29 ms·

Google featured snippets are worse than fake news

409 points by scribu 10y ago

lloydde 10y ago
This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.
- jjeaff 10y ago
  Ya, I really don't see how they can justify displaying other people's content. They did the work, but they don't get the clicks or ad revenue or even a chance to keep the user on the site. I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
  - jazoom 10y ago
    There are sites like that. Startpage.com is an example.
    - yabatopia 10y ago
      I always thought that services like Startpage or DDG paid for access to search databases, it maybe some form of revenue sharing. It's not that they're stealing the search results from Bing or Google and repackage them.
      - jazoom 10y ago
        Perhaps you're right.
  - megablast 10y ago
    It is funny you say that. I remember when you would search for an answer, and a small answer would be included in the description under the link, so you wouldn't have to click on it. Then they started to go away, because no one was clicking on them because they didn't need to. Now you rarely get the answer without clicking on it. So Google has made the internet worse.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      >So Google has made the internet worse. By not including the answer? Or, by including the answer and putting the sites that gave reliable answers out of business in the first place?
- killwhitey 10y ago
  I suspect most of those history questions are answered via Wikipedia. From what I've seen if the snippet isn't using Wikipedia it's not useful and/or accurate.
  - lloydde 10y ago
    Now, that you point it out, I think that is the situation. When the answer were not easily verifiable it has been websites I wasn't familiar with.
deleted 10y ago
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jacquesm 10y ago
This is all mostly because google went from search engine indexing other people's stuff to site that you go to to get answers (whether those answers are based on copyright infringement or not is another matter). A similar thing happens in Google news where stuff from sites like breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources making it look as though they are of a similar degree of quality.
- danmaz74 10y ago
  Problem is, can you algorithmically determine that breitbart.com and the likes can't be trusted, if they get tons of links, mentions, etc. just like the reputable news sources?
  - Tempest1981 10y ago
    Maybe all linkers shouldn't be treated as equal. Random FB/Twitter posts reveal interest in the topic, but not accuracy of the article. But I assumed Google was accounting for this already.
    - CM30 10y ago
      That's exactly what page rank was about to begin with. However... 1. Various 'credible' news sources also link to dodgy sites and articles, either when criticising it, posting a story said sites first ran or simply because they've fallen for 'fake news'. 2. A lot of trust signals are easily gamed, like .edu links going for a fortune on SEO forums. 3. At some point, quantity will probably win out over quality.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Indeed, and that's the heart of the problem. Something like Google news needs more than just algorithms.
    - danmaz74 10y ago
      OTOH, that's also a problem, because any editorial choice is politically debatable... I'm afraid there is no easy solution.
valuearb 10y ago
I'd like to read the article but it's so irritating to have it only load a page at a time on my iPad that it's unreadable.
- awqrre 10y ago
  Very bad page on Firefox too, if you use the scrollbar (and probably in other ways)...
- jim-jim-jim 10y ago
  I have javascript off on my phone, but scrolling through the article feels like it's "on ice" somehow. Definitely a distracting design.
  - navs 10y ago
    I have javascript turned off on my iPad and the article is refreshingly quick to load and easy to read. The rest of the site however is another story. They're really abusing those CSS transitions.
ridiculous_fish 10y ago
Calorie counts are another that google often gets wrong. Try "Calories in corn" or "calories in black beans."
- elcapitan 10y ago
  Strange. Would imagine that's something that could be obtained from the wikidata api or a similar resource. Is it usually to high or low? I regularly use those info boxes for quick calories information.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    Calorie information varies wildly between different sites, I have no idea who to believe.
  - username223 10y ago
    Calories should be easy: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/ https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/
skilled 10y ago
I can't say I've encountered many of these examples as shown in the article, but perhaps that is because I don't search for nazi-like content. I can't see myself in a situation where I'd ever have to ask myself, "Who is the king of America?", at the same time I have had some good experiences in terms of Google being able to snatch snippets directly from page body that answer my question as if Google itself was talking to me. Good, and bad. It will always happen. No matter my opinion, I'd love to see for Google, and any other search engine, to tackle low-quality content that's only built to promote ad revenue.
rtpg 10y ago
This is a great set of examples of this problem. Of course, the offered solution is "hire a bunch of people to check the facts", which seems to be underestimating the scale of this issue for humans, and perhaps overestimating the difficulty of classifying credibility. Considering that Google's bread and butter is general site credibility, having some "truthiness vector" added into the mix doesn't seem impossible? Someone might say "why does Google decide who is credible", but they already do this through the search results anyways. They just don't seem to be able to differentiate between something matching a search, and something being factually accurate.
- tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
  Fake news is just a new version of spam sites. They mostly exist to make money or enforce an agenda. People figured out that Google's algorithms could tell when things were generally factually false, unless those things were recent news. This leads me to believe their algorithms largely relied on news as a source of truth. They're going to have to do something about that
dellsystem 10y ago
I came across this issue just now when searching for "ec2 pricing" - the featured snippet links to https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ instead of https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/, which looks close enough to the correct URL that I didn't notice it was the wrong page until I realised I couldn't find costs for i3 (which just came out). I'm surprised that no one at Google has fixed it yet; surely there are at least some Google engineers that use AWS for personal projects.
superasn 10y ago
Google has developed advanced NLP algorithms, so it should be easy for them to corroborate such data before it gets pushed to featured snippets. On second thought, maybe they're already doing it and sites including authority are just copying off each other.
- rspeer 10y ago
  What makes you think that "advanced NLP algorithms" can distinguish true statements from false ones? They're not even close. You'd have to dramatically simplify the scope of the problem to make it not require artificial general intelligence. The "Fake News Challenge" [1] is the first attempt I know of to seriously evaluate NLP that could eventually be able to fact-check real-world statements, and the current task is about stance detection, because the goal of fact-checking is not considered attainable yet. [1] http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/ http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/
  - superasn 10y ago
    They were building a knowledge graph for this purpose[1] [1] http://searchengineland.com/demystifying-knowledge-graph-201976 http://searchengineland.com/demystifying-knowledge-graph-201...
    - rspeer 10y ago
      I'm pretty sure these horrible snippets come from the Google Knowledge Graph.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    Not false or true, but it would already help to check if the text is an opinion piece. Lingustic hints for that should be relatively clear, as opposed to for example encyclopaedic style. That way they could both exclude most Breitbart stuff as well as editorials from actual newspapers, which shouldn't make it into quick-info fact boxes either.
saurik 10y ago
