10 ms·

Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

149 points by howard941 7y ago

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I was thinking this was going to be about human moderation in search filtering, but it actually is about engineers implementing manual input into the algorithm to force certain results to never appear or certain results to always appear. I wonder what the consequences of no-filter algorithmic search results in. Google had to tweak its algorithm to avoid disinformation campaigns from spam in the past. Now we're dealing with another sort of disinformation campaign and I don't know a reasonable way for google to tackle it the way it is now.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  What is the new sort of disinformation campaign?
glup 7y ago
I've heard that historically all the major search engines have used a lot of hand-tuned results (ordering, exclusions) across the highest frequency searches. IIRC Microsoft bought Powerset in '08 just before the launch of Bing specifically to shore up their human tuning. That said, I expected humans to play less of a role by 2020.
danielfoster 7y ago
I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhaps I just search too many long tail queries?
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?
  - danielfoster 7y ago
    Good point. I see this behavior mostly on Search but the last example I documented is News. Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS620US621&hl=de&prmd=ivmn&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD3tjFiPTlAhVVoFsKHTs6BCEQ_AUoBHoECGgQBA&biw=414&bih=722 https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    John Kornblum, former US ambassador in Germany, is often present in German media when they need somebody to "explain" the USA or stories from cold war era. So in Germany media he can be found, how much then finds the way back in English speaking media I haven't checked.
- machbio 7y ago
  So much this - you have to go from least popular to most popular terms to get accurate results - there is a weightage penalty of how further the word is from the start of the query. if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better
  - frandroid 7y ago
    This is really useful advice, thank you.
  - dsl 7y ago
    I have found as of late that using natural language search terms works much better over the old keyword soup you'd have to feed in to AltaVista or something. i.e. "how do I change a ford taurus headlight" vs "taurus service manual headlight"
harikb 7y ago
Somewhat click-baity. They are not implying runtime / live intervention (which isn’t possible anyways). Top bad results are tweaked. That is part of making the “algorithm”. Who says that is immoral or illegal?
- tyingq 7y ago
  Not immoral or illegal, but using human raters to seed an algorithm can make the results worse. For example, it could skew to favoring websites where the rater is familiar with the brand. Which might rank mediocre branded content over less well known sites with much higher quality content. That seems to match what I've seen over the last 10 years with Google.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Can you give some examples of higher-quality-content sites that Google search is consistently missing?
    - rahidz 7y ago
      Examine.com is one, here's the prior HN thread. Had it not been for that HN thread I would never have known that site even existed, despite having frequently searched for queries where it would have been extremely relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        examine.com is the first organic search result I get for "supplemental vitamin d sleep". Maybe the results are hit-or-miss depending on the subtopic (or Google re-tuned the algorithm in the intervening 3 months).
  - cinnamonheart 7y ago
    I worked for Leapforce for a while doing this sort of rating work using Google's guidelines. The guidelines were linked elsewhere in this thread and, at a glance, they are the same ones I used: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... If you're doing something that would skew the results to favour a certain brand, you'd be going against Google's guidelines and your contract would be terminated quickly. I found the review process of my results to be fairly stringent; they were reviewed frequently to ensure I was staying within the guidelines, and I was told even about slight deviatiations.
lightwin 7y ago
The algorithms are also written by humans. Even those are not guaranteed to be unbiased.
bytematic 7y ago
This is the full Quality Raters Guidelines that physical people comb through a website with. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
- thedevil 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, I looked for their policies on misinformation. I could see some potential risks here but it still seems reasonable to me: > Demonstrably inaccurate content > YMYL content that contradicts well-established expert consensus > Debunked or unsubstantiated conspiracy theories This part, I imagine, is a bit more controversial: > pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive users, should receive the Lowest rating.
  - ppod 7y ago
    I think the first few are problematic too. Which conspiracy theories? Moon landing, pizzagate, Epstein? No idea where to draw a line there. Demonstrably inaccurate? I doubt they remove young earth creationists. It seems easy at first, but it doesn't take long to find a lot of gray areas.
    - skybrian 7y ago
      This is going to be based on conventional wisdom. The evaluators are a biased representation of general public. What do most people think are conspiracy theories? Despite all the policy guidelines, in the end it's not just a legalistic decision but more like a survey to see what people think. If you're running a search engine, you need to track of what people think somehow, or you'll totally miss things like cultural issues.
