22 ms·

Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)

270 points by Santosh83 6y ago

jhanschoo 6y ago
Relatedly, for sufficiently obscure historical figures for which a Wikipedia entry exists without any depictions in literature, we sometimes have images from the game "Crusader Kings 2" take the spot. r/crusaderkings are full of posts of these incidents, and at the time of this comment this is still the case for Cynewulf of Wessex.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  Relatedly, I’ve seen many many EU4 maps of countries come up in google results for those countries, which is concerning as they’re often (as is the nature of the game) inaccurate. At least with CK2, there’s really no harm done if someone sees a fictional portrait of a long dead minor ruler. With entire nations, the story is a little different.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  There are many cases as these. Facebook is another culprit here, pulling up info from various sources and presenting it as authoritative. I remember looking up the Dalai Lama and seeing at the bottom: "Nationality: Chinese" which made me laugh, but on the other hand things like these make many people upset.
  - huffmsa 6y ago
    That is likely intentionally or a regional specific label to appease Chinese interests. Google maps will show you different borders and place names depending on where you are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-maps-political-borders/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-...
  - em500 6y ago
    > I remember looking up the Dalai Lama and seeing at the bottom: "Nationality: Chinese" which made me laugh, but on the other hand things like these make many people upset. Out of curiosity, what do you believe to be the correct nationality?
    - tialaramex 6y ago
      I presume the Dalai Lama considers himself to be Tibetan. Now, perhaps you would consider that we ought to demand people's "nationality" be an actual UN member state which counts them as a citizen and since Tibet isn't a member... That's a bit awkward though because the "One China" policy ensures neither the Republic (in Taiwan) nor the PRC will allow the other to be a UN member at the same time as them. Also I find that I doubt we demand most people have documentary proof. Not taking their word for it is already a bit weird unless you're a border official. Is Samantha Bee really Canadian? I mean, she says she is so I just assumed...
      - brazzy 6y ago
        > the "One China" policy ensures neither the Republic (in Taiwan) nor the PRC will allow the other to be a UN member at the same time as them. Actually, 90+% of the population of the ROC, including their leaders, would be ecstatically happy to be an UN member separately from the PRC. The only reason they officially have a "One China policy" is that the PRC has made it clear that while they can tolerate the status quo of a rival government with zero prospects of actually challenging them controlling a small piece of their territory, they will very much not tolerate that piece of territory to become officially independant and provide an example for at least half a dozen others.
      - mc32 6y ago
        It could also be like asking what was Mozart’s nationality? Austrian or Holy Roman?
        ginko 6y ago
        He was a Salzburger, which was an independent princedom back then.
        mc32 6y ago
        Is that what he is celebrated as these days? Which country takes pride in this composer these days?
bbotond 6y ago
Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zB4HA54_0dsJ:https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=hu https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zB4HA5...
dredmorbius 6y ago
Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130303005243/http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130303005243/http://gregegan.c...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  NB: That points to what turns out to be an old version of a continuously updated page, from 2013. Actual content, which was offline at the time, dates to at latest 2016. Apologies for any confusion.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
czzr 6y ago
Interestingly a current search still shows this, and the root cause is the fact that there are no pictures of Greg Egan available. This is a fascinating failure mode - Google works on a best effort basis, so it doesn’t have a strong enough concept of “there is no correct answer to this question” or perhaps “my approach is wrong in this case”.
- fock 6y ago
  hm, actually, there are pictures of him available. At least to Google's secret heuristic-ML-mashup.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  Frankly, I find nothing fascinating here - more like a rookie mistake that nobody cares about - at least not stronlgly about to make something about it.
- spurgu 6y ago
  This is one of the many problems with Google nowadays. Instead of returning me the only 3 search results somewhat matching my query, it stupidly broadens my query so that it's able to show me pages and pages of (to me) completely unrelated results. For advertising I guess... > concept of “there is no correct answer to this question” or perhaps “my approach is wrong in this case”. Exactly. What's wrong with "We could only find 3 results matching your query. Try searching using some other terms, or try the following related queries."? It's so annoying to sift through the results just to realize that Google has no damn clue what I'm looking for.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  > Interestingly a current search still shows this It doesn't for me. I just get his home page as the top of search results, and a knowledge panel on the right-hand side that appears to accurately describe him (with zero photos), and a button "Claim this knowledge panel" which he could presumably use to correct any misinformation.
  - czzr 6y ago
simion314 6y ago
This makes me wonder if Google developers ever get feedback from outside the company, it feels like some feature is released and developers move the the nsxt shiny thing and most feedback (the one that does not reach on a news paper) is ignored. Probably this is expected when you have many users and most of them are not paying.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  I wonder this about a lot of "tier 1" software, whenever I get easy to access critical business logic breaking bugs in Amazon, eBay, etc... I just find it utterly unacceptable. I'd drag my developers over hot coal if they somehow released what I see from these trillion dollars companies. I wasn't able to "add to cart" with my Amazon app for instance and things like YouTube and Instagram constantly crash when I'm adding new content. And many banking apps totally freak out when I use a password manager. This is pretty core operation. It's really amazing. I really don't know how the valley operates sometime. I'd imagine they supposedly have entire departments and dozens of people who are supposed to make sure this stuff works. Sometimes I find it so unbelievable that I try multiple devices to take the possibility that it's just me out and it's invariably reproducible on all. Maybe nobody at the company uses Android or maybe nobody uses their own product? (Maybe people who work at, say, Facebook don't actually like using it...thats understandable, but also unacceptable) I really don't know how it happens. Maybe their tests are 100% automated and no human checks it? I don't know.
