How Google Ruined the Internet (superhighway98.com) 124
An anonymous reader shares a column: Remember that story about the Polish dentist who pulled out all of her ex-boyfriend's teeth in an act of revenge? It was complete and utter bullshit. 100% fabricated. No one knows who wrote it. Nevertheless, it was picked up by Fox News, the Los Angeles Times and many other publishers. That was eight years ago, yet when I search now for "dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth," I get a featured snippet that quotes ABC News' original, uncorrected story. Who invented the fidget spinner? Ask Google Assistant and it will tell you that Catherine Hettinger did: a conclusion based on poorly-reported stories from The Guardian, The New York Times and other major news outlets. Bloomberg's Joshua Brustein clearly demonstrated that Ms. Hettinger did not invent the low friction toy. Nevertheless, ask Google Assistant "who really invented the fidget spinner?" and you'll get the same answer: Catherine Hettinger.
In 1998, the velocity of information was slow and the cost of publishing it was high (even on the web). Google leveraged those realities to make the best information retrieval system in the world. Today, information is free, plentiful and fast moving; somewhat by design, Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. But, it's not our bodies that are turning into mush: It's our minds.
In 1998, the velocity of information was slow and the cost of publishing it was high (even on the web). Google leveraged those realities to make the best information retrieval system in the world. Today, information is free, plentiful and fast moving; somewhat by design, Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. But, it's not our bodies that are turning into mush: It's our minds.
At least it saved us from Bing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: At least it saved us from Bing (Score:2)
AV was just fine, especially with those 21164 alphas.
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I remember the early days with WebCrawler.
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And then, just before Google, we could just ask Jeeves. His grandchildren, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana aren't quite as useful (for the reasons in TFA).
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Jeeves WAS Shit.
Alta Vista was THE Shit. Almost as good as Dogpile or Lycos!
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I liked dogpile, though nowadays duckduckgo has taken its place
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Duckduckgo is by far the best search engine I've ever used, excepting that it isn't very good at search.
Google is close to useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, there was a time when Google seemed to know what I meant when I searched for something. It was kind of uncanny but damn was it useful.
These days when I specifically enter a set of search terms, it is not just not unheard of but quite common that Google will present me not just with search results that DON'T include one or more of my terms but actually the opposite of my terms.
Maybe I got older and missed changes in how Google works... possible. It's just at this point Google is nothing more than a pain in my ass.
It's the same principle as with AI customized ads that show me exactly what interests me... which is an outright falsehood. I almost never see ads that are of interest to me, anywhere.
I want the Rising Star Google back... That thing made life easier.
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the issue is that it's being gamed pretty hard, but yeah, it's definitely gone downhill. Seems like every time a search engine gets popular, then sites game it, then it sucks. We used to go through that cycle a lot faster, though, changing to the new best search engine every few years.
For politically sensitive searches, too, Google is not the right one. You can't find things that you know exist simply because someone at Google disagrees with them. Yeah, I know that sometimes they are filtering out actual BS like people who don't believe that vaccines work at all or what have you, but it's hard to even evaluate things for yourself when you have a censor sitting over your virtual shoulder. Thankfully, search engines aren't yet a monoculture, but it's still tough to find what you want these days.
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:5, Informative)
I have the same problem with searching something on Amazon. I'd say that 95% of the time, the words I'm searching for aren't even in the items descriptions. Annoying as fuck to be searching for something very specific and then be shown things that aren't even in the same category at all.
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Okay... "Why would you want 1.25 TB hard drives in the results?"?
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You need 1 tebibyte of storage and high longevity, so you get the extra for over provisioning, and on top of that you want to compensate for drives dishonestly being marketed by the amount of terabytes, instead of the more sensible tebibyte standard? And also you're completely insane.
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:4, Insightful)
The drive manufacturers had been messing with the well-established computer convention that "kilo" = 2^10 long before Euro-pedants like you gave them cover.
