Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions | Hacker News Reader

Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions

wsj.com

110 pointsangpappas106 comments

Halfway down that piece:

A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Alternative WSJ:

Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly improving system.

We should also emphasising how integral google's search is to the health of society and civilization because we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.

97% accuracy is abysmal for something you are presenting as "answers".

It’s good enough for my professor :)

Not sure what the margin of error is on these things, but generally 97% should probably be considered 100%.

There's no margin of error for the test they did, just potential sampling bias.

Given the 5000 questions they asked, the system will provide the wrong answer 2.6% of the time. Every time, until they improve it. There's a chance that they managed to ask the only 150 questions that it doesn't know the answer to, but not a very big one.

I agree -- given the sample space, there is not effective way to calculate the margin of error. Even so, I don't think that there are many examples of non-deterministic mechanisms that produce the correct answer 97% of the time.

a parser that is 97% correct is broken.

A parser (assuming you are talking about a programming language parser) has the luxury of having highly structured and deterministic inputs, and to be able to refuse giving an "answer" if they are not.

> highly structured and deterministic inputs

not all parsers deal with such inputs, and parsers that don't can and often do produce multiple interpretations of the input data.

Tell me of some parsers that do not deal with deterministic inputs and have 100% accuracy, then.

It's like Intel's floating point math used to be about 97% correct. Good enough, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

What you/we need is a healthy dose of taking things with a grain of salt and not just blindly trust what we read/hear.

This goes not only for results in search services today, but was also valid in the time before this, when we used encyclopedias, or asked someone.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to comment on how credulous I might be.

Anyway, the 97% is an impressive result, it just isn't so impressive as to be beyond criticism. My comment is a little over the top, in response to the other comment that sets the bar at effusive praise being the only proper analysis of the system.

This is not about "a grain of salt". Imagine you're a ten year old kid and you're looking for answers on some subject, say the Holocaust. What if all the "answers" you're getting are from far-right hate groups? How do you think that will affect that person?

Likewise, if you're looking for medical advice and you're getting nothing but anti-science woo, can we really be surprised that anti-vaxxers are becoming more numerous? These outbreaks of deadly, yet preventable diseases have serious fatal consequences for many.

"Grain of salt" means fuck all when people are dying from bad answers. You can't learn from your mistakes when you're dead.

At least Google could frame these with the idea of keeping a skeptical mind, but they should probably stop surfacing things as "the answer" and instead as "top search result".

If there was someone I knew who I could ask a question, with a 97% chance they were correct, I'd consider them to be a phenomenon, and an extremely valuable resource. For some definition of correct, I'd be happy to be 60% accurate.

Yeah but what if you got to choose between 2 people that knew the answer 50% of the time but one of the them enjoyed making up answers when they didn't know and the other just told you they didn't know?

I dug up the study by Stone Temple to see what kind of questions were asked (eg: are the questions really trivial or not) and they provide a few exampled in their write up. I am actually seriously impressed by how well those "personal assistants" work compared to what I would expect. Kudos to the engineers who built those things!

(Disclosure: I never worked on any of those, nor do I work for any of the companies making them)

That's absolutely the wrong way to go about looking at it. Not all facts are of equal importance. 97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system.

If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time. In fact, being right 97.4% of the time is worse in many ways, as it lulls people into a false sense of security about how much they can trust the system. Get 97/100 obvious answers correct, then give someone wildly inappropriate advice when they ask something more "off piste".

And let's not delude ourselves here, Google isn't doing this out of an altrustic desire to help people. They're making sure fewer people leave google.com, in the process starving the very sites they're getting information from of revenue. That should worry all of us.

> we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.

This feels like an absurd criticism. Couldn't it apply to absolutely every negative thing written about Google, ever? Why should Google be immune from criticism?

And that’s a ridiculous standard because there is no such thing as 100% when talking about knowledge. Humans and experts wouldn’t agree 100% of the time so it’s impossible for computers to get there.

So why create a feature that pretends such a thing is possible, and promote it as heavily as Google does?

