Wouldn't it be better to add a correction at the top of the article instead of deleting it?
Deleting it I'd think would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that existed but got removed, rather than something that got corrected.
But in the end, it's probably a loosing battle anyway...
I generally find that anyone expecting error-free perfection in any subjective field from an entire industry can be safely dismissed as a complete idiot. Intelligent people look at the processes that produce outcomes, not the outcomes.
(In this case, the process that produced the outcome was a former DDG employee mailing in an oped of incredibly questionable quality that criticized a DDG competitor, that was eventually pulled. Wired should probably read op-eds before publishing them.)
Admitting it was trash is proof of inaccurate reporting, whether they remove TFA or not
As for the conspiracy folks, they'll think what they want, regardless of evidence presented to them. That's the whole point.
The way to solve it is for "investigators" to get access to said source code and give us an honest assessment. Get someone neutral, get NDAs in place, have them look at the source in an air-gapped clean room, anonymize DB access, etc etc.
Instead we go around in circles. Journalism at the end of the day then becomes "we got some info that points to X, but we have no proof, and we won't look for it. We'll just wait till someone, somewhere, at some point, who knows when, finds some proof and puts it out in the public, only then will we say it's conclusive. Until then, you all go nuts, especially the conspiracy theorists. Don't worry, we'll ride this gravy train and report on those nut jobs too!".
It's a mess, and I'm not at all surprised that conspiracy-theorists have a field day with it.
Hey, let's get a bounty up so that a whistle-blower from Google comes forward. Maybe Mozilla foundation can take some of that sweet sweet endowment they use for "Social Justice" and pony up to fund this investigative effort. After all they claim to be fighting for a free internet. I'd say this is a much better use of money than paying random DEI consultancies huge speaking fees.
No evidence: obviously the evidence is being suppressed, proves the claim
Evidence against the claim: shills obviously trying to control the narrative, proves the claim
I showed him the IMDb and Wikipedia pages for it and a clip. Without missing a beat - remember they literally had never heard this before and have already decided it’s misinformation planted by the CIA - he said “Well it’s an independent show he put on that happened to be shown on RT.”
I mean what can you say to that?
They should have mentioned 1) what the article got wrong and 2) that the article was written by a former Duck Duck Go executive who should know better.
Making your mistakes suddenly disappear as if they never happened is tempting, but it's going to leave users feeling gaslit, distrustful, or even just misinformed.
“Ain't nobody got time for that”.
The role of journalists is to provide facts, but the business model of media in the internet age is about “creating content” and “engagement” and they don't work well together …
Yes, that's why you need press freedom with multiple point of views. But it is orthogonal to the point I was making.
I think you might just be disappointed in humanity, rather than any particular agency or person. Humans come together to get the right answer eventually; not multiple times a day, every day, without fail. Sometimes the software doesn't do what you want. Sometimes that article has a factual error. Eventually we figure it out. It's not the end of the world.
Think about the opposite. Imagine we pickup a bug in a live application and update it citing "our QA standards". This magical word does not absolve us of the fact that we let a bug through to production. And it's implied that we'll do better next time to pick up this kind of bug.
Is that really something you are challenging? Which pieces of popular software you can think of are bug-free? And are you thinking of more than a handful?
And they themselves were responding to someone criticizing media for using "editorial standards" as an excuse when they "retract a release".
And I explained how we are the same and supposedly strive to not release bad content/software, we just don't get to magically absolve fault with an excuse that "it doesn't meet our QA standards" as an analogy to "editorial standards".
Anywho, the whole thing breaks down when we have to beat it with a stick. It's a discussion, assume a charitable interpretation.
They got an opinion piece with an extraordinary claim about something the writer saw in a slide presented at a trial. She wrote the entire article about it creating theories and then how it needs to be stopped. Not to mention, she had previously worked with a competitive search engine. The central piece of fact checking was seeing that slide, that would have been the second question after "Are you sure you saw something like that?". The entire article hinges on that one slide she saw and what she understood from it.
This is not a case of missing a boundary condition. This is missing the central premise. At any level, it would be inexcusable.
PS: In a sense, as the artifacts are becoming public, i think more such confusions would surface in the coming weeks where merely misunderstanding what is on the slide would lead to a lot of rumors. Probably best we have an initial case and some intuition that this can happen.
There's a wide spectrum of how fucked your software can be when you release it without it being a huge deal, like if I push a broken release for my hypothetical build system that jumbles the error messages a little that's probably fine, if I push a broken build of the google dot com landing page that's raising a few more sirens and I really shouldn't make a habit of it, if I deploy critically broken firmware to your pacemaker or your crewed rocket ship I should probably be exiled from the field. I imagine there's a similar spectrum for journalists and we can't really figure out where on the spectrum to the article from the OP should be with just analogies to a different field. Complaining about a trend of publications slipping towards the yolo'ier end of the spectrum doesn't seem on its face hypocritical.
Editorial standards should stop bad stories from being published. Saying "we retracted this story because it doesn't meet our editorial standards" begs the question "why are you publishing things that don't meet your editorial standards in the first place?"
It doesn't take responsibility for or explain the mistakes in the article. It doesn't state that the article had factual errors. It's a frustrating cop-out. I sincerely hope this is a temporary measure while Wired gets a more comprehensive retraction put together.
