Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi...
Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay
Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv
Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's question answering. Yes, they say "according to so-and-so" first, but if Google is responsible for "organizing the world's information", they are essentially endorsing that answer as the best response. They've gone too far in favor of recall over precision/reliability and need to dial it back. Otherwise you end up with crap like this:
Is Earth flat? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat
If it's part of the core... Wow, what a useless cess pool google has become.
However, it is dependent upon the search query: https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth doesn't show it, for example.
Perhaps only queries in the form of a question show it.
But yes, it is a piece of shit and they should get rid of it if they aren't going to curate the kind of content that can get put in those boxes.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
Look at this search result. This fake news stuff cannot be allowed to continue.
https://www.google.com/search?q=best+taco+place+in+San+Fansi...
One downside to being sarcastic on a comment thread to make a point is I can't tell if people are down-voting me because they clicked the link, or because they didn't.
People just don't like it when you don't think the way everyone else is thinking.
For Google to be held liable, Google must know what is true and false for all it's knowledge base.
On mobile at least, it really does look like Google is presenting a fact: http://imgur.com/a/DZP1H
Attribution at the top, and maybe more context would help.
Note that the article Google scraped this from is NOT calling those presidents rapists. It mentions one of them was accused, but not prosecuted.
I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be correct -- the language is simply too fuzzy. For many, many things, this is a good idea. The date of Easter is the date of Easter. But the glaring danger here is that for many things this is a freaking evil dystopian nightmare. Why? Because Google will keep tweaking these impossible questions until they look real enough to most people that nobody complains At that point, millions, perhaps billions of people are asking complex questions to a little box that has designed itself to give an plausible but incomplete or wrong answer.
Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same.
Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK?
We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was.
But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of a secret society? The entire purpose of secret societies is that the outside world will never know if you're a member or not.
Look, I'm happy to assume he wasn't, and at some point only kooks continue to chase things down past all reason, but just assume for a second that he was, and that somehow that fact could be determined but the research has not been done yet. So history student X starts wondering about it one day and types the question into Google. Never fear! Google has the answer: he wasn't. And this is Google's answer because this answer has the benefit of looking the most plausible to the greatest number of people. Student X has an answer, gives it no more thought, and wanders off to think about other matters.
Student X is now more stupid. The world as a whole is now less productive. And some preponderance of data that academics have assembled somewhere around the year 2015 has become truth for all time. That's amazingly fucked up, Google. Please stop.
There probably is an argument to be made that in most English speaking countries "Easter" refers to the date calculated using the Gregorian calender, with some qualifier being used to specify the other date (Google answers searches for "eastern easter 2018" and "orthodox easter 2018" with the correct information).
That said, this is a really interesting idea for behind-the-scenes work. The public might not want percentages, but I suspect experts could get some interesting results by diving into confidence levels and secondary answers.
If Google were as good as the best human experts at answering any question, then I think we'd have to declare victory and live with the occasional miscommunication, just as we do today.
This is because most areas of human endeavor aren't solid sciences like physics, although for most day-to-day activity we treat them as if they were. I do not care about the nuances of Easter as long as I can get the flowers delivered to my grandma on the correct day.
But I do care about the nuances in a ton of other situations, and the dividing line isn't so clear. Simply BSing an answer that's good enough for most cases actually ends up hurting the rest of us more than it helps us. For lack of a better term, it's fake facts.
While I actively encourage this method of inquiry and information acquisition, I've found that people often don't care to know why their question isn't even wrong, and challenging it leads to a defensive posture. This conversation is only keeping them from getting an answer and the expert risks being labeled as "uncooperative" because they refuse to provide an answer. This is a social problem, and it won't have a technical solution.
Does Google show different Easter results based on location? I'll bet it does.
If "do mermaids exist" can't be classified as a thing you know, I'm not even sure you're at the point where epistemology is your most glaring problem. You know so little that you should stop volunteering to answer questions.
