6 ms·

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

danso 7y ago
Isn't the original PageRank, and every iteration since, defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? They have a 160+ page guide that tells their ratings team how to identify high-quality content: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
- dmg826 7y ago
  "Quality" is a really hard thing to define algorithmically. Even if you had great journalists on staff, I don't know if their heuristic expertise could translate to an algorithm. Most signals of trust/quality come via backlink profiles, which may be a poor proxy but are still the best that Google has been able to come up with.
- dexen 7y ago
  >Isn't the original PageRank (...) defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? No, quite the opposite. The original PageRank was defined by what other internet publishers considered to be a relevant and informative webpage. Specifically, the original PageRank was weighting content by the links (and content around the links) it was getting. The trust was placed on the internet publishers linking to it. The trust was distributed and also transitive to a degree. Which, if you think about it, is pretty close to what journalists do - they prop up the good ones in various ways. And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences - equal peers judging relevant materials and marking / linking the ones they approve. All in all, the original algorithm was effectively a "wall" between Google engineering and the actual content, as ranked & searched. It was clear delineation that "we don't editorialize search results". Granted, the later incarnations of Google Search take into account much more than just the original PageRank, and thus stray away from the idealized original formulation - and also get much closer to editorial decisions.
  - michaelmior 7y ago
    > And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences I don't see the connection between the peer review process and PageRank. Peer review consists of educated experts explicitly making a value determination on the quality of the work before it is published and publicly available. Citations can be useful for judging impact, but this happens after the peer review process has been completed.
  - danso 7y ago
    Right, I understand your point, and maybe I'm being too reductive here, but the idea heuristic that what people link to is authoritative is an opinionated decision that ended up being satisfactorily accurate (and efficient to implement). And evaluating the heuristic's accuracy ultimately boils down to human judgment; from their early Google proposal (though not the original Pagerank paper): http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > The biggest problem facing users of web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users' horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. For example, the top result for a search for "Bill Clinton" on one of the most popular commercial search engines was the Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily. (Yes, the opinion that a "bill clinton" query should probably return official/biographical pages before "Joke of the Day" is a pretty obvious and uncontroversial one)
    - dexen 7y ago
      >but the idea heuristic that what people link to is authoritative is an opinionated decision There are two decision spaces here. One is the selection of search ranking algorithm (whether to use PageRank or any other), and that decision was taken by Google[1]. The second decision space is the decision whether to link (or not) to any given document, and what content to put around it. That is a long lasting iterative process rather than any singular decision. Arguably it's geared towards approximating the distributed consensus - which is a global mutable state; expressed with edges the graph rather than any singular node. Can the process be gamed, perverted, or corrupted randomly or maliciously? Sure. Do we know any better one? Not yet, at least not in the public. -- [1] practically speaking we all selected PageRank, by preferring Google's over multiple competing engines.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  Yes, PageRank makes assumptions about what good content is and furthermore those assumptions are probably inaccurate in a lot of cases (dishonest clickbait can have a lot of backlinks). But it is unbiased in a sense that using human raters following guidelines is not. Moving from a purely algorithmic approach is a step away from being a neutral delivery service towards being a publisher, which carries extra responsibilities if you have as much power as Google.
aviraldg 7y ago
What would be the alternative? For lawyers to specify search algorithms?
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  Maybe a giant list of websites in alphabetical order? (joking - we don't need another DMOZ)
  - journalctl 7y ago
    That would at least make SEO easy: “How do we appear at the top of the results?” “We’ll call our website ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - Wikipedia’”
    - SquareWheel 7y ago
      That's how it worked in the Yellow Pages. "AAA Plumbing" and such.
    - teddyh 7y ago
      Off-topic, but: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!
saalweachter 7y ago
I haven't actually read any internal resumes, but why do you think no one working on Google News has any journalism education or experience?
lolinder 7y ago
To a large extent they already do, albeit unintentionally. We can discuss whether that should be the case in the first place, but Google has been shaping the news industry ever since "Google" became a verb. With that shaping now irreversible, and with shutting down being the only way to stop it from continuing, it certainly seems like the right thing for Google to think seriously about the rewards their engine offers. While Google is definitely prone to abusing their influence, this move seems very reasonable.
AFascistWorld 7y ago
Tech companies are being pushed to become judges on everything or face backlash.
binarybits 7y ago
Absolutely, but they have that influence and so far they've mostly been using it in ways that make journalism worse (creating powerful incentives for shallow articles with clickbait headlines). This seems like a step in the right direction.
concordDance 7y ago
Agreed, I would want some additional criteria for consideration for a number of these, for example when it comes to news I would want interview transcripts or links to such things to affect ranking, similarly links to scientific papers. Avoiding certain a number of common reasoning errors (such as equivocation) or stats errors (such as not considering biased sampling or even not considering sampling size at all when making points) should also be required for top quality.

