To a non-technical user, I'm sure the box looks like a human-curated result which they're more likely to trust. Maybe that's the goal of Google's UI choices. Couldn't be further from the truth.
https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58 (0:58 through 4:20)
Google has started favoring info inputted into the Google My Business listing (the same one that dictates what appears in Google Maps for claimed businesses), so if the owners are updating their website but not updating that (or checking their email for emails from google that say '[business], are you open on 4th of July?') it'll show incorrect info.
This is the problem with the web search and scaping provider also trying to be a thousand other services at the same time. It's a constant conflict of interest.
Unwanted by whom? The reader? If you don't want google as an intermediary you can just... not use them. If you want to search but not have an intermediary, you can just run your own search engine and index. The publisher? Again, if a publisher doesn't want an search engine to be an intermediary then they can always get their site delisted. Turns out that most sites don't do that, or do and then quickly revert back, so clearly they want Google as an intermediary.
As the old adage goes. The only thing worse than no documentation is outdated/incorrect documentation.
Opening hours and Google Maps are the only things that get me on Google from DuckDuckGo these days (even if Google Maps keeps getting worse every year).
I think you have a decent chance of getting a five figure+ settlement from this. Talk to a lawyer about your options.
EDIT: When I search "Hristo Georgiev" (from US IP) there is no longer an image in the infobox. (As of 21:55:10 UTC, June 24, 2021)
I think a google engineer saw this HN post :-D
(You could still talk to a lawyer - remedying it now does not alter the fact that you were previously defamed. But Google has a stronger position having now remedied it)
OP appears to be in Switzerland, where I'm not familiar with the laws.
In the UK malicious intent is all that is needed - even if the statement is in fact true.
Against Google? I am more inclined to think the dude is actually a serial killer than that he has a chance of winning a defamation suit.
I think he has a very good chance of receiving a settlement, Google will not want to take this to court.
Did some googling (lol), was looking for any lawyers who have won successful defamation cases against Google. The top results that were successful suits in non-US jurisdictions (Australia, Japan, Ireland, Hong Kong).
Ex. https://www.mondaq.com/australia/libel-defamation/931462/goo...
I am not a lawyer, I just find law very interesting. I'd recommend reaching out to a few lawyers that deal with defamation claims in your current jurisdiction to see if they think you have a claim.
Direct link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100
Nobody was hurt, nobody suffered any loss, we all had a good laugh, and hopefully we all learned a lesson about what technology does, which responsibilities we all have in building better systems, and that humans, when building such systems, make mistakes. Nobody had malicious intent, on the contrary, the intent was to provide people with information when searching for it (whether in the name of selling ads or not is a different question).
Why do we need to pull lawyers and courts into this? Lawyers cost a lot of money and judges should not have to waste their time with this kind of thing. There are actual criminals out there, let lawyers and judges focus their energy on those.
P.S.: Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending that it happened. Of course it's bad, needs to be fixed, and be prevented for next time. But screaming "sue them!" just feels like dramatically overboard.
Suing in Bulgaria is likely to end up nowhere with Bulgaria having the worst courts in the EU (a primary reason not being in Schengen)
Let's start there first before issuing a lawsuit. You only sue if you can prove damages for defamation. Which, as tepid as most people are on here about patent trolls, I can't imaging taking on google. It's literally like taking on god at this point.
I, being compulsively helpful, reported the error and it was quickly fixed. Maybe I'm part of the problem.
Amusingly that same infobox then has a table that states "2,560 stream processors" in the "Radeon RX 5700 XT" column. So one half of the ML parsed the web page correctly, presumably into some internal non-ambiguous representation, but then the other half of the ML interpreted it incorrectly anyway. Also, the "5500rx" (search query), "Rx 5700" (infobox title) and "RX 5700 XT" (infobox table header) are three different cards with different numbers of stream processors.
And people wonder why ML gets a bad rep.
- “Hristo Bogdanov Georgiev […] was a Bulgarian rapist and serial killer”
- “Cause of Death: Execution by hanging”
- “Died: August 28, 1980 (aged 23-24)”
Yet we also have
- Born: 1956 (age 65 years)
Also, if they don’t exactly know at what age he died, how do they know he would be 65 now, and not 64?
I think Google can do better, but not at the scale they need to cover all bases in Google search.
If you copied that correctly then that would imply that these results are personalized?
Hell of a feat, since he died in 1790.
Alternatively, add a drawing of the rapist to the original Wikipedia article.
Interestingly, for me, another Hristo (german principal investigator) appears on the right side when I google the name.
That Wikipedia article would probably meet the criteria for Speedy Deletion and just causes unnecessary effort for the Wikipedia editors.
"how many raccoons can fit"
No, I am not joking, and this is the result of 20+ years of web search development and decades of cutting edge AI research, right here.
