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Google turned me into a serial killer
- hpkuarg 5y agoI'm glad this guy has a sense of humor about this, but I really hope that Google does right by him and that he doesn't get stuck in their Byzantine customer service process.
- jeswin 5y agoActually he should sue them. The damage to his reputation and prospects are real.
- paulpauper 5y agothis is google we're talking about. so good luck with that.
- cryptica 5y agoIt's disturbing how often people infer that Google is impervious to the law.
- paulpauper 5y agoThat would req. showing that law was broken. I don't think in this case it was. More like a mistake.
- ghaff 5y agoIf Google refused to fix it, it might be different. But I expect that, if someone were to file a suit, not even trying to get it fixed wouldn't be seen as acting in good faith.
- inimino 5y agoDoes every person who is impacted by this kind of thing have the responsibility to do Google's QC for them? What about people who never notice it? Maybe a lawsuit would be hopeless, but it sure would be nice to see some kind of real consequences here.
- dcow 5y agoHow do you even contact Google about an issue like this in the first place? My only communication with Google in the capacity of a user has been automated messages.
- bliteben 5y agoMeanwhile sending an email to Google asking for something to be fixed, could be seen as an act of insanity.
- cwkoss 5y agoMistakes can be illegal. Intent only matters for small subset of laws.
- retrac 5y agoIt's surprisingly easy, just time-involved, to sue large corporations in small claims, at least in some jurisdictions. Yes, they've got lawyers, but if you have a case you may still win. I sued one of the largest telecoms in Canada for not honouring a verbal contract, and won quite easily once I proved the facts in dispute. Businesses assume people won't have the commitment to carry through and actually take them to court over malfeasance. Probably mostly correctly. I'm not sure it was really worth the hassle.
- paulpauper 5y agoGoogle is not a typical large corp though. They will spend millions on top lawyers for even small cases even if settling costs far less, just to make a point that they do not lose. If a company shows a willingness to settle or they they lose easily, then that makes them vulnerable to future litigation. Contingency lawyers will not take on companies that do not lose or settle.
- H8crilA 5y agoAnd you know this because?
- pizza234 5y agoI don't agree with the parent's way to put it, however, there is at least some truth. There as been an interesting case - Aaron Greenspan vs Google: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2.... It's a very interesting and even entertaining read.
- astrange 5y agoYou're replying to a comment that says "in small claims" and lawyers don't appear in small claims court. Though I don't know about winning vs Google there, just that it's worked against Uber.
- retrac 5y ago
- acjohnson55 5y agoHe should sue to get it fixed if they don't fix it, but I believe he'd have to show evidence of harm if he were to sue for damages.
- pavon 5y agoFor libel, you generally have to show harm, but there are some claims that are assumed on their face to be damaging an no proof of harm is needed (libel per-se). Falsely accusing someone of being a serial killer would generally fall into this category. Edit: I think the harder part would be showing that people would believe the claim (which legally is separate from showing harm). Google could argue that since the box showed the serial killer died in the 80's that a reasonable person would realize it must be a mistake.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bcrosby95 5y ago> Google could argue that since the box showed the serial killer died in the 80's that a reasonable person would realize it must be a mistake. A reasonable person would realize which part was a mistake: that it's a picture of the serial killer, or that the serial killer died in the 80s?
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoFalsely claiming that someone committed a serious crime is per se defamation in many jurisdictions. There is no need to prove actual damage. It is damaging by definition.
- pvaldes 5y agoEasy to provide when will be detained at random airport for 10 hours until the authorities will triple-check all the info until everybody and the janitor will be satisfied. People has been stopped to take their fly for much less.
- wicket 5y ago
- protomyth 5y agoFiguring out or demonstrating the "Quantifiably injurious" part might be very hard https://thelawdictionary.org/article/when-to-sue-for-defamation-slander-and-libel/ https://thelawdictionary.org/article/when-to-sue-for-defamat...
- duskwuff 5y agoMight not be necessary. Many jurisdictions recognize certain types of claims, including accusations of serious crime, as defamation per se; no specific proof of harm is required.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoI just looked it up and google does have a workflow that allows you to send them a court order. Let's start there first before issuing a lawsuit. You only sue if you can prove damages for defamation. Which, as tepid as most people are on here about patent trolls, I can't imaging taking on google. It's literally like taking on god at this point.
- xxs 5y agoRight to be forgotten would be much easier to invoke. Suing in Bulgaria is likely to end up nowhere with Bulgaria having the worst courts in the EU (a primary reason not being in Schengen)
- schoolornot 5y agoHe'll be lucky if they don't suspend his Google account outright for raising the issue.
- gundmc 5y agoThis just seems like a bad faith comment. Is there ANY example of a user raising a legitimate concern like this and getting banned for it? This reads like cheap, low-effort bashing.
