
Who'll be the next president – Google Search - sssilver
https://www.google.com/search?q=who%27ll+be+the+next+president
======
joelrunyon
Another unintended consequence of Google doing the things that Google
recommends you don't do (in this case, scraping sites).

Can we talk about how terrible a piece of pro-hillary propaganda that was?

Namely this:

> America is ready for the leadership of a Hillary Clinton. A new history will
> be made when she becomes the leader of the free world. The world of women
> everywhere will change

Sure, this sounds very reminiscent of 8 years ago, but what's even scarier is
the opening paragraph:

> She has paid her dues as a political candidate

Do people _really_ think like this? All you have to do is "pay your dues" and
you "deserve" it instead of voting on issues, track record & potential to make
real change?

This is why we can't have nice things.

~~~
visakanv
> Do people really think like this? All you have to do is "pay your dues" and
> you "deserve" it instead of voting on issues, track record & potential to
> make real change?

Yes. Source: Click around the Facebook comments of any substantially large
digital publication. Tonnes of people don't even vote. Of those that do, most
vote for the parties they're already loyal to. Of the few that are in the
middle, most decide according to whatever is fashionable. It's a vanishingly
small few that bother to evaluate issues, track records, etc.

~~~
joelrunyon
I get voting on party - what scares me is voting on someone because they "paid
their dues" \- which is especially mind boggling when you look at people's
approval ratings of those same candidates in their previous jobs (typically
congress - which is hanging out at around 16%).

~~~
rsynnott
I think the "paid their dues" thing is meant to be necessary but not
sufficient. That is, a lot of people would be cautious of voting for someone
who had no significant political experience.

~~~
clarky07
Except for our current president, when he ran in 2008?

~~~
rsynnott
He was a state senator for 7 years, and a US senator for 4.

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kattuviriyan
Some will need a screenshot of the query at some point:

[http://i.imgur.com/SEq4GW9.png](http://i.imgur.com/SEq4GW9.png)

~~~
draugadrotten
My search result is quite different.

[http://i.imgur.com/uDN14bw.png](http://i.imgur.com/uDN14bw.png)

~~~
vbezhenar
[http://rghost.net/6kDYqvpp9/image.png](http://rghost.net/6kDYqvpp9/image.png)
got backlink :)

~~~
andrelaszlo
This is now entirely self-referential. Also interesting, I guess :)

[http://i.imgur.com/VMrkvTn.png](http://i.imgur.com/VMrkvTn.png)

Edit:

Changing language to English helps.

[http://i.imgur.com/HnG9v4k.png](http://i.imgur.com/HnG9v4k.png)

~~~
Supersaiyan_IV
Sweden: [http://imgur.com/6XMCQOS](http://imgur.com/6XMCQOS)

~~~
dagw
I'm also in Sweden, but I'm getting the "Hillary Clinton is the next President
of the United States..." box at the top when using a desktop browser.

(hacker news is the first 'real' link)

------
HarrietJones
Two Points. Google answers questions, it sometimes gets those questions wrong,
but it's getting better. I'm not that worried about the odd wrong answer
because that's a consequence of fledgling deep learning software. Things will
get better. Of course, some idiot's going to listen to Google one time, and do
something disastrous with the "advice" and then they might have to tone it
down a bit, but I for one welcome our question answering overlords.

Of more concern is the possibility that Google is increasingly correct, and
the algorithms and heuristics it uses know us better than we know ourself.
Nothing's going to fuck with democracy more than the knowledge that free will
is a myth and the outcomes for Very Important Things are already decided.

Media in the UK are stopped from reporting on Exit Polls before elections and
there's a move to ban all polling because knowing how people will vote is
enough to adversely affect elections. I can see this being applied to issues
like this, but even that's problematic. I don't know if a machine accurately
telling everybody who will win is better or worse than a machine only telling
Important People who will win.

~~~
laumars
I'd rather see the media banned from telling people who to vote for than see a
ban on all polling. But something like that would be impossible to enforce
given all publications / news networks have a political bias.