In many ways, "I'm feeling lucky" was a great middle ground - by clicking it you're implictly saying "I know this might not actually be what I'm looking for, but I'm willing to compromise". Google has taken that compromise and stuck it at the top of the search results page.

For profit corporations require that the senior employees they hire for impossibly high paychecks are constantly providing benefits that can be brought up in quarterly board meetings. This means taking an already functional product and making changes to it -- any change -- that can be spun as being a positive improvement worthy of a promotion.

Google Search is already where it should be. Yet Google Search employs thousands of incredibly expensive engineers. Something has to be done, and that "something" is rarely going to be good, and almost guaranteed to be something nobody actually wanted.

That seems like a question with a really obvious answer.

Because it is useful, makes users happy, and generates revenue. There really isn't another useful standard to apply here.

> There really isn't another useful standard to apply here.

...accuracy?

Good luck turning that into an objective standard for a search engine.

Is your argument "Google should not be allowed to do anything if their algorithms aren't 100% flawless and perfect"? I really am failing to understand your viewpoint.

No, my argument is "Google should not present results as if they are an absolute answer when they are not capable of knowing whether that is true".

It's pretty simple: a list of search results does not imply certainty. Injecting a single "answer" does. As I mentioned elsewhere, it's as if they have decided that the "I'm feeling lucky" button should apply to everyone.

I guess I fundamentally disagree that them providing an 'answer' is somehow unethical, unless there is some kind of verbiage on the feature that claims 100% accuracy that I am unaware of.

But is google even implying that the results are the absolute answer?

If I search for "how tall is tom cruise" and it gives me a number. It doesn't say that number is an absolute answer, it doesn't say that it's verified, it just shows the number.

I personally don't see that as any different than if it returned a few websites, all of which say the same thing when I go to them. In all cases it's "Google" giving me the answer (an evil google could just as easily return websites with false results on purpose), but the way it currently works, it gives me the answer faster and in a better format. And even if that answer isn't 100% factually correct or verified in any way, it's still the same quality I would have gotten from google in any other method.

If the answer is the same using both methods, wouldn't the only real solution to be "refuse to answer the question"?

in the case of unattributed information, i would think some edge cases risk lawsuits (libel or other things) or pr problems if the information is wrong.

imdb was sued for revealing a person's age; and while imdb won the case, a law in california was passed that dealt with the matter. what happens if google displays information about you that you feel is private (or some legal jurisdiction asserts is so)?

i noticed that "what should i do if bitten by a snake" does have attribution. however, it seems to me that the information is presented in a "this is the answer" way, ie as trustworthy and actionable... what happens if following whatever google suggests results in harm or death?

either way, i'm surprised google hasn't bothered to add couching language or some notional caveats. (even a "here's what we found:" seems reasonable distancing.)

Yes, this is just as misleading as NSA saying "we only intercept 1% of the world's traffic."

Yeah, because 99% of the traffic is not communications, and most of it is video content and torrents.

>This feels like an absurd criticism. Couldn't it apply to absolutely every negative thing written about Google, ever? Why should Google be immune from criticism?

I think this is more a direct attack on WSJ's questionable neutrality rather than a strong defense of Google's behavior.

>If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time.

Should we burn all the dictionaries and encyclopaedias because they aren't perfectly accurate? Textbooks don't have a black-box warning on the front page saying "The accuracy of this book cannot be guaranteed. Please verify any facts stated before storing them in your long-term memory or using them for any purpose"?

"Truth" is an inherently messy concept. The very best curated sources and human experts are frequently fallible. If you assume that Google (or any other source) is infallibly accurate, then the problem lies with your education, not the source.

Google is not an encyclopedia or a dictionary, though. Encyclopedias are editorially curated products where each entry is researched and chosen very deliberately. The answers Google provides are picked by an algorithm and have nowhere near the level of oversight that dictionaries and encyclopedias do.

> "Truth" is an inherently messy concept. The very best curated sources and human experts are frequently fallible.

Here, we can agree. My objection is to Google presenting their tool as if it does provide one true answer to your question.

"The problem lies in your education" is a fantastic way of absolving responsibility. What if people's education about tech is in fact exactly the problem? Do we shrug our shoulders and say "well, they should all know better" or do we proactively try to make the situation better?

