
False information on the internet is hiding the truth about onions - howsilly
http://www.marketplace.org/2017/03/14/tech/internet-falsehoods-are-hiding-truth-about-onions
======
aluminussoma
I recently created a web page that provides - in my biased opinion - unique,
relevant information on a niche topic that I'm interested in. It's been
impossible for me to crack the top search results on this topic. Instead, the
top 20+ results are all news articles repeating the same thing.

I never had reason to complain about Google's algorithm until I became a
content creator. Now, I wonder what other great web pages I'm missing out on.

~~~
stinos
_Instead, the top 20+ results are all news articles repeating the same thing._

I encounter this several times a week it seems (google, ddg, doesn't seem to
matter). Usually when trying to find the actual source of something, like a
scientific study, the top hits are all news sites, often whith articles which
look like copies of each other. I'm assuming they're ranked by number of
visits and popularity in general of the site, but it makes it really hard to
drill down to the source of something. To the point I usually give up. I am
going to try the '-news' thing mentioned by another commenter though, hope
that helps. Or are there any other tips?

~~~
throwaway2048
Perfect example of this is trying to google for mailing list posts.

All sorts of maximum ad-cram crappy sites (including ones that try to pretend
to be a forum, with mailing list posts as "users") that maximize SEO gaming
techniques dominate the results for 20+ pages.

[http://marc.info](http://marc.info), which is the best archive avalible atm,
plain, simple no bullshit layout and is linked everywhere anytime somebody
wants to reference a mailing list archive, nowhere to be found.

~~~
mej10
I am sure they all have Google's ads on them, too. Only slightly suspicious.

~~~
robk
I can assure you adsense has no connection to crawl or rankings.

~~~
RyanZAG
How much connection does it have to making the removal of adsense spam pages
from Google's index a priority? I have a feeling it lowers that priority
significantly, and if those pages were hurting Google's bottom line, it would
be priority #1 for the company to remove them.

------
Gravityloss
This is about way more than onions. We are always in the danger of decline and
regression to the dark ages. The world of rumors, beliefs, marketing and
magical thinking is always there, biding its time.

~~~
diogenescynic
It seems like Trump is a sign that what you fear is already happening. Look at
the media his supporters consume. Listen to AM talk radio if you want to know
how much the world is still controlled by "rumors, beliefs, marketing and
magical thinking."

------
myfonj
There is well worded keyword dense _quotation_ in the beginning of the article
in question [1] that the rest of the article proves wrong, as latter [2]
article analyses. But how is poor machine supposed to understand this?

Ah, those semantic web utopian visions, with humans producing content gently
semantically marked for machines to "see" all those negatively ironic peculiar
ambiguities and relations.

Now, that problematic "quotation" in [1] is in fact:

    
    
        <div class="text-2 text parbase section">
            <p style="margin-left: 40px;">"[…]"</p>
        </div>
    

i.e. not even marked as quotation (eg `<q cite="[…]">[…]</q>`). Sigh.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/scocca/2012/05/how_to_coo...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/scocca/2012/05/how_to_cook_onions_why_recipe_writers_lie_and_lie_about_how_long_they_take_to_caramelize_.html)
[2] [http://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-
about-o...](http://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-onions-
and-blam-1793057789)

~~~
logicallee
This is why the semantic web lets you clearly mark up wrong information being
cited, which, in the words of the Wikipedia "is primarily used to mark text
that is mistaken".

[https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_strike.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_strike.asp)

Haha, just kidding. Just reminding you that there's nothing semantic about
HTML :) The strikethrough is kind of deprecated, but there's no good semantic
replacement, because the semantic web is actually a complete joke.

Source on my Wikipedia quote:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikethrough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikethrough)

~~~
kristianp
Sounds like a good place for a microformat [1] that lets search engines know
that they shouldn't take a sentence as true e.g. <div class="actually-
wrong">takes 5 minutes</div>

[1]
[http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page)

~~~
grkvlt
Ooh, awesome - then we can persuade all those sites we keep hearing about to
mark up their fake news using these microformats, and the world's information
problems will be solved!

------
dkrich
The problem, IMO, is introduced when Google tries to provide definitive
answers for questions that don't have definitive answers. To be sure, there
are lots of questions that have definitive answers that would correctly
satisfy 99% of searchers (what is the speed of sound, what is the height of
the Empire State Building, etc.).

Then there are questions that require explanation and don't have a binary
correct/incorrect answer. Even with the question serving as the example for
this article: "How long does it take to caramalize onions?" Well sure, the
author cited in this article adamantly claims it takes much more than ten
minutes. But does it? Maybe there are equally or more qualified people who say
that under normal circumstances and a certain heat level it doesn't take more
than ten minutes to caramalize an onion. Who is right? I don't think Google
can parse the available information to provide a "correct" response, and
shouldn't try to.

So to me a better solution would be to categorize queries based on whether
they can be answered definitively and, if they cannot, don't attempt to.