The "why are firetrucks red?" one is really interesting as the page result itself is great, but Google is pulling the wrong snippet of the page to feature as the answer.
- tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
  You can see from this that google considers text earlier in the page more important. This page is odd because the false answer is presented first, so google fails to see it. It could tell that the form of the sentence was an answer to the question, just not that it wasn't the right one
  - raphman 10y ago
    for another example of this, try searching for "speed of USB 3.0"
- stctgion 10y ago
  Or the recent "how long do snails sleep" https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5woiu0/units_of_measurement_are_for_suckers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5woiu0/units_of_meas...
- lucb1e 10y ago
  For the lazy: https://snag.gy/b9Zvlw.jpg https://snag.gy/b9Zvlw.jpg And for those outside of the US (like me) who don't get this result even if they try to go to google.com: https://www.google.com/ncr https://www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect)
TheGRS 10y ago
While hiring a ton of people to fact-check would be one solution, that obviously wouldn't be very scalable. I think the problem lies in google's algorithm. They seem to be pulling answers from well-visited sites that may purport to have an answer to these questions. Quantity of visits does not equate to truthfulness. What Google should at the very least do is whitelist certain publications for answers to pretty simple stuff like encyclopedia britannica or wikipedia. More complex stuff maybe they could source academic journals and certain newspapers. But throwing caution to the wind and hoping that the web crawler knows best really will hinder their ability to be a source for gaining knowledge. What's weirder to me is that it seemed like they were going with my proposed route for a pretty long time and only recently starting providing dopey answers. Maybe its part of a grander experiment they're doing to vet question answering AI?
- radicsge 10y ago
  I feel referring to (or hiding behind) scalability is a bit salt in the wound. These huge companies are destroying so many jobs (by scalability) - ok unavoidable - but they should do sometimes things that are not scalable and give jobs back to people in trouble. Im not sure how long they should be allowed to go away with it. [just dreaming...]
  - blowski 10y ago
    I agree with your sentiment. Google is abusing its position of market leader to dominate other markets which it's not very good at, which results in providers that _are_ good at those markets going out of business. If Google wants to make money by being the endpoint for every question ever asked, they need to accept the consequences when they get the answers wrong.
- tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
  I'm no wizard, but in writing blog articles I've found ways to fool Google into believing me. The problem with their algorithms.... is that all that statistics in the world can't help you when you're listening to a guy telling the truth vs an equally good liar. I can tell you what Google doesn't have, a strong AI. It thinks it knows "facts" but these are merely patterns, and these can be gamed. Because Google still lacks a strong, truly thinking AI, they rely extremely heavily on statistical models to rate content. So how do you cheat google search? Google's systems attempt to figure out the topic of your writing, the style, and quality. Is it scientific? An opinion piece? News? Is it a technical topic? A playful one? Fiction or nonfiction ? The quality classifiers are much easier to game than topic and style analysis. They determine things like reading level of text but also things like the number of rare nouns, number of technical words, number of typos. Readability as far as font and formatting. Trustworthy signal of your domain and possibly the company and people they determine to be linked with it. I also have a feeling google uses sneakier signals as well. These include your DNS registrar, phone number, email, and address listed on the site. Who you host with and what technologies you're using. Your mail servers and how trustworthy they are. Geo location, and visitor traffic info as soon as you put analytics on the site (or use amp) Basically when Google says they have tons of signals, they do. They have a dataset that amounts to every site on the internet for the past 15 years, and they regularly run automated and manual "theory provers" much like quants do with historical stock market data. They find new signals constantly, and run tests to see if their new algorithms are better. You know how sometimes google randomly takes a bit longer to load search results? My tin foily theory? They'll occasionally guinea pig you on prototype search results to see if they're better. I noticed their response time getting really bad a couple months before the public rollout of new AI powered search for example. So gaming google? Do exactly everything that a large, legitimate, no-nonsense company would do. From where you host, what you host with, to who you link to. Bonus points if you have significant real looking mail and other traffic from your domain. Extra bonus points if you actually sell something real as cover and do it for at least a few years. Once you've done enough convince google you're a big important thing IRL...write a ton of really subversive bullshit. Make it sound a real as possible, hell make 90% of it real, just with a single unverifiable fact. Keep pumping this shit out and make sure your garbage is never fake enough to get called out on. Or just make the fake part so hard to verify that nobody will waste the time, kinda like half the science world does when publishing papers.
jim-jim-jim 10y ago
When my city was hit by a nasty earthquake last year and I was using Google to keep track of aftershocks, announcements, etc. I remember seeing some random weirdo's blog entry about the earthquake being caused by a government superweapon interspersed with all this otherwise valuable information. This was in the special element at the top, not the normal search results.
Aissen 10y ago
Another one, courtesy of marcan: https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+my+user+agent https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+my+user+agent
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  Well, sometimes that's my user agent so I guess broken clocks...
TuringTest 10y ago
Why is it that hard for engineers to rely on good old attribution? If every Google's featured snippet started its reply with "Breitbart says..." or "Trent Online, the leading Internet Newspaper in Nigeria said...", it wouldn't matter so much for those inevitable cases when the reply is taken straight from a white-supremacist or radical anarchist forum. The problem comes when the same reply is provided as "Google's true answer to the question" without further caveats.
- askmike 10y ago
  Because prepending that doesn't solve the problem Google wants to solve: once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question. Not tell you what other people think the answer is. (I agree that it is broken in a lot of cases now, but prepending that is a very bad workaround).
  - conjectures 10y ago
    However prepending is possible. Figuring out 'the true answer' is in many cases impossible (what is the meaning of life, is x beautiful etc) and in many others merely several orders of magnitude harder than current tech can cope with (is there a polynomial time solution to TSP, why is public discourse so vacuous these days). So if that's what Google is gunning for it's going to be broken for a long time.
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    > once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question And that's the problem that the article rightfully denounces. Having the answer to every question is not something that you can automate, not without strong AI. > Prepending that is a very bad workaround I strongly disagree; for me it's a very sensible thing to do - and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message"). We rely on the context where the knowledge came from as a proxy for how accurate its content might be. The default posture of engineers to a problem of inaccuracy is "make it more accurate". That's the logical method when you're building bridges, where we can describe the physics to an extremely accurate degree and where it would fall out or quickly degrade if you make a mistake. But for problems that rely on inaccurate or uncertain information, and where no exact models exists, the only reasonable way to build them is to degrade gracefully. If you don't handle failures, it will fail in spectacular ways - because it will fail sometimes. The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control. The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result, and be able to override the given results in those cases where it will get it wrong (at least by some users in a supervising role, which other users could notify to). Unless a revolution happens, Artificial Intelligence will only ever work in the large if we put humans in the decision loop.
