Non-Fic Google is apparently altering search results

Discussion in 'General Chat' started by Lil K.O, Jun 25, 2019.

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Is this real or fake news

  1. Real

    16 vote(s)
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  2. Fake news

    4 vote(s)
    20.0%
  1. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    A hypothetical isn't even an argument. I haven't seen a single piece of solid evidence anywhere for Google doing anything like that. Exactly the same considering your filter example. What if Google suddenly only ever returns pages about bananas? Wouldn't that be bad filtering? This isn't adding anything to the discussion. You're saying they're at fault for something there's not even proof of. I struggle to see how it would even be in their interest.

    Paid trolls are actually detectable. Sometimes they're easy to spot as a human. There's been cases of them being traced to specific geographic locations, even. Overall, there's detectable (high probability) trolls and filtering them is only normal for a company whose service is being polluted.

    As for other low quality sources, some examples are pretty clear like the one this thread was started about. Now I am curious just like you how their learning process is structured (probably semi-supervised), and how the labeling process goes specifically. Funny thing is, from that graphic about human bias in the original article it's clear that Google knows about human bias and its impact on training data. They make their employees aware of it. Isn't that ... good?

    Anyway, I would like to see the general methodology of Google scrutinized by an independent party just as much as you do, but for a different reason. Google is a company, and the search engine their product. Normally, if you don't like it, opt out. But because of the large market share, it's almost become a commodity and them following ethics become very important. I don't want them scrutinized because I'm crying like a baby and I'm playing the victim because I'm not getting attention from daddy search engine, without any substantial proof. I want them scrutinized because they're a large company and their methodologies should be sound.

    The last part is just blatantly false. Companies do not want their code public because they do not want everything how they architecturally designed their software, how they've written it and especially what neat tricks and optimizations they use. I'm under a contract with an NDA for that exact reason. Or consider this: Google, for me, returns by far the best search results. Has been the case for years. Why aren't the competitors as good? Hasn't it all been stolen anyway, what's the point?

    Do you realize how many low quality or lower ranked results there are? How many different kinds there are? How many resources this would cost for a company with that many users? The internet is massive. Even if ignoring the economics side, it'd be impractical from an architectural standpoint. Have fun scaling everything up a few orders of magnitude. They won't pay the cost, especially if nobody's going to use it.

    Edit:
    "It's estimated that Google has only indexed .004% of all Internet pages."
    Imagine if they had to index all the junk they filter out, for example up till 40% of the web, they'd need to enlarge their index by a factor of a thousand. Have fun! That's only one part of the entire architecture though ...
    Also, people often don't read past the first, second, third result returned.
    So many reasons to not do what you guys suggest ...
    You forget that it's a company, not a political party. Companies set economical value first.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2019
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  2. Westeller

    Westeller Smokin' Sexy Style!! Staff Member

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    I said they can't be open source because it's a security risk. Not that being closed source automatically makes their software more secure than leading open source alternatives. Because, as you've said, closed source software can be absolutely riddled with vulnerabilities that don't exist in competing software. Open source code is just one flaw. ... I'd like to use a witty metaphor here to explain why you don't deliberately create security flaws in your software without extremely good reason, especially when you're responsible for the personal information of hundreds of millions of people and financial institutions, a responsibility that is no fucking joke and demands absolute caution... but I don't know one offhand.

    It's a security flaw that people can read it, yes. If you can easily disassemble it, then that's also a security flaw. Two flaws that don't contradict or undermine each other in any way -- both should be addressed. I'd use another witty metaphor here about how two wrongs don't make a right, but I'm short on them today.

    I've yet to contradict myself. I've said, repeatedly, that open source has an inherent and indisputable security flaw. I've acknowledged that the flaw may be outweighed (meaning it is a calculated risk) in some individual cases by public review. I've also said that isn't an option for a company like Microsoft, responsible for hundreds of millions - and I think this is like the third or fourth time I'm emphasizing that number - of people and corporations. You can disagree with that if you want, but it's not a contradiction.