1024 bytes had been a kilobyte for a couple of generations before anyone decided they needed to fight over "misuse" of the prefix.
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Remove the space, so it reads "10TB". Then you'll find it.
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The problem I have searching on Amazon is all the crap that gets loaded for them to push in my face before I can start entering search terms. Particularly on mobile.
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:4, Insightful)
I've often found it easier to find something specific on Amazon, by searching Google, DuckDuckGo, etc. with "amazon.com" in the search terms.
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I have the same experience. Ditto with other sites like Home Depot, Walmarts, etc.
Site:Slashdot.org (Score:2)
The syntax site:homedepot.com does precisely what you want on Google.
For example, search immerman site:Slashdot.org
Leaving off the "site:" will include somw results that aren't on the site you're looking for, though typically it doesn't make a huge difference.
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Yeah, i used sire: for a while, but eventually decided it didn't make enough difference to be worth the effort of typing (and remembering)
Not like the old days when all the advanced google syntax would actually let you rapidly dial-in the results. Seems like their advanced options languished one they got decent natural-language search, and then their natural language search went rapidly downhill too.
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> Yeah, i used sire: for a while
I didn't even know they had syntax for Lancelot! Cool.
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Or is it genealogy?
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There's alternate amazon search sites for pretty much this exact reason. I haven't researched how reputable places like jungle search are, but they do exist. Probably I'll take a closer look in the near future.
What I want is a simple browser plugin to redo a search with all FBA results removed. Amazon FBA is the place where all the counterfeit products that bought good reviews live. On top of that FBA protects sellers from bad reviews, so it's where the bad sellers live too.
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One of my adblock or privacy plugins really does not play well with Amazon. Maybe its privacy badger. But anyhow after a few minutes the tab freezes solid. Reloading tab causes it to freeze again. It also seems to happen with Advance Auto Parts. After a few minutes it tells me their website is down for maintenance. Switch to a different browser and it works fine. Probably so much cross site tracking is breaking things.
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I use privacy badger (in firefox) and have not had this issue on windows or linux. Maybe you're not blocking enough, rather than too much? Get some anti-scripting action going on, if you haven't. That should prevent endless loops.
Re: Google (and Amazon and Goodreads) is close to (Score:2)
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I have the same problem with searching something on Amazon. I'd say that 95% of the time, the words I'm searching for aren't even in the items descriptions. Annoying as fuck to be searching for something very specific and then be shown things that aren't even in the same category at all.
Amazon seems completely oblivious to what Google has been fighting tooth and nail against for over a decade: assholes sabotaging search results attempting to profit.
NewEgg suffered the same problem for a while, but unlike Amazon, NewEgg took steps. For a while there, searching for a video card on NewEgg would get you mousepads and adhesive decals for computer cases. Now you get... video cards. It has been a breath of fresh air in a sea of useless shit. Unfortunately because of Amazon, NewEgg has had to
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Gawd, I hate Amazon's search and it's even gotten worse recently. In the past couple of days I've noticed that they're throwing in items from my previous searches into my current search. It's bad enough that their search wasn't finding what I was asking for.
Usually I'm pretty specific in my searches and try to put a manufacturer name if I am able to. When I do I still get the products from a bunch of other manufacturers and any matches from any other categories. I then have to select a category from the sid
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:4)
But also, if I'm being real, it's not like any of the other search engines are better.
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You may be searching for stuff on Conservative-leaning sites, which Google censors [cbn.com].
Yeah, they deny it [snopes.com], but the denials ring hollow. They have the mechanism [dailymail.co.uk] — created to to (try to) fight spam and, their wording, "sites that actively aim to mislead". Are we supp
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Google didn't break the internet, Advertisers did.
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You're right in spirit, but I think you're maybe forgetting what Google does for money.
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It's semantic search. Google gives search results for related words even when the relation doesn't make sense.
