Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)

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

by Santosh83 • 6 years ago

270 187 6 years ago

jhanschoo• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

dvfjsdhgfv4• 6 years 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• 6 years 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-...

em500• 6 years 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?

bbotond• 6 years ago

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zB4HA5...

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130303005243/http://gregegan.c...

dredmorbius2• 6 years 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.

czzr2• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

hm, actually, there are pictures of him available. At least to Google's secret heuristic-ML-mashup.

dvfjsdhgfv4• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

crazygringo3• 6 years 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.

czzr2• 6 years ago

Definitely not what I saw - strange that it would be different for different users. Doesn’t seem to be something that would be personalised.

simion3145• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

aflag11• 6 years 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.

Fatalist_ma• 6 years ago

I think the main reason is that they can afford to not care. There is no pressure. They can afford to be inefficient because they know that as long as the core features work, customers will not leave.

nottorp3• 6 years ago

In large organizations like this you tend to do what advances your own career, not what's useful. Mainly because it's not going to affect Google's bottom line in the short term.

See how many chat/social networking offerings they have done.

simion3145• 6 years ago

In small companies feedback from customers reaches support or the CEO(sometimes) and tickets are opened for all(most) issues. So are this companies have no support people or what are those people doing? Their job is to collect this feedback and put in tickets and advocate for the user witht he developers. Many times I had some feature implemented in a clean.logical way from coding point of view but it had to be changed so custoemers are satisfied and not me the developer.

lrem2• 6 years ago

Let's try a thought experiment. There is a `Feedback` button on the bottom right, imagine that Google developers actually look at them. Let's assume some numbers:

- Once every ten searches there is that "smart" box. - Once every thousand "smart" boxes a user spots an error and clicks the `Feedback`. - There are a hundred developers behind this feature, working 8h/day.

So, according to [the result in a smart box](https://kenshoo.com/monday-morning-metrics-daily-searches-on...) there are 228 million searches per hour. So, to go through all the feedbacks, your developers need to average well over 600 per hour.

An alternative approach to get this estimation: imagine every tenth user reports one error per year. There are [2 billion gSuite users](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-g-suite-now-has-2-billi...), so intuitively there should be at least as many Google search users. By simple division, your developers would need to go through almost 700 feedbacks per hour.

Having these numbers: how do you think Google engineers should actually react to the feedback?

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but on something not exposed to the outside world. However, we do hit similar scale issues with our users being only Google engineers.

VRay• 6 years ago

Very slippery slope, since you can use that argument to justify anything you want.

The bottom line is this: You guys are actively spreading misinformation and profiting from it. That's a bad thing.

eutropia• 6 years ago

Solution: Hire 10,000 people to vet the feedback and funnel it into the org. Those people vet 6-7 feedback per hour, or 18-21 if you keep the operation running 24/7.

But that would cut into the Profit from the Money Printing Machine.

Saying "We're doing business on a scale that's too big for us to be (profitably) accountable" isn't an acceptable answer.

MisterTea• 6 years ago

Probably this is expected when you have many users and most of them are not paying.

Everyone pays one way or another otherwise google wouldn't exist.

I leave feedback on Google results and apps all the time. Either no one reads them, a computer reads them and based on keywords pushes them to a queue that reaches a human or /dev/null, or no one in the company wants to accept responsibility for mistakes otherwise they may not be promoted.

dwighttk• 6 years ago

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

fouc• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Do you have an example of Wikepedia page where this actually happened?

AdrianB1• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/978/

naringas• 6 years ago

A virtuous cycle indeed.

