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Comment by _etyf | Hacker News Reader

Google's Knowledge Graph info boxes are automatically-generated and littered with errors. I've been burned twice on operating hours, once for my local bank and once for a convenience store, driving over each time only to find the place closed. In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website. I've also seen bad KG results for medical conditions, listing the wrong symptoms or describing easily-treatable maladies as "Incurable". Now I actively ignore the info box and intentionally click through to an authoritative non-Google website.

To a non-technical user, I'm sure the box looks like a human-curated result which they're more likely to trust. Maybe that's the goal of Google's UI choices. Couldn't be further from the truth.

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Technology Connections had a great observation about this in his video about touch lamps: the problem with Google's knowledge graph is that it takes everything it reads on the internet at face value.

https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58 (0:58 through 4:20)

> takes everything it reads on the internet at face value.

it's terrible but a lot of people [0] think digital information, and thus internet, is truth

[0] and if google itself falls for this.. no wonder if people do too

Google isn’t interested in truth, they are interested in information. They are provide a search engine not a truth engine.

Sarcasm aside, how do we propose they determine what is truth? If we assume the internet is full of information and more truthful than not, then Google’s assumption could be accurate. Of course they do try and solve this with the knowledge graph and expert curation. Connections to verified information might give validity to that information, but not always.

Google isn’t interested in truth, they are interested in information. They are provide a search engine not a truth engine

Google has been transitioning to attempting to provide a "truth engine" for several years. Whenever I try a complex key-word search, it suggests a question format for it (often with worse result but sometimes OK). When I have finally got the key words down to filter just what I want, google whines about "Not very many results, here's what you should do..." and, of course, Google often gives explicit answers for questions in it's search results (a notable percentage of which are wrong as noted).

And Google being half-assed truth engine is all sorts of bad...

That doesn't need to be sarcasm, because it's true: at its core, Google's search is a method of finding information, not a method of directly ascertaining truth. It's not really possible for it to be a truth engine, and if you realize that, it's not even a flaw. You're left with a way of finding information you will need to evaluate for yourself, which is fine.

The problem is in the presentation: Google's tools in general, not limited to search, present themselves as though they can identify truth. That's the flaw, the lie, if you prefer.

Given that they are actively curating the information and censoring "misinformation", they certainly think they are a truth engine. And present it this way. Of course you'd only believe it if you believe Google is omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent.

That's the problem, isn't it. Most people want to be good, so most information on the internet is the-truth-as-they-know-it. It lulls you into a false sense of security.

I don't, I stopped caring about truthes, at least in a large scale social context.. now if someone could tell this to the world.

if you peek outside of math/physics it's pretty much landscape of relative truths; imho ideal thruth/fake news detecting machine would simply require axiomatic/weighted input, ie. "I trust MIT with public key 0x..., youtube jesus from la with public key 0x... and my childhood mate 0x..." – based on that is "X true, false or undefined"? (weighted output). Because I trust MIT with weight ie. 500% and MIT trusts Caltech, my trust graph will favour Caltech view of the world. Yes you can throw blockchain and AI into it and it actually makes sense.

Worth watching for the capacitater joke alone

> . In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website

Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the same one that dictates what appears in Google Maps for claimed businesses), so if the owners are updating their website but not updating that (or checking their email for emails from google that say '[business], are you open on 4th of July?') it'll show incorrect info.

That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault. Making it sound like the business's fault for not using Google's other service is just reinforcing the idea that Google's information is the only information that's real.

This is the problem with the web search and scaping provider also trying to be a thousand other services at the same time. It's a constant conflict of interest.

In the hypothetical example, they are providing wrong information to Google. If they provided no information, it would be a different story.

> That's still Google's fault. If their service is providing out-of-date information, it's their fault.

Huh? If the business owners aren't updating the correct info in My Business, how can that possibly be Google's fault?

Because this means My Business is not fit for purpose. Google is a web search engine, not a Google proprietary DB search engine.

Google is an advertising company.. not a search engine

> Google is an advertising company

Google is a company that sells space for ads; an “advertising company” conventionally refers to a company that designs ad campaigns and purchases ad space for them on behalf of a client.

> not a search engine.

No, its both. Just as historically newspapers publishers in the US have been both producers of newspapers and companies that sell ad space.

Google the company is an ad intermediary company. Google is also the colloquial name of Google Search.

Just because Google scrapes my website once to seed their database doesn't make me responsible for being their data monkey to keep it updated.

If Google is scraping this information and keeping it separate, unlinked and un-updated from its source of truth, how is that anyone but Google's fault?

