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Interesting and well-written article, but one big problem: why throw in the Siri abortion thing? It wasn't needed to legitimize the author's point, and if anyth
by gdubs 15y ago
Interesting and well-written article, but one big problem: why throw in the Siri abortion thing? It wasn't needed to legitimize the author's point, and if anything comes across as technically naive. While Siri contains easter eggs that were manually added by programmers, the vast majority of searches would have to be algorithmic. Siri fails to find an answer to many basic queries, so to say that the lack of a response to 'where can I get an abortion?' is due to a lack of insight on the part of 'male programmers' is specious.
- nextstep 15y agoYeah, I agree. The results Siri returns are from Google or WolframAlpha, so a lack of information on one subject is not necessarily Apple's oversight. I think that the abortion-directions issue was later attributed to Google's SafeSearch filter.
- rada 15y agoSiri uses Google by default. I just searched google local for "abortion", and Planned Parenthood was in fact listed. If SafeSearch filter is turned on, then it should not be finding prostitution providers either.
- gdubs 15y agoGoogle search results are vastly different these days depending on who (or what) is searching. My guess is that 'who is searching' in this case is a box in a datacenter, somewhere in the midwest.
- adolph 15y agoI agree with you and think it would be interesting to take a look at the world-view presented by the easter eggs or other special case affordances that exist and how they affect the folks who use the software.