That's true, and that's frustrating, but that's also the basis of shared human understanding, the dialectic. I wish I could just say "There are no mermaids", but the definition of "is" and "being" here is complex. In many other cases this definition is not complex.
We programmers get dissed a lot because we can tend to be on the arrogant side and think any problem can be fixed with more CPUs or algorithms. For many situations, like HN perhaps, if it works for 99% of the folks it's good enough.
But if you're the world dominant leader in answering questions? And you want to give the immediate, correct answer to anything somebody types in? Those little 1% cases pile up. There are a crap ton of situations where the minority opinion is the only thing that advances the species. Existence is much more than simply making the correct or best-guess decision based on a bunch of facts. Most times the facts and basis for definition of terms in the facts are in flux. Gad, I wish it were as easy as I thought it was when I was a kid.
Minority opinions are sometimes the thing that advances the species, but that's a job for a time and place that isn't "answering random questions for arbitrary users".
The answer to "do mermaids exist" is "no". It just is. That doesn't preclude a group of 200 experts devoting their research careers to investigating the question, and if they happen to prove otherwise, then we alter the textbooks and move on. Ideally, Google would then start answering "yes" instead. But if you want to be that world's dominant authority at answering questions, you can't just always say "well, it's complicated. People disagree. The world is a complex place and the definitions of terms and the facts are in flux", because you're no longer answering a question.
There does not exist a category of things the google can know when a question with semantic meaning is answered by trawling the web and looking for statically connections to the words and phrases in the question.
I don't even think we have to take a peek into philosophy of what "knowledge" is to categorically deny that any output of that process could ever be called knowledge.
My words fail me, the best explanation I've seen on machine learning 'facts' is: "The output of the algorithm is not a human-understandable fact. It is the result of complicated and unintuitive statistical properties of the input material. However, that data looks like facts we can easily understand" [0]
"Don't be evil"? Cleaning up the result of such an algorithm so that it looks like a fact to a layperson is in a very real sense evil.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5tovk1/on_the_...
What's weirder to me is that it seemed like they were going with my proposed route for a pretty long time and only recently starting providing dopey answers. Maybe its part of a grander experiment they're doing to vet question answering AI?
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.
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 lacks a strong, truly thinking AI, they rely extremely heavily on statistical models to rate content.
So how do you cheat google search?
Google's systems attempt to figure out the topic of your writing, the style, and quality. Is it scientific? An opinion piece? News? Is it a technical topic? A playful one? Fiction or nonfiction ?
The quality classifiers are much easier to game than topic and style analysis. They determine things like reading level of text but also things like the number of rare nouns, number of technical words, number of typos. Readability as far as font and formatting. Trustworthy signal of your domain and possibly the company and people they determine to be linked with it.
I also have a feeling google uses sneakier signals as well. These include your DNS registrar, phone number, email, and address listed on the site. Who you host with and what technologies you're using. Your mail servers and how trustworthy they are. Geo location, and visitor traffic info as soon as you put analytics on the site (or use amp)
Basically when Google says they have tons of signals, they do. They have a dataset that amounts to every site on the internet for the past 15 years, and they regularly run automated and manual "theory provers" much like quants do with historical stock market data. They find new signals constantly, and run tests to see if their new algorithms are better.
You know how sometimes google randomly takes a bit longer to load search results? My tin foily theory? They'll occasionally guinea pig you on prototype search results to see if they're better. I noticed their response time getting really bad a couple months before the public rollout of new AI powered search for example.
So gaming google? Do exactly everything that a large, legitimate, no-nonsense company would do. From where you host, what you host with, to who you link to. Bonus points if you have significant real looking mail and other traffic from your domain. Extra bonus points if you actually sell something real as cover and do it for at least a few years.
Once you've done enough convince google you're a big important thing IRL...write a ton of really subversive bullshit. Make it sound a real as possible, hell make 90% of it real, just with a single unverifiable fact. Keep pumping this shit out and make sure your garbage is never fake enough to get called out on. Or just make the fake part so hard to verify that nobody will waste the time, kinda like half the science world does when publishing papers.
