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Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

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Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#31

Post by blowski »

radicsge wrote: post #20
TheGRS wrote: post #17

While hiring a ton of people to fact-check would be one solution, that obviously wouldn't be very scalable. I think the problem lies in google's algorithm. They seem to be pulling answers from well-visited sites that may purport to have an answer to these questions. Quantity of visits does not equate to truthfulness. What Google should at the very least do is whitelist certain publications for answers to pretty simpl…

I feel referring to (or hiding behind) scalability is a bit salt in the wound. These huge companies are destroying so many jobs (by scalability) - ok unavoidable - but they should do sometimes things that are not scalable and give jobs back to people in trouble. Im not sure how long they should be allowed to go away with it. [just dreaming...]

I agree with your sentiment. Google is abusing its position of market leader to dominate other markets which it's not very good at, which results in providers that _are_ good at those markets going out of business.

If Google wants to make money by being the endpoint for every question ever asked, they need to accept the consequences when they get the answers wrong.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#32

Post by jacquesm »

danmaz74 wrote: post #27
jacquesm wrote: post #4

This is all mostly because google went from search engine indexing other people's stuff to site that you go to to get answers (whether those answers are based on copyright infringement or not is another matter). A similar thing happens in Google news where stuff from sites like breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources making it look as though they are of a similar degree of quality.

Problem is, can you algorithmically determine that breitbart.com and the likes can't be trusted , if they get tons of links, mentions, etc. just like the reputable news sources?

Indeed, and that's the heart of the problem. Something like Google news needs more than just algorithms.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#33

Post by stctgion »

saurik wrote: post #14

The "why are firetrucks red?" one is really interesting as the page result itself is great, but Google is pulling the wrong snippet of the page to feature as the answer.

Or the recent "how long do snails sleep" https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5woiu0/units_of_meas...

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#34

Post by tbrowbdidnso »

rtpg wrote: post #8

This is a great set of examples of this problem. Of course, the offered solution is "hire a bunch of people to check the facts", which seems to be underestimating the scale of this issue for humans, and perhaps overestimating the difficulty of classifying credibility. Considering that Google's bread and butter is general site credibility, having some "truthiness vector" added into the mix doesn't seem impossible? Som…

Fake news is just a new version of spam sites. They mostly exist to make money or enforce an agenda.

People figured out that Google's algorithms could tell when things were generally factually false, unless those things were recent news.

This leads me to believe their algorithms largely relied on news as a source of truth. They're going to have to do something about that

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#35

Post by navs »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #24
valuearb wrote: post #5

I'd like to read the article but it's so irritating to have it only load a page at a time on my iPad that it's unreadable.

I have javascript off on my phone, but scrolling through the article feels like it's "on ice" somehow. Definitely a distracting design.

I have javascript turned off on my iPad and the article is refreshingly quick to load and easy to read. The rest of the site however is another story. They're really abusing those CSS transitions.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#36

Post by jazoom »

yabatopia wrote: post #16
jazoom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are sites like that. Startpage.com is an example.

I always thought that services like Startpage or DDG paid for access to search databases, it maybe some form of revenue sharing. It's not that they're stealing the search results from Bing or Google and repackage them.

Perhaps you're right.

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#37

Post by superasn »

rspeer wrote: post #18
superasn wrote: post #11

Google has developed advanced NLP algorithms, so it should be easy for them to corroborate such data before it gets pushed to featured snippets. On second thought, maybe they're already doing it and sites including authority are just copying off each other.

What makes you think that "advanced NLP algorithms" can distinguish true statements from false ones? They're not even close. You'd have to dramatically simplify the scope of the problem to make it not require artificial general intelligence. The "Fake News Challenge" [1] is the first attempt I know of to seriously evaluate NLP that could eventually be able to fact-check real-world statements, and the current task is…

They were building a knowledge graph for this purpose[1]

[1] http://searchengineland.com/demystifying-knowledge-graph-201...

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#39

Post by malisper »

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #21
TheGRS wrote: post #17

While hiring a ton of people to fact-check would be one solution, that obviously wouldn't be very scalable. I think the problem lies in google's algorithm. They seem to be pulling answers from well-visited sites that may purport to have an answer to these questions. Quantity of visits does not equate to truthfulness. What Google should at the very least do is whitelist certain publications for answers to pretty simpl…

I'm no wizard, but in writing blog articles I've found ways to fool Google into believing me. The problem with their algorithms.... is that all that statistics in the world can't help you when you're listening to a guy telling the truth vs an equally good liar. I can tell you what Google doesn't have, a strong AI. It thinks it knows "facts" but these are merely patterns, and these can be gamed. Because Google still l…

> The problem with their algorithms.... is that all that statistics in the world can't help you when you're listening to a guy telling the truth vs an equally good liar.

While that's true for sites in isolation, Google published a paper a few years ago[0] that describes how you could estimate the trustworthiness of a website. The basic idea is you assign a trustworthiness score to each website. Then, you determine how likely a fact is to be true based on the trustworthiness of the sites that state that fact. You can then recalculate the trustworthiness of each site based on whether it agreed with the fact or not.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf

Re: Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

#40

Post by varjag »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

This is all mostly because google went from search engine indexing other people's stuff to site that you go to to get answers (whether those answers are based on copyright infringement or not is another matter). A similar thing happens in Google news where stuff from sites like breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources making it look as though they are of a similar degree of quality.

On Google Now, "news" sites like infowars, globalresearch.ca and on reign supreme, unless you manually filter them out. This hoax about "staged" MH17 crash is on my newsfeed why.. oh right "because you displayed interest in Ukrainian conflict". Fair enough then!

It is scary how much the default app on Android serves to legitimize the fringe.

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