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To put this into perspective, these algorithms, especially for autocomplete, have always been fiddled with by humans. Why? Because algorithms often produce terr
by greglindahl 8y ago
To put this into perspective, these algorithms, especially for autocomplete, have always been fiddled with by humans. Why? Because algorithms often produce terrible results, and few engineers want to stand behind an algorithm that coughs up bestiality results for vanilla queries about animals.
- wolco 8y agoTerrible? The autocomplete results were too honest. Sexual terms are more popular and that bestiality result has been proven to be the more popular site.
- batiudrami 8y agoPopular is not what you want in a search engine. Precise interpretation of your query and retrieving relevant results is. Sometimes that's the most popular; sometimes it is an obscure journal article discussing exactly what you were after. In neither case should a vanilla animal query return bestiality. I'd argue that an algorithm which is only able to do a search for 'most common query starting with" ignoring all context is a terrible algorithm.
- wolco 8y agoWhy would an obscure link come up first for a simple word? Perhaps you are logged in and it relates to your profile but for generic searches it shouldn't but if it did the link would quickly lose the obscure label anyhow. Maybe the vanilla term isn't so vanilla if those terms are being used that way on the most popular sites.