Did anybody think the contrary?
I want a strong AI, because I'm more a fan of the depictions along the lines of Iain Banks' post-scarcity Culture Minds.
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.
Once upon a time it was possible to identify "good" pages by how often they were linked - effectively crowd-sourcing the problem.
Natural selection: sites have learned to manipulate the game and the crowd.
Under pressure to optimize metrics that lead to SEO and better valuations, the internet is getting less useful from a user perspective.
I don't want to watch a video/slideshow, download an app, register for a forum, or read through a 2000 word fluff piece with interspersed ads and links to more information in which site has buried the one-sentence answer to a 2-second question in order to maximize my time on the site.
This garbage is what makes it to the front page of google these days. I guess the poor sites that aren't user hostile just aren't SEO'd enough.
This is likely because marc.info isn't playing the SEO game, and spamsite #43254 is.
The original search engines ranked pages by their content. Naturally this led to gaming by including keywords (remember huge invisible sections of pages that just repeated keywords thousands of times?).
Google's original PageRank algorithm was a complete breakthrough for this, almost completely disregarding content and instead ranking results based on the text other pages had used to link to the page. This was so good, in fact, that most of the other search engines from the time didn't survive.
This once again led to large-scale gaming with techniques like link farms, and a small arms race as Google came up with ways to squash these new techniques. The quasi-legitimate "SEO" industry spun out of this.
I think now we're in the same cycle again, and at this moment scam sites are winning. What's to be seen is if there's a looming breakthrough, or the arms race will continue.
CAUTION: subjective experience ahead
I feel like in the last few years Google's utility for knowledge discovery has decreased. Instead it seems to be geard more and more to drive you towards purchase and shallow content sites. I think the growing popularity of "awesome" lists and other forms of curated content discovery is also driven in part by Google's lack of "good content" discovery.
You can tell there was a paradigm shift at some point and the search engine became a second (third? fourth?) class citizen.
But if you need to replicate google, you need bootloads of user data and in generally data to operate on ( i.e. to be able to extract the equivalence of certain terms and expressions, and so on ). And generally some kind of feedback system ( like user clicking a link on a SERP, is adding that question/answer combo a certain boost for the future ).
In short: it's complicated and after 10 years of experience I couldn't tell if a solution is so unversal as google.
For example, current solutions implies there is a "document" with some metadata. But what is a document in wikipedia or SO context? So is quite hard to get a an answer which satisfies both cases and you end up with cramming all kind of data together just to make a fit. So in the end, you still have to use the google model, of using the URL as a key for (data, metadata). So in this case, just let google/bing/yandex do it's job.
On the other side, I saw Google Search Appliance fail spectacularly in enterprise, because the google model couldn't fit and you end using real custom search solutions. There are quite a lot of companies filling this niche at this moment and so I think Mozilla wouldn't make a dent, if decides to enter this market.
My line of thinking was on working with "what is the user asking" vs. "what is the user looking for" in a way that could be applied regardless of the information being searched (by, for example, a non-profit with some existing insight - hence the Mozilla thought). But I know almost nil about the space so I suspect that is somewhat naive.
If your business pitch is "Like Google search, but Google doesn't control it," good luck getting investors.
It's one fewer engineering task for a busy content provider to take on.
This first is that you were probably a power user back when good search results required you to be good at search syntax. Back when Google wasn't the only search engine on the web, you could ask Google questions. Your results would be limited in relevance. If you tailored your searches by ensuring specific words or phrases were included, excluded irrelevant phrases, and added wildcards where necessary, you'd get pages and pages of great results. Google takes your search history and tries to predict what you're actually looking for.
The second is how Google filters your results to try to tailor what is relevant to you. Most people who hang out here on HN or StackOverflow would probably get results for the software framework filtered to the top when searching for "electron". Chemists, physicists, and other scientists of the like are probably going to get results for the particle filtered to the top. Adding this type of customization probably has ramifications beyond simple terms like electron. I don't have any evidence whatsoever, but I imagine that this customization would give biased results when searching political, economic, or social topics based on the sites that are visited.
