Trusting Google’s Algorithms to Explain Google’s Algorithms

That must have been one awkward presentation room.

Sigh. I worked with someone that gullible ONCE (I wish I knew what college he’d gone to).

PigeonRank, of course, is a hoax, part of Google’s 2002 April Fool’s Day joke. But how did my student fall for it in 2009?

The gift that keeps on giving.

To complete the April Fool’s aspect of the joke, I think Zimmer should publish the name of the student! Just for a few hours, long enough for the page to make it into google’s cache.

The idea was presumably based on this.

Hi everyone, and thanks, Henry, for sparking the conversation here about this matter.

Yes, the student should have scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page, used multiple sources, and tapped into that skeptical part of the brain that would think twice about the use of pigeons in Silicon Valley (Silicon Alley, perhaps).

The most interesting aspect of this whole episode is that it happened while my colleagues and I are pushing for “information literacy” as a general education requirement on campus….

Doesn’t it seem more likely that the story about the student writing the report citing *Pigeon Rank* is itself a rather implausible hoax, playing on people’s willingness to believe just about any report of students’ incompetence.

IOW, people believing that a student believed the hoax are being hoaxed. Or something.

Shorter Anonymous Coward: Plato invented Google. Therefore, computer scientists should retire and study philosophy.

@bianca – CS folks, in general, started in Philo and then moved into CS … in hopes of getting something, if not done, actually to move – even if it was just that little turtle on the screen. FWIW I’m voting for the metahoax of a pigeon rank believing student.

So do you actually have anything of substance you’d like to say about my comment

I’d say it reads an awful lot like Tom Fuller.

I’ve noticed the difference in search results – I do or try to do a lot of narrowing down – but Anonymous Coward is being a little weird. The “expansion” mentioned involves cookies, which you have control over.

I’m having difficulty believing the meme that some student believed the meme that Google is arranged by pigeons.

The internet is serious business.

The original post on Michael Zimmer’s blog has apparently been deleted. Whazzup? (See, me, I try to check my sources.) :)

It’s pretty obvious to me that the student was not being serious … note “traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey”, and the final sentence’s “pecking order”.

Sounds like something I’d write.

bianca steele @11 To clarify, @10 I just meant that the Google spoof was presumably ‘inspired’ by the true and fairly unremarkable (and unclassified) story about a proposed bomb guidance system.

Blame it on the anti-google.

(or maybe your student secretly is a whiz kid)

(or worse!)

–zip–

i understand google won’t return any hits at all if you google “gullible”.

kid bitzer’s comment is so awesome that I had to try googling “gullible”. It turns out that as of this moment, Wikipedia does not have an entry for “gullibility”.

bianca steele @34 Why are you addressing your remarks to me? Either explain, or leave me out of whatever it is you are talking about.

@37: “top results” sb “results most customers will want most to see”

Salient, it would help if you had a more specific question. “Ordinary logic” means that combining two search terms returns the intersection of the result sets for each. “Better help” means pointing out on the first page that a search for “Henry Farrell” is not a search for “Henry Farrell” but rather a search for things that are more like “Henry Farrell” than the intersection of “Henry” and “Farrell”.

Ah, ok. Your answer makes sense to me, but I’m afraid I don’t have any more specific a question. The idea of “better help” falls under the category of better transparency about how search results are organized, I get that now — wasn’t sure if by “better help” you meant “clarify for users how to achieve better search results by modifying their input” (better transparency) or “provide access to alternative sets of algorithms and allow the advanced user to choose which algorithms are implemented when computing results to a particular search” (new functionality).

There’s trouble with implementing ordinary logic, of course; no search engine could implement it strictly and stay in business for long. Trivially, a web page which contains user-desired information about “Henry Farrell” might not show up in an ordinary-logic search for “Henry Farrell,” because the page itself and links to the page might only use his last name, or use Dr. Farrell, or Prof. Farrell, etc.

And people often type questions into google, and the content which answers the question often has only the slightest tangential resemblance to the words used to ask the question. For example, ‘where is the closest cheap hotel to my house’ is a perfectly ordinary user search. A search engine which returns the intersection of the pages indexed by {where, closest, cheap, hotel, house} would not address the user’s query. Only two lexical units are important: “cheap hotel” and “my house” — but even a search engine which identifies this and returns pages indexed by {cheap, hotel, my house} won’t return anything useful to the user. The relationship between these lexical units, obvious to a human reader, is hard to assess according to any general deterministic scheme (and harder when users don’t follow consistent grammatical guidelines).

A more subtle example: a search for ‘production assistant’ (no quotes) returns results ranked completely differently than results for {production, assistant}. The latter words return, in top results, miscellany and definitions; the former returns job-oriented information which (so far as I can tell in a quick visual scan) doesn’t appear in the top 100 results for either individual word.

Hence, the deployment of pigeons, a species with an uncanny sense of orientation, renowned for centuries of contribution to the advancement of human communication.

Something important wasn’t clarified, either in google’s informative explanation or the student’s follow-up research. So I’ll break the news. Those pigeons who perform exceptionally well, in terms of favorable results rankings on SearchWiki, are eventually mainlined into the system: coaxial cable is wired directly into the toes, and data is transmitted directly through the pigeon’s own neural fibers, so that search results are more directly computed and stored. These results may be retrieved instantly from the pigeon at any time, and may be transmitted directly to other pigeons, a process known as “infection.” By analogy, the pigeons which receive the distinction of direct system hookups are referred to as “carrier” pigeons.