  - aflag 6y ago
    Maybe their quality control can be improved, but you give no insight in QA practices they are obviously skipping. Unless you're counting "dragging developers over hot coal" as your advice. In which case, I have serious doubts the system you're comparing them with is actually of better quality.
    - RandoHolmes 6y ago
      It's a problem with many developers. They think that because there can be a root cause analysis, they didn't fuck up. But there are times when something simply shouldn't be, definitionally. As in, if X happens, it doesn't matter what the root cause analysis is, something is wrong. To give a real life example, if you're driving drunk, the events and reasons leading up to the act don't really matter. They're not without value, but they're not important for determining that someone fucked up. This is what the poster you're responding to is saying. That the problems are so goddamned egregious that they simply shouldn't be. It's not up to the aforementioned poster to fix the problems, it's up to the companies in question wanting to be better.
dwighttk 6y ago
Published 2012, but updated since then... I think it should say 2016
fouc 6y ago
I think most HN people know Google is essentially a dumb search engine. We're not surprised when image results have no correlation with the search term. The problem is when other people fail to notice this disparity. They'll go on to write articles and blog post based on google's results. Later someone else will make a wikipedia page based on the blog post. Google's flawed results will now be confirmed by the wikipedia page. A virtuous cycle indeed.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  Do you have an example of Wikepedia page where this actually happened?
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  Not really. I have a draft page in Wikipedia about a motorcycle model stuck for months to be approved because it does not have enough references even if it provides links to the manufacturer, dealers and motorcycle review sites. No, blog posts are not enough to put something in Wikipedia.
- jfk13 6y ago
  Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- naringas 6y ago
  > A virtuous cycle indeed. I think that "vicious" is more appropriate here
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    "indeed" stands for implied /s postfix operator. /s operator, applied to the word "virtuous", turns it into the word "vicious".
- elliekelly 6y ago
  Tangentially related, I had a surprising experience using DDG yesterday. It was... “smart” for lack of a better word. I was watching an episode of Star Trek TNG and a character was introduced that was a little over the top and vaguely resembled Jim Carrey so I searched “Star Trek Jim Carrey” and one of the top results (after a bunch of YouTube clips of some sort of Jim Carrey Star Trek skit) was the Wikipedia page for the specific episode I was watching. And here’s the interesting part: Jim Carrey wasn’t in it. My search results took my misguided query and still returned the one correct episode out of who knows how many hundreds of Star Trek episodes exist. I can only guess that enough people have searched “Star Trek Jim Carrey” and stopped searching once they got to information about that particular episode.
mm41 6y ago
Entitlement... There are 189 Greg Egan on Linkedin alone. No wonder Google doesn't show only his face. If his claim is valid, the result right now seems pretty ok to me...
- StormChaser_5 6y ago
  Why entitlement? If you just searched for Greg Egan and got a bunch of images for Greg Egan's that would be fine. But google is pulling together info as a bio of Greg Egan the science fiction author, presenting it as authoritative, and including a picture - not someone with this name but that specific person. The author being annoyed that Google is falsely saying this is what he specifically looks like doesn't sound entitled to me
  - vffhfhf 6y ago
    Because this dude is like I filled million recaptacha I deserve more free result when AI research is so new and so slow. This dude thinks just coz human can do it means its easy and forgets the billion years of evolution that went to make our eye or the massive amount of processing our brains does to see an object.
  - mm41 6y ago
    But it doesn't! Just look him up right now and you will see his bio doesn't include pictures of random people. There are pictures of his books covers and picture of other people users have been searching for (probably other authors and people loosely connected to him) Then in the middle part there are indeed fairly random pictures but these have nothing to do with his bio. They are just Google results.
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
I haven't even read it yet but this website is exactly what I'd expect to see all sites like, customisable to your taste (and even needs, for visually impaired). And this is the first web page I've ever seen that does that since... the web began I guess.
- ehnto 6y ago
  For better or worse, some US regulations have made it a requirement for certain websites to have accessibility functionality. That has spawned a small ecosystem of plugins that aim to fulfill the regulatory requirements. Does they make for a more accessible websites? Judging by the plugins I have seen so far, I really doubt it. But it is at least a springboard to work from, and a kick in the butt for people who truly do care and are talented enough to pull it off properly. That said, these plugins, and their failings, are a reminder to me that accessibility can't be an after thought, it needs to be baked into your product's UX.
- Santosh83 6y ago
  Fictionpress and Fanfiction.net are also similarly customisable. You can change para width, font-size, background/foreground colour, and the font too (about 10 different kinds). Font-size is trivially done by the user zooming, but the other settings probably ought to be implemented by more sites, especially text heavy ones.
vffhfhf 6y ago
