Google, the Stupidity Amplifier

http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html

by markbnine • 10 years ago

7 2 10 years ago

scholia• 10 years ago

Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan is complaining because Google keeps showing photos of other people called Greg Egan while claiming they are him.

As a Facebook user, I thought the problem of face recognition was pretty much solved. Even if not, it seems peculiarly stupid of Google to show photos of several completely different people under the label "Greg Egan is an Australian science fiction writer".

A partial solution would be to post several authenticated photos of the real (in this case) Greg Egan, but if I search Google on my own name, I see several other people's photos come up as well...

principalbundle• 10 years ago

Egan makes it clear on his web site that he has chosen not to publish any photos of himself online. Any human who speaks either English, French, Italian, Spanish or Czech would know this after reading http://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm ... and there are some human-curated sites where the message has clearly been understood and repeated (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan and http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32699.Greg_Egan ).

But apparently Google's algorithms don't allow for this possibility, so in the absence of the kind of signal they're expecting, they faff around amplifying noise. But even if it's beyond their ability to understand the simple declarative sentences on sources like Egan's web site and the Wikipedia article that say there are no photos, there are at least three things in the current sidebar results that are obvious bugs, and would be trivial to fix.

1. They have used photos from primary sources that are pages related to someone called "Greg Egan", but have nothing in their content, or context, to suggest that they are about a science fiction writer of that name. If a web page does not contain the words "author", "writer" or "book" at least once, then it is not about a writer. The pages they've taken images from include a lawyer, a painter, a random Twitter account, and a random Flickr post, all of which would be eliminated by that simple test.

2. They have used photos from secondary sources of extremely dubious quality, mainly script-generated regurgitations of Wikipedia or Wikiquote which mash up the original source material with results from Google image searches, and throw in some ads for, err, "Hot Young Single Girls Seeking Older Men". Google knows full well that these are junk sites; they don't appear in the first twenty pages of an ordinary text search for "Greg Egan". So why rely on them as sources for this sidebar?

3. They have a photo of Vernor Vinge, in a sidebar that's meant to be about Greg Egan. Google "knows" it is a photo of Vinge, in the sense that if you do a Google image search on exactly that image file, it says "Best guess: Vernor Vinge." So as with (2), if they took their own judgements and resources seriously, they would not be using that image here.

Google, the Stupidity Amplifier

Related Stories