Comment by why_is_it_good | Hacker News Reader

Comment by why_is_it_good | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed at how bad this situation is.

> Something happens.

> /pol/, being /pol/, flipped the switch that generates semi-random information around a subject, seasoned with bias-of-the-day

> some posters on /pol/ decide to blame Geary Danley for the Vegas shooting

> google indexes /pol/

Given that:

> Searches for _words_ yield content related to _words_

> Searches for a name yield content related to a name

> Searches for "Geary Danley" yield content related to "Geary Danley"

This ensues:

> Media shitstorm because google is "citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news"

This only happens because:

1) We are expecting google to feed us only the truth? Otherwise we would say "someone took google seriously and arrived to the wrong conclusions"

2) We don't care the slightest what URL we follow from google? Otherwise we would say "someone who doesn't know what /pol/ is is taking it seriously"

3) We find it easier to blame some conspiracy than to take a step back and think? We ascribe blame to google.

4) All of the above?

I feel I am living in some bizarro world where everyone's feelings and expectations must be met, and any deviation from this will result in riots and name calling[0].

Few things exist to serve your purposes. Think before using any tool. You wouldn't use a blowtorch to trim your nails.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2011-11-poop-throwing-chimps-intellige...

>We are expecting google to feed us only the truth?

To be fair, that is how Google presents things like the snippets. There's no disclaimer for the answers.

Normal non tech users wouldn't know if these were automated and highly fallible, or manually curated and somewhat reliable.

Here's my go-to example, where Google says a quarter is worth 50 cents. https://imgur.com/a/oibA7

No disclaimer or indication that this is at best, a bad guess. Also, it's been this way for months and months, even though I post it everywhere as an example. I also clicked the feedback button quite some time ago and reported it.

I understand this case wasn't a snippet. But it was labelled "Top Stories" and probably carousel featured. That sort of thing, like rich snippets, implies Google is presenting it as something more than just a search result.

I think you're entirely misrepresenting the problem.

The issue was that the data was being used in Google News, not Google Search. This doesn't just impact "what URL we follow", but how other pages get pulled in as "relevant". So we can be presented with "something terrible happened" from a news site, and "here's what we know about john smith" as relevant to the topic - without being told that the leap from 'something terrible' and 'john smith' was made by /pol/.

It's weird that people are blaming a search engine for providing relative links for discussion on a topic. Again, it's a search engine first and foremost, not a media outlet. It indexes media outlets.

It shouldn't be Google's job to vet articles. That should fall on the end user, and this push to hide "fake news" is just asking for more problems down the road.

Exactly, what happens when a credible news source has to _retract_ a need story?

Do we crucify Google for surfacing an expost facto false story?

It's not Google's job to verify sources of news. Could they algorithmically "guess" a credibility score and attach that to the newslink, sure, I suppose.

> Could they algorithmically "guess" a credibility score and attach that to the newslink, sure, I suppose.

Then why bother with other sources? Just generate a random summary based on the search terms, rank it, and present it to the user if it is credible enough. Repeat as necessary.

And if Google did start vetting articles in a more opinionated way, ie, making value judgments on content beyond popularity, they would most likely get hit with an antitrust lawsuit after someone didn't like Google's assessment.

>It indexes media outlets.

Anyone including "4chan" in a list of media outlets is an idiot. (Or whoever enacts a system that automatically includes 4chan in a list of media outlets ... it's not important to users how they got to that result.)

Google shouldn't be vetting articles, but they are picking what outlets are considered "news" for inclusion in the news.google.com "Google News" aggregator.

Does anyone think 4chan articles belong there?

I think some societal context is extremely important in understanding the situation.

Yes, Google is a search engine. Everybody who's become accustomed to modern computing technology over the past ~20 years is very familiar with what it is and what it does. At least the more technically-inclined and aware do. To you, it's a cold, logical machine that provides best-efforts based upon their heavily researched proprietary algorithms. That's absolutely correct. To others, however, it's become something else.

To illustrate:

For many people, especially the most vulnerable to being persuaded by search engine results, Google as become a word as ubiquitous as Kleenex.

When your nose is running, you need a "Kleenex", even if you mean "tissue". You probably don't care ultimately if the tissue is Kleenex brand as long as it solves your problem.

When somebody says they want to "Google" something, they mean "google". They aren't concerned, necessarily (though bias lives even in pop culture over Bing), whether you use Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, or Lycos (it apparently still exists, at least in spirit).

To that second category of people I'm using to illustrate, the problem they want solved is that they want an answer. They've become accustomed to "googling" something delivering them an answer they can generally rely upon. It's a learned habit/behaviour and, I'd argue, hardly their fault.

Yes, North American culture could do well with become more critical in its thinking and that would probably solve this issue. Sorrily, getting there isn't so simple. In fact, it's probably a compound problem in light of who is aptly taking advantage of that system of habit and trust.

Funny enough, those exploiting this problem are the same who would prefer to remove even further the ability to think critically in US society (and others), by means of cutting back on public services like healthcare and education so that bare survival becomes the mode.

I'm starting to get off topic now, so I'll leave it there.

I don't have a direct solution. I'm not sure there is one. Google is as Google does, and yes people need to improve at thinking things through, especially what they read. But if you just resign the problem to that last point, I really don't think we'll get anywhere at all.

Google should rank by relevance. That is their goal. Whether or not truth is more relevant than lies depends on the context.

In the context of news truth is more relevant than lies, because news is an account of recent events, not fiction.

So if I go to Google News and it displays fiction as if it was news then something has clearly gone wrong, and I don't think Google denies that for a second.

Google became a $600bn conglomerate largely off the strength of search quality.

Yes, people should be capable of determining that 4chan isn't actually a news source, but that doesn't mean it's defensible for a Google feature intended to surface news stories to be so poor that it's trivially easy to bomb it into highlighting posts on the world's most infamous bulletin board as "top stories", even if the search term is really specific.

I wouldn't use a blowtorch to trim my nails. I would use Google with the expectation that an internet search company capable of writing software that drives cars and performs real time translation is also capable of not labelling a website which is both extremely well known and trivially identifiable as NSFW user-generated content as a source for a "top story"

When I awoke the morning after and started searching, I had multiple, often generic searches ("las vegas shooting") that returned 4chan threads in the first page or two. I think the issue is a little more unique and involved than you describe.

4chan was discussing the issue. People were clicking said results (I can be wrong).

Should google not index 4chan?

Situations like these make me really question democracies. If the voting public is so poorly educated that they don't even question the source, that doesnt bode well for the complex problems facing our society.

The whole "fake news" phenomenon is even more disheartening. That the public is getting news from their Facebook or Twitter feed and think that is sufficient speaks to a major failure of our educational system and a lack of development of critical thinking and analysis.

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