Google turned me into a serial killer • Hacker News Board

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#291

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

dncornholio wrote: post #290

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google is an advertising company.. not a search engine

> Google is an advertising company

Google is a company that sells space for ads; an “advertising company” conventionally refers to a company that designs ad campaigns and purchases ad space for them on behalf of a client.

> not a search engine.

No, its both. Just as historically newspapers publishers in the US have been both producers of newspapers and companies that sell ad space.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#292

Post by iso1631 » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 8:58 AM UTC

haswell wrote: post #36

3pt14159 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that they do, but they don't. Plenty of information flows through emails, chat, social media, direct search on websites like Amazon. The internet is large, and Google is a very big player, but they're not controlling all the information flow on the internet, and if they really tried people would leave.

That Google controls/censors information is well established [0]. The side effects of their search algorithms and how they control the flow of information has also been a topic of regular discussion/scrutiny for many years (just one example here [1]) > and if they really tried people would leave Where would they go? - [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google - [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/google-e…

search - microsoft

maps - apple, microsoft, openstreetmap

mail - dozens of providers

compute - amazon, microsoft, digital ocean, linode, rackspace

Not sure what else google do, I rarely use them

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#293

Post by throwdbaaway » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

Somehow there is no mention here yet about this infamous rant: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/why-google-needed-graph-serving-...

> I started a project to unite all Google OneBoxes under this graph indexing system, which involved weather, flights, events, and so on.

Now we know who's to blame :)

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#294

Post by eingaeKaiy8ujie » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

Never post your photos on the Internet.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#295

Post by Liquid_Fire » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:27 AM UTC

firebaze wrote: post #93

ape4 wrote: post #73

Bing has also turned him into a serial killer. Its the unique name and a Wikipedia entry. https://www.bing.com/search?q=hristo+georgiev

According to the article, the name is not unique at all (for his people at least).

Indeed, for a Bulgarian name it's about as far away from unique as it can be. Both the first name and last name would be in the top 10 most common names in Bulgaria. Imagine something like "David Brown".

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#296

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

This seems a hardcore case of moral damage worth at least some hundreds thousands dollars in a settlement or even suing some millions dollars out of them, doesn't it? Perhaps you should at least ask a lawyer before just humbly reporting the bug to them and forgetting.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#297

Post by jokethrowaway » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:07 AM UTC

_etyf wrote: post #132

Google's Knowledge Graph info boxes are automatically-generated and littered with errors. I've been burned twice on operating hours, once for my local bank and once for a convenience store, driving over each time only to find the place closed. In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website. I've also seen bad KG results for medical conditions, listing the wrong symptoms or describing easily-tr…

Opening hours has been mostly surprisingly accurate - but I agree, it failed a few times.

Opening hours and Google Maps are the only things that get me on Google from DuckDuckGo these days (even if Google Maps keeps getting worse every year).

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#298

Post by mananaysiempre » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

clydethefrog wrote: post #181

neartheplain wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don’t know what the prioritization is if you are e.g. explicitly registered in some Google database, but I’ve had a good experience with just marking up the opening hours (addresses, etc.) with RDFa (or Microformats or whatever else Google accepts these days) on the official website. Of course how easy it is depends on the number of layers between you and the actual HTML, and my case was rather straightforward (three locations with separately listed addresses and opening hours), but you might want to check if it’ll take some of the pain out of the process.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#299

Post by ramblerman » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:14 AM UTC

It seems per the blog post that google fixed it quite quickly.

I wonder how they do that. Do they just have a manual intervention list, where they can code exceptions to the ML results?

Otherwise it seems non trivial to quickly come up with another algorithm that does't have this particular problem.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#300

Post by Piskvorrr » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #279

hermitdev wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because Google scrapes my website once to seed their database doesn't make me responsible for being their data monkey to keep it updated. If Google is scraping this information and keeping it separate, unlinked and un-updated from its source of truth, how is that anyone but Google's fault?

You have to register your business page. It's not automatic. I believe op here meant a Google business listing which was created by the owner explicitly, but not updated.

It's not? Interesting. Literally hundreds of business listings popped up in Google Maps overnight, a few months ago, which appear very much scraped out of some registry - name, category, address, nothing else. Similarly with the """"place names"""" that seem to be based on people's personal remarks, and about as inaccurate.