<story><title>Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dontnotice</author><text>Halfway down that piece:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternative WSJ:&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly improving system.&lt;p&gt;We should also emphasising how integral google&amp;#x27;s search is to the health of society and civilization because we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s absolutely the wrong way to go about looking at it. Not all facts are of equal importance. 97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system.&lt;p&gt;If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time. In fact, being right 97.4% of the time is worse in many ways, as it lulls people into a false sense of security about how much they can trust the system. Get 97&amp;#x2F;100 obvious answers correct, then give someone wildly inappropriate advice when they ask something more &amp;quot;off piste&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And let&amp;#x27;s not delude ourselves here, Google isn&amp;#x27;t doing this out of an altrustic desire to help people. They&amp;#x27;re making sure fewer people leave google.com, in the process starving the very sites they&amp;#x27;re getting information from of revenue. That should worry all of us.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.&lt;p&gt;This feels like an absurd criticism. Couldn&amp;#x27;t it apply to absolutely every negative thing written about Google, ever? Why should Google be immune from criticism?</text></comment>
<story><title>Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dontnotice</author><text>Halfway down that piece:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternative WSJ:&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly improving system.&lt;p&gt;We should also emphasising how integral google&amp;#x27;s search is to the health of society and civilization because we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxerickson</author><text>97% accuracy is abysmal for something you are presenting as &amp;quot;answers&amp;quot;.</text></comment>