~~~
alexbock
The speed of sound is probably more in the latter category as it is dependent
on altitude and temperature, and even then only after assuming that someone
really meant the speed of sound in air. If I search for "speed of sound"
Google's info box will give me an answer labeled as "speed of sound at sea
level" which should probably instead say "speed of sound in the atmosphere at
sea level at 20 degrees celsius". It's an ill-defined question when asked so
vaguely, and if you're going to pretend to give a definite answer by making a
bunch of assumptions, they should be clearly presented.

~~~
pesfandiar
If the difference in the speed of sound because of altitude and temperature
makes a difference for you, you should probably research a bit farther than
the Google's info box. I just see that as useful as answering trivia quiz
questions.

~~~
luck_fenovo
I sort of agree. On the one hand, an approximate answer is fine for this use-
case (especially when you can look down 2 inches and see the full context in
the Wikipedia result without looking through) but perhaps it would be
worthwhile on answers like that to say "Approximately" at the front just to be
clear.

------
anigbrowl
_Because bad information that people passionately believe has a way of rising
to the top._

Given that information is a sort of currency (which is exchanged for your
attention while an advertisement is displayed in close proximity), perhaps we
should have expected that something like Gresham's Law - that 'bad money
drives out good' when competing currencies exist - would hold true on the web
too.

Popularity is only a good proxy for quality when the population is rational.
given the abundant evidence of even smart people often suffering from large
cognitive biases, weak educational standards, and an economic system where
consumption and waste are more profitable to supply than more sustainable
solutions, it's not surprising that search quality could decline even as raw
performance improves.

Google and the existing web will be disrupted by the advent of contextual
search, which retrieves the graph of a specific information frame.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law)

------
sulam
Heh, I just typed "how long does it take to caramelize onions?" into Google
and got this answer:

about 5 minutes

With a link to his article. So, the news that this was fixed is premature.

p.s. he is absolutely right that caramelizing onions takes 35-45 minutes, most
people have no idea what a caramelized onion really looks like.

------
sleepychu
> _Ryssdal: Now, we should say, that in the days, what, week or so since this
> post was published, Google has in fact changed the search results, right?
> So, you 've changed two things: You've changed the New York Times and you've
> changed Google._

This is still a problem with this specific example today.[0]

[0] - [http://imgur.com/a/2R5k5](http://imgur.com/a/2R5k5)

~~~
lost_name
It seems it's more nuanced. Try the following searches:

    
    
      how long does it take to caramelize onions
      how long does it take to caramelise onions (note the typo)
      how long to caramelize an onion (not a typo but still wrong)
      how long to caramelize onions

~~~
linuskendall
Replacing the 'z' with 's' is not a typo, though.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Several years ago, a coworker pointed out that an article spelled
"organization" with an "s" instead of a "z" and wondered why such an obvious
mistake would pass an editor.

I pointed out that that's just the British spelling. Everyone in my group was
amazed that I would know such a thing. It was an eye-opening moment... for me.

~~~
bostik
There's a very old and very well established anecdote of this. It's the
difference between the words "color" and colour".

\- You show an American the word "colour" and they go: aha, a typo!

\- You show a Brit the word "color" and they go aha, an American!

~~~
bigger_cheese
Yes Australian here. I run into this problem with programming languages all
the time. Because of things like "colour" vs "color" or "centre" vs "center".
"Maximise" "minimise" etc are good examples as well

My coworkers and I call it the 'American API' problem.

~~~
duncan_bayne
Places I've worked - in Australia and NZ - have adopted American spelling
throughout the code in an effort to standardise with tools, APIs, etc.

That is, "Use American spelling wherever possible in the code" is part of the
coding standard.

------
sgs1370
For great onion techniques see "Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes,
A Cook's Manifesto" by Michael Ruhlman. Before this book I didn't know there
was a difference between sweating them and caramelizing them.

~~~
Ensorceled
A decade ago took a cooking class that an amazing chef offered to a bunch of
us regulars.

One of the things he showed us was how to properly chop and sweat onions to
sweeten them, including how to use smell to tell when they were done. Somebody
said "Oh, we're going to caramelize them." and the chef replied, quite matter
of factly, "Oh, no, we'll be here all night if we caramelize them."