      - stevenicr 7y ago
        This (and other things about not knowing who the manual raters are, or what cultures they come from and bring to the conscious ans subconscious table)should be of concern. Depending on what region of the world the publisher is in, and what region his/her readers are in.. and where the raters are from, can make some issues. Some years ago I sat in a class at a college for building contractors when the subject of burying electrical lines came up, people scoffed at the cost, then the teacher did a survey and found that 90% of the class thought radon gas was a fairy tale conspiracy theory, not real, and not something they would ever consider when building. Half of those in the class had already been in the building professions for years and some cases generations.
Ozzie_osman 7y ago
There are three things going on here, one of which is probably bad and the others pretty normal. - humans ranking results: these are called evals and Google has been doing them for at least 15 years. It used to be that there were a sort of "golden" set of manually ranked queries and results, and any change in the search algo would run against them to make sure nothing broke. My guess is over time, as the algorithm became less heuristic and more AI-driven, these sets are instead used to train the models. - blacklisting of misinformation or spam: as a user, I appreciate this. As a citizen, I'd rather not trust Google as the arbiter of truth, but I generally think they've made good choices here (vs other tech companies). Until society has solved this problem (through regulation or otherwise) I'm OK with this. - giving advice or favors to advertisers: this is messed up. And will be hard to argue that if they do it for advertisers they don't also (anti-competitively) do it for their other internal properties.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buboard 7y ago
Everyone with half a brain should at least block google from taking their content and boxing it in their page.
gowld 7y ago
Clickbait headline. How does the report know what I think?
justinmchase 7y ago
I don't know, I think there is a _lot_ so it would be scary if there was even more than I thought.
ilaksh 7y ago
It should be based on public protocols/networks running as a decentralized system rather than relying on a private for profit entirely. It may be possible to have businesses run on top to provide added value, but the core should provide transparency and auditability.
pascalxus 7y ago
Just do the following search on google and see what the auto complete shows you: Men can... (you get things like: men can have periods, men can have babies, men can get pregnant, etc) Then look at what women can do: Women can...(do it, fly, do anything, can vote, can work, etc) There's a very particular agenda that seems to be present. it's kinda scary how strongly biased their search results are.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Those seem like they could at least plausibly be representative of actual searches. "Men can..." is probably not a terribly common search outside of sex/gender discussion.
- matt4077 7y ago
  Suggestions are based on what people search on phrases that appear in text. People don't search and/or write down what everyone knows already. Those suggestions aren't there because Google believes men can get pregnant, it's because that's something confused teenagers search. I also don't get why you consider "Men can get pregnant" to be insulting or biased? It's mostly just nonsense, but if you want to find meaning in it, the potential to become pregnant has historically been regarded an almost holy facet of humanity. Another fun one I just found, and which you might appreciate: "[idiots can]'t get cold".
1_2__4 7y ago
Ok this is now the fourth day in a row this is getting pushed to the front page. The first three times it was the WSJ article over and over again, now we get recycled articles about the exact same report. It’s debunked thoroughly in the comments and pops up day after day. Almost as if there’s some kind of concerted agenda to get it on the front page of HN.
Gusen 7y ago
President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills 15 boys in Buffalo, NY on January 10, 2019. Full audio of this right here. //Full audio of the event from 10Jan2019. Download the mp3 and put on headphones, and turn the volume all the way up. 10JanCh3_1255-1557.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lTt_YKFEtsV6YDNzXFVQYLkStY-kSg2/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lTt_YKFEtsV6YDNzXFVQYLkStY... This is audio of the President, Donald J. Trump, demanding a $4 billion dollar bribe from child rapists to “take a blind eye” on January 3, 2019. Trump becomes one on January 14, 2019. Also, here is the big reason the major networks do not report any of it. //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. See page 63. Bribe demand at 10:18am: 3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... //President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills his first boy at 6:32am. Video link below: 14JanCh3_600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJNbqZW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJ... 14JanCh2_600-700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJL-IZ_/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJ... //On January 18, 2019 at 8:31am (see page 8) Trump acknowledges the four billion dollar bribe and says: "Let's get it done and get to fucking some kids." Video link below: 18JanCh3_725-.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4TwoNmY1h/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4Two... //The major reason this has not been reported by the major news networks is right here. Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 1980's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo on January 14th, 2019 at 5:00am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00am. Muir starts around 5:15am, then Holt about 5:38am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp & Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500-601.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX... 14JanCh2_530-600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1... Adding to the reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS & Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXa... 14JanCh2_700-800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWY... //Thiss is the tip of the ice berg. //Full 89 page PDF [updated 16Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... //This post will be censored when this account logs off, the posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ...
Starkus 7y ago
Google censors and manipulates their queries, political too. They're heavy censors. I recommend to get off of their search engine, go to DDG
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I feel like some of the objection to "human intervention" comes from the fact that things that society at large used to determine was true or false, black or white, are now less so. There is now so much misinformation that a huge portion of the population now screams "censorship". I mean, factually, there is 0 evidence vaccines cause autism, and it was shown that the guy who started this conspiracy theory did it basically as a scam to make money. So am I supposed to be upset or something that Google is tweaking their algorithm to not push falsehoods? Same thing as the suicide query. I say this as someone who has and still periodically suffers from deep depression, who has searched for suicide methods in the past: am I supposed to have a problem that Google is "pushing" results that try to keep me from killing myself?
stevenicr 7y ago
The HN discussion on MSN's reporting of this report has many aspects to consider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537 much less HN discussion on the wall st journal's thread. There are important issues, especially lack of transparency and censorship that warrant more discussions imho.
oblib 7y ago
I spent some time rating search results for google just to get a feel for how they rate pages. Not much time though because the pay is low and the criteria just silly. In essence, they give you search term, a url, and about 30 seconds (at most) to make about $10 an hour or less. Now, I'm pretty savvy when it comes to understanding what to look for but I found it nearly impossible to provide both an accurate rating and making enough money to make it worth one's while. The people I knew who were doing this for a living told me flat out told that they take a fast glance, check a rating, and moved on as quickly as possible because they pay for quantity, and quality of the rating isn't a concern for them. So what they're really rating more than anything is visual aesthetics. If the page looked nice and seemed to fit the description of the search term they'd give it a good rating. Based on that, Hacker News probably wouldn't be rated very high by most of those who rate for google.
turc1656 7y ago
"...even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress, that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its results." Ummm, isn't that providing false testimony and considered perjury? Why is this shit never, ever prosecuted against a large corporation? It's simple - you know who lied under oath an it's recorded. You know that person knew what the truth was because they were a high ranking person who's job it is would be to know stuff like that. So either they committed perjury or they are grossly incompetent. And it's not like they didn't know what was going to be asked of them, nor did they state they weren't sure. Can't stand this crap. The two standard requirements are that the person needs to have intent to deceive and that it must be material information to the proceeding. Since the discussion was entirely surround this aspect of search, there logically must have been intent to deceive. Furthermore, being the central topic, it was most certainly of material significance.
- windsurfer 7y ago
  Google definitely says that they blacklist dangerous and deceptive sites. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that, though.
  - turc1656 7y ago
    Probably not, but those lists are more than just dangerous and deceptive sites. They also include things that individuals at Google manipulate based on their own opinions which can be one-offs or added to the lists. From the article: "The engineer "didn't want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer's name," as the paper describes it. The unfiltered search results were "kind of horrible," he added." That has nothing at all to do with web safety or anything fraudulent or deceptive. Also, just because people wouldn't have a problem with that limited use (if it actually was limited to just those two things), that still doesn't make the statement not technically perjury. If you were in front of Congress and they asked you something like whether or not your business changed the design of the website the user sees based on metrics/tracking that an AI bot determines might generate more user engagement for that user, and you say "no, we don't do that" but later on you tell everyone that you're only doing it for people that opt-in, that's probably considered perjury. And I'm sure you could see why, especially if all users were set to "opt-in" by default.
dang 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537

