SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the department-of-unwanted-hyperfocus dept.
Researchers at the Cornell and the Technische Univerität Berlin and Cornell have studied the problem that more popular items get priority in search results, creating a positive feedback loop that unfairly deprecates other, equally valuable items.
Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine the utility (e.g. exposure, revenue) for the item providers (e.g. publishers, sellers, artists, studios). It has already been noted that myopically optimizing utility to the users – as done by virtually all learning-to-rank algorithms – can be unfair to the item providers. We, therefore, present a learning-to-rank approach for explicitly enforcing merit-based fairness guarantees to groups of items (e.g. articles by the same publisher, tracks by the same artist). In particular, we propose a learning algorithm that ensures notions of amortized group fairness, while simultaneously learning the ranking function from implicit feedback data. The algorithm takes the form of a controller that integrates unbiased estimators for both fairness and utility, dynamically adapting both as more data becomes available. In addition to its rigorous theoretical foundation and convergence guarantees, we find empirically that the algorithm is highly practical and robust.
Journal Reference:
Marco Morik, Ashudeep Singh, Jessica Hong, and Thorsten Joachims. 2020. Controlling Fairness and Bias in Dynamic Learning-to-Rank. In Proceedings
of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '20), July 25–30, 2020, Virtual Event, China.
ACM, NewYork, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3397271.3401100
Maybe this, if deployed widely, can help reduce the tendencies for discourse to develop isolated silos.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 24 2020, @03:12PM (30 children)
That's a feature not a bug, retard. Results are popular because they are by definition the result people want more often than not. That's what popular means.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Monday August 24 2020, @03:59PM (6 children)
I'm not sure. A hypothetical "perfect" search engine would find a way to link to the "best" information, even if it is on a relatively unknown and niche site. Knuckle draggers have corrupted the search results with stuff that is popular but crappy. The sites near the top might just have better SEO, not better information.
I don't really have the patience to find you a bunch of examples. Try Googling "genghis khan" and see what makes it onto the first page. Or "space news" which ranks NBC, CNN, ABC (both), zeenews.india.com, Express, Fox, random news articles, and some shitty Google Book [google.com], etc. with the superior NASASpaceFlight.com [nasaspaceflight.com] not even appearing in the first 90 results.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 24 2020, @05:04PM (5 children)
No, a search engine should give you the most popular results for the query you give it. It's on you if you ask for the wrong thing. Popular means it's going to be the correct result for the most people, which is what a search engine should be aiming for.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lester on Monday August 24 2020, @06:28PM (2 children)
No. A search engine should give you the results that you would select if you could read all the results. The first approach is to suppose that those picked by people were the best. But this approach has turn into an endogàmic system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @02:04AM
This, a search engine should aspire to scanning every website out there as frequently as possible and giving you as close to what you ask for as possible. If what you ask for isn't what you want, then the search engine should allow you some method of changing your request to get what you want.
One of the reasons why I use duckduckgo is that they try to give me what I ask for rather than what they think I want. The result is that it's less likely that I'm going to wind up in a bubble having my expectations changed in a self-reinforcing cycle.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 25 2020, @03:04PM
No, to do that a search engine would need to know way more about you than any site has any business knowing about you. The most popular result for a given search input is what should be returned.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @08:48PM (1 child)
By your definition, when you ask a search engine "what is 2 + 2", the search engine should return you "5" if the majority of people find that to be the right answer.
Be careful what you wish for...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:08PM
And? Search engines should not be catering to what a few people who think they know better than everyone else want. Only fascists think like that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday August 24 2020, @04:37PM (7 children)
Not necessarily. If an item shows up on the first search page, more people will click on it simply because it is readily there, not because it is really the one they would like best. It's quite possible that they would have preferred one from the second page, if they had been shown it immediately. But the algorithm just sees that you clicked on that link, therefore it concludes that this was indeed the right thing to show, and thus it gets better rank, which means it will get displayed even more prominently on searches by others.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 24 2020, @05:06PM (4 children)
Yup, there should be a way to say "no, that appeared useful but was not."
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2020, @06:51PM (1 child)
This is why they want tracking embedded, so the “no” can be inferred by later actions. A users opinion on usefulness means nothing to marketeers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday August 24 2020, @07:28PM
That's why a good search engine would only be funded by old-fashioned banner ads and its ranking should have nothing whatsoever to do with marketing. Nah, I don't think anyone's going to do it anymore either.
