
Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds - howard941
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/google-search-results-have-more-human-help-than-you-think-report-finds/
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537)

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danielfoster
I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem
to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show
broad matches.

For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the
top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings.
Google completely ignored “Germany.”

Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhaps I just
search too many long tail queries?

~~~
spurgu
It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my
queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my
searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this:

"us" "ambassador" "germany"

~~~
zerocrates
It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give
you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages
associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just
does the query over again but with that term in quotes.

~~~
spurgu
Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean
you would think that Google would _try_ to include pages matching your full
query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could
give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3
results.

~~~
zerocrates
Yes, in general I'd agree with the sentiment that Google trends more toward
trying to show you "popular" content and changing your search to fit that,
rather than the other way around.

With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide,
it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does
lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're
overridden.

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Ozzie_osman
There are three things going on here, one of which is probably bad and the
others pretty normal. \- humans ranking results: these are called evals and
Google has been doing them for at least 15 years. It used to be that there
were a sort of "golden" set of manually ranked queries and results, and any
change in the search algo would run against them to make sure nothing broke.
My guess is over time, as the algorithm became less heuristic and more AI-
driven, these sets are instead used to train the models. \- blacklisting of
misinformation or spam: as a user, I appreciate this. As a citizen, I'd rather
not trust Google as the arbiter of truth, but I generally think they've made
good choices here (vs other tech companies). Until society has solved this
problem (through regulation or otherwise) I'm OK with this. \- giving advice
or favors to advertisers: this is messed up. And will be hard to argue that if
they do it for advertisers they don't also (anti-competitively) do it for
their other internal properties.

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bytematic
This is the full Quality Raters Guidelines that physical people comb through a
website with.
[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf)

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thedevil
Out of curiosity, I looked for their policies on misinformation.

I could see some potential risks here but it still seems reasonable to me:

> Demonstrably inaccurate content

> YMYL content that contradicts well-established expert consensus

> Debunked or unsubstantiated conspiracy theories

This part, I imagine, is a bit more controversial:

> pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive
> users, should receive the Lowest rating.

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ppod
I think the first few are problematic too. Which conspiracy theories? Moon
landing, pizzagate, Epstein? No idea where to draw a line there.

Demonstrably inaccurate? I doubt they remove young earth creationists. It
seems easy at first, but it doesn't take long to find a lot of gray areas.

~~~
skybrian
This is going to be based on conventional wisdom. The evaluators are a biased
representation of general public. What do most people think are conspiracy
theories?

Despite all the policy guidelines, in the end it's not just a legalistic
decision but more like a survey to see what people think.

If you're running a search engine, you need to track of what people think
somehow, or you'll totally miss things like cultural issues.

~~~
stevenicr
This (and other things about not knowing who the manual raters are, or what
cultures they come from and bring to the conscious ans subconscious
table)should be of concern.

Depending on what region of the world the publisher is in, and what region
his/her readers are in.. and where the raters are from, can make some issues.

Some years ago I sat in a class at a college for building contractors when the
subject of burying electrical lines came up, people scoffed at the cost, then
the teacher did a survey and found that 90% of the class thought radon gas was
a fairy tale conspiracy theory, not real, and not something they would ever
consider when building.

Half of those in the class had already been in the building professions for
years and some cases generations.

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turc1656
_"...even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress,
that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its
results."_

Ummm, isn't that providing false testimony and considered perjury? Why is this
shit never, ever prosecuted against a large corporation? It's simple - you
know who lied under oath an it's recorded. You know that person knew what the
truth was because they were a high ranking person who's job it is would be to
know stuff like that. So either they committed perjury or they are grossly
incompetent. And it's not like they didn't know what was going to be asked of
them, nor did they state they weren't sure. Can't stand this crap. The two
standard requirements are that the person needs to have intent to deceive and
that it must be material information to the proceeding. Since the discussion
was entirely surround this aspect of search, there logically must have been
intent to deceive. Furthermore, being the central topic, it was most certainly
of material significance.

~~~
windsurfer
Google definitely says that they blacklist dangerous and deceptive sites. I
don't think anyone would have a problem with that, though.

~~~
turc1656
Probably not, but those lists are more than just dangerous and deceptive
sites. They also include things that individuals at Google manipulate based on
their own opinions which can be one-offs or added to the lists.

From the article: _" The engineer "didn't want a piece of human anatomy or the
description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer's
name," as the paper describes it. The unfiltered search results were "kind of
horrible," he added."_

That has nothing at all to do with web safety or anything fraudulent or
deceptive.

