Google search – “king of united states” | Hacker News Reader

Google search – “king of united states”

google.com

110 pointsgozmike61 comments

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Have a feeling this is going to be taken down shortly. So here's a copy for later http://i.imgur.com/JyVEY1p.png

Funny how much is Search localized these days: http://i.imgur.com/A1hTLPx.png

I don't have any Obama-ralated link within the first 10 results.

Just changed to this: http://imgur.com/YRQrPK2

I am based in Boulder, CO.

Hilarious! For those who didn't click the link, the search has switched from being answered by the breitbart article to being answered by a searchengineland article talking about the search.

Taken down from google? I kind of doubt it. Remember how long the whole Rick Santorum thing was there? Taken down from HN? maybe, I do not know much about there moderating policies.

It's taken down (I think). The box around the first result is no longer there, but the result still appears.

I believe Google's "One Box" question answering has a semi-manual processing of "trusted" sources.

For a long time only a selected set of highly-trusted sources were used, but my understanding is that they are now a lot more aggressive with using sources - which I suspect means automatically using sources above a certain trust level, and then gray-listing problem sites.

Still works for me. Probably user dependent.

still happening for me.

Which is always curious to me how someone with a rock solid website can have one wrong link on their site and BAM! they're delisted for months, and have to go through copious amounts of customer service levels to get their site to show up again.

And yet, this and the Rick Santorum searches have been reported on by plenty of mainstream media. And yet, it stays up for months on end.

It's like, "Don't try and manipulate the SERPS, unless of course it's politically motivated and Liberally slanted, then we'll let it slide."

The sarcasm and hyperbole tags have not made it into schema.org yet, so webmasters aren't deploying them widely.

Q: Who is the king of the world?

A: Muhammad Ali

https://www.google.com/search?q=who%20is%20the%20king%20of%2...

I imagine answering nonsensical questions is hard.

I think there is a problem with the way Google's algorithm scraps not-so-popular webpage to display the text for these kind of semantic questions. Usually the results are okay when it scraps text from Wikipedia,ESPN etc. But sometimes it just gives bizarre answers from untrusted sources.

It's a great example of the GIGO principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out

Deleted comment

Checking on http://www.breitbart.com/

> Monday night the American Left looted and burned in Ferguson, Missouri. Tuesday morning the same American Media that stoked that violence is now licking wounds received with the revelation that the American criminal justice system runs on facts and science, and not Don Lemon's feelings.

...Yeah, looks pretty much like garbage to me.

Appeal to ridicule isn't exactly a strong argument. Just quoting a website of political opinion and saying "yep, garbage" only entrenches people on both sides of a political view.

Yeah, I'm not a google bot, I get that falcor wanted to call breitbart garbage.

The Google Knowledge graph is stealing content from search results. I'm not sure if it's legal or at least ethical.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=who%20is%20the%20king%20of%2...

Google has to walk an extremely fine line here.

Note that in the first case (a .gov site) and the third case (Wikipedia) the service at the end is motivated by making sure the end user has correct information, not by page views. Google does a good job in exposing their information better.

The second case is a commercial site that is probably at least partially motivated by page views. Google doesn't expose all their information in this case, and instead provides a "see more" link to their website. I'd imagine this is actually quite effective at driving traffic to their site.

Is using the <title> of the page in the result stealing? What about making a summary of the page when there's no <meta name="description"> tag?

Gray area I guess. Instant answers definitely reduce clicks.

That's what I'm saying. When you ask "How tall is Kobe?" there is a very small chance that you will click on Wikipedia page.

Maybe I'm not seeing what you're seeing, but how is this any different from the snippets that have always shown? It's in a box and it has richer formatting, but I don't see how that makes it unethical.

It's trying to avoid user from going to the website it's finding results from.

I think this is a really interesting search case.

What would people except Google to return?

On a basic level, viewing Google as nothing more than a pure search engine it seems appropriate to return results referring to the phrase "King of the United States" or close synonyms ("Emperor of the United States").