I know Duckduckgo isn't supposed to track users but it uses results from some search engines that do so, I don't know.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @02:00AM (1 child)
Definitely. It pisses me off seeing all those links to resources where I have to pay money or join the site in order to see the full result. Expertsexchange and quora are particularly egregious examples. Not to mention the various random linkfarms that just exist to capitalize on random accidental clicks. Getting those demoted down to the bottom of the list would be great for everybody else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @05:16AM
"Expert sex change", now there's a naming disaster with recipe for disappointment.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday August 24 2020, @09:03PM (1 child)
>the algorithm just sees that you clicked on that link
See, that's where you're wrong. Real Search Engines also track engagement (it's partly why they've sunk their tracking tentacles into everything). If the site you visited is using Search Analytics, Search Ads, Search Like Button, etc, then it can track how long you spent on the page, whether you scrolled or moved the mouse, etc. Each search page also has tracking, so if you go through multiple links with an interval in between, it knows the first one you clicked wasn't useful.
If you add Machine Learning and a huge number of data points, you get a pretty good signal of what's the Best, although keep in mind that people don't know what good for them. Of course, if the Search Engine tries to decide what's Best for them, then it becomes a Political Agenda. You really can't win.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @05:14AM
They just need to listen on your computer microphone for the inevitable "fuck this site pisses me off", "now that was a waste of time", "fucking pop ups!!!", "why the fuck is this site in the first page", or "there's 10 minutes I'll never get back".
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday August 25 2020, @01:29AM (2 children)
Umm, of course not. The issue is with how the items get popular. They get popular by being popular - which is not a valid way to get popular. Let's pretend you're on reddit instead of this site. You open a post, it's sorted by "best" or "top." A comment gets an upvote, it's now on top of the results. So now it's the first thing people see, and it gets upvoted more. In about a minute, nothing but the first two upvoted comments are even visible without scrolling pages.
Google shows some results on the first screen, the first screen is what people click on, and now the first screen is at the top. How does something get on the first screen? With a single click, which then exponentially grows to thousands of clicks, irrelevant of the quality of the result.
So no, this is not what popular means. Retard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @04:48AM
You were doing so well until the unnecessary insult at the end.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 25 2020, @03:08PM
Oh, you're wanting to change or fight human nature then? Good luck with that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @01:57AM (3 children)
There's lots of things that are popular, but aren't necessarily what the person making the search wants. Similarly, there's a real problem finding older things as they get crowded out by newer ones. Sometimes I've really needed or wanted a resource that was older, but finding it was very difficult because there were newer items that become more popular burying the ones I was looking for.
What's more, popularity is a poor predictor of whether or not something is addressing the query that the person searching for made. Clickbait that people get one link into can easily crowd out more helpful links without actually giving any value to the viewer. Similarly, popular results may not address the question being posed better than less popular ones and in some cases it can be virtually impossible to get to those results without paging through dozens of pages of useless links.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 25 2020, @03:07PM (2 children)
What the individual making the search wants is irrelevant, serving the correct thing to the most people is their job.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @06:36PM (1 child)
No, that's not even wrong. The search engine isn't supposed to care what you search for, whether it be popular or not. They're supposed to give you what you ask for and what you ask for is supposed to be what you want. You're not going to ever know enough as the search engine to know better than the user what the user currently wants.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:10PM
How stupid are you? Search engines can not read minds, so they absolutely can not know better than the user what the user wants. They can only make a guess, which is going to be largely based on what most people searching for $foo want.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 25 2020, @02:30AM (7 children)
The problem is that good-enough quickly-enough often-enough items are given priority (so make quicker) in search results. The optimisation is for adequacy, not for perfection.
However, it sounds like their solution doesn't even address either of these "problems". To me, this symmetric evaluation function looks like it's intended to deliver sub-optimat results to the human, because some websites would prefer to get those lovely lovely clicks. Which sounds just terrible.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 25 2020, @03:09PM (6 children)
Adequacy is by definition adequate though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 25 2020, @07:29PM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:16PM (4 children)
Generally? Yes. It's a step up from what I usually find.
If I'm on a search for the best burger in TN because I want to know where to get it, I expect to have to wade through a whole lot of garbage before I find it. If I'm simply looking for an acceptable burger for lunch so I can eat and get back to work, I do not want to have to sample twenty or thirty burgers before I find an acceptable one; I want adequate and I want it the first time. Which is exactly what I want out of search engines five nines of the time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:39PM (3 children)
But it's shitty, as the things that were good for you were drowned in things that were not good.
Adequate is typically pretty shitty, that's what I'm trying to say, and definitely nothing to strive for.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:10PM (2 children)
See, I define adequate as adequate. Acceptable. Good enough. I don't define it as "typically shitty".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 27 2020, @11:07AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 29 2020, @05:22PM
Just did. "Adequate is typically pretty shitty" sums your position up quite nicely. And I disagree because I do not accept anything with a significant amount of shitty as adequate.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.