Yet Wikipedia is one of the greatest stores of knowledge on the planet, despite being full of inaccuracies.

How many Wikipedia articles are one sentence saying "this is the answer"? None. If anything they're padded out to excess, detailing the different perspectives about any particular topic, complete with referencing and footnotes.

I was going to take issue with you're "this is the answer" description but sure enough, on the featured snipped "About this result", Google interchanges the word "answer" and "result" pretty arbitrarily:

When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL...

Wikipedia came to mind when this topic of 100% accuracy came up, a metric people seriously think Google needs to hit in order to not cause mass hysteria, it seems. Wikipedia is constantly updated because the information is curated by humans. Humans have the ability to lie, omit facts based on beliefs, fudge numbers to paint a specific narrative, and so many more egregious examples of ways to mislead those who would use the resource. I understand having high expectations for things but just like with anything fact based there needs to be a level of skepticism and self policing of what we allow to become things we know to be true based on our own acknowledgement.

This is something I feel long time internet users have built up a tolerance to and an eye for. Of course I understand wanting to hit that 100% metric for those unfamiliar with the concept of others steering folks in the wrong direction purposefully but how can we honestly draw a defined line in the sand to gauge a systems usefulness? Especially when that system's data is based on the concept of human knowledge, an ever changing, rapidly developing, and hotly contested part of the human experience?

If an encyclopedia said the Earth is 6000 years old, and starts "Evolutionists fallaciously think that billions of years of time makes particles-to-people evolution possible", as the top hit when Googling "how old is the Earth" says, then yes, throw out that encyclopedia.

Being fallible is one thing, but Google's algorithm is misrepresenting scientific belief because an extremist group are the only ones who will pay for SEO about the subject. If Google wants to be the world's authoritative source of knowledge, they're gonna need a more advanced system where SEO spammers can't buy the truth, otherwise all we have are modern day iterations on Phillip Morris' research showing no link between lung cancer and cigarettes for decades.

> Textbooks don't have a black-box warning on the front page saying "The accuracy of this book cannot be guaranteed. Please verify any facts stated before storing them in your long-term memory or using them for any purpose"?

I just checked a 2004 medical textbok I had nearby (don't ask). YES, they do have such disclaimers, and they're worded even better than you put it.

> I just checked a medical textbok I had nearby (don't ask). YES, they do have such disclaimers

Most textbooks do not. Medical textbooks (and websites, etc.) often do because of special circumstances (legal and practical) applying to that field.

A few levels up, medical facts were the example used for needing disclaimers. The point is that Google isn't putting up disclaimers even where they should.

> ...97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system...

General information sources that include but aren't specifically focussed on medical information don't usually have disclaimers on the medical information (e.g., encyclopedias don't have disclaimers on entries that happen to concern medical information, while medical textbooks do).

Science and medical textbooks should have a "best before" date on them.

That would be the copyright date of the book, combined with medical licensing requirements that doctors stay up-to-date in their field.

Just imagine if software engineers had the same certification requirements as, say, pilots. Or, hell, plumbers.

I want to say that would be fantastic, except that the software engineers might be pretty miserable.

Also, aren't there such certs already?

Google used to be a place (when it was really new) where you would always find what you were looking for within the 10 first responses because of the power of it's "Pigeon Ranking". I'm not claiming 97.4% in all cases but really often "I Feel Lucky" would be the right answer. Slowly this got gamed by people that wanted to have their sites there and this magic disappeared.

I imagine these selected answers will either come for a dwindling amount of sources of "truth", turning Google in a sort of Yahoo! with lots of handpicked results or again these algorithms will be gamed and we get the same mess as Google turned into where it was constantly fighting new waves of spam.

Philosophically speaking, assuming there is always a single answer for any question and promoting a specific SINGLE answer for them is not only inaccurate and misleading, sometime it's WRONG! The world is complex, many questions will and should have multiple answers depending how you look at it.