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:5, Interesting)
Every day I have to wrap quotes around my search terms because they flat out get ignored. They get a strike through line below the results. They give you what is popular not what is accurate. Even still with quotes you get back things that are vaguely related further polluting things.
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They give you what is popular not what is accurate.
Actually they give you what they think is relevant to you based on your profile. It's funny seeing the people who are most against tracking are the same people who complain that results they get are popular rather than relevant to them.
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Google should return results for what you type, not for what is "relevant" to their model of you.
Re:Google is close to useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember when you could Google a fragment of a message you once read in a forum five years prior, and Google would reliably find the thread for you? God, those were the halcyon days.
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Still works just fine if you know how to Google. Quotes are your friend as are the many language modifiers you can use. The internet is a big place and you can't simply find everything by searching a single BBS anymore.
However there is also a question of what is relevant. If the fragment you're looking for is generic and related to something more recent, chances are the recent topics will get priority due to this perception that recent events are more relevant to your interests.
Re: Google is close to useless (Score:2)
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These days when I specifically enter a set of search terms, it is not just not unheard of but quite common that Google will present me not just with search results that DON'T include one or more of my terms but actually the opposite of my terms.
Maybe I got older and missed changes in how Google works... possible. It's just at this point Google is nothing more than a pain in my ass.
Google has changed a lot over the years and it's worth remembering that natural language queries are the norm. In many cases if you try to structure a search like you did in the 90s a search engine won't have a frigging clue what you're looking for.
Google still has by far the best hit rate for me, but then if you know how something works you can use it to your advantage.
It's the same principle as with AI customized ads that show me exactly what interests me... which is an outright falsehood. I almost never see ads that are of interest to me, anywhere.
I guess you have reasonable anti-tracking? I mean no adverts interest me, but I generally see ads only related to my interests. Usually stu
We need fact checking (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the current news cycle is the lack of Fact-Checking. The general rush to get the story out before your competitor comes at the expense of fact-checking.
This is actually a bigger deal than bias reporting. Because if we have bias information with factual information, someone can view multiple sources and get a bigger picture of what is happening.
However, when non-factual (or just flat out lies) are posted we are given conflicting information in which we will just stick to the source that we just seem to trust the most. This trust is only based on an emotional connection knowing who is telling the more complete truth.
Ministry of Truth will do the Fact-Checking (Score:1, Insightful)
And whom will you trust to do such checking? Certainly not anyone currently pretending to be such a checker...
The spoof — from even before Trump got elected — was that, if Trump claimed "the sky is blue", these checkers would denounce it as "mostly false" and "four Pinocchios", because the sky is sometimes red, and also black during the night...
Even if it weren't political — is wearing masks reducing or increasing the ris
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That is a complex problem.
But I feel the 24-hour news cycle is way to fast. As most News, We do not need to hear just when it comes out.
Eg Right Now
CNN Breaking News: CNN's Brooke Baldwin tests positive for coronavirus
Fox News headline: Republicans rip ‘partisan’ Pelosi panel on coronavirus response: 'This isn’t about oversight'
MSNBC Headline: Federal government sending desperately needed medical supplies to the private sector, not hospitals
Let us be honest here, None of these is something
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"The spoof — from even before Trump got elected — was that, if Trump claimed "the sky is blue", these checkers would denounce it as "mostly false" and "four Pinocchios", because the sky is sometimes red, and also black during the night..."
The spoof? Indeed, a spoof since nothing like this ever happened. Lies like yours are a great example of what is being talked about.
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The problem with the current news cycle is that you get what you pay for. Way back ten or twenty years ago there was this big debate about the value of professional journalism versus the economy of the growing army of bloggers. Naturally the bloggers won. Some of them even call themselves "journalists" now.
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The problem with the current news cycle is the lack of Fact-Checking.
No it's not. The problem with the current news cycle is the flat out overt ignoring of facts. What's the point of fact checking when the likes of Fox News will flat out lie to people's faces, to say nothing of those people who consider the likes of Infowars to be reputable.