Honestly, it pisses me off how bad Google's search is these days. It has close to zero clue about quality or relevance.
Basically, it's as relevant as searching for "the answer to life" and getting results spammed with 42.
Sorry, that is a bit over the top. What result would you expect for that query? Folks took a silly premise and made a joke about it and google in the absence of anything more relevant shows you their joke. While i was typing this query in I had to ignore the much more usefull suggestions: “How many raccoons in a litter”, “How many raccoons in the world”, “How many raccoons are in the us”, “How many raccoons live together”
And it provided reasonable looking lead to answer all of these question. And it did this while I was seriously mistyping the animal’s name!
If you don’t recognize how amazing this is then you left your blinders on. Let’s take this query for example: “How many raccoons are in the us”. This is a well formed human question, but it is not how one used to query a search engine. You were supposed to try to guess what words would appear on your imagined page and type those in. So for example you would type in “raccoon population us”. Except of course you were supposed to also know that the word “us” is ambigous, and appears too often in the wrong sense, so you would transform it to “United States” to help the machine. So by the expectations and conventions of the early google this is a badly formed query. A user error realky, yet now it can answer it! And it doesn’t just gives me a link where there might be an answer. Oh, no! It pulls the most important sentence out of the page and pasts it over the link.
This. Is. Freaking. Magic.
Are there mistakes? Sure. The linked serial killer thing is quite bad for example. But if you pick the raccoon example as your main argument then you lost me.
Presumptuous of you to assume that's not exactly what I want to see when I search for that specific phrase.
This isn't a case where a highly uncommon name can lead to a high degree of certainty in association.
I went to grad school with someone who later lived in NYC. He shared a name with someone who basically was the cause of George Steinbrenner (NY Yankees owner) getting banned from baseball for a few years during the same period. Obviously not a popular NYC figure.
This was pre-web etc., but my friend ended up with death threats left on his answering machine.
When put like this, the thought that one company controls virtually all information flow on the Internet is more than mildly terrifying.
You're not wrong, but I think rather than bringing up counter-examples, you've produced a list of similar problems.
When someone tries to find a new website someone told them about for the first time... what % of that is filtered through Google? If it's a majority, which I suspect it is, then it's still definitely a problem.
The side effects of their search algorithms and how they control the flow of information has also been a topic of regular discussion/scrutiny for many years (just one example here [1])
> and if they really tried people would leave
Where would they go?
- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
- [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/google-engineer-reveals-searc...
I am not sure about that. People are generally slow to change habits, especially that Google's control will not grow in a sudden fashion, but rather incrementally.
And let's not forget credentials. How many accounts depend on your GMail address? I don't know for you, but for me it encompasses most of the aspect of my life from banking to video games.
Which reminds me of this story: https://archive.is/EVrDv
> In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
EDIT: Because they put an image with unterlated information together in such a way that it misleads people.
However, not all US states allow all types of damage claims and/or have special rules or higher burdens of proof related to those types of claims.
Generally speaking though, it is incorrect to say that somebody must show that they have had actual, monetary damages in order to be successful in a defamation lawsuit.
This overview from the Legal Information Institute (Cornell Law School) has some helpful info: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation
You're basing your understanding of slander/libel on US laws I presume? If that person lives in Europe, generally, the bar for a successful lawsuit is __extremly low__ , it only requires the information to be blatantly false, there is no need to demonstrate the victim incurred any damages.
Suppose his name was "Thomas Edison"; would the title of the article then read, "How Google turned me into the inventor of the light bulb"?
Or suppose someone shared the name, with say, Slobodan Milosevic; is it Google's fault that a web search of that person's name turns up articles about someone who was charged with genocide and other war crimes?
I think it is mostly Google using his picture with the incorrect description below. I feel that is harder to catch for someone taking a quick glance than if the correct picture was used.
I believe that there is a simpler explanation.
The Wikipedia article is there in that side box because it is the top hit for "hristo georgiev" on Google's main search page. The picture is there because it is the top hit for "hristo georgiev" on Google's image search page.
The idea of mashing up the first image search result with the wikipedia snippet with no indication they are from totally unrelated sources seems pretty careless and irresponsible.
I seriously can't believe that the sources of the image and text aren't labeled with their respective sources. Doing so seems basic, obvious and trivial. Not doing so seems to be a blatant attempt to hide expected inaccuracies and make meaningless combinations of information seem more authoritative than it actually is.
While I think this individual would have a hard time in any court system, let alone the US court system, could Wikipedia perhaps have a claim of damages for libel (or something to this effect) due to misattributed information and reputational damage?
Or rather, all the knowledge graphic does is stuff not much more complicated than associate picture to name to article.