Google's instant answers are generally pretty good in my opinion, but in situations where the answer really matters, it could cause dangerous situations in the cases where Google does get it wrong. A good example is how Google chose the wrong picture on how to do cable crimping:

https://imgur.com/a/H3Uhg

Regarding the example above, Google's answer with a picture looks clear and sounds very authoritative. No further reading seems to be necessary.

that problem that you mention happens way to often. Answers are not "generally pretty good ", they are generally pretty relative.

I’ve found it pretty unreliable. I was researching Teflon pans the other day, and all the instant answers were myths about how Teflon pans will give you cancer. And when you click no the sites, it’s usually clear if their answer is at all reliable or not. Stuff like that means I always have to do more work with instant answers than if I just ignore it.

My company gets a minimum of six wrong numbers a day from people who got our phone number from Google. Google somehow thinks there are several thousand companies associated with our number.

My favorite example is "are lemons acidic?"

It's full of "alkaline diet" sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they're an alkaline. It's become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy.

Then again the answers are so consistent and I'm so used to trusting the first page of Google that I'm almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.

I'm not even sure Google's behaviour is wrong in this instance. The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that is probably actually more interested in the woo-answer, and I don't neccesarily think it's Google's job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it's risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).

To illustrate with another example, if I ask Google where the government is hiding the aliens, I'm probably more interested in the answer "Area 51" than "the government isn't hiding any aliens".

> I don't neccesarily think it's Google's job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it's risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).

Aside from my general disagreement with your statement, wouldn't that actually be pretty bad for business? If I'm looking for a factual answer about something, and Google continually gives me garbage, I'll just stop using Google.

Google isn't limited to factual information, in fact most content on the internet is not 'factual'

If they're presenting it as a factual answer, then it should be a factual answer.

A correct answer is better than an answer someone is interested in. For example "Is Obama a Muslim?". Someone googling that might be interested in hearing something that reaffirms their preconceived notions, but we as a society would be better off if they were provided with correct information.

> A correct answer is better than an answer someone is interested in. For example "Is Obama a Muslim?". Someone googling that might be interested in hearing something that reaffirms their preconceived notions, but we as a society would be better off if they were provided with correct information.

While I totally agree with the statement that it is better for society that people receive correct than reassuring information, I think the relevant question—not in terms of ethics, but in terms of what will happen—is whether Google feels it is better for them.

(It may also be fair to note that some questions don't have a correct answer, or that the answer isn't known, or that there is controversy, in which case I hope very much that Google doesn't get in the business of deciding what is the best answer, but simply neutrally points me to what is out there.)

> I don't neccesarily think it's Google's job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it's risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).

Eek, does it really sound appealing to you to have Google aspiring to do a 100% accurate job of deciding what information it's right for me to see?

> The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that

Yes, no kid is ever gonna google that. While we are at it, let's show that earth is flat when someone google for image of earth's curvature because why would you search that. You obviously are a flat-earther.

"2 Balances pH: Lemons are an incredibly alkaline food, believe it or not. Yes, they are acidic on their own, but inside our bodies they're alkaline (the citric acid does not create acidity in the body once metabolized"

That's what I get in the answer box. Wow.

I think it absolutely is Google's job to be the woo police in the privileged answer box. They can just choose not to display it for answers they're not confident in owning and leave you with the general search results.

It probably needs to be a whitelist. Most of the time it's wikipedia anyway (a whole other can of worms, but at least it won't tell you that lemons are alkaline or feed your conspiracy theories)

It looks like that's correct though, as supported by the first google hit [1] for that subject, which in fact is arguing the stupidity of the alkaline diet. It's also supported by the table in this paper [2]. The only catch being that your kidneys eliminate the extra alkaline products in your urine so it has no effect on most of your body.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/lemon-juice-acidic-or-a... [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002822395...

Unfortunately, people have extremely high trust of Google. People use Google to win arguments. People use Google as a replacement for text books. For cases like this, there shouldn't be a factual answer box. It would be really bad if people could just SEO Google into saying whatever 'truth' that's profitable.

What is the purpose of a search engine? To present answers, or to preset pages that mention a specific subject? It's hard give correct answers; sometimes there isn't one. I think it's better to point to pages (the classical search engine philosophy). But that requires 1) knowledge about how to search, and 2) critical analysis of pages you visit.

