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> It seems very improbable This is I think the critical point. It’s one of the core assumption that is correct for us to have in our day to day interactions w

> It seems very improbable This is I think the critical point. It’s one of the core assumption that is correct for us to have in our day to day interactions with other real people, and we also are able to adjust the probability levels looking at the person or the context, and follow up depending on the reaction to our answer. None of that applies to Google Search [0], and we are fed with “most probable” results without qualifiers, little to no sensible adjustments, and very little control or opt out options. Billions of people use Search every day, at these scales what is “improbable” actually happens millions of times, and I feel too many people are willing to throw the odd ones out under the bus, even if the current situation isn’t perfect either for the 90 part of the 10/90 split. [0] search personalization based on logged in profile could be used, but in practice they only apply that to very crude adjustments like country, language and frequent searches.

tshaddox 5y ago
There is something to be said about how failure cases are handled even for systems that are almost always (say, 99.9%) successful. This is particularly true for systems where failure cases cause harm to people. A common example might be assumptions about people's names that are implemented in some form on a government website. Perhaps it is the case that 99.9% of people in this jurisdiction do have a first name and a last name each of which are representable in Unicode with a character count less than 50. But that's still 0.1% of people who now can't get a driver's license, and that's unacceptable. However, in this particular case, I think the very low probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars, combined with the very low probability of any measurable harm being done to those people by Google's response, makes me conclude that this is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would call "broken."
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  You are bringing a very good point. On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing. For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display. And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query. There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action. Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.

tshaddox 5y ago

There is something to be said about how failure cases are handled even for systems that are almost always (say, 99.9%) successful. This is particularly true for systems where failure cases cause harm to people. A common example might be assumptions about people's names that are implemented in some form on a government website. Perhaps it is the case that 99.9% of people in this jurisdiction do have a first name and a last name each of which are representable in Unicode with a character count less than 50. But that's still 0.1% of people who now can't get a driver's license, and that's unacceptable. However, in this particular case, I think the very low probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars, combined with the very low probability of any measurable harm being done to those people by Google's response, makes me conclude that this is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would call "broken."

makeitdouble 5y ago
You are bringing a very good point. On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing. For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display. And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query. There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action. Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.