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Google is FUBAR

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Re: Google is FUBAR

#211

Post by bru »

bambax wrote: post #123
cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

I agree with you, and I think that Christopher Poole (moot) explained it very well at the Web 2.0 Summit 2011[1].

> Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror, but in fact, we're more like diamonds.

> Identity is prismatic

Those quotes may not be the best ones, but he explains well the dangers of the concept of identity according to Google and Facebook. An article about it was also featured here[2].

> If you try to use one to help the other you will produce a soup of irrelevant garbage.

I definitely agree. My different interests already enter in conflict on Youtube; and Google got trouble dealing with the fact that 90% of my searches will be in English and the last 10% will be in French, and I do not want it to filter my results towards one language or another.

1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...

2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3123086

Re: Google is FUBAR

#212

Post by manish_gill »

smspence wrote: post #101
manish_gill wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going. Preciously the reason why I've started using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. In my experience, it almost always provides unbiased results.

Could you give a specific example of a search that you've done on Google that gives you bad results? And that would give you better "unbiased" results on DuckDuckGo? I would like to try and do a side-by-side comparison. Also, what do you mean by "unbiased"? What is the "bias" that Google has? I am trying to find real, concrete examples of all of the complaints in this thead, and I can't really find any.

fred_nada described it way better than I could in this post earlier in the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511595

"Bias" has the obvious meaning here. When searching for a topic on which I am not very well informed, I expect to see informative, authoritative results(which Google /does/ provides), but I don't want references to what my "friends" think on the topic. This becomes worse because in many cases, these "personalised" results are higher than the ones which should be more relevant.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#213

Post by JS_startup »

yanw wrote: post #181
pron wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+googol. I just have to repeat this. Google, YOU WILL GUESS WRONG! And my hunch is, you'll guess wrong about, oh, 8 times out of ten. Google search is the last place I go to look for something that's already one of my interests. For that I have twitter, my feed reader etc. I only google things that I have no, or little, familiarity with. Google search is supposed to tell me WHAT I DON'T ALREADY KNOW. In fact, now whe…

Use the toggle to turn off the social stuff then.

A UX lesson I learned long ago: If you have to have an option for it then it's a poor design

Re: Google is FUBAR

#214

Post by reddit_clone »

bambax wrote: post #123
cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

Well said.

I hated it it when I saw search results polluted like that a few weeks ago. Now I keep myself logged out of GMail pretty much all the time.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#215

Post by reddit_clone »

mvgoogler wrote: post #210
bambax wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

"just show me the most relevant links" Here's the rub - for a given query there is no such thing as the list of link that are "most relevant". Different people will have (potentially widely) divergent opinions on what the most relevant set of links are for the exact same query . The goal Google web-search [1] is to show you the links from the whole web that are most relevant to you . Knowing more about you allows a s…

It is fine to show Ads depending on _that_ search. It had been a great invention of Google that had served them and us well.

But I don't want it to take my entire online life into account when I am doing a search. (At the very least I should be able to opt out of this).

Re: Google is FUBAR

#216

Post by lallysingh »

bambax wrote: post #123
cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

A query string, by itself, is just a few words in a specific order. It doesn't say very much at all. A machine has very little idea of what you're asking for. The more context it has for what you're talking about, the better chance it has at guessing what you meant -- that's all it can do, it'll never actually know.

Google's often guessing wrong now -- how many times is the link you want not the top one? How often do you have to change your query? It's all a guessing game, because the situations where there's an obvious right answer (like exact phrases) doesn't give satisfactory results. Moreover, interpreting queries for those situations can often (even usually) give sub-optimal results, as the computer's taking the query too literally.

As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux. A trivial scan of my email headers would say as much.

For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos.

And as for your friends, how about the people you follow? If I'm following really good programmers, and I type in a programming-related query, I'd rather get results biased toward what really good programmers like, versus the unbiased average. Even for my friends, I actually respect some of their opinions (gasp!). If they've +1'd something in the realm of what I'm looking for, it's probably worth considering.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#217

Post by jcrites »

mvgoogler wrote: post #210
bambax wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we know something of your interests (based on G+ and/or search), isn't suggesting more relevant content to you on Youtube (as a purely hypothetical example) a good thing? No, it's not. Not because of "privacy" concerns or this whole silly "evil" debate, but because YOU'LL GUESS WRONG. I have many interests. I never email anyone about my search queries because I do searches about programming, and I exchange mail…

"just show me the most relevant links" Here's the rub - for a given query there is no such thing as the list of link that are "most relevant". Different people will have (potentially widely) divergent opinions on what the most relevant set of links are for the exact same query . The goal Google web-search [1] is to show you the links from the whole web that are most relevant to you . Knowing more about you allows a s…

Here is a concrete example. A few days ago I visited Google and, rather tentatively, typed in the word "ring".

I was expecting to get garbage pages about wedding rings, or something like that. As its #1 result, Google sent me where I had wanted to go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(mathematics)

By knowing my interests lie in computer science, technology, and mathematics, Google was able to return this for me as the first result.

Other searches my friends did took them to rings for sale on Overstock.com or Amazon.

I welcome this new technology.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#218

Post by firefox »

I didn't see that coming, no, not with the creation of gmail, google docs, the acquisition of Youtube and everything else we use, why on earth would they want to put all my info into one place?... c'mon people! Facebook knows more about you than Google, and (shock) they're a for-profit organization, if they can target better ads to you, they will. I don't personally like this but as a corporation it's what they've to do.

Re: Google is FUBAR

#220

Post by landhar »

fred_nada wrote: post #142
cletus wrote: post #50

Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer. These opinions are my own. Nothing I say in any way represents the company's position, officially or unofficially. That being said, I see all this as much ado about nothing. Privacy policies are complex beasts governed by many regulatory environments. Reducing a huge number of these policies to a handful, announcing it ahead of time and giving you controls over privacy all seem lik…

Cletus: The outrage is from people who feel they were lied to and instead of apologizing google seems to be defending their actions. You said: As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out). This is not true. Example 1: Search for cars while "opted" out of G+ results. Ferarri's G+ page…

Concerning example 3, I find that this comment sums it all up:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/#commen...

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