My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised.<p>Google Search is a content aggregator that show you what it thinks you are most likely to click on. It does not know about politics, it cannot fact check, it does not think care about effort journalism, the only thing that matters is what stories generate more ad revenue.<p>Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don't believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization.
I feel like there's a big push to blame "fake news" and related phenomena on tech companies right now.<p>Fake news is created and shared by people. Tech is just one of the vehicles through which we share it.<p>The problem isn't tech, it's people. Fix the root cause with education and the tech will reflect it.
Not sure what to think here... Google's 'public liaison for search' says <i>"Google briefly carried tweets with dubious info "</i>[0] without defining further what that means - except their Twitter results are changing <i>"second by second"</i>[1], and later assuring that it <i>"only happened for a few thousands who searched for his name"</i>[2].<p>This was not my experience. I took a screenshot of my search results at 9:06PM ET [3], e.g. 1-2+ hours after the egregious tweets (which were already prominently featured within 30-40 minutes, if not earlier, as several other sources suggest[4]).<p>I might be missing something, but it seems disingenuous to suggest that this only happened for a short period of time, while downplaying the matter by vaguely and generally hinting at second-by-second dynamic tweet update algorithms.<p>Also I even think the claim that only a few thousand people saw this may be disproven by Google's own statistics. According to Google Trends, searches for Devis Patrick Kelly peaked between 7-9PM ET [5] - so before I took the screenshot that night.<p>I find it very hard to believe that only a few thousand people saw this over the 2+ hours when this peaked on that night. Based on the Google Trends graph[6] it seems the vast majority of searches happened during the peak, and I suspect it's reasonable to assume that millions have searched for his name since his name was publicly revealed?<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713318172635137" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713318172635137</a><p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713426440253440" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713426440253440</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713578827653120" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713578827653120</a><p>[3] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/ao4kK" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/ao4kK</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/google_twitter_fake_news/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/google_twitter_fake...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://imgur.com/a/lAh12" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/lAh12</a><p>[6] <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2017-11-05T05%202017-11-08T06&q=Devin%20Patrick%20Kelly" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2017-11-05T05%...</a>
Yes, there is bad information on the Internet. Yes, when you aggregate tons of user content some inaccurate things will be there. Go somewhere else BBC, NYT, WaPo. We know, you'd like to see a content regulated Internet. I wouldn't and I'm weary of seeing these articles day in and day out.<p>Beside why are articles from newspaper on HN front page so much lately?<p>From HN guidelines: Off-Topic: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon....... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."<p>This self serving media policy seeking doesn't belong here IMOP. It's not interesting, it's not informative. Shouldn't be constantly on front page day after day.
>Google's Danny Sullivan - "We want to get this right"<p>I feel like in a better world that would be, "We are legally obligated to get this right or stop trying."
A little off-topic, but on similar lines: searching for "demagogue" on google, gets you a Trump's picture: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/qFJk9io.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/qFJk9io.png</a><p>I wonder how that ends up happening, is google able to sum up popular opinion or is this someone's mischief?
I wonder when we finally get mandatory electronic locks on guns. Having an electronic license for a single gun could have prevented this man from using a whole battery of guns.<p>It makes little sense that we can have more sophisticated locks on an iPhoneX than on guns.