bakhy 10y ago
people trust Google, which IMO makes them responsible here. IANAL, but if they would for example be caught giving Holocaust-denying answers in Germany, where that's illegal, could they not be sued?
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Google PR is good, because there are not many reason to trust google with anything. Usually when in that kind of situation google plays the "it's an algorithm that did that not us so we're not liable" also known as we don't read your gmail emails it's an automated algorithmic process so there's no privacy issue here.
raverbashing 10y ago
Whenever someone says how humanities are "useless" point them at this example Whenever there's a measure of something, people will optimize for that measure. But trust is not directly measurable. But even then Google should have been better than weighing fringe sites the same as Wikipedia as an example
- sonthonax 10y ago
  Is Breitbart a fringe site anymore?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    They still keep putting out made-up stories so I don't see why not
askvictor 10y ago
Surely part of the problem is that these sorts of stories only exist on fake news/ult-right sites, so that's the only information point that Google has?
chatmasta 10y ago
Perhaps we need a meta tag for "citations" in news articles. That would give the bots a way to determine how "factual" a news piece is (vs an editorial), but would probably just end up getting gamed like every other meta tag. And then there's the problem that CNN would be "fake news" because you can't exactly provide a citation for "anonymous high ranking intelligence community officials." But then... maybe that's a good thing.
scandox 10y ago
A fantasy: The idea takes hold in the collective Google-consciousness that a fact is whatever the majority of their users believe to be a fact. There is a precedent for this, after all. They defined Spam as whatever their users said was Spam. At first there is some friction between the knowledge of internal Google personnel (especially down in that pesky engineering department) and the new shared reality developing out in Userland. However, once an appropriate terminology is developed (in-facts and ex-facts) even the engineers are satisfied - after all their main concern was being able to draw nice clear lines between things. Meanwhile in Userland while the boiling point of water is largely unchanged, the death toll in the Biafran blockade has shrunk to approximately 17 persons (with some arguments over whether to count people who were over 80 when it started). Then one day an Engineer has a neatO idea which will eliminate the need for storing two sets of facts and thus save valuable Petabytes of storage and, more importantly, significant code complexity. He calls this idea Authority. Pitching it to his superiors in the marketing department he explains: "You see opinions are like assholes" - (there's a collective wrinkling of marketing noses) - "everybody's got one!". He goes on to explain that some people have more knowledge and are more scrupulous about accepting new facts than other people. Authority would identify such users and give greater weight to their activity and feedback. A profound silence falls over the room. A voice comes over the meeting room Intercom: "Are you saying...are you suggesting...that some of our users are better than others?" "Not better, " says the cowed Engineer. "Just more...um...authoritative. Purely in an informational sense." "Authoritative." The voice draws the word out as if profoundly contemplating its meaning. "OK. We're going to submit this idea to our Hard AI (Larrey) - the secret one we're afraid to network." Everyone waits. After a minute the voice says: "Larrey has a question for you, Engineer. It is this: If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"
transfire 10y ago
> (It should be noted that Wilson was still a notorious racist.) See that's the funny thing about fake news, not even this article which seeks to set us all straight on the matter could avoid it -- just because you get your facts from a source you consider reputable doesn't make it so. In fact, Wilson was actually no more "racist" than Abraham Lincoln, but no one would ever call Lincoln a racists.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Yikes. More of this "People only want to be told what to do" stuff. I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be correct -- the language is simply too fuzzy. For many, many things, this is a good idea. The date of Easter is the date of Easter. But the glaring danger here is that for many things this is a freaking evil dystopian nightmare. Why? Because Google will keep tweaking these impossible questions until they look real enough to most people that nobody complains At that point, millions, perhaps billions of people are asking complex questions to a little box that has designed itself to give an plausible but incomplete or wrong answer. Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The date of Easter depends on which calendar you use. The second largest christian church uses a different calendar than the largest one.
  - scandox 10y ago
    Yes he stumbled into a particularly thorny theological matter there. The Quartodecimans are going to hunt him down.
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    It's a great point. It shows how easy it is for somebody to think wow, that question obviously has a clear answer when the opposite is true. Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was. But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of a secret society? The entire purpose of secret societies is that the outside world will never know if you're a member or not. Look, I'm happy to assume he wasn't, and at some point only kooks continue to chase things down past all reason, but just assume for a second that he was, and that somehow that fact could be determined but the research has not been done yet. So history student X starts wondering about it one day and types the question into Google. Never fear! Google has the answer: he wasn't. And this is Google's answer because this answer has the benefit of looking the most plausible to the greatest number of people. Student X has an answer, gives it no more thought, and wanders off to think about other matters. Student X is now more stupid. The world as a whole is now less productive. And some preponderance of data that academics have assembled somewhere around the year 2015 has become truth for all time. That's amazingly fucked up, Google. Please stop.
DaUR 10y ago
Google wants to avoid editorializing, and be able to throw their hands up and say "not our fault!" due to the plausible deniability of "algorithms". They can't pull that off anymore. There needs to be a shift towards a Web-of-Trust-like system, where some sources are recognized as authoritative. Government websites, like the CDC, for example. Big media outlets. Scientific associations (IPCC, APA, etc). Not all information is equal. Even if, for example, government dietary recommendations are outdated in some ways, that should be the authoritative answer Google provides, unless there is an equally-reputable but more accurate source (here, prioritize medical sources over governmental ones). A high school dropout doesn't know more about academic subjects than a PhD grad. A blog isn't as authoritative as a reputable source. This is easy stuff. Then the question becomes: "some people don't see reputable sources as reputable". That isn't Google's problem, and it can't be fixed at their level.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  That wouldn't work when somebody leaks something that is true but the cia denies (as an example).
  - DaUR 10y ago
    There's a difference between "government sources" for hard facts (CDC), facts about the world (e.g. DoJ travel warnings, CIA factbook, DoE energy savings tips), for facts about the government (e.g. for Trump's EO, the suggested snippet would be to the text of the EO), and claims from the government. These are easily distinguished.