You have to register your business page. It's not automatic. I believe op here meant a Google business listing which was created by the owner explicitly, but not updated.

It's not? Interesting. Literally hundreds of business listings popped up in Google Maps overnight, a few months ago, which appear very much scraped out of some registry - name, category, address, nothing else. Similarly with the """"place names"""" that seem to be based on people's personal remarks, and about as inaccurate.

Google map entries are connected to, but not the same as business entries. https://www.google.com.au/business/

Once you claim your business location, most submitted changes should come to you for review. (There may be exceptions, I'm not an expert here)

If this were the case then one would expect Google to be paying businesses for up-to-date information with a contractual SLA.

Even if 90% of businesses play along (doing Google's data entry work for them), the 10% chance of my wasting half an hour makes it worth ignoring the info box and double-checking each time.

It has also been a waste of working hours at our offices. I work at libraries and am responsible for the communication towards visitors — we are slowly opening up all our venues again with lifting of corona measures, which mean we need to update our opening times. With one click I can reverse them on our own website but I have to update every location manually on google results. Anyone can also change these opening times plus they might just change them again based on some third party website that scrapes outdated opening times.

I don’t know what the prioritization is if you are e.g. explicitly registered in some Google database, but I’ve had a good experience with just marking up the opening hours (addresses, etc.) with RDFa (or Microformats or whatever else Google accepts these days) on the official website. Of course how easy it is depends on the number of layers between you and the actual HTML, and my case was rather straightforward (three locations with separately listed addresses and opening hours), but you might want to check if it’ll take some of the pain out of the process.

Google recently changed the hours of operation on my business' Google My Business listing to an hour later than I had it set to. I have no idea why; I certainly didn't tell them to. We found out when we got some angry calls from customers who showed up after we were closed. It's hard to explain to someone that we don't own our own listing on Google, and that we're at their mercy to approve the changes we submit and hope they don't make their own arbitrary updates.

Are you saying you've claimed your listing, meaning Google has set you as the owner, and it was still possible for some rando to make changes?

Or that some runaway automated internal process is treated as more authoritative than the owner, or...

The even uglier aspect of this, I think, is that Google is trying to keep you on their site and discourage you from visiting the authoritative site. That is classic middleman (unwanted intermediary) behaviour. Google produces no content but they sure interested in everyone else's.

> That is classic middleman (unwanted intermediary) behaviour.

Unwanted by whom? The reader? If you don't want google as an intermediary you can just... not use them. If you want to search but not have an intermediary, you can just run your own search engine and index. The publisher? Again, if a publisher doesn't want an search engine to be an intermediary then they can always get their site delisted. Turns out that most sites don't do that, or do and then quickly revert back, so clearly they want Google as an intermediary.

This is not true. While the content may initially be auto-generated, the Google KG is worked on extensively by real people. There are regional teams which work to verify and source the information that is out there. My sister works on the traditional Chinese team (mostly out of Taiwan or Taiwanese ABCs). These teams, as far as I know, are WFH contract workers.

Can users tell when info box answers have been auto-generated vs. curated? How often is KG content updated or re-verified, as in the case of businesses changing their operating hours? Are KG verifiers subject matter experts, e.g. medical professionals, or unskilled workers?

Real people or not, I've been burned by false opening hours on google maps so many times I will never trust it again. I'd rather spend 20 seconds extra to visit the official webpage rather than a 25% chance of traveling half an hour to realize it's closed. Even if extensive work by a human team can reduce this to a 10% chance it's still not worth my trouble.

As the old adage goes. The only thing worse than no documentation is outdated/incorrect documentation.

I believe you but anyone got links? This is interesting information.

As far as I can tell the KG is also the source for Google Home when it answers questions. That's even more rough since it sounds authoritative and there are no visual cues to imply that it may be inferred.

Right. Voice assistants are a much harder format for Google, because you can’t just display a list of links. I ask my tube a question, I expect one (1) correct answer.

I once saw it source its info from a wrong answer in a multiple-choice quiz.

If Google isn’t legally liable for this under defamation statutes, maybe they should be.

The example in the article sounds like a pretty blatant case of libel/slander. Though not as downright dangerous as some of your examples.

Google's medical information boxes are irresponsible. They are not accurate enough to serve the general population. They aren't detailed enough to be a useful reference for professionals either. Even a Wikipedia article is a better resource.

Opening hours has been mostly surprisingly accurate - but I agree, it failed a few times.

Opening hours and Google Maps are the only things that get me on Google from DuckDuckGo these days (even if Google Maps keeps getting worse every year).

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