Do people expect google to be run by Magic? Google, wikipedia, even facebook, twitter and reddit have been a plus to modern human thinking. Just coz they fail somewhere doesnot mean they are bad. People dont remember how much things sucked before them. Also computer vision, AI are new things. ""And your mission was to organise the world’s information. How’s that working out for you so far?"" It working out so well. Internet is just 40 year old and we are here for fu*k sake. Some people have 0 bigger picture scene.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  > Just coz they fail somewhere does not mean they are bad. But looking at the bigger picture is not especially favorable to Google et al: Back in the 1980s, technology was advancing at a dizzying pace, and the world seemed on its way to peace, freedom, and brotherly love. Today the world has a dis/misinformation crisis, and authoritarianism is rising. Even if none of that is the fault of Google and social media, it casts doubt on the benefit of today's internet. How great can it be, given the state the world?
  - warrenq 6y ago
    Ha Ha peace, freedom and love. What a naive idiot
  - ddalex 6y ago
    I think you may be missing the forest for the trees, no offense intended. The world is still on its way to peace, freedom and love. What has happened is that the new communication paradigm surfaced truths that there were before but not acknowledged. Violence against blacks didn't start with Rodney King and didn't end with Jacob Blake. There were there before, and they got pushed into the spotlight exactly by the advancing technology of the Internet: videocameras, cell phones, search, video distribution, forums, etc. We are in the midst of the most important revolution of humankind - the knowledge revolution. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions before, it's going to turn up the society on its head, and it won't be pretty. But the society that follows will be way better that the one we have now.
alderz 6y ago
The author has written the novel "Permutation City", which I read after seeing it recommended here on HN a lot. It is a great book. I never thought I would be interested in sci-fi, but this book changed my mind. It deals with simulating conciousness and its implications. If you enjoyed the post, and the author's website, be sure to read some of his books too!
- wcoenen 6y ago
  If I remember correctly, Permutation City is more about the implications of modal realism (or "dust theory" in the book). Consciousness upload is used in the book to enter a simulated reality, but in itself that doesn't explain what happens when the simulation is turned off.
  - Filligree 6y ago
    There's a fairly simple explanation, when you think about it. They arranged to have the simulation in our universe turned off, but not to have all simulations turned off -- there's no way they could do the latter. So they ended up in a simulation run by someone who'd started off by simulating Earth, and who -- more likely than not -- were especially interested in embedded simulations. Embedded simulations like theirs, but also like the Autoverse, and whoever it is was interested enough that they'd violate the simulated physics of Earth to keep simulating the cellular automaton despite the physics of Earth saying it should be shut off. Viewed from that perspective, the ending is... not predictable, exactly, but at least plausible.
  - teekert 6y ago
    It does actually, and I really like this explanation: So, imagine you model a human mind. Now you can slow this model down, speed it up, the human mind does not know. In the novel states of the mind in time are computed, out of order, while watching reality, the mind observes it is time scambled but the mind itself does not notice. On the basis Egan concludes that the pattern that forms the mind may well be present in the universe somewhere, and the next time pattern, one time instance further may be somewhere completely different. But the mind does not notice. So the mind can just exist without it's physical basis being anywhere specifically... It get's one thinking. Honestly as the other response says, indeed there is a parallel universe part to it.. For which I didn't really understand it relation to "dust". I also liked "Quarantine" which made Quantum Mechanics somehow more intuitive to me. Truly a great writer.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Yep, I've also noticed a lot of really weird stuff from sketchy sources embedded in the answers panel. We forgot that the reason search engines were effectively exempt from libel/copyright etc. is because were just describing the web, they published the map but the content was on all the individual websites. It's a lot harder to argue that model still applies when you've got algorithms building out these micro-articles from increasingly disparate pieces. Somewhere here there's a line between a preview of a link and republication.
- centimeter 6y ago
  I’d argue that they also took on additional legal responsibility when they started censoring search results, whether it’s hard censorship like removing firearm-related products from shopping results or soft censorship like de-ranking right-biased news sources. If you take the entire internet and selectively filter it down, you have the power to craft any narrative as surely as if you were writing the opinion pieces from scratch yourself. It’s hard to call that anything except “editorial power”.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  That has come to my attention more recently when looking for short answers to small medical questions surrounding a condition—things I'd forgotten, etc. I quickly learned how off-the-mark those can be. The feature is really clever and works great when it works, but sometimes just because something is formatted as an authoritative answer, it's promoted above actual correct information. It's almost slower than just looking for a qualifying source in those cases.
donclark 6y ago
I feel the same for Google, and other search engines as well. Are the results given pushing us to come together as a people - towards common goals?
crazygringo 6y ago
Is this article still relevant? When I search for "Greg Egan", the knowledge panel in the right column doesn't show any photos at all. And it even has a button "Claim this knowledge panel" that he could presumably use to make corrections. So is this article just old news, where Google has not only corrected its mistakes but also provided a manual way for people to fix misinformation about themselves? I'm not understanding why this article is appearing now in 2020. (Also, a search engine is always going to get some things wrong. Without knowing the rate of errors, a single example doesn't really mean much of anything.)