Publications can simultaneously be praised for “rolling back a bad build” while being criticised for letting that build roll out to prod in the first place.
This would be like the SWE equivalent of pushing to production without code review. It's not an excusable mistake like when a bug gets through.
Maybe there were lots of articles that were never published due to editorial standards, but we only see the ones that slipped through.
I think we are saying the same thing, but it’s important to emphasize that the fuzzy matching is for ads. If you've used Google’s ad tools before you know that “+kids +clothing” notation means ad keywords.
The organic results don’t change based on this keyword matching system. The query contained “kidswear” and the matched ad keywords were “kids” and “clothing”. Basically recognizing that kids wear is another way of saying kid’s clothing.
That’s what the article got so egregiously wrong.
They retracted it so shrug
So it's showing "Nikolai kids clothing" being rewritten to "Nikolai kidswear".
1. (because of [kids → children]) ads with keywords “+kids +clothing” would also match searches like “clothing for young child” and “newborn children's clothing”
2. (because of [kids clothing → kidswear]) ads with keywords “+kids +clothing” would also match searches like ”nikolai kidswear” and “kidswear outlet”
3. (because of [clothing → apparel / outlet]) ads with keywords “+kids +clothing” would also match searches like “creative apparel for kids” and “kids outfits”
That is what the slide's title (“Advertisers benefit via closing recall gaps”) refers to: the gaps in recall (matching) are being closed, by being broader.
The WIRED article misunderstood the slide, and was entirely based on the premise that if you searched for “children’s clothing” you'd get results for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” which is not true (and would indeed have been “startling”, not to mention obvious, if it were true). In fact, the organic (non-ads) part of the search results in Google are always completely independent of anything in ads, something that the Search team in Google have maintained for several decades as a fundamental principle.
Are you sure? There's an email from the ads team proposing multiple measures to increase the number of search queries so they can reach their target revenue. One of the mentioned measures include "ranking tweaks."
Yours should be the top comment
Why are people not talking about this document more?
“I also don’t want the message to be we’re doing this because the Ads team needs more revenue…but what is the best for Google overall?”
Clearly, the ads team has influence over search to the point of saying more-or-less screw culture and team morale, let’s do what’s best for Google overall which is hitting our quarterly targets.
Ads didn’t get its way here. It doesn’t drive every decision. Especially not with search, but also not with chrome.
reading through the email chain, it seems ads did indeed get its way, and the product was indeed made worse to drive revenue numbers – chrome team was unable to say "no" when pressured by ad team
That email thread you linked is between the Ads and Chrome (not Search) teams, is about the number of search queries (not the results of search queries), and “ranking tweaks” there refers to the ranking that Chrome uses to show the suggestions in the omnibox (address bar). (To get a sense of these “ranking tweaks”, try this experiment in a (new?) Chrome profile with default settings: type "flowers" in the Chrome address bar and don't hit Enter, and look at the suggestions: what mix of search suggestions, entities, and bookmarks/history do you see? Try again with other commercial queries like “insurance” and “mortgage”, and also some less commercial queries like, I don't know, “Minnesota” or “economics”.)
(And FWIW, I think that whole email thread actually shows Google in a “good” light relative to the popular impression here on HN as a company whose every action is some Machiavellian scheme to increase ads revenue: it shows that Chrome actually launched something to production before its negative impact on revenue became a concern, that Ads leads had to work hard to persuade them to either roll back or find some other way to undo the decrease in search query volume, that starting to include search query volume as a launch criterion would be a “cultural shift” for Chrome, etc: that Ads having an influence on Chrome is a rare occurrence.)
>"Thanks Anil (Google Chrome Lead) for pushing your team and being open to this whole line of thinking... We are short REDACTED% queries and are ahread on ads launches so are short REDACTED% vs. plan...The Search team is working together with us (ADS) to accelerate a lunch out of a new mobile layout by the end of May that will be very revenue positive (exact numbers still moving) but that still won't be enough. Our best shot at making the quarter is if we get an injection of at least REDACTED%, ideally REDACTED%, queries ASAP from Chrome... I also don't want the message to be "we're doing this thing because the Ads team needs revenue." That's a very negative message. But my question to all of you is - based on above - what do we think is the best decision for Google overall?
>In that spirit, do we think it's worth reconsidering a rollback? Or are there very scrappy tactical tweaks we can launch with holdback that we know will increase queries? (For example, can we increase vertical space between the search box/icons/feed on new tab to make search more prominent? are there other ranking tweaks we can push out very quickly? Are there other entry points we haven't focused on that we could push on soon?) Just to be clear, the reason I haven't pushed harder on a rollback so far is because I don't want the message to be..."
(source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi...)
Is wired supposed to be a very accurate news source? I'm not surprised to hear bullshit from the media. This statement implies wired is supposed to be better than normal?
The author appears to have gotten the slide exactly backwards. She said the slide showed a query of “children’s clothing” that Google rewrites to be a “Nikolia kidswear” query so that it can sell more ads. But in reality, the slide is describing a fuzzy keyword matching system that takes a query of “Nikolia kidswear” and allows it to match ads with “children's clothing” keywords.
I’m surprised WIRED allowed such an obviously incorrect article to be published in the first place, particularly when it was by a known partisan (the article discloses that the author was a Duck Duck Go executive).