Another theory I have is that my perception of good results changed over time. It could be that for the first time in my life I know enough about the domains I'm looking up that I can differentiate the good from the bad. On the other hand even with that, when I enter a new domain, e.g. AI it still feels "less discoverable", even though there are definately good introductions out there that you can find when going beyond Google.
I feel like the article addresses this. Google has basically two different products that produce those top of the page, set-aside answers. One is "Knowledge Graph", which basically does what you are suggesting - grabs straightforward answers to simple questions from Wikipedia and similar. The second is "featured snippets", which is the one causing the outrages that the article highlights.
If every Google's featured snippet started its reply with "Breitbart says..." or "Trent Online, the leading Internet Newspaper in Nigeria said...", it wouldn't matter so much for those inevitable cases when the reply is taken straight from a white-supremacist or radical anarchist forum. The problem comes when the same reply is provided as "Google's true answer to the question" without further caveats.
And that's the problem that the article rightfully denounces. Having the answer to every question is not something that you can automate, not without strong AI.
> Prepending that is a very bad workaround
I strongly disagree; for me it's a very sensible thing to do - and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message"). We rely on the context where the knowledge came from as a proxy for how accurate its content might be.
The default posture of engineers to a problem of inaccuracy is "make it more accurate". That's the logical method when you're building bridges, where we can describe the physics to an extremely accurate degree and where it would fall out or quickly degrade if you make a mistake.
But for problems that rely on inaccurate or uncertain information, and where no exact models exists, the only reasonable way to build them is to degrade gracefully. If you don't handle failures, it will fail in spectacular ways - because it will fail sometimes.
The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control. The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result, and be able to override the given results in those cases where it will get it wrong (at least by some users in a supervising role, which other users could notify to).
Unless a revolution happens, Artificial Intelligence will only ever work in the large if we put humans in the decision loop.
It may be the same for you (if you remember to follow the link for every single result that you get from Google, ever), but it's not enough for a mass-targeted product; the way in which the information is laid out and its relative prominence is essential to the way it will be perceived by the majority of the people using the service.
This is not people being stupid, is how people's brain is hardwired to be efficient and only care about information that looks important from the way it's presented - rather than having to make a rational analysis of the relative importance of every information snippet that you find in your way.
An upfront warning "this fact is brought to you by..." will have much more impact than a small, semi-hidden link that you have to remember to press, even if both convey the same information. (Moreover, the link is not available in the voice interface.)
You might be right if Google wants to answer all questions ever, but they can just limit this feature to situations where they do know what the answer is (you already see this when you type in math, conversions between different units, etc).
> and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message").
That's not how I converse with people around me at all, I only talk about the source if there is some disbelieve about whether it is true.
----
When someone asks me for some information, I will answer and that is the context the person places me in. I won't tell that person "I heard this from Craig, he heard if from Judy and she was told by Bob, etc..". Google wants to become this person / context.
The whole idea is that you don't have to click / verify / think about the potential webpage, because Google has already ranked all webpages that mention your query, and it will only snippet the top one (which is the result Google thinks will most likely answer your question).
Adding the source is:
- extra noise (the user now needs to look at the text & look at who said it and determine whether it might be true or not). - easily spoofable: you either rely on some meta tag for an Author, which websites can spoof. Or on a URL, which will lead to people doing stuff like "nytimes.com.quotefromgoogle.com".
> The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control.
Below the snippet are the 10 links that you can still click, functionality available since the mid 90s.
> The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result
Just click the top link?
That argument was valid when they limited answers to simple calculations, coins exhange and the current weather. They are now trying to answer why fire cars are red and whether Obama is part of a conspiracy. For that kind of content, it's essential to be aware where the answer came from.
> That's not how I converse with people around me at all, I only talk about the source if there is some disbelieve about whether it is true. When someone asks me for some information, I will answer and that is the context the person places me in.
