Google Starts Warning Users If Search Results Are Likely To Be Poor (theguardian.com) 57
Google has started warning users when they search for a topic that is likely to have poor results, as part of its effort to tackle "data voids" on the search engine. From a report: The new warning was spotted by Renee DiResta, an academic who studies misinformation at Stanford University. "It looks like these results are changing quickly," Google will now caution users. "If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources. First time I've seen this response from Google Search," DiResta said. "Positive step to communicating that something is newsy/breaking (my search was for a breaking culture war story), and highlighting that facts are not all known or consensus on what happened is still being formed."
While social media is regularly linked with misinformation, researchers have long cautioned that search engines can be powerful tools for spreading falsehoods. Data voids, search engine queries that have little to no results, can often lead to fringe claims being given undue prominence -- a particular concern for breaking news. In a blogpost, Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, said: "We've trained our systems to detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn't yet weighed in. We'll now show a notice indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources might be available."
While social media is regularly linked with misinformation, researchers have long cautioned that search engines can be powerful tools for spreading falsehoods. Data voids, search engine queries that have little to no results, can often lead to fringe claims being given undue prominence -- a particular concern for breaking news. In a blogpost, Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, said: "We've trained our systems to detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a range of sources hasn't yet weighed in. We'll now show a notice indicating that it may be best to check back later when more information from a wider range of sources might be available."
Hilarious, google the judge of what is poor (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is an ad and marketing company, the lowlife that are sales and marketing vermin are not qualified to judge quality nor accuracy of information.
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They are a far better judge of what is poor or correct than the deulded morons who keep whining about a "stolen" election or how, without citing any constitutional authority, the election will be reversed. The same ones who talk about Jewish space lasers. The same ones who keep talking about the "massive" voter fraud yet can't cite a single example of fraud except when they're doing it.
Considering how many times people have been told the Earth is not flat, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that Evolu
Re:Hilarious, google the judge of what is poor (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they are not. A search engine should not "judge" at all.
Ironic, considering you're letting Google keep your search secure for you.
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No more than slashposts should be "judged".
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No, they are not. A search engine should not "judge" at all.
The whole point of a search engine is that it discriminates on how relevant results are to your search query. Otherwise you're just looking at random web pages. The problem nowadays isn't relevant, though, it's validity. Somehow I don't think Google's or anyone in the tech sector's 'solutionist' approaches will effectively deal with the validity problem very well. Machines are very poor at discriminating whether information has meaning or not, let alone whether it's true.
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Re: Hilarious, google the judge of what is poor (Score:2, Flamebait)
You talking about the 2016 or the 2020 election? There is no moral arbiter in the U.S. political sphere. Left and Right are just one-upping each other. And the side with the shortest memory seems to feel better about things.
Yuck.
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Google is first and foremost a data search company. They money through ads that they place on their search results (and other places), but all that depends on them being able to search data results and in another area to provide data on users to the ad buyers.
Of all the companies out there, they are probably one of the most qualified to know when their own results are poor and they aren't able to provide as much information as they'd like.
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Nowadays I'm not so sure. They likely gauge their search results as a function of ad revenue and, well, that's probably not the best metric. American car manufacturers gauged their effectiveness on revenue which worked well - until it didn't, when the Japanese came along with better quality.
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Of all the companies out there, they are probably one of the most qualified to know when their own results are poor and they aren't able to provide as much information as they'd like.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that."
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Because Google understands what "Furry Balls Plopped Menacingly on the Table" means.
Sorry Potsy, Google does not understand someone's search intention. Google is only able to to say, "hey, when other people searched on that string, they also liked these other results". Nothing more.
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I wasn't trying to say Google is a subject matter expert in everything, just that they know what the best results are when someone searches for something, and they also know what bad results are
Re:Hilarious, google the judge of what is poor (Score:5, Insightful)
To sell Ad's google needs to sell a lot of people. To keep its inventory of people high to sell to advertisers they need to make sure the people have a reason to stay on Google, vs going somewhere else.
Being lazy and bringing people to false information without even letting them know, can and has caused people to do poorly informed action. Which as best may just embarrass a person, but would be less likely to trust Google Searches, and my go to an other site where Google Cannot sell ad's. Or the person is injured and unable to use the service, or the person ends up in Jail, Which too makes it difficult for Ad's.
Warning people that it is poor information, is better than blocking, censoring, or even putting a valid search option onto page 2. It just means that this is the best result for your search however I wouldn't fully trust that info.
In general fictional stories are far more entertaining then factual ones. So people are often more attracted to fictional information than real information so it is super easy for a fictional news site to give us information that people would think is true, compared to one that actually has done the work and effort to find out what is really happening.
