Hands on with algorithmic search
Nov. 16th, 2019 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutArs Technica piece on investigation into google search, since it turns out there has been some hands on stuff (we knew about a lot of this, like, searching on how to do bad things to yourself can land you at the national suicide prevention information, but I did not know about all of it).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/google-search-results-have-more-human-help-than-you-think-report-finds/
A little bit into the comments, someone quibbles about some details, and then wishes beastiality (sic) did not show up so readily in image search. WITHOUT GETTING DISTRACTED BY WTF ARE YOU SEARCHING ON I DO NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM, I was reminded of a particularly entertaining meeting between me, my boss (initials D.B.) and a somewhat junior coworker (also initials D.B.) (who was super super innocent looking but had come to us after working at a porn site — he was a really great employee in so many ways). The topic of the meeting: what should we return when people search on stuff we really do not want to be selling them, specifically, bestiality / beastiality. Part of the discussion got yanked over to the correct spelling of the term, but the balance was how much code do we want to write, and how extensible do we want it to be in the future, when some other situation crosses our screen and makes us want to not help those customers.
So, _definitely_ not a new situation, because I retired from that company long enough ago that my retirement is now old enough to legally drink.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/google-search-results-have-more-human-help-than-you-think-report-finds/
A little bit into the comments, someone quibbles about some details, and then wishes beastiality (sic) did not show up so readily in image search. WITHOUT GETTING DISTRACTED BY WTF ARE YOU SEARCHING ON I DO NOT HAVE THIS PROBLEM, I was reminded of a particularly entertaining meeting between me, my boss (initials D.B.) and a somewhat junior coworker (also initials D.B.) (who was super super innocent looking but had come to us after working at a porn site — he was a really great employee in so many ways). The topic of the meeting: what should we return when people search on stuff we really do not want to be selling them, specifically, bestiality / beastiality. Part of the discussion got yanked over to the correct spelling of the term, but the balance was how much code do we want to write, and how extensible do we want it to be in the future, when some other situation crosses our screen and makes us want to not help those customers.
So, _definitely_ not a new situation, because I retired from that company long enough ago that my retirement is now old enough to legally drink.