When you converse with people, there's a context of what you were talking about and your previous relations. Plus, you trust that the person will filter the sources that might interest you, and that they will apply common sense when selecting the sources and will warn you if they have little confidence in the answer. And you could further inquire them about the sources if the information looks fishy.
Nothing of this applies to Google. The question and answer are devoid of any context in a conversation. Plus it doesn't have common sense, it takes sources from the whole web, and it won't tell you how it selected the sources used to find the reply. The answer being provided by a secret algorithm should make you always disbelieve whether it is true.
> The whole idea is that you don't have to click / verify / think about the potential webpage, because Google has already ranked all webpages that mention your query, and it will only snippet the top one (which is the result Google thinks will most likely answer your question).
Right. And it should be clear that doing it this way is a sure recipe for spectacular failures.
> (the user now needs to look at the text & look at who said it and determine whether it might be true or not)
The user always needs to (be able to) do that. Pretending that they don't is deluding themselves, both the company and the users. Just ask Wikipedia what happens when you build a large scale knowledge repository and you don't follow this principle.
> Below the snippet are the 10 links that you can still click, functionality available since the mid 90s.
> Just click the top link?
You don't have any of those in the conversational interface, which is the default mode and primary interface for which this functionality is being created.
Actually google and pagerank started like that.
You would probably risk giving more credibility to sites like Breitbart by crediting them with the top result, as people will come to associate those site names with answers given "by Google."
If Google gives you a top search result, it means Google trusts that result to be a good one. There's no getting around the fact that people trust Google to give them good information, and Google's algorithms are failing to provide trustworthy information.
Google doesn't "trust". That kind of thinking is the problem. Google has computed a ranking of the search results based on a bunch of factors, none of which involve any kind of cognitive analysis or judgement.
The rest of your statement is absolutely right; people trust Google's ranking to imply an authority that it simply can't provide, because it's magic to them.
More the reason to expose the relevant parts of the "magic" as much as possible, rather than working as a black box and presenting the result as appearing out from nowhere.
I don't care what your internal reasoning is. If I ask you a question and you present your answer as a fact, you're either trusting your information is correct or you're willfully lying to me.
I think Google's defense here would be that they intend these answers to be interpreted by an intelligent adult. If it tells me that mermaids are real, I'll have a laugh about it and move on with my day. If it tells huge groups of apparently functioning adults that President Obama is instituting Sharia law, and those people believe it unquestioningly, well, I'm not sure Google is equipped to operate in that world.
I only see a few ways this works.
The answer is correct. In this case, the source doesn't matter.
The answer is incorrect. In this case, the source doesn't matter, there is a flaw in the entire concept.
The answer's correctness depends upon the source. In this case, we have a deeper problem with the entire meaning of what a fact is.
Personally, I actually go with option three, but I think the deeper discussion needs to happen before we begin to even consider if something like featured snippets is worth doing. The best way for me to sum up on feelings on this is that while facts are absolute, any piece of information is either true or false (at least within the realm of normal human interactions), it is impossible to separate any fact from a human's perception of the fact which will automatically introduce biases.
An example: A few weeks ago I read online that <CNN anchor> did <very bad crime>. (I'll leave out the details because it only detracts from the point.) This is a factual statement, I did read it online, as did many others. But if many people who read it online states they read about it online, it creates a perception of truth to it, when the original post and the original replies were all showing how easy it is to create a false character assassination story. Regardless of how factual the statement is (it is true that I did read it online), my stating of such would still be an attempt to mislead even though I was using 100% factual statements.
I do not see any automatic truth determiner being possible until our society realizes the biased nature of human known facts.
> The answer is correct. In this case, the source doesn't matter.
> The answer is incorrect. In this case, the source doesn't matter, there is a flaw in the entire concept.
> The answer's correctness depends upon the source. In this case, we have a deeper problem with the entire meaning of what a fact is.