I looked at a search result today and there were ads at the top, a few answers in the middle, and more ads on the bottom of the first page. Once Google has to start paying all the ISPs their net neutrality blood money, I imagine a single result in a sea of ads will be the norm.

Single answers is basically what's needed for Alex, Google Home, etc. I was surprised that Google beat Alexa. Siri was horrible.

I haven't purchased a home voice device yet because I wanted it to get a little better. However, I'm not sure if there will be much improvement in the device itself. The real work is on the server.

Surprised Google beat Alexa? I have had the Echo since late 2014 and now several Google Homes. For understanding you and answering questions Google is well ahead of Amazon.

But you find this surprising?

This is what Google does and has for almost 20 years now.

I think people who have always used iphones seriously underestimate how good google has become at this.

It was one of the driving factors of the Goog-411 project: building a robust database of low-quality real-world voice samples for training up language recognition software.

Meanwhile, in my experience, Siri is at the back of the short bus licking the windows.

A lot of these answers seem to be borne of algorithmic consensus of top-ranked sites. There are probably worse ways to go about it, but in many ways Google has to take sides on ideas or concepts that are still strongly debated. Consensus does not create or prove facts, even if it's a strong signal. There are certainly things that I strongly believe that you do not. Does that make my beliefs (or yours) any less valid (until we're confronted with sufficient evidence to change our views), even if one of us has to be wrong?

* Are there sea monsters? Aliens?

* Is there a God?

* Is there a multiverse?

Historically, there was so many things that were 'consensus' concepts that were just flat (oops) wrong. Google would have gotten all of these wrong..

* What happens when you sail over the edge of the earth?

* What's holding up the earth?

* Is the earth the center of the universe?

How about:

* Is the speed of light a fixed constant?

* How much statistical error is introduced into carbon dating when extrapolating behind more than a few hundred years?

* Is cracking my knuckles bad?

How about this one, if it was listed on thousands of spammy self-help sites: "recent studies have shown that it's beneficial to drink gasoline in small quantities." (please do not drink gasoline. That's insane.)

Should Google be liable for those answers that are now coming from its site, with the authority of the world's dominant answer generator, instead of the third-party site that's spouting nonsense? (yes.)

Really, though, Google's answers are probably as good as any until we learn everything about everything and finally agree on everything. Even if they are self-serving to keep you on Google and not send you to a third-party site to get your answer.

"And, should Google be liable for those answers that are now coming from its site ..."

This is why Google references the source when it gives you the answer.

"what is tom cruise's age" didn't reference a source when i checked.

With my Google Home, I often ask it, "Can my dog eat X" and it'll answer usually from the single answer from Google.

While Google Home usually says the source, "According to WebMD..." or "According to <some blog post>..." it would be horrible if it gave the wrong answer - saying something was safe to eat but it really wasn't.

I hope they take extra precaution with answers related to medicine/safety.

I personally would hope that you take extra precaution with answers related to medicine/safety. Why would you trust google with something like this? If you ask Google "Can my dog eat X" and blindly trust the answer then it is your fault and not google's if your dog gets sick. Google isn't responsible for your dog, you are!

Why would you trust anything? Not to go to the extreme, but we do things every day where trust is integral, and what we trust is not something we verify independently. Or maybe you are different.

It isn't really a matter of verifying it independently. But we know that Google isn't the expert on dog eating and is only getting their information from third party sources. So we have to know the source to consider its credibility instead of Google's.

Yes we do things every day where trust is integral, but I do verify independently accordingly. This is relative to the importance of the thing off course. That is just common sense.

I accept googles answer when I ask for the weather. If google is wrong on this it mostly has no effect. So it is absolutely appropriate to accept this answer blindly.

I trust my doctor when I have a minor illness, but I did select my doctor carefully and I would get a second opinion if it is something serious.

Putting the same care into both of these things would either be dangerous or obsessive. It does terrify me that people here are suggesting that there are people who put less care into answering medical or safety related questions for themselves than I do reading a weather report for the day. It's crazy.

First off, why are you assuming I'm saying that Google is responsible for my dog? You may want to re-read what I wrote. I never said I'm taking blind trust to what Google says.