And that's when I learned there was a difference.

~~~
ska
He was not kidding. Full and careful caramelization for french onion soup,
say, takes 3 hours or more (and you have to cut them with the grain or it
won't work nearly as well).

If you ever wondered why it's really hard to find great french onion soup
(assuming you've had it once!) - that's why.

------
eikokuma
i'm new here and have no idea how long comments are allowed to be. there's a
lot to say, but i'll try to be succinct. (and probably fail.)

1) the quickest way to make bad AI is to train it on bad data. and the
internet is the king of bad data. if the New York Times is putting out bad
recipes and if other humans are regularly buying into fake news articles,
blaming the google algorithm seems like shooting the messenger for echoing the
low standards of society.

2) many (though not all) of these questions are injecting presuppositions.
when you ask google "how long does it take to caramelize onions," you're
implying that such a thing can be quantified. you'll get answers which try to
tell you how long it takes because semantically that's what fits. but in
reality, a lot of things are done when they look done. or done when they smell
done. or done when they're thick enough to form peaks.

so i really think this is a human problem. as much as we want to error-proof
all our software, in the world of general AI, we will need people to interact
responsibly.

~~~
jclos
1) It really depends on your AI and its goal. If the goal of the AI was to
summarize human opinions, then the current approach is fine. What isn't
working is that it's doing one thing (here is the answer of some people on the
internet) and presenting it as something else (here is the answer). Plus,
there are ways to put some bounds of confidence on an algorithmic prediction,
and I don't see why they are not displayed along with the answer that was
generated.

2) It relates to point 1, but the real solution would be that Google admits "I
don't know/it depends" when the confidence is under some threshold.

------
scandox
> Because bad information that people passionately believe has a way of rising
> to the top.

Great single line summation of the whole problem.

------
diego_moita
So, it isn't very different from the Big Lie idea[0]: if you repeat a lie long
enough it becomes truth.

It works for humans, it works for algorithms.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie)

------
nommm-nommm
The onions thing really bothers me too.

I mean, it takes 45+ minutes to caramelize onions. You can fry them for 10-20
minutes or so and get a pretty tasty result, but they aren't caramelized
onions.

I have no idea why people say otherwise!

I watch a lot of cooking shows and the contestants (supposed to be
professional chefs) will have 30 minutes to make a dish and they'll say "I
will start out by caramelizing the onions." No you won't! You'd need more than
your 30 minute cooking time to caramelize onions!

Onions can be caramelized in a slow cooker, as mentioned. They aren't as good
as doing it on the stove properly but are good enough for the labor you save.

/rant

I do proper caramelized onions only about once a year because they are so
tedious.

~~~
luminiferous
A trick I learned from Seriouseats is that you can use a pressure cooker to
carmelize onions in about half an hour. The normal stage of onion cooking
where the liquid is still coming out of the onion limits the cooking
temperature to about the boiling point of water; by using a pressure cooker,
the boiling point of water is raised to the point where browning happens even
before the water is gone. See: [http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/01/the-food-
lab-pressure-coo...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/01/the-food-lab-pressure-
cooker-caramelized-onions-onion-soup.html)

~~~
xiaomai
I've done this and the results product tastes great in dips/soups but for me
(and it seems many commentors) the onions turn to complete mush (almost like a
jam texture). Were you able to get your onions to maintain some texture?

------
mirimir
So am I the only person who thought that this would cover Tor vulnerabilities?

~~~
alexeldeib
Not at all. I must admit I found the actual topic pleasantly humorous after
expecting to read about Tor exploits/bugs.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, me too.

But seriously, that is a worrisome bug in all single-answer search solutions.
Search automation doesn't seem to handle sarcasm and irony very well. Maybe
website coding needs an "ignore this block when parsing page meaning"
property.

------
coldcode
Onions have layers and so does the truth apparently. Determining actual truth
from a lot of vaguely related information is quite difficult. I've always
found that there are things you can enter a search string for but you can't
describe it sufficiently to find the actual result, just things that appear
related somehow.

------
woliveirajr
And I'd like a step-by-step recipe on how to caramelize onions, which
ingredients to use, etc... Like "the final recipe".

~~~
simulate
Scocca provides a good method at the end of the article:

Scocca: I throw them in the Crock-Pot overnight.

Ryssdal: Oh, that's so smart.