Again, why is it so hard for engineers to grasp the concept and importance of graceful degradation?
A service doesn't need to be perfect to be useful, but if it's not perfect, it shouldn't burn your house when it fails.
> The best way for me to sum up on feelings on this is that while facts are absolute, any piece of information is either true or false (at least within the realm of normal human interactions)
People from Humanities would like to have a talk with you.
And, it's often below the fold.
"White House sources acknowledge that Trump had no idea whether the claims he was making were true when he made them."
Here we have great attribution and a high-profile source (Trump, the source of claims about being wiretapped by Obama). It's just that the source doesn't care whether the claims are true or not.
Now I just made up that organization. But how can an algorithm tell if it's a legitimate medical institute that develops vaccines or anti-vaxxer propaganda?
If the algorithm actually had a way to distinguish the two, it could blacklist bullshit just as easily as it could disclose it.
When you're the #1 source of information on stuff in the world, that's an awful lot of power that can be trivially abused (e.g. "let's just blacklist unfavorable coverage of this lawsuit against us").
If you don't know the source, you have no way of knowing its merits, as you won't be aware of how the people came up with that knowledge.
In fact, they should change their entire search result layout so as to add an "epistemological" (ie. related to how the presented result was obtained) knowledge dimension in the visual presentation, and enrich the search result with eg. links to employees, parent companies, and other known affiliations.
That would be a strong move and help fight fake reviews, astroturfing, and fake news campaigning. And it would be much easier to implement compared to strong AI, if the latter is possible at all. In any case, it would be much more useful than the "searched 3.123e8 pages in 0.3 ms" non-information we get now.
Not sure whether posts by verified/accredited people (real names) should be ranked higher in search results. Traditionally, hackers have preferred pseudonyms, and there are very good reasons to stay anonymous in oppressive regimes. OTOH, using pseudonyms/fake accounts at scale got us into the kind of political and other mass manipulation we have now.
Prominent attribution wouldn't help in that regard. These kg entries are great for Google. They present the most likely sought out info, so little reason to click through. As a bonus, the vertical space they use pushes down any organic results that might be better answers.
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.
Having these kind of anti-news sites appear as "news" on Google is not just poisoning their reputation but making them complicit in whatever disaster finally results from it. The worst case scenario is genocide e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
However...
1. Various 'credible' news sources also link to dodgy sites and articles, either when criticising it, posting a story said sites first ran or simply because they've fallen for 'fake news'.
2. A lot of trust signals are easily gamed, like .edu links going for a fortune on SEO forums.
3. At some point, quantity will probably win out over quality.
It is scary how much the default app on Android serves to legitimize the fringe.
https://twitter.com/ruskin147/status/838445095410106368/vide...
edit: I saw now this video lower on the article, I thought it ended on "SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER"
Google held onto releasing their Chaffeur because of the "uncanny valley" problem, where they thought the tech would do more harm than good in its "sort of working" stage. Perhaps they should have done the same with this.
^ See what I did there? I made a comment on the Internet, and called into question the legitimacy of your comments.
Anyone can do it! So what we really need is HN to moderate our comments to filter out comments like yours so that we can just read the truth without having to filter out the garbage. I don't want to hear about how you think the the earth is round just because I'm on a NASA thread. One thing for sure is this is HN's fault.
"reputable" news sources have generally devolved into being the ideological counterpart of breitbart.com so this makes sense.
I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
I remember when you would search for an answer, and a small answer would be included in the description under the link, so you wouldn't have to click on it.
Then they started to go away, because no one was clicking on them because they didn't need to.
Now you rarely get the answer without clicking on it.
So Google has made the internet worse.
By not including the answer?
Or, by including the answer and putting the sites that gave reliable answers out of business in the first place?
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world. It is not authoritative, and anyone who treats it as such, should be educated to the facts of what it is, and is not. Just because its moderated to be supported by links to facts, doesn't mean that every bit of content is free of bias and the whole truth. Its generally accepted that this is the case. Same thing goes for Snopes, and some other fact checking sites. They are generally looked to for a reasonable amount of truthfulness based on reputation. Same could be said for various media outlets, based on your preference and bias.