I think that "vicious" is more appropriate here

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

"indeed" stands for implied /s postfix operator. /s operator, applied to the word "virtuous", turns it into the word "vicious".

elliekelly• 6 years 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.

kevincox3• 6 years ago

IIRC search engines also use the text of the incoming link and surrounding prose. So it is quite possible that enough people on Reddit (or any other discussion site) said "The person in this episode looks like Jim Carrey $link" the the search engine picked up on it.

dempseye• 6 years ago

This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_feedback

mav3rick• 6 years ago

"a dumb search engine" - Yes that's how they dominated search. By being dumb. All hail ddg (but first let me use '!g")

drivebycomment2• 6 years ago

Citation needed. Sounding plausible doesn't mean it happens or happens frequently. Most likely there are small number of cases that fit into this description - after all, wikipedia has 54 million articles. But I won't believe there's meaningful number of such cases, unless I see an evidence to the contrary.

mm412• 6 years 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• 6 years 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

vffhfhf2• 6 years 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.

mm412• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

vffhfhf2• 6 years 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.

uniqueid2• 6 years 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?

ddalex• 6 years 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.

mitchdoogle• 6 years ago

I can understand the author's frustrations. Things like this could cause real world issues because people put too much faith in Google giving them the correct answer.

I think it is more the fault of individuals, and to an extent the institutions teaching those individuals which have a responsibility to teach about online credibility in our time. I.e. don't just copy information from Google - click the link to verify the source is legitimate and look for additional confirmations of the thing you want to report. Of course, if one "legitimate" writer or website gets something wrong, it exacerbates the problem for everyone down the line.

Maybe Google should have a warning somewhere that there information has not been vetted for accuracy?

kevincox3• 6 years ago

The problem is that without strong evidence you should assume that all information you read can't be trusted. This seems to be the root cause of all of the election meddling, fake news and similar social issues that are "popular" these days. The only real solution is to teach critical thinking. However teaching critical thinking to the masses is a very hard problem.

So instead of funding schools we just spend money passing laws that verge on censorship.

jodrellblank• 6 years ago

"Some people have 0 bigger picture scene."

You should read some of his stories, he's pretty good with the big picture.

yetihehe• 6 years ago

Do people expect google to be run by Magic?

I would argue, that most people actually do. They don't understand how search engines work. Its just a box, where you put what you search for and they provide answers. How do google gets those answers? They have no idea. Currently, I have only a remote idea how google provides those answers and I've implemented some searching myself back in the day, so how your nontechnical people could even understand this? They don't even want to, they have better things to do than to find out how their technology works, they just want it to work.

armitron• 6 years ago

Your argument collapses if one notices that Google Search used to be a lot more accurate in the first 10-15 years of its operation. One could say they were actually trying to organize information back then.

The damage that has been done in the last 10 years is hard to miss. Search accuracy went down the toilet as did ranking of results, they started rewriting queries en masse and also censoring.

I hope a competitor arises that steals their lunch. They're so bad these days that it can't be very hard to achieve.

II2II• 6 years ago

Do people expect google to be run by Magic?

Some would argue that Google wants to be seen as magic driven, or at least AI driven (which, to most, is the same as magic).

Google, wikipedia, even facebook, twitter and reddit have been a plus to modern human thinking.

These organizations have been hugely beneficial for finding or conveying information, which is different from thinking. Of the five, only the Wikipedia can claim to have reasonable (albeit, not always reliable) systems for vetting information in place. The others hide behind automation while concealing how the automation works.

I'm not going to claim the world is worse off for them, nor am I going to claim it's better. For the most part, it is a trade-off. While organizing the world's information is important, assessing it's value is also important. That's difficult to do when the priority is to do so at large scales and not all information is provided in good faith.

violetgarden• 6 years ago

I was reading some articles from when the internet was in its early days, and they were so full of hope and excitement. They were looking forward to how well everyone could be informed. There was one anecdote where someone had a less rosy view, and he worried that the access to a vast amount of information would lead to people becoming very polarized. This really struck me because I often feel like I can look something up and find 10 good articles on both sides that will really vindicate either view. I think in some ways it’s human nature to go with the view you prefer, and then if you find some articles, you can really trick yourself into feeling correct or very certain about something, despite the fact the information you found might be false. This is something I struggle with a lot, and I have troubles figuring out if a source is good. Your comment about assessing the value of information and information not being provided in good faith struck a chord.

alderz• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

Filligree2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

xaqfox• 6 years ago

I would also recommend Charles Stross' Accelerando for an interesting take on the post-singularity universe where "others" can be in control of the simulated worlds. Sorry for the limited details, but I do not want to spoil the ending for others.

emptyfile• 6 years ago

Permutation City is my favorite novel of his, but in many ways Diaspora is his most impressive work.

