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Comment by olivierduval | Hacker News Reader

The most worrying for me?

Even after countless updates to their algorithms, breakthrough AI and ML, breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics :-(

Or is Google biased toward "official" speech (even from a really-not-trustable source) like Twitter is when it will allow BS from a President (because it's an official account so not subject to moderation) or like FB is when deciding to NOT fact-check President obvious fake-news for the same reason ?

Maybe it's time to clearly distinguish 2 activities: search on one side, that has to be exhaustive, fact-checked, ranked by differences/complementarity (no use to show 10 times the same result, better to show 10 really different result with indication of common consensus) - and news of the day, where truth is much more "volatile" ?

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I mean the query "Boris Johnson model" is genuinely ambiguous, it's a property of language rather than Google. There are a lot of queries out there that are truly ambiguous.

Can't reproduce the "wrong" result locally, but I bet the results for the "woman model" interpretation are just below the results for the "model of restraint" interpretation.

The question is whether Google is supposed to be a neutral media or a biased one.

But besides that - most of the time I myself would prefer if Google served more diverse than more popular results.

E.g. seeing several most popular results for a term from every month this year will have way more information than 20 different content copies for the same event popular right now

Was it "tricked" or does it just prioritize recent news articles? If media stop reporting about "model scandal" and start reporting about "model of restraint", and Google assumes you're interested in most recent news stories (seems reasonable to me), then it's doing the correct thing. (Feel free to blame the media instead for dropping an important story, but then I feel the same thing about Epstein scandal...)

> breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics

Google wasn't tricked, it's intentional. Their business model is generating money from clicks. It's not showing you best results for what you search for. It's showing latest news, tragedy, and what people talk about. 10h old news? OLD, BORING. New shiny 2h young news? YEA, more clicks, clicks and more click, more ads, more clicks, more revenue. The sponsored content online must be constantly changing and adapting to new information to generate more profits and more clicks and keep people clicking and visiting and searching. Don't forget that it's not only sponsored content, but also targeted content with user tracking, because clicks count, on one day they will show you news to annoy you to generate more searches and clicks, on another day they will show you majority of stuff to calm you down. Keep clicking.

Good point that there can be misaligned incentives between searcher and search engine.

Is it really the case here though?

Most people would be running this search because they heard about the story elsewhere, so they will consider the search engine less useful when they see a completely different (non-)story.

If it was a bizarre tale about a prime minister making bus models, maybe, but "Politician praises himself, more news at 11" in place of a story hours earlier doesn't appear to help Google.

Eh, so you want older news on this one but you probably want newer ones on others? I don't think this rant makes any sense.

This isn't a rant, it's a statement of facts.

Seems like a rant to me. What exactly are you criticizing about the way Google decides which results to show first, in this particular case?

I'm not necessary criticizing, but it's a bit sad that most popular search engine turned to be manipulation and persuasion machine. I no longer thing about it as search engine, more like "what's trendy network", BUT I recognize that Google Search belongs to google and google is a business, and business does what's most profitable! That's good for them, not necessary for us, I personally almost never use google search, but I use android with google account, just because duck duck go is better search engine and google android is really comfortable.

This comes from Google News, which has been a very poor product for a long time. It groups together unrelated articles but still has repetitions, chooses articles with completely uninformative titles, choose articles about a video without the video or a link to it, often shows derivative articles missing important context.

Google cannot figure out which news items are more subjectively relevant for every individual. Any system with rules and emerging behaviour will be game-able by simple analysing what goes in and what comes out. There is no solution to this problem.

Isn't Google supposed to comply with the "right to be forgotten" in the EU? In that case Boris Johnson could have asked to remove the offending articles and, since they are gone, new ones take their place. Just a guess thought, but indeed it's strange that they can be so easily tricked.

I think right to be forgotten doesn't include public figures.

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