~~~
laumars
Why was this downvoted? A counter argument would be appreciated please.

~~~
laumars
Thanks for downvoting that comment too.

<rant> This site is getting worse and worse for people abusing the negative
karma feature </rant>

------
MrDosu
"Because the other side doesn't have a viable candidate" Glorious two party
system, how is that even remotely called democracy by anyone?

~~~
adventured
There's no correlation between having a lot of parties and a sound, well
functioning political system.

See: Italy, and a dozen other examples from Europe over the last 70 years

If your culture is rotten, your politics will be rotten, regardless of whether
you have 2, 5, 27 parties.

~~~
mrweasel
>There's no correlation between having a lot of parties and a sound, well
functioning political system.

Absolutely true, but it is remarkable that the Danes had 10 parties to choose
from at our election for parliament last week and the US is supposed to be
able feel represented by only two parties.

Denmark is pretty much as homogeneous a society as it is possible to be in a
modern world and yet we have 10 parties, granted many have very similar
policies. It's completely unrealistic that a country of 320million people
should feel that their views should represented by two large parties, when
5.5million people in a small Scandinavian country need 10 parties (9 of which
managed to get seats in parliament)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
The US does have more than two parties. Most ballots have anywhere from 3 to
6. It's just that nobody votes for them unless they happen to nominate someone
from the big two.

~~~
mrweasel
I do understand that there's more than two parties, I should have made that
clear. The US system is more or less a "winner takes all" system, leaving
small parties little or no change for representation, even if they do
represent a large percentage of the population. It is pretty much the same
"problem" the UK has.

If the Americans are happy with the system, then then there's no issue, but if
a large population group feels unrepresented then I don't think it's a fair
system. There's a valid point to be made in terms of the size and diversity in
the US might pose a problem for a parliamentary style of government, in as so
fare as a plethora of parties could gridlock legislation.

------
richmt
Interestingly enough, the top link for me just below the "in the news"
headline is this comment thread.

~~~
sjbase
It's reflexive SEO :)

------
raus22
They have not nailed the "Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the
Trustworthiness of Web Sources" yet

paper here(paper by google):
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf)

------
hsshah
Nice example of how much ground "AI" has to cover before it can be considered
"intelligent". OTOH, lot of humans struggle with differentiating facts from
opinions, so can't be too hard on these systems.

~~~
AJAr
I don't think this has ever been presented as the cutting edge of AI.

------
vixen99
300 million people and (as is all too possible) another Clinton, another Bush?
Someone should do justice to the sickness this demonstrates. Good example for
Kim in N. Korea.

~~~
happyscrappy
It is kind of humorous how people can't see past their hate of America.
Meanwhile weed is being legalized here, is it legal where you are?

~~~
ionised
While I am pro-legalisation, it's not among the most important issues.

~~~
happyscrappy
The point is the people get their way, albeit slowly. It is popular to believe
the US is a fascist country, mainly because it is very powerful regardless of
objective reality.

------
KhalilK
I like how the second search result points to this thread. We've gone meta HN!

------
higherpurpose
The dangers of having a machine give you the "right answer". This isn't that
different from that other "right answer" in Google about dinosaurs:

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-
givin...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-giving-a-
creationist-answer-to-a-question-about-dinosaurs/)

All this teaches us is to take Google's first answer with a huge grain of
salt, if not almost immediately discard it in favor of further research, even
when there's a "simple" question like "how tall is something" (remember Google
got Stephen Colbert's height wrong as well:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/google-stephen-
colb...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/google-stephen-colbert-
height-search-results_n_6022386.html)).

------
Ciantic
Interesting, I find answers from DuckDuckGo more relevant:
[http://i.imgur.com/Dg96e42.png](http://i.imgur.com/Dg96e42.png) all hits are
on the title.

I didn't get the one intended by parent from Google though.

------
DanielBMarkham
Okay, this is weird. I'm almost certain that within the last year or two one
of the main Googlers said something like "People just want to be told what to
do" It was quite a controversy at the time, and people argued that he was just
being flip.

I thought it would make a nice addition to this story, juxtaposing people's
desire for easy answers with an example of the type of easy answers Google
provides folks. It could have kicked off a discussion about the very, very
fine line between "helping people" and "telling them what to do"

Only now I can't find that quote anywhere on the internet. Huh?