- RockmanZero 5y agothis just seems like a google-faith comment.
- cwkoss 5y agoGoogle has cheap, low-effort customer support, so I'll allow it.
- renewiltord 5y agoWait, how does that help? Low quality customer support hurts us. Low quality comments also hurt us. That just doubles the hurt for me. It doesn't compensate in any way. It's like some guy punching me saying "For the Green Team!" and then you come by and punch me saying "For the Yellow Team!". Like, dude, you didn't undo the first punch. I'm now twice-punched. I want to be zero punched.
- cwkoss 5y agoGoogle's (Youtube's specifically) automated processes have allowed the rise of extortion via their copyright systems using the threat of automatic account deletion. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47227937 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47227937 Their automated processes do result in account deletions, and they intentionally build their systems so it is hard to reach humans to resolve complaints, so I don't think that comment was particularly undeserved - I read it as jokingly superlative.
- xxs 5y agoImagine trying to get a date...
- runawaybottle 5y agoLol what? They have customer service process? News to me, how to reach them?
- martyvis 5y agoI found a Google One subscription is helpful for that. It's only a few dollars a month, which in fact I fund for free using Google Rewards dollars. You then get to speak to a real live person that actually respond properly, even with handwritten emails.
- eitland 5y agoThis happens? Can anyone else confirm it? The only time I have seen actual people in the loop was on two rather large GCP users and even then it was sometimes just "have you tried restarting it?"-level of support half the time.
- pulse7 5y agoI would sue for damage. EDIT: Because they put an image with unterlated information together in such a way that it misleads people.
- encryptluks2 5y agoDamages require proof. Unless they can show they lost something because of the mistake, then there are no damages.
- jeswin 5y agoIt could certainly affect someone's mental health and confidence.
- encryptluks2 5y agoBut the author indicated that it hasn't had an impact as of yet.
- andai 5y agoIsn't the search result page a form of slander? The burden of proof rests entirely on the slanderer.
- aikah 5y ago> Damages require proof. Unless they can show they lost something because of the mistake, then there are no damages. You're basing your understanding of slander/libel on US laws I presume? If that person lives in Europe, generally, the bar for a successful lawsuit is __extremly low__ , it only requires the information to be blatantly false, there is no need to demonstrate the victim incurred any damages.
- n_u_l_l 5y agoThe barrier for a successful lawsuit is indeed very low, and based on my limited understanding, I think you will likely win when you demand that Google changes the picture on their website. They will likely also have to cover a part of your legal costs. However if we are talking about monetary damages, those require hard proof of the damages and even then it is unlikely that they will have to pay all damages. Most lawyers I talk to usually recommend against suing for monetary damages.
- elliotbnvl 5y ago> Maybe letting a single internet company "organize the world's information" probably isn't such a great idea. Some food for thought. When put like this, the thought that one company controls virtually all information flow on the Internet is more than mildly terrifying.
- cratermoon 5y agoYes, and a dozen or two people, mostly white males, control the company.
- nusaru 5y ago> mostly white males What is this supposed to imply, exactly?
- sidlls 5y agoAn extreme reading: white men of the past and (some) of the present were/are racist, therefore we all are. It should go without saying that (probably) isn't a charitable reading.
- systemvoltage 5y agoIt boggles my mind how we went from a google search result to white supremacy. I'd like people to please exercise restraint, the world feels like it is falling apart where every conversation becomes political/racial. If this is going on HN, I wonder how it is elsewhere.
- sidlls 5y agoYeah, it’s a bit much. The “extreme” reading is slowly becoming the only acceptable one. Partly because of comments like the one precipitating the thread: there’s no good reason to try to connect these items.
- 5y ago
- varjag 5y agoA great ice breaker for your next job interview.
- soneca 5y agoAnd a deal breaker for dating apps.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI mean, the fact that the serial killer in question has been dead for forty years makes this conclusively "a funny story" and not "a red flag". But it also probably is mandatory to cover this ice breaker before the person you swiped on Googles you. "Just FYI, funny story, Google thinks I'm a serial killer. But that guy's been dead for years, and Google is mixed up."
- dbalatero 5y agoI've seen how bad people are at skimming things they read online though even when the facts are laying there in front of them, and I could easily see someone (hiring manager, dating app they matched with) just googling their name, seeing the same pic match, and instantly running for the hills.
- cryptica 5y agoFor most people, if they came across a CV of someone who might be a serial killer, they'd want to read the full article. It's not something that happens every day.
- dhosek 5y agoA common error is to assume that one's own views are those of "most people." Experience has taught me otherwise.
- TechBro8615 5y agoGoogle probably doesn't even render the birthday on mobile.
- tanto 5y agoIs not really hard to imagine that more automation of this kind might result in some automated processes which results in someone get shot at a border by light handed policy. This kind of thing should have very hard legal consequences for a company like Google. Imagine being labeled as some kind of murder/rapist/pedophile whatever and moving into a neighborhood which gets angry fast.
