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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

Some things should not be autocompleted. I can't think of a reason why a search engine should suggest a completion if you start typing something generic like "xyz are ...".

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Searching "muslims are vegetarian" could be seen as another way to search "are muslims vegetarian". A good search engine lets you search query soup like this. They don't necessarily return the same results, but people are pretty bad at querying.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with a query like that, and I think autocomplete is fine once you typed "muslims are vege...".

But I don't see why you'd autocomplete a sentence that could go anywhere. Just because many people type that isn't a good reason.

Why isn't that a good reason?

It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.

Because it's a stupid thing to do. It makes sense to complete a query once it is obvious what the user wants to write. That's helpful, you saved me from typing a few characters.

But if you suggest completions for queries at a point where it isn't yet obvious what the user wants, you are no longer just helpful. You are steering people in a certain direction, whether that's your intent or not. You are effectively telling people, hey, try this query, it's popular, even if the user had no intent of typing that query.

Okay, I see your point now. Content discovery can be decomposed into "push" and "pull". In the 90s, searching was typically associated with pull. Over time, engines started providing a push component (e.g. autocomplete). It sounds like you want search engines to be mostly pull with less push.

You want the push to be more local to what you specifically choose to pull, which means greatly reducing the current scope of the push component. I guess that's fine, but a lot of people really like the push component, especially if they don't quite know what they're looking for. I think the whole of the two methods is more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Can we please stop wildly exaggerating every attempt to remove graffiti and trolling from the Internet as equivalent to invoking the “thought police”? Nobody is sending the authorities after you for entering overtly-racist searches into Google.

Keep in mind that you are currently enjoying the benefits of discussing this topic on a highly-moderated discussion forum. How relevant do you think Hacker News would be if such moderation was ended entirely?

Have you learned literally nothing from the utter disaster that was Tay[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

except it does suggest if you type 'people are...'

some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see, there's no other explanation :)

some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see

Yes, that's what a suggestion algorithm is.

There is no pure Platonic ideal neutral objective suggestion algorithm. Every suggestion algorithm is going to have biases based on both its training data and the goals (explicit or otherwise) of its creators.

You've gotten as far as, apparently, noticing that tweaking the algorithm after the public has seen it constitutes a choice on the part of the designers about what they do and don't want to show you. Now take the final logical step, and observe that they already made choices about what they do and don't want to show you in the initial design, before the algorithm ever went public.

If you have a problem with the former, I don't see how you can be logically consistent while not having a problem with the latter.

when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for, not "what people search for, except...", this talk about suggestion algos has nothing to do with the issue I think

When I enter something, I want to see what's relevant to me, not what other people searched for. As such, it makes sense to not suggest anything when I type in 'Muslims are', as Google doesn't know what I want to see yet; it could decide that once I started typing in more strings on the next word. It'd make more sense to me if, instead of completing search queries, it just completed individual words in the queries.

> when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for

That's never been the point, though it's sometimes been an implementation method because it's easy: the point is to provide a useful guess of what you might be searching for.

Some search engines do provide tools for exploring patterns of other people's searches, but recommendation systems have never been that except as a matter of leaky implementation details.

it was just an example, you can choose another if you think it's more appropriate, my point is that this idiotic censorship has no place in search

if it has something to show me regarding my search (and it certainly does), it must

Have you started using the internet in the last 2-3 years Google was not censoring suggestions until a lot of noise was made about racist results etc. So this hasn't come out of the blue and anyway search suggestions are just that suggestions I don't think Google is censoring the results unless it is being forced to us dmca or European right to be forgotten or whatever restrictions are being put by different countries for search results by users in each country.

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