Scocca: They become a little juicy, and you might need to dry them out in the
pan a bit before you actually use them, but it's a lot faster.

~~~
tclancy
I did this the first time (based on a post at Metafilter derived from the
original article mentioned in this piece -
[https://www.metafilter.com/115702/Oniongate](https://www.metafilter.com/115702/Oniongate))
and that was a good approach because it took me out of the process which meant
I didn't touch the onions or fiddle with the temperature or anything and 8
hours later I finally got the difference.

Now I cook them in a pan while doing something else. Takes an hour or so but
it beats running the crockpot all day.

------
DubiousPusher
My anecdotal experience is that internet recipes are always wrong about cook
time. Usually they skew short. I will take this as personal vindication.

~~~
djeikyb
i usually find that internet recipes on aggregators are only good for theme
and approach. like, what spices to use for a dish, and whether to braise or
saute. the recipe tends to suck in proportion to how specific you read it to
be.

------
sixdimensional
DISCLAIMER: I'm an amateur when it comes to the philosophy and science of
search engines.

I think a core problem is that what we determine to be "fact" [1] changes over
time (as it rightly should). As such, no deterministic function can adequately
represent fact, without having a bias.

Something that is "fact" today can be made invalidated tomorrow through many
methods, scientific and otherwise. Of course, that does not change the
importance of "fact" over time (i.e. at one time it was "fact" but it may no
longer be).

I don't know how Google search algorithms inject randomness into search, but I
believe that without enough randomness (and subsequent feedback) and testing,
any such algorithm would be deficient. It's almost like you have to A/B test
the "facts", in a way. And take into account time. And give each and every
fact due consideration.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact)

------
sevensor
It's interesting that PageRank was originally envisioned as a way to rank
academic papers. Now it's failing on caramelizing onions, which doesn't seem
like a subject anybody profits by spreading misinformation about. What does
this say about how we use citation metrics in academia?

------
hammock
And he ends the article with a falsehood! (Unintentionally I presume)

*>I throw them in the Crock-Pot overnight. They become a little juicy...but it's a lot faster

Is NOT true. Prep time might be shorter but cooking time 'overnight' is not
any faster than 45min on the stove top.

~~~
mattkrause
I think his point is that "drying them out in a pan" before using them is a
lot faster than caramelising them from scratch. It's true--it takes maybe 2
minutes to get the crockpot-onions to the same consistency as regular
caramelised ones.

Also, while the prep is the same, crockpot onions require literally no work
during the cooking. On the stovetop, you do have to watch and stir them, which
requires a little bit of attention. Since the crockpot version takes so long,
the prep is also pretty far away from the rest of the cooking, which makes it
"faster" if you have other stuff to do an hour before dinner.

Edit: If you haven't tried this, give it a go--it works well and you can put
them on everything for a few days! Yum

------
dredmorbius
What I've been noting in Web searches (Google and other providers) is that
_they 're becoming less useful_.

I'm not sure if this is a result of poorer relevance, gaming, my own changing
interests, or increased access to more authoritiative sources. I'm suspecting
all of the above.

As two Stanford University researchers noted in the 1990s, online epistemic
services are highly prone to skewing information to favour interests of
advertisers and business partners, rather than users. They proposed an
approach which would avoid this problem, results suggest they've fallen short.

There's a tremendous industry that's emerged to game and skew search engine
results. It's proved quite effective in its ends.

I've been shifting my explorations from programming and technical subjects to
economics, history, and philosophy. Where the former are well-represented
online and come from recent sources, the better sources for the latter are
often at best nearline, and authoritative sources range from decades to
centuries old, occasionally millennia. (Fortunately, the Data Explosion works
to advantage, as the search space for older works is far smaller.)

I've also been rediscovering libraries and library cataloguing systems,
including periodicals and scholarly indices (though far too few of these are
available online). Google's Scholar is useful, as is Books, though both remain
highly deficient. Samizdat and underground sources such as Sci-Hub, LibGen,
and BookZZ provide ready access to material. I can turn up a reference, and in
a few minutes, be reading it, from the original, unmediated by others'
interpretations or editorialising. That is a refreshing change from online
sources which skew to magazine articles, blogs, social media posts, and
tweets.

Given all this, I'm finding DDG to be a more useful search engine in that from
it, using bang syntax, I can hit specific sources (often from much better
search dialogs than their own native facilities). From Firefox, bang searches
work within the navbar. From Chrome/Android, "Home" => search. This is faster
than going to or typing in individual domains.

The ability to permanently blacklist domains from search results, shifting
more of the search filtering to client side, would be useful.

------
grkvlt
I searched for "How long does it take to caramelize onions?", and Google
returned an infobox with "35 to 40 minutes" highlighted (from this article)
along with three other results in the top ten explaining how most articles
about caramelising onions are wrong, from 2012 and 2014. So this particular
problem seems not to exist? Although, it could have been fixed in the last
week, I admit...

------
more_corn
I think the confusion might come in from the fact that many recipes refer to
the process of onions starting to brown as "beginning to caramelize" simply
meaning that they start to turn brown and sweeten. This does in fact happen in
five to ten minutes. "Caramelized Onions" might be an entirely different
proper noun than the concept "Onions which have begun to caramelize".