Then when someone does post something true the highest official in the country complains that it was fake news.
Fact-Checking is irrelevant to society, because people stopped actually caring about facts.
Advertising (Score:2)
You used to get blogs and random information from all over the world if you typed in a sentance about something. Now all you get is a hundred pages of vendors selling stuff. Stuff in particular at the end of your street or if you are outside the US at the end of your street and in the USA. I do not know exactly what they did to the algorithms but you cannot use it to look for information any more without fighting it. Is there something I should be doing in advanced search maybe?
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it's not JUST our bodies that're turning into mush (Score:1)
FTFY
Our bodies are turning into mush. How many men under 40 can do 30 pushups or 5 pullups or run 2 miles in under 20 minutes?
The internet turned us into couch potatoes.
Nonsense (Score:2)
Television did it first.
The internet hasn't really changed how we think, it's just made it possible for us to encounter things faster. There was always bogus news, now we just see a lot more of it.
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Why under 40?
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This should not surprise us (Score:1)
analogous to Tesla's 'autopilot' (Score:2)
Benefits vastly outweigh cons (Score:4, Informative)
Sure you can always cherry-pick examples of the failure of any system.
But on the whole, Google gives us accurate information WAY more than false information. Us technical, mostly developers/admin people know that better than most - because we are constantly taking advice from Google for which there is a very direct and measurable result that we can judge.
The more esoteric, and frankly worthless a question you ask - like who invented the fidget spinner - of course you are going to run into inaccuracy. But even there, over time that too will correct itself.
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But on the whole, Google gives us accurate information WAY more than false information. Us technical, mostly developers/admin people know that better than most - because we are constantly taking advice from Google for which there is a very direct and measurable result that we can judge.
Wouldn't you say that this is true mainly because Google links to Stackoverflow or Wikipedia for most questions developers/admins ask? We as a community have routed around the advertisers as much as possible.
For other queries ("what bag should I buy to be the largest possible for carryon" or "what credit card is best") it is very hard to get a good answer from Google, because the search results have been gamed by advertisers.
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Wouldn't you say that this is true mainly because Google links to Stackoverflow or Wikipedia for most questions developers/admins ask?
Not really, because (A) Google is still very good about linking to the RIGHT StackOverflow post, there are often several candidates and Google is still good at providing the most relevant. Bing in theory could do the same, but in practice it does not find the same SO posts.
I also rarely trust wikipedia anymore due to past experiences so generally I don't include results from
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But even there, although advertisers game those things you can still get great results - you just have to be selective as to which link is good, but it's pretty easy to tell and you are still fed some good information.
You have better skill than me.
By the way if pure size of carryon is your only concern the absolute best carryon is an Eagle Creek Medium Duffle bag, which perfectly fits into baggage guidelines and has essentially zero room taken up by superstructure so you can fit the most into it compared to other carryon luggage.
Thanks!
How could they (Score:5, Funny)
Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob.
Don't we have /. for that?
Truth Detector (Score:2)
Google isn't a truth detector, it's a search engine. It does it's job - you type in search terms and it finds relevant pages. If ABC has a BS story up that they haven't properly updated with an addendum, that's ABC's problem, not Google's.
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The trouble is...that Google "IS" trying to become the truth detector, with some mixed success.
They are actively trying to figure the truth out for you the viewer, often it seems towards a general political bent or philosophy Google mgmt has.
They do try to downplay what
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"While I think anti-vax folks are loopy, I'm not sure it is Google's place to judge is it...?"
Yes. Their job is to return relevant results.
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Why shouldn't Google just return all results, and let people make their own decisions?
Is it Google's place to figure most people are too stupid to make the correct decisions as to what viewpoints should be believed?
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"Why shouldn't Google just return all results, and let people make their own decisions?"
People don't want all results. People want useful results. That's why Google beat altavista.
"Is it Google's place to figure most people are too stupid to make the correct decisions as to what viewpoints should be believed?"
