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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

#181

Post by clydethefrog »

neartheplain wrote: post #141
judge2020 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the same one that dictates what appears in Google Maps for claimed businesses), so if the owners are updating their website but not updating that (or checking their email for emails from google that say '[business], are you open on 4th of July?') it'll show incorrec…

Even if 90% of businesses play along (doing Google's data entry work for them), the 10% chance of my wasting half an hour makes it worth ignoring the info box and double-checking each time.

It has also been a waste of working hours at our offices. I work at libraries and am responsible for the communication towards visitors — we are slowly opening up all our venues again with lifting of corona measures, which mean we need to update our opening times. With one click I can reverse them on our own website but I have to update every location manually on google results. Anyone can also change these opening times plus they might just change them again based on some third party website that scrapes outdated opening times.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#182

Post by smsm42 »

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…

Given that they are actively curating the information and censoring "misinformation", they certainly think they are a truth engine. And present it this way. Of course you'd only believe it if you believe Google is omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#183

Post by ghaff »

brewdad wrote: post #159
ghaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most problematic thing is when you share an unusual name with someone notorious who might plausibly be you at first glance. I went to grad school with someone who later lived in NYC. He shared a name with someone who basically was the cause of George Steinbrenner (NY Yankees owner) getting banned from baseball for a few years during the same period. Obviously not a popular NYC figure. This was pre-web etc., but m…

I have an uncommon name yet there are at least 4 (I discovered a new one today via Google) of us who share the same name and are all within 2 years in age. One of the other versions of "me" lives in the same state I grew up in. Fortunately, none of us are too notorious, though one alternate "me" has pretty poor credit and another has been sued a couple of times recently.

I'm actually not sure why I'm unique, at least in Internet times (someone much older turned up in a search at one point). Neither my given name nor surname are that rare. But they aren't super-common and are from different European nationalities so I guess that's enough to collapse into a unique point.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#184

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Google isn’t interested in truth, they are interested in information. They are provide a search engine not a truth engine

Google has been transitioning to attempting to provide a "truth engine" for several years. Whenever I try a complex key-word search, it suggests a question format for it (often with worse result but sometimes OK). When I have finally got the key words down to filter just what I want, google whines about "Not very many results, here's what you should do..." and, of course, Google often gives explicit answers for questions in it's search results (a notable percentage of which are wrong as noted).

And Google being half-assed truth engine is all sorts of bad...

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#185

Post by cwkoss »

You should seriously consider suing for defamation if this isn't fixed within a few days. This is an egregious error, especially if it was done by an automated system (and this could be a systemic issue affecting many others).

I think you have a decent chance of getting a five figure+ settlement from this. Talk to a lawyer about your options.

EDIT: When I search "Hristo Georgiev" (from US IP) there is no longer an image in the infobox. (As of 21:55:10 UTC, June 24, 2021)

I think a google engineer saw this HN post :-D

(You could still talk to a lawyer - remedying it now does not alter the fact that you were previously defamed. But Google has a stronger position having now remedied it)

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#186

Post by Oak_ »

Someone wrote: post #140
jetrink wrote: post #42

The info boxes sometimes contain surprising errors. I recently searched for Picasa and was informed that it was invented by Pablo Picasso in 2002! Google 'knows' Picasso died in the 1970s and it 'knows' he released a popular software program in 2002. That's an obvious contradiction requiring the simplest of rules to detect, but the system is just a dumb text extractor. (Interestingly, Google assistant gave the correc…

In this case, we also several hints that the guy is dead: - “Hristo Bogdanov Georgiev […] was a Bulgarian rapist and serial killer” - “Cause of Death: Execution by hanging” - “Died: August 28, 1980 (aged 23-24)” Yet we also have - Born: 1956 (age 65 years) Also, if they don’t exactly know at what age he died, how do they know he would be 65 now, and not 64? I think Google can do better, but not at the scale they need…

Interesting enough it tells me that he was executed by firing squad and not hanged. So do the screenshots of the source. "Cause of death: Execution by shooting"

If you copied that correctly then that would imply that these results are personalized?

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#187

Post by stordoff »

ghaff wrote: post #64
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…

The most problematic thing is when you share an unusual name with someone notorious who might plausibly be you at first glance. I went to grad school with someone who later lived in NYC. He shared a name with someone who basically was the cause of George Steinbrenner (NY Yankees owner) getting banned from baseball for a few years during the same period. Obviously not a popular NYC figure. This was pre-web etc., but m…

I have a relatively uncommon name, yet I've still come across two people who could be mistaken for me at first glance. One comes from the same county as me, and the other went to the same university. The former died 18 months ago in a car crash, so the first result for my name is now "[name] named as victim in [location] crash" (and there's a recommended search for "twitter" that uses my photo), which is a little strange to see.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#188

Post by smsm42 »

jetrink wrote: post #42

The info boxes sometimes contain surprising errors. I recently searched for Picasa and was informed that it was invented by Pablo Picasso in 2002! Google 'knows' Picasso died in the 1970s and it 'knows' he released a popular software program in 2002. That's an obvious contradiction requiring the simplest of rules to detect, but the system is just a dumb text extractor. (Interestingly, Google assistant gave the correc…

It's obvious for you, a human. There's no human curating those results (it's completely infeasible at Google's scales) and their graph building algorithms are extremely dumb. They are proprietary, but all of them are, so I'm sure Google's are too. The rules that could be added are obvious for each case, but there are trillions of possible cases, and there's no feasible way to create rules for even a small percent of them. So what you get is a giant mess of data that kinda sorta works most of the time, and spectacularly fails on any exception or complicated scenario. That's what we pay for doing such a massive information processing with such a relatively small amount of resources.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#189

Post by mirekrusin »

agumonkey wrote: post #173
gatorcode wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you peek outside of math/physics it's pretty much landscape of relative truths; imho ideal thruth/fake news detecting machine would simply require axiomatic/weighted input, ie. "I trust MIT with public key 0x..., youtube jesus from la with public key 0x... and my childhood mate 0x..." – based on that is "X true, false or undefined"? (weighted output). Because I trust MIT with weight ie. 500% and MIT trusts Caltech, my trust graph will favour Caltech view of the world. Yes you can throw blockchain and AI into it and it actually makes sense.
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