    And, yes, ofc, proprietary software secrecy and all that.
     
  3. sgrey

    sgrey Well-Known Member

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    This is just false. Being able to read the code is not a security flaw in the general case. Fundamentally, if opening the code causes it to become a security risk, then it is already flawed and is a security risk. I can't understand why you think opening the code poses a risk.
    All the best security algorithms, such as cryptographic algorithms, are open to the public and any company can say they use it, but they are still nonetheless secure. Building your software with inherent design flaws does not make this a problem of open source.
     
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  4. Westeller

    Westeller Smokin' Sexy Style!! Staff Member

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    Opening the code to public perusal is a security flaw precisely because it can reveal other security flaws. It's naive to assume that public review will identify and help correct all potential security flaws in your software; the same as it's naive to believe concealing your source will prevent them from being discovered. Regardless, going open source is a calculated risk. You hope that public review will identify flaws in a safe way before someone takes advantage of them, and that you won't just be assisting the latter. Might work out, might not.
     
  5. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    Cryptography is another matter entirely. It works because it mathematically simply does. It being open or not does not matter. Large software architectures are different.

    Just butting in on this one specific example.

    The security part can be debated, but I would think though that they don't make it open source to keep the whole ecosystem in their hands, no?
     
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  6. sgrey

    sgrey Well-Known Member

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    I think you kind of starting to get it. I never made a claim. People who released that article made the claim that google is engaged in political censorship. Whatever evidence they provide, I think you can go ahead and investigate? Like what people were banned by google recently, etc?
    And you keep trying to confuse definitions. Yes, the search should provide relative data. It also should not remove some of the relative data because google decided to do it just because.

    On social platforms, yes. Active bots and people who try to produce paid fake content, remove them. Just make sure you don't shoot someone who is legit. Free speech and all.

    Although this is true, it's only true for some types of software. Something like MS Office - no one gives a shit.
    As for why google produces better results, it can also be attributed to the amount of data they have, not just algorithms. It's pretty dificult to decide if their algorithm is better or just the amount of data they have collected for 20+ years had something to do with that. Maybe all those searches that are not doing as well right now will catch up in a few years. Also, google maybe number one search in the US, but it's not true in the world. There are countries (other than china) where other searches is more popular (yandex for example)

    It will reveal some security holes, which will be closed because of it. Those flows were there regarless and potentially were already exploited. Opening the sources wouldn't make the situation worse, it would make it better. I think it's better to open up your sources with a proper preparation, then to release a data leak of all customer information. Like google gave access to all private information for all users through developer api for google+.
     
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  7. Westeller

    Westeller Smokin' Sexy Style!! Staff Member

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    Probably.
     
  8. sgrey

    sgrey Well-Known Member

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    Yes, and buffer overflow doesn't exist when proper methods are used, as well as every other problem. Although I don't like to make general claims, I think in this case it's a pretty safe bet: there are almost no bugs that can be found by reading the source which cannot be found by analyzing the binaries with both static and dynamic methods. And depending on the program complexity, it is questionable which one is more difficult. And don't disregard side channel attacks too. They don't even care about how you compile and encrypt your binaries.

    It's not a security flaw. Security flaw is having shitty code in the first place. Opening code to the public, arguably, will cause a temporary higher risk, compared to prior situation. However, this will be quickly mitigated. You cannot, no matter how much you want to, call open source a security flaw. Or opening the source. If you release your source with hardcoded passwords, headers, usernames, etc - yea, sure. That actually happened. That's why I say that if you write shitty code, that is the flaw, not that the code is closed or opened.
     
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  9. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    As the saying goes, people think whatever isn't biased towards them is biased, it's nothing new.

    There has been absolutely no evidence to show any bias in google's search results. That is not to say that there are some people at google that are bias, and obviously like every corporation on earth, google will favor things that are in line with their thinking. That said, one and the other are completely different thing.