Are they wrong?
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"Is it Google's place to figure most people are too stupid to make the correct decisions as to what viewpoints should be believed?"
Are they wrong?
The error in your logic is that you are assuming the people who cannot make the correct decisions on viewpoints aren't also working at Google.
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No, I'm just assuming that the Google team can collectively work it out.
From where I'm sitting they are doing a tolerably good job. Do they make mistakes? Sure. But is it still the most useful search engine because they succeed more often than not? Also yes.
This may not be the right conclusion (Score:2)
The problem is... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that we see google search results like a source of truth when, in fact, it is only a source of entertainment.
Google just aggregates garbage (Score:2)
Garbage in, garbage out. It has more to do with journalist never being the best or the brightest. Ask a bunch of attention seeking peddlers of words anything and you will find truth is not a priority. Google as an aggregator of such garbage does not care. If anything they only care about what is politically important for their ability to sell ads. Which is why their attempts to promote their view further skews information away from truth.
The publishers need to update robots.txt (Score:1)
That was requested by the chap who started the whole "right to be forgotten" flap, but the publisher's weren't willing (or able!) to put old, obsolete stories in the "don't try to index these pages" list.
I actually suggested that it become part of Canadian law, in invited comments to PIPEDA (:-))
Guinness book of world records (Score:2)
There was no way to know if anything in the book was true, it was hat a matter of faith. Google is the same thing. If you accept the top links, the easy answers, then you are looking for an easy answer and not concerned with soundness or truth.
What google and the internet does is allow those who do not accept everything
Google’s Reddit obsession. (Score:2)
Oh bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
You're acting as if there weren't Urban Legends, rumors, and outright lies before the interwebs.
Well, the world DID exist, and did function pretty much the same way as it does now. Remember the one about the girl who said she was getting these creepy calls while she was babysitting, and when she had the operator trace it, they said it was COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!? Eek! (They made that one into a movie!) Or about how Mikey, the Life Cereal commercial kid, died because he literally exploded when he drank Coke after eating Pop Rocks?
All that's happened is that the shit flies faster now; likewise, we now all have the tools LITERALLY AT OUR FINGERTIPS to debunk, disprove, and deny fake news, rumor, and gossip faster than ever as well.
It's neither Google nor the internet's fault that we can't be arsed to look stuff up for ourselves.
Ruby Ridge was Bill Clinton's fault (Score:2)
Yep, see above. That still floats around despite that debacle happening under George H.W. Bush's watch, before Clinton was even elected, much less sworn in. And if this "fake news" standard was applied to the media, everyone from PBS to Fox to MSDNC would be blacklisted for repeating lies on a daily basis.
Click-baity title... for mush brains (Score:2)
If you think the internet is just search and news then you have a very limited view of it. And it just isn't Google. *cough* facebook. (or so I hear, I refuse)
It's also easy to focus on the annoying parts of Google and ignore all the amazing things they have given us.
If your mind is turning to mush because of the internet, then that is your fault. You choose how you use it.
Fake News (Score:1)
From search to filter (Score:3)
The problem is that google went from a search engine to a user preferences filtering system. It's not objective, it's tailored towards you and your surrounding. It's pretty clear if you travel a lot and sandbox your searches on google.
So yeah, it's not giving the answers that you are looking for. It's giving you the answers that maximizes some profit. That includes having you go to websites you find great and on which you will spend a lot of time watching those juicy adds. Independently of these pages containing the actual relevant information.
Welcome to the filter bubble.
That being said, if you think google ruined the web, then I urge you not to look at what facebook did. That, my friend, is pure evil.
I detect ... (Score:3, Insightful)
giving us what we want at the expense of what we need
And who decides what we need?
huh (Score:1)
cherry picked (Score:2)
In 1998, the velocity of information was slow and the cost of publishing it was high (even on the web). Google leveraged those realities to make the best information retrieval system in the world. Today, information is free, plentiful and fast moving
Apparently not fast moving enough to give a correct answer to Who invented the fidget spinner?