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Highly relevant. Google will monetize fully automated mistakes and you're saying it's OK because the victims can manually clean up the mess later?
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    No information on the web is 100% perfect or accurate. Even the NYT makes a host of mistakes daily across all its edited articles, and publishes corrections for the most serious ones when readers point them out. Google's results are largely accurate, and as long as it has a mechanism for correcting mistakes does seem to make it pretty OK to me. What are you suggesting any serious alternative be? That would actually work at scale?
    - tpxl 6y ago
      >What are you suggesting any serious alternative be? Not erroneously copy stuff?
      - summerlight 6y ago
        > That would actually work at scale? Probably "Not erroneously copy stuff?" is not a trivial thing to do at scale.
        6y ago
dorkwood 6y ago
I got a good one the other day. I searched "does freezing kill bacteria", and the featured answer came back "freezing food kills harmful bacteria that can cause food poisoning". I was curious, so I clicked through to read more. It turns out this text was taken from the headline at the top of a PDF. What the Google crawler didn't notice, however, was that the headline actually had another headline above it. The full text read "Myth: Freezing food kills harmful bacteria that can cause food poisoning".
- pvaldes 6y ago
  This was accurately fixed. Freezing definitely kills most types of bacteria
  - umvi 6y ago
    Which, I'm assuming, is why all sushi in the USA must must be frozen and then re-thawed before serving.
    - yawz 6y ago
      Really!?! I had sushi at the bar many times and it was prepared right in front of me. Maybe you meant ingredients?
      - snug 6y ago
        Sushi grade fish must be flash frozen to kill any bacteria, worms, etc. in order to be served frozen. Most fresh (killed, butchered and served quickly) food isn't really great, either taste wise or health wise. Especially if it's not fully cooked. Most red meats sit out for a bit, either wet or dry aged, which enhances the flavors. Fish will need to be frozen or cooked to a safe temperature.
        winter_blue 6y ago
        I knew someone (a French person) who was a massive fan of tartare. Tartare is basically raw meat. He'd go to expensive tartare restaurants (in Paris), where hygienically-raised cows were killed, and the meat cut out and served, all in the same day. He described tartare as being the best thing ever. (I've never tried it.)
ve55 6y ago
The worst part about this is that it's not an honest mistake, but rather a dishonest one: Google embeds as many 'answers' into their SRP as possible so that users do not leave their website. If Google just displayed links to users, then the user might actually click them, which would result in them leaving Google for another website, which is Not Okay. One of Google's largest efforts is to make sure they're the only website the user stays on, which is why they scrape contents from pages and display them on their SRP, why they want to hide the address bar from web browsers, why they push projects like AMP so hard, and many other things. Conveniently these efforts are also all of the nature that they can just claim they're helping the user get what they want more quickly - as long as they're using Google. Users also all trust Google a considerable amount, so very few will take any additional action after being instantly supplied with an answer that is scraped from some random website. Google gets 100% of the user flow, has 100% control over what answer to show, and of course can show the user some great ads while they're at it, while denying the source website traffic for their content.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  I blame the modern web for this. Google a question you have, especially something with mass appeal, (health, fitness, media, culture, travel, etc.) and click any of the top links. It will load slowly, 1000s of tracking scripts, there will be popups, scrolling might break, you will be redirected, more popups, half the screen covered by an ad, the site breaks, etc... In fact I just recorded myself doing this. Watch as I struggle to read the page, I end up not even able to scroll down: https://imgur.com/gallery/5fdBdcL https://imgur.com/gallery/5fdBdcL
  - boogies 6y ago
    I blame Google for the modern web. Tracking scripts, ads, etc.
    - jtsiskin 6y ago
      Yes. Google has created this monster of SEO optimized spam desperate to show you ads. If they changed their algorithm to prioritize sites with minimal ads and tracking, load quickly and aren’t bloated, and actually work with a good user experience, incentives would change. I guess that is what they are trying to do with AMP. But you would think they could do it by just changing their ranking algorithm.
makecheck 6y ago
I’m reminded of time learning a new language, and how little it takes to completely change the meaning of something. Imagine if you thought you understood 90% of what somebody said to you but you didn’t catch the word “not”; you would have exactly the wrong interpretation. Or what about skipping a modifier like “slightly” or “significantly”? (And don’t even get me started on sarcasm or other things that may not be detectable to all.) Google’s summaries, or any auto-summarization, risk inventing a new conclusion that was never part of the original. This is a cornerstone to critical thinking as well. If you spend your time trusting one-sentence tweets and other shallow writing, are you also asking yourself what hasn’t been stated? For example, I could say: “Engineers quitting Google amid latest executive actions”; the reality might be “it was exactly two engineers”, “their reasons for quitting were unrelated”, etc. It is extremely easy to create misleading summaries.
- kwillets 6y ago
  translate.google.com somewhat prone to misnegation. Basically one word doesn't change the score that much, and there are things like different word order that overwhelm it.
fredfoobar 6y ago
I've come to think that most of the tech on Internet act as a stupidity amplifier, consider: Twitter, Facebook
nikolastojkov 6y ago
Imagine taking headlines as concrete facts. Oh....
yters 6y ago
ai cannot understand irony
CarbyAu 6y ago
I like science. My kid is two. Major disappointment when Google('rockets') results in only sportsball. As in, zero indication that the word 'rocket' is to be associated with anything else. So I used duckduckgo. Same result. 1. Bitterly disappointed in the state of search engines today. 2. Reinforced the idea of teaching critical thinking to my child...
libso 6y ago
On a related note, how do I block Google from showing me the Answer blurb when I search for something, especially on desktop browsers?