- DevKoala 5y agoWhen solving problems at scale with a 0.0000001% error rate ends up destroying someone’s life.
- H8crilA 5y agoThe error rate is way, way higher than that. But yes, still low, and that's what almost certainly happened here.
- DevKoala 5y agoI was just throwing a number. I don’t work at Google, but I have heard from friends who work at that scale that when bugs only affect a few thousand people, it is “safe” to ship.
- eitland 5y agoThe error rate is so high that I see errors on a weekly or even daily basis when I fall back to Google and I only do 2 - 40 searches a day on Google these days. I'm not searching a lot of Bulgarian names but I do search for npm packages and the like and despite my best efforts they frequently show me something completely different than what I searched for. The saddest thing however is that DDG is just as bad, I use it just because I don't like Google and because it is easier to get from DDG to Google than the other way around.
- ISL 5y agoOf course, with a blog post and an HN article, algorithms for decades will now say, "Yep. $(THAT_GUY) <--> $(SERIAL_KILLER)".
- a-and 5y agoWhat's unfortunate is that Hristo Georgiev is a very common Bulgarian name. This isn't a case where a highly uncommon name can lead to a high degree of certainty in association.
- dhosek 5y agoI have a longstanding project where I rank graduate creative writing programs by their alumni's appearances in a selection of prize anthologies. This means I spend a lot of time googling authors. There are a number of authors whose internet presence is shadowed by criminals with the same name. Then there are those who are shadowed by more famous people of the same name such as the Australian poet Kate Middleton or the New England essayist Ravi Shankar. Then there are the authors whose names are the same as other writers. So far I haven't had to do an IMDB-style (II) after someone's name although it's come close with some authors differing only by the presence or absence of a middle initial. And one instance I had to try three times to find the correct author of one particular name because there were two others (not anthologized) who published under identical names. I have a short story that turns on the whole name confusion thing that was published last year. https://sandyriverreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020-edition-Draft-2-2.pdf https://sandyriverreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020...
- ghaff 5y agoThe most problematic thing is when you share an unusual name with someone notorious who might plausibly be you at first glance. I went to grad school with someone who later lived in NYC. He shared a name with someone who basically was the cause of George Steinbrenner (NY Yankees owner) getting banned from baseball for a few years during the same period. Obviously not a popular NYC figure. This was pre-web etc., but my friend ended up with death threats left on his answering machine.
- brewdad 5y agoI have an uncommon name yet there are at least 4 (I discovered a new one today via Google) of us who share the same name and are all within 2 years in age. One of the other versions of "me" lives in the same state I grew up in. Fortunately, none of us are too notorious, though one alternate "me" has pretty poor credit and another has been sued a couple of times recently.
- teraflop 5y agoSci-fi author Greg Egan has written about falling victim to a similar phenomenon, where photos of other people were showing up next to descriptions of him. No serial killers involved, though. http://gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html http://gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
- frumper 5y agoThis is a winning headline. It's got drama and levity that just drew me in. Bravo sir. edit: The article was an interesting read too.
- html5web 5y agoGoogle your name from time to time. I do it to protect my personal information. I don't want my personal information, including my home address, email, phone number etc. to be exposed on search.
- Tenoke 5y agoI literally just got my wallet back because someone Googled me, and could find an email easily since my site ranks well for my name so there's definitely some benefit to being exposed.
- kevingadd 5y agoHaving your personal email on your personal website is a little different from someone having posted your home address and phone # on some 'pay us money for people's personal info' website, though, and the latter is what you're going to spot by doing searches
- ghaff 5y agoSome things are public records or, like email, are pretty much inevitably exposed if you do things in public. But fortunately a lot of the "deep web" stuff that used to be free generally isn't any longer. (And cell phone numbers aren't accessible nearly as much as landlines were.)
- jetrink 5y agoThe info boxes sometimes contain surprising errors. I recently searched for Picasa and was informed that it was invented by Pablo Picasso in 2002! Google 'knows' Picasso died in the 1970s and it 'knows' he released a popular software program in 2002. That's an obvious contradiction requiring the simplest of rules to detect, but the system is just a dumb text extractor. (Interestingly, Google assistant gave the correct answer for 'who created Picasa?' so that system must use a different knowledge-base.) I, being compulsively helpful, reported the error and it was quickly fixed. Maybe I'm part of the problem.