Even so, while information used to be slow and expensive, there is no indication that it was any more correct. There is a story [ source: ? ] that while Crick, Watson and Franklin were on the trail of uncovering the structure of DNA, the standard textbook they were using contained incorrect information about one of the bases. Until someone who was better informed pointed this out, they were stuck.
The same appli
The real problem is lack of vetted source (Score:2)
Now, on the net, it is all anonymous. We have trolls (hello caffeinated bacon amongst others) whose function is to destroy and discredit any facts out there.
What is needed is to have vetting on stories, sources, logons, etc. Once logons are held responsible, it becomes possible to stop BS stories, as well as trolls.
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Now, on the net, it is all anonymous. We have trolls (hello caffeinated bacon amongst others) whose function is to destroy and discredit any facts out there.
Hi, WindBourne.
Maybe you were forgetting that I'm the one always correcting your 'WindBourne facts' aka lies.
And you still after all these years haven't shown a single one of mine.
Maybe I troll you a little bit sometimes cause you're a dick. But everyone knows the liar and discreditor of facts is you.
If you trust Google for fact-checking (Score:2)
... then your problem is a bit larger than that what it delivers is determined by prevalence, not by accuracy. Anybody that can do actual fact-checking themselves has long since realized that google is not trustworthy in any regard.
Use Google's Advance Search form (Score:2)
Dont use google... (Score:2)
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DuckDuckGo - Shows the same pages in the same order to the question "who invented the fidget spinner" all but Wikipedia say the same thing Catherine Hettinger, invented it, all are conventional media sites
Cross purposes (Score:2)
The core problem with Google is poor governance derived from a counterproductive business model. Everything Google touches leads to a reality in which people are incentivized to behave poorly.
In search SEO/link farms/associated bullshit exists to rake in cash from exploiting Google's platform. Google wants to be useful yet its own policies has itself directly funded a constant war between useful and bullshit.
On Android the dynamics of single vendor app store and everything must be free race to the bottom
How Google Ruined the Internet? What?? (Score:2)
Used to, you;d go to a field expert and ask their opinion, perhaps ask more if it seemed a little odd. Or you'd look it up in an encyclopedia mostly located at the library, which were expensive and hard to update and fairly heavily checked. (Buy THIS years version for only 90% of the previous price!)
Now, Google solves ALL problems and queries with a single, appropriate, correct answer. What's 2+2? 4. When does my local pizza place open? At 10
Yep 2 incorrect results... (Score:2)
Google definitely ruined the internet because someone found 2 incorrect results. Let's ignore the 100 million correct results to searches you get. The internet is RUINED!
Google ? missing the point.. (Score:2)
Never mind google. Javashit killed the internet (well at least the www part)
Ole Mr Berners Lee and those bright people at CERN/DARPA et. al. come up with a superb protocol (HTML) to allow *ANY* device running *ANY* operating system to talk to each other.
And now we're back to "upgrade your browser to XXX on operating system YYY to view this page". Because people just don't fucking get it. You might as well say "You need Ford petrol caps to fill this petrol tank with Ford petrol" (hello John Deere !).
Google
Nah, don't want your censorship, thank you (Score:2)
This is just the "you can't have security or privacy because child molesters" with different words. Accept corporate censorship because "fake news". If all this fake concern and Russiagate bullshit had been around in 2002, anyone questioning the invasion of Iraq would have been smeared as such. Fuuuuuuuck this.
Remember? (Score:2)
Remember the story....?
Nope I sure don't. I have no idea which Polish dentist you're talking about.
Make a non-Google internet. (Score:2)
Monty Python said it best... (Score:2)
Re: Google only shows their version of the truth (Score:2)
The time will come when they decide to use it.
Someone is measurably brighter and/or more honest than the genetic reject that downmodded them.