I do agree with the idea that google/others could usefully introduce an option to “search by strict indexing” or some such thing, so that users who want to see only those pages which are intersections of all words typed in can do so, bypassing the pigeonization of their query entirely. The “advanced search” feature doesn’t cut it. But this technique wouldn’t give useful results to the bulk of searches google receives, so it shouldn’t be the default setting. [bianca, I’m assuming you and I basically agree on this, since you said “for people sophisticated enough to use it.”]

I would love to see the article presented to viewers of various TV “News” shows to see which audiences are the most gullible.

bianca steele,

“Glen, Tim: How else would you explain why so many people don’t understand how the system they work on works? It’s got to be either a Platonic Idea that they intuit though can’t explain (and OMG DON’T change that!), or else a highly “classified” secret that only Freemasons are permitted to be informed about.”

People use tools quite successfully that they really don’t know the inner workings or mechanics of. This is true of literally mechanical tools, and doesn’t seem to surprise us, as when even a very good pilot doesn’t know what makes the jet engine he uses all the time (with our lives in his hands!) work. But it’s also, admittedly a bit counterintuitiuvely, true of cognitive tools. A surgeon, for example, could be quite innocent of all the epistemological theories about why science is true, or what the truth status of scientific propositions might be, and still be a much better choice to take out your gallbladder than my not very humble self, despite my status as a Board Certified and Fellowship-Trained Academic Internist (MPH and all!) who can lecture for hours on end (to proven deadly effect on my usually most unwilling audiences!) about the evidentiary basis of medicine.

For all the talk about evidence-based medicine being a good thing, and who can argue about using evidence when it’s available, the evidence they’re referring to is that gleaned form quantitative methods. While that’s wonderful stuff, and not to be ignored, what you can do, in medicine, with numbers, is pretty superficial. The real basis of medicine is the catalogue of diseases we have laid out over the millenia. That catalogue, which is absolutely prior to all quantitative methods, since you have to be able to differentiate apples form oranges before you can count either, is based entirely on pattern-recognition. It has often been quite spectacularly wrong, and the proof, the sole proof, that we have it right in identifying a particular disease entity, is that we can then act as if there really is such a disease, and it seems to work better, kill somewhat fewer people, than if we didn’t recognize such-and-such as a disease. Methodologic feet of clay! But I still would not advise refusing the antibiotic you’re offered if you get bacterial meningitis just because bacterial meningitis is a construct of dubious footing.

Plato, in those bits of the dialogues that I think I sort of get (and certainly not the parts where he talks about thinking being like flight patterns of birds — eeck!), explains this on the basis of our metaxic existence. We live in the middle somewhere between reason and natural order laid down by God/the gods/whatever (and we sure are in no position to be more specific than that), and the chaotic impulses below us. We can, partly, intuitively, who knows for sure how, recognize the difference, sometimes, between impulses from above and those from below, but not with any sort of reproduceability. We’re never sure if we’re the victims of false order from below, or the good, reasonable order from above. We ain’t God — tough luck; but some of the threads that control us like puppets are Golden. Or something like that. You buy this stuff or you don’t see its point — there isn’t much room in the middle.

(@ Glen Tomkins, could you maybe recommend some light reading on the basis of medicine, evidentiary or not.)

Google’s personalized search no longer requires the use of cookies.

Thanks for the correction. I’m still not sure what the worry is.

@53: Let me guess: some tech support person wouldn’t give you the information you thought you needed, or told you your guesses about his company’s product were wrong, and you’re sharing the love.

There’s a reason I don’t comment about topics I really care about and feel I have some responsibility to represent concerning.

Google’s personalized search no longer requires the use of cookies.

I found out recently that this is another one of those April Fool’s jokes. Turns out the personalized search always worked even if you didn’t bribe the IT guy with a cookie.

fred p,

I’ve never run into a book that addresses the evidentiary basis of Medicine, so I can’t say which ones might be any good, or which might be bad, or even if there are any accounts of the subject that even try to do it justice. What I have run into in practicing Medicine is the fact that the evidentiary basis is quite heterogenous from topic to topic within Medicine. (We haven’t been Pasteurized, either. Medicine is sort of the raw milk among the sciences.) To put it in Kuhn-speak, some of our paradigms are almost like those that Physics has developed, in that you can move around within them using equations (e.g.., acid-base disturbances), some are hopelessly woolly and full of just plain wrong (e.g., the Kveim test, and sarcoidosis in general), but most are just way less mature than what you see in a science like Physics.

Again, in Kuhn-speak, instead of working on only one or two paradigms at a time, like Physics, Medicine has no choice but to try to keep literally thousands of paradigms spinning at the same time. Physics has the luxury of only having to pay attention to problems that seem amenable to its favored methods, amenable to summary in equations; while Medicine has to focus on every problem that’s out there killing people, or even just worrying them — whether that problem happens to be amenable to equations, or amenable to nothing but prayer and fasting, or not even real, and everything that fits in the cracks between such broad categories.