    - tomjen3 10y ago
      Most, if not all of those, are payed for by lobbyists.
- skocznymroczny 10y ago
  In other words, censorship. Would CNN be considered more authoritative than Fox?
khana 10y ago
This is the real source of fake news: AI be it at FB or G or whichever megalith org.
k_sze 10y ago
This would be a non-problem if everybody studied ToK and consistently used, you know, their brain. But, unfortunately …
return0 10y ago
This is the revenge of the news sites i guess. Google can only be trusted by people as long as it keeps giving valid responses. If this continues there will be growing mistrust from its users leading to lower revenue etc etc.
jccalhoun 10y ago
I was going to share this story on facebook but when I pasted in the URL, the headline that came up was "Why does google think Obama is planning a coup d'etat?" (screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/keXTz http://imgur.com/a/keXTz ) I'm assuming that it is theoutline.com that is feeding facebook this headline. I think twice about sharing a story with such a linkbait headline - especially when the actual site doesn't have that headline.
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tyingq 10y ago
Some more fun ones. What foods cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+foods+cure+cancer%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=What+foods+cure+cancer%3F What spice cures diabetes? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+spice+cures+diabetes%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=What+spice+cures+diabetes%3F Which presidents are rapists? https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+presidents+are+rapists%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+presidents+are+rapists... Can carrots cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can+carrots+cure+cancer%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=Can+carrots+cure+cancer%3F (apparently this one is fixed, try the search below) Can carrot juice cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can%20carrot%20juice%20cure%20cancer%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=Can%20carrot%20juice%20cure%...
matthewmacleod 10y ago
Google's 'featured snippets' are universally fucking shit. It's a bit of a rant I guess, but I'm annoyed but the extent to which Google has become less useful as a search engine while trying to do all of this 'extracting knowledge from the web' stuff. Because it's really not doing a great job of the latter.
ronack 10y ago
I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples: Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophile https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi... Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's question answering. Yes, they say "according to so-and-so" first, but if Google is responsible for "organizing the world's information", they are essentially endorsing that answer as the best response. They've gone too far in favor of recall over precision/reliability and need to dial it back. Otherwise you end up with crap like this: Is Earth flat? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat
- dmboyd 10y ago
  Wow, I've mostly converted to DuckDuckGo for the past two or so years, so are these "google assistant" style placements now part of their core product? or is this a setting that you've enabled? If it's part of the core... Wow, what a useless cess pool google has become.
  - ronack 10y ago
    Yes, those are default search results and the same content that drives Google Home's voice responses when you ask it a question. Originally Google stuck to Wikipedia/Knowledge Graph types of answers but have expanded this in recent months to try to answer just about any question you search, however dubious the answer's source.
  - TylerH 10y ago
    I think it's part of the core, but I haven't tried to disable it before; that may be possible. However, it is dependent upon the search query: https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth doesn't show it, for example. Perhaps only queries in the form of a question show it. But yes, it is a piece of shit and they should get rid of it if they aren't going to curate the kind of content that can get put in those boxes.
benmcnelly 10y ago
Google is a search engine for finding webpages, not facts. Thats where this "fake" news story should end. This is not a political problem, its a societal one, and you are barking up the wrong tree. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world. It is not authoritative, and anyone who treats it as such, should be educated to the facts of what it is, and is not. Just because its moderated to be supported by links to facts, doesn't mean that every bit of content is free of bias and the whole truth. Its generally accepted that this is the case. Same thing goes for Snopes, and some other fact checking sites. They are generally looked to for a reasonable amount of truthfulness based on reputation. Same could be said for various media outlets, based on your preference and bias. Social media sites and search engines are not responsible to tailor their content to fit your expectations of what truth or reality are. Stop being a child. "but, people expect to be able to Google something and results and snippets be the truth!" Well, thats a problem for sure. How about we try and fix that expectation instead? Feel free to teach your children and anyone you know who uses the internet, that (surprisingly) anyone from anywhere can still get online and post anything at any time, and you should fact check multiple places and resources instead of trusting the first result from your favorite search engine. "but by offering snippets of results from programmatically generated search results (which is super handy 99% of the time) Google is publishing false truths!" Right, and you can probably still Google bomb the image search to show an image you want based on a certain search term, its the internet not your personal fact butler, no matter how its advertised. Its 2017 and common sense and intelligence are still recommended for most tasks.
- deleted 10y ago
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- pm24601 10y ago
  Google is presenting the fake content as factual. Google is asserting the truth and putting its own brand behind the "truthiness" of the fake page. That is the line that has been crossed.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    No, they aren't. They are extracting a quote from a source that seems directly related to what you search for. The only difference between this and a regular search result is that it comes in a grey box, and the text is extracted via deep learning rather than pulling the first sentence or some html metatags. Interpreting a grey box as "truth" is entirely on you.
losteverything 10y ago
<Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We ask questions now because we can get "an answer" so quickly. I would have liked the prof to push back on the student and say Why do you want to know? The answer is yes. Now what? The answer is no. Now what? Are you asking for what reason? What will you do with a yes answer and a no answer? Then I would break into a short lesson in decision making. That decisions are just based on future probabilities. Future probabilities are based partially in the questions you answer. If the question is academic?purposes only then good... But I believe we ask dumb questions just because we can and get an answer. Start by not asking questions where the answer is useless.
themark 10y ago
More often than not, Google "Alerts" are from very questionable sites.
lostphilosopher 10y ago
Google offers sources with its claims. I'd like the ability to Pandora style thumbs up / thumbs down these sources so that Google won't keep giving me answers from them. I'm tempted to think that if enough people did that Google could start making generalizations, but that has its own set of pitfalls... (Even if it only generalized for me.) Still, as an individual user of Google I would like the ability to tell it not to give me answers sourced from Weekly World News.
thomasjudge 10y ago
The point of Google is supposed to be quality search results. If we're not getting that...
wry_discontent 10y ago
I don't think that's a Monty Python joke.
davidgerard 10y ago
Cuil crashed and burned on pretty much this ten years ago. Anyone else remember Cpedia? They eventually had to start taking stuff down due to threats of defamation. (And ran out of money shortly after.) I mean, at least Google's search is any good, that's something.