270 points by Santosh83 6y ago

Relatedly, for sufficiently obscure historical figures for which a Wikipedia entry exists without any depictions in literature, we sometimes have images from the game "Crusader Kings 2" take the spot. r/crusaderkings are full of posts of these incidents, and at the time of this comment this is still the case for Cynewulf of Wessex.

vermilingua 6y ago
Relatedly, I’ve seen many many EU4 maps of countries come up in google results for those countries, which is concerning as they’re often (as is the nature of the game) inaccurate. At least with CK2, there’s really no harm done if someone sees a fictional portrait of a long dead minor ruler. With entire nations, the story is a little different.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
There are many cases as these. Facebook is another culprit here, pulling up info from various sources and presenting it as authoritative. I remember looking up the Dalai Lama and seeing at the bottom: "Nationality: Chinese" which made me laugh, but on the other hand things like these make many people upset.
- huffmsa 6y ago
  That is likely intentionally or a regional specific label to appease Chinese interests. Google maps will show you different borders and place names depending on where you are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-maps-political-borders/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-...
- em500 6y ago
  > I remember looking up the Dalai Lama and seeing at the bottom: "Nationality: Chinese" which made me laugh, but on the other hand things like these make many people upset. Out of curiosity, what do you believe to be the correct nationality?
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    I presume the Dalai Lama considers himself to be Tibetan. Now, perhaps you would consider that we ought to demand people's "nationality" be an actual UN member state which counts them as a citizen and since Tibet isn't a member... That's a bit awkward though because the "One China" policy ensures neither the Republic (in Taiwan) nor the PRC will allow the other to be a UN member at the same time as them. Also I find that I doubt we demand most people have documentary proof. Not taking their word for it is already a bit weird unless you're a border official. Is Samantha Bee really Canadian? I mean, she says she is so I just assumed...
    - brazzy 6y ago
      > the "One China" policy ensures neither the Republic (in Taiwan) nor the PRC will allow the other to be a UN member at the same time as them. Actually, 90+% of the population of the ROC, including their leaders, would be ecstatically happy to be an UN member separately from the PRC. The only reason they officially have a "One China policy" is that the PRC has made it clear that while they can tolerate the status quo of a rival government with zero prospects of actually challenging them controlling a small piece of their territory, they will very much not tolerate that piece of territory to become officially independant and provide an example for at least half a dozen others.
    - mc32 6y ago
      It could also be like asking what was Mozart’s nationality? Austrian or Holy Roman?
      - ginko 6y ago
        He was a Salzburger, which was an independent princedom back then.
        mc32 6y ago
        Is that what he is celebrated as these days? Which country takes pride in this composer these days?

bbotond 6y ago

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zB4HA54_0dsJ:https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=hu https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zB4HA5...

dredmorbius 6y ago

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130303005243/http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130303005243/http://gregegan.c...

dredmorbius 6y ago
NB: That points to what turns out to be an old version of a continuously updated page, from 2013. Actual content, which was offline at the time, dates to at latest 2016. Apologies for any confusion.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

czzr 6y ago

Interestingly a current search still shows this, and the root cause is the fact that there are no pictures of Greg Egan available. This is a fascinating failure mode - Google works on a best effort basis, so it doesn’t have a strong enough concept of “there is no correct answer to this question” or perhaps “my approach is wrong in this case”.

fock 6y ago
hm, actually, there are pictures of him available. At least to Google's secret heuristic-ML-mashup.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
Frankly, I find nothing fascinating here - more like a rookie mistake that nobody cares about - at least not stronlgly about to make something about it.
spurgu 6y ago
This is one of the many problems with Google nowadays. Instead of returning me the only 3 search results somewhat matching my query, it stupidly broadens my query so that it's able to show me pages and pages of (to me) completely unrelated results. For advertising I guess... > concept of “there is no correct answer to this question” or perhaps “my approach is wrong in this case”. Exactly. What's wrong with "We could only find 3 results matching your query. Try searching using some other terms, or try the following related queries."? It's so annoying to sift through the results just to realize that Google has no damn clue what I'm looking for.
crazygringo 6y ago
> Interestingly a current search still shows this It doesn't for me. I just get his home page as the top of search results, and a knowledge panel on the right-hand side that appears to accurately describe him (with zero photos), and a button "Claim this knowledge panel" which he could presumably use to correct any misinformation.
- czzr 6y ago

simion314 6y ago

This makes me wonder if Google developers ever get feedback from outside the company, it feels like some feature is released and developers move the the nsxt shiny thing and most feedback (the one that does not reach on a news paper) is ignored. Probably this is expected when you have many users and most of them are not paying.

