Comment by the_lonely_road | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_lonely_road | Hacker News Reader

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the_lonely_road

This seems disingenuous at best. Even on the very first day that Google launched if you typed those things into it, you would get 'the most relevant responses' which is all that these are, a search engine providing the most relevant response to your query. At some point the tool and its underlying algorithms have to operate on a good faith assumption which this twitter person was clearly not operating on.

There may have been some tomfoolery going on with that twitter guy as well and/or in the intervening time Google has improved the algorithms to handle people trying to get silly results. This is what I got trying to repeat his first query:

What year did Tom Hanks land on the moon

1995 William Broyles Jr. Apollo 13 is a 1995 American space docudrama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise.

For his second query, it makes perfect sense to me why google returned what it did (still returning the answer he got, but notice he conventently cutoff the paragraph of text that includes the saturn 5 rocket and the statue of liberty, possibly the only document on the web to have both in the same sentence, explaining why you got that return.

which rocket launched the statue of liberty into the ocean? The Saturn V rocket The Saturn V rocket was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a 36-story-tall building, and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed 2.8 million kilograms (6.2 million pounds), the weight of about 400 elephants.Feb 21, 2018 Apollo 13 (film) - Wikipedia

Relevant according to whom? You’ve explained _why_ Google returns those results, but that doesn’t make the answers relevant. Especially not when Google presents them so authoritatively as knowledge cards (or whatever they’re calling it these days).

Sure, if you’re a someone trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, then they’re probably pretty “relevant”. But that’s not how most people use Google. I’ll bet most of HN doesn’t use Google this way.

Maybe it’s a UI issue. It’d be nice if Google attached a little disclaimer that said: “These results are “relevant” to the way our algorithm produces these results, but there’s a chance they’re laughably incorrect, so please take with a bucket of salt.” Or better still, just show the search results, instead of being clever and pretending to understand what I’m looking for. Y’know, like back in the day, when it was such a delight switching from AltaVista/Yahoo! to Google. Good times.

Taking the paragraph out of the page it's on and displaying it separately in a highlighted box with no context is the problem; it's being presented as a standalone fact. Google should really stop pushing this half-baked feature and go back to displaying normal search results so that a person can click through and read it in proper context.

I guess the problem is expectations. It can be useful to have information summarized in that manner but I would never take it as authoritative.

Ranking urls by perceived relevance is far different than displaying a seeming answer.

> this twitter person

Randall Munro illustrated several of his tweets with drawings from his not-entirely-unknown Web comic, so having to resort to a phrase like "this twitter person" feels rather weird.

This kind of thinking shows how artificial intelligence has fallen since the 1970s.

Back then it was clear you could get the right answer 50% of the time with some heuristics and people thought the glass was half empty.

Today you can get the right answer 50% of the time with some heuristic and people think the glass is half full.

disingenuous means "saying something you don't mean, insincere".

It's a polite word for lying, most of the time.

> There may have been some tomfoolery going on with that twitter guy

No tomfoolery here, no sir!

Completely unrelated URL: https://xkcd.com/386/

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