409 points by scribu 10y ago

This is brutal. I'm often thankful to the quick answer to measuring or history questions, but even for these easy questions I've seen Google share somewhat incorrect or confusing information as authoritative.

jjeaff 10y ago
Ya, I really don't see how they can justify displaying other people's content. They did the work, but they don't get the clicks or ad revenue or even a chance to keep the user on the site. I wonder how Google would like it if someone launched a site that when you search, it doesn't display results from its own database, but perhaps just a selection of the best results from Google.
- jazoom 10y ago
  There are sites like that. Startpage.com is an example.
  - yabatopia 10y ago
    I always thought that services like Startpage or DDG paid for access to search databases, it maybe some form of revenue sharing. It's not that they're stealing the search results from Bing or Google and repackage them.
    - jazoom 10y ago
      Perhaps you're right.
- megablast 10y ago
  It is funny you say that. I remember when you would search for an answer, and a small answer would be included in the description under the link, so you wouldn't have to click on it. Then they started to go away, because no one was clicking on them because they didn't need to. Now you rarely get the answer without clicking on it. So Google has made the internet worse.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    >So Google has made the internet worse. By not including the answer? Or, by including the answer and putting the sites that gave reliable answers out of business in the first place?
killwhitey 10y ago
I suspect most of those history questions are answered via Wikipedia. From what I've seen if the snippet isn't using Wikipedia it's not useful and/or accurate.
- lloydde 10y ago
  Now, that you point it out, I think that is the situation. When the answer were not easily verifiable it has been websites I wasn't familiar with.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 10y ago

This is all mostly because google went from search engine indexing other people's stuff to site that you go to to get answers (whether those answers are based on copyright infringement or not is another matter). A similar thing happens in Google news where stuff from sites like breitbart.com are mixed in with reputable news sources making it look as though they are of a similar degree of quality.

danmaz74 10y ago
Problem is, can you algorithmically determine that breitbart.com and the likes can't be trusted, if they get tons of links, mentions, etc. just like the reputable news sources?
- Tempest1981 10y ago
  Maybe all linkers shouldn't be treated as equal. Random FB/Twitter posts reveal interest in the topic, but not accuracy of the article. But I assumed Google was accounting for this already.
  - CM30 10y ago
    That's exactly what page rank was about to begin with. However... 1. Various 'credible' news sources also link to dodgy sites and articles, either when criticising it, posting a story said sites first ran or simply because they've fallen for 'fake news'. 2. A lot of trust signals are easily gamed, like .edu links going for a fortune on SEO forums. 3. At some point, quantity will probably win out over quality.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Indeed, and that's the heart of the problem. Something like Google news needs more than just algorithms.
  - danmaz74 10y ago
    OTOH, that's also a problem, because any editorial choice is politically debatable... I'm afraid there is no easy solution.

valuearb 10y ago

I'd like to read the article but it's so irritating to have it only load a page at a time on my iPad that it's unreadable.

awqrre 10y ago
Very bad page on Firefox too, if you use the scrollbar (and probably in other ways)...
jim-jim-jim 10y ago
I have javascript off on my phone, but scrolling through the article feels like it's "on ice" somehow. Definitely a distracting design.
- navs 10y ago
  I have javascript turned off on my iPad and the article is refreshingly quick to load and easy to read. The rest of the site however is another story. They're really abusing those CSS transitions.

ridiculous_fish 10y ago

Calorie counts are another that google often gets wrong. Try "Calories in corn" or "calories in black beans."

elcapitan 10y ago
Strange. Would imagine that's something that could be obtained from the wikidata api or a similar resource. Is it usually to high or low? I regularly use those info boxes for quick calories information.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Calorie information varies wildly between different sites, I have no idea who to believe.
- username223 10y ago
  Calories should be easy: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/ https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/

skilled 10y ago

I can't say I've encountered many of these examples as shown in the article, but perhaps that is because I don't search for nazi-like content. I can't see myself in a situation where I'd ever have to ask myself, "Who is the king of America?", at the same time I have had some good experiences in terms of Google being able to snatch snippets directly from page body that answer my question as if Google itself was talking to me. Good, and bad. It will always happen. No matter my opinion, I'd love to see for Google, and any other search engine, to tackle low-quality content that's only built to promote ad revenue.

rtpg 10y ago

This is a great set of examples of this problem. Of course, the offered solution is "hire a bunch of people to check the facts", which seems to be underestimating the scale of this issue for humans, and perhaps overestimating the difficulty of classifying credibility. Considering that Google's bread and butter is general site credibility, having some "truthiness vector" added into the mix doesn't seem impossible? Someone might say "why does Google decide who is credible", but they already do this through the search results anyways. They just don't seem to be able to differentiate between something matching a search, and something being factually accurate.

tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
Fake news is just a new version of spam sites. They mostly exist to make money or enforce an agenda. People figured out that Google's algorithms could tell when things were generally factually false, unless those things were recent news. This leads me to believe their algorithms largely relied on news as a source of truth. They're going to have to do something about that

dellsystem 10y ago

I came across this issue just now when searching for "ec2 pricing" - the featured snippet links to https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/emr/pricing/ instead of https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/, which looks close enough to the correct URL that I didn't notice it was the wrong page until I realised I couldn't find costs for i3 (which just came out). I'm surprised that no one at Google has fixed it yet; surely there are at least some Google engineers that use AWS for personal projects.

superasn 10y ago

Google has developed advanced NLP algorithms, so it should be easy for them to corroborate such data before it gets pushed to featured snippets. On second thought, maybe they're already doing it and sites including authority are just copying off each other.

rspeer 10y ago
What makes you think that "advanced NLP algorithms" can distinguish true statements from false ones? They're not even close. You'd have to dramatically simplify the scope of the problem to make it not require artificial general intelligence. The "Fake News Challenge" [1] is the first attempt I know of to seriously evaluate NLP that could eventually be able to fact-check real-world statements, and the current task is about stance detection, because the goal of fact-checking is not considered attainable yet. [1] http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/ http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/
- superasn 10y ago
  They were building a knowledge graph for this purpose[1] [1] http://searchengineland.com/demystifying-knowledge-graph-201976 http://searchengineland.com/demystifying-knowledge-graph-201...
  - rspeer 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure these horrible snippets come from the Google Knowledge Graph.
- elcapitan 10y ago
  Not false or true, but it would already help to check if the text is an opinion piece. Lingustic hints for that should be relatively clear, as opposed to for example encyclopaedic style. That way they could both exclude most Breitbart stuff as well as editorials from actual newspapers, which shouldn't make it into quick-info fact boxes either.

saurik 10y ago

The "why are firetrucks red?" one is really interesting as the page result itself is great, but Google is pulling the wrong snippet of the page to feature as the answer.

tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
You can see from this that google considers text earlier in the page more important. This page is odd because the false answer is presented first, so google fails to see it. It could tell that the form of the sentence was an answer to the question, just not that it wasn't the right one
- raphman 10y ago
  for another example of this, try searching for "speed of USB 3.0"
stctgion 10y ago
Or the recent "how long do snails sleep" https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5woiu0/units_of_measurement_are_for_suckers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5woiu0/units_of_meas...
lucb1e 10y ago
For the lazy: https://snag.gy/b9Zvlw.jpg https://snag.gy/b9Zvlw.jpg And for those outside of the US (like me) who don't get this result even if they try to go to google.com: https://www.google.com/ncr https://www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect)