On another level, "king" could be viewed as a broad synonym for "leader". In some circumstances this works well, but in others it is extremely dangerous. I've built a toy question-answering system which uses synonyms in the broad sense. In my case "King" maps to "Leader", which maps to the DBPedia property "leader". DBPedia maps "leader" to people with constitutional authority, which seems reasonable, but in the case of the US will return John Roberts (the chief justice).

On a truly deep level, a system could understand that the US does not have a king, and that this is a politically loaded question.

Incidentally, I think Google does a really good job with https://www.google.com/search?q=who+is+the+king+of+united+st...

What's interesting is that Google seems to know what to do with other nonsensical searches. For example, "King of Canada" brings up "Queen Elizabeth II"...and so the search engine knew first to skip from the currently non-existent "King" to the next monarch (i.e. Queen), and furthermore, knew that Canada is part of the Commonwealth of Nations, which means that its queen is technically the same as the British Empire's queen.

So it's kind of unclear to me how Google's search engine would seemingly jump at "Let's find a recent news item/headline" and just show it, rather than doing the "thinking" it apparently does for "King of Canada"

For example, "King of Canada" brings up "Queen Elizabeth II"...and so the search engine knew first to skip from the currently non-existent "King" to the next monarch (i.e. Queen), and furthermore, knew that Canada is part of the Commonwealth of Nations, which means that its queen is technically the same as the British Empire's queen.

Close, but not quite.

Yes, Google is doing an equivalence of King<->Monarch

But Canada actually has a Queen, separate to any historical relation with the British empire.

Specifically, Freebase (owned by Google) lists Queen Elizabeth II as "Queen of Canada"[1]

Yeah, Google didn't do a good job for "King of the USA" in this case. Generally I believe it tries to surface recent headlines for a search, and this is what was being seen here. Unfortunately the UI for that is similar to the "fact" UI, and that has created some confusion here.

[1] https://www.freebase.com/m/0d060g?any=%2Fcommon%2Ftopic#/gov...

I don't know why you think much "thinking" is needed. She is Queen of Canada, and that status has been legally separate from Canada's status as member of the Commonwealth for decades.

Membership of the Commonwealth has for more than 60 years not been linked to being a monarchy, and is no longer directly linked to having been part of the British Empire either (Mozambique and Rwanda were granted membership without even having indirect legal links to the former British Empire)

There's no "thinking" needed in that case other than to treat alternate titles as synonyms in the case where there's no sufficiently highly ranked direct hit, which also explains the result in this article.

> knew that Canada is part of the Commonwealth of Nations, which means that its queen is technically the same as the British Empire's queen.

(1) There is no British Empire any more, and (2) Queen Elizabeth II is Queen of Canada, but not because Canada is part of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth of Nations is not coextensive with the set of nations that happen have the current monarch of the United Kingdom as their monarch as well (Queen Elizabeth II is also Head of the Commonwealth -- a title created because King George VI stopped being monarch -- Emporer, specifically -- of India while India remained in the Commonwealth), though there is still substantial overlap.

Since the formatting of the "King of Canada" box and the "All Hail King Barack Obama" box are different, I guess they are produced by different pieces of software. I had only seen the second kind before, where Google shows a snippet from a webpage with some bold text to highlight why it thinks the website provides the answer to the query. But the first kind, for "King of Canada", just prints the answer.

I guess they probably have some set of Wolfram Alpha-like programs to answer particular classes of queries (like artithmetic problems, or names of monarchs), an a different program to generate the snippets.

You search at the King, you best not miss.

Based on what you said, I'm not sure you're seeing what others are. Taken from JTon in this thread: http://i.imgur.com/JyVEY1p.png. The problem isn't the search results shown, but a big box at the top that Google is providing as the "correct" answer to the query.

See my response here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8660294

Well after the google whacking of GW Bush, turn about is fair play I suppose.

