[victork2]

I have to agree and even add it's more dangerous than that.

Never mind the fact that what attracted me to Google was its sober interface, its minimalist approach of results on the web (that's also why I like Hacker News). Never mind that Google tries to fit more information per inch square for no good reason and sacrifice readability of the "normal result", after all they are still a search engine.

But more worrying is that they are going to make assumptions without putting sources[1]. It's a very Orwellian approach to answers and that's something we should grow out of. There's a reason why we need sources: because what's written is just one of the way to see an event or somebody.

And Google, really your new Blogspot is awful, useless eye-candy.

[1] At least from what's shown on the blog.

[hahainternet]

None of this seems to be accurate. Their 'good reason' is that you searched for this information. That's why they're displaying it, in the most integrated way they can.

Your use of 'Orwellian' indicates you are just using buzzwords.

[hackinthebochs]

>Your use of 'Orwellian' indicates you are just using buzzwords.

It's legitimate. The point is that showing answers without sources makes Google the de facto "arbiter of truth". When Google's database updates its version of truth, that now becomes what is (or what has always been). There is no indication of different perspectives, or any analysis for how its version of "truth" was derived. That is very Orwellian.

[hahainternet]

I don't believe it is. Google is not the arbiter of truth, they are not dictatorially selecting the truth for the public. They are /searching/ for information and displaying the results of the search. They remain a neutral party in the middle.

It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control.

[floomp]

> It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control.

There's a lot of trust in Google with that statement. If this changes, how would you know? That's what's Orwellian about it.

It's not hard to imagine the results being silently tweaked by Google - not to say that they will do this, but it's a real danger, because it'd be very bad and hard to detect if they did do this at some point in the future, after we'd all gotten complacent and learned to implicitly trust the results.

[hahainternet]

That isn't Orwellian. If it was, it describes any resource which isn't instantaneously transparent. Lets say your clocks retrieve their time via radio signal broadcast. By your logic this is Orwellian because without checking external sources you wouldn't know if they changed the time!

Of course Google could use this for political gain or some other nefarious purpose, but they rely absolutely on user trust and so it would be an incredibly risky move.

Not to mention that looking at your watch or using bing or ddg or similar tools would show you the deception. It's just silly invoking Orwell over this I think.

[narphorium]

The bold, black fact headings (Born, Died, Spouse, Children, etc) are actually links that you can click on to do a search for sources for that fact.

[VikingCoder]

> after all they are still a search engine.

No, they are not.

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