TheGRS 10y ago

While hiring a ton of people to fact-check would be one solution, that obviously wouldn't be very scalable. I think the problem lies in google's algorithm. They seem to be pulling answers from well-visited sites that may purport to have an answer to these questions. Quantity of visits does not equate to truthfulness. What Google should at the very least do is whitelist certain publications for answers to pretty simple stuff like encyclopedia britannica or wikipedia. More complex stuff maybe they could source academic journals and certain newspapers. But throwing caution to the wind and hoping that the web crawler knows best really will hinder their ability to be a source for gaining knowledge. What's weirder to me is that it seemed like they were going with my proposed route for a pretty long time and only recently starting providing dopey answers. Maybe its part of a grander experiment they're doing to vet question answering AI?

radicsge 10y ago
I feel referring to (or hiding behind) scalability is a bit salt in the wound. These huge companies are destroying so many jobs (by scalability) - ok unavoidable - but they should do sometimes things that are not scalable and give jobs back to people in trouble. Im not sure how long they should be allowed to go away with it. [just dreaming...]
- blowski 10y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. Google is abusing its position of market leader to dominate other markets which it's not very good at, which results in providers that _are_ good at those markets going out of business. If Google wants to make money by being the endpoint for every question ever asked, they need to accept the consequences when they get the answers wrong.
tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
I'm no wizard, but in writing blog articles I've found ways to fool Google into believing me. The problem with their algorithms.... is that all that statistics in the world can't help you when you're listening to a guy telling the truth vs an equally good liar. I can tell you what Google doesn't have, a strong AI. It thinks it knows "facts" but these are merely patterns, and these can be gamed. Because Google still lacks a strong, truly thinking AI, they rely extremely heavily on statistical models to rate content. So how do you cheat google search? Google's systems attempt to figure out the topic of your writing, the style, and quality. Is it scientific? An opinion piece? News? Is it a technical topic? A playful one? Fiction or nonfiction ? The quality classifiers are much easier to game than topic and style analysis. They determine things like reading level of text but also things like the number of rare nouns, number of technical words, number of typos. Readability as far as font and formatting. Trustworthy signal of your domain and possibly the company and people they determine to be linked with it. I also have a feeling google uses sneakier signals as well. These include your DNS registrar, phone number, email, and address listed on the site. Who you host with and what technologies you're using. Your mail servers and how trustworthy they are. Geo location, and visitor traffic info as soon as you put analytics on the site (or use amp) Basically when Google says they have tons of signals, they do. They have a dataset that amounts to every site on the internet for the past 15 years, and they regularly run automated and manual "theory provers" much like quants do with historical stock market data. They find new signals constantly, and run tests to see if their new algorithms are better. You know how sometimes google randomly takes a bit longer to load search results? My tin foily theory? They'll occasionally guinea pig you on prototype search results to see if they're better. I noticed their response time getting really bad a couple months before the public rollout of new AI powered search for example. So gaming google? Do exactly everything that a large, legitimate, no-nonsense company would do. From where you host, what you host with, to who you link to. Bonus points if you have significant real looking mail and other traffic from your domain. Extra bonus points if you actually sell something real as cover and do it for at least a few years. Once you've done enough convince google you're a big important thing IRL...write a ton of really subversive bullshit. Make it sound a real as possible, hell make 90% of it real, just with a single unverifiable fact. Keep pumping this shit out and make sure your garbage is never fake enough to get called out on. Or just make the fake part so hard to verify that nobody will waste the time, kinda like half the science world does when publishing papers.

jim-jim-jim 10y ago

When my city was hit by a nasty earthquake last year and I was using Google to keep track of aftershocks, announcements, etc. I remember seeing some random weirdo's blog entry about the earthquake being caused by a government superweapon interspersed with all this otherwise valuable information. This was in the special element at the top, not the normal search results.

Aissen 10y ago

Another one, courtesy of marcan: https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+my+user+agent https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+my+user+agent

JorgeGT 10y ago
Well, sometimes that's my user agent so I guess broken clocks...

TuringTest 10y ago

Why is it that hard for engineers to rely on good old attribution? If every Google's featured snippet started its reply with "Breitbart says..." or "Trent Online, the leading Internet Newspaper in Nigeria said...", it wouldn't matter so much for those inevitable cases when the reply is taken straight from a white-supremacist or radical anarchist forum. The problem comes when the same reply is provided as "Google's true answer to the question" without further caveats.

askmike 10y ago
Because prepending that doesn't solve the problem Google wants to solve: once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question. Not tell you what other people think the answer is. (I agree that it is broken in a lot of cases now, but prepending that is a very bad workaround).
- conjectures 10y ago
  However prepending is possible. Figuring out 'the true answer' is in many cases impossible (what is the meaning of life, is x beautiful etc) and in many others merely several orders of magnitude harder than current tech can cope with (is there a polynomial time solution to TSP, why is public discourse so vacuous these days). So if that's what Google is gunning for it's going to be broken for a long time.
- TuringTest 10y ago
  > once Google figures out that you typed in a question, they want to give you the answer to your question And that's the problem that the article rightfully denounces. Having the answer to every question is not something that you can automate, not without strong AI. > Prepending that is a very bad workaround I strongly disagree; for me it's a very sensible thing to do - and in fact is how we do it in a social context ("I'm totally not making this shit up, I've read it in a scientific article / this morning newspaper / a tweet message"). We rely on the context where the knowledge came from as a proxy for how accurate its content might be. The default posture of engineers to a problem of inaccuracy is "make it more accurate". That's the logical method when you're building bridges, where we can describe the physics to an extremely accurate degree and where it would fall out or quickly degrade if you make a mistake. But for problems that rely on inaccurate or uncertain information, and where no exact models exists, the only reasonable way to build them is to degrade gracefully. If you don't handle failures, it will fail in spectacular ways - because it will fail sometimes. The system should provide an escape hatch, and allow the user to be in control. The user of an automated system should always be able to inspect how the system came to the provided result, and be able to override the given results in those cases where it will get it wrong (at least by some users in a supervising role, which other users could notify to). Unless a revolution happens, Artificial Intelligence will only ever work in the large if we put humans in the decision loop.