Social media sites and search engines are not responsible to tailor their content to fit your expectations of what truth or reality are. Stop being a child.
"but, people expect to be able to Google something and results and snippets be the truth!"
Well, thats a problem for sure.
How about we try and fix that expectation instead? Feel free to teach your children and anyone you know who uses the internet, that (surprisingly) anyone from anywhere can still get online and post anything at any time, and you should fact check multiple places and resources instead of trusting the first result from your favorite search engine.
"but by offering snippets of results from programmatically generated search results (which is super handy 99% of the time) Google is publishing false truths!"
Right, and you can probably still Google bomb the image search to show an image you want based on a certain search term, its the internet not your personal fact butler, no matter how its advertised. Its 2017 and common sense and intelligence are still recommended for most tasks.
That is the line that has been crossed.
Interpreting a grey box as "truth" is entirely on you.
In other words, I don't think there's anything wrong with trusting Google when you search for "25 divided by 5", "33rd president of the US", etc. But when Google extends that response structure to things that, on further research, are not established fact, it shares some blame in spreading false knowledge.
And no its not different, maybe I am not Internet savvy and believe the top rated comment on HN as the most informed opinion and take it as fact instead of researching something for myself.
To be clear, just because Google has some helpful widgets and search helpers built in does not mean it asserts its search results as facts or even the best result. Google is trying to get you the best answers it can, and makes no claim otherwise.
edit: I stand corrected, I had no idea about the Google TOS here that admits they are committed to only returning search results that are factual, and to that end factual to you specifically: https://google.com/things-that-are-not-there/
How can you justify that claim? It seems pretty obvious to me that it's trying to be both. Search for "current time utc" and tell me Google is just a search engine for finding webpages.
However these snippet boxes, to the computer-savvy at least, are clearly just another automated search result.
But I think we should have a clear divide between responsibility of the user and the content aggregates. Just like with editorial news and Journalism we of course can differentiate between the two, and there are ethics and integrity issues we should hold news outlets to, but we need to be careful of confusing a search engine with a news outlet just because people use it to find news and facts from various places. That does not make them arbitrators of the truth. The responsibility lies on the end user to use their judgment and wisdom and research to come to informed decisions. And the responsibility lies on the news agency to report factual things. Google just needs to help me find relevant information, and let me decide what is good ethical journalism and what is fictional drivel.
You might think "But doesn't that mean that anyone can scream as loudly as they want and people will hear them and might listen to them?" Well yes it does. And it seems like everyone here has a problem with that, because they think people have terrible common sense. People have been trying to sway public opinion through media since there was written word. But you should criticize the work of the book author, or maybe even the publisher who is constantly publishing crappy books, but not the book store or library who is just helping you find whatever you are looking for no matter who you are or what you like.
I don't think you people know what you are asking for when you want to put it in peoples heads that because someone or something is popular or used by many people it somehow has a responsibility to curate the truth.
(before someone replies, I know that educating the whole media-consuming public is easier said than done.)
The idea takes hold in the collective Google-consciousness that a fact is whatever the majority of their users believe to be a fact. There is a precedent for this, after all. They defined Spam as whatever their users said was Spam.
At first there is some friction between the knowledge of internal Google personnel (especially down in that pesky engineering department) and the new shared reality developing out in Userland. However, once an appropriate terminology is developed (in-facts and ex-facts) even the engineers are satisfied - after all their main concern was being able to draw nice clear lines between things.
Meanwhile in Userland while the boiling point of water is largely unchanged, the death toll in the Biafran blockade has shrunk to approximately 17 persons (with some arguments over whether to count people who were over 80 when it started).
