probably doesn't even render the birthday on mobile.

With Safari on a iPhone 11 Pro Max, I get the same infobox as in the article (showing birthday/date of death).

Amusingly, I also get recommended a TEDx video titled "Hristo Georgiev: How to deceive Artificial Intelligence". Mission accomplished?

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#175

Post by joe_the_user »

tzs wrote: post #91

> It turns out that Google's knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer. Which is also surprisingly strange because my name isn't special or unique at all; there are literally hundreds of other people with my name, and despite of all that, my personal photo ended up being associated with a serial killer. I can't really explain to myself how this ha…

"That explanation is the same explanation"

Or rather, all the knowledge graphic does is stuff not much more complicated than associate picture to name to article.

But what is pernicious is that presents itself as a knowledge graph and sometimes appears to have knowledge and so it seems to people to be a somewhat authoritative statement. And that causes people not-critically-thinking people to reach false and destructive beliefs.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#176

Post by ghaff »

hadlock wrote: post #151
Tenoke wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised to learn how hard it is to add anything to Wikipedia and have it stay accepted.

I added the wiki page for Kamala Harris' dad (a professor) to wikipedia (shortly after Biden announced her as his running mate in the election), and within literally 2 minutes, two different people had flagged it for deletion. One reason given was that academics need to be especially notable to warrant a wiki page, completely ignoring his relation to her daughter, which was mentioned in the original draft of the arti…

There's definitely a deletionist cult within Wikipedia. While acknowledging that it shouldn't be a dumping ground for essentially individual web pages, it goes too far IMO for people who have clear documented credentials and public history. This favors certain occupations over others of course--including academics, journalists, etc.--who have public bios, papers/articles, and often articles about them. But deletionist tendencies in these areas tend to work against claims that it's all about verifiability.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#178

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dntrkv wrote: post #160
da_chicken wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault. Making it sound like the business's fault for not using Google's other service is just reinforcing the idea that Google's information is the only information that's real. This is the problem with the web search and scaping provider also trying to be a thousand other services at the same time. It's a constant conflict…

> That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault. Huh? If the business owners aren't updating the correct info in My Business, how can that possibly be Google's fault?

Because this means My Business is not fit for purpose. Google is a web search engine, not a Google proprietary DB search engine.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#180

Post by pvaldes »

bartread wrote: post #67
walrus01 wrote: post #65

If you want to see a terrible example of Google automatically finding a "best" search result for the #1 entry of something, google the following: "how many raccoons can fit"

For anyone who's curious but not enough to actually run the search themselves, the top results (using the string without quotes) all relate to how many raccoons can fit into a human anus. No, I am not joking, and this is the result of 20+ years of web search development and decades of cutting edge AI research, right here. Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days. It has close to zero clue abou…

Racoon smuggling seemed a good job opportunity in the newspaper, but is obvious that the profit margins are tight.
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