    Just like the majority of people working at fox news (that is in nyc) is actually democrats, but it doesn't stop the channel from being biased towards the right. Business and personal are 2 different things.

    Again, the whole results are biased nonsense is nothing more than a politics. When things are not in your favor, you claim bias to garner support. The underdog effect. Hitler also claimed that bias against germans as an excuse to start a war.
     
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  10. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    I've never seen a credible claim, looked at all the claims now in this article and they were bogus. The article this thread is about is simply attention whoring/victim complex, as it usually is. Sure, leaving out relevant data is not something they should do. And they've things similar before - to get a competitive advantage in the market. But I don't see how that applies here. Anti-competitive practices are looked after and get punished. Maybe not as hard as they should, but that's another matter.

    I've seen a lot of hypotheticals but no evidence and the whole case doesn't make any sense to me from a corporate perspective. It's like they hold this conspiratory belief that everyone's out to get them, them versus the world, that they're the only reasonable people. Typical populist sentiment.

    It wouldn't surprise me if some people got partly filtered out. Like, pages of Alex Jones declaring that vaccines are evil, they could be filtered or lowered in rank. Not strange given that that's blatantly false. It's a senseless result to return, just like a paid-for troll webpage or a link farm.

    Allowing to disable parts of filtering is an insanely impractical and unfeasible idea.

    NLP and such are active fields of development. I'd be surprised if Google didn't have an edge in tech.

    Russia and China aren't exactly great examples for governmental reasons. I looked it up worldwide for the countries with data: it's basically Google, the Russians, and the Chinese. So ...

    The implementation can have problems indeed, as can any piece of software. It's still not a great example because crypto implementations will naturally have lots of eyes checking relative to the size of the implementation. I agree that open source can be more secure. Differs on a case-by-case basis. But security isn't the main worry, profit is. Yes, even for a product like Office. They make a lot off of enterprise and organizational sales.
     
  11. sgrey

    sgrey Well-Known Member

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    How did you look? Are you expecting something like a list of banned people directly from google's database for the proof? I don't know if google does information manipulation in the search, I know they do manipulate recommendations on youtube and also demonetize "bad" channels so they would stop posting the "bad" content. I also know that facebook is actually hiding posts of people you subscribed to if they post "bad content". This got out quite a while ago with some evidence. No, I don't have the link, I don't save them... But none of this is technically the proof. The problem is that google is unregulated, like, completely and they can do whatever the hell they want. It is actually irrelevant if they manipulate the search results or not at this point in time. They should be regulated so they won't do it in the future.

    Majority of the NLP research in the companies like google is shit. They are basically just running various neural networks for some specific tasks. There are not that many researchers, unfortunately, who actually do real NLP science, which does not involve only running neural nets. I don't mean that their results are particularly bad or wrong. I am talking from the scientific point of view - running texts through neural nets will help with achieving some tasks, but is extremely limited in what it can do and not extensible.
    As for the search engine, I've been to some small countries that don't show up in the stats generally. Usually, they share search - google for general info and their local search for stuff they need locally.
    erm.. yes? Everyone wants money. Money is the biggest motivator of all. I think RedHat selling open source OS is doing just fine? Oh, and btw, majority of Microsoft's income nowadays doesn't come from software sales too, it comes from subscription-based cloud services -> https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/...arnings-cloud-services-surface-gaming-windows
    And in term of security, I was just doing the selection of papers, just so that people won't misquote me again and say there is no proof and will never be.
    Here are some papers for the past 20 years, just to illustrate the point:
    https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3924
    https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/951496
    https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1529731
    https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/21250/1/CACM_-_Is_open_source_security_a_myth.pdf

    Summary: overall there tend to be more closed bugs/vulnerabilities in the open-source software. However, overall security is about the same between closed source and open source. BUT, having code with security holes, and not releasing it does not mean you are safe because it could've been long exploited by hackers. Opening the code to the public just increases the number of found bugs short-term, and they are being quickly closed. And the more money you get from your software, the faster the bugs are getting closed.
     
