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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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?

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