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by VikingCoder 2705 days ago
If you want Google to be authoritative, you're going to have a bad time. It's literally not designed to be a source of truth. It's designed to tell you what it finds on the Internet.
7 comments

> It's literally not designed to be a source of truth.

Google seems to be pushing very hard lately to be considered the source of truth, picking information out of context and putting it in their infobox with no explanation as to where they grabbed it from.

> It's designed to tell you what it finds on the Internet.

It used to be.

Per-user algorithmically customized search results now means that it shows you what you want to find on the internet - which is not the same thing.

Knowledge graph makes this more challenging since it doesn't always do a good job of surfacing the source of the information. In this specific case, for example, the box that pops up indicating Ehud is an Israeli computer scientist says nothing about why the system believes that to be true.
Given that Google is one of the, if not the single most important window to all internet content I don't think that is an acceptable status quo or a sufficient explanation.

Surely if we use search engines most of us try to obtain relevant and factual information about the world, instead of trying to get some tautological answer out of the engine.

The comparison here to journalism is apt. Technically, journalists could simply declare everything to be the mere invention of the journalist's mind, but we don't think that's acceptable for a lot of good reasons.

Actually, the comparison to Librarians is more apt.

If you want to find a book declaring that vaccines cause autism, you can find that book.

Google tries really hard to have the Card Catalog system be as good as possible, but "solving" that problem is basically impossible.

I don't think that comparison is going to go over well for Google though, because we actually do curate contents in libraries and personally assist you in finding the right source for whatever information you seek.

That is what a librarian does, one of the oldest and in many cultures respected professions you can choose. In contrast to Google, which might give you wild conspiracy theories about vaccines on page 1, with no help or indication whatsoever that something funky is going on, a library actually personally assists you.

If Google was a library then that library would have no employees. The books would initially all lie around randomly, and whenever you want a book, you simply shout into the library, and some guy randomly throws 20 books at you. If you take one of the books the next time, the chance will be higher that someone else gets that book as well. Let me just say that I don't think that it would be a great library experience, especially if you try to fit the entire worlds information into a single one.

" It's literally not designed to be a source of truth."

The info top-right is presented as factual not as 'search results'.

Its mission is technically to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

I would argue that organizing and making incorrect information universally acceptable meets some of the criteria, but it fails to be "useful."

"Vaccines cause autism." "Vaccines don't cause autism."

Both of those convey information. Both are expressed frequently. Only one is backed by research. And only one of those is true.

At best, Google might be able to tell you which is backed by research. But that's no guarantee that it's the true answer.

The study of epistemology is fascinating.

There's nothing in the upper right box on this search

https://www.google.com/search?q=ehud+reiter&oq=ehud+reiter

to indicate the person box isn't authoritative, or isn't intended to be authoritative...