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At least searching "muslims are" in Bing gives you honest autocompletes that reflect what people actually search for. Google, on the other hand, evidently censo

At least searching "muslims are" in Bing gives you honest autocompletes that reflect what people actually search for. Google, on the other hand, evidently censors content it deems to be offensive. If you search "muslims are" in Google, there are no autocomplete results at all. I doubt Google does not have enough data on "muslims are *" searches I have safe search off, meaning I don't want to be patronized when I am searching things. I would much rather know what people search for than have Google treat me like I'm their child with their hands covering my eyes during the dirty scenes.

jakobegger 8y ago
Some things should not be autocompleted. I can't think of a reason why a search engine should suggest a completion if you start typing something generic like "xyz are ...".
- anonytrary 8y ago
  Searching "muslims are vegetarian" could be seen as another way to search "are muslims vegetarian". A good search engine lets you search query soup like this. They don't necessarily return the same results, but people are pretty bad at querying.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    Yeah, there's nothing wrong with a query like that, and I think autocomplete is fine once you typed "muslims are vege...". But I don't see why you'd autocomplete a sentence that could go anywhere. Just because many people type that isn't a good reason.
    - jstanley 8y ago
      Why isn't that a good reason? It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.
      - jakobegger 8y ago
        Because it's a stupid thing to do. It makes sense to complete a query once it is obvious what the user wants to write. That's helpful, you saved me from typing a few characters. But if you suggest completions for queries at a point where it isn't yet obvious what the user wants, you are no longer just helpful. You are steering people in a certain direction, whether that's your intent or not. You are effectively telling people, hey, try this query, it's popular, even if the user had no intent of typing that query.
        anonytrary 8y ago
        Okay, I see your point now. Content discovery can be decomposed into "push" and "pull". In the 90s, searching was typically associated with pull. Over time, engines started providing a push component (e.g. autocomplete). It sounds like you want search engines to be mostly pull with less push. You want the push to be more local to what you specifically choose to pull, which means greatly reducing the current scope of the push component. I guess that's fine, but a lot of people really like the push component, especially if they don't quite know what they're looking for. I think the whole of the two methods is more valuable than the sum of the parts.
      - stouset 8y ago
        Can we please stop wildly exaggerating every attempt to remove graffiti and trolling from the Internet as equivalent to invoking the “thought police”? Nobody is sending the authorities after you for entering overtly-racist searches into Google. Keep in mind that you are currently enjoying the benefits of discussing this topic on a highly-moderated discussion forum. How relevant do you think Hacker News would be if such moderation was ended entirely? Have you learned literally nothing from the utter disaster that was Tay[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
- gear54rus 8y ago
  except it does suggest if you type 'people are...' some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see, there's no other explanation :)
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see Yes, that's what a suggestion algorithm is. There is no pure Platonic ideal neutral objective suggestion algorithm. Every suggestion algorithm is going to have biases based on both its training data and the goals (explicit or otherwise) of its creators. You've gotten as far as, apparently, noticing that tweaking the algorithm after the public has seen it constitutes a choice on the part of the designers about what they do and don't want to show you. Now take the final logical step, and observe that they already made choices about what they do and don't want to show you in the initial design, before the algorithm ever went public. If you have a problem with the former, I don't see how you can be logically consistent while not having a problem with the latter.
    - gear54rus 8y ago
      when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for, not "what people search for, except...", this talk about suggestion algos has nothing to do with the issue I think
      - dorchadas 8y ago
        When I enter something, I want to see what's relevant to me, not what other people searched for. As such, it makes sense to not suggest anything when I type in 'Muslims are', as Google doesn't know what I want to see yet; it could decide that once I started typing in more strings on the next word. It'd make more sense to me if, instead of completing search queries, it just completed individual words in the queries.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for That's never been the point, though it's sometimes been an implementation method because it's easy: the point is to provide a useful guess of what you might be searching for. Some search engines do provide tools for exploring patterns of other people's searches, but recommendation systems have never been that except as a matter of leaky implementation details.
charlesism 8y ago
> I don't want to be patronized when I am searching things. It's more like they're removing the penis graffiti. Most of the time, I search to find some content. You are probably the same. It's a search engine. Considerations aside from whether a search suggestion helps one locate desired content are beside the point. What's more, in some of the author's cases, the content would be illegal. If you are serious about researching search trends, then you could use tools, or lobby for more tools, like https://trends.google.com https://trends.google.com
boffinism 8y ago
The point of autocompletes is to make it easier for you to search by prompting you to choose a readymade option that might be relevant. They happen to use what other people search for, but that's an implementation detail. It's not that Bing is showing you the uncensored truth about what people search for, it's that it's prompting you to search for really bad things.
Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
I have just tried "muslims are" on bing.com right now and I get a single autocomplete result: "muslims are treated fairly". And "black people are" yields nothing at all. Unless it's a regional thing, it seems that someone at Bing has read this news and now they are censoring exactly like Google. If I try those same searches in Spanish, I do get some racist suggestions though. Probably not for long...
threatofrain 8y ago
When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants? And if individuals want to understand Google Search Trends, as noted already, it's there but I don't think many people are going there, because it's not what they want.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  > When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants? That's exactly what I want, at least. It'd make much more sense for them to just work on autocompleting individual words instead of queries. That way it's useful to the person who's searching and it doesn't matter what everyone else searched.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    Does that include things like React, Rust, or Ruby?