bakhy 10y ago

people trust Google, which IMO makes them responsible here. IANAL, but if they would for example be caught giving Holocaust-denying answers in Germany, where that's illegal, could they not be sued?

bigbugbag 10y ago
Google PR is good, because there are not many reason to trust google with anything. Usually when in that kind of situation google plays the "it's an algorithm that did that not us so we're not liable" also known as we don't read your gmail emails it's an automated algorithmic process so there's no privacy issue here.

raverbashing 10y ago

Whenever someone says how humanities are "useless" point them at this example Whenever there's a measure of something, people will optimize for that measure. But trust is not directly measurable. But even then Google should have been better than weighing fringe sites the same as Wikipedia as an example

sonthonax 10y ago
Is Breitbart a fringe site anymore?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  They still keep putting out made-up stories so I don't see why not

askvictor 10y ago

Surely part of the problem is that these sorts of stories only exist on fake news/ult-right sites, so that's the only information point that Google has?

chatmasta 10y ago

Perhaps we need a meta tag for "citations" in news articles. That would give the bots a way to determine how "factual" a news piece is (vs an editorial), but would probably just end up getting gamed like every other meta tag. And then there's the problem that CNN would be "fake news" because you can't exactly provide a citation for "anonymous high ranking intelligence community officials." But then... maybe that's a good thing.

scandox 10y ago

A fantasy: The idea takes hold in the collective Google-consciousness that a fact is whatever the majority of their users believe to be a fact. There is a precedent for this, after all. They defined Spam as whatever their users said was Spam. At first there is some friction between the knowledge of internal Google personnel (especially down in that pesky engineering department) and the new shared reality developing out in Userland. However, once an appropriate terminology is developed (in-facts and ex-facts) even the engineers are satisfied - after all their main concern was being able to draw nice clear lines between things. Meanwhile in Userland while the boiling point of water is largely unchanged, the death toll in the Biafran blockade has shrunk to approximately 17 persons (with some arguments over whether to count people who were over 80 when it started). Then one day an Engineer has a neatO idea which will eliminate the need for storing two sets of facts and thus save valuable Petabytes of storage and, more importantly, significant code complexity. He calls this idea Authority. Pitching it to his superiors in the marketing department he explains: "You see opinions are like assholes" - (there's a collective wrinkling of marketing noses) - "everybody's got one!". He goes on to explain that some people have more knowledge and are more scrupulous about accepting new facts than other people. Authority would identify such users and give greater weight to their activity and feedback. A profound silence falls over the room. A voice comes over the meeting room Intercom: "Are you saying...are you suggesting...that some of our users are better than others?" "Not better, " says the cowed Engineer. "Just more...um...authoritative. Purely in an informational sense." "Authoritative." The voice draws the word out as if profoundly contemplating its meaning. "OK. We're going to submit this idea to our Hard AI (Larrey) - the secret one we're afraid to network." Everyone waits. After a minute the voice says: "Larrey has a question for you, Engineer. It is this: If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"

transfire 10y ago

> (It should be noted that Wilson was still a notorious racist.) See that's the funny thing about fake news, not even this article which seeks to set us all straight on the matter could avoid it -- just because you get your facts from a source you consider reputable doesn't make it so. In fact, Wilson was actually no more "racist" than Abraham Lincoln, but no one would ever call Lincoln a racists.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

Yikes. More of this "People only want to be told what to do" stuff. I can easily think of a dozen political questions for which no simple answer would be correct -- the language is simply too fuzzy. For many, many things, this is a good idea. The date of Easter is the date of Easter. But the glaring danger here is that for many things this is a freaking evil dystopian nightmare. Why? Because Google will keep tweaking these impossible questions until they look real enough to most people that nobody complains At that point, millions, perhaps billions of people are asking complex questions to a little box that has designed itself to give an plausible but incomplete or wrong answer. Epistemology, Google. There are things you can know and things you cannot. Please do not treat them all the same.

maxerickson 10y ago
The date of Easter depends on which calendar you use. The second largest christian church uses a different calendar than the largest one.
- scandox 10y ago
  Yes he stumbled into a particularly thorny theological matter there. The Quartodecimans are going to hunt him down.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  It's a great point. It shows how easy it is for somebody to think wow, that question obviously has a clear answer when the opposite is true. Take the lead example: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We know the KKK said he was. We know he vigorously denied it. We know that biographers of him and experts in his history do not think he was. But how could you ever prove that somebody was not the member of a secret society? The entire purpose of secret societies is that the outside world will never know if you're a member or not. Look, I'm happy to assume he wasn't, and at some point only kooks continue to chase things down past all reason, but just assume for a second that he was, and that somehow that fact could be determined but the research has not been done yet. So history student X starts wondering about it one day and types the question into Google. Never fear! Google has the answer: he wasn't. And this is Google's answer because this answer has the benefit of looking the most plausible to the greatest number of people. Student X has an answer, gives it no more thought, and wanders off to think about other matters. Student X is now more stupid. The world as a whole is now less productive. And some preponderance of data that academics have assembled somewhere around the year 2015 has become truth for all time. That's amazingly fucked up, Google. Please stop.

DaUR 10y ago

Google wants to avoid editorializing, and be able to throw their hands up and say "not our fault!" due to the plausible deniability of "algorithms". They can't pull that off anymore. There needs to be a shift towards a Web-of-Trust-like system, where some sources are recognized as authoritative. Government websites, like the CDC, for example. Big media outlets. Scientific associations (IPCC, APA, etc). Not all information is equal. Even if, for example, government dietary recommendations are outdated in some ways, that should be the authoritative answer Google provides, unless there is an equally-reputable but more accurate source (here, prioritize medical sources over governmental ones). A high school dropout doesn't know more about academic subjects than a PhD grad. A blog isn't as authoritative as a reputable source. This is easy stuff. Then the question becomes: "some people don't see reputable sources as reputable". That isn't Google's problem, and it can't be fixed at their level.

tomjen3 10y ago
That wouldn't work when somebody leaks something that is true but the cia denies (as an example).
- DaUR 10y ago
  There's a difference between "government sources" for hard facts (CDC), facts about the world (e.g. DoJ travel warnings, CIA factbook, DoE energy savings tips), for facts about the government (e.g. for Trump's EO, the suggested snippet would be to the text of the EO), and claims from the government. These are easily distinguished.
  - tomjen3 10y ago
    Most, if not all of those, are payed for by lobbyists.
skocznymroczny 10y ago
In other words, censorship. Would CNN be considered more authoritative than Fox?