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  12. Lil K.O

    Lil K.O [Loki]

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    Adding onto the Russian interference part
    The Russian interference was investigated and proved that Russia did not interfere with elections. So Google is trying to prevent a situation that did not happen and in the video they clearly stated their intentions and more info was revealed stating their intentions. I dont care about where Google leans politically and so do most people I believe, right wing channels where not being suppressed on YouTube but where getting censored on printrest and some knitting site with 8 million people. Google is showing clear intentions to intervene with elections like what people accused the Russians of doing. Google has clearly to much power and should be broken up since they intent on abusing it. Google is being protected by US law since they a platform but they are acting as a publisher and they therefore responsible for what they put on thier platform, they should not be allowed to have it both ways
     
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  13. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    Youtube demonetization is because of content not appropriate for the ads they run. Same as sites getting removed from their ad network. As for recommendations, in my personal experience I got more than enough recommendations relevant to the article of this thread when I watched stuff like for a few days about a year ago. It's an anecdote, but hey I still haven't seen any evidence or indication otherwise anywhere. Everything I've ever seen is hypotheticals, falsified proof like in the article given in this thread, and whiny far-right/populist types.

    Even if those get filtered, there's the question: are there other reasons for getting filtered out that are not actually censorship? Were they putting out misinformation/malicious content? Like e.g. Jones being an anti-vaxxer, endangering public health? And as I said many times I'd like some investigation in large tech companies' methodology as well, but because they're large companies not because I have a persecution complex and like to play the victim like that senator in the article. But I'd like to make clear that their search engine is a product, and you can opt out of it. The only reason I think investigating them is necessary is because they've grown so large and their search engine is almost a commodity.

    Running texts through neural nets is extensible and is not extremely limited. It's also not the only possible approach, but it is the one with the most weight behind it. As for you calling their NLP shit, sorry, but I don't take any stock in your words. They've got a search engine, Google Assistant or whatever it's called, their translations and who knows maybe some other pet projects, all related to NLP.

    The anecdote you provide doesn't challenge my point in any way. There's some local search engines in small countries? As if they're going to provide as good a service as Google. In the end, it's just Russia and China.

    Office 365 is subscription based ... since when are subscription sales not sales?
    As for security, I wasn't contradicting you.
     
  14. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    Where exactly was no interference proven? As far as I know, there's a ton of proof. There's an entire Wikipedia page full of different things that happened in the 2016 elections under Russian influence. One little snippet:

    "During the summer and fall of 2016, Russian hackers intruded into voter databases and software systems in 39 different US states, alarming Obama administration officials to the point that they took the unprecedented step of contacting Moscow directly via the Moscow-Washington hotline and warning that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict."

    Anyway, there's been a lot of interfering by the Russians. Judges think it happened, the FBI thinks it happened, the CIA thinks it happened, the Obama administration thinks it happened, DNI thinks it happened, foreign intelligence agencies think it happened, and so on.

    And the article you linked to in your first post is a complete sham.
     
  15. reagents 11

    reagents 11 disaster personified

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    They don't happen. The entire russiagate narrative are based on a redacted crowdstrike report that is again a company with ties to British intelligence. Trump is a shocking but explainable result.
     
  16. Lil K.O

    Lil K.O [Loki]

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    Dude people voted for trump
    They dont all think Russia interfered and The US did launch an investigation, the Muller report and the conclusion was the was no collusion
    Still there is evidence that Google wishes to act like a publisher while being a platform and has a bias,the evidence is there and more evidence came to light today
    Most of the US politicians are saying Google needs to be broken up
    PS:Obama had a speech about the Russian collusion and said it didnt happen heres the speech
    So you saying that everyone believes so is false ,only the mainstream media and NPCs believe so
     
  17. reagents 11

    reagents 11 disaster personified

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    Since that isn't the topic of this threads i think it's better to stop.
     