~~~
kem
After thinking about this, I think you're probably right, along with a gradual
declining of standards about caramelization.

I've made caramelized onions multiple times, watching over them for long
periods of time. At some point several years ago I became confused by the
issue referred to in the article, and thought that I was mistaken about what
caramelizing onions was. I've come to realize that I was not.

However, caramelizing onions is a gradual process, and so I could see how what
one calls "caramelized onions" could be seen as a matter of degree. With candy
making, as a parallel, there are degrees of hardness; with roux there's
different degrees of browning, etc. etc. etc.

You're probably right, because at some point early on something very very
roughly resembling "caramelized onions" is achieved, which is basically the
same as "fried onions." People assumed because the onions resembled what they
were familiar with in fried onions, they must be the same, even though they're
not.

------
InclinedPlane
If you try to search google for technical information or product information
you can often end up with bad answers because it typically prioritizes older,
longer lived results. So instead of getting a result that's relevant to the
here and now you get one that was true for whatever version of a thing existed
5 or 10 years ago.

Even worse, google still hasn't banned pinterest from results.

------
ytpete
> bad information that people passionately believe has a way of rising to the
> top

That's the money quote for me. Certainly relevant to contemporary politics...
but I bet most of us can also think of cases where this happens in the
workplace, trendy frameworks, etc.

------
m_stone_code
I know this isn't really the point of the story, but if you add a pinch of
baking soda to onions you can turn them into something that's pretty similar
to caramelised in a few minutes. Add a little sugar to help them along.

------
ClassyJacket
Sadly, if you ask how to caramelise onions, Google still says to minutes. Ask
it how to caramelize onions, and it'll correctly say 45. I guess those of us
outside America will have to figure it out ourselves.

------
mtgx
One could even go as far as saying that "Google is fake news."

Now, I wouldn't say that myself, but Google brought this upon themselves. I've
criticized them in the past about their "top answer" solution, as well about
the AMP-powered carousel with (corporate-owned) "media partners".

They're setting up a system where there's a _high chance_ that the top answer
is indeed false, but _Google acts as if it isn 't_ \- and that's the real
issue here. Google envisions a future where its AI assistant will soon _only_
give you that "top answer" as the "right answer".

I think it's wrong of Google to do that, at least until our AIs become smarter
than humans, and can actually discern the truth way better than humans can
from "reading" thousands of related articles/papers.

------
mnx
The page seems slow/dead, so here's a mirror:
[http://archive.is/0Jc7G](http://archive.is/0Jc7G)

------
peterwwillis
Is nobody else disturbed by the fact that nowhere is anyone specifying what
kind of onions to use? Vidalia, Texas, Walla Walla? Bermuda? _Cévennes??_

~~~
Freak_NL
I just assume 'onion' means the bog-standard (and comparatively cheap) brown
onion unless a more specific term is used.

~~~
mod
Interesting, I've never even heard of a brown onion. I thought the cheap
standard onions were white, and I always buy yellow.

I'm even a gardener! (But I just buy whatever sets they have locally)

~~~
Freak_NL
Brown onions are also known as yellow onions; depends on your locale. I guess
the locale of the recipe's author matters as well (although it usually doesn't
matter too much if you use a white or brown onion).

------
koolba
This article would get even more traffic if it were titled: " _7 falsehoods
programmers believe about onions_ "

------
BrandoElFollito
The article and the comments are great, but where is that recipe? (seriously)

------
james_niro
lol I thought this article is about .onion

------
JacobJans
The grand irony is that this guy is absolutely wrong about caramelizing
onions. It simply does not have to take 45 minutes to caremelize onions. Sure,
you can do it in that amount of time, but he's wrong. His "crusade" is based
on incorrect information.

One of the best tricks I've learned for quickly caramelizing onions is to not
use any oil in the pan; the oil is more likely to cause it to burn. No oil;
slightly over medium heat; a thick pan; barely any stirring; slices evenly
cut; that's all you need.

~~~
Veratyr
> this guy is absolutely wrong

> but he's not wrong

I think you either contradicted yourself there or it isn't clear from the way
you've written it that you're talking about different things.

~~~
JacobJans
gah, I typed it in a hurry; that "not" was NOT supposed to be there.