- Arnavion 5y agoA few days ago, a person in an IRC channel I'm in was convinced AMD GPUs have CUDA cores, because they put "amd 5500rx cuda cores" into Google, saw the infobox entry that said "How many CUDA cores does a Rx 5700 have? 2,560 CUDA cores" and stubbornly refused to accept Google could be wrong. Amusingly that same infobox then has a table that states "2,560 stream processors" in the "Radeon RX 5700 XT" column. So one half of the ML parsed the web page correctly, presumably into some internal non-ambiguous representation, but then the other half of the ML interpreted it incorrectly anyway. Also, the "5500rx" (search query), "Rx 5700" (infobox title) and "RX 5700 XT" (infobox table header) are three different cards with different numbers of stream processors. And people wonder why ML gets a bad rep.
- js4ever 5y agoIndeed, especially when AI/ML decide to ban your account with no recourse and no explanation ...
- lostlogin 5y agoIt starts to get pretty circular when you consider that GPUs can be used for ML.
- breakingcups 5y agoIt's so strange, that infobox has never given me an accurate answer or an accurate question! What I mean by that is, it will find some snippet that sort of looks like it answers the question, but it's nearly always misleading. It's either lacking context, creating a question that doesn't make sense or just plain wrong. I avoid the thing like the plague and look for real answers in the actual search results (which are often the same pages, but at least provide context as to what question they are answering and how)
- romseb 5y agoSuggestion: Create a new Wikipedia article with the same Name, upload your own profile photo onto it and put a Disambiguation (Programmer/Hacker) in it so that Google will associate it correctly. Alternatively, add a drawing of the rapist to the original Wikipedia article. Interestingly, for me, another Hristo (german principal investigator) appears on the right side when I google the name.
- Tenoke 5y agoYou'd be surprised to learn how hard it is to add anything to Wikipedia and have it stay accepted.
- hadlock 5y agoI added the wiki page for Kamala Harris' dad (a professor) to wikipedia (shortly after Biden announced her as his running mate in the election), and within literally 2 minutes, two different people had flagged it for deletion. One reason given was that academics need to be especially notable to warrant a wiki page, completely ignoring his relation to her daughter, which was mentioned in the original draft of the article stub. All proposals for deletion have since been removed, but I was surprised at the ferocity at which users want to delete new articles.
- ghaff 5y agoThere's definitely a deletionist cult within Wikipedia. While acknowledging that it shouldn't be a dumping ground for essentially individual web pages, it goes too far IMO for people who have clear documented credentials and public history. This favors certain occupations over others of course--including academics, journalists, etc.--who have public bios, papers/articles, and often articles about them. But deletionist tendencies in these areas tend to work against claims that it's all about verifiability.
- romseb 5y agoYes, I have seen the deletion fetish on Wikipedia first-hand many times. It made me stop contributing to it.
- exporectomy 5y agoThis kind of mixup isn't too rare. I remember Googling "sigmoid" used to show a mixture of information about the function and the colon as if they were the same thing. There was also a famous case of something like "7 deadly sins" showing a rainbow flag for the sin of pride. It's creepy because it's presented in such a well designed integrated way yet a completely ridiculous mistake that a human wouldn't make.
- nerbert 5y agoYeah, I've been googling people in the last months (job search, interview prep) and google is really bad with homonyms. Occurrences like in this article is the norm when you're not looking for someone famous. Says a lot that Google rolled it out.
- tpmx 5y agoHa. Just googled my own name. I know there are ~5 living people with the same semi-unusual name. They now show wikipedia text for an 18th century person (with the same name) along with a great 2020ish color photo of one of other currently living people with this name. I've purposefully kept my few necessary online photos in grayscale, perhaps that helps ever so slightly with their brilliant industry leading AI algorithms...
- ElijahLynn 5y agoThat seems like defamation too. Some legal consequences on Google's end if you ever pursued it.
- bjarneh 5y agoUltimate click bate title.
- dqpb 5y agoCould he sue for slander?
- FabHK 5y ago(IIRC, libel is about written defamatory falsehoods, while slander is about spoken defamatory falsehoods.)
- annoyingnoob 5y agoNext time LinkedIn asks why I don't have a profile picture I'm going to provide a link to this article. Scenarios like this are why I do my best to keep my photo off the internet.
- walrus01 5y agoIf you want to see a terrible example of Google automatically finding a "best" search result for the #1 entry of something, google the following: "how many raccoons can fit"
- bartread 5y agoFor anyone who's curious but not enough to actually run the search themselves, the top results (using the string without quotes) all relate to how many raccoons can fit into a human anus. No, I am not joking, and this is the result of 20+ years of web search development and decades of cutting edge AI research, right here. Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days. It has close to zero clue about quality or relevance.
- yongjik 5y agoWell, apparently it's a meme. Yes it's objectively terrible, but I'll bet 80% of people searching for "how many raccoons can fit" are actually looking for those results. (I mean, unless you're buying a container to transport your twenty pet raccoons, it's just not the kind of phrase most people would spontaneously search for.) Basically, it's as relevant as searching for "the answer to life" and getting results spammed with 42.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoGoogle knows the answers to the questions we were afraid to ask.