However, for the average person, hearing an answer so confidentially from a Google product gives it integrity - whether you agree with it or not.

Think about it - millions of people Google medical questions and they trust "blindly" trust Google to provide them the right results.

Do you honestly not see the dangers of Google giving a single answer response to these types of questions?

You did not explicitly say in your comment that you blindly what google says and you did not explicitly say that google is responsible for your dog.

What you did explicitly say is:

- You often ask "Can my dog eat X".

- It would be horrible if google gave the wrong answer.

- You hope google would take extra precautions with answers to medicine/safety.

The second point implies that you act with this information alone and the third one implies that you would at least partially blame google in that instance.

I am actually terrified that you think there are millions of people blindly trusting google with medical questions. That is a very stupid thing to do. They should go to a doctor or at least read a bit further then that.

I do maybe see the danger of providing a single answer response to medical questions, but I don't jump to assume that they should take extra precautions. Rather I would think that they should stop providing answers to these questions. Or maybe they should do the idiotic american thing of providing disclaimers for common sense things. Like this: Don't blindly trust google. Talk to your doctor/vet/lawyer/expert.

Why should they take extra precautions? Why would they be responsible?

Relevant text:

"Google spokeswoman Susan Cadrecha said the company’s goal isn’t to do the thinking for users but “to help you find relevant information quickly and easily.” She added, “We encourage users to understand the full context by clicking through to the source.”"

I sincerely hope no one is relying on Google to do the thinking for them.

I sincerely hope no one is either - but why should Google even pretend to know the answer to something?

How is the average, non-technical person supposed to assume that Google won't give an accurate answer to a medical question?

Why shouldn't they? I personally like the answers and use them often if I'm trying to find a fact, like when someone famous was born. If someone is going to blindly trust Google without verifying and google doesn't try to answer, they'll probably just trust whatever site is listed first anyways...

I see no harm in Google guessing.

After the Vox music player changed from freeware to freemium, I searched for something like "best free flac player mac 2017". It took me a moment to realize that the featured result was one vendor's self-serving comparison with competitors.

I'm prepared for half of the results to a query like that to be littered with affiliate links, but I wasn't expecting a featured result like that.

That for me is the largest downside to google (or other search engines, really). It's impossible to get objective information on products unless you know a reviewer who is objective in the given domain...

On one hand, I see this as great way to encourage curiosity. A child can ask a simple question "why does it rain?" and get back an immediate response. No more clicking through links to try and find a simple explanation, only for them to have lost interest.

At the same time, I can't help but feel that way more people will look for an answer and just give up on their question if the immediate answer is not clear enough or not immediately available. With attention spans being as short as they are already, I can see it discouraging many people from performing the acts of reading and trying to understand what they read. And that kind of culture worries me a lot these days.

If you search in German Google (does not need to be in Germany) and Google mainly for English search terms... you won't see any of those. Google is still in many ways a "US English first" company :/

In many ways, this is a US English first world :/

I did some research on how to optimize for getting a site into the answer area at the top of results using schema.org's question & answer protocol.

http://robertspeer.com/schema-org-for-busy-professionals/

Turns out it's a LOT easier than it sounds. Unfortunately I never got a client to bite on this so I don't have results to share.

Is it possible this is the first iteration of an initiative getting more complete, nuanced answers?

As software developers, we talk about small cycles and iterations first that drive toward a working product, not a singular giant leap toward a goal. This would be consistent with that pattern.

Obviously context is important in pieces like this, as others pointed out, and I can't read it because stupid paywalls, but...

There should be some real anti-trust concerns with Google providing answers to questions itself. Google gets those answers by crawling sites with content owned by others. It has avoided copyright issues by arguing that they only show a snippet of the content to aid finding the best search result, thus it is not reproduced in whole or in part, but that the searcher will still visit the page and benefit the copyright owner.

If Google just gives you the answer and there's no need to visit the page, then that is a much bigger issue I think.

The real answer is: "don't go to the website we stole this info from, but click on an ad here"

Paywall-free archived copy:

https://archive.is/KLzPH

I hate links to wsj.com because I do not have an account...