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Google results are poor by definition.
Hint: see if selecting "verbatim" limits your results to ones including at least one of the search terms you used!
Re: Hilarious, google the judge of what is poor (Score:1)
And the Media Echo Chamber? (Score:2)
How will Google handle this? We all know for instance, that poor citizens around the world have lost their lives thanks to the media that never questioned what government did...
Re:And the Media Echo Chamber? (Score:4, Interesting)
We also had poor citizens around the world who have lost their lives because they decided to fight the government because the media was telling them untrue things the government was to be doing.
College education while may not adequate prepare people for corporate work, does a darn good job on teaching people how to do research and help people understand good sources vs crap sources.
So when my general news source says something that I find emotionally frustrating where I feel the urge to go out and act against it, I will often dig in further to get closer to the source of the information. Such as opening up the law as it was passed, and read it, to often find out that thing that was suppose to anger me, was actually a possible loophole that can only really be done in a particular condition.
For example, News: Tax Credits on Hummers (I don't want my taxes going to rich guys to get a hummer), read the bill, Tax credit for businesses who buy large trucks (That isn't too bad, because businesses need large trucks to more efficiently ship goods). The loophole is that a Business may be able to get a Hummer because it falls in the wight range. And the Company may allow the person to use it for personal reasons... However this would also mean the company would be still buying a less than effective truck for its business which could probably have gone better to a flatbed truck or a van.
Thank god (Score:1, Redundant)
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I wouldn't want to accidently do my own critical analysis and form an opinion which isn't consistent with the sanctioned mainstream narrative.
Assuming that the mainstream narrative, as you call it, is "sanctioned" might indicate that your analyses might not be as critical as you claim. But assuming they are, you cannot deny that the tendency of many people is to believe anything that aligns with their beliefs. I don't see how what Google is planning will interfere with any of that.
They're not talking about censoring search results, but identifying them as potentially unreliable. You'll be free to swallow anything you consider tasty.
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In other words tainting them with negative bias and thereby giving the impression that mainstream news is more reliable than less popular sources.
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As I said, people tend to believe the narratives that reinforce their beliefs, no matter how ridiculous. If the "mainstream news" contradicts their belief, they will reject it. If some bullshit nonsense aligns with their beliefs, they'll accept it. You need look no further than the number of people who "know" that the COVID-19 vaccines are a government population control program, and think the truth is fake news.
You think these people are going to be coaxed down from their crazy ledge by something they see
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"If the "mainstream news" contradicts their belief, they will reject it. If some bullshit nonsense aligns with their beliefs, they'll accept it."
You pit "mainstream news" as alternative to "bullshit nonsense."
"...by something they see on the network news? They're too busy propagating the latest Qanon horse pucky."
Again, you imply network news is some sort of stark contrast to "qanon horse pucky."
There are is no shortage of false and deliberately
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Summary: I'm not going to reveal any of the sources I consider reliable alternatives to "mainstream news"; I'm just going to cite a bunch of obvious and widely known egregious journalistic bad acts by NBC as proof that mainstream news is completely unreliable.
I don't know what you consider reliable sources or whether I'd agree that they're reliable. I can say, though, that I was aware of the truths you "revealed" behind every single case you cited in your righteously indignant screed. Well, except for the female soccer team thing; I don't follow sports. I wonder how that could possibly be, unless those truths were in fact widely reported by the very sources you decry? Maybe it's because I don't immediately form a conclusion based on something that appears to eit
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Perhaps you are attentive and did catch those details but millions of people did not. As with a subsequently exonerated public official, the damage is done with the original report. This is especially true when those reports are given a false sense of credibility via automated algorithms built upon an ad populum fallacy* as their methodology at scale in communications chokepoints like social
Results have been poor for a while now. (Score:2)
Can't remember the exact search but I was searching for a woodworking set of terms and it kept returning hair styling results. Useless. When will they start warning about useless results?
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Define "poor" (Score:5, Insightful)
because it seems like over the decades, the results I get from Internet search engines are getting worse and worse as everyone tries tacking on keywords or otherwise guessing how search engine algorithms work to get high results. Or sometimes the search engines attempt to second-guess me and give me results that aren't really what I want.
Lately they seem to lean towards commerce/catalog sites. That often isn't what I want.
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It's not about search anymore, it's about trying to get you to click something. Huge difference.
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Exactly. Not a day goes by where I don’t have to wrap quotes around keywords or else they get ignored.
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Lately they seem to lean towards commerce/catalog sites.
The ironic (and sad) thing is that they have a 'shopping' category right at the top. Why even have that if all results skew towards shopping to start with? What is needed is the ability to uncheck that shopping 'button' so that all those results go away and you can get down to actual searching.