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  18. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    I've seen no evidence for Google doing that at all and that gutter tier journalism article isn't evidence either. Every point of possible influencing by Google is also something that's absolutely needed for them to provide the product they do. Should their methodologies be checked? Yes. Is there proof of them influencing anything? No. And I certainly still haven't seen any in this thread.

    There's plenty of evidence for Russian influencing of the elections. The Wikipedia page is a nice compilation, but it's essentially agencies like the FBI, CIA, and others, plus foreign agencies and a lot of incidents that actually happened. There's no denying it. There's also motive for them to do so, way more than Google ever had.

    The video you gave as "evidence" isn't even evidence. Obama basically says: let the election process go its way and don't try to discredit it before it's even taking place. Also, for context: this video is from basically before the election even happened, a lot of of investigation only happened afterwards ... In essence, you are leaving out the context for that video and misquoting Obama. Similar logical fallacies the article you provided made.

    You don't have to project your insecurities about the election onto me. You can like or dislike Trump all you want. I'm only stating what are basically proven facts about the 2016 elections by now. Russian interference in your elections is a reality and it should be prevented. I'm not out for your skin or for anyone's skin, I want a proper democratic process and that is not what happened.

    As a finisher, here's what a committee from bipartisan inquiry concluded:

    "In May 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the interim findings of their bipartisan investigation, finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of helping Trump gain the presidency,"

    You're ignoring a lot of information sources.
     
  19. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    "In March 2018 the investigation revealed that the prosecutors have established links between Rick Gates and an individual with ties to Russian intelligence which occurred while Gates worked on Trump's campaign [...] alleges that Gates knew the individual he was in contact with had these connections."

    "Barr said that on the question of Russian interference in the election, Mueller detailed two ways in which Russia attempted to influence the election in Trump's favor, but "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." On the question of obstruction of justice, Barr said that Mueller wrote "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.""

    "During the course of the 2016 presidential campaign and up to his inauguration, Donald J. Trump and at least 17 campaign officials and advisers had numerous contacts with Russian nationals, with WikiLeaks, or with intermediaries between the two."

    So the point where the investigations by the justice system are, is that they didn't have enough evidence to conclude that the president specifically colluded with the Russians. But, people in his campaign did, and the report also did not exclude the possibility. Where there's smoke, there's fire ...

    So the question isn't even if Russian influencing happened, it's if the president personally participated. And given his questionable history with the law, given the proven collusion by his election adjudants, I'd infer yes.

    It's so easy to find ammunition. There's so much explicit and especially a lot of implicit evidence that the Russians had an influence on the elections. And even that they cooperated with the campaign. How much, we'll never know. But if you say it didn't happen, you are calling the FBI, the CIA, the justice system, foreign intelligence agencies, most politicians, and everyone in other countries laughing their asses off liars. The politicians denying it happened are as it typically goes those that profited off of it.
     
  20. Yukkuri Oniisan

    Yukkuri Oniisan 『Procrastinator Archwizard Translator and Writer』

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    See the title, read the discussion... (I'll ignore the American Politics discussion)

    Become confused...

    Why people think that Google, a company, will give an unbiased search result?

    I mean since Google search result is already censored and biased from years ago, that's why there is an entire Job about SEO and why companies paid Google so their result would come at the top.

    I mean if I don't like the City Guide that I employed right now since he only told me all the popular tourist trap and restaurant or locations that paying him, while all I wanted is to visit weird and obscure locations, I might employ a new Guide.

    I mean in this wide wide world there is not only a single Guide out there, but there are several. Even if their guidance sucks, it's better than randomly visit buildings at random and hope it got weird shit or something. Of course, you can always call your friend and ask where you can find weird shit and all...

    People just love overreacting I guess. The same with qidian dramas and the recent mangadex drama...
     
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