Use this bookmarklet to access WJS paywalled content:

    javascript:location.href='http://facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

Caveat: This helps Facebook track you even if you have an ad blocker.

I'm generally very critical of Google, especially the search results page, but it's important to remember the background context to this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch...

>Rupert Murdoch say News Corp is not looking to expand its newspaper empire, conceding digital advertising “has been tremendously damaging to print” and some of his papers were struggling.

Over the next few years it will be interesting to see how successful the right wing anglosphere press is at getting governments to regulate Google. It's been building for a while now and not just from the Murdoch press. The Daily Mail in the UK has been campaigning against Google for a number of years now.

Saw that Peter Thiel is funding some guy in Missouri to go after Google.

out of curiosity, what service said he was "funding some guy"?

The NYTimes and Guardian have been as aggressive in attacking Google and Facebook as anyone (subjectively I would say more so) so I don't think this is just right-wing. It is more like the entire world has realized that having these monopolies control the flow of information is incredibly dangerous.

From a very crass and cynical perspective, but probably accurate, as Google and Facebook become more powerful, they can and should expect opposition from all previously entrenched power centers. It would be a very, ah, Silicon Valley utopian nerd idea, for lack of a better phrase, that it could otherwise. And even if there are some ideological lines drawn, well, even people on the "same side" still jockey for position and work at cross-purposes at times. If Google and Facebook are agreed to skew left, yeah, you can probably expect a bit more vigor in the right side attacks if only because they have more operating space, but you can still expect plenty of left-wing "jockeying", and that the latter may even have a greater effect over time. (Could go either way, assuming you can even agree on a basis for measurement.)

Yes, it's fair to say that there's an increasing level of concern about social media and the influence it has from across the political spectrum (well, maybe not from the populist far right…). As well as the beginnings of an application of the impact on mental health. Those are things that certainly warrant concern.

What I'm talking about is more things like the Sun (Murdoch tabloid in the UK) printing front pages about how Google helps terrorists build bombs.

You are unjustifiably attacking conservative politics.

First, before he got busted for grabbing women, liberal Senator Al Franken was rallying the troops to against Google and FB: https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/09/al-franken-facebook-goog...

Second, liberal rags like the New York Times are scrutinizing the tech industry. Here’s a recent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/opinion/academia-tech-alg...

Sure, liberals have been criticising Google and Facebook recently over the Trump/Russia stuff and about their ability to influence elections, but only once Trump and Brexit happened. I'm not sure they cared all that much before, at least not beyond specific issues that were mostly confined to the tech sections of sites like the NYT or Guardian, or generic 'big corp' stuff like tax avoidance. The Daily Mail and the Sun have been running sensational front page stories about things like David Cameron having close links to Google or Google making it easy for terrorists to build a bomb for something like 5 years.

The reason I mention right wing politics is firstly that they are the ones in power at the moment in the US/UK/Australia - Trump and May aren't going to care what the Guardian or NYT say and don't have any ideological reason to care about things like the immorality of online advertising or the affect of social media on mental health. Secondly, in the UK at least, the press as a whole is much more closely aligned to the conservative political parties. The UK press is divided roughly into right wing (Sun, Mail, Express, Telegraph, Times, Spectator), liberal (Guardian, New Statesman, FT, Economist) and left wing (Mirror, at times). The right wing outlets have vastly higher readership and reach. So if the media does have an influence on politics, it's going to be in one direction.

But my point really was that it's interesting to me to see how much the papers are working for the right wing parties or how much the right wing parties are following the agenda set by the newspapers. That's probably not so much a thing in the US (although the same question about Fox might be), but it is in the UK, especially at the moment.

E: also, to be clear, the same financial inceptives apply to the NYT and Guardian - online advertising is killing their revenue streams as well. It's just that as I said they have limited power at the moment (and it's arguable how much power they ever have - neither seems to have the ability to set the news agenda outside of the liberal middle class bubble, unlike the UK tabloids for example).

> Second, liberal rags like the New York Times are scrutinizing the tech industry.

Is your argument that news organizations should not scrutinize an entire powerful industry?

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