Google’s sketchy quest to control the world’s knowledge
You probably haven’t even noticed Google’s sketchy quest
to control the world’s knowledge
By Caitlin Dewey May 11 at 12:52 PM
Google’s “knowledge panels” materialize at random, as
unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God:
Betty White is 94 years old.
The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car.
Taipei is the capital of — ahem — the “small island
nation” of Taiwan.
If you’ve ever Googled a person, place or thing — which,
survey suggests, you almost definitely have — then you’ve encountered these
aggressive, bold-faced modules, one of Google’s many bids for your fleeting
attention. Since their quiet, casual introduction in 2012, knowledge panels and
other sorts of “rich answers” have mushroomed across Google, appearing atop the
results on roughly one-third of its 100 billion monthly searches, not only in
response to simple, numerical queries like “Betty White age,” but also to more
complex, nuanced questions like “capital of Israel” or “D.C.’s best
restaurant.”
To Google, that’s proof of its semantic search
technology; to Googlers, it’s a convenience that saves them a few clicks. But
to skeptics, of whom there are a growing number, it’s a looming public literacy
threat — one that arguably dwarfs the recent revelations that Facebook’s
trending topics are curated by humans.
“It undermines people’s ability to verify information
and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions,” said Dario Taraborelli,
head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation and a social computing researcher
who studies knowledge production online. “And that is something I think we really
need to study and process as a society.”
For Taraborelli, the primary issue with Google’s
knowledge panels is that they aren’t terribly knowledgeable: They provide
information but often leave out any context on where that information came
from. That makes it difficult for readers to evaluate the accuracy of the
statement or whether it’s the best and most complete of the available options.
They could just scroll down the page and click through
some links, of course — but that becomes increasingly difficult as searchers
migrate to voice and mobile, and as Google expands its rich-answer offerings
without differentiating which programs those results source from.
There are “snippets,” for instance, which pull a portion
of text from a cited webpage in response to a question like “how to lose
weight.” There are maps, sourced from Google’s local search program, that will
direct you to local businesses if you search something like “best pizza D.C.”
These are all concerning, as they algorithmically confer
a lot of unearned authority. (There’s no indication as to what makes a
restaurant the “best,” for instance — the locations proffered during a recent
Google search wouldn’t make my top 10, let alone my top three.) But most
pertinent to our interests are the modules and carousels linked to Google’s
Knowledge Graph, an advanced database sourced largely from Wikipedia and
constructed in part from user search patterns. According to a October 2015
analysis by the digital marketing firm Stone Temple Consulting, these knowledge
panels, which are frequently unattributed, are one of the fastest growing types
in Google’s arsenal.
In a 2012 blog post announcing the introduction of these
modules, Google’s Amit Singhal rejoiced in the “critical first step” toward the
future of search, an engine that “understands the world a bit more like people
do.” Which is all well and good, until you get into subjects more complex than
the current time in Timbuktu.
Mark Graham, a geographer at the Oxford Internet
Institute, recently did just that: He and his colleague Heather Ford analyzed,
in a paper published last month in the academic volume Code and the City, how
the city of Jerusalem was represented both on Wikipedia and in Google knowledge
panels. They found that while Wikipedia may explain the city’s contested
geopolitical status in enormous depth — as of this writing, that portion runs
to almost 1,500 words — the nuance was jettisoned completely when the article
was deboned and ingested by Google.
“Google, through its data and algorithms, now controls
how we interact with many facets of the cities we live in,” Graham warned. “So
we should be asking whether we are happy ceding decisions about how we live our
everyday lives to them.”
In fact, as Graham dug into other contested cities, he
discovered that Google’s knowledge panels regularly, if inadvertently, make
rather important decisions for us: Taiwan, you’ll remember, is described as if it
were an independent nation, when only 22 countries actually recognize it as
such. Meanwhile, Google corrects searches for “Londonderry,” Ireland’s
fourth-largest city, to “Derry,” the (unofficial) term favored by Irish
nationalists.
Since Google frequently does not cite its sources — a
ploy, Taraborelli says, to make it seem more authoritative — there’s no way for
users to double-check “answers” for bias or error, which doubtlessly exist.
In September, for instance, my colleagues in the Style
section published a story on the peculiar fact that no one seems to know
Hillary Clinton’s height — not even Google, which until recently listed it as
5-foot-7 in a prominent knowledge panel. That error appears to date back to an
unsourced Wikipedia edit from 2007, which has since been debated and deleted by
Wikipedians.
Now Googling Clinton’s height produces a mere rich-answer
“snippet,” which incorrectly measures Clinton at “5 feet tall, maybe 5′ 2″.”
But at least now you can click through to CelebHeights.com and see exactly what
you’re dealing with.
In its defense, Google has made some changes to certain
types of knowledge panels that suggest it’s aware of the whole sourcing thing.
Medical queries now pull up proprietary editorial panels fact-checked by
doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic. And if you search for a food or recipe
ingredient, the accompanying knowledge panel will also link you to the
Agriculture Department’s database on food nutrition.
“Our goal is to be useful; we realize we’ll never be
perfect, just as a person’s or library’s knowledge is never complete,” a Google
spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re constantly working to improve search,
and to make searching with Google easier and results more accurate for people.”
Unfortunately, as long as Google has a commercial
interest in appearing omniscient, it probably won’t work to improve knowledge
panel transparency. That burden will fall instead to people like Taraborelli
and nonprofits like the Wikimedia Foundation, which is working on an
open-license, machine-readable knowledge base that will both source all of its
statements and accommodate conflicting sources. The hope is that Google will
begin pulling from that database and citing its sources, instead of dumbing
down Wikipedia.
Where history was once written by its victors, and later
by its nerds, it’s now being shaped by its algorithms.
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