
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier - markbnine
http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
======
scholia
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...

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principalbundle
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](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan)
and
[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32699.Greg_Egan](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.