149 points by howard941 7y ago

I was thinking this was going to be about human moderation in search filtering, but it actually is about engineers implementing manual input into the algorithm to force certain results to never appear or certain results to always appear. I wonder what the consequences of no-filter algorithmic search results in. Google had to tweak its algorithm to avoid disinformation campaigns from spam in the past. Now we're dealing with another sort of disinformation campaign and I don't know a reasonable way for google to tackle it the way it is now.

shadowgovt 7y ago
What is the new sort of disinformation campaign?

glup 7y ago

I've heard that historically all the major search engines have used a lot of hand-tuned results (ordering, exclusions) across the highest frequency searches. IIRC Microsoft bought Powerset in '08 just before the launch of Bing specifically to shore up their human tuning. That said, I expected humans to play less of a role by 2020.

danielfoster 7y ago

I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhaps I just search too many long tail queries?

bagacrap 7y ago
Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?
- danielfoster 7y ago
  Good point. I see this behavior mostly on Search but the last example I documented is News. Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS620US621&hl=de&prmd=ivmn&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD3tjFiPTlAhVVoFsKHTs6BCEQ_AUoBHoECGgQBA&biw=414&bih=722 https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  John Kornblum, former US ambassador in Germany, is often present in German media when they need somebody to "explain" the USA or stories from cold war era. So in Germany media he can be found, how much then finds the way back in English speaking media I haven't checked.
machbio 7y ago
So much this - you have to go from least popular to most popular terms to get accurate results - there is a weightage penalty of how further the word is from the start of the query. if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better
- frandroid 7y ago
  This is really useful advice, thank you.
- dsl 7y ago
  I have found as of late that using natural language search terms works much better over the old keyword soup you'd have to feed in to AltaVista or something. i.e. "how do I change a ford taurus headlight" vs "taurus service manual headlight"

harikb 7y ago

Somewhat click-baity. They are not implying runtime / live intervention (which isn’t possible anyways). Top bad results are tweaked. That is part of making the “algorithm”. Who says that is immoral or illegal?

tyingq 7y ago
Not immoral or illegal, but using human raters to seed an algorithm can make the results worse. For example, it could skew to favoring websites where the rater is familiar with the brand. Which might rank mediocre branded content over less well known sites with much higher quality content. That seems to match what I've seen over the last 10 years with Google.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Can you give some examples of higher-quality-content sites that Google search is consistently missing?
  - rahidz 7y ago
    Examine.com is one, here's the prior HN thread. Had it not been for that HN thread I would never have known that site even existed, despite having frequently searched for queries where it would have been extremely relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      examine.com is the first organic search result I get for "supplemental vitamin d sleep". Maybe the results are hit-or-miss depending on the subtopic (or Google re-tuned the algorithm in the intervening 3 months).
- cinnamonheart 7y ago
  I worked for Leapforce for a while doing this sort of rating work using Google's guidelines. The guidelines were linked elsewhere in this thread and, at a glance, they are the same ones I used: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... If you're doing something that would skew the results to favour a certain brand, you'd be going against Google's guidelines and your contract would be terminated quickly. I found the review process of my results to be fairly stringent; they were reviewed frequently to ensure I was staying within the guidelines, and I was told even about slight deviatiations.

lightwin 7y ago

The algorithms are also written by humans. Even those are not guaranteed to be unbiased.

bytematic 7y ago

This is the full Quality Raters Guidelines that physical people comb through a website with. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