- CountDrewku 5y ago>all relate to how many raccoons can fit into a human anus. Presumptuous of you to assume that's not exactly what I want to see when I search for that specific phrase.
- krisoft 5y ago> Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days. Sorry, that is a bit over the top. What result would you expect for that query? Folks took a silly premise and made a joke about it and google in the absence of anything more relevant shows you their joke. While i was typing this query in I had to ignore the much more usefull suggestions: “How many raccoons in a litter”, “How many raccoons in the world”, “How many raccoons are in the us”, “How many raccoons live together” And it provided reasonable looking lead to answer all of these question. And it did this while I was seriously mistyping the animal’s name! If you don’t recognize how amazing this is then you left your blinders on. Let’s take this query for example: “How many raccoons are in the us”. This is a well formed human question, but it is not how one used to query a search engine. You were supposed to try to guess what words would appear on your imagined page and type those in. So for example you would type in “raccoon population us”. Except of course you were supposed to also know that the word “us” is ambigous, and appears too often in the wrong sense, so you would transform it to “United States” to help the machine. So by the expectations and conventions of the early google this is a badly formed query. A user error realky, yet now it can answer it! And it doesn’t just gives me a link where there might be an answer. Oh, no! It pulls the most important sentence out of the page and pasts it over the link. This. Is. Freaking. Magic. Are there mistakes? Sure. The linked serial killer thing is quite bad for example. But if you pick the raccoon example as your main argument then you lost me.
- flyrain 5y agoIt is still there up to my search. Please fix it, Google.
- ape4 5y agoBing has also turned him into a serial killer. Its the unique name and a Wikipedia entry. https://www.bing.com/search?q=hristo+georgiev https://www.bing.com/search?q=hristo+georgiev
- html5web 5y agobing is not showing his picture though
- firebaze 5y agoAccording to the article, the name is not unique at all (for his people at least).
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoIndeed, for a Bulgarian name it's about as far away from unique as it can be. Both the first name and last name would be in the top 10 most common names in Bulgaria. Imagine something like "David Brown".
- karamanolev 5y agoBing has definitely not turned him into a serial killer. The main issue is associating his photo (wrongly) with the serial killer Wikipedia article. Bing is not doing that and instead showing a box with the Wikipedia article (without a photo, as it is in Wikipedia) and, separately, other results. The name is not unique - I personally know two people named that and in the whole country, there are probably hundreds. He has also stated that.
- dave0585 5y agoSuch nice smile on a corporate picture, that's hilarious
- tytso 5y agoI don't see what the big deal here. The serial killer really did exist, and has the same name as the author of the blog post. Searching for "Hristo Georgiev" using Bing and DuckDuckGo turns up the article about the serial killer as the first link. Why is this not "DuckDuckGo turned me into a serial killer", other than people hating on Google? Suppose his name was "Thomas Edison"; would the title of the article then read, "How Google turned me into the inventor of the light bulb"? Or suppose someone shared the name, with say, Slobodan Milosevic; is it Google's fault that a web search of that person's name turns up articles about someone who was charged with genocide and other war crimes?
- ashtonbaker 5y agoYou may have missed that the photograph is not a photograph of the serial killer, but rather the author of the blog post.
- imperistan 5y agothe big deal is that the author's photo is shown next to the information about the serial killer. If that wasn't the case, it wouldn't have been a problem of course.
- objectivetruth 5y agoThe photo that Google shows in the results is the problem, NOT a link to the Wiki article. Google put a picture of Hristo-the-NON-serial-killer alongside a small article about Hristo-the-serial-killer. You really don't think that's a "big deal" to the Non-Serial-Killer?
- varjag 5y agoThe photo in the Google summary card is that of the author, not of the serial killer.
- thecsw 5y agoThe whole point of the post is that Google grabbed his picture and attached it to the search card of said killer, so it looks like he is that person not only by name, but by first searched photo as well.
- tzs 5y ago> It turns out that Google's knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer. Which is also surprisingly strange because my name isn't special or unique at all; there are literally hundreds of other people with my name, and despite of all that, my personal photo ended up being associated with a serial killer. I can't really explain to myself how this happened, but it's weird. In any case, I am now in the process of reporting this Knowledge Graph bug to Google. I believe that there is a simpler explanation. The Wikipedia article is there in that side box because it is the top hit for "hristo georgiev" on Google's main search page. The picture is there because it is the top hit for "hristo georgiev" on Google's image search page.
- inimino 5y agoYes, but: the text snippet is clearly labeled "Wikipedia" and is in the same box with the photo. Combined with the Wikipedia article being the first result, this would certainly give the average person casually searching the impression that the data in the box comes from Wikipedia, which tends to be a reasonably accurate, conservative source on living persons. The idea of mashing up the first image search result with the wikipedia snippet with no indication they are from totally unrelated sources seems pretty careless and irresponsible.