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

danso 7y ago

Isn't the original PageRank, and every iteration since, defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? They have a 160+ page guide that tells their ratings team how to identify high-quality content: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

dmg826 7y ago
"Quality" is a really hard thing to define algorithmically. Even if you had great journalists on staff, I don't know if their heuristic expertise could translate to an algorithm. Most signals of trust/quality come via backlink profiles, which may be a poor proxy but are still the best that Google has been able to come up with.
dexen 7y ago
>Isn't the original PageRank (...) defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? No, quite the opposite. The original PageRank was defined by what other internet publishers considered to be a relevant and informative webpage. Specifically, the original PageRank was weighting content by the links (and content around the links) it was getting. The trust was placed on the internet publishers linking to it. The trust was distributed and also transitive to a degree. Which, if you think about it, is pretty close to what journalists do - they prop up the good ones in various ways. And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences - equal peers judging relevant materials and marking / linking the ones they approve. All in all, the original algorithm was effectively a "wall" between Google engineering and the actual content, as ranked & searched. It was clear delineation that "we don't editorialize search results". Granted, the later incarnations of Google Search take into account much more than just the original PageRank, and thus stray away from the idealized original formulation - and also get much closer to editorial decisions.
- michaelmior 7y ago
  > And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences I don't see the connection between the peer review process and PageRank. Peer review consists of educated experts explicitly making a value determination on the quality of the work before it is published and publicly available. Citations can be useful for judging impact, but this happens after the peer review process has been completed.
- danso 7y ago
  Right, I understand your point, and maybe I'm being too reductive here, but the idea heuristic that what people link to is authoritative is an opinionated decision that ended up being satisfactorily accurate (and efficient to implement). And evaluating the heuristic's accuracy ultimately boils down to human judgment; from their early Google proposal (though not the original Pagerank paper): http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > The biggest problem facing users of web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users' horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. For example, the top result for a search for "Bill Clinton" on one of the most popular commercial search engines was the Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily. (Yes, the opinion that a "bill clinton" query should probably return official/biographical pages before "Joke of the Day" is a pretty obvious and uncontroversial one)
  - dexen 7y ago
    >but the idea heuristic that what people link to is authoritative is an opinionated decision There are two decision spaces here. One is the selection of search ranking algorithm (whether to use PageRank or any other), and that decision was taken by Google[1]. The second decision space is the decision whether to link (or not) to any given document, and what content to put around it. That is a long lasting iterative process rather than any singular decision. Arguably it's geared towards approximating the distributed consensus - which is a global mutable state; expressed with edges the graph rather than any singular node. Can the process be gamed, perverted, or corrupted randomly or maliciously? Sure. Do we know any better one? Not yet, at least not in the public. -- [1] practically speaking we all selected PageRank, by preferring Google's over multiple competing engines.
sweeneyrod 7y ago
Yes, PageRank makes assumptions about what good content is and furthermore those assumptions are probably inaccurate in a lot of cases (dishonest clickbait can have a lot of backlinks). But it is unbiased in a sense that using human raters following guidelines is not. Moving from a purely algorithmic approach is a step away from being a neutral delivery service towards being a publisher, which carries extra responsibilities if you have as much power as Google.

aviraldg 7y ago

What would be the alternative? For lawyers to specify search algorithms?

SquareWheel 7y ago
Maybe a giant list of websites in alphabetical order? (joking - we don't need another DMOZ)
- journalctl 7y ago
  That would at least make SEO easy: “How do we appear at the top of the results?” “We’ll call our website ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - Wikipedia’”
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    That's how it worked in the Yellow Pages. "AAA Plumbing" and such.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    Off-topic, but: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!

saalweachter 7y ago

I haven't actually read any internal resumes, but why do you think no one working on Google News has any journalism education or experience?

lolinder 7y ago

To a large extent they already do, albeit unintentionally. We can discuss whether that should be the case in the first place, but Google has been shaping the news industry ever since "Google" became a verb. With that shaping now irreversible, and with shutting down being the only way to stop it from continuing, it certainly seems like the right thing for Google to think seriously about the rewards their engine offers. While Google is definitely prone to abusing their influence, this move seems very reasonable.

AFascistWorld 7y ago

Tech companies are being pushed to become judges on everything or face backlash.

binarybits 7y ago

Absolutely, but they have that influence and so far they've mostly been using it in ways that make journalism worse (creating powerful incentives for shallow articles with clickbait headlines). This seems like a step in the right direction.

concordDance 7y ago

Agreed, I would want some additional criteria for consideration for a number of these, for example when it comes to news I would want interview transcripts or links to such things to affect ranking, similarly links to scientific papers. Avoiding certain a number of common reasoning errors (such as equivocation) or stats errors (such as not considering biased sampling or even not considering sampling size at all when making points) should also be required for top quality.