But what is pernicious is that presents itself as a knowledge graph and sometimes appears to have knowledge and so it seems to people to be a somewhat authoritative statement. And that causes people not-critically-thinking people to reach false and destructive beliefs.
The name is not unique - I personally know two people named that and in the whole country, there are probably hundreds. He has also stated that.
"Just FYI, funny story, Google thinks I'm a serial killer. But that guy's been dead for years, and Google is mixed up."
I'm not searching a lot of Bulgarian names but I do search for npm packages and the like and despite my best efforts they frequently show me something completely different than what I searched for.
The saddest thing however is that DDG is just as bad, I use it just because I don't like Google and because it is easier to get from DDG to Google than the other way around.
I do a lot of scientific image analysis using an ancient (but reliable!) piece of software called ImageJ [0]. There's a more recent distro of the same called FIJI [1]. So when I tried looking for how to extract EXIF data for GPS coordinates using ImageJ (not even mentioning FIJI), Google returned an info box about the Fiji-the-nation and provided the coordinates of said nation:
https://i.imgur.com/HxSh8Zv.png
In case anyone doubts that this is real I'm seeing it too https://i.imgur.com/PXepl6C.png
Just googled my own name. I know there are ~5 living people with the same semi-unusual name. They now show wikipedia text for an 18th century person (with the same name) along with a great 2020ish color photo of one of other currently living people with this name.
I've purposefully kept my few necessary online photos in grayscale, perhaps that helps ever so slightly with their brilliant industry leading AI algorithms...
Google screwing up their knowledge graph is neither "fake news" nor "cancel culture". Misusing these terms makes them useless for actual discussion.
I've said some time ago already that there is a multi billion niche waiting for whoever wants to do what Google used to do:
- input field in middle of page
- user types text into field
- software shows list of pages that contain said text. Modifiers can be used to influence exactly how exactly the matching will be
- the company is nice and reliable and goes out of their way not to be evil
In an ironic twist, the process of trying to get support from Google will probably drive him to become a serial killer.
That dataflow is human-curated.
"when was running invented"
"how many terashits does the ps5 have"
Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time”.
“69 terashits
ppl when the ps5 is revealed to have 69 terashits per megafart.”
> Rachel was a Biblical figure, the favorite of Jacob's two wives, and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel ...
... along with a happy smiling face of some office worker somewhere, named Rachel, of course. It was glorious.
I'm a decent read of people and talented at figuring out who actually makes sense and should be listened to. So going to people with domain knowledge and talking to them is usually the most efficient and effective means for me to get meaningful information when I am out of my depth.
It's also why I try to be patient with people online and answer seemingly "dumb" questions instead of telling people to google it. In many cases, if you aren't familiar with the subject, you won't know the best search terms and you won't know that the top result is commercial garbage and not really the gold standard source on the subject.
I routinely provide links for things like SRO because not only do people often not know that stands for Single Room Occupancy, if you google it you get a variety of unrelated hits (Standing Room Only, for example).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
I was involved for a time with The TAG Project. I generally try to remember to provide a link for that as well because when I search for it, the thing I was involved with is not the top hit.
The top hit is thetagproject.com. I worked for tagfam.org and it is typically the third hit when I search for it.
I fairly often see people being obnoxious about "you should Google that" and I sometimes understand why they are aggravated with certain things, but I generally think that's asshole behavior.
"We made a profile of you, and if you think it's wrong, you'll have to register and share the right info with us" has been one of the safest giveaways of data hucksters. I used to think Google was the one exception, but by now I believe I should have trusted the rule.
At least someone is having fun with it: https://www.forgednfast.com/why-was-google-search-telling-pe....
This kind of thing should have very hard legal consequences for a company like Google.
Imagine being labeled as some kind of murder/rapist/pedophile whatever and moving into a neighborhood which gets angry fast.
edit: The article was an interesting read too.
> I started a project to unite all Google OneBoxes under this graph indexing system, which involved weather, flights, events, and so on.
Now we know who's to blame :)
What about all the others out there that can't do this for themselves?
Of course were I him it might be pretty bad. Serial killer is serious enough that people might consider there to have been a bug (as there was). But something less outlandish, like a misattributed fraud arrest, could have some pretty bad consequences.
I wonder how they do that. Do they just have a manual intervention list, where they can code exceptions to the ML results?
Otherwise it seems non trivial to quickly come up with another algorithm that does't have this particular problem.
17:19 Quick search shows your image has been removed from the right side panel.
Probably that's why :-)
Please don't kill me.
I wonder if the local sheriff could give him a small signed note explaining the problem to be shown to other policemen just in case. To assure at least that the local police in this place is aware of the situation (maybe ask them directly for advice?) could avoid future troubles.
github burned a house down twitter account I no longer have access to
Thanks google...
