Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

Re:Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click by reaperducer on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @05:28PM (#20690460)

I don't trust just the blurb for any answers any more.

I don't, either.

A site I used to own had a discussion forum on it. It contained a message along the lines of "Real Estate Agent X is a great guy. Real Estate Agent Y is a complete sleazebag."

The blurb that Google displayed for it was "Real Estate Agent X... is a sleazebag." And that was the first result for anyone who searched for that agent's name.

As you can imagine, I received many angry e-mails, phone calls, and legal threats. No, you can't explain to angry people that it's "just" an algorithm that told the world that they're a sleazebag.

I ended up editing the post so that Google would display a different version after its next scrape.

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Re:Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click by londons_explore on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @04:21AM (#20693637)

I think there's more to this... Google use lots of fancy Natural Language Processing stuff to extract that data, and unless the wording was very tortuous, I doubt it could make such a big mistake by chance.

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