kristopolous 6y ago
I wonder this about a lot of "tier 1" software, whenever I get easy to access critical business logic breaking bugs in Amazon, eBay, etc... I just find it utterly unacceptable. I'd drag my developers over hot coal if they somehow released what I see from these trillion dollars companies. I wasn't able to "add to cart" with my Amazon app for instance and things like YouTube and Instagram constantly crash when I'm adding new content. And many banking apps totally freak out when I use a password manager. This is pretty core operation. It's really amazing. I really don't know how the valley operates sometime. I'd imagine they supposedly have entire departments and dozens of people who are supposed to make sure this stuff works. Sometimes I find it so unbelievable that I try multiple devices to take the possibility that it's just me out and it's invariably reproducible on all. Maybe nobody at the company uses Android or maybe nobody uses their own product? (Maybe people who work at, say, Facebook don't actually like using it...thats understandable, but also unacceptable) I really don't know how it happens. Maybe their tests are 100% automated and no human checks it? I don't know.
- aflag 6y ago
  Maybe their quality control can be improved, but you give no insight in QA practices they are obviously skipping. Unless you're counting "dragging developers over hot coal" as your advice. In which case, I have serious doubts the system you're comparing them with is actually of better quality.
  - RandoHolmes 6y ago
    It's a problem with many developers. They think that because there can be a root cause analysis, they didn't fuck up. But there are times when something simply shouldn't be, definitionally. As in, if X happens, it doesn't matter what the root cause analysis is, something is wrong. To give a real life example, if you're driving drunk, the events and reasons leading up to the act don't really matter. They're not without value, but they're not important for determining that someone fucked up. This is what the poster you're responding to is saying. That the problems are so goddamned egregious that they simply shouldn't be. It's not up to the aforementioned poster to fix the problems, it's up to the companies in question wanting to be better.

dwighttk 6y ago

Published 2012, but updated since then... I think it should say 2016

fouc 6y ago

I think most HN people know Google is essentially a dumb search engine. We're not surprised when image results have no correlation with the search term. The problem is when other people fail to notice this disparity. They'll go on to write articles and blog post based on google's results. Later someone else will make a wikipedia page based on the blog post. Google's flawed results will now be confirmed by the wikipedia page. A virtuous cycle indeed.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago
Do you have an example of Wikepedia page where this actually happened?
AdrianB1 6y ago
Not really. I have a draft page in Wikipedia about a motorcycle model stuck for months to be approved because it does not have enough references even if it provides links to the manufacturer, dealers and motorcycle review sites. No, blog posts are not enough to put something in Wikipedia.
jfk13 6y ago
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
naringas 6y ago
> A virtuous cycle indeed. I think that "vicious" is more appropriate here
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  "indeed" stands for implied /s postfix operator. /s operator, applied to the word "virtuous", turns it into the word "vicious".
elliekelly 6y ago
Tangentially related, I had a surprising experience using DDG yesterday. It was... “smart” for lack of a better word. I was watching an episode of Star Trek TNG and a character was introduced that was a little over the top and vaguely resembled Jim Carrey so I searched “Star Trek Jim Carrey” and one of the top results (after a bunch of YouTube clips of some sort of Jim Carrey Star Trek skit) was the Wikipedia page for the specific episode I was watching. And here’s the interesting part: Jim Carrey wasn’t in it. My search results took my misguided query and still returned the one correct episode out of who knows how many hundreds of Star Trek episodes exist. I can only guess that enough people have searched “Star Trek Jim Carrey” and stopped searching once they got to information about that particular episode.

mm41 6y ago

Entitlement... There are 189 Greg Egan on Linkedin alone. No wonder Google doesn't show only his face. If his claim is valid, the result right now seems pretty ok to me...

StormChaser_5 6y ago
Why entitlement? If you just searched for Greg Egan and got a bunch of images for Greg Egan's that would be fine. But google is pulling together info as a bio of Greg Egan the science fiction author, presenting it as authoritative, and including a picture - not someone with this name but that specific person. The author being annoyed that Google is falsely saying this is what he specifically looks like doesn't sound entitled to me
- vffhfhf 6y ago
  Because this dude is like I filled million recaptacha I deserve more free result when AI research is so new and so slow. This dude thinks just coz human can do it means its easy and forgets the billion years of evolution that went to make our eye or the massive amount of processing our brains does to see an object.
- mm41 6y ago
  But it doesn't! Just look him up right now and you will see his bio doesn't include pictures of random people. There are pictures of his books covers and picture of other people users have been searching for (probably other authors and people loosely connected to him) Then in the middle part there are indeed fairly random pictures but these have nothing to do with his bio. They are just Google results.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

I haven't even read it yet but this website is exactly what I'd expect to see all sites like, customisable to your taste (and even needs, for visually impaired). And this is the first web page I've ever seen that does that since... the web began I guess.

ehnto 6y ago
For better or worse, some US regulations have made it a requirement for certain websites to have accessibility functionality. That has spawned a small ecosystem of plugins that aim to fulfill the regulatory requirements. Does they make for a more accessible websites? Judging by the plugins I have seen so far, I really doubt it. But it is at least a springboard to work from, and a kick in the butt for people who truly do care and are talented enough to pull it off properly. That said, these plugins, and their failings, are a reminder to me that accessibility can't be an after thought, it needs to be baked into your product's UX.
Santosh83 6y ago
Fictionpress and Fanfiction.net are also similarly customisable. You can change para width, font-size, background/foreground colour, and the font too (about 10 different kinds). Font-size is trivially done by the user zooming, but the other settings probably ought to be implemented by more sites, especially text heavy ones.

vffhfhf 6y ago

Do people expect google to be run by Magic? Google, wikipedia, even facebook, twitter and reddit have been a plus to modern human thinking. Just coz they fail somewhere doesnot mean they are bad. People dont remember how much things sucked before them. Also computer vision, AI are new things. ""And your mission was to organise the world’s information. How’s that working out for you so far?"" It working out so well. Internet is just 40 year old and we are here for fu*k sake. Some people have 0 bigger picture scene.