thedevil 7y ago
Out of curiosity, I looked for their policies on misinformation. I could see some potential risks here but it still seems reasonable to me: > Demonstrably inaccurate content > YMYL content that contradicts well-established expert consensus > Debunked or unsubstantiated conspiracy theories This part, I imagine, is a bit more controversial: > pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive users, should receive the Lowest rating.
- ppod 7y ago
  I think the first few are problematic too. Which conspiracy theories? Moon landing, pizzagate, Epstein? No idea where to draw a line there. Demonstrably inaccurate? I doubt they remove young earth creationists. It seems easy at first, but it doesn't take long to find a lot of gray areas.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    This is going to be based on conventional wisdom. The evaluators are a biased representation of general public. What do most people think are conspiracy theories? Despite all the policy guidelines, in the end it's not just a legalistic decision but more like a survey to see what people think. If you're running a search engine, you need to track of what people think somehow, or you'll totally miss things like cultural issues.
    - stevenicr 7y ago
      This (and other things about not knowing who the manual raters are, or what cultures they come from and bring to the conscious ans subconscious table)should be of concern. Depending on what region of the world the publisher is in, and what region his/her readers are in.. and where the raters are from, can make some issues. Some years ago I sat in a class at a college for building contractors when the subject of burying electrical lines came up, people scoffed at the cost, then the teacher did a survey and found that 90% of the class thought radon gas was a fairy tale conspiracy theory, not real, and not something they would ever consider when building. Half of those in the class had already been in the building professions for years and some cases generations.

Ozzie_osman 7y ago

There are three things going on here, one of which is probably bad and the others pretty normal. - humans ranking results: these are called evals and Google has been doing them for at least 15 years. It used to be that there were a sort of "golden" set of manually ranked queries and results, and any change in the search algo would run against them to make sure nothing broke. My guess is over time, as the algorithm became less heuristic and more AI-driven, these sets are instead used to train the models. - blacklisting of misinformation or spam: as a user, I appreciate this. As a citizen, I'd rather not trust Google as the arbiter of truth, but I generally think they've made good choices here (vs other tech companies). Until society has solved this problem (through regulation or otherwise) I'm OK with this. - giving advice or favors to advertisers: this is messed up. And will be hard to argue that if they do it for advertisers they don't also (anti-competitively) do it for their other internal properties.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

buboard 7y ago

Everyone with half a brain should at least block google from taking their content and boxing it in their page.

gowld 7y ago

Clickbait headline. How does the report know what I think?

justinmchase 7y ago

I don't know, I think there is a _lot_ so it would be scary if there was even more than I thought.

ilaksh 7y ago

It should be based on public protocols/networks running as a decentralized system rather than relying on a private for profit entirely. It may be possible to have businesses run on top to provide added value, but the core should provide transparency and auditability.

pascalxus 7y ago

Just do the following search on google and see what the auto complete shows you: Men can... (you get things like: men can have periods, men can have babies, men can get pregnant, etc) Then look at what women can do: Women can...(do it, fly, do anything, can vote, can work, etc) There's a very particular agenda that seems to be present. it's kinda scary how strongly biased their search results are.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Those seem like they could at least plausibly be representative of actual searches. "Men can..." is probably not a terribly common search outside of sex/gender discussion.
matt4077 7y ago
Suggestions are based on what people search on phrases that appear in text. People don't search and/or write down what everyone knows already. Those suggestions aren't there because Google believes men can get pregnant, it's because that's something confused teenagers search. I also don't get why you consider "Men can get pregnant" to be insulting or biased? It's mostly just nonsense, but if you want to find meaning in it, the potential to become pregnant has historically been regarded an almost holy facet of humanity. Another fun one I just found, and which you might appreciate: "[idiots can]'t get cold".

1_2__4 7y ago

Ok this is now the fourth day in a row this is getting pushed to the front page. The first three times it was the WSJ article over and over again, now we get recycled articles about the exact same report. It’s debunked thoroughly in the comments and pops up day after day. Almost as if there’s some kind of concerted agenda to get it on the front page of HN.