jakobegger 8y ago

Some things should not be autocompleted. I can't think of a reason why a search engine should suggest a completion if you start typing something generic like "xyz are ...".

anonytrary 8y ago
Searching "muslims are vegetarian" could be seen as another way to search "are muslims vegetarian". A good search engine lets you search query soup like this. They don't necessarily return the same results, but people are pretty bad at querying.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Yeah, there's nothing wrong with a query like that, and I think autocomplete is fine once you typed "muslims are vege...". But I don't see why you'd autocomplete a sentence that could go anywhere. Just because many people type that isn't a good reason.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    Why isn't that a good reason? It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.
    - jakobegger 8y ago
      Because it's a stupid thing to do. It makes sense to complete a query once it is obvious what the user wants to write. That's helpful, you saved me from typing a few characters. But if you suggest completions for queries at a point where it isn't yet obvious what the user wants, you are no longer just helpful. You are steering people in a certain direction, whether that's your intent or not. You are effectively telling people, hey, try this query, it's popular, even if the user had no intent of typing that query.
      - anonytrary 8y ago
        Okay, I see your point now. Content discovery can be decomposed into "push" and "pull". In the 90s, searching was typically associated with pull. Over time, engines started providing a push component (e.g. autocomplete). It sounds like you want search engines to be mostly pull with less push. You want the push to be more local to what you specifically choose to pull, which means greatly reducing the current scope of the push component. I guess that's fine, but a lot of people really like the push component, especially if they don't quite know what they're looking for. I think the whole of the two methods is more valuable than the sum of the parts.
    - stouset 8y ago
      Can we please stop wildly exaggerating every attempt to remove graffiti and trolling from the Internet as equivalent to invoking the “thought police”? Nobody is sending the authorities after you for entering overtly-racist searches into Google. Keep in mind that you are currently enjoying the benefits of discussing this topic on a highly-moderated discussion forum. How relevant do you think Hacker News would be if such moderation was ended entirely? Have you learned literally nothing from the utter disaster that was Tay[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
gear54rus 8y ago
except it does suggest if you type 'people are...' some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see, there's no other explanation :)
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  some fucker somewhere again decided what you should or shouldn't see Yes, that's what a suggestion algorithm is. There is no pure Platonic ideal neutral objective suggestion algorithm. Every suggestion algorithm is going to have biases based on both its training data and the goals (explicit or otherwise) of its creators. You've gotten as far as, apparently, noticing that tweaking the algorithm after the public has seen it constitutes a choice on the part of the designers about what they do and don't want to show you. Now take the final logical step, and observe that they already made choices about what they do and don't want to show you in the initial design, before the algorithm ever went public. If you have a problem with the former, I don't see how you can be logically consistent while not having a problem with the latter.
  - gear54rus 8y ago
    when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for, not "what people search for, except...", this talk about suggestion algos has nothing to do with the issue I think
    - dorchadas 8y ago
      When I enter something, I want to see what's relevant to me, not what other people searched for. As such, it makes sense to not suggest anything when I type in 'Muslims are', as Google doesn't know what I want to see yet; it could decide that once I started typing in more strings on the next word. It'd make more sense to me if, instead of completing search queries, it just completed individual words in the queries.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > when I enter something, I expect to see what other people search for That's never been the point, though it's sometimes been an implementation method because it's easy: the point is to provide a useful guess of what you might be searching for. Some search engines do provide tools for exploring patterns of other people's searches, but recommendation systems have never been that except as a matter of leaky implementation details.

charlesism 8y ago

> I don't want to be patronized when I am searching things. It's more like they're removing the penis graffiti. Most of the time, I search to find some content. You are probably the same. It's a search engine. Considerations aside from whether a search suggestion helps one locate desired content are beside the point. What's more, in some of the author's cases, the content would be illegal. If you are serious about researching search trends, then you could use tools, or lobby for more tools, like https://trends.google.com https://trends.google.com

boffinism 8y ago

The point of autocompletes is to make it easier for you to search by prompting you to choose a readymade option that might be relevant. They happen to use what other people search for, but that's an implementation detail. It's not that Bing is showing you the uncensored truth about what people search for, it's that it's prompting you to search for really bad things.

Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago

I have just tried "muslims are" on bing.com right now and I get a single autocomplete result: "muslims are treated fairly". And "black people are" yields nothing at all. Unless it's a regional thing, it seems that someone at Bing has read this news and now they are censoring exactly like Google. If I try those same searches in Spanish, I do get some racist suggestions though. Probably not for long...

threatofrain 8y ago

When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants? And if individuals want to understand Google Search Trends, as noted already, it's there but I don't think many people are going there, because it's not what they want.

dorchadas 8y ago
> When one types a query, why should a search engine model search success based on what everyone else in the world searches up? Doesn't it matter more that Google finds what that person wants? That's exactly what I want, at least. It'd make much more sense for them to just work on autocompleting individual words instead of queries. That way it's useful to the person who's searching and it doesn't matter what everyone else searched.
- threatofrain 8y ago
  Does that include things like React, Rust, or Ruby?