uniqueid 6y ago
> Just coz they fail somewhere does not mean they are bad. But looking at the bigger picture is not especially favorable to Google et al: Back in the 1980s, technology was advancing at a dizzying pace, and the world seemed on its way to peace, freedom, and brotherly love. Today the world has a dis/misinformation crisis, and authoritarianism is rising. Even if none of that is the fault of Google and social media, it casts doubt on the benefit of today's internet. How great can it be, given the state the world?
- warrenq 6y ago
  Ha Ha peace, freedom and love. What a naive idiot
- ddalex 6y ago
  I think you may be missing the forest for the trees, no offense intended. The world is still on its way to peace, freedom and love. What has happened is that the new communication paradigm surfaced truths that there were before but not acknowledged. Violence against blacks didn't start with Rodney King and didn't end with Jacob Blake. There were there before, and they got pushed into the spotlight exactly by the advancing technology of the Internet: videocameras, cell phones, search, video distribution, forums, etc. We are in the midst of the most important revolution of humankind - the knowledge revolution. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions before, it's going to turn up the society on its head, and it won't be pretty. But the society that follows will be way better that the one we have now.

alderz 6y ago

The author has written the novel "Permutation City", which I read after seeing it recommended here on HN a lot. It is a great book. I never thought I would be interested in sci-fi, but this book changed my mind. It deals with simulating conciousness and its implications. If you enjoyed the post, and the author's website, be sure to read some of his books too!

wcoenen 6y ago
If I remember correctly, Permutation City is more about the implications of modal realism (or "dust theory" in the book). Consciousness upload is used in the book to enter a simulated reality, but in itself that doesn't explain what happens when the simulation is turned off.
- Filligree 6y ago
  There's a fairly simple explanation, when you think about it. They arranged to have the simulation in our universe turned off, but not to have all simulations turned off -- there's no way they could do the latter. So they ended up in a simulation run by someone who'd started off by simulating Earth, and who -- more likely than not -- were especially interested in embedded simulations. Embedded simulations like theirs, but also like the Autoverse, and whoever it is was interested enough that they'd violate the simulated physics of Earth to keep simulating the cellular automaton despite the physics of Earth saying it should be shut off. Viewed from that perspective, the ending is... not predictable, exactly, but at least plausible.
- teekert 6y ago
  It does actually, and I really like this explanation: So, imagine you model a human mind. Now you can slow this model down, speed it up, the human mind does not know. In the novel states of the mind in time are computed, out of order, while watching reality, the mind observes it is time scambled but the mind itself does not notice. On the basis Egan concludes that the pattern that forms the mind may well be present in the universe somewhere, and the next time pattern, one time instance further may be somewhere completely different. But the mind does not notice. So the mind can just exist without it's physical basis being anywhere specifically... It get's one thinking. Honestly as the other response says, indeed there is a parallel universe part to it.. For which I didn't really understand it relation to "dust". I also liked "Quarantine" which made Quantum Mechanics somehow more intuitive to me. Truly a great writer.

coffeefirst 6y ago

Yep, I've also noticed a lot of really weird stuff from sketchy sources embedded in the answers panel. We forgot that the reason search engines were effectively exempt from libel/copyright etc. is because were just describing the web, they published the map but the content was on all the individual websites. It's a lot harder to argue that model still applies when you've got algorithms building out these micro-articles from increasingly disparate pieces. Somewhere here there's a line between a preview of a link and republication.

centimeter 6y ago
I’d argue that they also took on additional legal responsibility when they started censoring search results, whether it’s hard censorship like removing firearm-related products from shopping results or soft censorship like de-ranking right-biased news sources. If you take the entire internet and selectively filter it down, you have the power to craft any narrative as surely as if you were writing the opinion pieces from scratch yourself. It’s hard to call that anything except “editorial power”.
52-6F-62 6y ago
That has come to my attention more recently when looking for short answers to small medical questions surrounding a condition—things I'd forgotten, etc. I quickly learned how off-the-mark those can be. The feature is really clever and works great when it works, but sometimes just because something is formatted as an authoritative answer, it's promoted above actual correct information. It's almost slower than just looking for a qualifying source in those cases.

donclark 6y ago

I feel the same for Google, and other search engines as well. Are the results given pushing us to come together as a people - towards common goals?

crazygringo 6y ago

Is this article still relevant? When I search for "Greg Egan", the knowledge panel in the right column doesn't show any photos at all. And it even has a button "Claim this knowledge panel" that he could presumably use to make corrections. So is this article just old news, where Google has not only corrected its mistakes but also provided a manual way for people to fix misinformation about themselves? I'm not understanding why this article is appearing now in 2020. (Also, a search engine is always going to get some things wrong. Without knowing the rate of errors, a single example doesn't really mean much of anything.)