Gusen 7y ago

President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills 15 boys in Buffalo, NY on January 10, 2019. Full audio of this right here. //Full audio of the event from 10Jan2019. Download the mp3 and put on headphones, and turn the volume all the way up. 10JanCh3_1255-1557.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lTt_YKFEtsV6YDNzXFVQYLkStY-kSg2/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lTt_YKFEtsV6YDNzXFVQYLkStY... This is audio of the President, Donald J. Trump, demanding a $4 billion dollar bribe from child rapists to “take a blind eye” on January 3, 2019. Trump becomes one on January 14, 2019. Also, here is the big reason the major networks do not report any of it. //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. See page 63. Bribe demand at 10:18am: 3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... //President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills his first boy at 6:32am. Video link below: 14JanCh3_600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJNbqZW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJ... 14JanCh2_600-700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJL-IZ_/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJ... //On January 18, 2019 at 8:31am (see page 8) Trump acknowledges the four billion dollar bribe and says: "Let's get it done and get to fucking some kids." Video link below: 18JanCh3_725-.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4TwoNmY1h/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4Two... //The major reason this has not been reported by the major news networks is right here. Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 1980's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo on January 14th, 2019 at 5:00am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00am. Muir starts around 5:15am, then Holt about 5:38am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp & Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500-601.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX... 14JanCh2_530-600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1... Adding to the reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS & Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXa... 14JanCh2_700-800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWY... //Thiss is the tip of the ice berg. //Full 89 page PDF [updated 16Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... //This post will be censored when this account logs off, the posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ...

Starkus 7y ago

Google censors and manipulates their queries, political too. They're heavy censors. I recommend to get off of their search engine, go to DDG

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I feel like some of the objection to "human intervention" comes from the fact that things that society at large used to determine was true or false, black or white, are now less so. There is now so much misinformation that a huge portion of the population now screams "censorship". I mean, factually, there is 0 evidence vaccines cause autism, and it was shown that the guy who started this conspiracy theory did it basically as a scam to make money. So am I supposed to be upset or something that Google is tweaking their algorithm to not push falsehoods? Same thing as the suicide query. I say this as someone who has and still periodically suffers from deep depression, who has searched for suicide methods in the past: am I supposed to have a problem that Google is "pushing" results that try to keep me from killing myself?

stevenicr 7y ago

The HN discussion on MSN's reporting of this report has many aspects to consider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537 much less HN discussion on the wall st journal's thread. There are important issues, especially lack of transparency and censorship that warrant more discussions imho.

oblib 7y ago

I spent some time rating search results for google just to get a feel for how they rate pages. Not much time though because the pay is low and the criteria just silly. In essence, they give you search term, a url, and about 30 seconds (at most) to make about $10 an hour or less. Now, I'm pretty savvy when it comes to understanding what to look for but I found it nearly impossible to provide both an accurate rating and making enough money to make it worth one's while. The people I knew who were doing this for a living told me flat out told that they take a fast glance, check a rating, and moved on as quickly as possible because they pay for quantity, and quality of the rating isn't a concern for them. So what they're really rating more than anything is visual aesthetics. If the page looked nice and seemed to fit the description of the search term they'd give it a good rating. Based on that, Hacker News probably wouldn't be rated very high by most of those who rate for google.

turc1656 7y ago

"...even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress, that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its results." Ummm, isn't that providing false testimony and considered perjury? Why is this shit never, ever prosecuted against a large corporation? It's simple - you know who lied under oath an it's recorded. You know that person knew what the truth was because they were a high ranking person who's job it is would be to know stuff like that. So either they committed perjury or they are grossly incompetent. And it's not like they didn't know what was going to be asked of them, nor did they state they weren't sure. Can't stand this crap. The two standard requirements are that the person needs to have intent to deceive and that it must be material information to the proceeding. Since the discussion was entirely surround this aspect of search, there logically must have been intent to deceive. Furthermore, being the central topic, it was most certainly of material significance.

windsurfer 7y ago
Google definitely says that they blacklist dangerous and deceptive sites. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that, though.
- turc1656 7y ago
  Probably not, but those lists are more than just dangerous and deceptive sites. They also include things that individuals at Google manipulate based on their own opinions which can be one-offs or added to the lists. From the article: "The engineer "didn't want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer's name," as the paper describes it. The unfiltered search results were "kind of horrible," he added." That has nothing at all to do with web safety or anything fraudulent or deceptive. Also, just because people wouldn't have a problem with that limited use (if it actually was limited to just those two things), that still doesn't make the statement not technically perjury. If you were in front of Congress and they asked you something like whether or not your business changed the design of the website the user sees based on metrics/tracking that an AI bot determines might generate more user engagement for that user, and you say "no, we don't do that" but later on you tell everyone that you're only doing it for people that opt-in, that's probably considered perjury. And I'm sure you could see why, especially if all users were set to "opt-in" by default.

dang 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537