I think that's exactly what's happening. A bunch of conservative bloggers probably got together to promote the link really aggressively.

I don't think they even need to promote it- political echo chambers sustain themselves very well on the Internet. I monitor a few left- and right-wing political forums and the personalities and communication patterns are very similar despite the underlying political assumptions being almost diametrically opposed.

Wow that is interesting. I guess it's pretty intuitive if I think about it, why would extreme opinions be expressed differently. That would make a great data set to analyze though.

I'd love to analyze but it's a hard problem to quantify because you're talking about things like modes of arguments and so forth which are pretty abstract. The best small-scale idea I've had so far is to begin with an ontology dictionary and see if there's a correlation between social endorsements and characteristic adjectives and/or cliches.

However, I haven't spent much time on this, as my experience is that the more ideological folks are, the less attention they pay to statistics and suchlike. If you could produce quantitative evidence that followers of the Plaid Party were mentally identical to followers of the Polka-dot Party, both sides would find a way to condemn you, and strategists within the two parties would simply try to leverage the observed effect one way or the other.

I'm coming to agree with Slavoj Zizek that ideology (of all stripes) is itself the problem but that's easier to say than to fix :-/

I don't think it's a bug. It took some context from the Google search: "king" and a country, and published the most recent news article that some fuzzy string algorithm matched and put that sentence in the preview.

Seems like it's working fine to me. There is no King of the United States, but we wouldn't expect the algorithm to know that.

So... that's a bug? When I type random things in my computer, it executes them perfectly. It's just that it doesn't work because I typed random stuff.

Computers are perfect. Not us, so it's our job to create bugs.

Google's Knowledge Graph: brilliant but a bit gullible.

Like me! Except for the brilliant part.

I smirked, but then stopped. What took my smile away was the thought that enough people are going to see this and not take it as tongue-in-cheek, but as further evidence of a liberal bias among Silicon Valley companies, so on and so forth.

I don't think it's intentional in any respect, rather I'd wager it's more of a bug in Knowledge Graph or the search algorithm or something similar.

Even if it was intentional, Breitbart is a right-wing news outlet and so their headline would be expected to be tongue-in-cheek anyway.

If anything, calling the President "king" is a criticism. Has been since Andrew Jackson:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/presidency/4b1.html

Surely that won't happen with it listing breitbart.com as the source.

Not everyone knows that breitbart is a wingnut website.

If they try complaining about liberal bias they will find out rather quickly, though.

This is reminiscent of Dan Savage's campaign against Rick Santorum, the outspoken anti-homosexual US politican. (completely NSFW: google 'santorum')

Original title -> Google Bug? – The King of the United States of America (google.com)

Not a bug.

First, everyone searching for this is getting what they want, a haha moment.

Second, useful systems have errors.

They don't waste huge resources to fix small boundary issues.

This is why almost no one uses ada, and those who do possible would benefit from slacking off. And yes, I do include medical, military and space.

Heh well the answer is still the same, but the source has now changed to a story about this incident: http://searchengineland.com/according-google-barack-obama-ki...

Wolfram Alpha says "(none in office)", and then tells you that the current leaders are the vice president and the president, and then gives you the dates in office for all the presidents, vice-presidents, and, interestingly, the president's wives.

Wait until they discover the USA's late, self-proclaimed Emperor Norton:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton

Third result for me: Emperor Norton there you have it. Where's the problem? :D (yes, I know, emperor and not king)

Seriously, if you live in San Francisco, you should be mad that it's not Emperor Norton's portrait up there :)

https://www.google.com/search?q=emperor+norton&gws_rd=ssl

The title is ambiguous, I read it as "Google search is king of the US" and started wondering "huh?".

So google's PageRank works but does not yet comprehend sarcasm. Is that surprising?

I guess this is exactly what that little "Feedback" link is for underneath.

Looks to be fixed for me.

Anyone else expecting a picture of Chuck Norris?

https://www.google.com/?q=king%20of%20uk

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