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You're reading a lot into what I posted. For the record, I was mostly playing devil's advocate, but I don't think the question is as ridiculous as the post I re

by lemming 11y ago

You're reading a lot into what I posted. For the record, I was mostly playing devil's advocate, but I don't think the question is as ridiculous as the post I replied to seemed to think it is. There is One True Web, of course, which is the collection of all documents on the web at any given point in time. But the interface to that web is nearly always a search engine which are all obviously presenting a list of suggestions according to some criteria. Google used to use PageRank, which was a relatively "objective" criteria in that at least it applied equally to all pages. Google now uses tons of data to make decisions about what to show me when I search, but neither you nor I have any idea what they are. Maybe they do actually use some algorithm which applies equally to all pages. Maybe they use some deep neural net, and not even they know how it actually works. Maybe they have a list of heuristics that they're evilly using to manipulate all the world's information. We'll never know without seeing the source code. Again, I'm not tabling it as a serious proposal, or claiming that Google are doing anything evil. But given that they have the potential to essentially manipulate the sum total of the world's knowledge as seen by 99.999% of the population it doesn't seem ridiculous to consider whether we might like more insight into what they're doing.

danso 11y ago
> Google now uses tons of data to make decisions about what to show me when I search, but neither you nor I have any idea what they are. To be fair, a lot of people at Google probably don't know either. Peter Norvig had a great talk [1] in which he discussed searching Google's code base for "naive Bayes" and found some code in 2006 with a funny comment: > “And it was fun looking at the comments, because you’d see things like ‘well, I’m throwing in this naive Bayes now, but I’m gonna come back and fix it it up and come up with something better later.’ And the comment would be from 2006. And I think what that says is, when you have enough data, sometimes, you don’t have to be too clever about coming up with the best algorithm.” [1] https://youtu.be/ql623nyCdKE?t=5m25s https://youtu.be/ql623nyCdKE?t=5m25s I don't want to sound like an anti-algorithm-think-of-the-humans advocate...I love algorithms...but I think your statement: > Google used to use PageRank, which was a relatively "objective" criteria in that at least it applied equally to all pages. ...besides being too oversimplyfing for even a simplification -- I don't think the evolution of Google could remotely be reduced as: first there was purity of math, then came the money -- but I also think that you overlook the bigger issue...No one argues that algorithms are statements based in mathematical truths. It's the decision to use an algorithm -- including the weighting of its tradeoffs -- that is decidedly biased and opinionated. How is "a page should be evaluated by the number of pages (plus the authority of those pages) link to it" not an opinionated statement of the way information should be organized, versus the pre-Google algorithms of "If a page has a lot of mentions of a word, it must be particularly relevant to that word"? The fact that PageRank had to be changed and modified as soon as people figured out how to create networks of backlinks should in itself be evidence that an algorithm -- and the decision to use it -- is not just objective truth in the way that 1 + 1 = 2 is.

by lemming 11y ago

danso 11y ago

> Google now uses tons of data to make decisions about what to show me when I search, but neither you nor I have any idea what they are. To be fair, a lot of people at Google probably don't know either. Peter Norvig had a great talk [1] in which he discussed searching Google's code base for "naive Bayes" and found some code in 2006 with a funny comment: > “And it was fun looking at the comments, because you’d see things like ‘well, I’m throwing in this naive Bayes now, but I’m gonna come back and fix it it up and come up with something better later.’ And the comment would be from 2006. And I think what that says is, when you have enough data, sometimes, you don’t have to be too clever about coming up with the best algorithm.” [1] https://youtu.be/ql623nyCdKE?t=5m25s https://youtu.be/ql623nyCdKE?t=5m25s I don't want to sound like an anti-algorithm-think-of-the-humans advocate...I love algorithms...but I think your statement: > Google used to use PageRank, which was a relatively "objective" criteria in that at least it applied equally to all pages. ...besides being too oversimplyfing for even a simplification -- I don't think the evolution of Google could remotely be reduced as: first there was purity of math, then came the money -- but I also think that you overlook the bigger issue...No one argues that algorithms are statements based in mathematical truths. It's the decision to use an algorithm -- including the weighting of its tradeoffs -- that is decidedly biased and opinionated. How is "a page should be evaluated by the number of pages (plus the authority of those pages) link to it" not an opinionated statement of the way information should be organized, versus the pre-Google algorithms of "If a page has a lot of mentions of a word, it must be particularly relevant to that word"? The fact that PageRank had to be changed and modified as soon as people figured out how to create networks of backlinks should in itself be evidence that an algorithm -- and the decision to use it -- is not just objective truth in the way that 1 + 1 = 2 is.