Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google turned me into a serial killer

hristo-georgiev.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 313 posts

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#63

Post by Tenoke »

romseb wrote: post #45

Suggestion: Create a new Wikipedia article with the same Name, upload your own profile photo onto it and put a Disambiguation (Programmer/Hacker) in it so that Google will associate it correctly. Alternatively, add a drawing of the rapist to the original Wikipedia article. Interestingly, for me, another Hristo (german principal investigator) appears on the right side when I google the name.

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

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#64

Post by ghaff »

dhosek wrote: post #37
a-and wrote: post #22

What's unfortunate is that Hristo Georgiev is a very common Bulgarian name. This isn't a case where a highly uncommon name can lead to a high degree of certainty in association.

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 my friend ended up with death threats left on his answering machine.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#66

Post by bingidingi »

3pt14159 wrote: post #16
elliotbnvl wrote: post #4

> Maybe letting a single internet company "organize the world's information" probably isn't such a great idea. Some food for thought. When put like this, the thought that one company controls virtually all information flow on the Internet is more than mildly terrifying.

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.

How much email flows through gmail? Should Amazon have 50% of all ecommerce transaction data? How much of the chat space and social media does Facebook own?

You're not wrong, but I think rather than bringing up counter-examples, you've produced a list of similar problems.

When someone tries to find a new website someone told them about for the first time... what % of that is filtered through Google? If it's a majority, which I suspect it is, then it's still definitely a problem.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#67

Post by bartread »

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 about quality or relevance.

Re: Google turned me into a serial killer

#69

Post by brinfan »

Tenoke wrote: post #60
brinfan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's pointing out that Larry page and sergey brin are both Jewish, its a common antisemitic / alt right "dog whistle".

The 'white males are the enemy of the people' is such a leftist trope that it's almost hard for me to believe someone thinks it's an alt right dog whistle.

Yeah I'm just having a laugh, hn will unperson this account in a moment.
Post reply on HN