His short stories are also criminally overlooked.

manuelabeledo2• 6 years ago

I never thought I would be interested in sci-fi, but this book changed my mind. It deals with simulating conciousness and its implications.

That was exactly my feeling after finishing this novel. I went on to read Diaspora, another excellent book.

I think I was prejudiced against sci-fi because of how it is generally portrayed in movies and TV, with an emphasis in odd sounding words and fantastical themes. But Greg Egan makes a fair connection with the current world and expands it with such credibility, you can definitely see some things happening.

bsanr22• 6 years ago

I've not read Diaspora (and do not intend to, as it trips several of my phobias), but from what I understand about it, it makes most contemporary spacefareing sci-fi look like depictions of 2001 that featured bodycon jumpsuits and flying cars. Its vision seems very far away and yet far more realistic (aside from the baking of most of meatspace humanity with a gamma ray burst just after full digitization becomes available, which reads with the same kind of authorial vindictiveness as I see in the OP article).

JdeBP4• 6 years ago

Yes. Anyone reading this: Please do not take TV and film sci-fi to be representative of book sci-fi. This is indeed generally true, of more than just sci-fi.

coffeefirst• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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?

crazygringo3• 6 years 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• 6 years 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?

crazygringo3• 6 years 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?

JdeBP4• 6 years ago

Yes, because it's still happening to many people other than Greg Egan.

dorkwood• 6 years 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".

pvaldes6• 6 years ago

This was accurately fixed. Freezing definitely kills most types of bacteria

umvi2• 6 years ago

Which, I'm assuming, is why all sushi in the USA must must be frozen and then re-thawed before serving.

verylittlemeat2• 6 years ago

Unless I'm missing a joke or something I just googled it and it says freezing only makes bacteria inactive.

https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Does-freezing-food-kill-bacte...

ve55• 6 years 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.

jtsiskin2• 6 years 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

boogies• 6 years ago

I blame Google for the modern web.

Tracking scripts, ads, etc.

dorgo• 6 years ago

I also blame browsers. Create an empty .html file and open it in firefox. Load time 370 ms (according to an addon). It's a local empty file. How can firefox spend 234 ms on DOM processing? Chrome seems to be better here.

Edit: window.performance.timing.domContentLoadedEventEnd - window.performance.timing.navigationStart

Firefox: 411

Chrome: 70 => better, but still 70ms for what?

nonfamous2• 6 years ago

>> If Google just displayed links to users, then the user might actually click them

And ironically, this has the effect of making Google Search even worse. Whether someone clicked on a link used to be a signal to Google’s search algorithm that the link (or at least the title and snippet) was relevant. And there’s no quality feedback loop at all for the embedded info boxes.

untech2• 6 years ago

And there’s no quality feedback loop at all for the embedded info boxes.

Actually, there is feedback for so-called non-organic SERP elements. You can check whether a user clicked the next result after an element, which is a signal of uselessness of the element. On mobile devices you could also check whether user continued scrolling after seeing the element. Both signals are used by search companies.

greenyoda• 6 years ago

If Google just displayed links to users, then the user might actually click them, which would result in them leaving Google for another website

But if the user found the answer they wanted from Google itself, why would they stick around on Google's site?

Google might actually make more money if the user clicked on another web site, since chances are that the other site would serve them a Google ad (e.g., via DoubleClick).

makecheck• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

nikolastojkov• 6 years ago

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

yters• 6 years ago

ai cannot understand irony

CarbyAu3• 6 years 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• 6 years 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?

Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)

Related Stories