- hermitdev 5y agoOne might be so inclined to label Google a peddler of fabricated misinformation... I seriously can't believe that the sources of the image and text aren't labeled with their respective sources. Doing so seems basic, obvious and trivial. Not doing so seems to be a blatant attempt to hide expected inaccuracies and make meaningless combinations of information seem more authoritative than it actually is. While I think this individual would have a hard time in any court system, let alone the US court system, could Wikipedia perhaps have a claim of damages for libel (or something to this effect) due to misattributed information and reputational damage?
- Breza 5y ago
- williesleg 5y agoGood luck shit head
- stewx 5y agoPraying that Google turns me into a serial killer so I never have to work again. Settlement deal will be epic.
- cbsmith 5y agoAll I'm saying is try being named Chris Smith. ;-)
- m1117 5y agoThat post is just a justification and alibi.
- yongjik 5y agoI think it was Rachel - many years ago, for a few days, when you search "Rachel" at Google it would show a snippet from Wikipedia: > Rachel was a Biblical figure, the favorite of Jacob's two wives, and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel ... ... along with a happy smiling face of some office worker somewhere, named Rachel, of course. It was glorious.
- nomoreusernames 5y agoblows my mind that people didnt see this coming. and these guys want self driving cars. and all i ever wanted was a hoverboard that can go over water AND land. maybe fly an x wing. already it in VR. so im pretty ok with that. pretty disappointed that the future isnt more like the jetsons. it should go flintstones -> looneytunes -> jetsons
- armatav 5y agoThankfully you already have a job - next job should be journalism with a title like that, lmfao - 10/10
- smdz 5y agoSimilar mismatch stuff exists with Google Scholar on two patent applications(now abandoned) where I contributed. It has my name but somebody else's photo and job title. Cannot apply to correct it just because I do not have any University email.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- silviot 5y agoArchived version of the google search for "Hristo Georgiev": https://archive.is/ZizdK https://archive.is/ZizdK
- neil_s 5y agoI filed a bug. I don't work on the KG team but hopefully it'll get redirected to the right people and fixed asap.
- protomyth 5y agoGoogle also has a problem with its news.google.com when they get their news from certain sources. Snoopes headlines are shortened and put up as if they were true. This resulted into some really vile headlines.
- throwaway789256 5y agoAnd Twitter turned me into an a*hole. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- DoreenMichele 5y agoThis kind of thing is part of why I go ask people questions in areas where I don't have a lot of domain knowledge rather than just search for it. (That's not to imply I don't do a search first. That seems awkwardly worded and I can't think of a better way to say it.) I'm a decent read of people and talented at figuring out who actually makes sense and should be listened to. So going to people with domain knowledge and talking to them is usually the most efficient and effective means for me to get meaningful information when I am out of my depth. It's also why I try to be patient with people online and answer seemingly "dumb" questions instead of telling people to google it. In many cases, if you aren't familiar with the subject, you won't know the best search terms and you won't know that the top result is commercial garbage and not really the gold standard source on the subject. I routinely provide links for things like SRO because not only do people often not know that stands for Single Room Occupancy, if you google it you get a variety of unrelated hits (Standing Room Only, for example). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy I was involved for a time with The TAG Project. I generally try to remember to provide a link for that as well because when I search for it, the thing I was involved with is not the top hit. The top hit is thetagproject.com. I worked for tagfam.org and it is typically the third hit when I search for it. I fairly often see people being obnoxious about "you should Google that" and I sometimes understand why they are aggravated with certain things, but I generally think that's asshole behavior.
- neartheplain 5y agoGoogle's Knowledge Graph info boxes are automatically-generated and littered with errors. I've been burned twice on operating hours, once for my local bank and once for a convenience store, driving over each time only to find the place closed. In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website. I've also seen bad KG results for medical conditions, listing the wrong symptoms or describing easily-treatable maladies as "Incurable". Now I actively ignore the info box and intentionally click through to an authoritative non-Google website. To a non-technical user, I'm sure the box looks like a human-curated result which they're more likely to trust. Maybe that's the goal of Google's UI choices. Couldn't be further from the truth.
- judge2020 5y ago> . In both cases, the correct hours were posted on the business's website Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the same one that dictates what appears in Google Maps for claimed businesses), so if the owners are updating their website but not updating that (or checking their email for emails from google that say '[business], are you open on 4th of July?') it'll show incorrect info.
- neartheplain 5y agoEven if 90% of businesses play along (doing Google's data entry work for them), the 10% chance of my wasting half an hour makes it worth ignoring the info box and double-checking each time.