fxtentacle 6y ago
Highly relevant. Google will monetize fully automated mistakes and you're saying it's OK because the victims can manually clean up the mess later?
- crazygringo 6y ago
  No information on the web is 100% perfect or accurate. Even the NYT makes a host of mistakes daily across all its edited articles, and publishes corrections for the most serious ones when readers point them out. Google's results are largely accurate, and as long as it has a mechanism for correcting mistakes does seem to make it pretty OK to me. What are you suggesting any serious alternative be? That would actually work at scale?
  - tpxl 6y ago
    >What are you suggesting any serious alternative be? Not erroneously copy stuff?
    - summerlight 6y ago
      > That would actually work at scale? Probably "Not erroneously copy stuff?" is not a trivial thing to do at scale.
      - 6y ago

dorkwood 6y ago

I got a good one the other day. I searched "does freezing kill bacteria", and the featured answer came back "freezing food kills harmful bacteria that can cause food poisoning". I was curious, so I clicked through to read more. It turns out this text was taken from the headline at the top of a PDF. What the Google crawler didn't notice, however, was that the headline actually had another headline above it. The full text read "Myth: Freezing food kills harmful bacteria that can cause food poisoning".

pvaldes 6y ago
This was accurately fixed. Freezing definitely kills most types of bacteria
- umvi 6y ago
  Which, I'm assuming, is why all sushi in the USA must must be frozen and then re-thawed before serving.
  - yawz 6y ago
    Really!?! I had sushi at the bar many times and it was prepared right in front of me. Maybe you meant ingredients?
    - snug 6y ago
      Sushi grade fish must be flash frozen to kill any bacteria, worms, etc. in order to be served frozen. Most fresh (killed, butchered and served quickly) food isn't really great, either taste wise or health wise. Especially if it's not fully cooked. Most red meats sit out for a bit, either wet or dry aged, which enhances the flavors. Fish will need to be frozen or cooked to a safe temperature.
      - winter_blue 6y ago
        I knew someone (a French person) who was a massive fan of tartare. Tartare is basically raw meat. He'd go to expensive tartare restaurants (in Paris), where hygienically-raised cows were killed, and the meat cut out and served, all in the same day. He described tartare as being the best thing ever. (I've never tried it.)

ve55 6y ago

The worst part about this is that it's not an honest mistake, but rather a dishonest one: Google embeds as many 'answers' into their SRP as possible so that users do not leave their website. If Google just displayed links to users, then the user might actually click them, which would result in them leaving Google for another website, which is Not Okay. One of Google's largest efforts is to make sure they're the only website the user stays on, which is why they scrape contents from pages and display them on their SRP, why they want to hide the address bar from web browsers, why they push projects like AMP so hard, and many other things. Conveniently these efforts are also all of the nature that they can just claim they're helping the user get what they want more quickly - as long as they're using Google. Users also all trust Google a considerable amount, so very few will take any additional action after being instantly supplied with an answer that is scraped from some random website. Google gets 100% of the user flow, has 100% control over what answer to show, and of course can show the user some great ads while they're at it, while denying the source website traffic for their content.

jtsiskin 6y ago
I blame the modern web for this. Google a question you have, especially something with mass appeal, (health, fitness, media, culture, travel, etc.) and click any of the top links. It will load slowly, 1000s of tracking scripts, there will be popups, scrolling might break, you will be redirected, more popups, half the screen covered by an ad, the site breaks, etc... In fact I just recorded myself doing this. Watch as I struggle to read the page, I end up not even able to scroll down: https://imgur.com/gallery/5fdBdcL https://imgur.com/gallery/5fdBdcL
- boogies 6y ago
  I blame Google for the modern web. Tracking scripts, ads, etc.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
    Yes. Google has created this monster of SEO optimized spam desperate to show you ads. If they changed their algorithm to prioritize sites with minimal ads and tracking, load quickly and aren’t bloated, and actually work with a good user experience, incentives would change. I guess that is what they are trying to do with AMP. But you would think they could do it by just changing their ranking algorithm.

makecheck 6y ago

I’m reminded of time learning a new language, and how little it takes to completely change the meaning of something. Imagine if you thought you understood 90% of what somebody said to you but you didn’t catch the word “not”; you would have exactly the wrong interpretation. Or what about skipping a modifier like “slightly” or “significantly”? (And don’t even get me started on sarcasm or other things that may not be detectable to all.) Google’s summaries, or any auto-summarization, risk inventing a new conclusion that was never part of the original. This is a cornerstone to critical thinking as well. If you spend your time trusting one-sentence tweets and other shallow writing, are you also asking yourself what hasn’t been stated? For example, I could say: “Engineers quitting Google amid latest executive actions”; the reality might be “it was exactly two engineers”, “their reasons for quitting were unrelated”, etc. It is extremely easy to create misleading summaries.

kwillets 6y ago
translate.google.com somewhat prone to misnegation. Basically one word doesn't change the score that much, and there are things like different word order that overwhelm it.

fredfoobar 6y ago

I've come to think that most of the tech on Internet act as a stupidity amplifier, consider: Twitter, Facebook

nikolastojkov 6y ago

Imagine taking headlines as concrete facts. Oh....

yters 6y ago

ai cannot understand irony

CarbyAu 6y ago

I like science. My kid is two. Major disappointment when Google('rockets') results in only sportsball. As in, zero indication that the word 'rocket' is to be associated with anything else. So I used duckduckgo. Same result. 1. Bitterly disappointed in the state of search engines today. 2. Reinforced the idea of teaching critical thinking to my child...

libso 6y ago

On a related note, how do I block Google from showing me the Answer blurb when I search for something, especially on desktop browsers?