Also, just because people wouldn't have a problem with that limited use (if it
actually was limited to just those two things), that still doesn't make the
statement not technically perjury. If you were in front of Congress and they
asked you something like whether or not your business changed the design of
the website the user sees based on metrics/tracking that an AI bot determines
might generate more user engagement for that user, and you say "no, we don't
do that" but later on you tell everyone that you're only doing it for people
that opt-in, that's probably considered perjury. And I'm sure you could see
why, especially if all users were set to "opt-in" by default.

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oblib
I spent some time rating search results for google just to get a feel for how
they rate pages. Not much time though because the pay is low and the criteria
just silly.

In essence, they give you search term, a url, and about 30 seconds (at most)
to make about $10 an hour or less.

Now, I'm pretty savvy when it comes to understanding what to look for but I
found it nearly impossible to provide both an accurate rating and making
enough money to make it worth one's while.

The people I knew who were doing this for a living told me flat out told that
they take a fast glance, check a rating, and moved on as quickly as possible
because they pay for quantity, and quality of the rating isn't a concern for
them. So what they're really rating more than anything is visual aesthetics.

If the page looked nice and seemed to fit the description of the search term
they'd give it a good rating.

Based on that, Hacker News probably wouldn't be rated very high by most of
those who rate for google.

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harikb
Somewhat click-baity. They are not implying runtime / live intervention (which
isn’t possible anyways). Top bad results are tweaked. That is part of making
the “algorithm”. Who says that is immoral or illegal?

~~~
tyingq
Not immoral or illegal, but using human raters to seed an algorithm can make
the results worse. For example, it could skew to favoring websites where the
rater is familiar with the brand. Which might rank mediocre branded content
over less well known sites with much higher quality content.

That seems to match what I've seen over the last 10 years with Google.

~~~
cinnamonheart
I worked for Leapforce for a while doing this sort of rating work using
Google's guidelines. The guidelines were linked elsewhere in this thread and,
at a glance, they are the same ones I used:

[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf)

If you're doing something that would skew the results to favour a certain
brand, you'd be going against Google's guidelines and your contract would be
terminated quickly. I found the review process of my results to be fairly
stringent; they were reviewed frequently to ensure I was staying within the
guidelines, and I was told even about slight deviatiations.

~~~
tyingq
I'm not suggesting it would be on purpose. Trust must have some subconscious
effect.

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glup
I've heard that historically all the major search engines have used a lot of
hand-tuned results (ordering, exclusions) across the highest frequency
searches. IIRC Microsoft bought Powerset in '08 just before the launch of Bing
specifically to shore up their human tuning. That said, I expected humans to
play less of a role by 2020.

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SolaceQuantum
I was thinking this was going to be about human moderation in search
filtering, but it actually is about engineers implementing manual input into
the algorithm to force certain results to never appear or certain results to
always appear.

I wonder what the consequences of no-filter algorithmic search results in.
Google had to tweak its algorithm to avoid disinformation campaigns from spam
in the past. Now we're dealing with another sort of disinformation campaign
and I don't know a reasonable way for google to tackle it the way it is now.

~~~
shadowgovt
What is the new sort of disinformation campaign?

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lightwin
The algorithms are also written by humans. Even those are not guaranteed to be
unbiased.

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stevenicr
The HN discussion on MSN's reporting of this report has many aspects to
consider:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537)

much less HN discussion on the wall st journal's thread.

There are important issues, especially lack of transparency and censorship
that warrant more discussions imho.

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justinmchase
I don't know, I think there is a _lot_ so it would be scary if there was even
more than I thought.

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ilaksh
It should be based on public protocols/networks running as a decentralized
system rather than relying on a private for profit entirely. It may be
possible to have businesses run on top to provide added value, but the core
should provide transparency and auditability.

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hn_throwaway_99
I feel like some of the objection to "human intervention" comes from the fact
that things that society at large used to determine was true or false, black
or white, are now less so. There is now so much misinformation that a huge
portion of the population now screams "censorship".

I mean, factually, there is 0 evidence vaccines cause autism, and it was shown
that the guy who started this conspiracy theory did it basically as a scam to
make money. So am I supposed to be upset or something that Google is tweaking
their algorithm to not push falsehoods? Same thing as the suicide query. I say
this as someone who has and still periodically suffers from deep depression,
who has searched for suicide methods in the past: am I supposed to have a
problem that Google is "pushing" results that try to keep me from killing
myself?

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gowld
Clickbait headline. How does the report know what I think?

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Starkus
Google censors and manipulates their queries, political too. They're heavy
censors.

I recommend to get off of their search engine, go to DDG

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buboard
Everyone with half a brain should at least block google from taking their
content and boxing it in their page.