- clydethefrog 5y agoIt has also been a waste of working hours at our offices. I work at libraries and am responsible for the communication towards visitors — we are slowly opening up all our venues again with lifting of corona measures, which mean we need to update our opening times. With one click I can reverse them on our own website but I have to update every location manually on google results. Anyone can also change these opening times plus they might just change them again based on some third party website that scrapes outdated opening times.
- anigbrowl 5y agoGoogle is being eaten by its own algorithm at this point, and increasingly reminds me of Lycos (if you don't get it, be glad you're still young).
- gumby 5y agoIf I knew the author this would be cool: AFAIK I've never met a serial killer! Of course were I him it might be pretty bad. Serial killer is serious enough that people might consider there to have been a bug (as there was). But something less outlandish, like a misattributed fraud arrest, could have some pretty bad consequences.
- make3 5y agoHe still shows up as the image of a serial killer to me
- prezjordan 5y agoThe riff on cancel culture sort of soured the entire post for me, to be honest. But otherwise I really enjoyed this read and hope you get it sorted out.
- pvaldes 5y agoI hope he don't try to fly, or take a train, or cross a frontier in a few years, or things could escalate really fast. Some people wouldn't need much more excuses to shoot first and ask later. I wonder if the local sheriff could give him a small signed note explaining the problem to be shown to other policemen just in case. To assure at least that the local police in this place is aware of the situation (maybe ask them directly for advice?) could avoid future troubles.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>I am now in the process of reporting this Knowledge Graph bug to Google. In an ironic twist, the process of trying to get support from Google will probably drive him to become a serial killer.
- shadowgovt 5y agoIt's actually pretty simple: click the Feedback button, identify the flawed data, and explain the need to correct it. That dataflow is human-curated.
- draaglom 5y agoSee also the google results for: "when was running invented" "how many terashits does the ps5 have"
- ant6n 5y ago“1784 Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time”. “69 terashits ppl when the ps5 is revealed to have 69 terashits per megafart.”
- ab_testing 5y agoI think this is a legit case of defamation and the author should be able to sue Google in local courts and get a judgement.
- cwkoss 5y agoYou should seriously consider suing for defamation if this isn't fixed within a few days. This is an egregious error, especially if it was done by an automated system (and this could be a systemic issue affecting many others). I think you have a decent chance of getting a five figure+ settlement from this. Talk to a lawyer about your options. EDIT: When I search "Hristo Georgiev" (from US IP) there is no longer an image in the infobox. (As of 21:55:10 UTC, June 24, 2021) I think a google engineer saw this HN post :-D (You could still talk to a lawyer - remedying it now does not alter the fact that you were previously defamed. But Google has a stronger position having now remedied it)
- Cheezemansam 5y ago>I think you have a decent chance of getting a five figure+ settlement from this. Against Google? I am more inclined to think the dude is actually a serial killer than that he has a chance of winning a defamation suit.
- cwkoss 5y ago"Google wrongly called me a serial killer" is a story many news outlets would love to run. He has the capacity to give them massive amounts of bad press, in a time where US regulators and politicians are closely looking at the dangers of automated algorithms from tech monopolies. I think he has a very good chance of receiving a settlement, Google will not want to take this to court.
- teawrecks 5y agoNice try, serial killer ;)
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoIf you search my first and last name, the first result is of two 18 year olds who burned a house down because one kid has my first name and the other has my last name. For me it goes: github burned a house down twitter account I no longer have access to Thanks google...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rdiddly 5y agoEven if I didn't know about the mistake, I would still think idly that something was amiss, because that's the best-dressed and friendliest-looking goddamn serial killer I've ever seen!
- oblak 5y agoIt's not like most media outlets would show the nicest possible picture of someone accused of multiple rapes and murders.
- SrslyJosh 5y ago> The rampant spread of fake news and cancel culture has made literally everyone who's not anonymous vulnerable. Google screwing up their knowledge graph is neither "fake news" nor "cancel culture". Misusing these terms makes them useless for actual discussion.
- dcow 5y agoYou missed the point. In a world of rampant “fake news” and “cancel culture”, Google screwing up their knowledge graph is dangerous ammunition that could be used to attack somebody’s reputation (which might lead to real/permanent damages before or regardless of whether the error can be corrected).
- varispeed 5y agoWere you ever emailing a company a serial number of a device or told your friends that you made a killer deal on something? Probably that's why :-) Please don't kill me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- architectonic 5y agoThat's exactly what a serial killer would say!
- dannyphantom 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27477797 17:19 Quick search shows your image has been removed from the right side panel.
- spoonjim 5y agoIf you find the right lawyer you will get at least $1 million out of this. Even if you don't feel like doing this, PLEASE do it for the greater good. Google will only start caring about these things if it costs them money. Money is the only language a corporation is fundamentally equipped to understand.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoYou say you should focus on more productive things than suing, but suing in this situation seems very productive
- coding123 5y agoYou know what bugs me about these kinds of things - the millions of people that have already had this happen to them, but are terrible at public speaking or writing pretty much have no chance of getting these things corrected. Yes, we're all glad Hristo seems to have his situation fixed, but it did go viral and he's a great writer. What about all the others out there that can't do this for themselves?