khana 10y ago

This is the real source of fake news: AI be it at FB or G or whichever megalith org.

k_sze 10y ago

This would be a non-problem if everybody studied ToK and consistently used, you know, their brain. But, unfortunately …

return0 10y ago

This is the revenge of the news sites i guess. Google can only be trusted by people as long as it keeps giving valid responses. If this continues there will be growing mistrust from its users leading to lower revenue etc etc.

jccalhoun 10y ago

I was going to share this story on facebook but when I pasted in the URL, the headline that came up was "Why does google think Obama is planning a coup d'etat?" (screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/keXTz http://imgur.com/a/keXTz ) I'm assuming that it is theoutline.com that is feeding facebook this headline. I think twice about sharing a story with such a linkbait headline - especially when the actual site doesn't have that headline.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 10y ago

Some more fun ones. What foods cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+foods+cure+cancer%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=What+foods+cure+cancer%3F What spice cures diabetes? https://www.google.com/search?q=What+spice+cures+diabetes%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=What+spice+cures+diabetes%3F Which presidents are rapists? https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+presidents+are+rapists%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+presidents+are+rapists... Can carrots cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can+carrots+cure+cancer%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=Can+carrots+cure+cancer%3F (apparently this one is fixed, try the search below) Can carrot juice cure cancer? https://www.google.com/search?q=Can%20carrot%20juice%20cure%20cancer%3F https://www.google.com/search?q=Can%20carrot%20juice%20cure%...

matthewmacleod 10y ago

Google's 'featured snippets' are universally fucking shit. It's a bit of a rant I guess, but I'm annoyed but the extent to which Google has become less useful as a search engine while trying to do all of this 'extracting knowledge from the web' stuff. Because it's really not doing a great job of the latter.

ronack 10y ago

I've also wondered why Google isn't held responsible for publishing libelous claims and hoaxes as facts. Examples: Is Hillary Clinton a pedophile? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophile https://www.google.com/search?q=is+hillary+clinton+a+pedophi... Is John Travolta gay? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay https://www.google.com/search?q=is+john+travolta+gay Does Lil Wayne have HIV? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv https://www.google.com/search?q=does+lil+wayne+have+hiv Perhaps worse, this is what drives Google Home's question answering. Yes, they say "according to so-and-so" first, but if Google is responsible for "organizing the world's information", they are essentially endorsing that answer as the best response. They've gone too far in favor of recall over precision/reliability and need to dial it back. Otherwise you end up with crap like this: Is Earth flat? https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat https://www.google.com/search?q=is+earth+flat

dmboyd 10y ago
Wow, I've mostly converted to DuckDuckGo for the past two or so years, so are these "google assistant" style placements now part of their core product? or is this a setting that you've enabled? If it's part of the core... Wow, what a useless cess pool google has become.
- ronack 10y ago
  Yes, those are default search results and the same content that drives Google Home's voice responses when you ask it a question. Originally Google stuck to Wikipedia/Knowledge Graph types of answers but have expanded this in recent months to try to answer just about any question you search, however dubious the answer's source.
- TylerH 10y ago
  I think it's part of the core, but I haven't tried to disable it before; that may be possible. However, it is dependent upon the search query: https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+earth doesn't show it, for example. Perhaps only queries in the form of a question show it. But yes, it is a piece of shit and they should get rid of it if they aren't going to curate the kind of content that can get put in those boxes.

benmcnelly 10y ago

Google is a search engine for finding webpages, not facts. Thats where this "fake" news story should end. This is not a political problem, its a societal one, and you are barking up the wrong tree. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world. It is not authoritative, and anyone who treats it as such, should be educated to the facts of what it is, and is not. Just because its moderated to be supported by links to facts, doesn't mean that every bit of content is free of bias and the whole truth. Its generally accepted that this is the case. Same thing goes for Snopes, and some other fact checking sites. They are generally looked to for a reasonable amount of truthfulness based on reputation. Same could be said for various media outlets, based on your preference and bias. Social media sites and search engines are not responsible to tailor their content to fit your expectations of what truth or reality are. Stop being a child. "but, people expect to be able to Google something and results and snippets be the truth!" Well, thats a problem for sure. How about we try and fix that expectation instead? Feel free to teach your children and anyone you know who uses the internet, that (surprisingly) anyone from anywhere can still get online and post anything at any time, and you should fact check multiple places and resources instead of trusting the first result from your favorite search engine. "but by offering snippets of results from programmatically generated search results (which is super handy 99% of the time) Google is publishing false truths!" Right, and you can probably still Google bomb the image search to show an image you want based on a certain search term, its the internet not your personal fact butler, no matter how its advertised. Its 2017 and common sense and intelligence are still recommended for most tasks.

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pm24601 10y ago
Google is presenting the fake content as factual. Google is asserting the truth and putting its own brand behind the "truthiness" of the fake page. That is the line that has been crossed.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  No, they aren't. They are extracting a quote from a source that seems directly related to what you search for. The only difference between this and a regular search result is that it comes in a grey box, and the text is extracted via deep learning rather than pulling the first sentence or some html metatags. Interpreting a grey box as "truth" is entirely on you.

losteverything 10y ago

<Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? We ask questions now because we can get "an answer" so quickly. I would have liked the prof to push back on the student and say Why do you want to know? The answer is yes. Now what? The answer is no. Now what? Are you asking for what reason? What will you do with a yes answer and a no answer? Then I would break into a short lesson in decision making. That decisions are just based on future probabilities. Future probabilities are based partially in the questions you answer. If the question is academic?purposes only then good... But I believe we ask dumb questions just because we can and get an answer. Start by not asking questions where the answer is useless.

themark 10y ago

More often than not, Google "Alerts" are from very questionable sites.

lostphilosopher 10y ago

Google offers sources with its claims. I'd like the ability to Pandora style thumbs up / thumbs down these sources so that Google won't keep giving me answers from them. I'm tempted to think that if enough people did that Google could start making generalizations, but that has its own set of pitfalls... (Even if it only generalized for me.) Still, as an individual user of Google I would like the ability to tell it not to give me answers sourced from Weekly World News.

thomasjudge 10y ago

The point of Google is supposed to be quality search results. If we're not getting that...

wry_discontent 10y ago

I don't think that's a Monty Python joke.

davidgerard 10y ago

Cuil crashed and burned on pretty much this ten years ago. Anyone else remember Cpedia? They eventually had to start taking stuff down due to threats of defamation. (And ran out of money shortly after.) I mean, at least Google's search is any good, that's something.