~~~
paulhauggis
I think they realized that they can easily influence our political landscape
by pushing desired candidates and ideas to the top of the search engine
results.

But what he said does have truth to it. Most people are employees (they need
to be told what do do). It's just an easier way to live.

*Edit: I forgot. So many people on HN work for Google and I can't criticize the king.

------
glogla
Given that google shows different people different results for the same query,
to tell people what they want to hear, I wonder if others see the same result
I do.

~~~
DrStalker
I used incognito mode and the top hit was this page, so I guess Y Combinator
will be ruling the USA shortly.

~~~
billpg
We're doomed!

------
AJAr
Are there other known instances of this bug? Funny, but could be pretty
impactful with the audience being the whole general public.

~~~
domas
There was an instance where Google gave creationist's answer about what
happened to dinosaurs[0].

[0] [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-
givin...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/26/why-is-google-giving-a-
creationist-answer-to-a-question-about-dinosaurs/)

------
mladenkovacevic
In a couple of years we'll be hearing from digital marketers who worked on
Hilary's campaign about how they "hacked Google results" that one time. That's
only if she wins, though. If she doesn't we'll never speak of this again.

------
IanDrake
The thing that scares me is that Google is probably right (my political
leanings aside).

It's scary because the political machine (the "news" and media) probably gives
off a signal that a deep neural network has learned. It might be that simple.

Our entire democracy could be exposed for the sham that it is. It doesn't
matter what a candidate has done or says they're going to do, it only matters
what media keeps saying about it 24/7.

I've seen this over and over. I'd tell someone about a particular
congressmen's voting record and bills he's sponsored and they'll say "wow,
that guy sounds too good to be true, I'd vote for him", then tell them it's
Ron Paul's voting record and they'd say "That guys is crazy" and then repeat
everything they've ever "heard" about him.

That's just one example, but voters only know candidates by the media's
labels, not by their actions or platform.

~~~
paulhauggis
It's even worse on the Internet with younger voters. If you look at /politics
on Reddit, it's all propaganda that bashes the opposition. Link titles are
changed to invoke anger.

I hate to see when this generation grows up and Twitter and Reddit are the
sole sources of political information.

The "hands up don't shoot" is a good example. Forensic evidence came out and
it was proven that this never happened, yet it didn't fit the political
narrative. CNN and most of the mainstream news continued to push it as if it
was fact.

------
bsbechtel
To me this is a great example of how far we have yet to go in machine learning
and AI.

------
EU_hacker_nrd
..err..so you guys get identical search results? Are you all on Tails over Tor
with en_US? I get: "Who will replace Sepp Blatter? - ESPN FC", "Who will be
Zambia's next president? | - sardc" etc.

Is this an American problem?

~~~
SomeoneWeird
Nope, I'm in aus and I see it.

------
popeshoe
While it's kinda funny, I think it's made pretty clear that text is a summary
generated from the first search result that is clearly linked below, only a
moron would consider this an endorsement of Hillary by Google.

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hudell
It's funny that the first result is now a link to this post on Hacker News.

------
rajathkm
I think it can confuse a lot of people at first glance because Google
generally displays the best answer to the query in that space. Funny to see it
in this context.

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lern_too_spel
Is it wrong? Google's answer is the most likely next president, no matter my
politics or whom I would like to win instead.

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kriro
I love that this thread is #1 and "Who will replace Sepp Blatter" is #7 at the
time of this post :D

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adibchoudhury
Looks like Google took it down? I'm not seeing Hillary when I search this.

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exo762
I would prefer seeing answer to this question from prediction markets, not
analysis of websites aka "experts opinions". It's much easier to understand
mechanism that generated such prediction and you know that those people
actually bet their own money on result.

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decafbad
Which country?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Whaddya mean, there's only one country that owns the internet; how could that
question even be relevant. /s

~~~
patrickmn
For now!

------
ExpiredLink
As always, the candidate with the higher advertising budget wins.