Re: Define "poor" (Score:2)
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The other day I was trying to learn what an "integration test" was in the context of that HBO Max intern thing. Couldn't find anything about "integration testing" because all the results were links to various stories about the goddamn Twitter response.
On the other hand, I have searched for things like "song that goes like da da da daaaa da da" and actually found it, so...meh.
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Welcome to the semantic web [wikipedia.org]. Courtesy of tags-R-us.
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Probably because the commerce/catalog sites are paying someone to do SEO while the others are not.
Google (Score:1)
Would it kill them to return results on something you actually search for?
Not what people on twitter are saying about it, what the song lyrics are, or what journalists are saying about it. But the actual thing.
Likely? (Score:3)
Likely, is...well like almost a simile. One of those "hedge" words...most likely, like, maybe. But a simple question what is the quantification of "poor results" ?? Those results that are more ad driven, so pushing Google's profits but unrelated things pushed, advertised?
Or a flaw in the venerated Page algorithm? or perhaps an arch-competitor has a better algorithm, approach? This is...state something, but the meaning is nothing. For a company that is about results, quantification, and smart people its...well making non-sequitur statements. As Nomad from StarTrek TOS would state "You're facts are uncoordinated." Or more simply put colloquially, I'm going to need a new set of boots when I Google search as the crap is getting a bit thick now.
JoshK.
I already know when Google searches are poor (Score:5, Insightful)
When Google returns interesting search results, I get half a page of "sponsored content" (read: Google ads), followed by a page of promising links to Stackexchange, Stackoverflow, Wikipedia, relevant Pinterest images, forums related to what I'm looking for, perhaps Youtube videos of some relevance, links to people on LinkedIn or Facebook if I'm looking for someone... Then I get a million pages of links to shit for sale on eBay, Amazon, Aliexpress... first in English, then repeats of the same in every conceivable language on Earth. Then - if I'm patent enough to scroll through all the commercial links - I get to truly bizarre links that make no sense and probably lead to malware hosted on fly-by-night servers somewhere where the law doesn't apply.
When Google returns poor search results, I get all that, minus the links to Stackexchange, Wikipedia, Youtube... with actual content. It's very easy to spot: at the boundary between ads and non-ads, it jumps straight to shit-selling sites.
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relevant Pinterest images
No such thing exists.
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That depends what you're looking for. For obscure gear within my particular obscure hobby, it does a fair job at turning up weird stuff I haven't seen before.
Of course, Pinterest being Pinterest, once you've seen a picture you're interested in, you can't get any kind of information about it, and you're immediately met with the registration nagware. But usually I can find out more about the picture I found by doing a screenshot of it and feeding it to Google image search.
(In case there was any doubt though,
Easy (Score:3)
Just add this to the HTML:
<div style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; right: 0; text-align: center; padding: 0.5em 0; border: 0.2em solid red; background-color: white; text: black">Results are likely to be poor</div>
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I don't know about you, but generally speaking, I find what I'm looking for on Google, in the top 1 or 2 results of the first page. That's pretty darn good!
I'm old enough to remember Alta Vista and Web Crawler, which produced truly awful search result relevance. I'm amazed by the quality of results Google produces.
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Google doesn't even try anymore. The first results very often don't include all the words I searched for, and unsurprisingly aren't what I was looking for, with search terms missing. This is even when there pages that have what I searched for exist. I know about enclosing search terms in quotes, but Google really shouldn't second-guess absolutely everything I search for without quotes. I am quite happy if there is only a handful of results that match my search. I don't need or want Google to fluff it up wit
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Do you have a better search alternative? Perhaps you could try Bing!
Ironically ... no warnings (Score:2)
Google has started warning users when they search for a topic that is likely to have poor results, ...
My Google search for "poor results" returned "About 903,000,000 results (0.57 seconds)" -- didn't see any warnings though.
Like, always? (Score:2)
They always show what they think I'm looking for instead of reading what I entered.
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What a HOOT!!! (Score:1)
Warning: Group Think Not Ready (Score:2)
Wait for consensus to form? For what? Why do I care what random people on the Internet feel about some story?
They cannot do this! (Score:2)
I already get 2 or fewer results... (Score:2)
I had a search return just two results on Google Search yesterday. They were duplicates of each other and neither one was particularly helpful.
And I've run a few hundred searches in the past year where the response from their search engine was, "We didn't find anything. And we have no suggestions either." But then a search for the exact same string on GitHub turns up plenty of results.
I'm what? (Score:2)
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So you want Google to make a tool to tell you if something is reliable but you don't trust Google to tell you if it is reliable?