- murphyslab 5y agoI recently encountered the same underlying problem with Google's knowledge graph. I do a lot of scientific image analysis using an ancient (but reliable!) piece of software called ImageJ [0]. There's a more recent distro of the same called FIJI [1]. So when I tried looking for how to extract EXIF data for GPS coordinates using ImageJ (not even mentioning FIJI), Google returned an info box about the Fiji-the-nation and provided the coordinates of said nation: https://i.imgur.com/HxSh8Zv.png https://i.imgur.com/HxSh8Zv.png [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5554542/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5554542/ [1]: https://imagej.net/software/fiji/ https://imagej.net/software/fiji/
- tgbugs 5y agoGlorious. False positives on the synonym match gone wild. This is the kind of thing that deep learning was supposed to solve. The fact that it is failing from specific (imagej) to general (fiji) is beyond the wildest dreams of anyone doing quality assurance. I'm guessing the neural nets have been slacking by trying to do pure substitution matches and the devs have been rewarding them at the worst possible time. Wow. This is like seeing a toddler who is screaming in public and the parents are actively giving them candy to try and get them to stop. Wow. In case anyone doubts that this is real I'm seeing it too https://i.imgur.com/PXepl6C.png https://i.imgur.com/PXepl6C.png
- eitland 5y agoThis started going downhill about a decade ago. I wrote about it 8 years ago and I am fairly sure I had seen it going on for a while already at that time: https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/?m=0 https://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/?m=0
- Aeolun 5y agoWhat I think is more interesting is that the box displays that the serial killer is 65 years of age, even though they were executed in 1980.
- generationP 5y agoGreg Egan (the geometer and sci-fi writer) had a similar (if much less harmful) issue for years, which he blogged about at https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html https://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html . "We made a profile of you, and if you think it's wrong, you'll have to register and share the right info with us" has been one of the safest giveaways of data hucksters. I used to think Google was the one exception, but by now I believe I should have trusted the rule. At least someone is having fun with it: https://www.forgednfast.com/why-was-google-search-telling-people-to-throw-their-car-batteries-into-the-ocean/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThrowing%20car%20batteries%20into%20the,it%20as%20the%20top%20answer https://www.forgednfast.com/why-was-google-search-telling-pe....
- mjparrott 5y agoIt shouldn’t require a HN front page story to fix something like this
- eitland 5y agoNews at 11: Google search results are now almost as bad as what they replaced, sometimes worse. I've said some time ago already that there is a multi billion niche waiting for whoever wants to do what Google used to do: - input field in middle of page - user types text into field - software shows list of pages that contain said text. Modifiers can be used to influence exactly how exactly the matching will be - the company is nice and reliable and goes out of their way not to be evil
- progre 5y agoI'm still sad that runnaroo went away as it felt like searching google felt like 10 years ago. https://www.runnaroo.com/ https://www.runnaroo.com/
- bor100003 5y agoI'm sharing a name and surname with a (Bulgarian) criminal. Not sure what to do since it's not a problem so far and google doesn't show any of my pictures.
- martin1975 5y agothe best google result I ever saw was "disney children songs" with a google image search returning a very explicit pornographic picture.... I have no idea whether this is result of deliberate bombing or maybe something else. This does not surprise me at all - as I've seen completely wrong results for many other things...wrong years...wrong names...associated with people or events....
- whamtet4 5y agoWell dressed serial killer!
- throwdbaaway 5y agoSomehow there is no mention here yet about this infamous rant: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/why-google-needed-graph-serving-system/ https://dgraph.io/blog/post/why-google-needed-graph-serving-... > I started a project to unite all Google OneBoxes under this graph indexing system, which involved weather, flights, events, and so on. Now we know who's to blame :)
- eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y agoNever post your photos on the Internet.
- qwerty456127 5y agoThis seems a hardcore case of moral damage worth at least some hundreds thousands dollars in a settlement or even suing some millions dollars out of them, doesn't it? Perhaps you should at least ask a lawyer before just humbly reporting the bug to them and forgetting.
- Egrodo 5y agoWhat damages were there though? You can't sue (in the US) based on the possibility something might have happened.
- qwerty456127 5y agoWell, whoever googled him would conclude they should really avoid him. He could have missed a lot of great job, business and personal relations opportunities during the period Google was saying he was a serial killer.
- ramblerman 5y agoIt seems per the blog post that google fixed it quite quickly. I wonder how they do that. Do they just have a manual intervention list, where they can code exceptions to the ML results? Otherwise it seems non trivial to quickly come up with another algorithm that does't have this particular problem.