Then one day an Engineer has a neatO idea which will eliminate the need for storing two sets of facts and thus save valuable Petabytes of storage and, more importantly, significant code complexity. He calls this idea Authority. Pitching it to his superiors in the marketing department he explains: "You see opinions are like assholes" - (there's a collective wrinkling of marketing noses) - "everybody's got one!". He goes on to explain that some people have more knowledge and are more scrupulous about accepting new facts than other people. Authority would identify such users and give greater weight to their activity and feedback. A profound silence falls over the room. A voice comes over the meeting room Intercom:
"Are you saying...are you suggesting...that some of our users are better than others?"
"Not better, " says the cowed Engineer. "Just more...um...authoritative. Purely in an informational sense."
"Authoritative." The voice draws the word out as if profoundly contemplating its meaning. "OK. We're going to submit this idea to our Hard AI (Larrey) - the secret one we're afraid to network."
Everyone waits. After a minute the voice says:
"Larrey has a question for you, Engineer. It is this: If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"
This was in the special element at the top, not the normal search results.
This page is odd because the false answer is presented first, so google fails to see it. It could tell that the form of the sentence was an answer to the question, just not that it wasn't the right one
And for those outside of the US (like me) who don't get this result even if they try to go to google.com: https://www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect)
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?
Someone might say "why does Google decide who is credible", but they already do this through the search results anyways. They just don't seem to be able to differentiate between something matching a search, and something being factually accurate.
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
What foods cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+foods+cure+cancer%3F
What spice cures diabetes? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+spice+cures+diabetes%3F
Which presidents are rapists? https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+presidents+are+rapists...
Can carrots cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can+carrots+cure+cancer%3F (apparently this one is fixed, try the search below)
Can carrot juice cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can%20carrot%20juice%20cure%...
Whenever there's a measure of something, people will optimize for that measure. But trust is not directly measurable.
But even then Google should have been better than weighing fringe sites the same as Wikipedia as an example
Definitely a distracting design.
And then there's the problem that CNN would be "fake news" because you can't exactly provide a citation for "anonymous high ranking intelligence community officials." But then... maybe that's a good thing.
They can't pull that off anymore.
There needs to be a shift towards a Web-of-Trust-like system, where some sources are recognized as authoritative. Government websites, like the CDC, for example. Big media outlets. Scientific associations (IPCC, APA, etc). Not all information is equal. Even if, for example, government dietary recommendations are outdated in some ways, that should be the authoritative answer Google provides, unless there is an equally-reputable but more accurate source (here, prioritize medical sources over governmental ones).
A high school dropout doesn't know more about academic subjects than a PhD grad. A blog isn't as authoritative as a reputable source. This is easy stuff.
Then the question becomes: "some people don't see reputable sources as reputable". That isn't Google's problem, and it can't be fixed at their level.
We ask questions now because we can get "an answer" so quickly.
I would have liked the prof to push back on the student and say Why do you want to know?
The answer is yes. Now what?
The answer is no. Now what?
Are you asking for what reason? What will you do with a yes answer and a no answer?
Then I would break into a short lesson in decision making. That decisions are just based on future probabilities. Future probabilities are based partially in the questions you answer.
If the question is academic?purposes only then good... But I believe we ask dumb questions just because we can and get an answer.
Start by not asking questions where the answer is useless.
It's a bit of a rant I guess, but I'm annoyed but the extent to which Google has become less useful as a search engine while trying to do all of this 'extracting knowledge from the web' stuff. Because it's really not doing a great job of the latter.
But, unfortunately …
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 about stance detection, because the goal of fact-checking is not considered attainable yet.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/demystifying-knowledge-graph-201...
I mean, at least Google's search is any good, that's something.
Usually when in that kind of situation google plays the "it's an algorithm that did that not us so we're not liable" also known as we don't read your gmail emails it's an automated algorithmic process so there's no privacy issue here.
See that's the funny thing about fake news, not even this article which seeks to set us all straight on the matter could avoid it -- just because you get your facts from a source you consider reputable doesn't make it so. In fact, Wilson was actually no more "racist" than Abraham Lincoln, but no one would ever call Lincoln a racists.